This is going to be another busy week here at Seattle Geekly. Tomorrow we have a Geekly Spotlight with our review of the Stocker Farms Field of Screams including some interviews and audio from the haunt to get your scare going. Then on Thursday we have Episode #35 of the podcast, our Author Explosion featuring interviews with Mark Henry, Cherie Priest, Rob Rogers and A.P. Stephens.

Monday news is under the fold

Anime

♦Anime News Network is reporting the announcement of the full cast for the live action Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers) movie. Interestingly, two characters that are male in the anime will be female in the movie. Filming has started and the movie is scheduled for a December 2010 release in Japan.

Books

♦You may remember the story back in July about Amazon surreptitiously deleting purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their owner’s Kindles. The deletions were prompted by legal issues with the electronic editions, but Amazon’s handling of the deletions, specifically the lack of warning or explanation, irked many of their customers. Amazon continues to catch fallout from the deletions, the latest being a settlement of $150,000 paid to a student whose homework was disrupted by the deletion.

Comics

♦Reports are starting to trickle in from the Long Beach Comic Con that went on down there in California this weekend. The LA Times has an interview with Bloom County creator Berke Breathed, who was one of the guests at LBCC. In the interview he takes an unflinching look at his early work and talks a little about the differences in the cartooning world now versus when he was coming up.

Movies

♦Zombieland cleaned up at the box office, taking in a reported $25 million dollars over the weekend. For me this has kind of a good news/bad news flavor to it. It’s good news because Zombieland is a good movie and deserves to do well. Its bad news because this will only encourage studios to try and cash in on it. There was talk of a sequel even before the movie hit theaters and the fact that it made its budget back on opening weekend just about guarantees that we’ll be seeing Zombieland 2. As much as I enjoyed Zombieland I think it would be difficult to pull of a sequel that didn’t just take some of the shine off the original (think Highlander 2 and the sequels to The Matrix). It also would surprise me to see a couple more zombie comedies rushed into development.

♦In the latest bit of news that made me say “Really? Wait… what?” Variety is reporting that a musical version of The Toxic Avenger is heading out for a national tour starting in 2010. The show has been playing Off Broadway in New York for about 6 months. Toxic Avenger the musical. Really? Wait… What?

♦Geek Tyrant is reporting on some interesting changes to the IMDB page for the upcoming World of Warcraft movie. The movie now appears to officially be titled Warcraft : Rise of the Lich King. Speculation now runs rampant that we’ll be seeing the story of Arthas’ transformation from the Paladin Prince of Lordaeron to the Lich King.

MMO

♦Reuters is reporting on a study being conducted by researchers at Indiana University that is using the virtual economies in MMOs, specifically SOE’s Everquest II, as a model for the economy in the real world.

“We can do controlled experiments in virtual worlds, but we can’t do that in reality. Controlled experimentation is the very best way to learn about cause and effect. We are on the verge of developing that capacity for human society as a whole.”

Perhaps I’m just cynical but this almost sounds like an excuse someone set up so they could jack up the price of Paladium on their server and make a crapton of in-game cash.

♦Cryptic has released the full list of ships that will be available for Federation players in Star Trek Online. The list is ordered by the rank of the commanding officer from Lieutenant Commander to Admiral. One can only assume that a similar list of Klingon ships will be coming out in the near future.