Seattle-Geekly.Com

Archive!

Shannon — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:32:19 +0000

Hey all, apparently some people have been under the impression that we’re still doing the podcast, but we aren’t. We had a great run for over 2 years and thank all of the guests and fans for the success we had.

We are no longer taking review submissions.

Also, the website will be going down in December, so if you’d like, please archive the mp3s that you enjoyed.

Our email seattlegeekly@gmail.com will still be up, if you need to contact us.

Thanks again!
–Shannon & Matt

Show Notes – Episode #98 “The Final Frontier”

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:07:20 +0000

We are finishing up the Seattle Geekly podcast by doing one of the things we have enjoyed most: talking to authors. This week we have interviews with Peter Orullian about his first novel The Unremembered and Chris Farnsworth about The President’s Vampire, the second book in his horror/spy thriller series

Plus Shannon watches her final bad movie and since this is the last episode of the podcast we’ll be running down a list of other places you can go on the internet to get your geek fix.

Our Geek Week

Read Yarn by Jon Armstrong
Read The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell
Read first collection of Matt Fraction‘s run on Invincible Iron Man
Caught up with trade collections of Air by G. Willow Wilson
Finished Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
Epic Game Day
Saw Thor in the theater
Free Comic Book Day with Paper Windows at Top Pot and Arcane Comics

Author Talk

Peter Orullian

Christopher Farnswoth

Get Your Geek Fix

GENERAL GEEK MADNESS

MUSIC

Radio Free Hipster/Hipster, please!

BAD MOVIES

Mail Order Zombie

COMICS

Backroom Comics

VIDEO GAMES

WARCRAFT

Music

Music this week was ‘Meantime’ by Adam WarRock, it’s one of the many free tracks you can download from his website and you can also buy his album The War For Infinity off Bandcamp. You also heard ‘It All Makes Sense At the End’ by Molly Lewis from her EP I Made You a CD But I Eated It

Monday (not) News

Shannon and Matt — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:36:56 +0000

We are still dealing with the fallout from our Important Announcement. Honestly it provoked more of a response than we were expecting. People have been very kind in supporting our decision while still being disappointed and for that we thank everyone.

A lot of people have been asking us if having another person working with us would have made a difference. The answer is that of course having another person would have helped, but it probably would have just delayed the inevitable. We actually did try and bring on a couple of guest reviewers for books and music but it really didn’t work out. What it came down to was that it isn’t really fair to harass people about deadlines and production when all you are offering them is the opportunity to do work for free.

In order to keep the podcast going we would really have needed a person who’s full time job was being a producer; lining up interviews, coordinating events and conventions, keeping track of review material and all that. In addition having a graphic designer and a website designer on staff would have helped as well. Unfortunately none of that was really viable economically. We didn’t mind putting our time into the podcast because this was our pet project but we couldn’t really expect anyone else to indefinitely volunteer for the hours and hours it took to do this every week or even every two weeks.

Because of the response we’ve been getting we are looking in to ways to keep the Event Calendar going, we will still be twittering as Seattle Geekly, Shannon will still have her personal twitter @askageekgal and you can follow our book recommendations on GoodReads. We are also encouraging people to call our voicemail line (206)201-2352 and leave a message to be played on our final podcast on May 12.

Thanks again for all the kind words and support.

An Important Announcement

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:41:19 +0000

(If you are looking for the Episode #97 show notes, they are right here and, no, that is not the important announcement)

There is no easy way to do this, so here it is; We have reached the point where we are going to have to lower the curtain on Seattle Geekly. The demands of producing the show have exceeded our available resources, both financially and in terms of time. This is a heart rending decision for us and one that we did not come to easily.

I’m sure it seems that this is coming out of nowhere but the fact is this has been brewing behind the scenes for quite some time now. We went through a list of changes we could make in order to keep Seattle Geekly going but what it came down to was the fact that if we scaled it back to the point where it would be sustainable it would no longer be the show we wanted it to be and it wouldn’t be something we could be proud of producing. After long debate we decided we would much rather end at a high point and have the legacy of Seattle Geekly be people wishing we had kept going and done more than keep pushing on and leave a trail of disappointing shows before we petered out at the bitter end. The first rule of show business is “always leave them wanting more” and while we aren’t exactly in show business we felt it still applied.

In addition to the question of the resources required, there have been a few things recently that brought home to us the fact that, no matter how much work we put in to the show, at the end of the day we are still just another podcast and blog in a vast ocean of podcasts and blogs. We are proud of the work we’ve done and constantly amazed by the enjoyment people seem to get out of what we do, but we realized that in the grand scale of things the two of us putting down this project was not going to be the end of the world even for our most dedicated fans.

We said when we started the podcast that if we connected one person with one book, movie, TV show, game or event that they would not have otherwise found that it would be a success and we have had more success in that department than we ever could have imagined. The opportunity to see people geek out over things they found through our show is going to be the hardest thing for us to give up.

We want to thank everyone for all the kindness we have been shown over the past two years and apologize deeply to all those who are feeling like we have let you down. The wonderful thing about new media, though, is that if you decide that there is a geeky podcast/blog shaped hole in your world you can start one! We haven’t done anything here that anyone else couldn’t do at least as well, if not better.

Once this announcement goes out we are going to be unplugging ourselves from the internet for a bit. We’ll be back to answering e-mail and twitters and such in a couple of days, we will be having our last hurrah at Epic Game Day this Saturday and we’ll be back to put out one final show in two weeks. We’ll be keeping the website up and the past podcasts available for download until the end of the year.

We will not be dropping off the face of the planet after this. We have been participating in the geek community all our lives and we will continue to do so. You will still see us at various geeky events around the region and you can still come up and say hi to us if you are moved to do so. The only difference will be that instead of being Shannon and Matt from Seattle Geekly we will just be Shannon and Matt, two geeks from Seattle.

Show Notes – Episode #97 “Norwescon 34”

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 03:00:47 +0000

Norwescon has been the center of our Geek Year for a very long time now and this year was no exception. This week we’re going to try and summarize our convention experience, just to try and give a taste of what went on over what was an amazing weekend. While we were at the convention we also had the chance to catch up with local author and geek scene icon Bruce Taylor, “Mr. Magic Realism”.

All that, plus Shannon watches a bad movie and we have a major announcement about the future of Seattle Geekly

Our Geek Week

Listened to the audiobook of The Prefect by Alistair Reynolds
Reading The Unremembered by Peter Orullian
Finished single player Portal 2 on the PC
Watched Season 6 Dr. Who premiere
Almost done with Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
We, along with Julie from 19 Nocturne Boulevard are guests on the most recent episode of the Zombie Mob podcast with McPierce! You should check it out!
New nook firmware update (Yay! App store!)

Norwescon 34 Wrap Up

Matt’s panel ‘Best Board Games for Nongamers’ with Jeremy from Bucephalus Games/Greenlake Games and Julie Haehn

FRIDAY

Shannon’s panel ‘Fandom in Daily Life’ with Death*Star and Dierde Phoenix
Shannon’s panel ‘Grrrl Gamers!’ with Julie Haehn, Tamera Mickelson, & Kate Marshall
Matt’s panel ‘The State of SyFy’ with David A. Page and Judith Herman
Like Water for Quarks
- Bruce Taylor “Mr. Magic Realism”
The Philip K Dick Award presentation

SATURDAY

Shannon’s panel ‘Podcasting 101′ with Jim Granger of Pacific Fen Spotlight and Bonehand Steve of The Bonebat Show
Shannon’s panel ‘Godzilla vs. Zombies’ with Rev. En Fuego and Lilith von Fraumench
Shannon’s panel ‘Batman vs. Superman’ with Ashley Cook Spencer Ellsworth and Matt Youngmark
Matt’s panel ‘When Fandoms Collide’ with Karen Rall
Saturday Concerts:

SUNDAY

Matt’s panel ‘Gaming and Community’ with Donna Prior and Liz Courts
Matt’s panel ‘Plagues, Pandemics and You’ with Miki Garrison and Darry Willis

Pre-registration for Norwescon 35 will be open soon. Keep your eye on the official Norwescon website or follow @norwescon on twitter. We’ll see you there next year!

Dare Shannon to Watch a Bad Movie

This week’s bad movie was Season of the Witch (2011)

News

Music

Music this week was ‘Social Apothecary’ by Death*Star from the forthcoming album A New Dope. Catch Death*Star LIVE at at Rendezvous/JewelBox Theater with Klopfenpop & Sketch of a Monster TOMORROW NIGHT or, if you missed that you can see them Saturday, May 14 at 9:00pm at the Blue Moon Tavern with Gonken and Fro Magnum Man

An Important Announcement

There is no easy way to make this announcement, so here it is. We have reached the point where we are going to have to lower the curtain on Seattle Geekly. The demands of producing the show have exceeded our available resources, both financially and in terms of time. This is a heart rending decision for us and one that we did not come to easily.

Wednesday Review: Portal 2

Matt — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:18:48 +0000

Anyone who has been following us here at Seattle Geekly for any length of time will already know two things that are going to influence this review; first, I have been excited about the prospect of Portal 2 since I finished the first game right after it came out and second, in general I cannot stand to play multi-player FPS games, at least with people I don’t know well. One of the biggest criticisms I have had of reviewers of games like the Halo series, Gears of War II and even Red Dead Redemption is that they gloss over the single player modes of these games to focus on multi-player. To be completely frank, I don’t give a single crap about the muliti-player aspects of games of this nature. I want to know up front if a game has enough value for a single player to justify the price I am going to have to pay for it because chances are good that is the only way I will ever play it. Now that we have that established, let me talk about Portal 2.

The short version is that I loved it. Every aspect of the game lived up to the standards that people have come to expect from Valve. I was playing it on an approximately three year old PC (that wasn’t top end when it was new) and it still ran smoothly and looked amazing. The voice acting, especially Stephen Merchant as Wheatley, was very good and the writing kept the same snarkiness and irreverence that made the original game such a standout.

The basic premise of the game hasn’t changed; you get your portal gun and use it to maneuver through an increasingly difficult series of test chambers. Many of the same techniques that were used to solve the puzzles in the first game still work but the addition of new elements, repulsion and speed gels, catapulting platforms, hard light bridges and the like, kept it fresh enough that it really felt like a new game rather than just a Portal expansion. If you enjoyed Portal I can’t think of a single reason that you would not thoroughly enjoy Portal 2.

The question is, though, does the single player campaign by itself justify the $50 retail price and, much as I enjoyed the game, unfortunately I have to say that it does not. While the single player game is definitely longer than the original Portal, I was still able to finish it in just a couple sittings. I do highly recommend picking the game up, but if you have absolutely no intention of ever playing the co-op mode, I would wait until Portal 2 goes on sale and pick it up then. $50 is a lot to ask for ten to fifteen hours of gameplay.

For myself, in spite of my aversion to multi-player, I do intend to try the co-op mode but I am going to wait until I can schedule time to play with a friend rather than risk the vagaries of random partners from the internet.

Portal 2 is available now on Steam, XBox 360 and PS3.

Events to Watch Out For

Shannon and Matt — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:06:29 +0000

- A selection of some of the great geek events going on in the Greater Seattle area this week -

Kind of a quiet week this week but there are still two events that are not to be missed!

First up there is going to be an awesome night of nerdcore Friday night at 10pm at the Rendezvous/JewelBox Theater, 2322 2nd Avenue in Seattle, featuring live performances by Klopfenpop, Death*Star and Sketch of a Monster. Tickets are only $7 at the door and this is a 21 and over show. This is a great opportunity to hear some great live music but if, like us, you have lamented the fact that so many geek music shows seem to be on Sunday nights you NEED to get out to this rare Friday night event. Let the venue operators know that there is an audience for geek music!

This Satuday is, of course, EPIC GAME DAY at the AFK Tavern, 1510 41st Street in Everett. Epic Game Day is a celebration of hobby gaming, where gamers from both inside and outside the industry can mingle, play games, and enjoy each other’s company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional game designer, industry vet, community leader, or a hobby enthusiast – Epic Game Day is full of epic win for all hobby gamers! And did we mention that it is totally free?!? Epic Game Day runs from Noon to Midnight and the schedule of games is available at EpicGameDay.com. We are definitely going to be there and Shannon is even going to be hosting a game of Talisman from 4-8pm. Don’t miss it!

Monday News Roundup 04/25

Matt — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:46:52 +0000

The big convention weekend has come and gone and, as far as I can tell, Seattle survived! Attendence numbers for Sakura-Con and Norwescon were both impressive, though on very different scales. Sakura-Con topped out at over 19,000 and Norwescon had it’s largest convention ever with 3,600 attendees. We spent the whole weekend at Norwescon and had an amazing time which we will be talking about in some detail in this week’s podcast!

The Monday News is under the fold.

Books

The British Science Fiction Association Award winners were announced this weekend at Eastercon. The winners are:
- Best Novel: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
- Best Short Fiction: ‘The Shipmaker’ by Aliette de Bodard
- Best Art: Cover for Zoo City by Joey Hi-Fi
- Best Non-Fiction: ‘Blogging the Hugos’ by Paul Kincaid

The winner of the Philip K. Dick Award was also announced this weekend at our very own Norwescon. The award went to The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder, with a special citation to Harmony by Project Itoh. The award cerimony was live-streamed to the Internet for the first time ever this year and the response was good enough that it will most likely be streamed again next year.

Last but not least in awards news, the Hugo nominees were announced this weekend at a joint ceremony held at Norwescon and Eastercon. The nominees include:
The full list of nominees is available at the Worldcon 69 Website.

Amazon announced in a press release that “Library Lending”, a new feature launching later this year, will allow Kindle customers to borrow Kindle books from over 11,000 libraries in the United States. Kindle Library Lending will be available for all generations of Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps. No specific release date was given.

Comics

Greg Rucka announced in an audio interview with Stumptown Trade Review that he will be creating a new steampunk webcomic. Titled Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Ether the comic will feature art by Eisner Award winner Rick Burchett and will be a “steampunk, pirates, western thing” with airships, floating islands, gunslingers and sword fights. Rucka said that this was planned to be an ongoing series and that he hoped to launch in July.

Tabletop

WizKids has announced the upcomming release of a series of Street Fighter Heroclix. The series will include a starter pack with Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Blanka and Guile and will also have 21 additional Clix including M. Bison and E. Honda. , the starter set will retail for $19.99 and individual figures will be priced at $2.99. The Street Fighter set will, of course, be compatable with the entire HeroClix line and is scheduled to be in stores this August.

Video Games

Sony’s PlayStation Network has been down since Wednesday due to “an external intrusion.” The netwrok was not crashed but was turned off by Sony in order to “conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of network services going forward” according to the announcement on the Playstation Blog. As of this morning the network remains down and the most recent entry posted by Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media Patrick Seybold says that “I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time” as far as when service might return.

Events to Watch Out For 04/19 – 25

Shannon and Matt — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:37:14 +0000

- A selection of some of the great geek events going on in the Greater Seattle area this week -

This weekend is all about festivals and conventions in Seattle!

Running Friday Saturday and Sunday is the first ever Seattle International Film Festival Animation Fascination Festival at the SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer Street in Seattle. SIFF Cinema will take a look back at some of the best animated shorts from the past few years, recent works from the National Film Board of Canada, the latest feature from the legendary Bill Plympton, the rarely screened Chuck Jones classic The Phantom Tollbooth, a tribute to the classic short films of Pixar, and the Seattle premiere of Academy Award winning animator Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max. More details and specific show times are available at the SIFF website. Passes for the entire festival are $60 or $25 for SIFF members. Animation Fascination is co-presented by The Stranger and 2D OR NOT 2D Animation Festival.

Also running Friday through Sunday is Sakrua-Con 2011 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. Sakura-con is the largest anime/manga/Japanese culture convention in the Northwest and all the excellent programming you’ve come to expect will be back in abundance. Anime theaters, gaming, cosplay, cultural panels, dances, concerts, art contests, AMV’s, industry guests, over 100,000 square feet of exhibits hall, guests of honor and more! The full program schedule is available online. Weekend passes are $60 at the door and day passes are also available.

Last but not least, this Thursday through Sunday is Norwescon 34! Norwescon is one of the largest regional Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions in the United States. While maintaining a primarily literary focus, Norwescon is large enough to provide a venue for many of the other aspects of Science Fiction and Fantasy and the interests of its fans such as anime, costuming, art, gaming, and much, much more. Norwescon features over 500 hours of panel programming, presented by more than 200 panelists, covering such diverse subjects as science fiction, fantasy, science, costuming, art, writing, genre television and movies, as well as a myriad of other topics of interest to fans. Weekend passes are $60 at the door or $55 for Northwest Science Fiction Society members. This is where we’re going to be all weekend and if you want to track us down our panel schedule will be under the fold.

Many people have asked why two major conventions with a high degree of overlap between their audiences would schedule themselves to be on the same weekend. We have wondered that ourselves since we would love to be able to check out Sakura-Con but it ALWAYS conflicts with Norwescon. Long time friend-of-the-podcast DJ Wudi wondered about that as well and he actually does a very good job of explaining it.

The Seattle Geekly panel schedule for Norwescon is under the fold. Come see us sweat in front of an audience!

Shannon

Fandom in Daily Life
Grrrl Gamers!
Podcasting 101
Godzilla vs. Zombies
Batman vs. Superman: Who Would REALLY Win in a Fight?

Matt

Best Board Games for Nongamers
The State of SyFy (née Sci-Fi Channel)
When Fandoms Collide
Gaming and Community
Plagues, Pandemics and You

Monday News Roundup 04/18

Matt — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:37:36 +0000

Game of Thrones premiered on HBO last night. You don’t have to worry about any spoilers here though. I can’t really talk about the show since, due to my ridiculous day job schedule Monday mornings, I was not able to stay up and watch it. What I can talk about is the genre snobbery in the mainstream press reviews.

Disdain for genre fiction is certainly nothing new. The Culture Show on the BBC recently aired a special titled ‘The Books We Really Read‘ that was so dismissive of genre fiction that it prompted a letter of protest signed by 85 science fiction, fantasy and horror authors ranging from Iain Banks to Michael Moorcock. Authors like Margaret Atwood have spent their entire careers fighting against having their work classified as “science-fiction” no doubt in some part because of the stigma attached to the label by critics. Given that, it isn’t surprising that some reviewers have been pretty contemptuous of the Game of Thrones premiere.

The New York Times review is particularly bad. The reviewer praises HBO for shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood and Big Love but goes on to say that “when the network ventures away from its instincts for real-world sociology, as it has with the vampire saga ‘True Blood,’ things start to feel cheap, and we feel as though we have been placed in the hands of cheaters.” So real world = good, vampires or fantasy setting = bad. Got it.

The review also criticizes Game of Thrones as being “boy fiction” to which HBO added sex and romance “as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise,” an accusation so egregious that George R. R. Martin took the rare step of responding to the critic

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say

if I am writing “boy fiction,” who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?
and

thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

The worst part of the review is that it fails to do any kind of actual review of the show itself. The reviewer talks about how expensive it was to produce, complains about the fantasy setting, explains how the show came to be on HBO, makes a couple of cracks about the use of invented languages, takes a swipe at D&D players and makes her laughable and vaguely sexist “boy fiction” comment all with virtually no discussion of what the show is actually about.

As I have mentioned before, in spite of the rising popularity of geekdom, the easiest way to prove your cool cred in the mass culture is still to make fun of the nerds and that is pretty much all the New York Times is doing with this review. Game of Thrones is something geeks would like, therefore it can’t be any good.

I will be watching Game of Thrones at the earliest opportunity and since I am both a boy and a D&D player I anticipate enjoying it thoroughly

The Monday News is under the fold.

Comics

the 2011 Stumptown Comic Art Awards were presented at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland over the weekend. The winners are:

Manga

Manga publisher Tokyopop has announced that they will be shutting down their North American publishing division as of May. Founder Stu Levy put a posative spin on the closure in a post on the Tokyopop website saying “our community has fought the good fight, and, as a result, the Manga Revolution has been won –manga has become a ubiquitous part of global pop culture.” Tokyopop’s film and television projects and European operations, including the German publishing program, will not be affected by the North American office closure.

Anime News Network is reporting that Fruits Basket creator Natsuki Takaya will launch a manga series called Liselotte and Witch’s Forest starting this May. Takaya wrote Fruits Basket from 1998-2007 and the series was published in the U.S. by Tokyopop starting in 2004. The new series “centers around Liselotte — a girl who, until now, has lived a different life from others on the very easternmost tip of a country.”

MMO

Developer Bigpoint announced in a press release that their browser-based Battlestar Galactica MMO has passed the one million subscriber mark since the open beta started in February. The game centers around space combat and allows players to fly missions either as Cylons or Humans and has story based PvE missions as well as strategic PvP battles for resources. BSG Online is free to play with optional microtransactions.

TV

Farscape creator Rockne S. O’Bannon created something of a stir with a tweet on Saturday. The tweet, saying only “Great meeting at Syfy yesterday. New project. HUGE. New series. Very excited. Very, very excited” has created a lot of speculation about what the nature of this project is and how huge it could be. Farscape ran on *shudder* SyFy from 1999 – 2003, was plagued by changes in time slots and was finally cancelled by the network due to the show’s high production cost. We will be watching for further developments on this.

We mentioned a few weeks ago the rumors started by SGU producer Joseph Mallozzi that if the ratings were good enough for the final episodes of the show that an SGU movie was not out of the question. Well those hopes have now been pretty definitively dashed by an announcement by executive producer Brad Wright at this weekend’s Creation Stargate convention in Vancouver. Airlock Alpha reports that Wright told an audience at the convention that financing for future Stargate projects had fallen through, partially because of the recent bankruptcy and financial restructuring at the show’s studio home MGM. *shudder* SyFy officially canceled the series in December and the last episode is scheduled to air in May.