As it happens I’m hard at work on a large-ish story about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so it hasn’t escaped my attention that some hacker somewhere is claiming that he grabbed a copy of the book off a Scholastic computer and posted information about the ending.
Coupla things to say about this. One, it’s surprising in a way that …
Disclaimer: Volunteers will not actually participate in a space mission to Mars. Instead they will be confined for 17 months in “a series of interlocked modules in an research institute in Moscow.” The point being to study the psychological stresses that would result from an actual mission to Mars.
The European Space Agency is looking …
1. Man-Witch. Jack Black plays a teacher who discovers he has magical abilities. He then has to join a coven and go to magic school with a bunch of girly-witches. There is nothing about this concept that I don’t like. Nothing. IMDB has this as 2009.
2. The Homestar Runner Movie. Don’t misunderstand, there is nothing about the state of …
Earlier this year, for a story I never ended up writing, I sank some time into watching Night Watch and then, later, its sequel Day Watch, two films that were colossal blockbusters in their native Russia. I mean, huge, industry-changing, all-time box-office record-setters. I’d been aware of their come-hither effects-heavy trailers for …
For my late Friday afternoon non-post, I bring you a link to the thing I wrote in Time’s print edition on touchscreens and why they are the future. Yes, it’s mostly an excuse to run a big picture of the iPhone, but it also brings in Microsoft’s new Surface Computing initiative, which may — I actually believe this — in the long run be …
(You see what I did with that subject line — it’s like the movie itself has been snatched and remade as an emotionless alien version of itself. So meta. These are the dividends that you, the reader, reap from my three years in grad school.)
For me the 1970’s-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the primal SF horror movie experience. …
Earlier this week I got a copy of the hardcover collection Marvel Zombies, and I have to admit, I’m deeply impressed. With all the corporate ass-covering that goes on in the media world, what other company would be willing to take its flagship intellectual properties, several of which are the basis of forthcoming mega-budget movies — …
I wasn’t at Jobs’s keynote yesterday, but I was interested to hear that John Carmack was there, showing off his new technology. Carmack is the guy who pretty much invented the first-person shooter — Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Doom again — the technical side of it anyway, and he’s still at the top of his game. So to speak. And it’s been …
Last weekend the display onmy phone up and died. It’s not a proper snow crash, since my brain-stem hasn’t been hacked with an ancient Sumerican code, but just about. I did not mourn, since I’m not all that fond of my phone, but it’s definitely an annoyance. It’s still a phone, it still makes and receives calls, but I can’t see who’s …
I’m going to post a lengthy excerpt here from the conversation I had with Bill Gates earlier this week, because, well, I have so much of it, and it kind of works as this wonderfully absorbing dramatic monologue about where Microsoft came from. This is him essentially telling the story of how he and Paul Allen figured out that writing …
Trailer’s up for I Am Legend. It’s a last-man-on-earth story, based on a science fiction novel I’ve never read (anybody?) I believe Will Smith plays the sole survivor of some kind of nuclear catastrophe — the Brooklyn Bridge bites it in the trailer, anyway, the victim of an air-to-surface missile attack. Smith does lots of chin-ups …
I don’t generally like to work when I’m on vacation. I like to vacation when I’m on vacation. But I got an e-mail last week saying that Bill Gates was thinking about doing some press around his Harvard Commencement address today, and whenever there’s a chance to talk to Gates, I take it. Hence my getting on a plane to Seattle on …
