GOOD DEED OF THE DAY

Last week while talking about the Gulf Coast Blood Center, the good people reached out to me and pointed me to another awesome thing they're doing so I thought I'd bring it to your attention now. The Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center is working with Team Liquid through the year and eligible people can win an Alienware Aurora Computer valued at $800. The campaign is called Heal For Real, and I like it. Get involved today.

CONTENT WARS SPILL OVER

So I've often discussed streaming wars on Nerd Thug Radio and here in this column, but now we're seeing the next phase of all this, content wars. Ninja of Twitch streaming fame has jumped ship to a competitor, Mixer. Mixer, the Microsoft owned streaming option, probably paid a mountain of money to move Ninja over, it's been reported recently he was paid a million dollars cash to stream Apex Legends when it came out for the first month or so, so getting him to move streams would be a pricey prospect. Twitch has handled the defection rather poorly, instead of just showing old streams of Ninja's and simply stating that he's left the service as is their usual, they instead posted other streams they wanted to promote on his page, using his fame for their advantage. Not exactly classy.

DIGITAL WOES

DC Comics digital sales have been flat and aren't exactly good, according to Jim Lee. Their digital app does give away most of the DC Comics library as part of its package so I imagine that's taking a pretty good bite out of the sales. You can't sell something and offer it freely to the same consumer base and then expect sales to perform at all, it isn't practical. DC has to be aware of that, the real question is, how are the creators being compensated for the fact that their work is being given away instead of sold for royalty producing revenue? These are the real questions that I would be asking if I worked at DC Comics.

PRE-SEASON FOOTBALL

We just wrapped up week one of preseason football and there wasn't a lot of news making stuff except Antonio Brown is an even bigger crazy person than we thought and The Texans did not in fact improve their offensive line woes. There's an amazing gif going around from all the Houston Sportswriters where both the right tackle and the running back miss completely on two blocks letting two defenders run untouched on the Quarterback's blind side. It's an excellent sign for this season, truly.

NOT THAT YOU ASKED

House of X and Powers of X is chugging along on schedule but there's already controversy. There's a HUGE moment in House of X #2 that I don't want to ruin or reveal here, I think it's worth reading, however it comes with controversy. The writer, Hickman, made a quote awhile back alluding to a book he had read that he was enjoying. The problem with this quote is that it parallels the idea in House of X #2 he wrote years later. The idea isn't exclusive to only these two places but it's similar enough in style and tone that it feels like a rip off or a homage and it got a lot of people intrigued including the writer of the inspiring work. My personal position is that there is a lot of borrowing and idea bleeding that happens in pop culture and creating, and when it happens that the idea becomes dangerously close I think honesty and apology is the right course of action.