Due to circumstances beyond my control and which have nothing to do with the excellent work being done by the guys at Wyrd, the trailer for the Twenty Palaces series won’t be released until July. The guys are nearly finished with their work (which looks fantastic) but other factors will delay things.
Which means I’ll probably be sitting on a finished–and awesome–trailer for weeks without releasing it. Have I mentioned that I’m not the most patient person in the world?
Ah well.
1) If this summer’s movie posters told the truth.
2) Patton Oswalt on the Star Wars prequels. Video (but really just audio).
3) This is so friggin’ funny, and it so perfectly encapsulates the utterly irrational gonzo appeal of comic books. Even if you don’t think you’ll be interested in the subject of this article, give it a look: The Greatest Dinosaurs in Comics.
4) A psychopath walks into a room: Can you tell?
5) Life-size baby T-Rex puppet makes kids scream. Video. This is awesome!
6) Tom Waits Theme for Iron Man 2 (Rejected). Video. Best comment on this video: “Quite obviously fake.”
7) Jonathan Coulter on being a fluke (or not), new business models, connecting with fans, and being compared to the Snuggie. Lots to think about for everyone who creates entertainment in the modern era.
Last week I took my son to see THOR. He loved it, while I only liked it, but the most annoying thing about it was the way it reminded me that every big-time Hollywood movie nowadays has to feature a protagonist who’s all twisted up with Daddy Issues.
I’ll admit that I don’t see as many films as I used to, but I’m already sick and tired of watching movie stars struggle to win their Daddy’s approval. It was in SOURCE CODE, IRON MAN 2, STAR TREK, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, THE HULK (John Woo version) and so on and so on.
What the hell, Hollywood? When did someone decide that this was a solid story beat that had to go into every movie? Can’t we stick with a romantic subplot and GTFOI?
Which started me wondering how much of this was cultural. Continue reading
I just watched a rough cut of the Twenty Palaces trailer (no, I will not share) and it looks fantastic!
There are no effects yet, and the cut is still rough, right? Obviously. But it looks fantastic.
Sooooo excited!
Added later: I watched it at home with the sound, and it’s 50x more awesome. You guys, seriously.
1) The world’s first zombie-proof house.
2) It’s the newest fad! White guys across the globe are going to be sporting this baby soon. Real soon.
3) Amazing WWII monuments in Yugoslavia.
4) “Who is Osama bin Laden? Is he famous?”
5) If Superman was an alien in other movies.
6) “Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.” The ten oddest sentences from conservative editorialist David Brooks’s new book.
7) Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day: Which offerings are good and which are not? And if you drop by a comic shop, be sure to buy something, too.
2) Every Time Magazine cover in one image. Warning: big file
3) The Sartre Star Wars. Video. via Tor.com. The YouTube user’s other videos are pretty good, especially “Be A Good Sport, Sport.”
4) Now for a big change. Gorgeous… and I do mean gorgeous time lapse photography from a mountain in Spain. Video. Really amazing.
5) It’s been a while since I dropped politics into one of these link salads, but here’s one: Three important health care graphs. This is why I support effectiveness studies, which Republicans oppose: we’re already spending too much, and we don’t take the time to find out what works and what doesn’t. The first thing we should be cutting from our health care spending is a treatment that doesn’t work. Plus, I happen to believe we can learn something from the good examples of others.
7) This is awesome, and they need help from book collectors.
1) This is crazy and awesome: Man builds functional CPU in Minecraft, using only redstone dust, torches, levers and stone. Of course it’s bigger than two city blocks (and I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about as he describes the parts, but it’s freaking awesome. via @laura_hudson
2) Try to watch this video without reading the comments first. It’s pretty funny and kind of brilliant.
3) The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation.
4) Silent security cam footage of a tornado hitting St. Louis airport. Video. Brr.
6) Awesome! Check out the new trailer for THOR… as made my mockbuster crap-slingers Asylum Entertainment. Video.
This is the sort of story that annoys me, I have to admit. For those who don’t want to click, it basically says that Taylor Lautner would be interested in continuing his role in the TWILIGHT movies, if the author decided to write a spin off series.
And how is this news? The guy’s an actor. Actors want jobs. I imagine Lautner has a whole SHARKMAN AND LAVAWOMAN pitch carefully folded in his pocket, just in case he runs into Robert Rodriquez at a party or something.
You know what would be news? An actor who said they hated a role and never wanted to do it again. Even better: An actor that loved a role so much that they were raising funding to pay the novelist to write a sequel. Wake me up when that happens.
In more personal news, over on my LiveJournal account, user Ms_King asked me about outlining, and I answered, describing my odd way of pseudo-planning the books I write. So naturally, what should happen? Later that morning I realized I had rushed into the draft of A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark, before I was ready because I had some half-baked character interactions and not nearly as much of the book worked out as I needed. In fact, I was almost at the end of my synopsis at only 34K workds.
No worries, though. I have plot elements and under-utilized characters, so I’ll just have to work out how they all come together, and I’ll be ready to draft again. Today is a long(ish) writing morning, so I’ll be on that for the next few hours.
Also, Twitter, where I’m @byharryconnolly.
1) Slow motion photography. Exploding cakes. Techno. I promise you that you will love this: Video. And it even comes with little stories! via @ChuckWendig
2) “I like big butts and I cannot lie, but is there some evolutionary reason as to why?” Sir Mix-A-Lot mashed with the modern just-so stories of sexual selection pressures. The comments are stone hilarious.
3) The sounds of Minecraft, as music. Video.
4) New Zealand brewer markets a “breakfast beer.” I’m not opposed to the idea of a (small) beer at breakfast, but this sounds god-awful.
5) “How I got a blank book onto the Amazon.com bestseller list.” via @victoriastrauss
6) Some posts on the resurgence of “epic” fantasy: One. Two.
7) Alternate Star Wars. What if George Lucas had been inspired by a Kurosawa film other than HIDDEN FORTRESS?
1) Simpsons jokes, by season. via Bill Martell.
2) A James Bond script, written by Ben “The Shakespeare of Hollywood” Hecht. I especially love the idea of giving the name “James Bond” to different agents, just to mix things up. It explains the parade of actors in the role so nicely.
3) Seven massive holes in the Earth.
4) Read this wonderful story by Jane Rice, written in the 1940s.
5) Novels and novelists: imperfect competition
6) An interesting new format for physical books. (Ignore the seo crap about killing the Kindle).