Peter Fenzel hosts with Mark Lee, Josh McNeil, and John Perich to Overthink Mark Lee’s trip to New York Comic-Con, the future of comics, and the Neal Stephenson novel Reamde.
[Note: due to a technical issue, the last ten minutes of the episode were cut off from the recording. We apologize and hope to be back next week with a full, unabridged episode.]
[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/mwrather/otip172.mp3]Want new episodes of the Overthinking It Podcast to download automatically? Subscribe in iTunes! (Or grab the podcast RSS feed directly.)
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call (203) 285-6401 to leave a voicemail.
WELL ACTUALLY.
A gerund is a verb used as a noun, as in the sentence, “Walking while dead is exhausting.” A verb used as an adjective, as in “The Walking Dead”, is called a participle.
I mean, geez. You take one week off and…anarchy!
Yep. Wanting the “ing” at the end was kind of key, so just asking for a participle isn’t enoug, but you’re right, I got lazy. Sorry about that.
By the way, because of the technical difficulties – you guys missed the best one – the TV show where a zombies chef sautes a delicious stir-fry.
That’s right, “The Wokking Dead.”
I guess you’d have had to ask for a present participle.
Though “The Learned Dead” might be kind of a fun show.
(yes, not a past participle exactly.)
OK, I’m a moron. This is the first time I noticed that Fenzel’s avatar has a photoshopped Naruto hair, not a Milk Man/bus driver from the 50s hat.
That’s does it, I’m going to fix my glasses today. :(
To be more specific, it’s Hatake Kakashi hair, which is why the headband is pulled down over one of my eyes.
(For reference, Kakashi is a ninja master who is fairly chill and blase about stuff when his headband is down, but when he wants to get serious, he lifts up his headband and uses the ninja powers of his covered eye, which was transplanted into his head from his dying best friend.)
I’m not a fan of a shōnen. OK, I admit I still watch Bleach and seen few episodes of One Piece but I refuse to watch Naruto. It’s not about Naruto story line or characters but I can not see setting myself for another 10 years of catching up.
It’s late 2011 and I’m still stuck on season 4 of Ranma1/2 FFS!
Thats what I always thought it was too!
Yeah, the Sims have had zombies since the Year 2000: http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Zombie
I’D FORGOTTEN ABOUT SUPERMARKET SWEEP; I LOVED THAT SHOW
-gold farming-
You usually run into gold farmers in obscure corners of higher level areas, running around killing the same mobs over and over again. Most use automated programs so one person can monitor several characters at the same time but still be available to respond if they get messaged by a GM checking to see if they’re a real player. You can usually identify them by their crappy greens (a low level of armor), their pattern of play, their gibberish names, and the fact that they don’t speak much English. Players usually treat them badly but I’ve had several nice run ins with farmers that helped me out, either by saving me from dying or actually giving me stuff, the latter of which I find kind of confusing. The only way I find them annoying is when they spam the chat channels or private message me with ads for buying gold. The accounts that do that are quickly disabled though.
WELL ACTUALLY, Peter Jackson’s “Brain Dead” [1] had a zombie sex and even zombie birth. I highly recommend this movie for the times when you just want to drown yourself in gory silliness.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/
Can’t believe I forgot this! The movie is also known as _Dead Alive_, and a bunch of the OTI guys watched it together long before OTI was a twinkle in our eyes. A truly great and kooky movie.
I have seen it on Polish in middle school. Our teacher was cool. I’ll put it on my weekend TODO list.
The important thing to remember is this:
When you are in the checkout line and you hear that beep, think of all the fun YOU could have on Supermarket Sweep.
The ambitiously titled Pokémon: The First Movie grossed $163,644,662 back in 1998.
Maybe one day, a Pokémon movie can grow up to be a true hero, living up to the prophecy of hitting the two hundred million mark.
I know it’s not pop culture, but I really like it when you guys get sidetracked on other things, like grocery store lines, airplane loading strategies, and bottle caps.
Now that you mention it, it is very strange that you have to have a special tool in order to enjoy the best beers. I think it’s interesting that mass market soda makers have really hitched their wagons to plastic bottles and aluminum cans, with glass bottles almost disappearing from the market. They’re really invested in making soda as easy and convenient to drink as possible. While beer brewers are all about glass bottles. There’s a microcanning movement getting traction, but for the most part, canned beer is still seen as cheap or inferior. It seems strange that Budweiser hasn’t come out with a plastic beer bottle yet. And of course there’s the economics of materials to think about – recycled glass and aluminium are cheaper than ‘fresh’ glass and aluminium, while recycled plastic costs more than ‘fresh’ plastic.
On a totally different yet related front, 6-packs of cans of Coca-Cola and Pepsi products have completely disappeared from the grocery store. When and why did that happen?
I still get my Dr. Brown’s diet cherry soda in a six pack! But I just looked it up and Snapple/Dr Pepper owns it so I guess you’re right. It’s all about fridge packs now I guess? On a side note, everyone give me their empty fridge packs; my guinea pigs love them.
That’s very interesting about the cost of recycled versus fresh with various materials. I wonder if beer does not keep fresh in plastic? They do sell hard liquor in plastic.
I also like when we broaden our “overthinking” mandate a bit to talk about other dross sort of stuff that fits into our common cultural world.
Coors Light rolled out plastic beer bottles in 2005 for their “cooler” product – the idea seems to have been that you have to present them as some sort of value-add or people won’t settle for them. Coors pitched the plastic bottles as a sort of game-day tailgate convenience.
Not sure how successful they’ve been, but they don’t really appear to have caught on. The Bud Light aluminum beer bottles are fairly ubiquitous, though.
6-packs of soda cans from major soda bottlers went away a few years ago – around the time they rolled out the 12-pack cardboard carrying case (which is a pretty sweet packaging design – portable, fits in a fridge, serves one can at a time). Plastic can holders have gotten bad press for a long time, and of course those companies get their chemicals so cheap that they want you to buy their stuff in as large servings as possible. You still get six-packs of other kinds of soda cans, though – like smaller regional sodas or premium or “relatively healthier” sodas.
Apparently, beer continues to brew in the bottle, and that process is accelerated by light. Which is why most beer is bottled in darker glass. I suppose they would have to bottle beer in colored plastic, which is probably not as cheap as the clear plastic that soda bottlers are using.
Special overthinking side note: I used to work at a convenience store that sold bottled water from the local artesian spring, in 1.5L bottles and 1-gallon milk jugs. Both products were the same price, because the price of the different plastics was more of a factor to the cost than the value of the water.
…It probably doesn’t deserve.
I felt like the podcast didn’t really end.
A that never really ends lives on in all our hearts – just like the Korean War.
Can you guys just quick get together again and release yourselves saying the tagline?
OTI for the Billboard Top 100!
Or whatever ridiculous multiple charts you have.
Well in that way it’s appropriate that Lee declared the Podcast 172 Armistice.
Along the lines of the bottle cap thing, I watched Objectified the other day, a documentary about industrial design by Gary Hustwit (also did Helvetica and Urbanized, which I both really liked). One of the interviewees made the point that if you think of all the many thousands of chairs that have been designed over human history, it’s kind of insane that anybody sits in an uncomfortable chair.
After Superman, the 80’s were a bad time for comic book movies: Howard The Duck, Sheena, Red Sonja, Supergirl, Swamp Thing (although there were some fun bits).
However, there were plenty of high points before X-Men and Spiderman such as Weird Science (based on EC comics), Heavy Metal, Blade, The Crow, The Mask and Men in Black, all based on comics.
Plus there are some hot properties not just from DC and Marvel, Dark Horse has some good properties made into movies: The Mask, 300, Hellboy, and Sin City. They were also responsible for Barb Wire, Mystery Men and Aliens vs Predator so you do have to take the bad with the good.
As for indie comics, Scott Pilgrim was an indie comic and I hear they are making a movie out of Y: The Last Man. So even if the Thor’s and Spiderman’s run out, there should still be plenty of material for possible movies.