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The First Black Comic Convention in Philadelphia
The ECBACC was created in 2002 in Philadelphia to serve as a place for Black comic creators and fans to meet and network. This was back when Facebook, YouTube and Twitter didn’t exist so people had to meet face to face. The convention founder and president is Yumy Odom. He is a strong advocate for Black creators, and that is why he founded the convention. For more information on the leadership board, visit the ECBACC website.
After the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, every major studio wants to copy that model. There have been rumors of a Ghostbusters Universe, Transformers Universe and more Star Wars. Universal Studios was hoping to launch a new Monsters Universe beginning with 2014’s Dracula Untold, but that is in limbo. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg and the beginning of the mimicry. The biggest threat comes in the form of a massive experiment from Warner Brothers. DC Comics and Warner Brothers appear to be the only forces that could come close to dethroning Marvel. With the slew of announcements, the DC Cinematic Universe could be a breath of fresh air or a beautiful disaster with merit.
Diversity
From the beginning, DC and Warner Brothers announced that the Justice League would be replacing founder Martian Manhunter with Cyborg. This minor change was just the beginning to something bigger when we learned that Jason Momoa was Aquaman. Stage actor Ray Fisher will portray Cyborg and also star in the solo film, which was announced before Black Panther. The interesting aspect to this is who will direct the film. Let’s look at other directing choices:
Patty Jenkins will direct Wonder Woman after only directing one real hit film, 2003’s Monster.
James Wan who is of Malaysian and Chinese descent will direct Aquaman. Wan has directed countless hits including Furious Seven (2015), which is one the highest grossing films of all time and one of the most diverse.
There is a strong chance Antoine Fuqua or someone else could direct Cyborg’s film.
Nintendo
This year’s E3 was not very good for the mega gaming company. There were some lukewarm reaction to its releases and to their presentations. However, there was a gem or two that emerged from the filth. Some of the big moments included the announcement of Platinum Games co-developing Star Fox Zero with Shigeru Miyamoto and Metroid Prime: Federation Force. Fans have been awaiting these two games but Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the 3DS has not been received well. The trailer has been destroyed since its release.
Source: Nintendo/Youtube
Email can be a useful tool for work communication and file-sharing, but if users send a “bad” email with regrettable content, it could ruin their career. A new Gmail feature allows the sender to stop the email in its tracks.
“It lets you un-send an email for a short while after sending. Of course, it isn’t reaching out and snatching the email back — it just holds the email for a brief period sufficient for you to evaluate your regrets — but it can still be a life-saver. This feature has actually been available since March of 2009, but it has been hidden away in the Labs section of Gmail’s settings,” reports
Kristofer Wouk for Digital Trends.
In order to activate the feature, Gmail users with the beta version of the unsend option will have to go to general tabs and click on “Enable Undo Send.”
One cool aspect the feature has is the option to choose time intervals of the unsent email. What that means is that in the settings of the unsend feature you can set the wait to send time to 5 seconds, 10, 20 or 30 depending on how safe you want to be.
This feature does not erase a bad email. It just slows it down so that you can edit it and clean it up if need be.
According to The Financial Express, the ‘Ultimate Player Edition’ PS4 comes with double storage, meaning 1TB, and will be released across Europe on July 15. There is no news on a wider release as of yet.
This new PS4 will be a direct response to Microsoft’s new Xbox One, which will also have more storage capacity. With the new storage, gamers can download games, save highlights, share experiences and extend play with more add-on content.
This announcement is just part of a slew of new products Sony is releasing in the next few months. The company will also release an updated 500GB model PS4 that will be slimmer and more energy efficient for those who are looking for an upgrade.
These two machines will more than likely be released stateside during the holiday shopping season.
Source: Sony/Youtube
Mission Main Street Grants
Chase Financial and LinkedIn are awarding the Mission Main Street Grant to lucky, qualifying small businesses. Chase awards $2 million in the form of 20 small business grants at $100,000 each. The deadline has passed for this year, but for more information on next year’s application process visit Missionmainstreetgrants.com.
This month, Facebook released its new product “Moments” during a time when online privacy has come under attack.
“If you’re unfamiliar, ‘Moments’ is one of Facebook’s sister apps for mobile devices. It works by burrowing into all the photos on your camera, and sorting them into discrete temporal events – that party, that bike trip, that office function – to create ‘Moments.’ The app then tags everyone it recognizes by comparing the faces in the photos to existing Facebook friends (your ‘social graph’ in tech parlance), and invites you to share the resulting ‘Moment’ with everyone tagged in the photo,” reports Jeff John Roberts for Fortune.
This feature will change how everything works for online Facebook users. Because of the constant debate over privacy and the lack of strong laws that prevent social media sites and websites from tracking your location and creating ads suited to you, this feature will not be welcomed with open arms.
In fact, Canada and many European nations have banned the tag feature. Those same countries will more than likely reject the “Moments” feature. In Ireland, privacy watchdogs have noticed that the feature has only a default mode, meaning that users can’t decide to turn it on or off.
According to Slash Gear writer Chris Davies, “the social network claims more than 97-percent accuracy at identifying the right people, juggling in excess of 120m parameters as it builds 3D face models using a neural network. Last year, Facebook said it had trained the network using more than 4,000 people and in excess of four million images.”
The debate over the new app/feature is just getting started. “Moments” was released June 15 and it is available in the App Store and Google Play.
On June 25, Eveline Pierre, founder and executive director of the Haitian Heritage Museum in Miami, along with co-founder Serge Rodriguez will host a regional tech summit presented by Miami Caribbean Code (MC2).
“MC2 is an empowering movement and event series with the goal of fostering a bridge between the fast-moving tech world, the Miami-Caribbean community and the Caribbean region. We recently kicked off MC2 with our inaugural Youth Tech Summit in April for local Miami-Caribbean youth and educators,” according to Arlice Nichole, editor of awomansworthonline.com.
The event will feature entrepreneurs and tech innovators looking to expand their networks and connect with like-minded individuals. This space will be used to discuss the future of technology, and there will also be a variety panels that will cover tech innovations, trends and recent developments in the tech industry.
One of the major features of the event is the Caribbean Tech and Innovation Awards that will highlight the achievements of tech leaders from the Caribbean.
There will be a fundraiser for future events and the Haitian Heritage Museum.
Scheduled speakers include founder and host of devLatino Jason Mazier, president of Belle Fleur Technologies Tia Dubuisson and Oracle principal technical consultant Perside Foster. For the full list of speakers, visit MC2’s website.
The Miami Caribbean Code summit will be held in the Miami Design District. There is still time to register. Go to MC2 for more info.
The New Green Arrow comic creative team, writer Benjamin Percy and artist Patrick Zircher, will take the character into familiar territory as they discuss the recent social movements in the United States.
After 41 issues of the New 52 Green Arrow, this new team wants to shake up the comic by having upcoming storylines echo events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore as the character tackles tough social issues.
“I can’t go into much detail. I don’t want to give away any of the mysteries that keep readers reading. I will say that the first arc has a veiled, incendiary connection to what is happening in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. Green Arrow has a history as a political firebrand,” said Percy.
According to writer David Barnett from The Guardian, “Green Arrow certainly asked the tough questions back in the early ’70s, during an infamous run of stories written by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, which actually appeared in the Green Lantern comic, though Green Arrow (secret identity: Oliver Queen) had joint billing.”
During that time, Green Arrow and Green Lantern dealt with segregation in America, rising drug usage, and with mental health all in an attempt to save a struggling book.
Percy goes on to say that “DC wanted me to bring that back to the series. This won’t dominate the book – but it will be an essential undercurrent. These are culturally, politically, environmentally dangerous times, and I’m taking a knife to the nerve of the moment. But even as I wrestle with these issues – some of them ripped from the headlines – I hope the story never comes across as editorial or preachy – just relevant. I think stories should raise questions, not answer them.”
DC Comics has been pushing the envelope lately in order to compete with Marvel. The character Midnighter is the first mainstream homosexual male to have a solo series, and recently there was a transgender character introduced in Batgirl.
If DC wants its books to be more reflective of the times, putting Green Arrow in the midst of a new social movement is a good call.
