This week’s podcast is going to be our summer movie wrap-up. We’ll talk about the big summer movies that are out now, have gone by and even a few things that we’re looking forward to.

Our Author Spotlight this week shines on S. G. Browne, author of the darkly humorous Breathers and we also have our interview with Emmy award winning makeup artist Brian Sipe who, among many other things, worked on J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek, one of the aforementioned big summer movies.

the news roundup is under the fold -

Anime

♦News from Otakon as reported by Anime News Network. Noboru Ishiguro, director of the Space Battleship Yamato television anime series (better known as Star Blazers to those of us who grew up with summer afternoon anime back in the early 80s), has confirmed that a live-action version of Yamato is in development. There is also a new animated Yamato in the works, set to be released in December.

Books

♦In “life imitates art and not in a good way” news, i09 is reporting that Amazon secretly removed George Orwell’s 1984 from customer’s Kindle e-book readers. The book was pulled from the Kindle store due to copyright issues, but Amazon went one step further and deleted all purchased copies as well.

MMO

♦In “life imitates Second Life” news, Discover has a story about student nurses and doctors receiving real training in Second Life’s virtual hospitals.

Movies

♦The One Ring has some exclusive pictures of the reconstruction of Hobbiton for the upcoming film version of The Hobbit. Pre-production is obviously continuing in spite of potential legal problems stemming from the Tolkien family’s dispute with New Line over profits from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.

♦Followers of Jon Favreau on Twitter got the word from the man himself, but Marvel’s official website now has the news that Iron Man 2 has wrapped principal photography right on schedule.

♦The Hollywood Reporter has an extensive piece on DC comics’ movie future including word of several projects in the pipeline including The Flash, Bizarro Superman, Shazam, and a sequel to Constantine. They also mention that “this past fall, Warner quietly hired three of DC’s biggest writers — Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison and Marv Wolfman — to act as consultants and writers for its superhero line of movies” which is encouraging news.

Science

♦In “life imitates art but probably only in my mind” news, word broke over Twitter last night that the planet Jupiter is sporting an interesting new black spot near it’s south pole. Bad Astronomer has a quick write up on the phenomenon which experts speculate is possibly weather related or an impact event. Those of us who remember Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 know that it is really thousands of monoliths in the process of collapsing the planet into a new star.

TV

♦Sci-Fi Wire has a very good interview with Joss Whedon about his reaction to the Emmy nomination for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Dr. Horrible is up for the newly created Outstanding Special Class – Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs award, a category that is rumored to have been created specifically for Dr. Horrible.

Video Games

♦Wired has a list of 10 Gaming Gadgets That Will Make Us Hurt Ourselves. I was a little surprised to find that only seven of the ten were Wii peripherals.