Nerds. Blogging. It's a Pretty Simple Concept

Winnie the Hulk

That sound you heard this morning? You know, the one that sounded like a million souls crying out at once? Yeah that was the collective nerd community reading that Disney has bought Marvel for FOUR. BILLION. DOLLARS. If you haven’t already, go read the details. I’ll wait…………Done? Do you need a minute to collect yourself? Maybe a tissue? Well too stinking bad. Regardless of how much this seems like a poorly executed belated April Fools joke, it’s true.

So what does this mean for the future of Marvel comics? Right now, nothing. Mergers/buyouts take time, and it’ll probably be a year or two before the purchase has been fully executed. But lets not kid ourselves; change is coming. At some point, some Disney exec will make some “suggestion” along the lines of “Hey, you know the Punisher? Does he have to kill people ALL the time?” And before you know it, the big summer event will be something along the lines of a 27-issue Jonas Brothers/X-Men crossover, guest staring Mickey and Hannah Montana, of course.

I really do understand Marvel taking the deal. $4 billion dollars is a lot of $%^&-ing money, but make no mistake, there will be strings attached. Does anyone remember Kevin Smith’s Dogma debacle from the 90’s? The Catholic League attacked Smith and Disney continually until Disney finally agreed to not release the movie. Disney(and any of it’s associated companies) has a giant target painted on their back, and the publicity to be gained by attacking them makes them a very attractive target for various parent groups and “action leagues.” It’ll be interesting to see what happens the next time Marvel announces a gay character(Northstar), or Peter Parker makes a deal with the Devil(It was actually Mephisto, but that’s a post for another time).

And I haven’t even really talked about what this means for the movies, either. If you thought Marvel made some questionable casting choices before(I’m looking at you Vinnie Jones), wait till this happens:

Zac Efron as Spiderman | The Rock as Wolverine | Miley Cyrus as The Invisible Woman

Yep, you’ll be having nightmares about these pictures for weeks, I promise.

For those of you considering jailbreaking your iPod Touch or iPhone I couldn’t really give you a good reason to until recently. The recent controversy over Apple blocking Google’s Voice app, and then removing GV Mobile after it had already approved their app, has given me a slightly different perspective on the whole situation. I wholeheartedly disagreed with Apple’s choice in the matter, and have decided to jailbreak my iPod Touch and give GV Mobile a try.

Installing Cydia and getting it running is not something I’m going to be discussing on this blog. It’s not very hard to Google “redsn0w” and find tutorials and help that way. If you follow the instructions carefully I’m almost 100% positive you will not brick your device. That being said, if you aren’t comfortable with the possibility of turning your iPod/iPhone into something useless, please do not attempt this.

Once you have Cydia opened and updated, use the search feature and look up “GV Mobile”. A few clicks later and you’ll be able to go back to the home screen and “Avada Kedavra” you device no longer works. (erm… I mean) Viola! you now have a new icon on your screen and it looks surprisingly like this:

Home Screen goodness:

Ok. Here’s my complaint about GV Mobile. It gives me the iPhone-esque buttons and dialer, and when I press call…my cell phone rings?! Not the iPod Touch. What gives? I have the mic plugged in, Skype works, Voice Memos works, and I can even  listen to the voicemails, but I cannot make calls from the Touch. Further research into the problem reveals its a limitation in the way GV Mobile works, not in Google Voice or the iPod itself.

But now onto things that work. SMS – It works, and works well, it makes use of the gtalk type storage/indexing and keeps track of all incoming and outgoing SMS regardless of which interface was used to send them. So all the SMS from the webpage, show up here as if I had been using my Touch the whole time. Call history shows all calls made in the same manner as described with the SMS.

Voice Mail is one of the features I’m most looking forward to using. You can set all of your calls to your Google Voice number to go straight to Voice Mail. And its nice they give you a callback option, which same as the keypad/dialer area, calls your phone first and then calls them from your GV number.

So in conclusion, while the app isn’t nearly as powerful as it would be if I had an iPhone, it does call my cell phone, and also allows me to send texts and read or listen to my voice mails. I really hope there’s going to eventually be a way to use either the bluetooth or the mic input to turn my Touch into a sort of Wifi-enabled phone, I would still recommend looking into seeing if jailbreaking could be in your future.

Overall I’d say this is a fun way to utilize your Google Voice account, and as it stands I’d give the app an overall positive review

Grade: B-

This guy is definitely on to something. Looking somewhat like a super hero, spewing comedy the likes of and SNL digital short, and making it accessible to everyone with online access via YouTube; really, how much better could it get. I am certainly one for a gargantuan laugh and this gentleman, my friends, gladly provides. The premise is the most arcane art in the world of middle school pranks; that being you call an unsuspecting target, and get them to buy into the lines you are feeding them and unknowingly they have just become your next victim! It is brilliant, always good for a midday laugh, and will definitely be the next water cooler topic, as so far the videos I have seen are definitely NSFW. So when you have a spare minute, which you should more than be willing to make to take in the likes of the Fonejacker, take that minute to soak in some old school comedic pranks courtesy of the man behind the mask, ski mask that is!

Fonejacker