A mere five days remain until Halloween and Thursday’s podcast is going to continue our coverage of the spookiness. This week’s show will feature an interview with “Bonehand” Steve from the Bonebat show and a report from Crypticon and The Beta Society’s event Slashacre. We’ll also have a review of Torchlight, the forthcoming action RPG for the PC from Runic Games.
Your Monday news is under the fold
Books
Amazon is expanding its Kindle e-book reader to the PC. The new Kindle Books application will run on Windows 7, XP and Vista and will allow users to browse for and purchase books through Amazon’s Kindle store. The PC application will support Amazon’s Whispersync service, which allows users to automatically sync their bookmarks or current pages across PCs, Kindle tablet devices or iPhone/iPod Touch handsets. There is no announced release date but according to Amazon it will be out “soon”.
Author Charlaine Harris was interviewed on CNN to promote her latest book A Touch of Dead, a compilation of previously published short stories. In the interview she mentions that she has a contract to write three more Sookie Stackhouse novels in addition to the next novel Dead in the Family which comes out in May. She also says that those three may be the last of the Sookie Stackhouse books. Harris’ novels are, of course, the source material for the HBO series True Blood.
Dark Horse has announced that it will be publishing Mogworld the first novel from Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation. Mogworld is the story of Jim, who, sixty years after dying in a magic-school mishap, is wrenched back to life by a renegade necromancer. All Jim wants is to die properly, once and for all—no easy task for a minor character in a MMORPG. Mogworld is Croshaw’s first foray into published fiction and is due to hit shelves in August 2010.
Movies
Paranormal Activity held on to the #1 spot at the weekend box office and the film adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy manga took in an estimated $7 million putting it at #6. The rest of the top 10 was as follows;
- Paranormal Activity
- Saw VI
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Law Abiding Citizen
- Couples Retreat
- Astro Boy
- The Stepfather
- Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Sony
- Zombieland
Unsurprisingly with Paranormal Activity continuing to rake in the dollars, Paramount is already talking about making a sequel.
Neil Blomkamp, the writer/director of District 9, has obtained funding for his next movie according to Variety. Blomkamp had very little to say about the project other than that it is going to be another science fiction film.
Hopefully, this will be a bit unique, very much a reflection of me. It is absolutely another science fiction film, quite different from `District 9,’ but some of the blending of genres and the tone might be within the same realm.
MMO
Superhero MMORPG Champions Online is offering a free trial weekend as part of their Blood Moon Halloween event. You can sign up for the trial and download the game client at the official Champions Online website. The Blood Moon event starts on October 27 and the trial “weekend” will run from 10:00am October 30 until 10:00am November 2.
TV
Sci Fi Wire is reporting that Fox will be pulling Dollhouse off the air during the month of November. Fox has committed to air all 13 episodes of season two that have been filmed, but they apparently don’t think it will pull in the kind of numbers that they want to see for the November sweeps which is when networks set advertising rates. Fox will be rerunning episodes of House and Bones in Dollhouse’s time slot for the month.
Video Games
An official version of Settlers of Catan is now available for the iPhone/iPod Touch from German developer exozet games. Like the boardgame, Catan: The First Island allows you to compete with up to four other players, although it does not appear to support multiplayer over wifi (sorry iPod Touch owners). First Island also has AI players who “will prove themselves worthy competitors” if no human opponents are available. The app is available through the iTunes store and costs $4.99. In even more good news exozet also appears to be working on a version of Catan for the Nintendo DS.
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