The Underground — Issue #32
Everything you need to know about in this weekly series: The 5 best trailers to come out of SDCC, everything you need to know about New Horizons, the company that makes the best main sequences for TV and video games, what causes thunder and lightning, and how fast all of your favorite spaceships from real-life and sci-fi travel.
At Social Underground we go beyond the mainstream stuff and see what’s underneath the surface. What should we get into, listen to, read, eat or watch? If there is something in our culture that needs attention that’s our job: Show you the underground things that you need to know about: Books, music, television, movies, comedians, art, and whatever else we can find to get you into something you never knew about. That’s The Underground.
1. Here are the 5 best trailers to come out of San Diego Comic-Con. Comic-Con has been less about comics and more about the entertainment industry showing off their upcoming titles. There have been many “leaks” of trailers coming out of the big show, but it’s not like the studios don’t know that it will happen. I mean, everyone has a smartphone with a camera on it, and the biggest trailers and events are in hall H.
Here are the best trailers from Comic-Con:
Suicide Squad
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Fear The Walking Dead
Ash vs. Evil Dead
Hannibal: Red Dragon Preview
Sure, there were other trailers shown at SDCC, but many are bad quality. Deadpool looks great, but the quality is garbage, so I’d rather keep the best of the best shown. There is a trailer for the new Fantastic Four film, but, I don’t want to put anyone through that. That looks like money that could’ve gone to charity.
2. Everything you need to know about New Horizons. The near decade long journey of New Horizons has come and gone on to it’s next destination, but it has learned a lot about Pluto AKA everyone’s favorite former planet. It’s one of the most ambitious probes sent out by NASA in human history, but why do we have to wait so long for the pictures?
It takes about 4.5 hours at the speed of light to send data from the New Horizons to Earth? It will take around 16 months to download all the data. In an age where you can download a movie in less than an hour, it’s understandable that people will whine about that. In actuality, the speed in which the New Horizons sends its data back to Earth is about 56k modem speed. Remember when you downloaded a song on AOL before you went to bed? It was only 5 megabytes and it still wouldn’t be downloaded fully by morning. Now, think about downloading a huge movie on AOL, looking at the time left, and it says “2 years” remaining. This is vaguely what it’s like. It’s a massive amount of data to send over 3 billion miles with a slow data transfer speed.
I’m sure there are many more questions that you need answered, so here is a documentary by NASA that explains just about everything you need to know. From the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and beyond.
3. Here are the genius’ behind those opening credits of the best TV shows and video games. There are so many television shows that have such artistic opening sequences, they’re sometimes better than the show that follows them. Who is behind such amazing sequences that make you not want to skip over them?
Antibody is the best of the best when it comes to opening title sequences for some of the most beloved TV shows and video games in the industry. I didn’t put the connection together until I actually searched one sequence out and it made sense. It’s like recognizing a style, but not being able to connect the dots.
Antibody has most recently won the Emmy for outstanding main title sequence in 2014 for True Detective. If you’ve watched the opening sequence, you’ll know that it has been picked apart by fanboys to try to figure out the rest of the season after the first episode. That is how much care they put into their artwork.
Check out just a taste of their work and go to their website for even more.
DareDevil (2015 Nominee for Outstanding Main Title Sequence)
Halt And Catch Fire (2015 Nominee for Outstanding Main Title Sequence)
True Detective (2014 Winner for Outstanding Main Title Sequence)
Tom Clancy’s The Division
4. What exactly causes thunder and lightning during a storm? If you’re from California, you probably don’t have much rain to deal with depending on where in Cali you live. When it does rain, Los Angeles becomes an hellish experience trying to drive through heavy traffic because no one knows what to do. If you’re from the East, you get to deal with storms all the time, so it just means you have to turn your windshield wiper on faster. If you’re from the South, you get to deal with hurricanes and tornadoes — yet still live in trailer park homes!? What all these storms have in common is that they all have thunder and lightning (except the boring rain storm where it just drizzled all day and you have to change your shoes at the gym).
When I was in grade school, it was explained to me how it all works — which you’ll see in the video. But when I was really little, and my Grandpa died, there was a huge storm the next day. My family members would say, “Well, looks like Dad is making his presence known to God!” I was little, and since I believed that an omnipresent being called Santa that delivered presents to all the children on Earth in a few hours, I just shrugged and went along with it.
The explanation of how thunder and lightning works is more impressive than believing people are bowling in the clouds. I mean, you’re in heaven, bowling is what you choose to do? Give this video a watch and refresh your memory about how it all works up there when a big storm hits your area.
5. This Infographic shows you the speeds of real and fictional spacecrafts. Since the New Horizons passed Pluto and is one of the fasted moving crafts we’ve sent into space, I’ve always wondered how fast some of the other ships in space actually go.
Most sci-fi shows have an FTL drive (Faster Than Light), but they never really say how much faster they go than light. If you watch Star Trek, no ship ever really leaves the Milky Way because it’s so massive that their warp drive can’t extend that far out. The Alpha, Gamma, Delta and Beta quadrants are just cut up sections of the galaxy. Other ships can go from galaxy to galaxy like the ship from Stargate Universe because of an FTL that exceeds understanding.
Luckily, the crew over at fatwallet.com have created this wonderful infographic to try to explain how fast your favorite ships from real-life, film, movies, and video games actually go:
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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com