Geek Music is a genre on the rise and the variety of styles under the geek music umbrella is on the increase as well. This week we explore the breadth of geek music with nerdcore MC Klopfenpop, Filk heroes Vixy and Tony and hard rockers Sci-Fried. There should be something for just about anyone!

All that plus some geek news.

Our Geek Week

• Read the eBook of Hellhole by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson
• Watched The Horde (2009) on DVD
• Watched Monsters (2010) on Blu-ray
• Played in the regular D&D game
• Read All the Lives He Lived by Frederick Pohl
• Read Badass: Birth of a Legend by Ben Thompson

Geek Music Variety Pack

• Klopfenpop (interview starts at 14:47)
  • See Klopfenpop live at the Rendezvous/Jewelbox Theater in Seattle April 28



• Vixy & Tony (interview starts at 33:28)
  • Upcoming Vixy & Tony show at the Kenmore Community Club on April 16
  • The Norwescon Concert Series
  • Seattle’s Filk convention Conflikt
  • Emerald Forest Filk Society Mailing List



• Sci-Fried (interview starts at 1:00:32)

News

• Wonder Woman Will Have Shorts After All
• The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Announces 37th Annual Origins Awards Nominees
• FBI Raids University of Michigan Students’ Apartment over WoW Gold Farming

Music

Music this week was ‘We Don’t Need Another Trilogy’ by John Anealio from his new EP Books, Bytes & Bots (buy it on Band Camp) as well as selections from our three interview victims!

Next show: Episode #97– April 28th – Post-Norwescon. We’ll talk about our panels, the concerts and whatever else we can fit in!

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

Kracklefest 2011 was an absolutely amazing show. I’m not sure what else can be said about it. Based on the quality of their set Adam WarRock and Tribe One should be playing to sold out arenas, we got to see the west coast debut of H2Awesome and I already can’t wait for them to come back and somehow Kirby Krackle continues to get better every time we see them live.

After an incredible night of music all the performers took the stage for a grande finale. If you weren’t there this is just a taste of the evening you missed.

Check back here on Monday for a roundup of some of the news that dropped at Emerald City and be sure and tune into the Seattle Geekly podcast this Thursday for the first of two shows full of more news and interviews we recorded over the weekend.

We are tremendously excited about Emerald City ComiCon this year. Not only is this the first year that the con will be three days, but there is a great roster of amazing guests and events. This week we preview some of what will be going on at ECCC. First up we talked to three of the memebers of geek rock band H2Awesome who will be playing along with Adam WarRock and Kirby Krackle at Kracklefest this Saturday and we follow that up with interviews with Star Trek historian Larry Nemecek and Felicia Day and Amy Okuda from The Guild!

All that plus the weekly geek news.

Our Geek Week

• Listened to the audiobook of Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber
• Reading Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• Read River of Gods by Ian McDonald
• Watched RED (2010) on Blu-ray
• Watched Let Me In (2010) on Blu-ray
• Watched the Oscars

Emerald City Madness!

• H2Awesome



• Larry Nemecek



• Felicia Day and Amy Okuda from The Guild (among other things)

Don’t forget that Saturday morning is the Seattle Geekly meetup at Emerald City! We’ll be meeting outside the coffee shop on the first floor of the convention center. We’l have prizes and maybe even a couple of special guests!

News

• Red Dead Redemption, Minecraft clean up at GDC Awards
• Valve Unveils Steam Guard
• Bone: 20th Anniversary Full Color One Volume debuts in San Diego

Music

Music this week was ‘Why So Serious’ by H2Awesome off their forthcoming album. If you hurry you may be able to still get tickets to see H2Awesome play live at Kracklefest this Saturday! You also heard The Guild’s ‘Do you Wanna Date my Avatar‘ and ‘Tonight I’m Frakking You’ from Break.com

Next show: Episode #93 on March 10 and it will be the first of two weekly episodes of interviews from Emerald City ComiCon. Stay Tuned to find out who we’ll be talking to!

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

The world of science fiction and fantasy fandom has been around for a long time and occasionally it is nice to be reminded of that. Andy Porter has posted a collection of historical photos of science fiction fandom on Flickr that I have enjoyed browsing through immensely. The collection is 92 photos from conventions, author portraits and more dating back to the 1920s. Porter told SFScope that “I have thousands which are not scanned in. They are, primarily, from the late 1970s through 2002″ and I really hope that more of the collection makes it online soon.

This example of the enduring nature of fandom was nice to see since, once again, genre films did not fare terribly well outside of the technical awards at the Oscars last night. Inception picked up awards for cinematography, visual effects, sound editing and sound mixing, Alice in Wonderland won for art direction and costume design and Rick Baker and Dave Elsey won for makeup in Wolfman. The highlights were slim enough that Anne Hathaway’s electric-blue dress (which apparently looked kind of like something from Tron Legacy) made Blastr’s list of 11 most memorable sci-fi moments during last night’s Oscars. Oh well, there’s always next year!

The Monday news is under the fold.

Books

• The Horror Writers Association has announced the nominees for the 2010 Bram Stoker Awards. The nominees include:
  Superior Achievement in a Novel
  • Horns, by Joe Hill
  • Rot and Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry
  • Dead Love, by Linda Watanabe McFerrin
  • Apocalypse of the Dead, by Joe McKinney
  • Dweller, by Jeff Strand
  • A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub

  Superior Achievement in a First Novel

  • Black and Orange, by Benjamin Kane Ethridge
  • A Book of Tongues, by Gemma Files
  • Castle of Los Angeles, by Lisa Morton
  • Spellbent, by Lucy Snyder

  Superior Achievement in Long Fiction

  • ”The Painted Darkness,” by Brian James Freeman
  • ”Dissolution,” by Lisa Mannetti
  • ”Monsters Among Us,” by Kirstyn McDermott
  • ”The Samhanach,” by Lisa Morton
  • ”Invisible Fences,” by Norman Prentiss

  Superior Achievement in Short Fiction

  • ”Return to Mariabronn,” by Gary Braunbeck
  • ”The Folding Man,” by Joe R. Lansdale
  • ”1925: A Fall River Halloween,” by Lisa Mannetti
  • ”In the Middle of Poplar Street,” by Nate Southard
  • ”Final Draft,” by Mark W. Worthen

  The awards will be presented at World Horror Con in Austin, Texas the weekend of April 28.

• The final ballot for the 2010 Nebula awards has also been announced by the SFWA. The nominees include:
  Novel:
  • The Native Star by M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
  • Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
  • Echo by Jack McDevitt (Ace)
  • Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
  • Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Spectra)

  Novella:

  • “The Alchemist” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
  • “Iron Shoes” by J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
  • “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
  • “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September)
  • “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance” by Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January-February)
  • “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer)

  Novelette:

  • “Map of Seventeen” by Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
  • “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July)
  • “The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara” by Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy, April)
  • “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December)
  • “Pishaach” by Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
  • “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September)
  • “Stone Wall Truth” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s, February)

  Short Story:

  • “Arvies” by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, August)
  • “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” by Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy, February)
  • “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, 17 January)
  • “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed, June)
  • “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine, November)
  • “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
  • “Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s, January)

  The awards will be presented at the 2011 Nebula Awards Weekend, May 19-22, in Washington, DC.

Movies

• Paramount Pictures has acquired screen rights to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. The project has Wolfgang Petersen attached to direct, David Self adapting the screenplay and Scott Stuber producing. Word from John Scalzi himself via his blog;
  

  I’m very happy with the team putting it together. I’ve been an admirer of Wolfgang Petersen’s for a long time now, both as a director and as someone whose films do great business here and abroad, and I think he’s a very good fit for Old Man’s War. Scott Stuber is likewise a very smart and savvy producer, and someone who knows how to shepherd a film through the process right to the big screen. Screenwriter David Self has done some great work adapting material (see: The Road to Perdition), so I was very happy to hear he was operating on my work. I’m also very pleased to be at Paramount, who knows their way around making, marketing and distributing very large science fiction and adventure films. Basically, a good fit all the way around.

  He also notes that “As with any potential film project, there’s a lot that can happen between an announcement of a project and the first time it ever gets shown to an audience. We’re in very early days, and my philosophy is: let’s see what happens next. I’m optimistic and realistic.” Fingers crossed!

Music

• Just in time for his show at Kracklefest in Seattle this Saturday, Adam WarRock has released a mixtape in conjunction with Oni Press. The album features music inspired by several Oni comics and includes “interlude” tracks with Oni creators Jarrett Williams, Cullen Bunn & Brian Hurtt, Jen Van Meter, Greg Rucka and Antony Johnston. Best of all you can download the mixtape for free from Adam WarRock’s website.

Video Games

• Some good news for fans of Guitar Hero and DJ Hero. After the well publicized cancelling of the franchises by Activision it was announced that, following the currently scheduled releases, no further downloadable content would be forthcoming. Now, due to “continued support” from fans, it seems Activision may have reconsidered. The announcement of new DLC was made via the Guitar Hero and DJ Hero Twitter pages but no other details have been released.

In other Kirby Krackle news, their Fallout tribute song ‘Vault 101′ is now available on Rock Band Network! Go get it. Now.

The rest of the Monday News is under the fold.

Anime/Manga

• Distributor Viz Media is episodes of four of their shows as free downloads via iTunes. Clearly designed to get new viewers hooked, the “Download-to-Own promotion” includes the full first episodes of Vampire Knight, Bleach, Kekkaishi, and Naruto Shippuden with all subsequent episodes available for rent for $0.99, or to own for $1.99. The free downloads will be available from now until February first.

• As expected the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly passed a revised bill to amend the city’s Youth Healthy Development Ordinance. Ostensibly aimed at keeping anime and manga with adult themes out of the hands of children the new law has been blasted by creators, fans and free speech advocates as thinly veiled government censorship. The Comics Journal has a great editorial that highlights many of the problems with the new law as well as an entertaining graphic showing how the poster for the 2011 Tokyo Anime Fair will have to be changed if the coalition of ten publishers follow through on their threat to pull out of the event if the bill passed.

Movies

• Multiple sources around the internet are reporting on an interview with H.R. Giger’s wife shown on a Swiss television station in which she mentioned that the artist was busily working on concept art for the Alien prequel that Ridley Scott is set to begin shooting in February. The prequel is rumored to be titled Alien Paradise and will focus on telling the story of how the Aliens came to be on planet LV-426 where they were found by the crew of the Nostromo in the original film.

• Speaking of aliens, the international trailer for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s new comedy Paul has been released into the wild. Enjoy!
  

• The Golden Globe nominees have been announced. Genre films did resonably well with Alice in Wonderland and Inception both picking up nominations for Best Motion Picture in their categories. On the TV front, The Walking Dead was nominated for Best Television Series-Drama and The Big Bang Theory was nominated for Best Television Series-Comedy or Musical. The full list of nominations is available on the official Golden Globes site.

I’m a bit behind in some of the ‘hard sci-fi’ classics, so I grabbed the unabridged audiobook of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and dove in. I read 2001: A Space Odyssey a long time ago, but I’d never read Rama. The audiobook is relatively short at around 10 hours so I thought, “Why not?”

I didn’t read any of the uncountable number of reviews or anything else about it beforehand, I just went in blind. The only preparation I had was the excellent introduction to the audiobook by Robert J. Sawyer (author of Flashforward) that I listened to. I felt it really helped to explain Clarke’s style of storytelling, in particular his tendancy to use humanity as a whole as a character rather than individuals. Hearing that, I was ready for Rama to be a ‘world building’ type story rather than it focusing on character development which was something I really appreciated. Peter Ganim, who performed the audiobook, did a wonderful job with voices but, as expected, the characters were not really the focus of the story. I normally enjoy stories about people rather more than those that just rely on an amazing setting or concept, so I was a bit wary at first but after the first 2 hours I was hooked.

The story involves a huge cylindrical alien starship that is approaching Earth and the group of humans sent to explore it to discover it’s purpose and who built it. The world of Rama was different from anything I had ever read before. Clarke really was a master at descriptive passages. I swear I could see Rama while I was listening.

A lot of the classic science fiction stories, while still good, can feel fairly dated with the passage of time but I didn’t find that to be the case with Rama. I purposely did not look up the publication date before I read it to see if I could guess when it was written. There were a few anachronisms, like saying “television cameras” and “viddies”, but even so my guess was that it was written in the mid to late 1980s. I was extremely surprised when the audiobook finished and the original copyright date of 1973 was announced. I was astounded at how little Rama showed it’s age.

I don’t think this is a book for everyone, but it is undeniably a classic. It won the Nebula Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Hugo Award, the Jupiter Award and the Locus Award, and deservedly so. If you want a great book written by one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction this is one not to miss. It will have you dreaming of frozen oceans, mirror buildings and biobots.

Daft Punk was the obvious choice to do the soundtrack for Tron Legacy. Who better to create the music for a film about becoming a computer program and waging war in a virtual world than a duo who has spent their career creating personae that merge human and machine elements? I had very high expectations for the Tron Legacy soundtrack and while it didn’t end up being exactly what I expected it did not let me down.

This is not at all a typical Daft Punk album. If you go in to this album expecting something like Discovery, Human After All or any of Daft Punk’s previous work you may be disappointed. The hand of Daft Punk is clear and their style can be heard throughout, but the music is firmly in the “film score” genre. The instrumentation runs from being almost entirely orchestral in tracks like ‘Outlands’ and ‘Adagio for Tron’ to almost entirely electronic in tracks like ‘End of Line’ and the album’s current single ‘Derezzed’. Most of the tracks are somewhere in between, though the album over all seems to be weighted much more on the orchestral side than I expected.

The music itself fits the little footage I have seen from the movie so far very well, dark backgrounds highlighted by bright strips of intensely artificial light. This is a worthy successor to the soundtrack of the original Tron, with strong orchestral work fused to the very best in twenty-first century electronica. I highly recommend picking it up and I just hope that the movie itself lives up to the promise of the music.

Physical copies of the Tron Legacy soundtrack are on sale for around $12 or you can get a digital download from Amazon for $4.

Edit – Well that was fast. The link on the Slash Film site now does not seem to work. Drat.

Your Monday News is under the fold

Anime

• Distributor Anime USA has announced the theatrical release dates for Summer Wars, the science fiction anime film written by Satoko Okudera and directed by Mamoru Hosoda. The film will be showing in Seattle from January 28 through Feb 3 at the Varsity theater, its only west-coast screening outside of California. Summer Wars won the Japan Acadamy Prize for Animation of the Year and there is a campaign to get it submitted to the Acadamy Awards for Best Animated Feature. The film tells the story of Kenji Koiso, an eleventh grade math genius, who agrees to take a summer job at home of his crush, Natuski. When he arrives, he finds that Natsuki’s family have reunited to celebrate the 90th birthday of the family matriarch and job is to pretend to be Natsuki’s fiancé. Meanwhile, his attempt to solve a mathematical equation causes a parallel world’s collision with earth.

• The first teaser trailer for the new movie Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has been released into the wild. Enjoy!
  

Movies

• Underworld 4 has directors and a release date according to multiple sources on the internet including Inside Pulse. Reports are that the film will be directed by two Swedish filmmakers, Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stei, who most recently directed Shelter (2010), a thriller starring Julianne Moore and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers which has not yet been released the U.S. theaters. Kate Beckinsale will be returning as Selene in Underworld 4. The movie is set to begin production in Vancouver this March and has a release date of January 20, 2012.

• There have been a lot of rumors flying around about the live action movie of Akira. Fortunately one of the more recent ones, that Zac Efron was going to play Kaneda, has been reported to be false. Now Screen Rant has a review of the script. It had been previously reported that the new film would be “Americanized” and set in New York instead of Tokyo. Among other changes to the story – the character of Tetsuo is now named Travis, Princess Miyako is now an elderly trash-collecting lady in Old Manhattan, Kaneda uses a Tech 9 machine pistol instead of a laser rifle in the climactic battle with the transformed “Travis” and an entirely new character, Ray Arcman, is introduced as the scientist that created Akira. Screen Rant also goes over some of the plot changes. I have to say, if the review is accurate I don’t hold out much hope that the resulting film will be decent.

Video Games

• Viacom is preparing to sell off its entire games division which includes MTV Games and Harmonix. In the announcement CEO Philippe Dauman said “The console games business requires an expertise and scale that we don’t have, so we have taken steps to sell Harmonix and we are in discussions with several potential buyers”. The announcement comes on the heels of disappointing sales figures for Rock Band 3. Harmonix has responded to concerns about ongoing support for it’s titles by stating that the sale will not impact the release of downloadable content for either Rock Band 3 or Dance Central.

The geek music scene continues to thrive and we’re bringing you another in our ongoing series of geek music shows. This week we’re playing some music from Seattle’s own eclectic geek-punk-electronica-chiptuner Gonken and we have an interview with Silver Age MC Adam WarRock.

Plus Shannon watches a bad movie that isn’t really all that bad and the weekly geek news.

Please Note: Due to technical difficulties the audio quality of this week’s episode may be a little off. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Our Geek Week

• Reading Season of Rot by Eric S. Brown
• Listening to the audiobook of Dog Blood by David Moody
• Keeping up with the NaNoWriMo goals so far!
• Read Vanished by Kat Richardson (Labyrinth next!)
• Reading the webcomic Our Valued Customers
• Watched episode 2 of The Walking Dead on AMC
• Playing Dance Central with the Kinect on XBox 360

Geek Music

• Gonken
  • Gonken’s official site which has links to find his music on Sonicbids, Purevolume, Reverb Nation, etc. plus all the major social networks.

• Adam WarRock
  • Adam WarRock’s official site which has links to find him on Bandcamp and all the major social networks.

Dare Shannon to Watch a bad Movie

This week’s bad movie was Pumpkinhead (1988)

Next week, Shannon is daring herself to watch a double header of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) and Jonah Hex (2010)!

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.

News

• Seattle Geekly Podcast Schedule
  We’re going to be taking some time off from the podcast over the holidays. Episode #86 next week will be our last show for the year. We’ll be continuing to update the website with Monday News, Events to Watch Out For and Wendesday reviews so we aren’t leaving you completely without your geek fix. We’ll be back to podcasting after the first of the year.
• Rosario Dawson says she’s a ‘big Trekkie’ and wants a role in Trek 2
• ‘Hack/Slash’ Ongoing Series In February

Music

Music this week was various selections by our two featured artists

• Openening music and bumpers: ‘Call Me Johnny Wander’ by Adam WarRock from the Tracklog
• Featured Gonken track was ‘The Zombie Shuffle’ from The Halloween EP
• Featured Adam WarRock track was ‘I Will Do Science To It’ from the Tracklog
• Closing Music: ‘Do Dreams Die or Do We Die in Our Dreams’ by Gonken from Robot vs Zombie B-Sides

Next show:
Episode #86, more Geek Gift Guide! We’ll be offering some suggestions on what to get the geeks in your life this holiday season!

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

Dreadnought is the third novel in Cherie Priest‘s Clockwork Century universe, joining Boneshaker and Clementine. Dreadnought follows the adventures of Mercy Lynch, a nurse in a military hospital in Richmond Virginia who goes on a cross-country journey to see her dying father in Seattle. The journey is complicated by shifting fronts in the Civil, intrigue between North, South, the Empire of Mexico and the Republic of Texas, armored locomotive battles and, of course, zombies.

Cherie Priest did an excellent job of creating the character of Mercy Lynch. There is a very real sense of authenticity about both her and the descriptions of the Robertson Hospital where she works. She also handles some of the more delicate issues of racism and sexism (this is, after all, set in 19th century America) with good grace. The story itself is well paced and very compelling and the Clockwork Universe world is easily accessible, even for those who may not be familiar with steampunk fiction or alternate histories. There are a few small nits that could be picked with the book but they are small inclusions in an otherwise flawlessly executed story.

Dreadnought could easily be read as a stand alone novel, but there are certainly little nods to those who have read the other Clockwork Century books and I think the background that comes from those novels adds a little to the depth of the plot. The important thing is to start reading these books in whatever order seems convenient.

Dreadnought is published by Tor and has a cover price of $14.99

20-Sided Rhymes is a nerdcore compilation put together by Z from Hipster Please and the Radio Free Hipster podcast. The concept was originally to put together a tribute album to the classic role-playing game. The project was then expanded to include the electronic games in addition to pen-and-paper RPGs when the original concept proved to be “a bit of a limiting”. The album includes 20 tracks of rarely heard, remixed and re-released geek music.

This is an excellent compilation for nerdcore fans and anyone who plays tabletop RPGs or the video games that they inspired. The cover art is a very good litmus test. If you owned, or are at least familiar with, any of the products that the cover is modeled after you will almost certainly enjoy any number of the tracks on the album.

The album starts off with what is easily the best chiptuned version of the theme from Conan the Barbarian you will ever hear (performed by The Video Game Orchestra) and from there it is a good mix of geek rock and nerdcore hip-hop. There is also a wide variety of production value which occasionally makes the compilation seem a little rough. There is nothing inherently wrong with songs that sound like they were produced by a single person in a basement using Garage Band, but when put up against some of the more polished tracks on the album from the likes of Epic-1 and MC Frontalot they can sound a little jarring.

This may not be the best choice as an introduction if you are unfamiliar with the various genres of geek music, but if you are a fan and are looking for some good work by artist you may not recognize you should absolutely grab it.

20-Sided Rhymes is available as a free download with a suggested donation to Child’s Play.

John Daly’s ProStroke Golf may seem like an odd fit here at the geekly but I do have to confess a secret fondness for golf games. We both played various entries in the Hot Shots golf franchise somewhat compulsively and while Prostroke Golf is definitely aimed at a more serious golf simulation audience, we still had fun with it.

The game makes very good use of the PS Move controller. The motions seemed much more intuitive than any of the other games we’ve tried using the move although I still had a little trouble dialing in on exactly how to maximize my swing power and still hit the ball straight on long shots. The control on putts was fantastic and I found that, once I actually made it to the green, I was able to actually sink some pretty long putts. This is a complete reversal from my usual experience with non-motion controlled golf games where usually it is much easier to take very long shots and much harder to get fine control for the short game.

The only difficulty with the control was in changing the aim of your shot. Pointing the Move controller and tapping the trigger was very twitchy and it was hard to get precisely dialed in. That wasn’t much of an issue for me, since nothing I was hitting was that accurate anyway but players with a little more skill might run in to serious issues. There were also a few graphical glitches with the game, most noticeably one where the ball would disappear completely when it was rolling on the ground.

If you’re a serious golf fan I think you’ll get more out of Prostroke Golf than we did as casual players. That said we still enjoyed playing it and we did see our play improve with just a short time practicing. If you have a Move controller and are looking for a game that really takes advantage of it this would be a good game to check out.

John Daly’s ProStroke Golf was developed my Gusto Games and retails for $49.99

The War For Infinity is one of the geekiest albums I have ever run across and that is really saying something. I’ll get into why that is in a bit. The album is the first released by Adam WarRock, though he has been releasing individual tracks for some time now along with DJ Ruckus Roboticus. WarRock has undeniable talent as an MC. He’s fast with excellent flow and backed up by Robiticus’ amazing beats he has produced a hip hop album that is excellent by any measure. This is not just good nerdcore, this is good music.

Where the serious geekiness comes in is the concept. The War For Infinity is a retelling of the events of the early 90s Marvel comics crossover events Infinity War and The Infinity Gauntlet with the climactic battles done as rap duels between WarRock and fellow rapper Tribe One. Concept albums are tricky to pull off and a concept album based on one of the “this changes everything” full universe crossover events from comics in the 90s is just asking for a descent into a mire of cheesy awfulness. Amazingly though, WarRock pulls it off. I enjoyed the Infinity Gauntlet storyline at the time and even though I haven’t read it for fifteen years of more I was still familiar enough with it to get the references in the album. The rap battles between Warlock and Thanos (renamed Demonos for the album) and the song Heroes Requiem about the epic battle between “Demonos” and all of Earth’s heroes (including appearances by such non-Marvel Universe characters as GI Joe and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) are a comic geek’s delight. It isn’t all about comics though. There is a somewhat deeper message in the album that peeks through in certain tracks that seems to relate some of the themes in the Infinity War to more current events.

This album is a must have for old school comics geeks and even if you have never heard of the Infinity Gauntlet stories before the quality of the music still makes The War For Infinity worth buying. The War For Infinity is available to download through Amazon and you can get a physical CD/digital download package through Band Camp.

A Sepiachord Passport is the latest compilation album put out by the folks over at Sepiachord. The question of what steampunk music is gets asked frequently and this album goes a long way towards answering that question. Not all of the bands on the compilation would necessarily embrace the label of steampunk music but embrace it or not there is something in every one of the songs that will appeal to the steampunk set.

Album curator Mr. Bodewell did an excellent job of selecting tracks for the compilation that fit well together while keeping enough variety in the sound and styles that it doesn’t become monotonous. The instrumentation in most of the songs leans towards a kind of retro-future cabaret sound, lots of brass, concertinas, banjos and piano, but there are also tracks with a more world music sound, Nathaniel Johnstone & The Brazilian Surf Mafia’s ‘Scarlet Carpet Interstate, Part One’, for example and more modern rock sounds like Blackbird Orchestra’s ‘Hollowland’.

The appeal reaches well beyond the steampunk scene. If you have ever listened to the Dresden Dolls or The Squirrel Nut Zippers or Abney Park and wondered where to find more music like that, then this is the album for you. I also highly recommend picking it up if you’re interested in throwing some unique sounds into your play list. A Sepiachord Passport is available through Best Buy and the Projekt website.

Starting with February 1935′s NEW Fun cover and ending with the September 2008 Alex Ross cover of Batman #679 DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book collects 100 “ready to frame” posters of covers from the extensive DC Comics history and would be a great addition to any comic lover’s library.

Even casual comic fans will instantly recognize covers from Dark Knight, Watchmen, The Killing Joke and many more when they peruse this book. There are also some less well known covers included, like ‘Leave it to Binky’ #60 from October 1958 & ‘Heart Throbs’ from 1964-65. The commentaries by Robert Schnakenberg on each of the covers make for an interesting read, especially on some of the more obscure titles, and they give a good perspective on how far comics have come in 75 years.

If you aren’t a framer, I could see arranging these covers as a wallpaper in a library or office to geek it up a notch. The only downside I can see with the book, is that the colors of the covers aren’t printed on glossy paper and the colors seem a bit washed out.

This would make a GREAT holiday gift for the comic collector you know. While looking through the compilation both Matt and I kept saying, “Yep, had that one!”

DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book was published by Quirk Books and has a $40 cover price. The cover price might be a tad high for some, but it is available across the web and at CostCo for as little as $19 which is well worth it.

Eyes in the Dark (2010) is a locally produced film by Emerald City Pictures, written and directed by Bjorn Anderson, that has made film fest rounds since April 2010. Structured like The Blair Witch Project and The Fourth Kind, Eyes takes viewers on a trip to discover what the mysterious red glowing eyes from the DVD cover belong to.

Starting with “Top Secret” footage discovered after a tragedy, you find out a bit about the history of what the killing machine might be. You follow a couple doctors who meet their end, see some search and rescue footage and finally meet up with the lead characers. The main storyline is about a group of college kids going up to a remote part of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State to have a lodge weekend filled will hot tubbing and beer. What they don’t expect is the evil lurking out in the woods. Helped by the lodge caretaker, the group, through cell phone and hand held camera footage, start to find out what might be lurking in the treeline.

The video footage is cleverly edited to look like there has been damage to the hard drive of the camera which adds a nice element of realism. Since I have a bit of a problem with the “shaky-cam” filming style, I can’t say I had my eyes on the screen for the entire movie. Many scenes were extremely shaky on my home tv and I had to look away every couple of minutes to keep my dinner down. I can’t imagine seeing this in a theater, there isn’t enough Dramamine on this Earth.

Even though the film shares it’s name with a 2007 documentary about Sasquatches, this film never lets you know exactly what the monster is. Is it an evil force from the woods? A yeti/sasquatch? A big wolf monster? The big letdown of the film is that the filmmakers decide to let you see too much of the monster without more explanation. There are some tense scenes that involve danger to the characters, and many of the actors do quite well with acting terrified, but not all.

Overall, if this is playing at a film fest near you, I’d suggest going to it. It’s worth the jump scares to see it in a theater late night. If you have motion sickness problems, I’d say skip it. It was shakier than Cloverfield…*urp*