SF Signal

While surfing one of my favorite sites, the register for some juicy tidbits that they won’t tell us at work, I found out that besides surrendering, the French also good at stealing source code and calling it their own; hell! I didn’t even know they can code…

Filed under: Science and Technology

No, not supermodels (sorry Pete), but a bunch of Space 1999 models, from the guy who built them. Really cool. It reminds that I really like the Eagle ships immensely. There are even some other cool models, including one that looks like the Discovery from 2001.

The only quibble I have with this page is the “immensly popular” tag it places on Space:1999. Cult following != immensely popular. If it had been immensely popular, it wouldn’t have been canned after 2 seasons. And this coming from a (lapsed) member of the cult!

Filed under: TV

Remember the Mootrix video? Well, just in case you can’t get enough cow videos (and really, who can’t?), there’s this collection of cow videos. Or should I say “Moooovies”?

Filed under: Web Sites

Reminds me of my neighbor. [Link]

Filed under: Games

In case you were wondering about the worst game room ever, Matt over at X-Entertainment offers a candidate.

Filed under: Web Sites

Good grief, it looks like musical SF/Fantasy is making a big splash.

In addition to the Holy Grail musical, SCiFi Weekly notes the possibility of a

Spider-Man musical. Ugh.

And from The Website at the End of the Universe, we learn of Batman and Star Wars musicals. I’m thinking someone needs to channel Wagner so he can write an opera for 1984….

Filed under: Music

With the demise of Interplay (and yes I know they are not quite dead yet but the weight-challenged norse looking opera singing lady is out in the hallway), Fallout 3′s future seemed in jeopardy. But fear not for another publisher (Bethseda Softworks of Morrowind and Cthulu game fame) has picked up the reins and will be publishing the game. There is some Q/A with Bethseda on Gamespy, but I can’t handle all the ads you clickthru to get to the details – but I have placed the link here as well.

Filed under: Games

Why Star Wars and LEGO, of course!

The pic of the Millenium Falcon box looks sweet. I want one.

Filed under: Star Wars

Here’s a really cool animated music video that’s sure to please the geek in all of us. And by “all of us” I mean me. And that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

[With a Rube Goldberg treadwheel-mouse-generated shoe-lever in the plastic butt to TexasBestGrok for the link.]

Filed under: Music

REVIEW SUMMARY:

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The story continues the adventures of Drizzt Do’Urden and his companions (Cattie-Brie, Wulfgar, Regis, and Bruenor Battlehammer) and the other characters that R. A. Salvatore has created in his Forgotten Realms books. In this novel, our heroes work to destroy an object of extreme evil, and Wulfgar continues to battle inner demons.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: This book reads like a well done action movie with the right amount of detail for this type of story, and I continue the story of characters I already feel I know from the earlier books.

CONS: Drizzt always seems too perfect at times, and Salvatore gets a bit preachy doing the transition sections.

BOTTOM LINE: I am enjoying this series and feel an attachment to the characters and how they progress from the Icewind Dale series til now. I will continue the series and someday I will eventually catch up to the latest set of books.

Read the rest of this entry

Filed under: Book Review

In the continuing story of directors enhancing movies and building the vision they really had when the movie was first made (yeah right), Lucas has updated THX-1138. And lucky for us – somebody has taken some shots to show the differences between the old version and this “new and improved” version. The link is here (and now working after suffering the slashdot effect.)

Filed under: Movies

I’m looking at you, John. James at Big Dumb Object, points us to two SF mags with online sites where you can find more SF short(ish/er) stories. Just in case you were worried about not having enough short fiction to finish out the year with….

Filed under: Web Sites

Author William H. Majoros has written a fantasy trilogy, of the Tolkein type, called The Sarnaethian Trilogy. The interesting thing about this is that he has released the books in PDF format and they are free to download. Also, if you look, he has a link to the Cafe Press print on demand site to allow you to buy the book form of the stories. How cool is this? Now, these stories may suck, I can’t find anything Majoros has written before, but hey, they’re free and it can’t hurt to try them out.

The bigger story here is the print on demand/PDF aspect. The author sets the price for the books and gets the money when someone uses the POD service. Take that, archaic, cumbersome printing industry! Now, much like the music industry, authors can have more control over their books and how they are sold. I would like to see some major author do this, and I’m not talking Doctorow, with his/her next novel. I would also like to see authors release their out-of-print stories so we can print them out and read them. Of course, this would put the used books stores out of business, and thus deprive John of what little joy he has left in his life. Seems a small price to pay to me!

Filed under: Books

He might have come up with something like this Spider-Man 2 Lego movie. The animation, the camera angles, the humor, its all good. Check it out.

Filed under: Movies

Vernor Vinge’s next novel is titled Rainbow’s End, and IEEE Spectrum has an excerpt online for your reading pleasure. I know what you’re thinking, why does a magazine that caters to a bunch of EE hardware geeks run a science fiction story in its pages? Well, apparently the new novel is about a society where computing is ubiquitous (come on Lix!) and people share a consensual reality. The Spectrum is also running a report, called Sensor Nation, about ubiquitous computing and the issues surrounding it. See, there’s the connection, and it wasn’t that I was claiming EE’s don’t read anything other than technical manuals, much.

I really enjoyed Vinge’s last two novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and I also like his short story, Cookie Monster, so I’ll have to pick this one up as well. Check it out!

Filed under: Books

So silly, in fact, that there is now a musical in production based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It has Tim Curry, Hank Azaria and David Hyde-Pierce in it and Eric Idle helped write the cript and the musical lyrics. Maybe it will come to Houston!

Filed under: Music

Star Trek’s “Scotty” from the original series was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently. Son Chris said the diagnosis stemmed from his father’s increasing loss of short-term memory. His long-term memory (like his memories of working on the Trek series) seems unaffected.

Filed under: Meta