Back in 1988, an amazing movie featuring human interaction with animated characters was released. It was called “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and it signaled a shift in my childhood perspective on animated characters. As a child who had gone through a phase of adamant refusal to watch anything that wasn’t animated, “Roger Rabbit” was my first real exposure to an acknowledgement of animated characters in a live-action world. And it was fascinating. The ‘Toons were like another race of linguistically developed, perhaps further evolved humanoid creatures that these people lived alongside with little consequence. (Unless a ‘Toon killed your brother.) But they were still cartoons. They weren’t flesh and blood people, they were Ink ‘n’ Paint.

So, my beef with the influx of 3D animation/live action movies is this: Are we supposed to think these characters are real now? Seriously? When we see characters like Garfield, Marmaduke, the Chipmunks, Yogi Bear, etc. interacting with humans, animated to look like they were born of this world, organic, living creatures that look freakishly unlike other animals of their species (is Yogi an av-er-age bear in this world, or is an average bear an average bear? or is Yogi the only one like that? WHY? What happened?), how is it that the humans with whom they interact don’t question it?

This past week, we’ve been doing our best to ignore a perniciously misleading science story that’s been making its way through both blogs and mainstream media. According to these reports, bees have managed to solve an NP-hard problem in mathematics and computer science known as the Traveling Salesman Problem, which consists, when “given a collection of cities and the cost of travel between each pair of them,” of “find[ing] the cheapest [lowest-distance] way of visiting all of the cities and returning to your starting point.”

Many news stories about this, which stem from research done by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway, University of London, take the angle that this somehow proves that humble bumblebees have beaten computers and those egghead scientists that rely on them. “Bees’ tiny brains beat computers, study finds” proclaims The Guardian‘s headline.

As a writer who regularly attempts to cover scientific developments in a way that’s easily understandable by a broad readership, I can understand the appeal of this strategy: It takes the forbidding topic of the Traveling Salesman Problem, to which volumes of arcane computer science literature have been devoted, and makes it into an emotionally resonant populist narrative. “See, bees can beat computers after all!” Read that headline and you don’t have to know or care what the Traveling Salesman Problem is or what the research consists of; you just know that the bees have bested machines. Sadly, this isn’t true.

Semiconductor company AMD recently published a guide to getting a geek guy in five lessons. It is either a fiendish, deliberately outrageous troll post to get blog links (success!) or merely a patronizing dispatch from a bizarre mirror universe governed by high-schoolish social rules and wince-inducing gender norms. Let’s run through the steps:

The rumored Ninja Theory-developed Devil May Cry game has been officially announced by Capcom, complete with trailer and screenshots, prompting the following letter of melancholy and defeat. The above picture on the left is of the old, ruggedly handsome, Josh Holloway (Sawyer from LOST) lookalike Dante and the picture on the right is the new Dante. And yes, that is a mugshot full of teenagery angst.

I hate the Shrek movies. I just hate them. In what, at times, seems like a golden age of children’s entertainment (see: every Pixar movie that doesn’t include Larry the Cable Guy), they’re a sharp reminder of just how lazy the genre can be. They have nothing to say, their only purpose is to steal money from indiscriminating parents, they’re marketed based on the actors in them instead of a the characters and story (this is even worse for the rest of the Dreamworks Animation bilge), and, worst of all, they feign “sophistication” by filling the movie with dated and inappropriate pop culture references that are meant to keep the poor adults in the audience from committing mass suicide and traumatizing their children even further. I’ve said it many times; the Shrek movies are poisoning our youth. Now though, it seems they’re poisoning kids literally.

In an interview with the LA Times and in a Twitter based Q&A session, Frank Miller has revealed some details of his upcoming Xerxes, a graphic novel prequel to the groundbreaking 300 with a decent shot at becoming another movie if all goes according to plan.  For example, while Xerxes is the title character, the “lead character” is Themistocles, whose historical role is actually super interesting.  Even Miller admits that the intellectual Athenian statesman Themistocles is the polar opposite of the Spartan war-king Leonidas.  The story will begin at the Battle of Marathon and cover ten years’ time, presumably wrapping up somewhere around the Battle of Thermopylae (i.e., 300).  Both Leonidas and Ephialtes will appear.

Well, that’s all the facts.  But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the details in there that stirred the sleeping beast of our nerdrage.  Stirred it, but did not rouse it to full wakefulness.

Also, why is it that even unaltered stills from 300 look like bad Photoshop mock-ups?

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The horserace that is the casting of the next Captain America for the Joe Johnston-directed 2011 movie of the same name — The First Avenger: Captain America — has been covered by entertainment media like the nomination of a Pope.

A brief timeline. We’ve had:

• An initial pool of contenders including John Krasinski, Chace Crawford, Scott Porter, Michael Cassidy, Patrick Flueger, Mike Vogel, and Garrett Hedlund. Much excitement.
• The rumor that the role was “John Krasinski’s to lose.” Maybe so, but he had other obligations, and as the rumor blew up into “John Krasinski is FOR SURE going to be the next Captain America,” a lot of people looked foolish.
• Ryan Phillippe added to the mix; Phillipe and Channing Tatum trying out.
• Now, the possibility that (gasp!) a Romanian, Sebastian Stan, will get the role.

Each iteration of this has witnessed a flurry of articles, listicles, further speculations, and, of course, fan polls — not only at superhero movie-devoted outlets like MTV’s Splash Page and fansites like ComicBookMovie, but among the heavy hitters. Here’s the thing: Does anyone really care who plays Captain America is that much?