The Gay Geek (May 6, 2008)

We're pleased to announce a new AfterElton.com mainpage feature The Gay Geek, a weekly column bringing you the latest gay geek news from the world of gaming, comics, science fiction and more. Enjoy!

And the heroes cried, “Four more years!”
The game often said to be the most gay-friendly among MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games, City of Heroes, hit its fourth anniversary this week. Amid the festivities marking the mileston, NCSoft has put out a calendar highlighting the 12 updates the game has seen since its debut (including key CoH dates – there’s a double XP weekend coming in July!)

In his message to the CoH community, Lead Designer Matt “Positron” Miller looks back at the game’s progress including a few notes about what drives CoH players. I’m pretty impressed at the idea that 32 million characters have been created in the game, even as someone who has created about 70 of those characters myself.

Miller also slips in an announcement that CoH will soon allow users to create their own missions and make them available to the entire CoH community. While the CoH community may be pretty gay-friendly, the game has lacked for gay content. With this feature, I wonder if CoH’s queer fanbase will get the chance to incorporate gay people among the NPCs of Paragon City.

I'd love to hear if any of our AfterElton.com readers create some gay-inclusive content of their own. In the meantime, I think I'm going to do some research into my favorite villain group, the Carnival of Shadows.

Ah, Carnival of Shadows, if you didn't bring a camp sensibility to Paragon City, the work of us gay superheroes would be that much harder.

Hey kids what time is it? Why, it’s meme time!:
Ah, the comics blogosphere certainly loves their PhotoShop memes and here’s one I’m surprised I hadn’t seen earlier, “What’s J. Johan Jamison yelling at the TV set?” Here are a couple of contributions from me.

Why not join in the fun, pick up the original image and create your own version?

I wonder who’ll be bringing apples:
If you’re a Death Note fan who’s been waiting for the chance to see the live action movie, Viz announced that the film will finally be seeing a national release on May 20 and 21. The film will be hitting theaters for two days only but in a good number of cities, so most fans should get a chance to see it. (Two warnings — this is a dubbed version of the film and the action continues in a second film, so I'd brace myself for a cliffhanger ending.)

When I first started reading Death Note, I described it as Profit reimagined as a Rod Serling morality play … though I realized at YAOI-Con that plenty of readers found it full of potential for shipping the title’s … uhm, complicated male leads. Did anyone find themselves crushing on Light Yagami or ‘L’?

Tatsuya Fujiwara as Light and Kenichi Matusyama as L from the live action film Death Note

And, let's not forget that the actor playing Light's dad is best known in the states as a flamboyant, eccentric gourmet with a hot American nephew.

Takeshi Kaga as Death Note's Police Investigator and his culinary Liberace character