Geekanerd Spotter: Stormtroopers Take Keyspan Park

Hey did you see The Clone Wars when it opened yesterday? I didn't, making it the first Star Wars movie I haven't seen on opening day since I was born. Ooh, it just looks so bad. But I can't help feeling like I skipped an old friend's birthday party, even if that friend has turned into an infantile cash-monger. Sad.

But on a lighter note, yesterday at the Brooklyn Cyclones game at Keyspan Park, a troupe of Stormtroopers showed up to pass out posters. I love this picture, because the guy on the left looks very self-conscious about being photographed in a nerdy context, the girl in the middle is being a good sport, and the girl on the right is somehow pulling off a "Yeah, I'm holding a Clone Wars mini-poster, you jealous?" look.
Foaming Geek Analysis Moment: I do have to question exactly what sort of troopers these are supposed to be. Given that they're promoting Clone Wars, you'd think they're supposed to be Clone Troopers from the era between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The red guy is clearly a Clone Captain in Phase II armor, you can see the model here. So that checks out. But those other guys are just classic Stormtroopers, who weren't around until after (or at least the very end of) Revenge of the Sith. C'mon Lucasfilm, you couldn't spring for a few more Clone Trooper uniforms, you have to pull those old Halloween costumes out of storage? It never ends.

Thanks to loyal Gnerd reader Lena for sending these pictures in; here's her sister Alison in a classic photo op post with a trooper.

Neil Gaiman Gives It Away

Neil Gaiman has my lifelong allegiance for having written Sandman, the ten volume tome that helped to remind me in my formative college years that comics could be brilliant and were worth taking seriously. Starting today Neil Gaiman's similarly deity-themed book, American Gods, is available in it's entirety on Harper Collin's website, a promotion intended to celebrate the seventh anniversary of Gaiman's blog. Gaiman fans were able to vote for which of his book's would be available for free, and American Gods won by a landslide. This creates a neat little narrative circle, as the blog itself was born out of a promotional stunt to document the writing process of a little book called....American Gods. Ah, closure! You can read the book by clicking the "browse" button on this handy widget...



Analysis after the jump...


This book was very in vogue within my circle of friends circa the summer of 2001. I loved the first few chapters but eventually grew tired of the main character, a strong silent type whose still waters never seemed to run terribly deep. I made it past the part where he gets tied to a tree for a few days (awesome, by the way) and left it at that. But I just may reread it now that it's so aggressively available. There doesn't appear to be anyway to download the text, so you've got to read it on Harper Collin's bookviewer, which is a pretty bare-bones eBook interface. Every time you turn the page a little loading screen pops up for about .5 seconds, which is annoying but is probably not a problem for those with a better internet connection than I. Several booknerds I'm acquainted with hate reading anything on a screen, but I think my aversion to that was cured when I started downloading comics- er, legal comics, I mean, like you know, Zuda. That's a real thing, right? Anyway, if anyone loved or hated American Gods, let me know if you think I'll like it now that I've grown more refined in my tastes and my attention span has decreased by about %45 due to our friend and overlord the internet.

Bionic Assessment Test

A promotion for the Bionic Woman series coming to NBC, this Bionic Assessment Test consists of four different trials that measure your reflexes and cognitive abilities in an effort to see what percent bionic you are. You should know that my score above was achieved while my girlfriend was trying to talk to me about drapes for our apartment and having dinner with her friends tonight. So factor that in. Go take it yourself and report your better-than-albo scores in the comments.