A wonderfully creative person in Second Life by the name of Janeel Kharg has actually built a virtual version of Ankh-Morpork, with all kinds of interesting details, hidden ways, goodies and giveaways. Be sure to pick up a free map when you arrive so you can find your way around. To get there, use this SLURL. There are also some excellent Discworld Avatars available at the sim, which you can look at here.
Today is the opening ceremony at the NADWCon, or North American Discworld Con, in Baltimore, MD. Obviously Sir Terry Pratchett is the Guest of Honor, but a lot of other folks will be there as well, including another favorite satirical author of mine, Esther M. Friesner. I recommend haunting the media area, in case you might be able to see some footage of the new TV series The Watch, assuming they got the money to make it. Note this is supposed to be a full TV series, and not a miniseries like Hogfather, Going Postal, or The Color Of Magic. 13 hour long episodes!
Hope everyone is having a great 4th, including all those folks for whom it isn’t a holiday. I spent a lot of years working for Zambelli Bros. every 4th doing fireworks displays at various places, which was very exciting. Something I never would have expected before doing the shows; even when you are lighting off the launch charges on the firing line, you can still hear it when a few thousand people all go “Ooohhh” and “Aaahhh” at the same time. In the interest of retaining what little hearing I have left I no longer do fireworks from ground zero, but enjoy watching the results of other peoples pyrotechnic expertise. I also like virtual fireworks, and thought I would share a nice one I picked up from the Free Flash Animations web site. If you are interested in creating your own, watch the Flash fireworks tutorial, one of a huge collection of animation, coding, and scripting tutorials put together by Adam Khoury. He covers HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and a lot of other really useful languages and server environments.
It appears the luggage is eager and hungry to be loaded and prepared for the next expedition. Always a good sign when you are gearing up for a vacation in Discworld, or anywhere else where misplacing your luggage could be catastrophic. After all, it is difficult to lose anything which is determined to follow you around, no matter the obstacles. A friend of mine who has way more artistic talent than I do built this wonderful physical interpretation of one of Terry Pratchett’s best loved non-alive but most definitely animate creations.
I watched a beautiful trailer for Terry Gilliam’s latest masterpiece The Zero Theorem and I would love to post it here, but it was watermarked Not For Distribution, and while I couldn’t make out all the small print below that I got the impression it was to be used to shop the film around to find a distributor. As soon as I find a version that can be shared here I will post it; in the meantime, I thought you might like to here him speak a bit about it, and about the state of the film industry today.
Both of the two main releases this week are on the big screen on Wednesday the 3rd to take advantage of the extended holiday weekend box office returns. The Lone Ranger and Despicable Me 2 are both films I have been waiting quite a while to see, and I will be in the theater for both of them on the 3rd.