National Comic Book Day

Coming up next Friday on Sept. 25th, 2009 is National Comic Book Day.

Not to be confused with Free Comic Book Day, NCBD is a chance to share your love for comics with friends who might not be into them. You could also pick up a couple of titles you've never read before and give 'em try.
Maybe you have some trade paperbacks that you've read and don't want to hang onto any longer. You could donate them to the library or pass them along to friends.
You might like to make a comic book-themed cake to celebrate the day.

Or, perhaps you could just dress up in a superhero costume and worry your family and scare the neighbors.

Whatever you decide to do or however you want to celebrate is up to you.

Analysis On Being A "Red Shirt"

If you've got a few minutes to kill and want to read something funny, I suggest you take a look at this analyis of the "Red-Shirt Phenomenom".


It's an interesting subject, given that a lot of people (not just Trekkies... or Trekkers) are familiar with the phrase "Red Shirt".

For example:
The basic stats:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.
Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

• Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
• Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
• Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
• Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

He goes on from there breaking it down into nice little statistics, but that ought to give you enough to want to read further.

In the meantime, please enjoy this...




(Red-Shirt analysis found via the Presurfer)

Disney to buy Marvel! OMG! Mickey vs Hulk! Mr. Incredible to join Avengers!

The Link.

Now Disney should buy WB.

Room With A View

Who wouldn't love to look out and see Batman standing guard over Gotham City?

Well, probably not criminals.

But I'm sure the regular law-abiding citizens wouldn't have a problem with him keeping an eye on them and keeping things safe for everyone.

You know... if he were real.

But you can almost have the next best thing by plastering a wall in one of your rooms with an image of the Dark Knight keeping vigil 24/7.

A company called Room Mates is selling quite a few wall murals with comic-related themes for uber-geeks to choose from.

You could have Superman flying over Metropolis. Spider-man webswinging.

Maybe you can't decide on any particular hero and would want to decorate your wall with a myriad of classic comic book covers. Well now you can do that too.

Or maybe, just maybe you want to go all out and proclaim your geektitude to the world (or whoever happens to visit your home).

You could decorate the walls with the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise:

But don't stop there.

You'll want an official replica of Capt. Kirk's chair to go with it.

And while you're at it, pick up a wall mural of the Carina Nebula to really set the mood and make the "experience" complete.

If all that is a little too much for your wallet, you could just change a few switchplates in your house for a more "subtle" nerd effect.

Happy decorating!

The Comic Stop Fantasy Football League

As many of you know, George, Chris and myself are big sports fans. Football, hockey, soccer, baseball, basketball. You name it and chances are that one or more of us loves it.

Our love of sports also translates to our love of fantasy sports and after many years of debating it, we have finally decided to start a fantasy football league just for The Comic Stop! That's right. Now you will be able to talk smack to George "on the field"!

If you would like to join the league, just send an email with "I Want To Join" as the title to:

redmond@comicstoponline.com

We will only be accepting 13 people for the inaugural year, (plus George, Chris and myself). If we get a lot more than 13 people that want to play, we might consider having 2 leagues but the plan, at the moment, is for just one league of 16 people.

The league dues will be a paltry $10.00 a person. We will be holding a live draft on Monday, Sept 7th. Your team name MUST be comic related in an obvious way. Any other questions? Just let me know.

I look forward to completely kicking your arses this football season!

Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller creator dead at 59

John Hughes has died of a heart attack at the age of 59. And I'm not ashamed to admit I'm crying as I write this. Rest in Peace Mr. Hughes

Star Trek vs. Star Wars

On Wired.com there's a funny article about which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars.

I won't repeat the whole article, but the writer is a fan of both and makes a good case for either franchise, eventually giving one of them the edge overall.

I feel the same way, but not sure I can really pick a "winner" in this case.
Afterall, one the one hand you do have green alien chicks in Star Trek. But in Star Wars, you have slave Leia.
*SIGH* It's a tough call for sure.

Maybe this will help:


... or maybe not.