Archives for June 2009

The Daily Show‘s John Hodgman interrogates President Obama on his geek cred at the TV & Radio Correspondents’ Dinner.

My favorite line: “The Constitution is perhaps the most geeky document of all time. It is essentially the Frequently Asked Questions list of the United States, that was written by moneyed, sickly, bookish, bifocal-wearing nerds who believed that God was a distant, uncaring Dungeon Master.”

Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel on MSNBC:

Rachel Maddow: Are we likely to see the amount of video that we’re getting of what’s happening in Iran decline over the next few days as Western sources are kicked out?

Richard Engel: That will to some degree happen, but what the Iranian crackdown is — it’s very old-fashioned — they want to control the media so they’re cutting off phones and they’re kicking out established reporters and harassing reporters. That’s a very, if you will, 1980s, 1990s way of a media crackdown. It has not helped them control the information war. Already online if you look on sites like YouTube there’s more than 3,500 videos that have been posted by demonstrators — that’s videos — plus tens of thousands of pictures, in addition to all the information that they’re exchanging on sites like Twitter … And this is the class of people that are much more savvy. The Revolutionary Guards, and the establishment of the state, it’s not really a very technologically savvy group, versus the students, the intellectuals, the moderates, the … the geeks, if you will.

Rachel Maddow: Yay for the geeks! The revolutionary geeks.

Tonight I caught a screening of the new sci-fi flick Moon (which featured a Q&A with director Duncan Jones).

Moon stars Sam Rockwell as the lone inhabitant of a lunar station who’s just wrapping up an arduous three-year contract when weird stuff starts happening to him. The movie is well-done and enjoyable, but nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. I also had a lot of scientific/plausibility issues. On the other hand, Sam Rockwell gives a good performance and the visuals are nice, especially considering the budget was only five million.

Okay, here’s a pretty funny YouTube channel: The Irate Gamer.

I particularly recommend his videos about Ghosts & Goblins (the most outrageously, unfairly difficult game ever made; I think I spent about as much time hurling this cartridge against the wall in fury as I did actually playing it — and wait until you see how preposterously cheap the game becomes in its impossible-to-reach final levels), Super Mario Bros. 2 (turns out the reason this game is so different from other Mario titles is because Nintendo just took an existing Japanese game, changed the hero sprites to Mario & friends, and sold it in the US as a Mario game), and E.T. (legendary as the worst video game ever made — it single-handedly destroyed the company Atari, who was forced to bury five million unsold and returned copies of this game in the New Mexico desert).

Over on SciFiWire there’s an article 7 ‘Unfilmable’ Sci-Fi Books —- And the Filmmakers Who Could Adapt Them. In the comments thread, several people suggest a film version of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. I don’t know how many people know this story, but there was a Lord of Light film adaptation in the works at one point. From Wikipedia:

In 1979 it was announced that Lord of Light would be made into a 50 million dollar film. It was planned that the sets for the movie would be made permanent and become the core of a science fiction theme park to be built in Aurora, Colorado. Famed comic-book artist Jack Kirby was even contracted to produce artwork for set design. However, due to legal problems the project was never completed.

Parts of the unmade film project, the script and Kirby’s set designs, were subsequently acquired by the CIA as cover for an exfiltration team posing as Hollywood location scouts in Tehran in order to rescue six US diplomatic staff who escaped the Iranian hostage crisis by virtue of being outside the Embassy building at the time.

There’s an interview on YouTube with one of the CIA men who took part in the operation, and there’s a detailed article about it here.

Jack Kirby’s Concept Art for the Lord of Light Film

Here’s the (beautiful) cover of the first issue of the newly-relaunched Realms of Fantasy magazine.

This is the first issue for which my good buddy Doug Cohen is serving as art director.