Fanboys Anonymous

In the season of cancellations, it's time for some new series announcements! The Flash and iZombie have each been greenlit for a full first season. The posters and descriptions below give us a great idea of what to expect from these DC Comics properties.

Based upon characters published by DC Comics. Through a freak accident, scientist Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) is given the power of super speed, which transforms him into the Fastest Man Alive.

The DC's speedy superhero series stars Grant Gustin (Glee), Jesse L. Martin (Law & Order), Danielle Panabaker (Shark), Rick Cosnett (The Vampire Diaries), Candice Patton (The Game), Tom Cavanagh (Ed), John Wesley Shipp (The Flash from the '90s), Carlos Valdes, guest star Patrick Sabongui, and recurring star Michelle Harrison (Emily Owens, MD).

A med student-turned-zombie takes a job in the coroner's office to gain access to the brains she must reluctantly eat to maintain her humanity. But with each brain she consumes, she inherits the corpse's memories. With the help of her medical examiner boss and a police detective, she solves homicide cases in order to quiet the disturbing voices in her head. Based on the characters created by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, and published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint.

DC's Vertigo comic adaptation executive produced by Rob Thomas stars David Anders (Once Upon a Time), Robert Buckley (One Tree Hill), Rose McIver (Once Upon a Time), Malcolm Goodwin (Breakout Kings), Alexandra Krosney (Last Man Standing), Nora Dunn (Entourage), and Rahul Kohli.

Regardless if you are a huge Hunger Games fan or not, we have all at some point wondered how long we would survive the Hunger Games if our name was chosen at the Reaping. While (thankfully) the games are not real and we don't have to fight for our lives in an arena already trying to kill us, we can experience the gist of it in an archery-styled tag game.

Photo via Indoor Extreme Sports

Same-sex marriage has been at the forefront of many heated debates in recent years, and members of the LGBT community have striven for equality in all forms—and it doesn't stop in the real world.

Spoilers are abhorrent acts by trolls, misfits, and sociopaths meant to ruin the joy of surprise and intrigue for adult nerds and innocent children alike. The one exception to this definition is comic book films (and other films that revolve around geekdom). Every detail of comic book films are fair game.

Hey there Dacitonians, The Dace Man is back to take you down nostalgia Route '90 and give you another Lost Relic from the golden age of entertainment! Last time I re-exposed you to the gem that is Europop by the band Eiffel 65, this time I'm going to jog your memory with a film from 1994. Directed by Jonathan Prince, written by Andrew Kurtzman and Eliot Wald, and starring Christopher Lloyd, Jonathan Jackson, and a very young Jessica Alba in her film debut, Camp Nowhere fed into the fantasy of every child who grew up at this time: a chance to get away for a summer and experience life's firsts, and overall have an epic adventure that would live on for years to tell.

The story follows a young kid nicknamed Mud as his parents decide to kick his butt out of the house for the summer and send him to computer camp. Mud would go on to find that his friends all suffered a similar fate—just to different camps. Enter Christopher Lloyd playing the character of a former drama teacher named Dennis who happens to owe money on a AMC Gremilin he bought. Insert classic '90s children blackmail, and the group is off to a camp to do whatever they want for the summer. After enjoying a summer of freedom, that dreaded Family Day that ultimately happens at all camps comes along, and then they have to spring into action to cover for what they've actually been doing. Sprinkle on some morality lessons because it's a Disney film and of course the send off of the Christopher Lloyd character who learned something, and you have your self a Lost Relic of the '90s!

I absolutely love this film because it allows me, a kid at the time who lived in his own world of creativity and ADD, to submerse myself into the idea of a summer of freedom where anything can happen. Even at the age of 25, I still have high hopes of that memorable summer that we can sing about in the fall just like John Travolta in Grease, but hey a crazy man can dream, right? I leave you with the trailer and most likely the urge to find this on Amazon or Netflix or something…you're welcome. Excuse the quality; after all, it was the '90s.

Yesterday saw the release of a new trailer for the upcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, showing in cinemas July 2014.

Hey, hey, hey, Dacetacular nation! Check out episode 46 of The Dace Man Show with hosts Dace, Gibby, and Frank Ward.

• Current NHL playoff results
• Current MLB standings
• Current NBA playoff results
• Richard Sherman gets a big pay day!
• Plus much, much more!!

• Gibby gives us the goose. Not sure what that means.

• Music Facts!

• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Movie on the way.
• Celeb birthdays from May 1st to May 7th
• Monica Lewinsky back in the news.
• Shaq Fu 2 is on its way.
• The most ridiculous viral fight ever

 

The Ultimate Universe has survived another near-death experience, which means it is time for line-wide relaunches. Although I found All-New Ultimates 1 to be generally underwhelming, Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man 1 kick-starts the next chapter of Miles' life and includes two cameos that promise things have only just begun.

Want to know what happened the past few days in nerd culture? WEEK IN GEEK is your quick fix to catch up with the rest of the Fanboys out there.

Not that it's anything new, but there's a lawsuit happening in "Rocktown" and it's coming from Glenn Danzig, the former Misfits frontman against the band's very own bassist, Jerry Only (real name Gerrard Caiafa).

Selling out never looked so good

Nope. Not cool.

Artist Ray Bruwelheide is the man behind the very interesting comic strip Viridian City, which depicts the world of Pokémon in stark contrast to what the series usually represents. Rather than appealing to the child in all of us, it is a much more adult, gritty, dark interpretation that evokes themes from crime dramas and horror/thriller mysteries with a noir feel.

When I came across this I thought it was particularly interesting, so I reached out to Ray to get some more information about where this idea came from.

Q: How did you originally get into Pokémon?

A: The same way everyone around my age did, I think. I was in 4th or 5th grade when it first came out, and I had a subscription to Nintendo Power at the time, so I was basically the perfect target demographic for it. Plus, all of my friends played it as well so it was inescapable.

Q: Everyone has a favorite Pokémon, so which one is yours?

A: I'm most familiar with generation 1, so the first that comes to mind is Kabutops, because an ancient crustacean horse-shoe crab Pokémon with blade arms is about as cool as it gets. I'm also partial to Blitzle and Crustle.

Q: What was your motivation for starting the Viridian City comic?

A: When I started it, I had a lot of free time and a well-paying job, so I wanted to make something that represented what I was thinking about at the time, and that ended up being a stylized, adult take on something that was really important to me as a kid.

Q: What did you draw from for inspiration? Was this interpretation based on anything in particular?

A: Well there's the obvious answer of "Pokémon and film noir," but more specifically I was looking at a lot of work by J.C. Leyendecker who was an amazing illustrator from that period (and later became Norman Rockwell's mentor) as well as plenty of Bioshock and the 2001 animated Metropolis.

Q: What are your thoughts on the reception it has received so far?

A: Mixed, honestly. I obviously love the positive reception it has received and all the great feedback, but the cynical part of me also realizes that on the Internet, it's easy to have formulaic success by combining two things people like or have nostalgia about. Most nerdy blogs these days are pretty full of posts like "My Little Game of Thrones Ponies" or "Breaking Bad Adventure Time" and it just seems so predictable.

Q: What are your plans for the future of Viridian City? Are you going to continue making up new strips?

A: Yeah, but slowly. The pages currently up were created in 3 batches with plenty of time between. I shot myself in the foot a bit by setting the level of detail so high. The pages look good in the end but require a lot of time.

Q: What other projects do you have under your name and coming up in the future that you want to let others know about?

A: I've got a game in the works that won't be seeing the light of day for a while, but new info on that and on future Viridian City stuff will show up first on my personal art tumblr

The argument about artificial intelligence (AI) has been heated since before Stephen King crapped Christine. Interestingly enough, intelligent minds say it has more validity than most people give credit for. AI could literally change the lives of every person on the planet, not only because they would have plenty more time to shape their figures into figures similar to the people on Wall-E, but because it would literally change everything we know and think about the world around us.

If robots can do all the work, the inevitability of socialism would undoubtedly drop. The wool over our eyes would be pulled back. No person would have the heap of excuses for not accomplishing anything any longer. After all, and some minds were intelligent enough to figure this out before, eventually no person would have to work, and there would be no reason to make them do so. That's socialism, unless we don't plan on feeding the people when we have no reason to refuse. Business? What business? I have no need for money, because I'm taken care of by robots of human invention. Socialism. Sorry to break it to you, but it's not as evil as we all thought, especially when everyone is cared for like a rich baby.


The space race would be the joke of the last era if we had AI. It would be the Earth space project, and we would be star trekking in no time. After all, Jesus said, "It is less likely for a rich man to make it to Heaven, than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." The problem? What would this AI think about us? Are we worth keeping around? What sort of conscience would it have?

Perhaps it's time for a rewind, because I sense you are laughing. The Independent ran an op-ed Sunday containing some of the concerns of famed physicist Stephen Hawking, one of few brave enough to take on Einstein. Stephen Hawking's concerns over the future advancements in AI probably came as a surprise to most, as the common consensus is that nonliving material cannot manifest a soul and cannot thereby be animated in the sense that a living being can be. "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," Hawking wrote. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last."

Hawking outlined the progress in robotics to date—robotically-driven vehicles, digital personal assistance, all the information we could ever need at our fingertips almost anywhere. People don't even need to pick up maps anymore. We are currently in the beginning stages of building our own science fiction setting. Hawking's issue? Is the Earth rapidly becoming the sort of sci-fi blockbuster we want to take part in, i.e., Human victims similar to those in The Matrix?



Will we soon be living sci-fi? In other words, will sci-fi be known as science fact? There is no shortage of financing for AI start-ups. The ever-crushing titan that is Google is at the helm and with such competition, other companies will not be short with ideas to squeeze in next to the beast. It's a fact that has Hawking saying,"All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks."

Regarding the common consensus of people concerning robots and conscience: coursing through the human body is a combination of earthly metals, soil nutrients, and a powerhouse that turns mass into fuel. It's no less likely for a man-made earthly contraption to be intelligent and capable of independent thinking than for an environmentally manufactured biological contraption. Perhaps we should be asking this: is Hawking correct? We all know it is in our nature to rush to the next level. We are still the tots outside who pick up something icky and stick it in our mouths. Too bad our mommies aren't trying to stop us. Tell me what you think downstairs.

Hey, hey, hey Dacetacular nation! Dace Man here with the second episode of The Dace Man Plays!! Going forward, yours truly will play a game here and there for about 10 minutes because, frankly, anything longer and you all would lose interest. Hear my commentary as I take on some of the classics and some of the new-age stuff I don't quite understand!

This November, Pokémon fans are going back to Hoenn with Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire. The Pokémon Company marks these releases as a fresh take on the story, told in Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire, that will give fans a new world to explore.

Will secret bases be making a comeback?

"We're thrilled to be partnering with Haim Saban and his team to maximize the potential of this immensely successful and universally recognized franchise. The Power Rangers stories and characters have been embraced by generations of audiences for more than 20 years, and today they are more powerful than ever. We have the ideal partner and the perfect brand with which to create a motion picture event that will resonate with moviegoers around the world for years to come."

"Lionsgate is the perfect home for elevating our Power Rangers brand to the next level. They have the vision, marketing prowess and incredible track record in launching breakthrough hits from The Hunger Games to Twilight and Divergent. In partnership with the Lionsgate team, we're confident that we will capture the world of the Power Rangers and translate it into a unique and memorable motion picture phenomenon with a legacy all its own."

Now that we know several of the cast members of the upcoming Star Wars film, the next piece of the puzzle had to be either the title or the names of the characters that those actors would portray. For people like myself who are waiting on some kind of confirmation that Domhnall Gleeson is Ben Skywalker, we'll have to wait a little bit longer.

However, there may be some news about the former of those two mysteries. Ain't It Cool News is reporting that the working title for Episode 7 is THE ANCIENT FEAR and that it is referring to Max Von Sydow's character, who is a villain "who makes Pazuzu look like a pussy."

There are several things of interest about this news, if it indeed turns out to be true.

First, it would confirm what pretty much everyone speculated about from the beginning—that Max Von Sydow is playing an important villain. Just looking at the guy would make that obvious, but then again, you can never be sure about these things.

Second, it would follow in the footsteps of the regular formatting for titles in the franchise. The third film's titles have reflected each other, with Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi. The second films refer to an action of war from a faction. What does the empire do? They strike back. Who attacks? The clones do. The first film has a recognizable pattern as well, with three words that speak of a particular person. A New Hope and The Phantom Menace and The Ancient Fear of Max Von Sydow. Makes sense, right?

That being said, I hope this is not the title and we get something else. I don't like the idea that Max Von Sydow is a villain who has existed beforehand, as that kind of undercuts the importance of Darth Sidious being the end-all-be-all of evil. Then again, maybe he's not supposed to be. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. On top of this, I feel like the title is too bland. It reminds me of the laundry list of title suggestions that I've been reading for years from fans that are really weak. There may be better ones out there, but I've been throwing a particular name out for a while that I like: "A Rising Force." To me, The Ancient Fear plays itself to the common folk too much and dumbs itself down just to make it easier for people to know what's going on.

But hey, at least it's no "Divisions of the Quagmire"...

Fox has released the first official trailer for the upcoming Gotham television show—a prequel series building up to the Batman mythos that we all know and love.

It will be centered around rookie cop James Gordon (Ben Mackenzie) long before he is able to rise to the rank of commissioner.

Other cast members include Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock, Jada Pinkett Smith as underworld criminal boss Fish Mooney, David Mazouz as a young Bruce Wayne, Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepot aka The Penguin, Camren Bicondova as the future Catwoman Selina Kyle, Eric Richards as Barbara Kean, Sean Pertwee as Alfred Pennyworth, and Zabryna Guevara as Captain Essen.

There have been rumors of an older Bruce Wayne being cast, so does that mean we will eventually see The Batman himself on this show?

Check out the trailer below and tell us what you think about it in the comments!

Indie supporters: I recently took up my most difficult reading task to date. There have been many a book to touch these hands—some I liked, and some I did not. A recent read left me feeling clueless some of the time, though, and I'm not certain it was warranted. In fact, I'm still not exactly certain I followed the book's narrative all that well.

Tales From the Emerald Wind: The Green Shadows Trilogy by Saifulnizam Shukor was a long and arduous excavation for me. Actually, what I gathered from it was a unique combination of two themes: a fantasy religion about prophecies, gatekeepers, and bards mixed with a hard science fiction opera. From what I was able to gather, as the forces of evil have nurtured a prophecy and built themselves to rise against all that is positive in the world and subscribe to annihilation, two young boys are recruited to be the new heroes of all civilizations in the deep of space. It all takes place in a futuristic and technologically advanced universe, save for the planet the boys are from. The closest comparison I can make to explain the religious science fiction aspect is The Chronicles of Riddick, but a backwards version.