The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Glen Weldon takes us through Batman’s history and evolution and how it was affected by the culture in which it was written. I knew bits and pieces of the story from other histories of comics, but this was the first time I’d read one focused on Batman. There are many ways to tell this story and I think Weldon’s is a very good strategy.

What does The Man in the Yellow Hat do for a living that allows him to afford a big apartment in NYC and a big house upstate?

In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.

Scarlett has become hardcore obsessed with the BBC show Octonauts. Nothing she used to care about - Mulan, My Little Pony, Beauty and the Beast - can be put on the television for her. All she wants to watch is Octonauts. So for Easter we got her all the characters. She has two favorite characters/toys: Shellington, a koala bear, and Kwazii, a cat descended from a long line of pirates. This is what Kwazii looks like:

Just in case you didn’t read it or watch the movie, each district has a fashion designer who designs the costume for its contestants representing the products the district produces. The narrator mentions that these fashion designers aren’t always creative. In the movie, the logging district girl is dressed like a tree. Then again, maybe Hunger Games was copying Miss Universe - I don’t watch beauty pageants. Either way I think the only way Miss Canada could have been more of a stereotype is if she had a jar of syrup in her other hand.

He’d have made Bee and Puppycat, Natasha Allegri’s latest surreal cartoon masterpiece. I think there’s something great about Allyn Rachel’s mumbling delivery that really sells it. I love this amazing world we have that allows for experimentation - I hope we don’t lose it through bungling of Net Neutrality issues. (I like eps 1 and 2 from the Kickstarter [second video] more than the pilot [first video])

http://youtu.be/lOG_UtLxh58

http://youtu.be/3-oweoj9G30

I really enjoy the anime-like music cues. Also, Puppycat’s voice makes me think of the turrets in Portal.

I come in from raking the leaves and Scarlett is standing there with one remote in her hand and the other two in front of her. She’s pushing buttons and asks me, “Daddy, what button do I need to push to watch a video?” I told here there were a lot of buttons to push. “But which one do I push first?”

Last night I had a dream that combined Games of Thrones and Perl programming. Like it was in the GoT world, but we had to do some Perl programming to defeat the Lannisters.