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	<title>Tech &#187; Lev Grossman &#124; TIME.com</title>
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		<title>Tech &#187; Lev Grossman &#124; TIME.com</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com</link>
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		<title>TIME Person of the Year Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist</title>
		<link>http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/runner-up-tim-cook-the-technologist/</link>
		<comments>http://poy.time.com/2012/12/19/runner-up-tim-cook-the-technologist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2012 13:43:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Apple]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=153708</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[He inherited the most valuable company in the world from one of the greatest innovators in history. In 2012 he made Apple his own. Runner-Up: Tim Cook, the Technologist &#124; TIME.com.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=153708&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Apple</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/companies-2/apple/</primary_category_link><featured_image>http://timenerdworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/2012poy_cook_landing_story.jpg?w=240</featured_image>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<item>
		<title>Beyond Good and Awful: Literary Value in the Age of the Amazon Review</title>
		<link>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/02/08/beyond-good-and-awful-literary-value-in-the-age-of-the-amazon-review/</link>
		<comments>http://entertainment.time.com/2012/02/08/beyond-good-and-awful-literary-value-in-the-age-of-the-amazon-review/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:00:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Amazon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Companies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[books]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://timenerdworld.wordpress.com/?p=118073</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s a basic but still weird fact about books that two people’s experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=118073&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Amazon</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/companies-2/amazon/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Comic-Con Royalty, Part Three: The Jester</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/24/comic-con-royalty-part-three-the-jester/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/24/comic-con-royalty-part-three-the-jester/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:30:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Diego Comic-Con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=91461</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Damian Hess has been recording and performing as MC Frontalot for 11 years now. When he started out the music he made didn’t have a name, so he named it himself: it’s called nerdcore. Frontalot raps about computers, video games, Dungeons and Dragons, superheroes, action movies, cartoons and other things beloved of the Comic-Con crowd. He inverts the gangsta swagger you usually associate with hip-hop: Frontalot rolls self-deprecating. He comes to Comic-Con every year &#8212; music isn’t a medium that’s well-represented at the show, and he occupies the role of its unofficial composer in residence. (PHOTOS: Comic-Con 2011) Frontalot was at the con this year to promote his new album Solved, which drops August 23. “The last album, Zero Day, was all about problems &#8212; the difficulty of it all,” he says. “This one seemed to naturally come out of it. Plus I find myself saying that all the time, any time I get done with a chore: all right, solved! I decided to name the album that. Which sucks,” he added, after a pause for reflection, “because I can’t use that as my thing that I say all the time. I sound like a jerk.” Among the problems solved on Solved are jocks, power users, and when you’re part of a mech squadron that assembles itself into a giant robot, who gets to form the head? “It’s not exactly a concept record, but the songs fall into little acts,” Frontalot explains. “The first act of it is trying to dig all the way through the authenticity question that ought to be raised by my rapper name.” You can’t accuse Hess of under-thinking anything. (MORE: Comic-Con Royalty, Part One: The Queen) Frontalot’s songs are nothing if not funky and funny, and you can enjoy them on that level, but it’s all a bit of a feint – the more you listen to them, and the further you get into decoding Frontalot’s densely wrought lyrics, the more layers you find. “There’s the whole idea that solutions themselves aren’t necessarily real until<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=91461&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/24/comic-con-royalty-part-three-the-jester/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Comic-Con Royalty, Part Two: The King</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/23/comic-con-royalty-part-two-the-king/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/23/comic-con-royalty-part-two-the-king/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2011 01:26:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[joss whedon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Diego Comic-Con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=91443</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Joss Whedon&#8217;s movies don&#8217;t make billions. His last foray into TV, Dollhouse, was canceled after two seasons. The one before that, Firefly, lasted only eleven (glorious, unforgettable) episodes. But more than any other writer or director working in Hollywood, he represents the authentic voice of the fan in the big-studio world, and more than any other writer or director, his fans are fanatically loyal to him. He&#8217;s also, as it happens, quicker and cleverer than just about anybody I&#8217;ve ever interviewed. I caught him in a green room at Comic-Con just before he went on for a talk about the Buffy comics he&#8217;s doing with Dark Horse. Although he&#8217;s been hard at work directing the new Avengers movie, and he was fresh off giving five other interviews in a row, he seemed relaxed and fit and sharp as ever. (PHOTOS: Comic-Con 2011) One reason Whedon gets it right so often is that he pays attention when he gets it wrong. In Season 8, as the first run of Buffy comics was called, he went big, doing the stories he didn&#8217;t have the budget to do on screen. &#34;But I think ultimately I made a miscalculation,&#34; he says, &#34;because as much as I could do anything I wanted, what people wanted was that metaphor of their lives, reflected through the monster stories. And we went on this grand epic journey. So I think we lost a little bit of the ethos of the show. I didn&#8217;t think people would want something as mundane as the show in a comic book, but they do. &#34;Season 9 we’re getting back to that. It’s Buffy&#8217;s daily life. There’s definitely monsters, but they really are this metaphor for, here you are at this point in your life. And for Buffy that point is, I’m not in charge of an army, I’m not prophesied to die in the next five minutes, so what exactly am I supposed to do?&#34; I ventured an analogy between what Buffy&#8217;s life must be like and the later life of Harry<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=91443&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Comic-Con Royalty, Part One: The Queen</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/23/comic-con-royalty-part-one-the-queen/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/23/comic-con-royalty-part-one-the-queen/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:16:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[felicia day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Diego Comic-Con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdcc11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Video Games]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=91434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today I was able to meet up with, seriatim, three artists who in different ways exemplify what Comic-Con is about. They are not the richest or most famous people at Comic-Con, but they are its royalty. If there is a soul within the heaving mass of hype and advertising that Comic-Con has become, they are it. Royal Number One is Felicia Day. Day is a creature of that hybrid medium the Web serial &#8212; she stars in (and created) The Guild, and had major roles in Dr. Horrible&#8217;s Sing-Along Blog and The Legend of Neil. Her unique combination of scorching prettiness, sharp intelligence and tender vulnerability have made her a cult icon with 1,800,000 Twitter followers. As an actress with a hardcore gaming habit and a double-degree in math and violin from the University of Texas, her nerd credibility is unimpeachable. (PHOTOS: Comic-Con 2011) In person she&#8217;s almost impossibly elfin &#8212; you really have to look at the tips of her ears to convince yourself she&#8217;s fully human. Her face would be almost too perfect if it weren&#8217;t graciously offset with a teensy girlish overbite. We had breakfast &#8212; she sipped tea, because her voice was shot from talking for two days straight. &#34;I was responsible and left the party at one last night,&#34; she moaned. &#34;All my friends stayed till four. And all I did was lay in bed staring at the ceiling.&#34; She floated the possibility that, in the future, she would have a day-clone who would do work, and a night-clone who would go to parties. This seemed like a reasonable idea to me. She&#8217;s here to promote a couple of different projects. Season five of The Guild starts Tuesday. She&#8217;s also working on a Web series based on the game Dragon Age that&#8217;s due out this fall. That took training. &#34;I worked out like three four hours a day,&#34; she says. &#34;I started training with the stunt guys. And then I realized how very fit athletes are.&#34; She takes it all very seriously. More than anybody<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=91434&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/23/comic-con-royalty-part-one-the-queen/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Comic-Con Diary, Day Two: A Whole Bunch of Fantasy Writers Walk into a Bar; Also, Tintin!</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/22/comic-con-diary-day-2-a-whole-bunch-of-fantasy-writers-walk-into-a-bar-also-tintin/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/22/comic-con-diary-day-2-a-whole-bunch-of-fantasy-writers-walk-into-a-bar-also-tintin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jul 2011 23:59:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdcc11]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=91374</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Christopher Paolini, Scott Westerfeld, David Anthony Durham and I walk into a bar. No, seriously, we did. After the show floor closes at Comic-Con, big entertainment companies throw parties at bars all around the city. Mostly they&#8217;re the big movie and game companies &#8212; in the great Comic-Con hierarchy of artistic media, books rank somewhere below injection-molded action figures and just above those little flair buttons people pin to their convention lanyards. (MORE: The 10 Video Games You Have to Check Out at Comic-Con 2011) But Random House threw a party last night, and the writers at the show descended on it en masse. It was at the Double Deuce, a cowboy-themed bar complete with mechanical bull. An interesting choice. Much alcohol was consumed &#8212; you can count on writers to out-drink other artists, even if they don&#8217;t outsell them. Christopher Paolini and Patrick Rothfuss rode the mechanical bull. Both acquitted themselves admirably. I will say nothing further. This morning the big event was Steven Spielberg&#8217;s Tintin presentation. Or that was the big event for me, as an old-school obsessive fan of the sexless, stateless journalist-detective. (By the way, being a journalist is nothing like Tintin made it seem. I feel so lied to!) Peter Jackson was there as well, and he talked about the challenges of getting Tintin on screen: &#8220;Even though these characters had faces you&#8217;d never find on a human being,&#8221; he said, &#8220;we still wanted it to have a level of detail where it almost looked like live action.&#8221; Spielberg apparently operated the camera on this one personally. He described it as being as much like painting as moviemaking. (PHOTOS: Comic-Con 2011) They showed about five minutes of the movie. Tasting notes would have to include mentions of Dick Tracy and Polar Express: directors seemed to be convinced that somewhere in that foggy realm between cartoons and live action, there&#8217;s a happy medium that isn&#8217;t just freaky and weird. I&#8217;m still not convinced it&#8217;s there. But I was definitely entertained.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=91374&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/22/comic-con-diary-day-2-a-whole-bunch-of-fantasy-writers-walk-into-a-bar-also-tintin/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Comic-Con Diary, Day 1: Fear and Branding in San Diego</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/22/comic-con-diary-day-1-fear-and-branding-in-san-diego/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/22/comic-con-diary-day-1-fear-and-branding-in-san-diego/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:15:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdcc11]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=91235</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Dateline: San Diego! Where every year countless hordes of “Trekkies” and “cosplayers” and other freaky “pocket protector” types descend on the convention center for what “some” have called “nerd Woodstock”… OK. Now that&#8217;s taken care of. The first thing you notice when you get close to Comic-Con is the creeping branding that grows on everything. It’s like a rapacious mold. The entire exterior of my hotel is one gigantic Cowboys and Aliens ad. I’m looking out at the world through somewhere around Daniel Craig’s right nipple. The inside of the elevator is a wall-to-wall ad for True Blood. One of my hotel keys is an ad for Lord of the Rings: War in the North. The other key is an ad for the complete Smallville DVDs. (PHOTOS: Comic-Con 2011) You get the idea. I’m just trying to give you a feel for the situation on the ground here. This is the place where all the shows and movies and books that you love will be force-fed to you till you can&#8217;t stand them. One day they’re going to put an ad on the last flat surface in all of San Diego, and it’ll be like when they cut down the last Truffula tree in The Lorax. I had been scheduled to interview Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried today, but the schedule got borked, so I spent most of my first day as what they call a “professional” here at The Con, which means I’m being a novelist rather than a journalist. My plane ticket here was paid for not by Time but by my book publisher, who sent me here to flog my new book. (I will flog it once here, then leave off flogging for this and all future columns: The Magician King, out August 9. There. Done.) So I gave interviews. I signed autographs. I appeared on a panel called “Magic &#38; Monsters.” I tried to make the case for a five-year moratorium on new books with monsters in them. We, as a culture, are busily chewing through<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=91235&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>San Diego Comic-Con, Day Zero: Has the Nerd Bubble Burst?</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/20/san-diego-comic-con-day-zero-has-the-nerd-bubble-burst/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/20/san-diego-comic-con-day-zero-has-the-nerd-bubble-burst/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:24:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2011]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sdcc11]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.time.com/?p=90829</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you&#8217;re a professional, when you&#8217;re going there for work, the sad truth is that you do not go to Comic-Con with a feeling of joy in your heart. You go with a weary sense of inevitability. You&#8217;re not complaining, God knows! But Comic-Con is too big and sweaty and busy to really enjoy. And when you&#8217;re working &#8212; when you&#8217;re covering it, or promoting your own stuff there, both of which I&#8217;m doing this year &#8212; you don&#8217;t go to the panels you really care about, and talk to the people want to, you go to and talk to whatever and whoever you have to. And also, personally, the reason why I&#8217;m obsessively interested in science fiction and fantasy has more to do with avoiding other human beings than with stuffing myself into a convention center with 130,000 of them. (MORE: Inside the World&#8217;s First Video Game Amusement Park) Plus when you&#8217;re 42, you feel creepy ogling the teenage cosplayers. You do it &#8212; don&#8217;t get me wrong! But you feel creepy. So you&#8217;re not exactly sprinting to catch that cross-country flight to San Diego. You&#8217;re more like a monarch butterfly returning to that one glade in Mexico that gets all covered with butterflies every year. You&#8217;re looking forward to some tasty milkweed or whatever, but damn your wings are tired. And some of those other butterflies could use a shower. Fortunately I&#8217;ve been to Comic-Con enough times that I&#8217;ve acquired some survival skills. I&#8217;m not going to get enraged at the spectacle of the subculture that kept me alive when I was an alienated 13-year-old being mainstreamed and dumbed-down and sold off for parts. I will be Zen about that. I will also drink one glass of water for every alcoholic beverage I consume. I&#8217;m not going to get stressed out about all the stuff I&#8217;m missing out on. For example at 4:45 on Friday afternoon I&#8217;m not going to stress about the fact that I&#8217;m missing out on the preview footage of the Total Recall reboot, and<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=90829&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2011/07/20/san-diego-comic-con-day-zero-has-the-nerd-bubble-burst/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Paolo Bacigalupi: This is What It Takes to Write a Novel</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/27/paolo-bacigalupi-this-is-what-it-takes-to-write-a-novel/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/27/paolo-bacigalupi-this-is-what-it-takes-to-write-a-novel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:06:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=47373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Paolo Bacigalupi, in case you don&#8217;t know, is one of the most exciting SF writers working right now. His first novel The Windup Girl won both the Hugo and Nebula awards this year. It&#8217;s radical and amazing. It would be a good idea for you to read it. He also has a YA novel, Ship Breaker, and a collection of stories, Pump Six, that will be out in paperback later this fall. And yet he is unreasonably modest. He talked frankly with us about his work, his incredible year, his four unpublished novels, and the many punishments and humiliations of the writing life. Lev: I&#8217;m going to start with the question that all interviews with you should start with: how the hell do you pronounce your name? Paolo: I have no idea. Bunch o&#8217;galoshes. that&#8217;s the best description I&#8217;ve heard. Yeah, it&#8217;s Paolo BATCH-i-ga-LOOP-ee. Lev: I&#8217;ve been doing it wrong all these years. Paolo: It&#8217;s &#8220;baci&#8221; as in &#8220;kiss,&#8221; so &#8220;kiss of the wolf&#8221; is the loose translation for it. Lev: Wow. That&#8217;s what your last name means? Paolo: That&#8217;s what my father tells me. Lev: Clumsy segue: Ship Breaker is your first YA novel. What was it like shifting audiences like that? Did you have to adjust? Paolo: What I was really thinking about was back when I was first getting into science fiction and stuff, when I had read all the Heinlein juveniles, and especially things like Citizen of the Galaxy, and how much I&#8217;d liked those and been completely absorbed by them. I was really trying to work from a model of what I&#8217;d read as  a child, and build a modernized version of this sort of high adventure, boy-who-learns-better sort of story, that I found so appealing. But mostly I sat down and said, I&#8217;m not going to write a boring story. And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. Don&#8217;t dick around too much in the weeds of, oh, gee, this character&#8217;s deep interiority or anything like that. Get it done and make this<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=47373&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/27/paolo-bacigalupi-this-is-what-it-takes-to-write-a-novel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Question: Are We Living In a New Golden Age for Fantasy?</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/10/question-are-we-living-in-a-new-golden-age-for-fantasy/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/10/question-are-we-living-in-a-new-golden-age-for-fantasy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fantasy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=44653</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Not long ago SFSignal asked a bunch of writers this question: what fantasy novel published in the last 10 years will stand the test of time? I was one of the writers they asked. I said things. Things like this: The past decade has been freakishly productive of fantasy masterpieces. I could pick half a dozen books, literally, which I think is actually pretty unusual in the history of the genre, or of any genre really. It&#8217;s a cluster. A classic cluster. I wrote that in the heat of the moment. But even now, in the coolth of this later moment, it still seems true to me. Think about it: you&#8217;re living in a time when fresh books by (among others, and in no particular order) Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Susanna Clarke, Catherynne Valente and George R.R. Martin can appear on bookstore shelves at any moment. I don&#8217;t remember previous decades being like this. I feel as though a Cambrian explosion of fantasy is happening. Maybe it&#8217;s all the Harry Potter money floating around, supercharging things like some kind of mutagenic cosmic radiation. Maybe a bunch of mommies and daddies gave each other big hugs and then gave birth to a statistically improbable number of geniuses all at the same time. Maybe it&#8217;s just that Tolkien and Lewis have been dead long enough that their specters aren&#8217;t intimidating and hogtying writers the way they once did. Who knows. Whatever the reason, it&#8217;s cool, and maybe we should acknowledge it: we are living in a new golden age for fantasy. Or platinum? Or an electrum age &#8212; that would be cool.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=44653&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/10/question-are-we-living-in-a-new-golden-age-for-fantasy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Video Game Dialogue that Haunts My Subconscious</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/07/what-video-game-dialogue-haunts-your-subconscious/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/07/what-video-game-dialogue-haunts-your-subconscious/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:02:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[xbox 360]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=43815</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Whenever I do something spectacularly stupid or self-defeating, which is about every 8 seconds or so, I hear a little voice in the back of my head that says &#8220;IDIOT!&#8221; It says it in this slow, growly voice, like a drunk leprechaun: ID-EE-YUT! This is because I have spent many aggregate months of my life playing Myth and Myth 2, which were real-time strategy games that Bungie did before Halo. They&#8217;re both truly great games, elegant and brutal, definitely in my top four or five all-time. One of the units you control in Myth are dwarves. They&#8217;re useless hand-to-hand, but they carried explosive satchel charges that they could set as mines or throw like grenades, comme ca: They&#8217;re crotchety little guys, and if you mis-handled your units and a dwarf took friendly fire (and it didn&#8217;t die instantly, because they were so insanely weak), the dwarf would get all indignant and say: ID-EE-YUT!!! I heard that a lot. And even though I haven&#8217;t played Myth for years I hear it still. And I hear other scraps from video games. Like whenever I hit my head I hear the unforgettable noise the prince makes in the old Mac game Beyond Dark Castle (you&#8217;ll find it below at 3:05): It made me wonder: what other lines of video game dialogue are kicking around in other people&#8217;s subconsciouses? (BTW the screenshot up top is from Myth III: The Wolf Age, which is only semi-canonical on account of it sucks, but it was a good image)<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=43815&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/09/07/what-video-game-dialogue-haunts-your-subconscious/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/news/gaming-culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>Your Wednesday Morning Chill-Out Video: MGMT, &#8220;Congratulations&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/25/your-wednesday-morning-chill-out-video-mgmt-congratulations/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/25/your-wednesday-morning-chill-out-video-mgmt-congratulations/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:22:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Web Video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[culture]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=41489</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Awl described it as The Sheltering Sky set on Tatooine. I would&#8217;ve gone more with Eraserhead. Either way I felt strangely compelled.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=41489&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Web Video</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/web-video-apps-web/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The 10 Tiny Details that Made Star Wars Matter</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/23/the-10-tiny-details-that-made-star-wars-matter-to-me/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/23/the-10-tiny-details-that-made-star-wars-matter-to-me/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:48:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[star wars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[star wars month]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=38441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The first time I saw Star Wars I was really freaking scared. I was 7 in the spring of 1977, and I had already been traumatized by Young Frankenstein. Yeah, I ended that one out in the lobby. So uppermost in my mind, as we drove out to the Burlington (Mass.) Mall Cinema, where Star Wars was playing, was whether or not I could gut out the whole thing. As it happened that turned out all right. Though it was touch and go for a while there in the trash compactor scene. The problem wasn&#8217;t staying in the theater, the problem was getting me out of it. It really wasn&#8217;t for the obvious reasons. I probably could not, at the age of 7, have explained to you what exactly Star Wars was about from a logical point of view. I don&#8217;t think I grasped the tactical importance of blowing up the Death Star, or what Princess Leia was a princess of. The big deal for me was the world. And the world-building in Star Wars happens at the edges of the screen as much as in the middle. It was in the tiny details. What sold me on the whole production was the idea that if you turned the camera around at Uncle Owen&#8217;s moisture farm on Tatooine, you wouldn&#8217;t see George Lucas and a bunch of key grips standing around in Tunisia. You&#8217;d see &#8230; more Tatooine. Here are 10 of those details View gallery on your mobile phone<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=38441&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/23/the-10-tiny-details-that-made-star-wars-matter-to-me/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/77c4d80ad85632f86f82b5709527fe7c?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
		</media:content>

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		<title>Meet Your New Pinball, Yo-Yo, and Pokemon World Champions</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/16/meet-your-new-pinball-yo-yo-and-pokemon-champions/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/16/meet-your-new-pinball-yo-yo-and-pokemon-champions/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:07:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pokemon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=40105</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Perhaps you, like me, did not know that there were champions of these things. Well you knew wrong. Dead wrong. Over the weekend the Professional/Amateur Pinball Association held its world championship in Scott Township, Pennyslvania. 406 players entered. They played Cheetah, Johnny Mnemonic (&#8216;better than the movie!&#8217; &#60;tm&#62;), Creature from the Black Lagoon, Family Guy, and The Addams Family. One man left with the championship: Keith Elwin, who also left with it the past two years. He scored 547,503,300 points on Creature from the Black Lagoon. Yeah, pretty good. Meanwhile, Jensen Kimmitt was winning the 2010 World Yo-Yo Contest in Orlando, Florida. I don&#8217;t often use the words &#8216;sick&#8217; and &#8216;yo-yo routine&#8217; and &#8216;Jensen&#8217; in the same sentence, but Jensen Kimmitt&#8217;s yo-yo routine was sick: Not being a technician here, but I would say that it&#8217;s at about 2:49 that his routine goes from chronically to terminally ill. Though I can do a round-the-world. Most of the time. Also, the 2010 Pokemon World Championships were this weekend in Hawaii. Yuta Komatsuda of Japan won the masters division of the trading card category. Ray Rizzo of the U.S. won the senior division of the video games I think next year they should hold all these in the same place, give somebody a chance to unify the championship in one grueling all-round event. We could call it an Adamantium Man triathlon.<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=40105&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/news/gaming-culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Singularity Is Coming; or No It Isn&#8217;t; or Wait Maybe It Is!</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/16/the-singularity-is-coming-or-no-it-isnt-or-wait-maybe-it-is/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/08/16/the-singularity-is-coming-or-no-it-isnt-or-wait-maybe-it-is/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=40013</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was in San Francisco this past weekend, covering the Singularity Summit. You probably know what the Singularity is. If I was 100% sure that you knew, I wouldn’t try to explain what it is. But a sliver of doubt remains, so here goes. Every once in a while human civilization reaches a moment when the rate of social and technological change accelerates non-linearly, and the whole business rapidly transforms so totally that life afterwards bears no resemblance to life before. Such moments are singularities. Canonical examples would include the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution. Some people think we’re approaching another one. The technologies that would bring about the next Singularity include nanotechnology, robotics, assorted biotechnologies, and especially artificial intelligence. One scenario would involve computers becoming so powerful that they become self-aware. At that point these artificial intelligences would take over their own evolution, driving technological innovation themselves. They would take over almost all white-collar work. We would merge with them, becoming far more powerful (if less human), as well as functionally immortal. Some people think this would be a good thing. Some people think it would be a bad thing. Some people think it’s total nonsense. I came here pretty skeptical about it. When you look at what has actually been achieved so far on the AI front, it&#8217;s all pretty primitive. But I can&#8217;t deny that my skepticism is being, if not assuaged, at least chipped away at and complicated. That Kurzweil, he has a lot of exponential growth curves on his side, and if Moore&#8217;s law holds for another 30 years, yeah, I  would at least agree that it&#8217;s very hard to predict what the world is going to look like once computing power has increased by a factor of a billion or so. And you talk to a guy who&#8217;s been breeding fruit flies for longevity for 30 years and studying the changes in their genome and figuring out how we could manipulate the human genome in similar ways &#8230; well, it&#8217;s good to<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=40013&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
		<media:content url="http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/77c4d80ad85632f86f82b5709527fe7c?s=96&#38;d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96&#38;r=G" medium="image">
			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con: Oh My God Shut Up About Comic-Con</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/26/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-oh-my-god-shut-up-about-comic-con/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/26/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-oh-my-god-shut-up-about-comic-con/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:00:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2010]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the guy who hates comic-con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=37257</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Closing arguments please. #1. A major test is coming up for Comic-Con. It will happen on August 13. The test is how Scott Pilgrim does at the box office. This time last year Kick-Ass was riding high. An edgy adaptation of an indie comic that basically won Comic-Con! (I know I was raving about it.) Can&#8217;t miss, right? But Kick-Ass cratered at the box office. If the same thing happens to Pilgrim (which I also loved), it will seriously damage the Hollywood fantasy that people at Comic-Con are Gladwellians influencers who will repay the marketing money the studios dump down their throats, tenfold. (More on Techland: Comic-Con: What It&#8217;s Really Like on the Convention Floor) If that marketing money dries up, it would not be a bad thing, for Comic-Con. I halfway hope it happens. It could. August is a real boneyard for releasing movies. And even in the boneyard, that weekend (August 13) is a bad one: Scott will run smack into The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love. On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim is really good. I want to see it again. And I never see movies twice. #2. Objects bought this year: &#8211; a little plushy Chibi-Totoro for my daughter &#8211; a Penny Arcade I Roll 20&#8242;s t-shirt, which I had long coveted &#8211; a Metric album, following their brief cameo in Scott Pilgrim. Note to self: next year, sack up and buy original comics art. (More on Techland: Comic-Con Wrap Up: Winners and Losers of This Year&#8217;s Con) #3. Nerd Altamont: it came closer to literally happening than I would have liked. #4. Comic-Con is hurting nerd culture, in a broad and systemic and probably permanent way. Nerd culture is a counter-culture, and counter-cultures can die; in fact if there&#8217;s one thing late-stage capitalism is good at, it&#8217;s co-opting and killing counter-cultures. Viz. punk, the 60&#8242;s, etc. Nerd culture could be the next punk. Every time I&#8217;m walking the floor of Comic-Con, and I see one of those dudes with drive-time DJ voices flogging plastic promotional objects at me, in the<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=37257&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con Has Left Comic-Con</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/24/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-has-left-comic-con/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/24/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-has-left-comic-con/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:40:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2010]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flynn's arcade]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the guy who hates comic-con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=36755</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I gotta go. Comic-Con will have to find some way to get by without me. The appropriate way to leave Comic-Con would be gripping the skid of a Huey as it lifts off from the roof of the San Diego convention center, Saigon-style. That option wasn&#8217;t available, though give it a few years. By then it&#8217;ll be a corporate-sponsored promotion, and the Huey will be advertising Scott Pilgrim V starring David Schwimmer. It&#8217;s important for people to leave Comic-Con. There are way too many people here as it is. A huge surge arrived Friday &#8212; it was the first day I really saw those classic black-hole-gridlock Comic-Con corridors. You know that show you saw an episode of one time on a plane and you thought it was pretty OK but nothing special &#8212; that show? The line for the panel on that show is an hour long. So instead of going to panels I hung out at the Random House booth for a bit, where I ran into, in sequence, Christopher Paolini (Eragon), Ann VanderMeer (Weird Tales, etc.) and Justin Cronin (The Passage). I wandered over to Artists&#8217; Alley to admire John Picacio&#8217;s stuff. I walked over to the panel for Super, with Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Liv Tyler and (audience favorite, and why not) Nathan Fillion. It was the one time I saw Hall H with no line. They screened footage of Wilson, in a home-made superhero costume, smacking a woman with a wrench. It was hard to say which side of edgy it was on. On my way back to my hotel, to get my stuff and go to the airport, I made a final stop: the fake 1980&#8242;s Flynn&#8217;s Arcade they&#8217;d set up to promote Tron: Legacy. They&#8217;d rounded up an incredible collection of vintage arcade games, including Centipede, Berserk, Robotron, Defender, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Arkanoid and (deep breath) Battle Zone. It was just like the arcades of my youth. Except I don&#8217;t remember there being quite so much Coke Zero around when I was kid. My<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=36755&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con, Part V: They Are Sex Bob-omb</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/23/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-part-v-they-are-sex-bob-omb/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/23/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-part-v-they-are-sex-bob-omb/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:44:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2010]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scott pilgrim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the guy who hates comic-con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=36600</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I saw Scott Pilgrim last night. Full disclosure, this took place in the context of some major-league cosseting. I mean, pampering on the level that makes you feel like you&#8217;re some kind of evil ancient god-emperor. First of all the Scott Pilgrim screening was a surprise screening, so just to begin with you get this climate of hysterical gratitude in the room. (OK, I knew about the screening ahead of time, but still.) It&#8217;s free, of course, as such screenings are, but it&#8217;s not just free. You walk in and are confronted with these like bales of free popcorn (=my dinner last night), accompanied by vast quantities of free water and soda. Then, because it takes a while to get everything set up, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala get up on stage and play a set for you. Then the director &#8212; Edgar Wright, the guy who made Shaun of the Dead &#8212; gets upon stage and personally introduces the movie for you. He also reassures you that, should these tributes be insufficient, if you merely remain where you are after the movie, Metric will play a live show for you right there in the theater. These factors are what in a courtroom would be called prejudicial. So I want to get them on the record before I disclose that I thought the movie was beautiful. It&#8217;s not quite like the books. Michael Cera plays Pilgrim as a bit more of a floppy emo-boy than he is in the comics. But Cera is always extremely likeable, whatever he&#8217;s doing. And the secondary performances are almost eerily perfect, especially the world-weary Kieran Culkin as the gay roommate Wallace, Ellen Wong (unwinkingly over the top) as Knives Chau, Anna Kendrick as Scott&#8217;s sister (I suppose we have to be grateful to Twilight for her now?), and, amazingly, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona, who&#8217;s supposed to be so mysteriously alluring that you can&#8217;t imagine any actress living up to her, except Winstead kind of does. (And a special shout-out to Satya Bhabha,<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=36600&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con Goes to Comic-Con, Part IV: Adam Warlock Is Dead</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/22/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-goes-to-comic-con-part-iv-adam-warlock-is-dead/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/22/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-goes-to-comic-con-part-iv-adam-warlock-is-dead/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comic-Con 2010]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the guy who hates comic-con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=36472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve spent the entire day so far in panels. I present to you my scattered impressions: The Power of Myth On it: Amber Benson, Esther Friesner, Thomas Greanias, me, Les Klinger, Seanan McGuire, Michael Scott, and Thomas Sniegoski The take-away: Michael Scott, the Nicholas Flamel guy, knows a lot about myth. And has a dreamy Oirish accent. Amber Benson (Tara on Buffy, plus she wrote the Calliope Reaper-Jones Novels) is really smart, in addition to being kind to fawning fanboys (please don&#8217;t ask me how I know this). Actually this panel, despite its slightly vague title, was intensely wonderful. Mythology is really weird, and fantasy writers have interesting ideas about it &#8212; we revere it, but also we pillage it and steal from it and desecrate it. (More on Techland: The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con, Part III: Stormtrooper House Party) Sci-Fi That Will Change Your Life On it: Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Lou Anders, Meredith Woerner, Cyriaque Lamar, Marc Bernardin, Bonnie Burton, Douglas Wolk The take-away: Lots of good things came out last year! Including Dash Shaw&#8217;s Bodyworld, Warren Ellis&#8217;s Freakangels, and Paolo Bacigalupi&#8217;s The Windup Girl. Also some people like Chuck. (More on Techland: The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con, Part II: Hope Kills) Once Upon a Time: Fantasy authors discuss whether Epic Fantasy requires bigger-than-life heroes and heroines. On it: Lynn Flewelling, Christopher Paolini, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Megan Whalen Turner and Brent Weeks The take-away: Making your hero a Mary Sue is not necessarily a bad thing. Prophecies and Chosen Ones are fine as far as they go, but they raise serious plotting problems. It&#8217;s fine to make up a language, but unless you&#8217;re an actual philologist like Tolkien, be careful. Adds Paolini, &#8220;apostrophes are really fun!&#8221; I knew Rothfuss was hilarious, but I&#8217;d totally forgotten how funny Paolini is in person. (More on Techland: The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con Goes to Comic-Con, Part I) The Visionaries On it: J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon The take-away: I&#8217;m sitting in this now, and it&#8217;s not over, but so<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=36472&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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		<title>The Guy Who Hates Comic-Con, Part III: Stormtrooper House Party</title>
		<link>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/22/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-part-iii-stormtrooper-house-party/</link>
		<comments>http://techland.time.com/2010/07/22/the-guy-who-hates-comic-con-part-iii-stormtrooper-house-party/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:37:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Lev Grossman</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Gaming & Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comic-con]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the guy who hates comic-con]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://techland.com/?p=36330</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s Thursday morning, the morning of the first day of actual programming at Comic-Con, and the atmosphere is approximately the same as right before the fiesta starts in Hemingway&#8217;s The Sun Also Rises. At least nobody&#8217;s getting their genitals shot off here. As far as we know. The preview night last night was really nice for about an hour, which is all the time you can spend on the exhibition floor before you have to take a saving throw vs. madness. If you looked really carefully, in between the giant gleaming metal Transformers, and the giant gleaming throne of Asgard, and the giant gleaming Tron light cycle, you could see tiny scurrying forms. These tiny scurrying forms were artists, who were at Comic-Con with their art, and much of it was amazing. So that was good. This morning I&#8217;m on a panel myself, which is pretty much why I&#8217;m here. (It&#8217;s on here somewhere.) The small panels at Comic-Con are great. Great writers come to be on them (Patrick Rothfuss, China Mieville, Naomi Novik, Scott Westerfeld, and others I&#8217;m forgetting right now are all here.) The rooms are always full (partly because it&#8217;s impossible to get into anything else, but partly because people here care passionately about fantasy and science fiction). The conversations are fascinating. Even I lack the power to bitch about it. I wish that were more the focus of the Con. I&#8217;m going to stick to the panels as much as possible today. But I will decloak long enough to go see Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams talk onstage, and then tonight I will plunge directly into the fires of promotional hell to see a screening of Scott Pilgrim. Don&#8217;t let me down Scott. (I was going to interview Robert Rodriguez for Machete, too. But his people bailed.) Which will be followed by an absolutely mental event celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back. As far as I can tell in advance this will consist of trying to make eye contact with celebrities while people<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=techland.time.com&#038;blog=5290478&#038;post=36330&#038;subd=timenerdworld&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	<primary_category>Gaming &amp; Culture</primary_category><primary_category_link>http://techland.time.com/category/apps-web/gaming-%c2%a0culture/</primary_category_link>
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			<media:title type="html">leverus</media:title>
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