A millionaire murdered at a New York convention turns out to have delusions of being Batman, right down to owning a fully working Batmobile and 4 warehouses full of other Batman devices and memorabilia. His wife (who set him up to be robbed of a million dollars in 2002) and his stepdaughter are fighting over the estate, while the police have not yet named a suspect. Meanwhile, Wired has come out with its list of the Top 10 Science Fiction Languages, and yes, Klingon got the number one spot. While Sindarin, which also made the list, is almost as fully realized, you can’t search google in it; only in Klingon. This one had me rolling on the floor; IJustine with a little bit of Nerdcore…
The announcement was made today: Summer Glau is going to join the cast of Dollhouse as a recurring character! On top of yesterdays news that Even Rachel Wood is joining the cast of True Blood, the upcoming TV season is looking better and better.
Word from SciFi Scoop is that the live-action movie Blood, The Last Vampire will be out on DVD in the US on October 20th. Considering how few theaters had the movie, this is great news for all the Anime fans who missed seeing it on the big screen. On the small screen (although nowhere near as small as it was a decade or so ago), two Tales of Television this week. Scott at Wired reminds us all why we need to fight Friday night Death Slot programing decisions and save some quality SciFi, while io9 talks about the Television that Ate Our Brains and shaped our lives. I loved District 9, which for me worked seamlessly on all levels. That may be why I had forgotten how riveting the music was; it was integrated to the experience, but sounds just as intense standing on its own.
Paste Magazine has a very insightful article about the four movies that saved SciFi this summer; District 9, Moon, Cold Souls, and , of course, Star Trek. In the real world (a place I sometimes visit), a few new twists in the development of the Web are mentioned by MIT’s Technology Review. First, using White Space for Wi-Fi was proposed this week at SIGCOMM 2009. In the old analog TV days, the White Space was the empty spaces in the video datastream where things like closed captioning could be inserted. These days it means the gaps between existing digital Radio and TV transmission spectrum allocations. While this process has been going on for a while, with Google, the FCC, and many others fighting over the bandwidth, the SIGCOMM presentation makes it a global push. Even more interesting, it looks like we are several steps closer to building a quantum internet, and the quantum computers to run on it.
You can see the To Aru Kagaku no Railgun trailer over at the official web page; the Anime starts airing in October in Japan, and will hopefully be imported to the US soon. Davies is already writing season 4 of Torchwood, according to this SF Universe take on a new Torchwood Magazine article. And DVD Review posts step-by-step instructions on how to recreate a famous movie werewolf scene.
My favorite moment during last night’s awards presentation (which I had to watch online through Cheryl Morgans Live coverage, not being there) was when they announced Best Fan Writer goes to Cheryl Morgan and her response: #*%! I won a Hugo!!!… LOL. David Anthony Durham won the Campbell Award for best new writer. Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form was won by Wall-E, while Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form went to Dr Horrible’s Singalong Blog. Winner for Best Novel was The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, and Neil was the presenter for Our brand new category, Best Graphic Story: won by Girl Genius, Kaja and Phil Foglio. Other winners included Ellen Datlow, David G Hartwell, Weird Tales, John Scalzi, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Nancy Kress, and several others. I find this rather amazing, because for the first time ever every one of my picks from the nominations were actually the winners. Congratulations to everyone, and do you know where your towel is?