A BRIEF HISTORY OF LUKE CAGE AND AMERICA

Luke Cage is amazing. There, I said. If you watched it, you’ve probably said it. Critics have said it. And if you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead and do so. I guarantee you that you’ll say it, as well. (The dialogue might seem kind of hokey at first, but soon it becomes as natural to Luke Cage’s world as the quick-talking dialogue in the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

But what about Luke Cage makes him such a winner? The obvious answer is that it’s about time that we’ve gotten a person of color as a lead superhero. Don Cheedle/Terrence Howard might have made a great War Machine. Anthony Mackie might have made a great Falcom. In DC’s upcoming Justice League, Ray Fisher will make for what I’m sure is a solid Cyborg. This is all great. However one thing that all of these movies share in common is that the people of color in them are not leading characters.

via BlackFilm.com

As in virtually all superhero movies, they’re supporters. Wingmen. Assistants. Friends. The spotlight’s not on them. Sure, Cyborg is set to get his own movie in 2020, but come on–that’s 4 years away. Meanwhile, Black Panther is slated to get his own movie in 2018. These are all great steps in the right direction. But when we’re talking about the present, the now, the right-here–Luke Cage is the only superhero of color to have is own widely disseminated TV show. And it’s a well-written TV show, at that...

For the full blog, go to DamianEsteban.net.

IBM Gets Hipper with Swift

IBM is notorious for being the stodgy old man of the tech sphere. They’ve been around a long-time and (barring IBM Watson) in terms of fielding new innovations that tap into the zeitgeist of the times, they’ve often lagged behind. With IBM’s recent introduction of IBM Bluemix Runtime (IBM’s multi-faceted cloud platform as a service) for Swift, they’re proving that they’re showing that they can indeed get down and dirty and hang with us rambunctious youths.

For those unfamiliar, Swift is Apple’s baby. It’s the programming language that they’ve developed for macOS, iOS, OSOS–basically any contemporary Apple OS that you can think of. It’s concise, natural language nature has made it a big hit with the coding community, especially for those who have any ambitions to make anything for an Apple OS (mobile devs, I’m looking at you!). It works for both client-side and server-side development, requires less memory usage, and overall causes less wear and tear on hardware, all of which results in a coding language that make’s everyone’s lives a whole lot easier...

For the full blog, go to DamianEsteban.com.