The Hunger Games, With Beanie Babies!

Maurice Sendak RULES!

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

A List For Lovers

111 Male Characters Of British Literature, In Order Of Bangability

Lots of The Lord of the Rings characters in the top 25.

There's also this:

68. Peter Pan (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up)

Yeah...

Tyrion Lannister...

...the true hero of the books.

The Great Gatsby NES Game!

Just, just click. It's spectacular.

Oh, NO! NOOOOOOO!

[Last spring] Warner Brothers had picked up the rights to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos series of sci-fi books. It looks like they've found their director - Scott Derrickson of The Day the Earth Stood Still most recently.

You bet your ass that's my emphasis.

The short article.

Why couldn't it have been an eight to twelve hour miniseries on HBO covering all the books?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Trailer

It's based on a comic/novel series meant for 8- to 12-year olds (I assume) that I probably enjoy too much and the movie, at least based on this trailer, looks pretty promising.

"'That was its fate,' he explained."

From the blog of Paul Pope, where you'll find the rest of the page:

I wanted to try applying the lessons learned from the Wednesday Comics experience to a different subject ... I find that with the format of Wednesday Comics ..., one must condense the plot and action to the briefest yet most vivid bursts of information available ... The Wednesday Comics single page format forces the artist to create a story unit which may well be part of a larger storyline, however it still must be able to stand alone.

And no, I don't think there's going to be an awesome Dune comic written and drawn by Mr. Pope, although I wish there were.

Via Blog@Newsarama

For those of us who still care...

The newest Wheel of Time book, The Gathering Storm, will be released, in the US and Canada, on October 27 this year.

Also, there's a review of the book up over at Dragonmount, with minor, very minor, spoilers.

Oh, and Brandon Sanderson understands your frustration.

Now's the time to choose. Do you go back and reread the series? Do you just reread the last one? Do you buy the new one and go with it? Or do you just say fuck it and read the spoilers a week after the release?

Me? I'll be starting Eye of the World when I get to my apartment this evening, but I'm a masochist when it comes to books I've enjoyed.

TV Tropes

I've been looking through TV Tropes for a while now and just assumed that I found it because one of the others posted it here. Couldn't find it when I searched, though. Enjoy.

From the first page:

What is this about? This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

Some entries I've enjoyed:
Straw Vulcan
Dan Browned
Mac Guffin
No Such Thing As Wizard Jesus

Trailer

Where the Wild Things Are trailer

They're not allowing embedding and I really don't want to go searching for an embeddable version.

1984

Oh, the beautiful irony!

A-Z of Awesomeness

Neill Cameron, of Neill's Blog, is working his way through the alphabet:

I have been feeling the need lately to just draw some stuff that is fun, for my own amusement. And so I am going to spend the next month doing just that: drawing STUFF that is AWESOME. And the best part is - you get to tell me what.

This is - patently - inspired by Garen's A-Z of Comic Strip Characters from last year, because.. well, because that was fantastic and looked like a lot of fun to do. I'm widening the remit for my attempt, from comic strips to the wider world of pop cultural entertainment. You may suggest characters from film, animation, TV, literature... anything, really, so long as it is AWESOME.

To keep up to date check out A-Z of Awesomeness.

Here's today's picture:


Edit@3:45PM: It's Mr. Whedon's birthday, too!

Where are the Wild Things?

"giant yellow eyes" by Clay Sisk

About Terrible Yellow Eyes:

What I've wanted to do for sometime is make a collection of paintings inspired by Where the Wild Things Are as a tribute and celebration of the book. And now with the release of the film later in the year, the world of Wild Things has opened even wider.

My goal for this project is really just that, expressing of my love for the story. None of the art has been done for any profit but has all been created out of admiration for Maurice Sendak and Where the Wild Things Are.

Over the coming weeks and months I'll display a growing collection of works created by invited contributing artists and myself. We share a love and admiration for Sendak's work and the pieces we present here are done as a tribute to his life and legacy.

Simply put, like a visual love letter to the book, with Terrible Yellow Eyes I am seeking to celebrate and promote the original masterwork by Maurice Sendak in the best way I know how -- with pictures.

Via Robot 6

The Blockbutster Event of the Summer!

Read the story!

Who Watches the Mr. Men?

Plenty more Mr. Men mash-ups at Steven Anderson's Flickr account.

Found at Robot 6.

The Ballad of Kevin McUgly

Here's the link.

Still, It's Upsetting

The Amazon thing I posted about was an error:

Amazon managers found that an employee who happened to work in France had filled out a field incorrectly and more than 50,000 items got flipped over to be flagged as "adult," the source said. (Technically, the flag for adult content was flipped from 'false' to 'true.')

"It's no big policy change, just some field that's been around forever filled out incorrectly," the source said.

Some questions were answered here:

Q: Was the problem with a French programmer? Can you illuminate what you think happened?

Daisey: Someone was editing the category systems inside of Amazon.fr, made an error, and that system is global, so it propagated everywhere. I have no insight as to anyone's nationality, or whether it was a language gap, or anything of that nature.

As one who helped to blow it more out of proportion, sorry. Still, to know that one employee making a mistake (or a "mistake") can effect thousands of titles is disturbing.

To Amazon or Not to Amazon

Looks like Amazon is discriminating against GLBT material when it comes to their ranking lists.

Authors such as Jaci Burton, Maya Banks, Larissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler have reported that since being stripped of their sales rankings, their titles are no longer found in searches on Amazon.com. MetaWriter is also compiling a list of titles that have been stripped of their sales rank.

When pressed for a reason, Amazon.com’s customer service department told YA author Mark Probst:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

There's an ever growing list of books at Meta Writer of books not listed.

BeaukoupKevin wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, on his blog.

Me, I'm seriously disappointed in Amazon, but I'm sure the paltry amount of money I spend there wouldn't even be missed. Still, I won't be ordering from them for a while.

DAMNIT!

According to a press release [March 31st] from Tor/Forge Publicity Manager Dot Lin, the details are set for the final, posthumous book in Robert Jordan’s bestselling Wheel Of Time fantasy series. One of the big revelations: that last "book" [A Memory of Light] is being split into three volumes.

The rest is at AV Club.

EDIT: From Brandon Sanderson's (the guy who took over after Jordan's death) blog:

April 2008. I had to make a decision. I realized that the book would be impossible to do in 200k. I'd begun to say on my blog that it would be at least 400k, but even that seemed a stretch. I looked over the outlines, both mine and Mr. Jordan's. I stared at them for a long time, thinking about the book. And this is where the first decision came in. Did I try to cram it into 400k? Or did I let it burgeon larger?

To get this into one book, I'd need to railroad the story from climax to climax. I'd have to ignore a lot of the smaller characters--and even some aspects of the larger characters. I just couldn't justify that. It wouldn't do the story justice. I cringed to consider what I would have to cut or ignore.