Re:not just a reboot, also a new distribution mode
on
DC Reboots Universe
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· Score: 1
If by "a decade or so ago" you mean "roughly a quarter century ago", that's correct.:)
Re:not just a reboot, also a new distribution mode
on
DC Reboots Universe
·
· Score: 2
Comics sold a lot better (millions not tens of thousands) when they were impulse items and you could buy just one of them at random (effectively picking up a series and dropping it at will), than they do now.
I give comics to the kids who come to my door on Halloween.* Some are confused by these unfamiliar things, but most of them think it's great. Anyone who thinks that "kids don't read/like comics" is simply mistaken. The problem is that comics are not readily available to kids. DC's new digital distribution initiative (which is being promoted by overhauling the DCU at the same time) is their latest effort to correct that, and I wish them luck with it.
*At least I did until I ran out of the ones with fun, self-contained stories. Now all that's left are the 1990s-2000s grim never-ending soap opera issues.
The issues addressed by those partial reboots didn't address the existential question that faces DC (or Marvel) today. It isn't a question of whether Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed while coming home from a fancy cinema in the 1920s or coming home from a Blockbuster Video in the 1990s. The question is the distribution model used for delivering stories told using juxtaposed pictures and words. Starting over with a fresh, rebooted universe is just a much better way of getting the attention of potential new comics readers, compared to trying to interest them in issue #900-something of a series that's been going since the Great Depression, and constantly refers back to stories published before they were born.
The roughly 50K remaining fans who are obsessed with nothing but whether or not the "backstory" they've been reading will "count" anymore are worth risking.
not just a reboot, also a new distribution model
on
DC Reboots Universe
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Another part of this announcement, which is probably more significant than the reboot itself, is that DC will be releasing these new comics simultaneously, both at bricks-and-longbox retailers, but also on apps for the iPad, Android, etc. That is where DC is hoping to gain new readers for this rebooted universe, by finally reaching the younger crowd where they live (rather than expecting them to find the local equivalent of the Android's Dungeon), and maybe bringing back some of the many older geeks who've drifted away but find the idea of a new-and-different DCU interesting enough to take a look.
I don't know if this will work for DC (unlike the Comic Book Guy types out there, I'm not going to prejudge the books before they've been published), and trying to survive in this Brave New World of digital publishing while competing with cooler-looking video games and movies is going to be an up-hill battle. But I think it's a smart move to make, because the alternative was the eventual heat-death of the DC Universe as aging fans of dead-tree pamphlets about characters with decades of continuity dragging along behind them, slowly faded away.
Fortunately US law does not define porn as "something able to excite someone". For one thing, it doesn't define "porn" at all. Second, the definition of "obscenity" (which might be what you're thinking of) is more complex than that. One part of the definition (known as the Miller Test) is that the material as a whole has to serve to excite someone, so the fact that the judge got a stiffy during the two-minute bedroom scene in Generic Romantic Comedy VIII doesn't cut it. Also, it has to depict the sex in a clearly offensive way. And finally, it has to have no redeeming literary/artistic/political/scientific value, which is a part of the test that even XXX-rated porn movies are able to pass.
About 15 years ago I tried installing Windows 1.0 on a then-current computer (probably a 386 or 486) and couldn't get it to work. My guess at the time was that the VGA chipset of the machine was doing a poor job of emulating the EGA graphics modes that Windows 1.0 was trying to use for (but even already in those days no one actually cared enough to test), but it could have been any of a hundred devitations from the then-current "IBM PC/XT compatible" standard that Microsoft assumed it would be running on.
As soon as you can demonstrate that you know why your counterargument is a cheap rhetorical cheat, I'll entertain a sound one. Otherwise I'll just assume you're as myopic as your username.
Yeah, we're switching to widescreens where I work. So the clerical staff can get neckstrain turning their heads back and forth trying to read e-mails that now put a whole paragraph on a single 20-inch line.
I love my iMac dearly, but it's probably the last one I'll buy. In fact, I bought a refurb unit for the current one because Apple had just switched to glossy-only displays, and I didn't want to deal with all the damn glare. I won't buy the new MacBooks for the same reason. I've been figuring on buying a Mac Mini next time 'round (which I'm starting to have doubts about, as they're not getting the spec bumps that the iMacs and MacBooks are getting, but that's another topic), but even there I'm seeing a depressingly limited supply of monitors – from any source – that meet my needs. My computer is not an HD television or a DVD player; I do not need a freakin' Cinemascope display. My primary use of my computer is for web browsing and (more importantly) illustration work, both of which would benefit from taller screens and higher vertical resolution. But the resolution improvements in the past ten years have been meaningless baby steps from 1024 to 1050 to 1080, while the horizontal resolution has nearly doubled. Sure, there are 4:3 LCDs that I can turn sideways for a better-I-guess vertical resolution of 1280, but they tend to suffer from poorer viewing angles in that orientation.
It reads like the "business plan" of a 14-year-old who wrote this really cool song (well, the lyrics so far, plus the guitar hook) that he knows will be a bit hit, and he wants to know if he'll become a millionaire faster by signing a deal with a big record company or by releasing it on his own label.
Heck, when I took Comp Sci 101 my freshman year in college, it was 1983 and there were no high school programming classes. I did fine. And if I hadn't.... isn't flunking an intro class usually a reliable sign that it's not a good subject for you? If you really want to challenge yourself by studying something you don't understand easily, go ahead and retake it. But you'd probably be better off finding a field you'd be naturally good at instead.
It might be because people who read books are (correctly or not) presumed to be mature enough to understand that the way ones supports an author one likes is by paying him for his work, not by taking a copy for free and "sharing" it with their friends.
One thing that may mitigate the popularity of downloadable porn from Amazon is the fact that they are removing some of it from their catalog. It's been haphazard so far, but they've pulled kinky erotic prose and softcore male/male comics from their catalog, citing them as violations of their content policies.
My Mac SE X is similar, but not quite the same. A G4 Mac Mini was an essential component of the upgrade of course, in order to run both OS X (Tiger) and contemporary apps such as Photoshop 3. But I replaced the original 10" B&W CRT with a 10" monochrome CRT with VGA input (max resolution 800x600), which was a perfect-fit drop-in replacement. And {ahem} I used the case from an actual Mac SE, and an early ADB mouse and keyboard (via a Griffin USB/ADB adapter).:)
I did this several years ago with a Mac SE (vintage 1989). 8MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, 40MB HD, no built-in ethernet controller, no TCP/IP stack in the OS... but to be honest, it was no great feat, requiring only the right combination of off-the-shelf hardware and bits of existing gratis and libre software. Compared to the AppleTV, which ships with a an IP-enabled fork of BSD already pre-installed, I think it was a bit more of a challenge.
Upgrading another Mac SE to run OS X itself was even more of a challenge....
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If by "a decade or so ago" you mean "roughly a quarter century ago", that's correct. :)
Comics sold a lot better (millions not tens of thousands) when they were impulse items and you could buy just one of them at random (effectively picking up a series and dropping it at will), than they do now.
Imagine: entertainment fiction will be purchased for its entertainment value, not its (fictional) collectibility.
I give comics to the kids who come to my door on Halloween.* Some are confused by these unfamiliar things, but most of them think it's great. Anyone who thinks that "kids don't read/like comics" is simply mistaken. The problem is that comics are not readily available to kids. DC's new digital distribution initiative (which is being promoted by overhauling the DCU at the same time) is their latest effort to correct that, and I wish them luck with it.
*At least I did until I ran out of the ones with fun, self-contained stories. Now all that's left are the 1990s-2000s grim never-ending soap opera issues.
My point being: it's about the digital distribution, not the reboot.
The issues addressed by those partial reboots didn't address the existential question that faces DC (or Marvel) today. It isn't a question of whether Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed while coming home from a fancy cinema in the 1920s or coming home from a Blockbuster Video in the 1990s. The question is the distribution model used for delivering stories told using juxtaposed pictures and words. Starting over with a fresh, rebooted universe is just a much better way of getting the attention of potential new comics readers, compared to trying to interest them in issue #900-something of a series that's been going since the Great Depression, and constantly refers back to stories published before they were born.
The roughly 50K remaining fans who are obsessed with nothing but whether or not the "backstory" they've been reading will "count" anymore are worth risking.
Another part of this announcement, which is probably more significant than the reboot itself, is that DC will be releasing these new comics simultaneously, both at bricks-and-longbox retailers, but also on apps for the iPad, Android, etc. That is where DC is hoping to gain new readers for this rebooted universe, by finally reaching the younger crowd where they live (rather than expecting them to find the local equivalent of the Android's Dungeon), and maybe bringing back some of the many older geeks who've drifted away but find the idea of a new-and-different DCU interesting enough to take a look.
I don't know if this will work for DC (unlike the Comic Book Guy types out there, I'm not going to prejudge the books before they've been published), and trying to survive in this Brave New World of digital publishing while competing with cooler-looking video games and movies is going to be an up-hill battle. But I think it's a smart move to make, because the alternative was the eventual heat-death of the DC Universe as aging fans of dead-tree pamphlets about characters with decades of continuity dragging along behind them, slowly faded away.
Pretty much, yeah.
I fixed one this afternoon: my parent's WinXP computer. Adjust your stats accordingly.
Fortunately US law does not define porn as "something able to excite someone". For one thing, it doesn't define "porn" at all. Second, the definition of "obscenity" (which might be what you're thinking of) is more complex than that. One part of the definition (known as the Miller Test) is that the material as a whole has to serve to excite someone, so the fact that the judge got a stiffy during the two-minute bedroom scene in Generic Romantic Comedy VIII doesn't cut it. Also, it has to depict the sex in a clearly offensive way. And finally, it has to have no redeeming literary/artistic/political/scientific value, which is a part of the test that even XXX-rated porn movies are able to pass.
I don't work there any more, but I can arrange for a tour of the CIT and Comp Sci offices and maybe a student computer lab at Hope College!
Slightly cooler, I more recently did tech support work for Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, and still have friends there....
About 15 years ago I tried installing Windows 1.0 on a then-current computer (probably a 386 or 486) and couldn't get it to work. My guess at the time was that the VGA chipset of the machine was doing a poor job of emulating the EGA graphics modes that Windows 1.0 was trying to use for (but even already in those days no one actually cared enough to test), but it could have been any of a hundred devitations from the then-current "IBM PC/XT compatible" standard that Microsoft assumed it would be running on.
As soon as you can demonstrate that you know why your counterargument is a cheap rhetorical cheat, I'll entertain a sound one. Otherwise I'll just assume you're as myopic as your username.
Crap, another move to ensure that new users will never understand how their computers work.
Darmok and Jilad at Kalenda's.
Yeah, we're switching to widescreens where I work. So the clerical staff can get neckstrain turning their heads back and forth trying to read e-mails that now put a whole paragraph on a single 20-inch line.
I love my iMac dearly, but it's probably the last one I'll buy. In fact, I bought a refurb unit for the current one because Apple had just switched to glossy-only displays, and I didn't want to deal with all the damn glare. I won't buy the new MacBooks for the same reason. I've been figuring on buying a Mac Mini next time 'round (which I'm starting to have doubts about, as they're not getting the spec bumps that the iMacs and MacBooks are getting, but that's another topic), but even there I'm seeing a depressingly limited supply of monitors – from any source – that meet my needs. My computer is not an HD television or a DVD player; I do not need a freakin' Cinemascope display. My primary use of my computer is for web browsing and (more importantly) illustration work, both of which would benefit from taller screens and higher vertical resolution. But the resolution improvements in the past ten years have been meaningless baby steps from 1024 to 1050 to 1080, while the horizontal resolution has nearly doubled. Sure, there are 4:3 LCDs that I can turn sideways for a better-I-guess vertical resolution of 1280, but they tend to suffer from poorer viewing angles in that orientation.
It reads like the "business plan" of a 14-year-old who wrote this really cool song (well, the lyrics so far, plus the guitar hook) that he knows will be a bit hit, and he wants to know if he'll become a millionaire faster by signing a deal with a big record company or by releasing it on his own label.
Heck, when I took Comp Sci 101 my freshman year in college, it was 1983 and there were no high school programming classes. I did fine. And if I hadn't.... isn't flunking an intro class usually a reliable sign that it's not a good subject for you? If you really want to challenge yourself by studying something you don't understand easily, go ahead and retake it. But you'd probably be better off finding a field you'd be naturally good at instead.
It might be because people who read books are (correctly or not) presumed to be mature enough to understand that the way ones supports an author one likes is by paying him for his work, not by taking a copy for free and "sharing" it with their friends.
One thing that may mitigate the popularity of downloadable porn from Amazon is the fact that they are removing some of it from their catalog. It's been haphazard so far, but they've pulled kinky erotic prose and softcore male/male comics from their catalog, citing them as violations of their content policies.
My Mac SE X is similar, but not quite the same. A G4 Mac Mini was an essential component of the upgrade of course, in order to run both OS X (Tiger) and contemporary apps such as Photoshop 3. But I replaced the original 10" B&W CRT with a 10" monochrome CRT with VGA input (max resolution 800x600), which was a perfect-fit drop-in replacement. And {ahem} I used the case from an actual Mac SE, and an early ADB mouse and keyboard (via a Griffin USB/ADB adapter). :)
I did this several years ago with a Mac SE (vintage 1989). 8MHz CPU, 4MB RAM, 40MB HD, no built-in ethernet controller, no TCP/IP stack in the OS... but to be honest, it was no great feat, requiring only the right combination of off-the-shelf hardware and bits of existing gratis and libre software. Compared to the AppleTV, which ships with a an IP-enabled fork of BSD already pre-installed, I think it was a bit more of a challenge.
Upgrading another Mac SE to run OS X itself was even more of a challenge....
I don't like coffee. I've tried it, hated it, and have no intention of "learning to like it".
Fortunately there's another well-established way of warding off prostate cancer, which I enjoy quite a bit.