Culture

Looks like Pixar may be doing a John Carter of Mars trilogy (original). That has some promise. For available texts, go here.

Bob Mould is running a poll on possible models for sales of his music, prompted by Radiohead’s nifty “pay what you want” release. $40 for a yearly subscription to Mould’s music seems like a decent deal to me. Better if you also get access to his back catalog. A lot of people would pay the $40 once and get a massive deal on all the old music, sure, but that’s still sales you might not see otherwise.

This is the second PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where people really like to punch each other in the face. Face-punch count: 4. Recap punches don’t count even if you think a slap in the face does. PITF Index after the cut.

This is the first PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where people like to punch each other in the face. Really. Go back and watch the first season; there’s an awful lot of face-punching going on. Therefore, it makes sense to do a weekly recap of who deserves to get punched in the face the most. At least, in our world it does. Face-punch count: 3, or 2 if you don’t count the face slap. Susan does not. PITF Index after the cut.

Amazon now has a Print on Demand service. The pricing is a bit more complex than the competition (namely, Lulu), but everything gets an ISBN and you can publish into Amazon. Which is pretty huge. I don’t think this is a Lulu killer, but it’ll definitely be competition, which hopefully will spur both companies to improve.

DKM’s Emerald Eyes is up for download (original). Picoreview: worth reading, a youthful book, author who’s in love with his characters.

Oh, yay, the Weinsteins are investing money in Asian film… “Titles slated for the fund include… a remake of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950’s epic The Seven Samurai.” What the hell?

Not greatly to my surprise, Rowling’s got plans for more Harry Potter stuff (original). There are some spoilers in the article, but the gist is that she intends to write an encyclopedia containing backstories for some characters, plus details on what happens after Deathly Hallows.

Daniel Keys Moran has put The Armageddon Blues up for download, right over here. It’s not his best novel, but it’s worth reading. And it’s a good sign, because it fulfills the promise that there’s more coming. So big thanks to him. The judge in the Rodgers/Moran court case has apparently asked both parties to stop flaming each other online. At least, he asked DKM to take his blog down and there’s nothing left of all the posts Alan Rodgers made about how evil DKM was over on his blog. Thanks thusly go out to the judge, too.

From his new blog: In any event, AI War is the only thing I’ll be working on this summer, and once it’s clean, I’m going to roll into the concluding sequel – it’s been years since I’ve written SF, but I am going to publish AI War and its sequel, Crystal Wind, before the people who care about it succumb to Alzheimers. But, yeah. He was gonna turn in AI War to Bantam in 1995. And he was gonna animate The Long Run in 1998 – “the pilot will happen.” (original) Plans, I suppose, sometimes fall through. ...