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New character posing/3D model viewing tool from inside the Warcraft armory came out tonight. Wowhead has had something like this, but this one finally lets you scan through the animation loops, and has pretty high quality visuals to boot. I'm kind of surprised they didn't add Twitter & Facebook links though -- that seems de rigeur these days :)
My main:
My eeeeevil alt:
...and the somewhat camera-shy in-game standin for me:
We've been re-watching ST:TNG lately. It was a good show for me as a kid. It espoused an idealistic view of humanity. It was pro-science and pro-rationality. Every problem could be solved in short order through communication, intelligence, and gadgetry. It's clear to me in retrospect how this show helped form my own ideals and attitudes.
Unfortunately, two decades later, the show's flaws are more evident. The "Rubber Science" of Star Trek is, of course, a long standing joke. But what's truly striking to me now is how pervasive the problem is. In literally every episode, some dramatic new technological event occurs. I've just watched two episodes in a row where eternal life gets invented. In the first, the ability to download brains to computers! In the second, the ability to use the transporter to filter out old age!
These are interesting and deep ideas, well and truly explored throughout the sci-fi literature. But in Star Trek, they're just part of a fusillade of the sci-fi smorgasbord that's being hurled at us. In a good sci-fi, these kinds of ideas are used as a backdrop, and what becomes interesting is the exploration of the societal impact. But Federation culture is impervious to change. The Prime Directive seems to apply more to the Federation itself than to the noble savages they continuously encounter. Disruptive technologies assault the crew of the Enterprise on a daily basis, and yet they rise above, serene, impermeable.
Perhaps this is why Babylon 5 was so attractive; it was arguably the first modern sci-fi show that acknowledged that change happens. Re-watching Firefly in the past few days (in between discs of ST:TNG, since Firefly was so mournfully short) also demonstrates a sci-fi universe where technology has cultural implications.
Here are some examples in the past two decades of ideas that would have been throw-away plot devices in ST:TNG:
For example, seven years ago, the iPod was just coming out. Now, iPhones, Droids, and Pres have dramatically changed the way we look at computing. Where, in ST:TNG's seven year run, is the impact of ANY of their throwaway ideas shown? I'd argue the closest Star Trek ever comes to this is the Holodeck, a technology introduced with the first episode, and which ends up having great impact on the social interactions of the crew.
The show is nice to re-watch, largely because it does harken back to a simpler time. After a stressful year, it's nice to watch a fairly low-impact and innocuous fantasy, where people are just fundamentally trying to be nice to each other. But the elephants in the transporter bay are hard to overlook.