Having one of those classic family emergencies and won’t be back till… not sure yet.
Updated July 16@9:06 a.m.: Things are still on the crazy side and I’m not fully back yet, but starting tomorrow I’ll be posting again regularly.

George Carlin died last night due to heart failure. He was 71.

On campus for iTunes all day Monday and Tuesday.

The dislike for Dan DiDio is so strong that now film industry people are reporting on it!

The problem isn’t just that, under DiDio’s leadership, fanboys are disappointed with the directions of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other characters. (How dopey of DiDio to come out with a new series Decisions this September where the superheroes take political stands timed to the election.) Little wonder that fanboys are selling “Dan DiDio Must Die” t-shirts. But also average sales of the DCU line are down more than 20% from a year ago, and DiDio has lost a big chunk of existing readers in a year while deliberately failing to reach out to new ones.

Damn. Steve Carell’s “Get Smart” obliterated Mike Meyer’s “Love Guru.” The former is expected to break $40 million for the weekend hull while the later is going to make around $14. I blame it Carell for being so awesome and on Meyers being such a diva.

Here is the third PSA I did at work this week. If you missed the first & second you can find them here and here.

I just discovered that for some reason I’ve not been getting comments emailed to me. So for all of you who have left comments in the past 3-5 weeks, I’m seriously sorry. The problem has been fixed and I’ll once again be responding to comments.

Even though there was nothing juciy in it, I still got really excited when I saw that I had an email from the Dharma Initiative:

Octagon Global Recruiting, on behalf of the Dharma Initiative, would like to thank you for registering your expression of interest in our latest volunteer recruitment drive.

We will be launching in San Diego on July 24th at Comic-Con International offering select registrants the opportunity to take an exciting aptitude test that will give applicants the chance to demonstrate their unique talents.

The Dharma Initiative hopes you will be able to join us to find out more about their ground-breaking new research project. We will contact you closer to the date with more information.

For those not able to join us in San Diego, Dharma’s full recruitment program will be made available online to registered recruits after July 27th.

Madchen Amich, who was on “Gilmore Girls” (she played Chris’ baby’s Mama for two seasons), is joining “Gossip Girl.” She’ll play a cougar for at least five episodes and will be a love interest for Nate.

Even though he’s on hiatus while switching from TV Guide to EW, Ausiello is still dishing out the scoops:

My increasingly itchy moles report that Sam Witwer, best known to Battlestar Galactica fans as ex-Raptor ECO Alex “Crashdown” Quartararo, has been tapped to play the series regular role of Doomsday. Additionally, relative newcomer Cassidy Freeman is joining the cast as Tess, a sexy and vengeful firecracker with whom Lex hires to run his empire in his absence. Ironically, the actress’ most recent credit was the failed CW pilot Austin Golden Hour — starring none other than Green Arrow himself, Justin Hartley (who’s back on Smallville full time next season).

Finally got some time to play “Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.” Basically the game has two major problems. The first is that it is way too simple for an RPG and lacks no depth. I mean second to story, depth/customization is the most important part of an RPG. I’m shocked this was so basic.

The second problem is that if you are normal and don’t own an HD TV then the font is too small/blurry to read. This problem has basically made the game unplayable. I can’t read the dialog or narration boxes and as a result I’m missing all the humor (which is the best part of the game).

Wow. EA produced a really crappy “Princess Bride” game. It’s downloadable (for a fee of course) and seems to have been made for a two year old.

Here is the second PSA I did at work this week.

J.J. Abrams is now producing a movie about the topic of this article. Basically some crazy NY architect designed an apartment ala’ Da Vinci Code/National Treasure with secret panels, clues, furniture, walls, and the works.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

Looking for something to watch with the lack of TV? Then try out “Burn Notice” on Hulu. The whole first season is online for free and now is a great time to get caught up before the second season starts.

“The Incredible Hulk” the game sucks. The gameplays is worse then its predecessor that came out like 3 years ago and even on the Xbox 360 the graphics are total crap. It’s a sandbox game set in NYC, yet for some reason you can’t see more than a block ahead of where you are. There is that cliche video game fog and even when there isn’t fog the graphics pop in and out of existence like bad wizardry. Avoid this game at all cost!

The “Iron Man” game sucks. Unlike “Hulk” the graphics on this are pretty decent and its actually fun to fly around destroying stuff. However the gameplay is totally wonky. Instead of being a sandbox game, the game has set levels where you are given horrible tedious missions that make absolutely no sense. Not only that but after the third level they get extremely repetitive and aren’t anywhere near fun. Too bad the game makers didn’t simply combine the good parts of “Iron Man” with “Incredible Hulk,” if so then we may have gotten at least one game worth playing.

This is some weird floating city that is being built as a prototype for people who have to flee their native lands due to environmental changes.

It is a true amphibian half aquatic and half terrestrial city, able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters. This artificial lagoon is entirely immersed ballasting thus the city. It enables to live in the heart of the subaquatic depths. The multifunctional programming is based on three marinas and three mountains dedicated respectively to the work, the shops and the entertainments. The whole set is covered by a stratum of planted housing in suspended gardens and crossed by a network of streets and alleyways with organic outline.

Here is a cool teaser trailer for the upcoming “Alone in the Dark” game. The game comes out next Tuesday and as long as I get a review copy (the promised copy of Dragon Ball-Z never came) I should have a full review. Also you can pre-order the game at gamestop.

Things at work are at a stand still because of campus politics. To keep busy (since I literally had nothing to do) I made three PSA’s to try out a new HD camera and a green screen. These aren’t too fancy, it was more a matter of testing out the green screen to see how difficult it would be to use. I wrote/acted/co-edited these while my co-worker Chris handled the camera and the brunt of the editing (they actually look amazing in HD but YouTube can’t handle high rez).

Click this link to see the first quick glimpse of Two-Face from “Dark Knight.”

Time has an article about how “Super Soldiers” may no longer be science fiction:

Imagine bad guys able to fight without sleep. Or enemy soldiers with hardware implanted in their brains that makes them better able to target U.S. troops than U.S. troops are able to target them. How about future foes able to outfox GIs thanks to the “pharmaceutical intervention” that has improved their “brain plasticity”? Or American soldiers rendered flat-footed and lethargic because a crafty nemesis has been slipping lead into their food.

Len Wiseman (”Underworld,” “Live Free or Die Hard”) is set to direct the adaptation “Gears of War” for New Line. It will be interesting to see what the movie is like since the Xbox game lacked any real story (just lots of action, aliens, and explosions).

George Lucas’ next movie, “Red Tails,” will focus on Tuskegee Airmen.

The black airmen whose lives will be the basis of a George Lucas movie know the picture will highlight their record of successfully escorting thousands of U.S. bombers in World War II. They also feel it should tell of the trials they encountered stateside, like seeing German prisoners of war being treated better and afforded rights that were withheld from black American citizens.

Saw “The Incredible Hulk” and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought it would. The best way to describe it is just sub out Jason Borne for Bruce Banner and then add in an occasional green monster who smashes things. What surprised me most about the movie was just how close my plot guessing based off the trailers was. I got several key points wrong (partially because the scenes in the trailers weren’t even in the movie) but I got the majority of it right.