This week on the Sunday Night Showcase –

We will be joined in IRC and on air by

The 44 FIRES are a new political rock/Metal group,we bring you the truth through our music ….we spawned from the different styles of music we all grew up listening to, from Corrosion of conformity to soundgarden, primus to rage against the machine, Pantera to Clutch. This has made us into the band we are today.

The band will be joining us in IRC and live on air this evening, answering you questions from IRC, Facebook and twitter

Make sure to join us aswell to get some requests in! The Live request system both on the website and in IRC @ irc.sanitarium.fm port:6667 #sanitarium.fm for live show discussion

Also, keep an eye on this thread for future youtube videos and info about the band and for any ramblings from the band themselves

Yes indeed, Sunday Night Showcase LIVE!!! with your host, LoneSamurai!

Sunday 5th august, 9pm til Midnight GMT, 4pm til 7pm EST.

See you there

~Lonesamurai

As the result of a childhood wish, John Bennett's teddy bear, Ted, came to life and has been by John's side ever since – a friendship that's tested when Lori, John's girlfriend of four years, wants more from their relationship.

Ok, one quick thing about this, if you hate family Guy, you will hate this…  But fuck that, this film is fucking GOLD!

The film starts with a hilarious intro from Patrick Stewart, yes, Captain Picard has become a regular on American Dad and does the narration for the film and seriously, Picard swearing still makes me laugh my arse off, i dunno why, maybe its the shakespearian actor voice over

As I said above, this film is typical Seth MacFarlane fair, crude fart jokes, guys being 13 year olds trapped in mens bodies (which we all are) and of course, Flash Gordon himself, Sam J. Jones

Ted, Voiced by Seth McFarlane is comedy gold and Mark Wahlberg does a genius job of of being the little kid that never really grew up after his teddy bear came to life from a christmas wish in 1985!  27 years later and John and Ted live with Lori (Mila Kunis, gorgeous as always) and are pretty much fuck up stoners…  Obviously after four years this causes trouble in John's relationship with Lori and after John, Ted and Flash Gordon get drunk, do coke and fight the asian dude next door with a goose, Lori kicks John out!

All this time, a creepy dude (Giovanni Ribisi) who's stalked Ted since he was a kid and ted was a celebraty on TV, kidnaps Ted for his own kid to keep and John and Lori have to go rescue him… 

Anyway, story aside, this film is awesome!  I laughed so hard I have a stitch an hour after I got home from the cinema and I'm still giggling as I write this

Cos of that alone, I have to give this a 10 outta 10, it was utter genius and the cameos are awesome (especially a certain Green Lantern)

10 outta 10

~Lonesamurai

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be going free to play this fall, publisher EA announced this afternoon.

All eight character storylines up to level 50 will be accessible with "certain restrictions."

Unlimited access including higher-level content and new features will be available through subscription options.

EA cites "choice" as the reason for the switch, and BioWare GM Matt Bromberg said in an interview with IGN that the free-to-play decision is less about subscriber losses as much as it is the market:

"There has been some decline in our subscriber numbers, but I wouldn't say that's what's driving the decision…what's happened in the marketplace is that free-to-play has really become the market standard for MMOs and we felt like there were both potentially millions of new players who were Star Wars fans who never tasted the game because the subscription was a barrier. Our research also told us that a lot of the folks who we had earlier on who left the game would like to come back and try some of the new features and content that we've put into the game since they've left if the subscription wasn't a barrier. So we feel like the market and our players are telling us that greater access is what they want and so we're really responding to that.

Additionally, EA and BioWare say that the new free-to-play option will enable them to increase the frequency of content updates. The first of the new updates will come this August, alongside a temporary sale of The Old Republic for $14.99, which nets users both the game and a one-month subscription. The goal after that is to release content every six weeks, focusing on group content. Staff reductions have now occurred twice for developer BioWare Austin, once in May and again in the last couple of weeks, but Bromberg says the team they currently have will be able to handle the increased production. "We really have built a team around this newer and different model..so we think have the right team to do it and at the right numbers."

Dying social network Digg, designed as a site to share news on the internet and allow people to judge its importance to decide which become today's headlines on the site's homepage, was bought over by a new team roughly two months ago for a trivial amount of money. Now the new Digg team have explained their plans for revamping the social network to make it relevant once again, in a blog post at rethinkdigg.com detailing discussions over the last six weeks.

One of the major sticking points in the new rethink is to refocus the site around getting to the content people want in the simplest ways possible, dropping anything that isn't constructive to that process. Gizmodo published an article today about one such move, ditching the much-loathed Diggbar; but other plans include dropping Newsrooms; and renaming “Newswire” back to its original name, Upcoming.

Perhaps most telling of all though is the new Digg team's assessment as to the role of Digg in the modern internet. Rather than encouraging people to stay on Digg and ignoring every network, the new Digg is being designed to get you to the content you want to read quickly, in the belief that the easier it is to discover things using the network, the more likely you'll come again to find new things (now where have we heard that before…?); as well as to embrace the networks people have already to judge the relevance of articles. While you can still "Digg" articles on the site itself to increase their score, Digg scores will now also consider how often an article has been shared on Facebook and Twitter to determine an article's overall importance, thereby highlighting the articles most grabbing of people's attention whatever network they use.

An early mock-up of the new Digg scoring system. Although this article only has 54 Diggs, it scores 212 due to the many mentions of it on Twitter and Facebook. Clicking the overall score shows a breakdown.

(Image Credit: RethinkDigg)

Also of note is that the early launch of the new Digg will lack a comment system, to give the developers time to consider how to "do it right". As posted on RethinkDigg:

At launch, v1 will not include a commenting system. When Digg was founded in 2004, it was one of the only places on the web to have a conversation with like-minded people. Today, conversations happen everywhere, and the problem that Digg started to solve in 2004 now has no shortage of solutions. We knew that if we were going to support commenting at launch, we had to do it right, and we knew that we couldn’t do it right in six weeks. In the coming weeks we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.

Time will tell if the rethink of Digg by its new team will help make it relevant to the modern world and keep it away from Death's Door. What are your views on its chances?

Eight years on, a new terrorist leader, Bane, overwhelms Gotham's finest, and the Dark Knight resurfaces to protect a city that has branded him an enemy.

Yeah this is a toughy of a review…  Now I had been looking forward to this, BUT in the advent of Phase one of the Avengers, my love for the Dark Knight Trilogy has wained and Rises didn't prove my waining interest to be false unfortunately

Again, Spoilers ahead, so if you haven't watched it yet, don't read on, BUT pretty much everyone already knows this is the final Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman film before the JLA reboot by Warner and THAT is where my interest and love of this trilogy takes the major hit in how much I SHOULD have loved it…

Now, from the outset, this is EIGHT YEARS after the last film!  I know Batman took the fall to make Harvey Dent a martyr, but 8 years?  Far too long in the canon for it to have carried on and later in the film, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Blake, is asked by another boy at the orphanage if he thinks Batman will return, but after 8 years, the lad was obviously too young to remember Batman's scuffle with the Joker or Dent, let alone even being born when Bruce Wayne first became Batman anyway…  So first nit pick down, more to come

Secondly, Bruce Wayne has MANY injuries from being Batman, BUT after his 8 years of hiding away in teh newly rebuilt Wayne Manor, why would someone that driven let himself become a cripple, even if he was hiding from the world?

Now the redeeming feature of this film is, IMHO, Anne Hathaway as Catwoman (cos no one remembers Halle berry's Catwoman film, that never happened remember) and could, on her own merit grab a follow up film all of her own

Now I was a HUGE fan of Batman: Knightfall, and even more so the Audioplay version that the BBC did not long after the release in comic form and I especially liked the breaking of the Batmans back by Bane giving a great nod to the first fight between Bane and Batman in the film, so we know Knightfall had a great influence in the film and this especially helped build the character of Bane, played brilliantly by Tom Hardy, but I have to still agree with criticisms from the first trailers, the mask did NOT help the character, at times still being difficult to understand and others sounding disconnected from the narative, another downer on a great performance unfortunately

Now, the highlight performances, as usual in teh Dark Knight trilogy came fromt eh supporting cast of Gary Oldman as Commisionar Gordon, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and of course the highlight of all three films, Michael Caine as Alfred, the heart AND soul of the Batman character

The one character that didn't quite work was Marion Cotillard as Miranda/Talia Al Ghul, BUT it gave us a brief cameo by Liam Neeson taunting Bruce Wayne as Ra's Al Ghul during his prison stay and rehabilitation before he climbed out of the prison

So yeah, as a stand alone film, it failed to deliver the quality of those that came before and even as an ending to the trilogy it didn't quite stand up, BUT watched all together, would work better, so definetly refresh your memory by watching the others first

So, my score?  difficult, i want to give it 5 out of 10 as I felt dissapointed, BUT it was still a better film over all than Promtheus and it only failed for me because I am so invested int eh character and the history of the character and holding that against it isn't fair (plus it didn't push 3D, it was a straight 2D film, so plus points for that too)

8 out of 10

~Lonesamurai