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Show Notes – Episode #75 “Books and Movies”

Shannon and Matt — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:56:10 +0000

We took time out of our PAX-prep madness to talk to one of our favorite local authors and one of our favorite local film buffs about their latest projects. Harry Connolly was on the show back in Episode #43 with his first novel Child of Fire and he was kind enough to return now that his second, Game of Cages has hit the shelves. We also talk with Sean “The Butcher” Smithson about his Film School Confidential U.S. film series that starts up this weekend.

Shannon is still trying to recover from last week’s Dared Movie so she didn’t watch one this week but we do have the weekly geek news and we talk about what to expect from out PAX coverage this year!

Our Geek Week

Read Chew Vol. 2 “International Flavor” by John Layman and Rob Guillory
Read Hack/Slash Omnibus #1 by Tim Seeley
Listening to the audio book of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Read Atomic Robo vol. 1 by Brian Clevinger with art by Scott Wegener
Played Dixit (boardgame)
Picked up the first issue of Another Passion which features 12 interviews with various creative types, including a certain pair of local podcasters!

Books

Game of Cages by Harry Connolly

Movies

Film School Confidential U.S. with Sean “The Butcher” Smithson

Contest!

We have TWO PAIRS of full weekend passes to the Maelstrom International Fantastic Film Festival to give away. The festival runs from Friday September 17 through Sunday September 19 at the SIFF Cinema, 321 Mercer Street in Seattle. You and a friend will be able to watch every short, feature film and documentary at the festival!

This contest will run through September 9 and we will pick the two winners during Episode #76 of the Seattle Geekly podcast.

“How do I enter?”
Please register / log in to our website, and leave a comment on THIS POST. You can just say “hi” or whatever! One entry per person please, we’ll delete any multiple or offensive posts. Make sure you use a valid e-mail address when you register so we can contact you if you win!

“How will you randomly pick someone?”
We have D&D dice of all shapes and sizes, even a 100 sider! We’ll roll and see who wins!

News

Seattle Geekly PAX 2010 Meetup!
- Stay tuned for our PAX 2010 coverage starting next week which will include interviews with Runic Games, Square Enix, Turbine, Valve, NC Soft and many more!
Lovecraft film plot details leak, Cameron calls it a new Aliens
Henson Family Donates Original Muppets to the Smithsonian

Music

Music this week was ‘Jacquelyn Hyde’ by MC Frontalot off of his latest album Zero Day. MC Frontalot will be at PAX performing at the Saturday night concert with Paul & Storm and Jonathan Coulton!

Next show: Episode #76 – PAX 2010 #1 show – We’ll play our interviews and impression about PAX this year.

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattl-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Show Notes – Episode #74 “Film Festivals”

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:12:17 +0000

If you long to see something on the big screen that isn’t just another sequel, adaptation or remake these days your best, if not only, option is film festivals. We are lucky here in the northwest to have a strong and diverse group of festivals every year. This week we talk to the organizers of two upcoming festivals that will be of interest to the geek set, the Bonebat Comedy of Horrors and the Maelstrom International Fantastic Film Festival.

We also have the weekly geek news and Shannon watches her worst dared movie yet!

Our Geek Week

Re-connected with the XBox 360, including a round of Left 4 Dead 2 with Seattle Geekly listener McPierce.
- Look for us on XBox Live! Our gamer tags are Shankay and Yakboy23
Played in the semi-regular D&D game
Read Air by G Willow Wilson
Read NYX by Marjorie M. Liu
Read The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman

Film Festivals

Maelstrom International Film Festival

SIFF

Dare Shannon to Watch a Bad Movie

This week’s movie was Die You Zombie Bastards! (2005)

Shannon was unable to find even ONE good thing about this movie, thus making Josh the second ever winner of the Seattle Geekly Bag of Sand! Congratulations! (acutal bag of sand may not match photo)

If you want to dare Shannon to watch a bad movie, e-mail us at seattlegeekly@gmail.com or call us at (206)201-2352. Check our Dared Movies Page to see what is on the list and what Shannon has already watched.

Contest!

Win a Pair of Maelstrom International Fantastic Film Festival Passes!

This contest will run through September 9 and we will pick the two winners during Episode #76 of the Seattle Geekly podcast.

“How will you randomly pick someone?”
We have D&D dice of all shapes and sizes, even a 100 sider! We’ll roll and see who wins!

News

Music

Music this week was ‘I Feel Fantastic’ by Jonathan Coulton and ‘Opening Band’ by Paul & Storm. You can catch all three of them live at the PAX Saturday night concert along with MC Frontalot!

Next week’s show: Episode #75 – We’ll be talking to Seattle Author Harry Connelly about his new book Game of Cages, and we’ve got a couple other things in the works.

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattl-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Show Notes – Episode #71 “The Nature of Existence”

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 01:43:08 +0000

Even if you are not familiar with the name Roger Nygard chances are good you are familiar with his work. He has directed three documentaries that are well known in the geek community; Trekkies, Trekkies 2 and Six Days in Roswell. This week we talk with Roger about his new documentary, The Nature of Existence, that should have some geek appeal as well.

Plus we hit some of the weekly geek news and we also have an announcement about some changes here at Seattle Geekly. Don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere but Real Life™ has intruded a little.

Our Geek Week

Listening to the audiobook of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Reading Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
Watched The Colony Season 1 on Discovery
Played the regular D&D 3.5 game
Watched a few movies:
- Inception (2010) in the theater
- Clash of the Titans (2010) on Blu-ray
- Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010) on Blu-ray
- Repo Men (2010) on Blu-ray

The Nature of Existence

The Nature of Existence – Original Trailer from Roger Nygard on Vimeo.

Visit TheNatureofExistence.com to see where it is playing and to request a screening in your city!

Contest!

Comic Swag Giveaway!

We have a pile of comic swag to give away. Some single issues, a couple compilations and even a couple Hellboy figures! Check our Contest Page for details and to find out how to enter!

News

Join the Facebook group to try to get Kirby Krackle’s Ring Capacity in the Green Lantern movie!
Seattle’s Cinerama to close for two months for a sound system and 3-D projection upgrade.
Changes at Seattle Geekly: Due to circumstances beyond our control we will be moving the Seattle Geekly home/office/studio (better known as the Geek Cave) shortly. Since it takes about twenty hours a week to produce our hour and a half podcast, the impending move along with the day jobs and family obligations means that we’ve pretty much run out of hours in the day and something has to be cut back. The podcast is NOT going anywhere but we are altering the format a little. We will be dropping the events section and scaling back the number of interviews we do every week with the goal of keeping the podcast under an hour. We will be expanding the content on the website with more reviews being done on the blog rather than in the podcast and every Tuesday we’ll be posting “Events to Watch Out For” to help you plan your weekend. We appreciate your patience and hopefully Real Life™ will bugger off soon so we can get back to being full time geeks!

Music

Music this week was, of course, ‘Ring Capacity’ by Kirby Krackle. If you are on Facebook don’t forget to like, join and promote the Facebook group to try to get Kirby Krackle’s Ring Capacity in the Green Lantern movie!

Next week’s show will be Episode #72 – The Geek Closet. It isn’t always easy to be a geek and we’ll be talking about the experience of having to be low-key about your geekdom in certain areas of your life.

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattl-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Monday News Roundup 09/02

Matt — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:03:58 +0000

It is no secret that the U.S. lags behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to the popularity of board gaming and the people behind the gaming blog Seize Your Turn are aiming to change that with their Play in Public campaign. The goal of the PiP campaign is to raise the profile of boardgaming and to educate the general public about the existence of games beyond Monopoly and Chess. Their list of guidelines is as follows:

Play a game in public and share the experience.

Game: any game listed on boardgamegeek at a rating of 5.5 or higher (number may be adjusted in the future if popularity of site changes and skews site scores from current baseline)

this blocks: Battleship, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Connect Four, Monopoly, Life, Uno, Payday
this allows: Cranium, Stratego, Rummikub, Apples to Apples, Go, Chess, and almost all Eurogames or adult strategy games

Public: any environment that a game is not typically played in, any location where someone will see you playing a board game who wasn’t expecting to play or learn about board games in that environment
Share: Declare your participation and support

take a picture or write up a description
post it somewhere (blog, website, Facebook)
tweet about it with the #PiPCampaign hashtag or post it on the Facebook Fan Page
link to the PiP campaign page so people can learn about it

Some helpful hints:

Encourage observers to ask questions… explain the game at a high level (theme, goal), encourage them to try it out (even let them take your spot for a few turns)
Talk about adult board games and the wide variety that exist… explain that some are more social and others are more competitive/intellectual (“the full range between chess and Cranium”, these boundaries resonate with most people)
In your write-up, brag about your attempt… how many people stopped, watched, and were curious… how many asked questions… how many people played that weren’t part of your initial group?
Spread the good word!

If you are already a boardgame aficionado go out there and game! If you want to get in to boardgaming but aren’t sure where to start, there are a ton of weekly and monthly game nights in the Seattle area many of which are listed on our Event Calendar.

Your Monday News is under the fold.

Books

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers has announced the winners of the Scribe Awards. The awards “acknowledge and celebrate excellence in licensed tie-in writing—novels based on TV shows, movies, and games.” The winners of interest to the geek set are Terminator Salvation: Cold War by Greg Cox which won for Best Novel (Speculative Fiction)and The Tudors: Thy Will be Done by Elizabeth Massie which won for Best Adaptation (General & Speculative).

Fans of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s comic Girl Genius will have another medium in which to enjoy the adventures of Agatha Heterodyne. Studio Foglio has announced a deal to have Girl Genius adapted into prose novels, and those novels will in turn be converted to audiobooks. Night Shade Books will publish Agatha H. and the Beetleburg Clank, the first volume in the Girl Genius Trilogy, in Spring 2011 with the following two volumes coming in 2012 and 2013. In addition, TOR books will be republishing the first three Girl Genius graphic novels as a color omnibus edition in Fall of 2011. Can’t wait!

Comics

Mark Millar has released a few details of Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Walls. In an interview with MovieWeb Millar said that he is writing the comic now and that as soon as director Matthew Vaughn is done with X-Men: First Class in April they will begin work on the Kick Ass 2 movie. The interview also gives a few story details which, if you don’t mind spoilers, are kind of interesting.

Internet

Airlock Alpha is reporting that *shudder* SyFy has a new Battlestar Galactica web series in the works. The series, titled Blood and Chrome, will be made up of 10 episodes running around 10 minutes each and it will tell the story of William Adama’s experiences in the first Cylon war. The series will be written by Mark Stern, Syfy’s executive vice president of original programming along with Battlestar Galactica and Caprica co-executive producer Michael Taylor. No release date has been announced.

Movies

J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company will be producing a movie version of Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting according to The Hollywood Reporter. The alternate history stories featuring Boilerplate begain on the Boilerplate website in 2000 and were collected into a book in 2009. You can hear our interview with creators Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett in Episode #36.

Podcasting

The finalists for this year’s Parsec Awards, presented for excellence in science fiction podcasting, have been released. Unfortunately we don’t appear to have made the cut The nominees include:
The winners will be announced at Dragon*Con in Atlanta. The full list of nominees is available on the official Parsec website

Monday News Roundup – 07/25

Matt — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:21:59 +0000

Most of the news this week has been coming out of San Diego, unfortunately though not all of it has been good. Twitter lit up Saturday night with then news that a fight that broke out after the Resident Evil: Afterlife panel had resulted in one person being stabbed in the face with a pen. The alleged perpetrator was quickly arrested and the victim was transported to UCSD Medical Center. Violence at Comic Con is very unusual. Director of Marketing and Public Relations David Glanzer told Comic Book Resources that he couldn’t remember “anything near to this” happening in the 26 years he has been with the convention.

Non-stabbing related news is under the fold

San Diego has been generating more news than you can shake a long box at. Robot 6 has been posting very good summaries of all the news broken down by day. You can read Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

A few highlights that caught my eye –

Comics

The 2010 Eisner Award winners have been announced. Winners included:
The full list of winners is up at the official CCI Eisners page. We had the opportunity to talk with John Layman at Spokane Comic Con and you can listen to our interview with him in Epsisode #63

MMO

Sean Dahlberg, Community Manager for SW:TOR confirmed on the official forums that there will be space combat in The Old Republic. This has been suspected since it was announced at E3 that players would be getting their own ships. Space combat will be “an alternative gameplay experience to the primary game” in which you will ” fly your personal ship to various ‘hot spots’ on your galaxy map. From there, you will blast your way through asteroid fields, enemy fighters, frigates, destroyers, and a variety of other obstacles”. TOR is expected to be out sometime next year.

DC Universe Online now has an official release date of November 2 thanks to an announcement by DC writer Jim Lee. Also revealed at the DCUO panel at Comic Con was a lengthy trailer that starts setting up the story players will find in DC Universe Online. Enjoy!

Movies

The full cast of the Avengers movie is now official, as well as who will be directing. The cast will include Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Samuel L Jackson (Nick Fury), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Chris Evans (Captain America), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/The Hulk), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) and the film will be directed by Joss Whedon. Sandwichjfilms on twitter posted video of all the introductions from the Avengers panel.

Monday News Roundup 06/28

Matt — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:28:48 +0000

The Seattle Geekly Summer Vacation is in full effect, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t still going to hook you up with a little news. First off, i thought this was just too cute to not share. Laura Shigihara posted a YouTube video of herself performing the theme from Plants vs Zombies at home on her piano. The video also includes a special appearance by George Fan, the designer of Plants vs. Zombies, and Metroid the cat. Enjoy!

Your Monday News is under the fold

Books

Best SF Novel

Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)

Best Fantasy Novel:

The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

Best First Novel:

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

Best Magazine:

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Best Book Publisher:

The complete list of winners is online at the Locus website.

Comics

DC Comics is partnering with comiXology and PlayStation Network for two separate digital comics distribution deals. Both the comiXology and the PlayStation Network Digital Comics launch offerings will include classic titles from DC Comics, Vertigo and WildStorm, such as Batman: Hush, Green Lantern: Rebirth, Fables: Legends in Exiles and Planetary: All Over the World and Other Stories. Both programs will share a tiered pricing format, with digital comics priced from $.99 to $2.99 per issue. In addition, several comics will be available for free at launch, including the first installment of the ZUDA series Bayou and select stories from Batman: Black & White, and one issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman will be available through comiXology each week.

Movies

The live-action movie version of Katusuhiro Otomo’s manga Akira is moving ahead with a new screenwriter. Comics Alliance is reporting that Albert Torres will be writing the scrpit for the movie which will supposedly cover the first three volumes of the manga. Torres’ only other writing credit is for the 2008 film Henry Poole Is Here. Albert Hughes, who’s credits include From Hell and The Book of Eli, is set to direct.

Video Games

There are a whole crop of existing games headed to the iPhone. Square Enix has announced plans to release two of their classic RPG titles, Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy Tactics, though neither has an official release date yet and Zynga has released a Farmville app that is available now. The Farmville app would appear to be Zynga’s attempt to keep ahold of players that are fleeing their games on Facebook. Gamasutra is reporting that Farmville on Facebook has lost about 20 million players from it’s peak last year with about half of those losses coming in the last month.

Everyone’s favorite cephalopod is coming to the XBox Live Indie Games channel in Cthulhu Saves the World, a new game from developer Zeboyd Games. Cthulhu Saves the World is an 8-bit RPG that promises “an epic journey of redemption and insanity”. Game Informer has a couple of screenshots that are well worth checking out. The game is scheduled for release this August.

Show Notes – Episode #67 “Crypticon 2010”

Shannon and Matt — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 06:42:53 +0000

Crypticon 2010 was a blast. The weekend flew by and, the same as last year, there was more good programming going on than two people could possibly cover. We did our best though and now we have the results.

We have interviews with many of the media guests from the convention including Heather Langenkamp, Felissa Rose, Doug Jones and Ernie Hudson, we have interviews with local luminaries like “Bonehand” Steve from the Bonebat Show podcast, Julie Hoverson, creator and producer of the audio drama 19 Nocturne Boulevard, Dread Central and Fangoria writer Sean “The Butcher” Smithson and many more.

The show is very long this week. We recommend you break it up a little and stretch it out over the next two weeks to make up for the fact that we will not be putting out another episode until July 15. We will be continuing to update the website with news and reveiws, maintaining the event calendar and there MAY even be some Crypticon swag given away so keep checking back!

Our Geek Week

The Warcraft addicition continues.
Browsing for a new anime to watch on Crunchyroll
Watched Shutter Island (2010) on Blu-ray
Watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) on Blu-ray
Dropped in on the Seattle Steamrats meetup at Wayward Coffee

Dare Shannon to Watch a Bad Movie

This week’s movie was eXistenZ (1999) – Dared by Trey

If you want to dare Shannon to watch a bad movie, e-mail us at seattlegeekly@gmail.com or call us at (206)201-2352

Check our Dared Movies Page to see what is on the list and what Shannon has already watched.

Stay tuned for the next Bad Movie when we return from the Seattle Geekly Summer Vacation on July 15.

News

Events

Conventions
- June 29 – July 3, 2010 – Platform International Animation Festival – Portland, Oregon
- July 8 – 11, 2010 – Gate Con – Vancouver, BC Canada
Events
- June 26, 2010 8pm The Crocodile 2200 2nd Ave, Seattle – Discs of Fury and Death*Star. Discs of Fury performs live at The Crocodile with special guest Death*Star!
- June 27, 2010 11am Downtown Seattle on 4th between Columbia and Cherry – Zombie Pride Parade. Both Seattle Pride and the Seattle Goths are sympathetic to the zombie cause and have asked all Seattle zombies to join the Pride Parade this year! Zombies willing to dress up and have a blast are encouraged to show up and march in the parade. Looking for peace signs like “Zombies are People too!” “DON’T HATE! DETERIORATE!” “ZOMBIE is the new Black” “I ♥ my gay undead son” “wish this march happened when I was alive and I would have Come OUT” “BRAINS!” “ALL WE WANT IS BRAINS!” Please NO WEAPONS, NOTHING that would imply violence or hate (you can be dead and rotting but you can’t be a hater), NO BUSINESS SIGNS OR LOGOS, we are here to support the pride parade and not insult it. More information is available at http://cleozombie.livejournal.com/22395.html
- July 1, 2010 5 – 9pm EMP|SFM 325 5th Ave N, Seattle – Late Nights at EMP|SFM. A new program giving guests extended visiting hours, live music and drink specials in Sky Church. All exhibitions at EMP|SFM (including featured or special exhibitions) will remain open during Late Nights. Admission to the museum galleries during Late Nights is included in the daily admission price to EMP|SFM. Admission to Sky Church during Late Nights is free and open to the public. The acclaimed local band, We Wrote the Book on Connectors, will kick-off Late Nights on Thursday, June 3. No-Fi Soul Rebellion and Boy Eats Drum Machine will perform Thursday, July 1, while Rat City Brass will perform Thursday, August 5. All ages are welcome.
Plan Ahead
- July 3, 2010 Fremont Outdoor Cinema 3501 Phinney Ave North
  Seattle – Red White and Dead. With summer just around the corner, Seattle welcomes the return of warm summer nights, boating afternoons, barbeques and…zombies? Yes, thousands of zombies will again return to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood this Fourth of July weekend to walk and dance their way back into the history books during the second annual Red, White & Dead zombie walk. At stake? The zombie walk Guinness World Record currently held by the Big Chill Music Festival in England. More details at the Red, White & Dead Facebook page

Crypticon 2010

Interviews

We want to give a huge thank you to all our guests and Eric and the rest of the Crypticon staff for putting on an amazing convention. We’ll be back next year!

Music

Music this week was various selections from the 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street score by Charles Bernstein, Dream Warriors by Dokken and The Ice Cream Man by John Frizzell from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for Legion.

Our next show will be on July 15, Episode #68. We’ll be interviewing some of our favorite women authors as part of our Women in Geekdom month!

Seattle Geekly by http://www.seattl-geekly.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Monday News Roundup – Tuesday Edition

Matt — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:55:24 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen, Death*Star has arrived. Alert listeners to Seattle Geekly will have heard us talking about Death*Star on occasion, mostly about the remarkably good quality of their live performances. Well now I’m going to do it again. Death*Star had the release party for their first full length CD, The Fandom Menace on Saturday at the Blue Moon Tavern. The arrival of the long-awaited album and the performance they gave on Saturday have moved them solidly from the “hey, these guys are pretty good” category to the “holy crap, why aren’t these guys famous” category.

The show on Saturday was opened by Ultraklystron who effortlessly kicked out a set that I imagine most performers would happily trade a major internal organ to be able to pull off and Billy the Fridge also made a brief appearance. I’ve seen Billy the Fridge live three or four times now and he just gets better every time.

The highlight of the night, though, was Death*Star. The addition of DJ Bill Beats backing up C0splay and MC-3PO pushed their sound over the top to straight up amazing. You should absolutely pick up The Fandom Menace, which Bill Beats also contributed heavily to, but if you are a serious fan of nerdcore you owe it to yourself to see Death*Star live. Songs like ‘Bounce’, ‘Quick and the Dead’ and ‘Sound of Nerdcore’, which are strong entries on the album, are brought to a whole new level when performed live. There was a large and enthusiastic crowd at the Blue Moon on Saturday but that seems to be fairly typical of Death*Star shows. Fortunately Death*Star seems to enjoy playing live so you should have plenty of opportunities to catch them if you haven’t already.

Your ~~Monday~~ Tuesday news is under the fold.

Books

Wil Wheaton and John Scalzi are teaming up for an interesting cherity project. From John Scalzi’s blog;

For the benefit of the Lupus Alliance of America, John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton and Subterranean Press are running a fan fiction contest, in which contestants write a 400 to 2,000 word story describing the picture above. Any form of fan fiction is acceptable except slash. The winner of the contest will be paid for their story (10 cents a word), win a prize pack of books from Subterranean Press, and will have their story published in a special electronic chapbook featuring stories about the painting, written by Scalzi, Wheaton, Catherynne Valente and Patrick Rothfuss, to be published later this year, with profits to benefit the Lupus Foundation of America. E-mail the stories with the text in the e-mail to fanfic@scalzi.com by 11:59pm Eastern, June 30, 2010. One entry per person.

The painting in question is the image to the right, which you can click on to embiggen.

MMO
- If you’ve been waiting impatiently for more information on the development of the DC Universe MMORPG you’re in luck. Game Director Chris Cao and Creative Director Jens Anderson have put out another in the series of Inside the Studio videos in which they answer questions posed to them by fans on Facebook. They have some tantalizing information about character creation (which is always the best part of any superhero game in my opinion) including the option to create a character “inspired by” existing DC characters that you can then customize. DCUO is set for release this November, and will be launching simultaneously on the PC and PS3 platforms.
Movies
- Multiple sites across the internet are reporting that Guillermo Del Toro has stepped down as director of The Hobbit. Del Toro blamed “the mounting pressures of conflicting schedules” for his decision. MGM, the studio behind the proposed two-film adaptation, is mired in finacial trouble and the start date for shooting has been delayed multiple times. On the up side, maybe this means Del Toro will finally get around to making At The Mountains Of Madness
Music
- Jonathan Coulton has a new album in the works! He made the announcement on his blog last week. According to the post, he will be debuting new songs at a couple of live shows next month (both on the east coast unfortunately) and then heading to New York to start recording. He promises “fantastic new songs with talented musicians using high quality audio equipment” but offers no release date.

Monday News Roundup 05/10

Matt — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:41:20 +0000

To start off the Monday news I wanted to talk about a couple of upcoming album releases. Many of you will know that this weekend was a big geek weekend in Seattle. Not only did we have w00tstock but there was an amazing night of nerdcore music at the High Dive featuring Billy the Fridge, Lisa Dank, Beefy, and MC Frontalot. At the High Dive show we were delighted to hear Beefy do a couple tracks of his forthcoming album With Sprinkles. We spoke with Beefy after the show and he told us that the last track for the album was being mastered and that it would be off to the printer early this week, meaning that it should be released into the wild very soon. If you just can’t wait you can hear the first single “Geek Out” on Beefy’s site and you can hear the live version of “Up Up and Away” that he did at the High Dive on our YouTube channel.

Unsurprisingly, one of our other favorite nerdcore groups, Death*Star, was also at the show and even took the stage to do a song with Billy the Fridge. Cosplay was nice enough to give us a heads-up that Death*Star also has a new album in the works called Soldiers of Fortran. Stay tuned because you know we’ll be talking about it when it comes out.

The other big event we went to was the regional Pokemon video game championships. We’re going to have a special Geekly Spotlight show coming out tomorrow where we talk about what we saw but, once again, if you can’t wait you can check out some video we shot on our YouTube channel. Our regular Thursday show is going to be another author episode. We’ll be talking to Ken Scholes and Scott Nicholson about their work.

Your Monday news is under the fold.

Anime

The 2004 CGI film of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed is headed to Blu-ray. Sentai and Section23 Films are releasing the film on May 18 and it will include an all new dub featuring the voice cast from Appleseed: Ex Machina. The Blu-ray will include most of the extra features from the original DVD release and adds a 35 minute “making of” piece called “The Birth of 3D Live Anime”.

Comics

Writer Mark Millar has announced that he is working on both comic and movie sequels for his book Kick-Ass. Comics Alliance is reporting that the new Kick-Ass comics will be part of Millar’s new magazine CLINT the first issue of which will be out in the UK this September. The movie, titled Kick-Ass 2: Balls to the Wall, will start production in 2011 and be in theaters in 2012.

Movies

Burried in a Hollywood Reporter story about Jason Priestley’s latest foray into the director’s chair is the news that Splice director Vincenzo Natali has been selected to replace Joseph Khan as the director of the film adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The film has a tentative release date of 2011 and will reportedly star Hayden “Anakin Skywalker” Christensen. Yay.

Monday News Roundup 05/02

Matt — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:55:43 +0000

Saturday was, of course, the ninth annual Free Comic Book Day, celebrated at comic stores around the country. We hit our local store and grabbed a few of the books that were available which we’ll be talking about in this week’s podcast. Highlights included the Matt Fraction written Iron Man/Thor #1, Image’s Fractured Fables which features work by Ben Templesmith and Shannon Wheeler among many others, Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Other Unusual Tales from Fantagraphics, and a stack of other very cool items. If you couldn’t make it to your local shop for Free Comic Book Day Bookgasm has excellent summaries of many of the books that were being given away.

The main focus of Thursday’s podcast, though, is going to be the world of collectable card gaming. We’ll be talking to Mark Rosewater, the head developer for Magic: The Gathering, as well as the developer of a new entry into the CCG arena and a representative of one of the largest on-line retailers of CCGs to get a view on what new games are out there. Stay tuned!

Your Monday news is under the fold.

Comics

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Eisner-nominated miniseries Incognito has been optioned for a film adaptation according to Deadline.com. The adaptation will be written by Robert Schenkkan, a playwright best known for writing The Kentucky Cycle and for playing Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes “Coming of Age” and “Conspiracy”. Incognito tells the story of Zack Overkill, a supervillan, trying to survive in the federal witness protection program after ratting out his boss.

Manga

A new quarterly manga/comics anthology will begin publication in the U.S. this year. F*X*T (pronounced “fix it”) will focus on American and European artists who have been influenced by the manga style. According to About.com publisher Fawn Lau already has a lineup for the first issue which will include the beginnings of several continuing series and a new one shot story by Oregon-based artist Sloane Leong.

MMO

Cryptic Studios has announced new rewards for current players and a “Welcome Back Weekend” aimed at luring former players back to the game. The welcom back weekend, scheduled to run from Friday, May 7, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. until Monday, May 10, 2010 at 10:00 a.m., will be free to play for anyone who has a lapsed STO account. Massively is also reporting that Cryptic has plans to offer a free demo for new players at some point in the near future.

Movies

Multiple sources around the internet, including i09, are reporting that the third Batman movie directed by Christopher Nolan has a confirmed release date of July 20, 2012. Rampant and unbridled speculation about plot, casting and magor villians may now commence.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower books are headed to the big screen. According to Deadline.com, Imagine Entertainment and Weed Road are in discussions to make a screen trilogy and TV series based on the novels. Akiva Goldsman who wrote the screenplays for The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and A Beautiful Mind as well as numerous episodes of the TV show Fringe will be writing the adaptation and Ron Howard is set to direct. So far there is no word on even a tentative release date.

Video Games

The big news in the video game world is, of course, the announcement that Bungie has signed a ten year deal with Activision after splitting with Microsoft. Under the terms of the deal Activision will get worldwide publication rights to new Bungie titles, but Bungie will own the intellectual property rights to anything it develops. Bungie is currently wrapping up Halo: Reach, the multiplayer beta for the Microsoft-owned Halo franchise. There are no details on the new project that Bungie will develop for activision, but Bungie community director Brian Jarrard was quoted by Game Informer as saying that another Halo game “just doesn’t fit within our plans”.