Interesting idea: The Human Body as Touchscreen Replacement. The downside to using a touchscreen over something with physical controls is that you lose that instant feedback of where the buttons are. (Skip a song on an old-school iPod while driving? Easy. Do the same on a touchscreen? That’s trickier.) Your own location sense plus knowing exactly what part of your hand (or, in another prototype, ear) you’ve touched could really improve usability for applications that are suited for it.
Tag: Imported Post
Death Star Window
Partway down the central escalator at the San Diego Convention center, you can look down the long cylindrical skylight that makes up the roof of the lobby, rings forming the appearance of concentric circles. Years ago, a friend of mine referred to it as the Death Star Cannon shot, and it’s a popular one to take, both during Comic Con and at other events.
At this year’s Comic-Con International, I found myself looking at the windows surrounding the stairs instead. My first thought was to mix things up with the classic cannon shot, but when I got home and looked at the results, I realized: This really does resemble the windows in the Emperor’s throne room. It’s still a Death Star shot, but a different part of the station!
If you’d like to see more photos or read more about my experience at the convention, check out I Survived Comic-Con 2013.
Safety Record
I want to know who broke that streak.
The strict shuttle arrives exactly every 17.5 minutes
The strict shuttle arrives exactly every 17.5 minutes.
Crisis of the New 52
I think my biggest disappointment with the New 52 is that they didn’t go far enough.
They had a chance to completely reinvent the DC Universe to an extent that we haven’t seen since the dawn of the Silver Age. Instead, we have the same basic characters: Superman is still Clark Kent, Batman is still Bruce Wayne, Wonder Woman is still Diana, Flash is still Barry Allen, Green Lantern is still Hal Jordan (and John Stewart, and Kyle Rayner, and Guy Gardner), etc.
They could have tried to recapture the sheer creativity that made the Silver Age such a success. (What if instead of a guy with a magic ring, we make him a space cop? What if instead of a small guy who’s really strong, he actually shrinks to microscopic size?) Instead, they tried to recapture the success of the post-Crisis DCU. That’s still ambitious, but it has nowhere near the same level of potential, and I think that’s thrown a wet blanket over the past two years.
But the New 52 seems to be this weird combination of top-down heavy-handed editorial mandate and throw-things-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks. The post-Crisis on Infinite Earths universe felt a lot more open and creative, like almost anything was possible.
Then again, I’m thinking of the first five years or so after COIE (before it accumulated enough complexity that they started doing things like Zero Hour and all the gimmicks we now think of as exemplifying the 1990s), and we’re only two years into the New 52, and I do remember there being a bit of a shakedown period — and I’ve had 20 years to forget the stuff that didn’t work in the late 1980s in favor of what did. So I could be seeing it through nostalgia-colored glasses.
Edited together from a pair of comments I originally posted on Reddit