Culture

eBooks on the iPhone are pretty obvious; I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good reader. Here’s the first cut: Stanza (original) (App Store link). The key is being able to download your own books, which Stanza allows. Grab Stanza Desktop (original) and load your books into there, then select Enable Sharing from the Tools menu and fire up the iPhone Stanza app. Shared Books -> Books on Macintosh displays the list of currently open books in Stanza Desktop. Select the ones you want, and there you go. ...

Squee! (original)

“It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn’t have owned up so quickly a few years ago. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You’re creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it.” -- Jon Favreau (original), director of Iron Man (original) So there you go.

I’m in love with Massachusetts And the neon when it’s cold outside And the highway when it’s late at night Got the radio on I’m like the roadrunner

“OK, here’s the plan for the rest of the night. We’re gonna play the next song, then we’re gonna play the fake last song. Then I’m gonna introduce the other guys on the stage, with their Christian name, their nickname, possibly their Zodiac sign, their place of birth, and their surname. Then we’re gonna turn our backs to you and act like we’re off stage for a few moments. Then we’re gonna turn around, pretend to be surprised, and play some more music and then the show will end.”

As per this news. The novel is titled Anathem, and the blurb follows: Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians – sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown. ...

Peter Berg is directing a Dune adaptation (original). Well, that’s a thing. I haven’t seen any of his movies… no, wait, I saw The Rundown, which was mildly amusing. Possibly thanks to the Walken. Maybe they’ll cast Walken as De Vries, and Dwayne Johnson as Duncan Idaho, and Seann William Scott as Feyd-Rautha? Nah, I don’t like where that went either.

15 movies, 15 quotes, no Googling. The last few answers have been supplied.

This is the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It’s a picture of box office grosses per movie over time, from 1986 to the present day. Very clever. You can see the evolution of the summer blockbuster, not to mention the winter blockbuster trend.

And the WGA more or less won. (original) It’s been really interesting to watch; this is the first US strike I’m aware of in which the PR battle was fought on blogs. And when you get right down to it, the writers make a living writing persuasive prose, so it’s not entirely surprising that the PR went well. On the other hand, it’s also the case that this strike didn’t affect the majority of the public in the way that, say, a garbage collection strike does. That helped PR too. ...