Titans Terrors and Toys

I love VR. I’ve loved it for years, and I am excited to see what it still has to offer in the years and decades to come as an immersive, interactive digital medium. However, VR is still undergoing growing pains, and an occasional loss is inevitable. The latest casualty: AltspaceVR, one of the earliest social VR platforms, which is scheduled to close on March 10th of this year. Odds are that many of you who see this post will have no idea what AltspaceVR is. With Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s Quest standalone VR headsets grabbing all the attention of mainstream media, platforms such as AltspaceVR inevitably fly under the radar and into obscurity. Then again, getting shut down by Microsoft may be the most press coverage AltspaceVR has ever gotten, even though it has already achieved in VR what Zuckerberg has been promising for his Meta VR platform but has yet to deliver.  A Star Trek fan group meeting in AltspaceVR. AltspaceVR started in 2013, making it one of the oldest social VR platf...

Sometimes, it's hard being a fan of a cult classic franchise. In the case of Tron, Disney knows that there's a fan base for Tron, but it also knows that Tron doesn't bring in money the same way that Marvel and Star Wars do. As a result, Disney will roll out new Tron content every now and then, but it feels more like half-hearted afterthoughts than serious attempts at storytelling and universe building. Disney recently announced that it is going to open the Tron Lightcycle / Run roller coaster ride in its Tomorrowland area at Walt Disney World in Florida in April of this year. According to the official Tron ride page : "Climb aboard your very own Lightcycle and take off on a high-speed adventure, racing against the Grid’s most menacing Programs. Surge past your fierce opponents as you attempt to cross through 8 Energy Gates and secure your team’s victory—so you can survive to race another day. ... Scheduled to open April 4, 2023, TRON Lightcycle / Run will be one of the...

As part of my recent Christmas gift haul, I got the Blu-ray release of Tarantula (1955) , Jack Arnold's entry into the "big bug" subgenre of horror/sci-fi movies that was popular during the '50s. The Blu-ray was released by Shout! Factory and the extras are sparse, but the 2K scan of the original print and Tom Weaver's audio commentary make the purchase worthwhile if you're a classic creature feature buff like me. However, this post isn't about the Blu-ray--it's about Tarantula itself, where it came from and where it crawled off to after it left the silver screen. The screenplay for Tarantula was written by Robert M. Fresco as a revision of another script Fresco wrote for a 1955 episode of Science Fiction Theatre , a science fiction anthology series. The episode was called "No Food for Thought" and it was also directed by Jack Arnold (you can watch the episode on YouTube here ). According to Fresco, Arnold liked the script so much that he...

I'm used to seeing public acts of nerdity at stores, conventions, and theme parks. That said, it still makes me smile to see a small town recognize and celebrate its connection to nerd culture. Steve Ditko (1927 - 2018) was a comic book artist who is mostly known for co-creating popular superhero characters such as Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. He was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; last year, the local Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center honored Ditko in Johnstown through a commemorative mural painting which consists of 50 panels that were combined to form a Marvel Comics-approved 49-foot by 28-foot mural that hangs on the exterior of the Stone Bridge Brewery . This mural even has its own Facebook page . I visited Johnstown a few weeks ago to see this mural for myself, and it is very impressive. Not only does it show local pride around Ditko's accomplishments, but it also celebrates the more abstract and psychedelic aspects of his art that he put in the pages of the Doctor St...

Last month, I went to the winter 2022 Virtual Market on VRChat. Virtual Market (VKet for short) is a series of events created by the Japanese company Hikky where groups of companies can advertise their products in VR. (I produced a few videos about a previous VKet event on my MindEyeMedia channel on YouTube , which you can see here , here and here .) VKet has frequently attracted Japanese companies that specialize in VR content such as avatars, environments and accessories; however, it appears to be attracting companies from around the world that specialize in non-VR products. During this event, I saw a booth that advertised a TV show from Japan titled Gannibal . It doesn’t take much imagination to connect this title to the word “cannibal”, and the dark, horrific design of the booth encouraged such a connection. According to Hollywood Reporter , here’s the plot outline of this seven-episode series: “Set in Kuge, a fictional Japanese village, Gannibal follows newly hired local polic...

By now, everybody knows the drill when it comes to eagerly awaited movie releases. We get teaser images, teaser trailers and teaser posters, each of which providing some kind of hint as to what viewers can expect. Then there's Scream 6 . Anyone who has been keeping an eye on this sequel knows that it will take place in New York City, and the recent teaser trailer showed surviving characters from the last Scream movie riding in a NYC subway car. The latest Scream 6 poster plays with the subway idea and takes it to a completely new level: I mean, just LOOK at this thing. It uses a subway map to connect characters from the previous five movies and does so in a way that forms the shape of a Ghostface mask. Each color line corresponds to each movie in the series, and those lines feature the names of the characters who only appear in that particular film and the order in which they were killed. (Note that the Scream 6 line is "in construction".) Just as each Scream movie re...