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What do they call you? Wheels?

I grew up with the 80s version of X-Men, so twenty years ago I was pretty stoked for the X-Men movie. What I got was disappointment. Some of the casting was genius. Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen? Fantastic. Other casting was less so. Hugh Jackman was great in the role of Wolverine, but his Wolverine was not the version from the comic books. He was way to tall for starters. Conversely, Halle Berry was also great as Storm, but she was way too short! Plus, they had a phenomenal actress and gave her 20 lines in the whole movie.

My final disappointment was the lack of the Danger Room. It was one of my favorite things from the comic book, and was originally suppose to be in the first X-Men movie, but it was deleted. The Danger Room was alluded to in X2, but didn’t show up until the third X-Men movie, The Last Stand. And then it was a glorified holodeck, not at all what I imagined from the comic books. We at least finally had a look at the Sentinels.

Before the finale, there is a scene with a three dimensional display that looks a lot like the sand tables in Black Panther. Foreshadowing?

Does X-Men hold up after 20 years? Up to the X-Men release, there had been 3 great superhero movies released. Superman in 1978, Batman in 1989, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990. X-Men is not better than these three, so the answer is no, it wasn’t great then, and it’s not great now. It has its moments, especially the friction between Wolverine and Cyclops. But, not enough to make me say the movie is great.

X-Men is available to stream on any of the HBO services and DirecTV or to rent from any of the other services. You can also buy a digital copy. Amazon has it the cheapest at $9.99. If you’re a fan, you probably already own the DVD, but, if you don’t, Amazon has you covered for $6.45 Prime.

I bet you could also hit the $5 bin at Walmart the next time you’re there.

If Bitcoin is mentioned, it’s probably a scam

This past week hackers broke in to several popular Twitter accounts, including those of Elon Musk, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. What would you do if you were able to tweet as these people? Apparently try to get others to send me Bitcoin I guess. The hackers were able to get almost $120,000 worth of Bitcoin before Twitter shut them down.

Who knew the Egyptians got it right?

Pretty soon we won’t need letters to form sentences and will be able to write entirely in Emoji? More emoji is coming this year, including a dodo, pinata, and from the I don’t know how we survived this long without it department, the ninja emoji!

“My wife just sent me a message with the married couple emoji and the dodo. Does this mean she wants a divorce or that she wants to eat a bird with me?”

I need my videogames!

Things are all sorts of nuts right now in this dumpster fire of a year we call 20202, but the NBA is trying to bring some sort of normalcy to the sport by quarantining all of the NBA teams and players in Orlando. At the time of the planning, Orlando sounded like a good place, but now I wouldn’t go near Florida with a six foot pole. What I found interesting was what some of the players brought with them to FL. They will be there for three months, away from their families and friends, so I guess you need to find something to take up your time. The number of players with videogames, laptops, and their whole streaming set up is really cool.

Me, I’m in my own bubble in the basement. Not as cool as Disney World, but some call it the Disney World of Ohio. And by some I mean me.

Remember when things came with manuals?

When I first got my Apple Watch, I remember one of my first searches. There was a red dot at the top of the face, and I didn’t know what it meant. Nowhere did I see any description of the dot. It turns out, the red dot means I have notifications. I think I should get some slack for that, since the red dot doesn’t do anything when you tap it, you have to pull down from the top to see notifications.

On the other hand, people are now realizing that the button labeled Tip in the Apple Watch calculator app can calculate the tip on a check. I think that is worse than me not knowing what the red dot means.

By the way, if you need to use a calculator to calculate a 20% tip, here’s how to do it in your head. Take the total, move the decimal point one place to the left, and double what you see.

$17? Move the decimal left to give you $1.70 and double that to $3.40. Now I just saved you from buying a $300 watch. Email me at [email protected] and I will give you my PayPal address.

Actors are just regular people

Have you ever wondered what Superman did in his spare time? Apparently he builds gaming PCs. I’m very impressed with his perseverance, especially after he has to disassemble the computer after he realizes he put in the cooler upside down.

Get some major geek cred with these fonts

The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack contains every nerdy font you need.

Oh, how far we’ve come

It’s easy to forget all of the tech goodies that have been released in the last 30 years. We’ve come from acoustic couplers and 300 baud modems to super computers and high speed networking that we carry in a pocket. Here is a video of two daughters receiving iPods for Christmas. I love their look of, “I have no idea what this is”.

Fin

That’s it for this week! Be sure to get all the deets on Goz from gozgeek.com, your one stop shop for everything geek.