Woot is running a great deal ($150) for an Asus 900. Not very powerful and runs Linux, but I would be very tempted if I thought I had a prayer of convincing Clancy that what we needed was another portable computing device.

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

Online Dating Helping Pathetic Women Get Their Hopes Crushed More Efficiently

With The Econoholic having chosen to go get himself married and unwired and unplugged and unblogging, posting on his blog slowed to a crawl. As such, I offered Sheila Tone the opportunity to start posting here and she has accepted. So starting next week, you will start to see some posts with a new authorname. So before you start wondering why Trumwill is married to some dude or talking about his kids, be sure to check the author’s name.

I was talking to Renata the other night on Facebook. She asked me what I thought of the GI Joe movie and we started talking about the exhumation of our childhood favorites. She said that she was boycotting them until they actually exhumed something for girls rather than just playing to the Peter Pans. She was thinking of Jem in particular. I commented that I hadn’t thought of Jem in forever but then corrected myself when I realized that she popped into my mind when I was introduced to Hannah Montana and thought “A singer with a secret identity… like Jem.” She did not appreciate the connection since Jem was a do-gooder but Hannah is the latest pump-and-dump adolescent female property.

She brought up an interesgting point, though. I wonder why they haven’t resurrected any of the female properties. Having grown up in an 80% male household, I don’t even know what (other than Jem) they’re failing to produce, but I assume that there exists something. Guys are not generally more prone to nostalgia, I don’t think. Maybe it’s because the producers and whatnot are mostly men so they’re more likely to make the movies that they dreamed of when they were younger? If so, I’m still waiting for my Thundercats.

In preparation for watching the GI Joe movie, I started watching some of the old cartoons that used to come on right after Thundercats which came on right after I got home from school. The cartoons were… not what I remembered. I specifically watched two two-part stories that have remained in my mind all of these years. What I remember as epic 9-part tales of action, characterization, and intrigue were actually rather shallow. One was pretty blatantly ripped off a movie and the other was… well it was there. They weren’t bad, of course, but they were so much better when I was ten.

I still haven’t seen the Transformers movies. I was never big into Transformers. I thought Go-Bots had a cooler backstory (albeit the toys were not nearly as cool). Some of my friends swear by it. Maybe I’ll check it out to see if it confirms something I’ve noticed… which is that cartoons have gotten ridiculously better than they were. When I’m at my folks house flipping through, I sometimes catch the stuff expressly aimed at kids and find it, if not gripping, something to pass the commercial breaks with. I think they may have figured out a zen to making entertainment aimed at kids more palatable to adults. But not in the way the cheap ways that entertainment can be made more grown-up. They’re just these clever bits that seem totally and utterly absent from GI Joe. It’s got me a little scared to go back and watch any Thundercats for fear that my memories of that awesome (and epic!) mythology will turn out to be mundane.

I don’t have that question about He-Man. Even what I remember of it was awful. A couple years ago I ran into a remake that didn’t seem to totally suck and thought to myself “Hey, it’s like He-Man with story… oh wait, it is He-Man!” A few weeks ago I ran across an list of 11 Disappointments About He-Man, In Retrospect. It discusses how of all the shows designed to sell toys it was by far the most transparent with interesting factoids on how Mattel brought it together. I found the closing, though, to be particularly insightful:

Now… with all this being said, you’d think I was down on “He-Man”. But I’m not. Not in the least. I still have incredibly strong memories of the show and the toys. Writing this blog entry made me feel nostalgic, not jaded or angry or deceived.

Because, in spite of everything above, “He-Man” transcended its sellout roots to become a legitimate cultural phenomenon. And one I’m really happy to have been a part of.

If a generation grows up believing that dogfood is actually delicious, does that make it delicious? Does the fakeness of He-Man revealed make it any less genuine, in the end? Granted, it sort of comes up with I think of what from the old days to ram down the throats of show my future children. I’m reminded of something I read recently about some old Trek fans trying to introduce their kids to the original Star Trek which did not hold up well. Or rather, whatever plot there had been was overshadowed by the crappy effects. Even if He-Man were Shakespeare on script, the animation by today’s standards would be too detracting to notice.

Back to GI Joe for a moment, I have a sort of dissonance as I try to reconcile the episodes as I remember them and the ones that I just watched. Can I reinsert the intrigue that was noticeably absent in “There’s No Place Like Springfield” into my memories of it? Can I unremember the mediocrity of World Without End and instead take my mind back to the epic tale I had remembered? Does this mean that I should never, ever watch Thundercats again?

Disney to Buy Marvel for $4 billion

Robert A. Iger, Mouse House prexy and CEO, said in a statement: “This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories.”

In a sense, it’s really quite amazing that Marvel has remained independent for as long as it has. If this goes through, it will bridge one of the major differences between Marvel and (my preferred) DC Comics, which is megacorporate sponsorship. DC has been owned by Warner Bros for forever and a day and it has had effects both positive and negative. On the negative side, it’s made DC Comics more broadly tame with WB keeping an eagle-eye on its properties’ profit potential. Further, DC Comics has always been worse than Marvel about using comics and comics properties as a vehicle for selling toys and franchise tie-ins and focusing less on overall story development. On the other hand, Warner Bros is likely one of the forces that has held DC Comics back from making some of the more questionable editorial decisions that Marvel has made in reference to using its properties to make controversial political statements. Warner Bros would be far less likely to allow Superman to become a leftist apologeer for American foreign policy (nor would they allow him to be jingoist), which is constricting in one manner but also keeps the brand more universal. Nor are they as likely to have their heroes go to war against one another in a thinly-veiled critique of the Bush Administration.

On the other hand, Warner Bros has been too lax with allowing DC to do what it wanted. Someone should have stepped in to prevent the death of Bruce Wayne, for instance. I’ve no attachment to Wayne himself, but it was a poor marketing decision. So in that sense, maybe WB is not as responsible for DC’s restraint as previously suspected. And as such, maybe Disney will keep a similar hands-off policy.

I’m torn between hoping they do and hoping they don’t. If they take more of an interest in Marvel than WB does in DC, they may prevent Marvel from making some of the mistakes that they (and DC) have made. On the other hand, Marvel has avoided some of the biggest mistakes that DC has made. The disconnect between DC Comics and WB’s usage of DC properties is a constant bug up my crawl while Marvel has broadly done a better job of trying to use the success of the movies to move comic books. Since comic books are their main trade rather than a mere side-venture, they have all the incentive to. WB can let DC have its sandbox and poach the characters for movies whenever the mood strikes them. If Disney takes that attitude, it could put the comic business in even greater peril.

And that’s why I think that I am, on the whole, skeptical of the deal. Business-wise, of course, it makes a whole lot of sense. But while I prefer DC Comics, I do not want Marvel to become more like DC (nor vice-versa, except in very specific ways). I like the fact that they are distinct with different priorities. While I wish that DC sold more comics than Marvel, I don’t want Marvel sales to diminish to the point of DC’s. I want a strong industry, if only so that DC has the chance to rebound and take advantage of the onslaught of superhero popularity.

I’ve driven from Soundview to Union City the last couple days, first to watch a movie and second to retrieve my lost cell phone (yay!). There is some very, very weird smell eminating from Soundview. When I was driving back last night, I was afraid I’d gotten some excrement on my shoe or something, but then when I got to downtown the smell seemed to go away. When I passed through the same part of the city, near the Soundome sports facility, the same smell was there. I stopped at a gas station out there and just breathing was a very unpleasant experience. As longtime readers know, this is despite my generally-atrocious sense of smell. Unfortunately, that poor sense of smell prevented me from identifying exactly what manner of foul odor it was. Smelled a little like manure, maybe.