The press release from Scholastic apparated (unsplinched) in my inbox this morning at 7:00 precisely: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published on July 21 of this year. There’s a good summary of what’s known about the book, and the outstanding plotlines left to be resolved, in Wikipedia.
I figured as much. She’s always …
And went to this commercial shoot that her friend’s dad was doing for Apple, now she’s sort of famous. Meet switcherette Ellen Feiss all over again. (Attorney’s note: Feiss was definitely not high for that shoot. No way.)
In other Apple news, whoever writes the genuinely funny blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is claiming that legal …
In an oddly ultra-soft launch, Amazon appears to have silently begotten a wiki entirely devoted to product reviews entitled Amapedia. This seems to me like a basically good (or at least non-evil, in the Googlian sense) idea. I just wonder a) how they’re going to keep corporations from exploiting it with fake reviews (though I suppose …
Matthew Polly’s new book American Shaolin comes with this memorable epigraph from Snow Crash, which I can’t quite transcribe verbatim on Time’s website:
Until a man is 25, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf____er in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in
…
Is that meme funny again yet? No? OK.
I had a visit from the Chumby people today. The Chumby is a little gadget that’s supposed to live in your couch or your kitchen or your bedside table — I’m thinking of it as a clock radio replacement right now. It’s soft and squishy and talks to the Net and runs widgets: weather, music, pictures, …
I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire is going to be an HBO mini-series. Not that it’s up to me. HBO has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of creating quality content, one example of which is Rome, which I sometimes watch, and one of the Rome producers is working on the Martin project. …
Probably most of you are aware that the World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade came out at midnight two nights ago. It raises the maximum possible level from 60 to 70. The first character to max out the new level cap hit it this morning at 4:04 AM. Dude is Gawell, a gnome mage, who is played by a 24-year-old French guy. There’s …
I’m writing this on a train heading north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco for MacWorld. Doing a little amateur war-driving on the way. Distinct lack of creativity hereabouts vis-a-vis naming WiFi networks — “linksys” and “NETGEAR” and “default” all the way. Somebody should get right on that.
Great piece here about the decline of …
(Continuing Nerd World’s look at the year ahead in nerd cinema…)
May 4th. Spider-Man 3. By and large I believe that Sam Raimi is not the enemy. He’s got lifetime nerd cred from the whole Evil Dead thing, and there are some remarkably good things in the Spidey movies. And nice to see James “Flyboys” Franco still working. (Also, judging …
Last year just wasn’t a very nerd-friendly year at the box office. Like scavengers, we took our pleasures where we found them, and they were scarce–X3, Superman Returns, Scanner Darkly. I thought after the success of Lord of the Rings nerds would be aggressively pandered to, the way Hollywood pandered to 13-year-old girls after Titanic. …
This post began life as my “About the Author” blurb. It was supposed to give people a sense of the scope and focus of this blog, and maybe warn them in advance about my various biases and predilections. But then, as John Ronald Reuel would say, the tale grew in the telling, until it was too big to fit in that little box. It’s raw and …
