Category: Geekitude

I finished up Season 2 of The Mandalorian. Just as with the first season, the second season’s storylines were great. Plus, like any great sequel, the creators upped the ante and let us see real life characters only seen in the cartoons. The ending was just bleeding awesome. How do you do successful Star Wars. This Is The Way.

The movies have been up and down. The original trilogy is still classic. The prequel trilogy was an excellent concept executed poorly. The Disney trilogy started off okay, but lacked a consistent story arc and felt more like someone trying to recreate a great painting by doing a paint-by-numbers. Honestly, it was kind of the inverse of the prequels in that it was a bad concept executed beautifully. Rogue One and Solo are actually some of my favorite films in the universe. So it wasn’t just Disney that fucked up.

Yet, the recent Star Wars series on television has been just consistently damned good. Season 7 of Clone Wars and The Mandolorian have exceeded my expectations at nearly every turn. Then, Disney announced a slew of new stuff. I will admit, I am salivating.

The Brother shared this article from ArsTechnica about Acer reintroducing the Gateway brand for a line of new laptops. They were less than impressed. From the article:

Back in 2007, Taiwan-based PC manufacturer Acer bought the once-iconic Gateway brand in order to stick a thumb in the eye of rival OEM Lenovo and increase its US market presence. In the 13 years since, the Gateway brand has languished largely unused, while Acer built up its own name in the United States directly. The cow is officially back now, though, with a new line of mostly budget, Walmart-exclusive Gateway laptops.

The new line ranges from $180 to $1,000, and several models seem interesting – but when we looked closer, we found a familiar and not particularly attractive name behind the brand. Gateway is also making two models of Android tablet – an 8″ GWAT8-1 which doesn’t appear to be available retail yet, and a 10″ model available at Walmart for $67. Trying to find more detail on the GWAT8-1 led us to a surprising discovery – it’s actually made (or imported) by EVOO.

In June of this year, we reviewed and absolutely despised a $140 EVOO laptop – a device powered by an AMD A4-9120e CPU, just like the cheapest model of Gateway laptop in the table above. The new GWTN116-1BL has twice the RAM and storage compared to the effectively uncooled, drastically underclocked, and absolutely bletcherous EVOO EV-C-116-5 – but when we went sleuthing, we discovered shipping records indicating that it, too, is an EVOO system.

And of course the kicker:

An Acer representative confirmed later that, although Acer does own the Gateway brand, it is not directly involved in the production or manufacture of these devices.

My first computer (that was mine, not one of the family computers) was a Gateway. My family bought Gateway systems for a long time. For the nineties, Gateway was exactly that, a great gateway for people purchasing their first computers. It is disappointing to see such an iconic brand treated so shabbily.

Season 2 of The Mandalorian next month.

Because the trailer for the new Dune movie looks awesome.

Denny O’Neil, a giant in the comics world died over the weekend at age 81. What did he do? Among other things:

He also created/co-created Ra’s al Ghul, Talia al Ghul, Leslie Thompkins, Azrael, and Richard Dragon; he was also involved in the revitalization of the Joker and Two-Face as modern DC villains, and watched over the death of Jason Todd, the second Robin. He also worked in television , writing episodes of Logan’s Run, Superboy, Batman: The Animated Series, and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.

He also gave a robot a very important name – Optimus Prime.

In a fit of nostalgia, I’ve been binging on old cartoon intros from my childhood. It amuses me how many of the theme songs will still just pop into my head out of nowhere.

Since I enjoy sharing the bizarreness of my mind with the readers, these are my five favorite themes from my childhood cartoons. These aren’t my favorite cartoons – just the theme songs. Also, these are my favorite versions of the songs.

Mighty Orbots

Silverhawks

GI Joe

Adventures of Galaxy Rangers

Starblazers

This video’s been making the rounds.

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some X-Wings. That being said, I prefer this one.