Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.

If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.

*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.

The Links

  • Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
  • Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
  • WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses. [Edit: Amazon’s forums have been shut down.]
  • I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
  • Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
  • Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)

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Spotted on the Dynamite forums: Amazon has New Spring: The Graphic Novel available for preorder, with a release date of January 18, 2011.

They’re using the cover from the prose novel in the listing, which I assume means Tor hasn’t submitted a cover yet. I’d say the cover from issue #1 of the comic book (shown here) would work just fine.

It’s taken a long time (and three publishers) to complete this adaptation of the Wheel of Time prequel, even though it only covered eight standard-sized comic books. (Check out the New Spring-tagged posts here for the whole story.) I’m sure Tor Publishing was frustrated, since they couldn’t actually release the collection until the individual chapters were complete, and Robert Jordan was extremely frustrated with the situation.

The same studio has also started adapting the main series. The third issue of Eye of the World arrived in stores earlier this week. According to this post, the original plan was for Eye of the World to cover roughly 36 issues, to be collected in six volumes. Just for book one.

Dynamite has been good at keeping the comics on schedule since they relaunched a few months ago, but at that pace, even if they never miss a month, it’ll take 42 years to adapt the whole series!

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If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw a turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.

In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!

Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…

Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.

Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.

Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?

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Remember the Battlestar Galactica cake? For last night’s LOST finale, Katie made an authentic DHARMA Initiative chocolate cake, and pizzas with the Swan and Orchid logos.

The cake is chocolate, with homemade buttercream icing (vanilla for the background, chocolate for the design). The pizzas have an outer ring of sausage, with bell pepper strips for the I Ching. The Swan logo is cut from a bell pepper. The Orchid is cut from a tomato, and placed on the pizza after baking.

For more views, including in-progress pictures, close-ups, and making-of commentary, check out the LOST finale food photos on Flickr.

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The latest seasonal beer at Oggi’s* is The Schwartz, a Belgian IPA. And just in case the “May the Schwartz Be With You” tagline wasn’t clear enough…well, check out the poster:

Sorry about the image quality. I wasn’t sampling the brew, it’s just the phone camera in low lighting.

*Oggi’s (pronounced OH-jeez) is a chain of pizza & brewery restaurants in Southern California, mostly in San Diego and Orange County.