In Which A Sad Banker Does Something Drastic

A few weeks back, my very good friend (and occasional Geek-tastic contributor) Mike Noyes approached me with a concept for a short film he wanted to make. The general idea was to make something really simple, that we could shoot in a day and which would only require the two of us to make.

The result is what you see above. We hope you like it. Filming it was definitely an . . . . interesting experience for me. Just watch it and you'll understand.

This is actually the first of a series of unrelated short films we'd like to make. I'll be sure to post more of them here as they get released.

Retro Star Wars Posters Make Me Happy

I absolutely adore these delightfully retro-styled Star Wars posters by artist Szoki. You can see larger versions of these posters HERE as well as three other posters featuring Greedo, Hammerhead, and one of the Bith musicians from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

On a totally unrelated side notw, to this day it still amuses me that according to official Star Wars cannon, the cantina band members are referred to as Jizz-wailers. This is because the style of music they play is called a jizz.

Yes, I am only 8 years old.

Welcome To Geek-Tastic.com 3.0

Hey there,

Well, it's about that time again. It's time for another Geek-Tastic site update. We are now on version 3.0 of the site. For those of you who recall, version 2.0 involved the site jumping from being hosted privately by my good friend Josh Lander to being hosted by the online community called Squarespace.

The move to Squarespace was good at the time because it offered a number of things that private hosting through Josh couldn't. First and foremost, it freed up my poor Josh from having to work on the site all the time for no pay. Thanks for all of that work Josh. I really do appreciate everything you've done for the site. :)

The move also allowed me to take more control of the look of the site. Squarespace is great with some of their templates and tools to design things. The site suddenly looked a bit more professional, and I was also able to have more direct access to site controls and was better able to monitor site usage. However, there were a number of things about the move that I didn't like.

The biggest detractor to Squarespace was the price. It cost $100 to sign up for one year, and that yearly price just jumped up to $150 a year. I'll be honest here, I like having this site, but it's really just meant to be a creative outlet and hobby where I share cool news that I find and try to stretch my writing muscles a bit. I can't really afford to spend $150 a year to keep the site going (that's not even counting URL registry fees and the cost of a Flickr pro account) on a site that I haven't really been posting to regularly anyways for the past year. I needed to find an alternative, and preferably a free one if I could.

I had used Google's Blogger site before, but this was years ago and I didn't care for it at the time. It seemed too restricted for what I wanted. Recently though, my friend Robert Magness asked me to design a new site for the Matt and Wes vs. The Zombie Apocalypse web series using the Blogger tools and that experience was a bit of a revelation for me. I'll freely admit that I'm not the most tech savvy guy in the world, but even I was able to hop into Blogger's tools and figure out how to make a decent looking site in only an hour or two.

I was so happy with this experience, I decided right then and there to move Geek-tastic over to blogger. The options it now offers are exactly what I wanted. It's easy to use and set up, I was able to import over all of my other content from Squarespace, and best of all . . . it's free.

As an added bonus, I am able once again to set up contributor accounts for others who write things for the site. This was something that Squarespace didn't offer unless I wanted to shell out even more money. You have no idea how happy this makes me. I felt really bad when suddenly I was the only person who could access the site once I moved from Josh's hosting to Squarespace. Thankfully, that isn't a problem any more.

There are some small downsides to moving to Blogger though, but they're minor. First, all of the pictures that were hosted on my previous Squarespace site will be lost once that site gets shut down in a month or two. To combat this, I've updated the last year or so worth of posts so that the images in the articles are hosted elsewhere. That means that if you go looking through the site's archives, you will probably notice that a little over a year out, a lot of posts will be missing photos. I'm sorry about that, but there's just too many posts to update (0ver 1,300) and I couldn't get to them all. Besides, most people aren't going to be looking up a lot of dated news from over a year ago anyways. Hopefully, you'll forgive me for some bad, older posts.

Also, I can't seem to figure out how to make the Web Comic button in the main navigation bar become a link that takes you directly to the separate Geek-Tastic Web Comic site. The best I can do for now is to provide a link on that page to the Web Comic site. I apologize for the requirement of a second click-through. If anyone knows how I can fix that, please by all means feel free to let me know in the comments, or email me at geek.tastic@yahoo.com.

Ok, enough rambling on my part. I hope you like the new layout of the site. I've made some changes to the navigation bar on the right, as you can see. I will most likely continue to make tweaks and fixes to the format going forward too. Let me know what you guys think of it.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled Nerd Blog.

I Want To Go To There

I absolutely love this map that combines a ton of different fantasy worlds as if they were all part of the same world. Seeing things mapped out like this just makes me wonder about certain things too. If all of the fantasy lands were indeed laid out like this, how have the Orcs from Mordor not slaughtered the Who's from Whoville by now? And what about the Elves who "go west" in the Lord of the Rings books? Are they all going to hang out where the Wild Things are?

What about Hyrule? Does Ganon have evil plans to invade the Labyrinth of Jareth? There's just so many questions that this map poses.

As cool as the map is though, it's seriously missing some major fantasy lands. No Mushroom Kingdom? WTF? I demand to know where Princess Peach's kingdom falls amongst all of this. I would have sworn that it was next to Hyrule.

Great Scott! Why Can't This Be A Full Series?!?!?!

Even if you aren't a big Superman fan, you need to devote a minute of your day to watching this fan-made animated short. It's quite possibly the best looking animated superman I've ever seen, and this is coming from a guy who loved the 90's Superman series and the Justice League Cartoons.

For this short, animator Robb Pratt took the music from the classic Superman serials of the 40's and hand drew a classic looking version of the Man of Steel vs. a giant Robot.

The results are a thing of pure beauty. The only negative to this short is the knowledge that it is only a minute long, and the possibility of us ever getting a full 30 minute animated series that looks even half as good as this is more remote than my chances from actually being born on Krypton myself.

Sigh.

Yes, Batman Would Still Win!

It doesn't matter who he faces. It doesn't matter if they are indestructable. It doesn't matter if they are gods. It doesn't matter if they are bigger than planets in size.

In the end, Batman will find a way to beat them. That's just the way it is.

"How?" you ask. "How could one single man possibly defeat Galactus, the destroyer of worlds?"

Because he's the God Damned Batman. That's how.

(Via the Sci-Fi Wire [which I still refuse to call Blastr])

Know Your Doctor

Have you ever wanted to start watching Doctor Who, but have been daunted by the show's lengthy history? Have no fear! Just check out this handy dandy infographic. It gives you most of the basics on The Doctor and his background that you need to understand who he is.

To see the full size infographic, click on the picture above, or click HERE.

Then, I would strongly suggest starting with Season One of the newly relaunced BBC series that started in 2005. If you want to be more current though, you can start with the 5th season as well since it is a reboot of the show to a degree, but then you'll be missing out on Christopher Eccleston and David Tenant and their great runs as The Doctor.