Misc

I am not among the earthly elect who subscribe to HBO (nor for that matter am I among that somewhat larger elite class who own a TV) but these days video content is leaking messily all over the Internet, which is how I caught the first episode of Flight of the Conchords this weekend. The premise: a nerdy folk-singing duo from New Zealand …

They’ve released a little video to announced the start of shooting on Indiana Jones 4. Not a lot of meat to it: no stars visible (that I recognized, anyway), just some drag racing with old-tymey classic cars, and Spielberg and Lucas standing around in the sun looking like the grizzled warhorses they are. The takeaway: making movies sure …

I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t really believe in the myth of the spoiler — the idea that knowing how something ends takes all the fun out of it. But I do hate it when I’m reading something and I can’t remember how it began. And now that the Deathly Hallows — whatever they are — are hard upon us, I find myself thinking: how long has …

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 …

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. …

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 …