[Crocostimpy posted this in comments. It feels like it deserves a post of its very own. It's damn long, but there are some gems in there. Teddy isn't a Metamorphwerewolf. And re: the person who was supposed to do magic in later life: "I’m sorry about this, but I changed my mind!" Original is here.]

Finished Spook Country, the new William Gibson. I doubt there will ever be a Gibson novel I won’t read, and read with pleasure, but there is, after nine novels, a certain undeniable sameness to his work. Maybe he’s just a victim of his own success — there’s so much faux-Gibson out there that even real-Gibson [...]

I was dickering around with Ain’t It Cool News’s Comic-Con updates, which contain some tidbits about Joss Whedon — he’s thinking about doing a BBC movie about Rupert Giles from Buffy. And I felt a pang when I realized I hadn’t seen anything by Whedon onscreen since Serenity two years ago.

I have almost — but not quite — nothing to blog about today, so I will simply note that I am grooving, really intensely, to “The Mesopotamians,” off “The Else,” the new album by nerd-rock legends They Might Be Giants. There’s an intermittent quality to TMBG’s brilliance, but I don’t think that makes their genius [...]

I wrote a short profile of Neil Gaiman in the print magazine this week. It’s here. For those curious about Gaiman’s presumably-now-lost English school novel, the full quote is as follows (I only had a measly page for this piece):

I’m not there, but Time’s got you covered. (Maybe that should be our new slogan. Did we have an old slogan?) Rebecca Winters Keegan, our one-person Los Angeles bureau, is covering it.

Three people are dead and three more injured in an explosion that occurred at a spaceport in the Mojave Desert. These were people from Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan’s outfit, the folks who won the X-Prize with Spaceship One, who in latter days have morphed into Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s as-yet-notional space tourism outfit. Apparently they [...]

This time to USA Today. I wish they’d gotten her to talk more about Deathly Hallows. This is probably the most interesting quote:

While I wasn’t looking Comic-Con kinda sorta became the biggest event on the nerd-media calendar. You know, where everything happens and everything exciting gets previewed. I’m not there. Instead I’m stuck picking up dribs and drabs on the Internet like everybody else.

It still feels weird to post about anything besides Harry. Maybe that’s why nothing else really seems worth posting about today anyway. A video of some astronauts throwing away an ammonia tank, in slow motion, in space? Some computer program is pretty good at poker? They’re making a movie of the good-but-IMHO-overrated comic Y the [...]