IO9 scores again, with two excellent articles today. The first talks about the new shows on SyFy, and how they are for the most part recycled old shows. They are right on the money about Warehouse 13, and the combination of two old favorites is quite entertaining (the web page is nicely done as well). They also touch on Eureka (I disagree with their conclusions on that one), and the forthcoming Alien Nation and (possibly?) Quantum Leap. The other article I enjoyed today was on science fiction lawyers, which is a larger list than I would have expected. And that’s surprising, because I knew everyone mentioned; but they forgot Eli Stone and a few others. The first teaser trailer is out for Burden, a movie that has already been nominated for multiple awards before being released. Independent films often make the festival circuits pre-release, and this one is no exception; you can see it at the DragonCon Film Festival in September, Action On Film IFF on the 25th, and the International Film Festival Ireland at the beginning of September.
Cory Doctorow worried that folks might not find the 404 Wine Bar for his pre-Play performance meet-and-greet the other night in Chicago. But everyone can find his latest story, serialized at TOR Online, and read it as each chapter gets uploaded. The story is Makers, and for those of us who get cross-eyed after staring at the screen for 18 hours a day it will come out in print in the fall (what date in the fall is a variable dependent on which continent you live on). Or perhaps for those of us who can’t wait for the serialization to finish up in Jan 2010. But there is an extra, Online-Level draw on this one; the images with each chapter! Download and collect them all, then download the Flash/Java App that will allow you to create your own image structure for the story. This is the extended (I.E., Complete) story originally told on Salon as ThemePunks. Now you can finally find out how it turns out! The folks at Barnstorming are doing the graphics, and they are building them to inter-connect. Which means the Flash App, whenever it gets released online, will allow you to take the various tiles and build your own cover for the book. All in all, this looks like a fun ride!
That’s right, today is Nicola Tesla’s 153rd Birthday. The man who invented AC power, the electric motor, the florescent light (years before Edison came up with the incandescent light bulb), the field of RC and the first Remote Control vehicle (a boat), the audio speaker, and Radio (no, it wasn’t Marconi; his patents were invalidated in 1943). He also invented the Tesla Coil and Broadcast Power (never deployed because no one could figure out how to put a meter on it for billing purposes), and there was a rumor that he built a book-sized vibrator that could topple buildings and caused an earthquake. He contributed to a lot of other fields, including Robotics and Radar, he has a ton of published articles and patents, and my favorite bit: he was the guy for whom the phrase Mad Scientist was coined! Happy Birthday, Nicky!
Word has come out that the new season of Dollhouse will be starting a week later than the announced original air date, but this is not a bad thing. They made the move to give a bit of extra production time to the team, since they only start building the new episodes this month. If Fox wasn’t already aware there was a serious following for the program, they probably got a clue when their sales servers crashed from people hammering on it to order the limited edition season 1 box set available only to Comic-Con 2009 attendees. Fox finally got it right, now can NBC do the same with Day One? The last TV show built by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator of Day One, was The Middleman, which comes out on DVD on July 28th.
At least the finest Steampunk TV I have seen so far. The new show Warehouse 13 has some quality Steampunk props, including a 2-way TV communicator built by Phylo T Farnsworth, a ray gun assembled by Nikola Tesla, and a computer keyboard that had to at least be inspired by Jake’s Steampunk Workshop, if he hasn’t been hired to build the props for this show. Watch it now, along with a Tesla short…
Fathom Entertainment brings another exclusive Anime event to the big screens across the US. This time around they have the feature film Eureka 7 – good night, sleep tight, young lovers, playing one night only on Thursday, September 24th (yes, that is 2009). Tickets went on sale today for its only other big-screen showing in North America, and its North American Premier, at the FanTasia 2009 Film Festival in Montreal, CA, on July 28th. Purists will want to be at the FanTasia showing, which is in Japanese and subbed; the Fathom presentation will be dubbed.
The Fantasia International Film Festival 2009 starts this Thursday, July 9th, and runs to the 29th. The films include a dozen of my favorites that I never expected to hear about being on a big screen, like Cyborg She and The Clone Returns Home, as well as many others I would love to see but never have, like Rough Cut and 8th Wonderland. There are even some I would go to just because of the silly titles, like Lesbian Vampire Killers. It doesn’t hurt any that Montreal has near-perfect weather in July.
Since I don’t have the option of going there, my sights are set on something a bit more temporally restricted: Otakon 2009, the Otaku-friendly Anime Con also held every July, this year from the 17th through the 19th. It kicks off with a performance by VAMPS, and has way too many guests and events for me to go into here; visit their Guests and activities menus for a full rundown.
And finally today, I had to share this video of Guillaume Estace playing the Star Wars Cantina song on a Chapman Stick. Enjoy…