Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 123
July 2, 2017
‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Reportedly Not Having A Panel At SDCC
Star Wars: The Last Jedi will not be having a panel at San Diego Comic Con this year, according to io9’s Germain Lussier and backed by the San Diego Comic Con Unofficial Blog. The latter reached out to Lucasfilm recently and they were told that Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s “presence at SDCC 2017 will be focused on our booth on the convention floor, so there will be no press events or interview opportunities this year.” This likely extends to Han Solo not having a panel as well.
It makes sense since the movie will be having presentations at D23 this year, along with Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. Disney and Lucasfilm might not want to put in their efforts for another event happening the week immediately after.
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi stars Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa, Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Lupita Nyong’o as Maz Kanata, Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico, Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, Gwendoline Christie as Captain Phasma, Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke, Domhnall Gleeson as General Armitage Hux, Benicio Del Toro as “DJ”, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, and Jimmy Vee as R2-D2.
The Last Jedi will be hitting theaters on December 15, 2017.
Source:
http://heroichollywood.com/last-jedi-reportedly-sdcc-panel/
June 30, 2017
HOW VIRTUAL REALITY COULD CHANGE THE ART WORLD
There’s a new player on the virtual reality (VR) scene. Acute Art is marketed directly to artists and will be available in the fall. To preview the platform, the studio invited artists Marina Abramović, Olafur Eliasson, and Jeff Koons to try out some new material. The making-of video discusses the potential of a viable commercial VR.
Over the decades, VR has moved from the edges to the mainstream, always greeted with skepticism and fears that it’s just another passing fad. But we now have consumer-grade specs like the Oculus Rift and controllers like the Touch for games. Virtual reality in art has always been less sleek, more DIY, and with lots of stops and starts.
As Raymond Gozzi Jr. wrote about virtual reality’s promise and threat back in 1995, it “has caught people’s imaginations and inspired fantasies far out of proportion to what the technology can actually deliver, now or in the foreseeable future.”
To the outside observer, there is only the strange spectacle of a person wearing a bulky helmet waving a gloved hand around and moving in weird, unpredictable ways…. I am told that the graphics are rudimentary and the illusion is partial. There is a slight delay between your movement and the corresponding movement of the environment. The head-mounted display is bulky and heavy. And after a while, some users start to feel queasy and ill.
Gozzi feels the main potential of virtual reality is as a “miniaturizing metaphor,” a way to make a large and complex problem simple and digestible—though there’s a risk that making something too digestible can diminish its power and meaning. A great example is Abramović’s interactive work for Acute Art, which focuses on the theme of climate change. If you choose environmentalism, Marina lives; if you choose consumption, she drowns from rising sea levels.
There’s an obvious irony here; the virtual environment becomes an idealized stand-in for an imperfect (in this case, rapidly declining) reality. Any recreation of a natural landscape can be a distraction from, or a reminder of, its loss. This is encapsulated beautifully in the New Palmyra 3D scanning and printing project, where Syrian activist Bassel Khartabil created 3D models of heritage architecture under threat of destruction during war. (For his efforts, he was detained by the Syrian military in 2012 and has been missing since 2015.)
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The more seamless a new VR platform—the farther away from bulky, heavy, and queasy—the more it risks devaluing its source material. Why travel to visit an iceberg and see its crumbling firsthand when you can virtually interact with an immaterial glacier that will never melt?
While VR was certainly more challenging to use in the 1960-2000s, its very imperfect nature—the ad-hoc assemblages of various technologies—was often what made those projects special. In 1994, Dan O’Sullivan wrote in “Choosing Tools for Virtual Environments,” about work that was “disjointed” and “full of seams,” concluding that VR environments shouldn’t strive to be perfect. A little bit of abstraction goes a long way. It commits the participants to use their own imaginations, involves them more fully in the process, and brings some of our IRL experiences into the virtual space:
Beyond producing perceptual illusions, interactive media can tap the imagination by making a partner of it. If the audience has an investment in the creation of an imaginary world, less technology is required to maintain the illusion. Less work maintaining the illusion means a greater ease of creativity. Creative work feeds back again to better capture the imagination.
Source:
https://daily.jstor.org/how-virtual-reality-could-change-the-art-world/
Meet the 7-year-old entrepreneur running her own food truck
A 7-year-old entrepreneur in Arkansas who ran a successful lemonade stand in her grandparent’s backyard last year has upgraded this summer, and is now operating her own food truck with the help of her mother.
Kyleigh McGee, 7, of Little Rock, told ABC News that she came up with the idea to expand her business and make it mobile last summer when she was operating her original lemonade stand.
“We had a lemonade stand in my grandparents’ backyard and we started to make a lot of money with it,” Kyleigh said. “So I thought why don’t we have a lemonade stand to bring to events?”
Gabrielle Williams, Kyleigh’s mother, told ABC News that they upgraded this year, after Kyleigh showed how dedicated she was to running her lemonade stand all summer long last year, telling ABC News, “She had so much fun with it and she had a chance to kind of get an idea of how it is to be an entrepreneur.”
“We purchased what used to be a snow cone stand, and we converted it into a lemonade stand,” Williams said, adding that they also expanded the menu to include ice cream, snacks and the incredibly popular pineapple snow cones, which are sold in a hollowed out pineapple.
Williams said that having Kyleigh operate the food truck is “teaching her responsibilities,” including “how to save money and how to count money.”
The rising second-grader said her favorite aspect of running her own business, is “being the boss and serving people food.”
Williams added that the response from the community to Kyleigh’s food truck has been overwhelming.
“Everyone is so excited, I have gotten so many phone calls, so many messages,” Williams said. “It happened so fast … the response we’ve gotten, I don’t think I was expecting that.
“Everybody’s been going crazy about the pineapple snow cones with pineapple juice at the bottom,” Williams added, saying that the lemonade also remains a crowd favorite, “everybody is saying, ‘This is the best lemonade I have ever had.'”
Williams told ABC News that her daughter has shown an interest in food and cooking since she was very young, but she has also expressed interest in other fields.
“I’ve heard her say she wants to be a teacher, a doctor, a singer and a tennis player,” the mother said. “I just tell her whatever you decide to do you have my support, 100 percent.”
The mother added that the original plan was just to run the food truck while Kyleigh was out of school during summer vacation, but they have received bookings all the way through December, “so this will be open throughout the year now,” she said.
Kyleigh added that she invites everyone in the Little Rock area to come try her lemonade.
“You can come downtown and look at it yourself, and get some nice food,” she said of her business.
Source:
Nike is finally going to start selling on Amazon for one simple reason
Even the world’s largest sportswear maker can’t deny the power of the world’s largest eCommerce platform.
Nike will begin selling some products on Amazon next month, but the deal isn’t necessarily about growing volume. Instead, Nike’s goal is to work more closely with Amazon to crack down on third-party sellers, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Stevens and Sara Germano.
Nike is already the number 1 clothing brand on Amazon even though it does not sell directly on the website, according to Morgan Stanley research. Nike products are instead sold by unauthorized third party re-sellers, which Amazon still profits from by taking fees for facilitating the sale. Cottage industries have sprung up, with entrepreneurs buying up large stocks of Nike product to unload on the website.
“That’s how I make my money. Amazon is the No. 1 marketplace. Nike is the No. 1 brand,” said one such Amazon seller told The Journal. “If they’re not in bed together, that’s my opportunity.”
As part of the deal between Amazon and Nike, Amazon will monitor its website and no longer allow third parties to sell Nike merchandise, the Journal reports. According to the WSJ, the initial amount of product it will actually offer on Amazon is small.
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Still, cutting off the flow of reselling on Amazon will likely lead would-be Nike buyers to Nike’s own website or retailers like Foot Locker if they can’t find what they’re looking for on Amazon. This helps Nike better control its product and how it appears on Amazon — a marketplace with large exposure to potential customers and usually the first place customers search when looking to shop.
This fits with Nike’s broader plan to tighten its grip on brand and image as it focuses more on direct-to-consumer and moves away from wholesale.
Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-nike-is-selling-on-amazon-2017-6
