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

THURSDAY
• 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:
  • Death*Star
  • Vixy & Tony
  • The Heather Dale Band

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

• Playstation Network Hacked
• PAX Prime 3 Day Passes Selling Out

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.

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.

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:
  Best Novel
  • Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
  • Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
  • The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
  • Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

  Best Novella

  • “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
  • “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All New Tales, William Morrow)
  • “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Troika” by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines, Science Fiction Book Club)

  Best Novelette

  • “Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen (Analog, September 2010)
  • “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)
  • “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July 2010)
  • “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December 2010)
  • “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog, September 2010)

  Best Short Story

  • “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)
  • “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)
  • “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, November 17, 2010)
  • “The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)

  Best Graphic Story

  • Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham; illustrated by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
  • Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
  • Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
  • Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler; colors by Howard Tayler and Travis Walton (Hypernode)
  • The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross (Vertigo)

  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.

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

1. 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

2. 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:
  Best Artist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Writer: Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  Best Cartoonist: Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
  Best Letterer: Johnny Ryan, Prison Pit #2
  Best Colorist: Emily Carroll, His Face All Red
  Best Publication Design: Michael DeForge, Spotting Deer
  Best Anthology: Studygroup 12 #4, edited by Zack Soto
  Best Small Press: I Want You #2 by Lisa Hanawalt
  Best New Talent: Michael DeForge
  Reader’s Choice: Pang, the Wandering Shaolin Monk by Ben Costa
  Director’s Choice: The Sixth Gun, by Brian Hurtt and Cullen Bunn, published by Oni Press

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.

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.

I wanted to start out with some local news that I am excited about – Hello Earth is bringing back Outdoor Star Trek this summer and you could be a part of it! Straight from the press release:

Open call for actors for Outdoor Star Trek project.

Hello Earth is a grass roots community enterprise formed with the intention of presenting free entertainment in outdoor spaces. Last year’s inaugural Star Trek episode, “The Naked Time,” was a great success and this year will be even more spectacular.

Needed: Actors to fill all roles (except Kirk and Spock), which will be cast without regard to the gender or race of the original series characters. We are not looking for impersonation. We are looking for creative people who want to be part of the process both on and off stage.

Auditions: Sunday, May 1st from 1-3 pm OR Monday, May 2nd from 7-9 pm

Location: Stone Soup Downstage, 4029 Stone Way N.

Auditions will consist of cold readings. Please be prepared to stay for the entire time; we may not need you for that long but we will be holding callbacks after hearing everyone.

Performances will take place on July 23, 24, 30 and 31 and August 6 and 7 outside at Blanche Lavizzo Park.

Please contact us at helloearthseattle@gmail.com with any questions, or if you wish to help with the production in another capacity.

Last year’s production of ‘The Naked Time’ was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to see what they are going to do this year. If you have ever aspired to be on stage this would be a great way to take the plunge.

The rest of the Monday News is under the fold

Awards

• This year’s class of inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame have been announced. Artists Vincent Di Fate and Moebius, author and editor Gardner Dozois and professional iconoclast Harlan Ellison will be inducted in a ceremony as part of the Science Fiction Awards Weekend, June 24-26, here in Seattle.

Books

• The nominees for this year’s Scribe Awards have been announced. The Scribe awards are presented by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and “acknowledge and celebrate excellence in licensed tie-in writing—novels based on TV shows, movies, and games”. Of particular interest to the geek set will be the nominees for Best Novel (Speculative Fiction) which are:
  • Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon by Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb
  • Star Trek: Mirror Universe: The Sorrows of Empire by David Mack
  • Star Wars: Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams
  • Supernatural: Heart of the Dragon by Keith R.A. DeCandido
  • Warhammer: Bloodborn: Ulrika the Vampire by Nathan Long

  The full list of nominees can be seen on the IAMTW website. The winners will be announced this July at San Diego Comic Con.

Comics

• The 2011 Eisner Award nominations have been announced. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola was nominated for a total of five awards including Best Single Issue (or One-Shot), Best Limited Series and Best Cover Artist. John Layman and Rob Guillory’s series Chew was nominated for Best Continuing Series, Best Writer (for Layman) and Best Penciller/Inker (for Guillory). The surprisingly long complete list of nominees can be seen here. The Eisner award winners will also be announced this July at San Diego Comic Con.

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

Putting together the first news post after April Fools Day is always a challenge. There were some great stories out there this week but many of them turned out to be not-so-much true. One of my personal favorites was the story from Comic Mix about Warner Brothers lawyers handing out cease and desist orders to people with “unlicensed” tattoos of DC comics characters. This, in my mind, is how you do it right. The story was juuuuuust plausible enough that it really gave me pause. Think Geek also did a fine job again this year with their lightsaber popsicles and the Angry Birds pork rinds.

I’ve done my best to sort through and find some actual news stories but if something in here seems too good to be true it probably means someone’s joke slipped past.

Books

• The short list for the first Terry Pratchett Anywhere but Here, Anywhen but Now First Novel Prize has been announced. The six nominees are:
  • Postponing Armageddon by Adele Abbott
  • The Platinum Ticket by Dave Beynon
  • Half Sick of Shadows by David Logan
  • Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan
  • Lun by Andrew Salomon
  • The Coven at Callington by Shereen Vedam

  The winner will be chosen by Sir Terry Pratchett and four other judges and announced at a party to be held on May 31.

Comics

• IDW Publishing announced at Wondercon this weekend that they have acquired the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and would be publishing new TMNT stories along with reprints of the original Eastman and Laird comics. Comic Book Resources is reporting that IDW’s take on the Turtles will be based on the original series but there was no comment on whether or not Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird themselves would be involved in the relaunch. The new series is scheduled to debut this Summer.

• According to an official press release, Too Much Coffee Man creator Shannon Wheeler has signed a three-book deal with BOOM! Studios. Wheeler will be publishing Too Much Coffee Man: Cutie Island & Other Stories and a follow up to I Thought You Would Be Funnier as well as an all new graphic novel titled Grandpa Won’t Wake Up under BOOM!’s BOOM! Town imprint. Grandpa Won’t Wake Up and Cutie Island & Other Stories are scheduled to be out this year and the I Thought You Would Be Funnier follow up will be out in Spring 2012.

Movies

• Warner Brothers released four minutes of footage from Green Lantern into the wild. This is a “condensed version” of the footage that was a huge hit at Wondercon. Enjoy!
  

Tabletop

• Twilight Creations’ Deadlands boardgame may finally make it in to stores. From their website;
  

  After many delays we are happy to announce that Deadlands: Invasion of Slaughter Gulch (affectionately known as DL2) is at the printers. We expect to have it sometime in late May. We think you will find that it was worth the wait.

  The game, which has been listed as “coming soon” since 2009, has players vying for control of a frontier town and the supply of “ghost rock” in the surrounding area.

TV

• The BBC continues to crank up the hype for the new season of Dr. Who with a new extended trailer that was released into the wild on Friday. Enjoy!
  

There is a good crop of geeky movies coming up in the next few months and this week we’re giving you the rundown. We’ve got the previews, our thoughts on the films and we’ll tell you whether you should see it in the theater, watch it at home or skip it all together.

We also talk to Danielle from Seattle’s Pacific Science Center about the exhibit Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination and we review the locally-produced documentary Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man.

All that plus some geek news and Shannon watches another Dared Movie.

Our Geek Week

• Playing Poker Night at the Inventory on the PC
• Read Other Kingdoms by Richard Matheson (see Shannon’s review here)
• Playing Knights of the Old Republic on the PC
• Read Deathless by Catherine M. Valente (see Matt’s review here)
• Read Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe (see Matt’s review here)
• Playing You Don’t Know Jack on XBox360

Spring/Summer Movies

Sucker punch


Source Code


Super


Your Highness


Sceam 4


Rio


Thor


Priest


Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides


X-Men First Class


Super 8


Green Lantern

Geekly Extras

• Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man



• Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination

Dare Shannon to Watch a bad Movie

This week’s bad movie was Laserblast (1979)

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 Pile o’ Books!

We have a pile of books courtesy of Tor and Ace and we want to give them to YOU!

The books include:

• River Marked by Patricia Briggs
• Glen Cook’s third book in the Instumentalities of the Night series Surrender to the Will of the Night
• The Bird of the River by Kage Baker
• SIGNED COPIES of Paul of Dune and the brand new book Hellhole by Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson!

This contest starts today and we’ll be picking the winner during our show on April 14. We will ship the books to you via USPS.

“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

• Epic Game Day II is April 30! Event submissions are open now if you want to host a game!
• Wolverine Pirate Pleads Guilty to Copyright Infringement

Music

Music this week was ‘Geek Rock’ and ‘Far From Home’ by Sci-Fried off their new album Future Tense.

Next Episode: April 14 – Episode #96 – Even Yet Still More Geek Music! Interviews and samples from another selection of geek musicians.

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

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

From the “almost entirely self-serving news” department, tabletop gamer geeks in the Greater Seattle area will be pleased to hear that event submissions for Epic Game Day 2 are now open! If you want to host a game at the event, head over to EpicGameDay.com and fill out one of the event submission forms. There are some very nice perks for those who volunteer to be GMs including, but not limited to, a free menu item and (non-alcoholic) drink voucher at AFK Tavern where the event is being held. Epic Game Day will take place April 30th and is absolutely FREE!

The rest of the Monday News is under the fold

Anime

• Japanator is reporting that Sentai Filmworks will be releasing Angel Beats! on Blu-ray and DVD in the U.S. for the first time. Angel Beats! follows the adventures of Otonashi, Yuri, and Angel, three students at a high school that is actually a Purgatory where students learn to give up any lingering attachments they still have from life before continuing to an afterlife or reincarnation. The series was written by Jun Maeda and directed by Seiji Kishi. It originally ran in Japan between April and June of last year.

Books

• ‘Shada’, the Doctor Who episode written by Douglas Adams which was never completely filmed and never aired, is being adapted into a novel by Dr. Who and Sara Jane Adventures writer Gareth Roberts according to SFX. The episode was intended to be the final serial of the 1979-80 series with the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, but production was interrupted by a strike at the BBC and it was never completed. Pieces of the footage that was shot were used in ‘The Five Doctors’ and Adams re-used some of the elements of the plot in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The novelization is scheduled to be released in march of 2012.

Movies

• Those who listened to the interview with Brian Herbet and Kevin J. Anderson that was in Episode #94 of our podcast will have heard Brian Herbert talking optimistically about a new version of a Dune movie. It seems that his optimism may have been somewhat… optimistic. *shudder* SyFy’s Blastr.com is reporting that the plug has been pulled on Paramount’s development of the film. The project had gone through two directors and several screenplays and had never built up much in the way of momentum towards actually getting made. The possibility still exists for another film version to be made but it will almost certainly have to start from scratch.

TV

• Deadline.com is reporting that Showtime is developing a live-action TV series based on the comic book Chew. Supernatural and Eureka writers Terri Hughes Burton and Ron Milbauer reportedly wrote the script and Stephen Hopkins, who has directed episodes of 24 and Californication, is attached to direct. This story has been pretty well confirmed with tweets from Chew creators John Layman and Rob Guillory. No information about a potential air date was given.

• Fringe has fought off the “death slot” of Fox Friday nights and been renewed for a fourth season. Ratings have falling somewhat since the move to Fridays, but that didn’t stop Fox from ordering another full 22 episodes. The announcement was initially made in a tweet from series executive producer J.H. Wyman and later confirmed in a press release. In spite of it’s somewhat lower ratings Fringe remains the best performing show Fox has had in the “death slot” and will likely remain there next season.

• In more Doctor Who news, the BBC has released a teaser for the upcoming sixth series into the wild. New episodes start April 23.
  

- Kick off your week with a roundup of the geek news you may have missed -

One last bit of Emerald City ComiCon news to start off. We got word on attendance numbers from the man himself, Jim Demonakos the founder and organizer of ECCC. He tells us that 32,000 people were at the convention center over the course of the weekend versus 20,000 last year. To put that in a little broader context, San Diego reported 130,000 attendees last year but in my book being smaller than San Diego is not at all a bad thing.

The Monday News is under the fold

Comics

• Stumptown Comics Fest has announced the final list of 2011 nominees for the Stumptown Comic Arts Awards and you get to decide the winners! The nominees include:
  Best Artist:
  • Emily Carroll – His Face All Read
  • Roman Muradov – Etc and A Cave
  • Stuart Immonen – Moving Pictures
  • Brian Hurtt – The Sixth Gun
  • Brecht Evans – Night Animals

  Best Writer:

  • Carla Speed McNeil – Finder: Voice
  • Cullen Bunn – The Sixth Gun
  • Greg Rucka – Stumptown
  • Aaron Renier – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Ben Marra – Benjamin Marra’s The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Down (A Work of Satire and Fiction)

  Best Letter:

  • Johnny Ryan – Prison Pit Vol. 2
  • Madeline Flores – The Girl and the Gorilla
  • Carla Speed McNeil – Finder: Voice
  • Aaron Renier – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Brittney Sabo – Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny, Vol. 1

  Best Colorist:

  • Brecht Evans – Night Animals
  • Emily Carroll – His Face All Read
  • Alec Longstreth – The Unsinkable Walker Bean
  • Ben Costa – Pang: The Wandering Shaolin Monk
  • Sarah Glidden – How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less

  Best New Talent:

  • Michael DeForge
  • Adam Hines
  • Emi Lenox
  • Sarah Oleksyk
  • Julia Gfrörer

  Reader’s Choice:

  Voters are asked to list up to three of their favorite comics from April 2010 to April 2011. Any graphic novel, trade paper back collection, single issue or ongoing series, small press or online – whatever title has the most votes as determined by the readers will win this special prize.

  To vote in this year’s awards visit stumptowncomics.com/awards_ballot. After voting, you will receive an email which must be confirmed in order for your vote to be counted. Winners will be announced at the Stumptown Comics Fest, the largest creator-focused comics convention in the Pacific Northwest, which will be held April 16-17 at the Oregon Convention Center.

• The Stumptown Award nominated writer Greg Rucka is returning to Marvel with a new ongoing Punisher series. The announcement was made at the Marvel’s Cup O’ Joe panel at C2E2 this weekend. Rucka said that he will be taking a “back to basics” approach on the book;
  

  There is a baseline that is very clear in this character, in my opinion, and I have no urge to f*ck with that at all. In all sincerity. It’s working, it’s dynamite for the character, it defines him well — I’m not going to go in there and mess with that, no way.

  Newsarama is reporting that the series will have art by Marco Checchetto of Squadron Supreme fame and will debut in August.

Manga

• Publisher Kodansha USA announced in a press release that it will be reprinting the entire run of Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon. In addition to “deluxe editions” of the series, which has been out of print since 2005, they will be releasing the two-volume prequel series Codename: Sailor V which has never been published in the United States. The original 18 volumes have been condensed into 12 volumes covering the main storyline, and two volumes dedicated to short stories. They will be released bi-monthly starting in September of this year.

Movies

• Warner Brothers has released a behind-the-scenes teaser video for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 into the wild. Enjoy!
  

Tabletop

• Atlas Games has announced Cthulhu Gloom, the newest addition to their line of “transparent” card games. Cthulhu Gloom can be played either as a stand alone game or as an expansion for the basic Gloom card game. It continues with the basic Gloom mechanic of having players try and inflict the most suffering on the members families they control before engineering their tragic deaths and will also add two new mechanics, Story cards and Transformation cards. Cthulhu Gloom was designed by Keith Baker and will be in stores this August.

TV

• The first picture of actress Adrianne Palicki in her role as Wonder Woman for the new NBC series has been making the rounds (click the thumbnail for full size). Reviews have been mixed from fans and other interested parties. On the positive side, original TV Wonder Woman Lynda Carter told E Online that she liked the new costume;
  

  ‘I think she looks fabulous,’ said Carter, who originated the role in the classic (and oh-so-campy!) series in the mid-’70s. ‘It’s a new look and, jeez, her body looks fantastic.’

  On the negative side we have Fox News. Fox responded to the photo by republishing an article from July about the Jim Lee-designed costume from the Wonder Woman comics on which the new TV costume is based. In the article they complain that Wonder Woman has “been stripped of her patriotism” with the removal of the stars-and-stripes motif of the original costume. I would make the attempt explain to the Fox writers that Wonder Woman is not actually an American but I’m afraid if I did they would start calling for her to be deported.

• Good news for fans of Being Human. Both the BBC and *shudder* Syfy have announced new seasons for their respective incarnations of the series, a fourth for the BBC and a second for *shudder* Syfy. Both versions of the show will begin airing new episodes next year.

The rest of the Monday News is under the fold.

Art

• The eighteenth annual Spectrum awards for excellence in science fiction and fantasy art were chosen on Saturday. The winners include:
  Concept Art
  Gold: Kekai Kotaki for Riven Earth
  Silver: Tomaz Jedruszek for Legends of Norrath

  Comics

  Gold: Rebecca Guay for A Flight of Angels
  Silver: David Palumbo for Sleep
  Silver: Joao Ruass for Fables 96

  Books

  Gold: David Palumbo for God’s War
  Silver: Dan Dos Santos for White Trash Zombie

  Editorial

  Gold: Andrew Jones for Share One Planet
  Silver: Brom for Redd Wing

  Unpublished

  Gold: Rebecca Guay for Pandora
  Silver: J. S. Rossbach for White Heat
  Silver: Scott Brundage for Tigers Have Striped Skin

  The full list of winners is available here.

Books

• Fantasy Magazine is relaunching with a new editor and a new online format for its March issue. Following in the footsteps of its sister publication, Lightspeed, Fantasy will be offering all of its content online with electronic subscriptions and copies of individual issues available for purchase as well. Each issue will include four short stories (two originals and two reprints), three nonfiction articles, closely tied to the fiction, plus one feature interview. Fantasy will also be prodcing two fiction podcasts. The March issue will include stories by George R.R. Martin, Holly Black, Tanith Lee, and Genevieve Valentine and is available now.

Comics

• If you listened to the podcast last week you will remember us talking about yet another delay in the release of DC’s new Batwoman comic. Now series artist J.H. Williams III has commented about the delay on his blog. He said that the delay was not the choice of the creators but offered no details, saying only that he is “not at liberty to really discuss [it].” The up side to the delay, according to Williams, is that they have had plenty of time to get ahead on production and he showed off some artwork for the cover of issue #3 to help ” keep spirits up.” The series is now expected to debut next month.

MMO

• BioWare released a new trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic in to the wild at PAX East this weekend. Enjoy!
  

TV

• Entertainment Weekly is reporting that both BBC One and BBC America have confirmed air dates for the new series of Doctor Who. The sixth series will air on BBC One on April 23 and on BBC America on the same day a few short hours after it’s premiere in England. The first empisode will be a two-parter written by Steven Moffat. The series will include guest appearances by Mark Sheppard (Romo Lampkin from Battlestar Galactica and Crowley on Supernatural) and Alex Kingston (River Song).

• SyFy *shudder* has started airing the final ten episodes of Stargate Universe but the possibility exists for the story to continue. Show producer Joseph Mallozzi wrote on his blog about the chance for SG:U to return as a TV movie after the series finale titled ‘The Gauntlet’.
  

  Hopefully, by the time its airs, we’ll have definite word on a potential movie or two. If it’s a go and fans can look forward to a proper end to Destiny’s mission, then Gauntlet will certainly set the stage for a grand conclusion. If, on the other hand, things don’t pan out and Gauntlet does turn out to be the bittersweet finale, fans will be thrilled, touched, heartbroken – and left to wonder what could have been.

  ‘The Gauntlet’ is scheduled to air in May.