Isegoria

Season 2 of the Discovery Channel’s post-apocalyptic reality-show, The Colony, has just begun, and episode 1 is now online. Watching people struggle for food, water, fire, shelter, and security puts some things in perspective.

A few centuries from now, xkcd notes, all the English of the past 400 years will sound equally old-timey and interchangeable:

I’m guessing this wouldn’t have been nearly as funny to me a decade ago — like Dilbert when I was still in college:

(Hat tip to Buckethead.)

John Kovalic’s Dork Tower isn’t just gamer-geeky:

That’s film-geeky. In case you’re not familiar with Sergei Eisenstein, master of montage, here’s the scene in question, from Battleship Potemkin:

The first homage to that scene that I remember seeing was in The Untouchables, but they’re everywhere. I suppose you could say that Shogun Assassin (Lone Wolf and Cub) inverts the trope.

Comic books sell to a remarkably small — but hardcore — fanbase, but many of the characters are so iconic that their latest PR stunt can garner New York Times coverage. No, Superman hasn’t died (again). Wonder Woman has had a makeover:

In the reimagining of her story, Wonder Woman, instead of growing up on Paradise Island with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, and her Amazon sisters, is smuggled out as a baby when unknown forces destroy her home and slaughter its inhabitants.

Mr. Straczynski, who created the television show “Babylon 5” and wrote the screenplay for “Changeling” in 2008, starring Angelina Jolie, said in an e-mail message that he wanted to address “the wardrobe issue” as soon as he took the job.

“She’s been locked into pretty much the exact same outfit since her debut in 1941,” Mr. Straczynski wrote. “If you’re going to make a statement about bringing Wonder Woman into the 21st century, you need to be bold and you need to make it visual. I wanted to toughen her up, and give her a modern sensibility.”

The new costume was designed by the artist Jim Lee, who in February was named co-publisher of DC, alongside Dan DiDio. Given the assignment, “my first reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” Mr. Lee said in an interview. But he welcomed the challenge: “When these characters become so branded that you can’t change things, they become ossified.”

The new look — with an understated “W” insignia, a midnight blue jacket and a flinty fusion of black tights and boots — is darker than the famed swimsuit-style outfit, and aims to be contemporary, functional and, as Tim Gunn of “Project Runway” might say, less costumey.

Given the hope that the character will one day have her own international film franchise (a feature has long been gestating at Warner Entertainment, DC’s parent company), one test of the design was to imagine how it would look standing next to, say, Batman’s politically neutral ensemble. “The original costume was the American flag brought to life,” Mr. Lee said. “This one is a little more universal.”

It’s always been odd that an Amazon from out of Greek mythology wore a star-spangled outfit, but does an iconic superhero really need a costume that’s less costumey?

The whole things seems remarkably reminiscent of a previous makeover that did not go well — which was apparently totally different in some unexplained way:

The new costume will almost certainly be better received than the curveball thrown Wonder Woman in 1968, when she lost her powers, dressed mod and practiced martial arts

Somehow I missed the initial Iron Sky teaser, which came out two years ago and has since garnered 1.3 million YouTube views:

The Finnish filmmakers behind the trailer managed to bring in micro-investments from 52 fans and produced a second teaser trailer:

Now that the space-Nazi trailers have brought in funding, the film is going into production:

With 90 percent of the feature-length project’s $8.5 million budget now funded, casting for Iron Sky is nearly complete, with filming set to begin in Australia and Germany this fall.

CGI maestro Samuli Torssonen supervised Iron Sky’s visual effects after spending seven years working on zero-budget feature Star Wreck. For the Iron Sky trailers, “everything was either shot by ourselves or created by our VFX team at Energia Productions,” Torssonen told Wired.com in an e-mail. “I think for indie productions it is very important to have in-house creative which can archive visually impressive shots with a decent budget.”

Torssonen relied on Maya 3-D software to craft the trailers’ visual effects. “Every shot was filmed against blue/green screen in a local studio,” he said. “Every shot, of course, also had quite a lot of CGI.”

Fan investments in Iron Sky were augmented by money from 12 traditional financiers, according to producer Tero Kaukomaa of Blind Spot Pictures. “If we are able to make money,” Kaukomaa said, “then the crowd who invested will make money, and if that happens, it will speed up the possibility to fund films totally with crowds.”

But VFX man Torssonen cautions that “fan/community funding is not an easy way out. We didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been building our internet community and visibility since 1999, with Star Wreck. You have to invest a lot of time and energy to win the trust of the internet audience. The only way to do that is to deliver good quality. Mediocre stuff just won’t cut it.”

As a hybrid model blending conventional business cash with microdonations from sci-fi zealots, Iron Sky is emerging as the most expensive fan-curated movie to date. As such, it points the way toward a future in which audience and investor become one and the same.

“I think it’s great that the audience can, in some terms, ‘order’ a film that they find cool by investing, participating in the production or donating money,” Torssonen said. “They can give ideas and feedback, become part of the whole process, and finally see a film in theaters that has been tailored for their needs.”

This invites an obvious comparison:

Steve Sailer reviews Toy Story 3 — good, but not 1024 times as good as the original, despite the march of Moore’s Law — and comments on Pixar’s not-quite-Disney culture:

In 1986, Pixar delivered 90 seconds of perfection with Luxo Jr., a father-son tale about table lamps playing catch. In retrospect, it established Pixar as the guy alternative to Disney’s gay pandering to the daddy’s little princess market. Pixar movies are made by men who have managed to extend their childhoods (Lasseter says, “Every animator is a child at heart”) into fatherhood.