March 31, 2008 1:51
The Return of Neal Stephenson
An e-mail containing the most astounding news just surfaced in my inbox, still dripping wet from the great oceanic Interweb. Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., you know who he is, has a new novel out this September. It's called Anathem. Below, lovingly hand-transcribed, is the catalog copy:
Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to get from this. Sounds like a post-apocalyptic scenario, maybe something along the lines of A Canticle for Liebowitz (which is also set post-apocalypse and also has monks in it)? Anyroad, Stephenson is going back to the future, and I'm very very excited.
(I thought I was first w/ this information, but I see Wikipedia has the pub date. Damn you, Wikipedia, you beautiful million-headed monster.)
March 31, 2008 12:42
An Open Letter To Edward Norton
Puny Norton,
Please do not make Hulk's new movie suck. Hulk want new movie to smash box office records, not smash nothing.
Hulk stuff always sucked. Starting with Hulk cartoon, when lady flapper sings "Aint he unglamorous!" in old-time voice. What the Hulk is that?
Then Hulk TV show. Too much puny Bixby, not enough Hulk. Yes, Hulk know puny Bixby died of cancer, but still. Hulk is just saying is all.
Then Ang Lee Hulk movie. Hulk not make obvious Brokeback Hulk joke, but give Hulk a break. Is Ang Lee's worst movie! Except for Eat Drink Man Woman, which Hulk feel was emotionally insincere.
This is Hulk's last chance for good movie. But puny Norton has taken over new Hulk movie. First, puny Norton rewrote script of Hulk movie. Now puny Norton is editing new Hulk movie. This worry Hulk. Hulk hear when you got into editing room of American History X, puny Norton gave self too much screen time. Critics smash movie with words like "self-indulgent." People want to see Hulk! Not guy from Fight Club who not Brad Pitt.
Hulk know one thing: Ed Norton cannot open a movie. Hulk is the star. Not puny Norton. When puny Norton is on screen, people thinking, "where is Hulk?"
Give puny Norton a chance, you say. Fine. But new Hulk trailer already look like crap. When Hulk punch Abomination, it looks like end of Rocky 3 where Rocky and Apollo Creed hit each other in face at same time and turn into painting. Hulk never knew who won that fight. Maybe Rocky.
To sum up, when Hulk check Box Office Mojo Sunday after movie come out, Hulk not want crawl into bed with case of Krisy Kremes and stay there for a month. Please make new Hulk movie not suck Hulk's big green nards.
Thank you for you time,
The Incredible Hulk
P.S. Is it too late for Hulk to be in Iron Man? Hulk could play Iron Man.
March 28, 2008 11:43
Two Awesome Things that Need to Be Watched, by You
I could have split these up and given them their own posts, but that would have required extra effort, and that's not how we roll at the NW.
Thing 1: You've probably already seen this cardboard animation of the light cycle sequence in Tron, but you haven't seen it here! Now you have. A testament to the power of unshaven French people.
(I know people are calling this a 'sweded' version, which I think is picked up from that movie Be Kind, Rewind, which I didn't see. Apparently that word is well on its way to becoming real slang. But it still feels like fake slang to me.)
March 27, 2008 1:00
A Nerd's Guide to Going to the Opera
I have been to the opera on two occasions this spring. Once to Prokofiev's War and Peace and once to Wagner's Die Walkure. This brings to two the total number of times, lifetime, that I have ever been to the opera. Though I have occasionally dabbled in classical music, the opera house is not my natural habitat. But it is possible for a nerd to find sustenance there.
Here are some notes from one who survived:
-- On arrival at the Wagner performance you immediately notice a dude walking around wearing a Viking helmet. Apparently LARPing is allowed at the opera. You immediately feel more at home.
-- Every seat comes with a little low-res amber-display monitor that shows the lyrics that are being sung, in real time, for those who don't speak German or Russian or Operanian. You feel a sudden desperate urge to know the technical details of this system. Is it wireless? Is it hackable?
-- As soon as the curtain goes up you realize that all of 20th century fantasy must basically be descended from Wagner. I mean, look at this set. It looks like the cover of Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.
-- You double-check the program and then suppress an urge to flee as you realize that Siegmund and Sieglinde are going to have sex. They are brother and sister. Twin brother and twin sister. Germans are weird.
-- Intermission. You note that along with LARPing, drinking is not only acceptable but apparently expected. This could work.
-- Back to the opera. Damn, Wotan just slew a dude by waving his hand. What was that, Slay Living?
-- War and Peace ran over four hours. Die Walkure cracks the three-hour mark. But amazingly, it appears to be socially acceptable to leave before the thing is over. As Act III of Walkure gets under way, you discreetly make for the exit.
-- The orchestra is playing that music from Apocalypse Now. Germans are weird.
March 26, 2008 10:39
The Awesomeness of Dead Fantasy II
I wouldn't necessarily recommend that you watch all 11 minutes of this. But I don't see how any true green-blooded nerd wouldn't want to watch some of it. Dead Fantasy II (there's also a Dead Fantasy I) is a ridiculous fan film in which the women of Final Fantasy and the women of Dead or Alive kick the crap out of each other in about 90,000 awesome ways. Watch for a couple of unannounced cameos further in -- video game pantheons are mixed freely and with no regard for continuity. We're in the multiverse here.
The auteur is somebody named Monty Oum, and my helm is off to him, whoever he is -- the choreography and camerawork are just relentlessly cool throughout. Any commenter who can clarify the technical side of how a film like this gets made (not to mention the legal side?), I'd be curious. Personal favorite scenes include the vertical wall-sliding battle that starts at 3:30, and a very quick, slick bottle-smashing sequence at 6:15. Yours? And who is that white-winged lady who enters at 7:15? Help?
March 26, 2008 5:00
People Do What the Net Tells Them To
Two datapoints for your consideration:
Digg Recovers a Stolen Xbox. A guy in Philadelphia gets back from SXSW to find that his house has been burgled and his Xbox stolen. He gets a new Xbox and receives a message via Xbox Live asking for a ransom to get his old console back. The message comes from an actual valid gamertag. The guy calls the police, but they don't care. So he blogs about it, publishing the offending gamertag, and the blog entry gets Dugg. Readers trace the gamertag and relentlessly harass the Xbox-napper till he gives up and returns the hardware.
Crazed Craigslisters Steal Everything a Guy Owns. Somebody posted a Craigslist ad saying that such-and-such a house had been abandoned and that everything in it was free for the taking. The ad was a hoax, but people actually turned up at the house in question, raided it and stripped it. Needless to say the actual owner was not best pleased when he got home.
There you go, two parables of the power of the Net to effect spontaneous collective action, for good and for ill. You almost wonder why this kind of thing doesn't go on more often, and why people don't push it further. People love to be cyber-vigilantes. What couldn't you get them to do, with a sufficiently plausible come-on? And this kind of thing is only going to accelerate and get scarier once the mobile Net becomes more prevalent. Imagine you're on the subway (or whatever), and the other people in the car get a message on their iPhones (or whatever) that you're a known felon, or a racist, or a fan of masochistic sex. The mind boggles.
March 25, 2008 3:09
Unfinished Topical Blog Posts
THE STAR WARS EMPEROR'S CLUB V.I.P. -- VERY IMPERIAL PALPATINE
Princess Leia -- Gold Slave Bikini -- 7 Death Stars -- 5000 Galactic Credits / hour
Princess Leia -- Hoth Snowsuit -- 3 Death Stars -- 1000 Galactic Credits / hour
Aunt Beru -- Tatooine Rags -- 0 Death Stars -- 5 Galactic Pennies / year
---
SUPERHERO LAIR FORECLOSURES
"The Batcave" -- Traditional limestone solutional cave. Over three million years old & loaded with period charm! Only one owner! Incredibly spacious, high ceilings, naturally cool, granite everywhere! No bedrooms, no baths, no kitchen, no heat. Included are giant penny, punch-card computer, fifty years of bat-themed paraphernalia, Soloflex (used) and wry, octogenarian butler.
---
W.H. AUDEN'S "FUNERAL BLUES FOR GARY GYGAX"
The dice are not rolling now; bag up every shape,
Put away your helmet and take off your cape,
Pour away the soda and eat the last Funyun;
For life without Gary is forever minus one
March 21, 2008 1:49
Some Notes for Peter Berg, Who Is Apparently Directing Yet Another Dune
So you're making Dune. Good stuff, good stuff. Epic story, sandworms, the whole environment angle. Could be a serious thing.
But listen man: you're a long way from Friday Night Lights here. I know you did Hancock, so you've goofed around with some CGI, got some technical chops. But Dune is a toughie. Lot of serious fans, lot of seriously gnarly development history. So a few notes of advice as you rig your stillsuit for the deep desert.
-- The Lynch version. I know, I know, it's a grind to watch the whole thing. But there's a lot of seriously good stuff there. Some beautiful desert vistas. Those sweet shield effects. And those dark sets, and Kyle McLaughlin's creepily earnest intensity. And Sting. If Lynch had had a bit more CGI and a little less studio meddling it could've been great. Steal from it liberally.
-- No voice-overs would probably be OK, though. And maybe smaller boils on the Harkonnens. Those big oozing pimples freaked me out.
-- The Weirding Way. It's your chance to make up a whole new martial art and go prana-bindu on some asses. Forget the modules, this is a serious opportunity for freaky kung-fu! Take it!
-- The Bene Gesserit. I don't know if I'm remembering aright, but aren't some of them supposed to be sort of...super-hot? Maybe I'm remembering the book wrong. But if I'm not: another serious opportunity. Take it!
-- Definitely don't license a melange energy drink. The Mountain Dew people will come to you. I think I hear them now. Turn them away.
-- Wow, I can't believe Virginia Madsen was in the original Dune. Not a suggestion there, just: wow.
-- Patrick Stewart. He's still a young man. OK, he's 68, but he's a young 68. Give him a call.
-- Most important, Dune is a weird book. It's a sick, twisted story. Don't try to compress it like Golden Compass, don't try to make it into something conventional, don't try to smooth out the kinks. Revel in the freakiness. You'll make more money that way anyway, in the long run.
OK, that's all I can think of. I'm sure the commenters will have more.
March 18, 2008 6:55
Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008
The science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke has died, in Sri Lanka, at the age of 90.
As a person and as a writer he remained an enigma to the end. Part of the challenge of grappling with Clarke is the sheer size of his oeuvre: towering masterpieces like Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama almost disappear among his more than 30 novels and a dozen short story collections.
And there's a paradox at the heart of that massive body of work. The son of a farmer, Clarke studied math and physics at King’s College London. He worked on the development of radar in WWII. He was among the first people, in 1945, to propose and flesh out the idea of using geosynchronous satellites in communications.
But after the war he turned to writing science fiction, and despite his nuts-and-bolts background his work had a pronounced mystical bent. Look at Childhood’s End, which remains an astoundingly creepy, compelling book, in which humanity hits an evolutionary singularity and children begin displaying unearthly telekinetic and telepathic powers. As their parents commit mass suicide, the future-kids merge into a hivemind, possessed of dark wisdom and high purpose, and begin to radically reconfigure the solar system. Or 2001, more famous now as a book than a movie (on which Clarke collaborated), in which astronauts encounter an interstellar monolith that transforms and translates them into a new kind of being.
Clarke was fascinated with ultra-far-future scenarios and massive technological constructs, like the mysterious 30-mile-long alien starship Rama, soon to be appearing in a movie starring Morgan Freeman. As he put it – in what has come to be known as Clarke’s law – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 and spent the last 50 years of his life there. He may have been gay, but he politely avoided questions about his personal life. He was and remained a golden-age SF writer at heart -- of the generation of Asimov and Heinlein, though he outlived them all – and he never truly embraced the kind of disillusionment with technology that shaped later writers like the cyberpunks. For Clarke the line between scientific knowledge and religious revelation would always be thin, or possibly nonexistent. He saw no contradiction there.
In his immortal story “The 9 Billion Names of God,” he imagined a remote community of Buddhist monks who hire computer engineers to grind out every last one of the 9 billion names of God in search of the true name, which, once revealed, will bring about the end of existence. Nowadays you could do this with a widget on your iPhone, but back then it was 1953, so it takes the monks and their hired engineers 3 months.
At the end of the story the skeptical nerds-for-hire have packed up and are making their way back to civilization. They look up. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
March 18, 2008 11:50
Return of the BattleBots
Popular Mechanics is reporting that BattleBots will be returning to ESPN, or at least to ESPN2 and ESPNU, which I don't even know what that is -- presumably it covers sports events taking place in the Underverse.
The piece has a good summary of what made the original show a beguiling but also a frustrating watch -- basically the problems were the annoyingly non-technical hosts (Carmen Electra et al.), and the culture clash between them and the engineers they were interviewing, plus the inherent paradox of robotic combat, which is that the most spectacular, dangerous-looking weaponry (flamethrowers, etc.) always ended up being the least effective when metal actually hit metal in the arena, to the point where the finals tended to be two featureless steel cheese wedges head-butting each other till time ran down.
The new show is going to focus more on following and explaining the technical drama behind the scenes, and the battle arena is actually going to be modified to take away the advantage of wedge attacks. I'll watch, though I don't know that I'll really feel the sport has reached maturity until the competitors are fully autonomous rather than remote-controlled. And of course at the end the winning bot should be rewarded with the privilege of vivisecting the yapping human announcer.
March 15, 2008 7:18
The Frankencoat Remembered
The Summer Movie Season is now in spitting distance, and this year's slew of lumbering mega-movies is plodding clumsily into view. But before everyone picks apart the (presumable) goofiness of big-budget behemoths like Speed Racer and The Incredible Hulk, let's think back to four years ago, when a tiny-yet-sublime scrap of summer movie dumbness went unnoticed and, amazingly, un-goofed-upon.
It's 2004. The summer blockbuster Van Helsing is in theaters. Monster-hunter Gabriel Van Helsing, played by Wolverine, takes on The Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster. The quality of this picture will be debated for the ages, but the critics have neglected to mention this colossally insane film's most colossally insane detail: Frankenstein's Monster wears a coat that is stitched together from other coats. As the Monster is made of pieces of discarded corpses, so too is his coat assembled from the pieces of discarded coats. That is, to say...
Frankenstein wears a Frankencoat.
Where did this Frankencoat come from? Did Frankenstein's monster feel compelled by unknowable dark forces to create a coat as fragmented as his soul? Or did Igor, the servant of Dr. Frankenstein himself, save the coats of the corpses from which they assembled the monster, then match each coat-part to the corpse-part from which it came to create a truly perfect fit? Or did an overzealous costumer say to her staff, "Everybody, check this out. I am such a genius. Since Frankenstein is all stitched together, I was thinking, wait for it... that it totally makes sense Frankenstein's coat would totally be stitched together too. Hello? Is that genius? I know, I know! Right? Right? Am I right? Why is everyone laughing? Just do it!"
Why did they stop at a Frankencoat? Where was Dracula's cape that had pictures of bats all over it? Shouldn’t the Wolfman have had a jacket that changed from human skin to wolf fur under the light of the full moon? Why didn't the Mummy (was he in this movie?) wear a t-shirt that had a picture of a Mummy on it and read "The Mummy" in a spooky font?
So, the next time you are goofing on a big summer blockbuster, and you think you've noticed something so profoundly moronic that it will never be out-stupid-ed, please, take a moment to remember The Frankencoat. I think you'll be glad you did.
March 14, 2008 12:39
You Still Won't Like Me...When I'm...Even Angrier...
I was going to link to yet another story about the semantic Web, except the phrase "semantic Web" has now been shown to induce narcolepsy in otherwise normal humans. Then I was going to post about this Heavy Metal-type cartoon that David Fincher is supposedly making, but for some reason I am unable to grasp what the hell it's about. Then I was going to talk about how the last Harry Potter movie is now two Harry Potter movies, because the last book is really long and complicated, and plus Warner Brothers gets more money that way. But I didn't have anything to say about it, except that I hope some of that money goes to fund Warner Brothers' underperforming print journalism subsidiaries.
So instead here's the trailer for the new Hulk movie, with Ed Norton as Bruce Banner:
Hulk hair still bad.
March 13, 2008 10:13
Last Post About Speed Racer Until the Next One
If they stop making new trailers I'll stop blogging about them. But this is the best one yet -- gives you much more of the flavor of the movie:
Christina Ricci looks good -- though almost unrecognizable -- in that wig, but yowr, those are some crackling Oedipal sparks between Emile Hirsch and Susan Sarandon! And also yowr, those are some cool shredding tire effects.
March 12, 2008 2:39
Daily Traily: Wall*E and the Lost Boys sequel (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!)
Will somebody please tell me how the Sam Hill to spell Wall*E? Wall*e? Wall-E? Wall-e?
Whatever, the new trailer is up, and it drops all that coy stuff from the teasers and plunges us deep into the Wall*everse, which is a lot bigger and richer than I first thought. We meet Wall*E's probe-android luvva, who appears to have been designed by Jonny Ive, and get a look at what's left of human civilization in deep space. There's still a lot of kidsy cuteness going on, and that vaguely English voice-over dude is way punchable, but overall it looks gorgeous -- the physics is bouncy and crisp, the animation realistic where you want it to be and cartoony where you want it to be. My hopes are raised.
Also on tap: the trailer for Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, with Corey Feldman reprising his role as Edgar Frog:
It doesn't really look that bad. I mean, I know it will be that bad? But it doesn't look that bad.
March 12, 2008 2:16
Hulu Goes Gamma!
Or whatever you call it when something comes out of beta and launches. Hulu is live. You know, that Web video thing that has content from Fox, NBC, Bravo, USA, and a bunch of channels you probably didn't really know existed.
I was in the Hulu beta, so I've been watching shows on Hulu for months now. And I gotta say, it's brutally good. The video is high quality and almost stutter-free even on my irregular, unreliable stolen bandwidth. (Thanks, 'sunny', whoever you are!) The interface is elegant and simple. Commercial interruptions are reasonable. Navigation is intuitive. And the offerings are generous:
User-created what-now? Nothing kills your hope for humanity deader than when large corporations do something right on the Internet.
March 11, 2008 12:29
REAL DEATH STAR TO KILL EVERYONE -- FOR REAL -- REALLY!!!
In the ever-raging battle for internet eyeballs, here's a Yahoo News headline that probably grabbed more than a few:
REAL DEATH STAR COULD STRIKE EARTH
Wow, that is a big story. An actual man-made, planet-sized, battle-station could attack planet earth, just like in Star Wars. That certainly pushes the Hilary and Obama mudwrestling show under the fold (or whatever the online version of that is). If this story is true, you could stop worrying about declining home values, and spend your remaining cash eating at three-star Michelin restaurants and having sex with seven-diamond rated Emperor’s Club V.I.P. prostitutes (topical) until the day the Grand Moff of this particular Death Star turns our planet into the next Alderaan.
Yep, it's quite a story.
Oh, wait. It's not a deadly, moon-sized space ball full of Stormtroopers and Grand Moffs. It's a "beautiful pinwheel" -- two stars locked in each other's orbit, which might someday explode. Maybe I'm a purist, but unless it has a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port, it's not a Death Star.
Calling these two dancing stars a "Real Death Star" is like calling my Toyota a "Real Landspeeder." (Actually, a car is much more like a landspeeder than this fruity binary system. A car can drive on sand.) This lame-ass pinwheel can do nothing except maybe supernova "any time within the next few hundred thousand years." It's 8,000 light years away, and doesn't even have a special room for Darth Vader to air out his helmet. I'm not Joël Robuchoning myself to death quite yet.
Laser cannon.
Laser Floyd.
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This story, originally from Space.com and picked up by Yahoo News, is littered with "mights," "potentials," "one days," "coulds," "remains uncertains," and, finally, a big fat juicy "don’t worry." Once scientist remarks that a Gamma Ray explosion aimed directly at the Earth might "cut off 1 or 2 percent of total sunlight. It might cool the climate somewhat, but it wouldn't be a catastrophic ice age kind of thing." Global cooling? That sounds like a good thing. Maybe this "Real Death Star" could save us all .
Perhaps, technically, the gas balls in question are potential "death stars." However, if these twirling celestial bodies did blow up, and litter the planet with Gamma and Cosmic Rays (hopefully creating big piles of Incredible Hulks and Fantastic Fours), at least we'd be free of cheap, deceptive internet headlines like the ones you see every day on Yahoo.com. It would be worth it.
March 10, 2008 11:02
Speed Racer Trailers Still Refusing to Suck
When my daughter (age 3) wants me to shut up she says "Daddy, stop saying words!"
That's what I want to say to the actors in the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, two new trailers for which are on the Web. (They are "international trailers," which I don't know what that means.) The movie features Emile Hirsch (who's significantly upgraded his ride from the broke-ass magic bus of Into the Wild), clad in white leather, and John Goodman mouthing sort of campy Rebel Without a Cause-type dialogue, which will be very funny if the dialogue in the trailer constitutes all the spoken lines in the entire movie. Which it probably won't.
But the driving scenes are just ridiculous -- it's like the Wachowski brothers are the first people to realize that making a movie with CGI means you can show a car doing whatever you want it to do. It's like what you thought driving would be like when you were 5. It's that cool. And Speedie's car is looking sweet. Sweet as in, I want to lick it, it looks so cool.
And then when people aren't driving they're punching each other.
March 7, 2008 12:01
What To Do At Parties
Here's a fun, anti-social game to play at parties with your introverted friends instead of meeting new people. It's called, "Who's Read The Most Books On The Shelves?" This game is awesome. If you only know one person at a party, it can suck up just enough time to leave the party feeling like you at least tried to have a life.
Here's how you play "Who's Read The Most Books On The Shelves?" Locate your host's bookshelves, and count how many books you've read on a given shelf. If you've read more books on that shelf than your opponent (s?), you get one point. Then, when you and your friend (s?) have gone over all the shelves, whoever has most points wins.
This game is only fun if you are scrupulously honest. If you lie to your friends and count as read books you own-but-haven't-read or started-but-never-finished or are-super-embarrassed-that-you-haven’t-read, the game is screwed. Also, this game is only fun is you are an anti-social introvert who doesn't want to meet new people.
I've played many exciting games of "Who's Read The Most Books On The Shelves?" Picture this: I was three shelves behind -- not good, right? Suddenly, I hit a vein of Robertson Davies, a wagon load of Larry McMurtry, and a sweet chunk of Tom Clancy. (I'm not proud of the Clancy, but all's fair in "Who's Read The Most Books On The Shelves?") Suddenly, my adversary and I were tied. We each desperately scanned the last shelf. Not a lot happening for either of us. Then, out of nowhere, at the end of the pile... G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday! Thanks to ol' Gilbert Keith, Victory was mine.
Now that was a great party.
March 6, 2008 11:52
Watchmen Alert: What Some of Them Look Like
Watchmen is one of those things -- like most nerdy things -- where if you haven't read it you couldn't care less, but if you have read it it's massively important to you. I'm in that second group. Which is why I'm posting these character shots from the upcoming Watchmen movie (so cruelly lampooned by co-blogger Matt on The Simpsons).
I think they look amazing. I get that feeling that maybe he (meaning director Zack "300" Snyder) is doing it again.
Click to embiggen:
First up, the Comedian in all his bad-assed middle-aged glory. That actor, whoever he is, definitely nails the leer.
Nite Owl. The dude looks good, the ship looks great.
Ozymandias. Interesting. A bit more foppish than I'd expected, and that headpiece -- I guess it's supposed to evoke Caesar's laurels? But interesting.
Rorschach. Yep, that's Rorschach. If you're wondering that's Jackie Earle Hailey in the suit.
Silk Spectre. I don't remember her quite this va-va-voom in the comic -- I remember her with a slightly faded quality. But maybe I'm projecting. The actress is Carla Gugino, who looks positively prim in this outfit after Sin City.
I guess they're saving Dr. Manhattan for a big reveal. Warner Brothers also sent me a Watchmen-themed digital clock which is counting down the seconds till the movie premieres this time next year. Watchmen Babies in 2010!
March 5, 2008 12:35
Exploding Runes: A Roundup of Gygax Tributes
Some posts -- and other things -- in response to Gygax's death, from around the Net:
-- an eclectic but entertaining selection of Gygax trivia at Gawker-spawn SF blog io9. Plus bonus scan from Barrier Peaks
-- fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss points out that some things are more important than Brett Favre retiring
-- from Penny Arcade, the definitive memorial image. Also check out Tycho's ever-eloquent news post about it.
-- from Order of the Stick, a celestial vision of Gary Gygax on his way to heaven
-- Time's Jim Poniewozik about Gygax's cultural legacy, citing in particular the kick-ass final episode of Freaks and Geeks
-- Wil Wheaton weighs in with some vivid early gaming memories.
I remember the first glimpse I had of D&D, which was when an older kid was showing me some of his stuff -- rule books and character sheets and such. This was before I knew what a Bohemian Ear-Spoon was and thought all games were either card games or board games.
He whipped out a map of a dungeon that he'd sketched out on graph paper. I said, is that the board? He met my gaze and said gravely: one of them. My mind sort of exploded at that point.
March 4, 2008 1:21
Gary Gygax, 1938-2008
It's being widely reported around the Net that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died at age 69.
I'm not sure what to say except to quash any jokey "he's given up his last hit point" lines. You just can't wrap your head around what a massive influence this one guy's imagination had on the minds of a generation of people who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons. Even his name on the cover of the Player's Handbook was freaky and otherworldly (it was Swiss, apparently). It would be easy to dismiss him -- and he has, of course, been largely dismissed by mainstream culture -- and God knows there was plenty of later wrangling over the rights to D&D, in which nobody came off well -- but you have to give it up: he was one of the master architects of the dungeon-crawling fantasies that play themselves out in my constantly looping mental fantasy movie, and I'm not the only one. And you know, the idea of simulating those heroic Fafhrd-and-the-Grey Mouser-style stories, of breaking them down into numbers and probabilities, governed by cruel plastic dice-gods, and then inserting yourself into them as a role-player -- it must have required a tremendous leap of the imagination, and huge amount of work on top of that to make it happen. And he was one of the people who made it.
I never met Gygax, though I did send him a galley of my first book. The book wasn't very good, but he sent back a very kind blurb to put on the back cover, of which I was hugely proud -- it remains my favorite thing about that book. I'll leave you with a link to the best piece of writing I've seen about Gygax, Paul La Farge's "Destroy All Monsters," which ran in a 2006 issue of The Believer. La Farge actually had the stones to go to Wisconsin, hunt down Gygax and play in a game that Gygax DM'ed. Now that's a fantasy right there.
March 4, 2008 11:39
More Details about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse
Dang it, can't seem to put itals in the subject line. If I would I could have clarified that we're talking about a piece of intellectual property, Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's first post-Firefly TV series, and not some kind of miniature play environment. Lemme blockquote it for you:
The drama stars Dushku as Echo, a member of a group of men and women who are imprinted with different personalities for different assignments. In between tasks they are mind-wiped, living like children in Dollhouse, a futuristic dorm/lab. A group of people, known as "Actives" (or "Dolls"), have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas and hired out for particular jobs, crimes, fantasies and occasional good deeds. When not imprinted, the Actives live, childlike and unremembering, in a hidden facility nicknamed "The Dollhouse". Although the Actives are ostensibly volunteers, the operation is highly illegal, and under constant threat from a determined federal agent on one end and an insane rogue Active on the other. The story hinges around a greater and more subtle threat: Echo, a female Active, begins, in her mind-wiped state, to become self-aware.
The one thing I don't get here (other than the charms of Ms. Dushku, who for some reason I've never really gotten the point of her tough-but-fragile on-screen persona) is how they're going to develop consistent characters from week to week (other than the increasingly self-aware Echo) if everybody's gettin' their minds wiped all the time. Maybe it'll be entertaining just to see the actors take on different personalities? But Whedon will have a good solution. He always does.
March 3, 2008 2:30
YouTube Is Your Mommy Now. Love Her Now
Horrible deadline today, so I offer you YouTube love instead of the real kind.
First, the trailer for the new Lego Batman game. Perhaps you will find Lego Catwoman both arousing and disturbing, as I did:
Next up, this video reimagines the Star Wars opening credits in 50's-style animation. Apparently Chewbacca is not cool enough to be in it.
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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