Not sure how I feel about this, but Marvel is resurrecting Marvelman (AKA Miracleman). I think of the character as a British figure, reminiscent of some of the UK comics I grew up with, so how will this pan out? (See Newsarama.com : MARVELMAN Returns Via Marvel Comics in June)

Anyway, it’s been a while since I read anything like this (see Greenflame · Miracleman and Captain Sunshine), so I might pick up the primer and see what it’s like. (I liked the Dan Dare comic that was redone in the last couple of years)

For more details on the character see: Marvelman – Wikipedia

3D printing has always intrigued me, but potentially using a 3D printing system to make replacement body parts is really interesting. See Printing body parts: Making a bit of me | The Economist.

The Green Lantern movie can’t get here soon enough for me (unless it sucks, in which case that’ll be really disappointing), and it was nice to see two Kiwi connections to the film today: Temuera Morrison is going to play Abin Sur and Taika Waititi is going to play Thomas Kalmaku. Another space opera for the Kiwi accent!

See Jango Fett To Play Green Lantern’s Abin Sur – green lantern – io9

Probably not the sort of ideas the current Minister of Tertiary Education (see here) is thinking about

See COOLEST College Courses

Came across a link in The Technium: The Game-ified Life to this (somewhat depressing in some ways) video presentation about the future of video/online gaming: DICE 2010: “Design Outside the Box” Presentation Videos – G4tv.com.

But one thing stuck out for me in particular, and that was the example of turning student assessments and classes into environments similar to role-playing games. It comes out of Lee Sheldon’s teaching at Indiana University, and you can see an actual curriculum over here at Terra Nova: Build Your Own Sheldon Syllabus. (The comments there are also worth reading).

Hat tip to Philip Culbertson, who emailed me this link.

Stephan’s web-page : Pop songs about Jesus

The people who compile this sort of things have way too much time on their hands.

There’s a new 10th anniversary edition of Dylan Horrocks’ “Hicksville” coming out!

You can read more about it here – Newsarama.com : Dylan Horrocks Welcomes Readers Back to HICKSVILLE.

And there’s a book launch and exhibition for it on Friday, 19th March, here in Auckland. See Hicksville at the High Seas! « Hicksville Comics

I loved ‘Hicksville’ (Greenflame · Mapping the land and ourselves and Greenflame · Dylan Horrocks on comics, games and world-building) but I have never gotten around to purchasing a copy. Looks like this might be the time, though given how much I’m out of home in the evenings and weekends for work things at the moment, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to it.

Over the past year of so I’ve become quite interested in the whole ‘warrior nun’ figure in contemporary comic book. From The Magdalena and Warrior Nun Areala through to more recent The Sisterhood. While they tend to follow the standard superhero formulae (including ‘spandex’) there are the odd moments where some interesting religious/spiritual material gets dealt with and also novel ways that religious symbols are appropriated.

Finding back issues of these kinds of comics is pretty hard here in NZ – I’ve picked up some at events like Armageddon – some I was interested to read that there was a new series of The Magdalena coming out soon.

As part of that there was a recent interview with the co-authors of the series, Ron Marz and Nelson Blake, about what they plan to do with the series. (See Newsarama.com : The Descendant of Jesus Christ Fights in TOP COW Ongoing Series).

In the interview, Marz says,

Well, hopefully nobody thinks this is going to be a theology text. The book is still about a kick-ass chick in a cool costume fighting monsters. But we’ll definitely touch on matters of faith, and the role of organized religion in the world.

So I guess it’s business of usual there.

You can also see some of a past Magdalena story over at: Tied in with that is

Newsarama | Ron Marz/Ryan Sook’s Full MAGDALENA Story FREE! Page 1

(I wonder if any of the nuns I know have an assortment of ninja weapons and equipment?)

I was talking to someone today about their experiences about buying DRM audio books, and how in the end they gave up. Between grief with paying and downloading, installing a separate piece of extra software to play the books, and then finding on the bus that the software then wanted to authenticate via the net before things would play (and that wasn’t an option), he’d basically lost any faith that it was worth it. Too hard and too painful.

The cartoons in this post sum that experience up quite well. See TidBITS Tech News: A Pair of Cartoons Reveals DRM Frustrations.