ellestra | Entries tagged with news

The one good thing about CW shows killing many cool secondary characters is watching the actors go for better things.

I was very happy to learn Tracy Ifeachor is going to be on new ABC show Spark (since it's only been written about on Deadline and for some reason Livejournal hates that site and flags any link to it as spam you have to just believe me - or replace @ with a in this url http://de@dline.com/2016/02/tracy-ifeachor-cast-abc-pilot-spark-brianne-howey-the-exorcist-1201708583/). But there is finally a little more known about the show and io9 picked up the story so I can link to that. The lead will be played by Antonia Thomas (Misfits) and the show is to be set in alternate Steampunk universe.

Set in an alternate history where gas and coal fuel the world, the drama centers on the battle for power between two rival families and a rebellious young woman with a spark of invention that could level both their empires.
...the drama centers on the battle for power between two rival families and Pin (Thomas), a rebellious young woman with a spark of invention that could level both their empires. Thomas’ Pin is the smart, driven, fiercely independent young woman whose mission it is to bring back electricity to the masses no matter the cost.

Lincoln is still alive but Ricky Whittle has been announced to be the lead on Starz's adaptation of American Gods so his death can't be far off (it seems like the actor actually quit because he was fed up of being sidelined to 5 seconds in prison every 2 episodes and disagreements with the producer). Ian McShane has been cast as Mr. Wednesday. He was pretty popular fan choice and I can see his Kings character when I think about this.

In more news about British actors finding work - Finn Jones, the guy who plays Loras on Game of Thrones, has been cast as Danny Rand the title character in Iron Fist. This of course means a great disappointment to everyone who hoped they would change his race. Hard not to agree - it's not like MCU has a shortage of white guys from all over the English speaking world so one less wouldn't make a difference. On the other hand, while there are some Asian women in MCU the only male, non-evil one is also an alien. Marvel seems to want to placate fans by adding supporting characters some of whom are Asian. Also Mike Colter has announced the premier date for Luke Cage - it's coming to Netflix on September 30. Daredevil is of course dropping this Friday.

Back home the heat wave is just ending (36C!) and school begins and I'm making an aggregation post again.

There were some good news today. Syfy just announced that both Dark Matter and Killjoys are getting renewed for another season. And The Dome is finally being put out of its misery.

And Tatiana Maslany is being linked to another Star Wars leading role -this time in Episode VIII. (Along with some other awesome people.)

Some interesting changes - like Google making most radical change in their logo since last century (it's sans-serif now and G has multiple colours).

And if you want to get angry (or depressed) Anita Sarkeesian released another Tropes vs Women in Video Games video and it's Women as Reward this time (reminds me when I unwisely tried to see how Falling Skies ended and wanted to throw something at TV).

And if you want to get really sad - Terry Pratchett's last book has been released today in US (it's been out in UK and Commonwealth since last Thursday). The Shepherd's Crown is part of Tiffany Aching series. The final glance at Discworld before the glass ball becomes completely opaque.

So this is the time we learn who lives and who dies and what is coming next.

Orphan Black has already been renewed for another season. No long wait this time. CBS renewed Person of Interest, Elementary and The Good Wife (along with lots of other unimportant stuff) which means that (with all the ABC picks) I got to keep everything I wanted. CW kept everything except for Heart of Dixie and Messengers (you know that show about angels that only started a second ago and already crashed - it wasn't horrible but had problem with pacing and explaining what it was about). Also cancelled - Constantine but there is a large campaign already to save it and it has some famous backers. The full list is here.

And then there are trailers and descriptions for the new series coming next autumn. They seem to show a certain pattern. There will be Lucifer based on another DC comic book but mostly rewritten into another crime procedural with supernatural twist. Then there is Minority Report that also has a a guy with special powers pairing with female cop but this time it's in the future and so the precogs are science fiction. (Fox trying for another Sleepy Hollow?). And then there is The Frankenstein Code about man brought back to life trying solve his own murder (and many others I assume). They don't look bad (especially the Minority Report one) but I predict neither will last. It's Fox after all. NBC tries this in search for another The Blacklist. With much less genre but they have Jaimie Alexander. In Blindspot she is amnesiac woman with the tattoos pointing at dangerous crimes and a lot of special skills (fighting, languages). Looks like another superhuman on her resume (not a bad type casting). I just feel bad for her all her make-up hours. Also coming to NBC is a restart (?) of Heroes - Heroes Reborn and a new end of the world comedy that actually sounds pretty fun - You, Me And The End Of The World. And speaking of old series coming back - The X-Files miniseries got airing date. CBS will make shows based on Limitless and Rush Hour (they are digging deep into movies this year to make a police procedural, don't they) and try another shot at angels in comedy form this time - Angel From Hell. Lets see if that one will survive.

If you just want to watch all of those trailer in one place:

The winner of this year Clarke Award has been announced. The award goes to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Somewhere out there Puppies are very Sad now.

So Syfy is really getting into the whole science fiction thing. There are already many new series coming and a lot of them are adaptations of popular book series (serieses?) but the newest one is true classic. Along with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment they plan to adapt Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a miniseries.

Large parts of Internets are hyperventilating because Martin Freeman has been cast in Captain America: The Civil War. No one knows who he will play but the most prevalent hypothesis (aside from Spiderman) is that he will be set up as a foe for Dr. Strange. Or people just want to see him share the screen with Cumberbatch again.

In more good news CBS as officially ordered Supergirl to series and iZombie got renewed for second season.

Here's the preview for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and we finally know the release dates - on 17th of May in UK and on June 13 in US.

If you are in Europe or Siberia I hope you remember there will be a solar eclipse visible tomorrow (well today by your time). Some of it will also be visible from Northern Africa and some other parts of Asia but it'll only cover less then 40% of the Sun there. It won't be total in Europe either - the totality is moving over the Arctic Ocean but the further North you live the more of the Sun will disappear. The only people who will see total eclipse are the ones living on the Faroe Islands and Svalbard. In Iceland, Greenland, Scotland, Ireland and Norway more than 90% of the Sun will be covered. In Poland it'll be about 70%. There is only 6 hours left until it starts in Poland so I hope you are ready (I mean you are probably asleep now but you should be already prepared anyway - next one so big will be in 2026).

We no longer fear it and people are more excited than anything when eclipses happened but the rise of solar energy gave media new reason to panic. It's been fun reading all those predictions of power failures, especially in Germany (7% - 18% of power in Germany comes from the Sun). It's not like they didn't had plenty of time to prepare - eclipses doesn't come by surprise. But it's fun to see the press get all worked up about it.

I'm still unable to express my feelings, although I'm sure there is a meaning of Arghh! that encapsulates them perfectly so here are other people's thoughts and tributes:

Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing, Telegraph, io9, The Mary Sue, Wired, New Scientist, quotes from the books on Buzzfeed and tor.com - both the obituary and Jo Walton's reminiscence. All the guardian stuff including the main post, tributes, photos, obituary and Andrew Brown's reminiscence. Independent mentions his sword (that he made - from meteorite - after knighted because, obviously, knights should have swords).

Here is the link to the donation campaign in his name for The Research Institute for the Care of Older People.

Neil Gaiman talking about Terry Pratchett just a few days ago

If you are in US you can watch the pilot of Powers for free.

It's kind of cute and has some interesting ideas and I liked the two main characters and both villains but is also repetitive and a little disjointed.I loved the use of teleportation, Wolfe containment, the way Walker uses his former status to get what he wants while missing it, the wannabe culture and everything about Deena. I hated the constant repeating of the whole "did we mention he was Diamond, do you know he lost his power, I hope you haven't forgotten he used to have powers - we only said it 20 times already" but they didn't even get to being sure there was a murder (Olympia - might've died from old age). Still I think I liked it more than Gotham pilot so probably the biggest problem is that most people won't even know where to find it. Playstation. Really? Is anyone rally going to pay for that?

I've never heard about the original show but the reboot of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl as a webseries with Grace Helbig and Hanna Hart looks awesome. At least the costumes do.

And Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillon are trying make a webseries called Conman. Alan Tudyk's description:

It's about the convention world. My character, Wray Nerely, was on a science fiction show called Spectrum, that was canceled too soon, and now he goes to conventions, to sign head shots, and meet fans, and do panels. Nathan’s character, Jack Moore, who was the captain of the spaceship on Spectrum, has gone on to incredible action-hero stardom, like Matt Damon. My character is frustrated with his situation and frustrated by Jack’s stardom. We follow Wray’s story as he goes to the conventions and does video game voiceovers and we are going to populate it with sci-fi actors and people that you will find at conventions. Zany hi-jinks ensue!

It's already has more then double of what they asked for on indiegogo but you can still help fund it - it has 30 more days to go.

Yesterday snow mostly melted by the afternoon but don't worry a brand, new snowstorm is here. The forecast varied between apocalyptic - 6 hours of freezing rain to just bad - heavy snow storm with 3-10 inch accumulation (that's 8 - 25 cm). Right now it's beautiful perfect winter wonderland. Someone even put their Christmas lights back on. I was out taking photos until snowploughs destroyed my perfect landscape.

In none weather related news. Orphan Black season 3 will premiere on all AMC Networks channels at the same time (remember they now co-own BBC America). I'm not suer if anything but AMC is really more exposure but it's nice to know they appreciate the show.

Nebula nominated stories you can read on tor.com.

The awesome Power Rangers fan film with Katee Sackoff and James Van Der Beek. It's better quality that the whole show. Watch it before the gets taken down.

And it's gone.

The biggest story right now of course is Spiderman joining MCU. This makes everyone excited at the thought of having all Marvel properties back together but it's very unlikely for X-Men. X_men have bottomless supply of characters and are basically universe on their own. Spiderman despite being popular is just one character. All the plans to make him into a shared universe were always ridiculous. And universe is where it's at right now. The strength of MCU is that the movies create positive feedback for one another. Because even though each movie is separate it enhances the experience to see them all and getting all the story. Like Thor fed into Captain America:TFA and both of them set up Avengers and then avengers set up the Thor 2 and Cap 2. It's all connected and that enhances the experience. And now Spiderman gets to have some of that and Sony gets to cash in on it. But I wish they didn't just reboot Spiderman again. It's getting tiresome.

Ian Cameron Esslemont is going to write a trilogy about the rise of Malazan Empire. The first book is to be called Dancer's Lament and is to be set before Malazan Empire. So maybe this will be about how Dancer met Kellanved and about their time at that tavern on Malaz where it all started. And how the family was formed.

Here's a short clip from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

And here's a new teaser for season 3 of Orphan Black

2014 was not a happy year in the world. Climate change lead to another warmest year on record - and weird weather patterns from very warm winter in Europe (and melting Olympics) and record heat waves in Australia (50 ^oC!) to severe drought in California, South Africa, China and Brazil, extreme floods in Africa, Indian subcontinent and Europe and cold eastern part of North America. Let's hope the food shortages are not going to be too bad.

The anti-vaccine movement has achieved giving us vaccination related deaths when the lack of vaccinations has led to resurgence of almost forgotten diseases. And the Ebola outbreak is still going on in West Africa and people are still dying (even thought it stopped being on the news now that no Westerners are sick). And still even more people die from flu and malaria every year.

And then there was all the things we did to each other. From the nightmare fuel of ISIL and Boko Haram to Vladimir Putin's using Hiler's tactics and excuses for territory grab. The racial tensions in US and Brazilian protests against World Cup corruption (and FIFA washing their hands of slavery and death in Quatar and proving to everyone that they are the pit of corruption and evil). The internets full of misogyny (both stolen pictures and Gamergate). It's sometimes hard to believe all the kinds of evil people will do to others and then explain it as just and necessary and for the greater good even when you see it happening in front of your eyes. Do Boko Haram and ISIL leaders really believe "god" wants them to kill and rape kids? Was the "defending" of ethnic Russian's in Ukraine worth them dying in war torn land and the economic collapse of your country? What kind of denial makes killing unarmed people justified? Or threatening someone with death and rape just because they said/wrote something you didn't agree with? Or ignoring death and suffering just so you don't have to admit you were wrong? I'm not even going to link any of that because it's already too depressing and I haven't even mentioned the random terror attacks, shootings and Bill Cosby.

And, of course, my cat died so I can't even find respite in my personal life.

There were some good stories - especially Malala one of hope and bravery - but this has been a bad year. I hope next one will be better.

Laika, the stop-motion film production studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls, have announced their next project is going to be Kubo and the Two Strings - a story based on folktales and mythology. There is only a poster so far but it looks so beautiful.

The rumour proved true and Benedict Cumberbatch is Dr. Strange. The internet went into the waves of excitement (because Sherlock) and disappointment (because so predictable and white). I'm staying out of this one. So now the only important casting left is Carol Danvers and I hope whoever they will chose the actress will be tall (which is why unlike the most of the fandom I prefer Tricia to Katee for the role).

Netflix is preparing four Marvel TV series - Daredevil, followed by Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Daredevil has already started filming and the first official stills are out showing his costume. It doesn't look bad. The next series is going to be the one with female superhero. Few weeks ago it was officially announced that Krysten Ritter will be playing Jessica Jones. Back then it was rumoured that Mike Colter was going to be Luke Cage and now it has been confirmed. He will appear in Jessica Jones series before getting his own. I didn't have any strong feelings about casting these either but I liked Krysten Ritter in everything I saw her in - drama and comedy - and I love Mike Colter's portrayal of Lemond Bishop in The Good Wife so I'm pretty happy with this.

In may Alien film will be 35 and to celebrate that Poster Posse asked artists to create art to celebrate the film. All the posters are beautiful but this one by Laurie Greasley is my favourite:

Jupiter Ascending opening has been moved to 6th February 2015. The trailers have been playing everywhere for a while already and it was scheduled for release in a little over a month from now so they must be really badly behind. The Wachowskis' weren't able to complete their work on more than 2,000 special effects shots in the film and get it ready for a July release especially internationally so I will have to wait have to wait for Guardians of the Galaxy for some space action.

And imdb.com has trailers for many of the new shows coming next season. Some are actually quite interesting. For example - I learned Hieroglyph will have vampires and John Rhys-Davies.

According to

grrm editor Anne Groell A Song of Ice and Fire might become an 8 book series (it was 6, then 7, and now 8). I had a feeling it was coming ever since the Feast for Crows/Dance of Dragons split barely moved the plot forward. It's suffering from WoT disease so won't be surprised if Brandon Sanderson writes the ending. At least the TV series will get an ending one way or the other. Probably with Dragons and Others taking the world with them during Mutually Assured Destruction event.

This the cover for the new sci-fi parody book from Steven Erikson - Willful Child - coming this November (he took a break from writing malazan to write this so the next book in Kharkanas trilogy will come the whole 2 years and 4 month after the first in January next year - it's like super slow for him). This and Interstellar almost make me feel excited about November.
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It's Towel Day today. I hope you all know where your towels are.

I just learned that general Jaruzelski died today. This made me feel weird as he is, for me connected to my early childhood memories. I was to young to care about politics when communism ended but old enough to remember it. So I remember liking going to 1st of May parades - I love them as we would go the whole family and then have ice cream (if it was hot) or sausages (if it was cold) after and they would give us stuff for free (hats, scarves, paper flowers and little flags - my favourite was blue with white dove on it). As I was from Warsaw we were in the big parade that walked by all the dignitaries. I remember Jaruzelski sitting there looking just like on TV with his sunglasses - my first ever celebrity spotting.

My friend (who is also Polish and here on post-doc) was run over by a car few days ago. She was on a bike and a guy decided to just drive into her. Her leg is broken and she's stuck at home. We learned that US medical care is not only overpriced but also lousy - the guy in urgent care wouldn't even wear gloves or clean her wound until she asked him to repeatedly. But she said the policemen were very nice. And even though she is stuck at home she finally has people visiting her at her flat. If only any of us understood how the whole insurance thing works... Everyone here keeps mentioning something about lawyers and that sounds scary.

But the really upsetting thing - at least to certain corners of the internet - is the fact that Edgar Wright and Marvel broke up and he's no longer the director of Ant-Man. I can't say I care either way but I always liked watching the fandom melt down over the smallest things (Quicksilver(s), Ben Affleck, Ben Affleck's Batman costume) like it's the end of the world.

Everyone is panicking and rightfully so because a really, really awful security bug was discovered. One that lets people get random fragments of data that supposed to be supper secure. It is as bad as everyone says and you can't do anything about it - it has to be fixed on the server sites by providers - and noone knows what data got out - the chunks that were caught were random so maybe they got your credit card numbers they might've contained passwords or even SSL private encryption keys and then you could get everything else. Or just grab so many of those chunks you got everything anyway. That's why they called it Heartbleed.

Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it.

"Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.

Half a million sites are vulnerable, including my own. Test your vulnerability here.

The bug has been patched. After you patch your systems, you have to get a new public/private key pair, update your SSL certificate, and then change every password that could potentially be affected.

At this point, the probability is close to one that every target has had its private keys extracted by multiple intelligence agencies. The real question is whether or not someone deliberately inserted this bug into OpenSSL, and has had two years of unfettered access to everything. My guess is accident, but I have no proof.

So to sum up not only you don't really know if you've been compromised (or where) you also cannot do anything about it. Just wait till it gets patched and change all your passwords. Again.

CNet checked the most popular American sites so you'll know which password you can change now.

The funny thing is I learned about it from xkcd (before all the big news outlets and official work emails).

Gotham TV show has cast it the kid Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (she looks eerily like Michelle Pfeiffer). The show is to be an origin story of Commissioner James Gordon but it seems like all the Batman iconic characters are going to be there so I wonder how long they'll manage to do it without mentioning the names.

There is a Santa origin story in the works and it has nothing to do with St. Nicholas the bishop. Winter Knight dark Viking-mythology-tinged origin story - basically The Hogfather but with more reindeer.

Speaking of winter warriors - there is a new trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Funny, how they love to name soldiers after winter when it's really bad time for war.

I was on a birthday party on Sunday and just looked at the winners before going to sleep. It was a big night for British cinema and I pretty happy about it (especially all the firsts) so here's something to celebrate with - the winner of the Best Animated Short Film:

As we move away for the year 2000 the predictions of end of the world are getting more and more rare. I remember the times when the end of the world happened almost every other week. Now it's been over a year since the last big one - the Mayan Apocalypse. But despair not - the Ragnarok is scheduled for tomorrow so go party like it's the Twilight of the Gods (or at least the Tea-Time). I'll be doing my shopping in case the world doesn't end and I need some food.

So now let's talk about things that will happen if the world doesn't end on this Saturday.

If the world stays around for another spin around the Sun "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy" will launch in 2015. This means including SF&F in the series that's features annual anthologies of the best American fiction and essays. Few more years of such acceptance and nobody will want to read SF&F too.

Terminator reboot has cast its Kyle Reese - Jai Courtney. So Sarah Connor played by a Brit and both John Connor and Kyle Reese by Australians. This makes Arnold the most American of the whole cast even if his accent is the least convincing.

The new Fantastic Four cast has been officially announced. Michel B. Jordan's Johnny Storm will be joined by Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Miles Teller as Reed Richards and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm. I was fine with the Jordan's casting as I think he was great in the Chronicle as a very similar character but these choices as a whole make it feel weird. They just look too young for Fantastic Four - especially Teller who looks even younger then he is and is supposed to play Reed. But maybe they have a really good story to go with this.

Like the coming Marvel movies. In addition to the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer Marvel also released character vignettes with the actors and some additional footage. That Gamora/Nebula fight looks pretty awesome (and Karen is really tall, isn't she? - BTW here she talks about that last scene and wigs).

They also released a new trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Bad news sell better and most of the good news is boring (who cares that billions of people haven't been murdered today?) so it's important to sometimes just look at the world and see it doesn't just go to hell. It also pretty steadily gets better. Just look at the progress we've made on death prevention, poverty, literacy, tolerance and stopping warfare in ThinkProgress' 5 Reasons Why 2013 Was The Best Year In Human History and Cracked's 5 Amazing Pieces of Good News Nobody Is Reporting.

Or you can watch John Green talk about how life got better for all of us in this video:

With all the news showing how much there is still to do and how much horrible things happen and how much inequality is still around us and how much we can still screw up the world it's easy to forget how much better the world we live in now is compared to what it used to be. I'm sitting here, well fed and worm despite minus temperatures outside with easy access to water, sewer and transportation. And internet. And even though, on the global scale, I'm one of the privileged I'm also one of the millions (hundreds of millions) who live life like that. This is an enormous progress and a lot of it happened very quickly. It sometimes hard to comprehend how much the world has changed in relatively short amount of time.

I'm not dead. I was just busy and tired and then I looked at the news and I that destroyed all my will to write. But it's the end of the first week of December now and it's time to change the month on my layout so here are some news.

The first photo showing confrontation between Sarah and Rachel Duncan and some of the information about the second season of Orphan Black has been shared during interview with the creators of the show. And the first trailer for the second season didn't show anything new but it let us know the show is coming back on 19th of April.

In film world they are casting new Sarah Connor in the Terminator remake (I'm starting to think there are meeting where the whole pitch for future film is "what haven't we remake yet?"). The most talked about choices are Emilia Clarke and Brie Larson but Tatiana Maslany's name also get mentioned. But what really got me was the news that there is also new Terminator TV series in development. It just made me so sad and angry because I still miss The Sarah Connor Chronicles and why can't we just have more of that? I know I didn't like the idea of T:TSCC and it turned out to be awesome so I probably shouldn't judge the show before I see it but I'm just so attached to the versions of characters from T:TSCC so much I can't imagine caring for the other incarnations as much. Also their exploration of AI sentience. I don't want to go back to just programmed to be good or evil robots. On the other hand this is produced by some of the same people who did T:TSCC so maybe it'll be all good.

Disney seems hellbent on owning every piece of our childhoods. And this time it's all the future adventures of Indiana Jones. Which means that there most likely will be future adventures of Indiana Jones which I don't mind per se, as I didn't hate The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as much as there rest of the Internets seems to, but I'm afraid that it'll just mean another reboot.

I know they did pretty well with what they got so far but we haven't seen any of the Lucasfilm properties yet and most of the rumours about Star Wars seems horrible. And Saving Mr. Banks is coming to remind us what horrible things they did to Mary Poppins (I love those books as a kid - read them over and over again). But then again they give us things like this:

This is how evil seduces you - it's just so much fun.

Swedish cinemas are to implement new rating for the movies. One that will inform viewers if the film has passed the Bechdel test (to pass it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man). Just trying to read the comments makes me realise how bad is still is - so many people take personal offence at this being implemented (in another country). Luckily, in RL all my friends where pro this as soon as I explained to them what Bechdel test is. My Swedish friend said she won't be able to watch a movie without thinking about this. She never thought or noticed before and that is why this rating is a good thing. It doesn't stop you from watching (and liking a movie). It just makes you notice the gender bias. It's easier to get change to happen when people notice there is something to be changed.

Now that Carol Denvers is Captain Marvel the Ms. Marvel name is free and Marvel is filling it with a new character - Kamala Khan. Kamala is a Muslim, Pakistani-American girl living in New York who discovers she has shape-shifting powers and decides to take the name of a hero she is a big fan of - Ms. Marvel. Guess which part of this description has people foaming at their mouths. I always feel awkward about religious characters in a universe that has literal gods (and devils). After all, when you hang out with Thor and fight demons in hell and knowing those are aliens and other dimensions, religion seems a little like denial (or insanity). Still, I like the idea of this character getting her own book. In fact it's awesomely appropriate. Mutant stories are about being different and fitting in.

Netflix is teaming with Marvel to create TV shows that, unlike SHIELD, will actually star superheroes. Netflix will air live-action, 13-episode, superhero TV shows (streaming shows?), based in Marvel Cinematic Universe and starring Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Daredevil. There is also a miniseries event based on the Defenders planned. The series will start in 2015 and air (stream) over the next few years. This might be what we were all waiting for - especially if Jessica Jones show is going to be, even remotely, based on Alias.

A town in New York state got a Klingon on the town board. John Hertzler, who played Klingon General Martok on ST:TNG and now is an adjunct professor at Cornell University’s film and theater department, got elected to the Ulysses Town Board in Tompkins County on the 5th of November.

There were another awards awarded this weekend on a con. The 2012 Zajdel awards were handed out on this year Polcon:
Novel:
Robert M. Wegner, Niebo ze stali (Sky of Steel)
Jakub Ćwiek, Kłamca 4. Kill’em all
Jarosław Grzędowicz, Pan Lodowego Ogrodu, tom 4
Anna Kańtoch, Czarne
Andrzej Ziemiański, Pomnik Cesarzowej Achai, tom 1

Short Story:
Robert M. Wegner, Jeszcze jeden bohater (One More Hero)
Jakub Ćwiek, Będziesz to prać!
Jakub Ćwiek, Co było, a nie jest...
Jakub Ćwiek, Kukuryku!
Jacek Dukaj, Portret nietoty
Tomasz Kołodziejczak, Czerwona mgła

I haven't written about nominees before because I didn't read any of them, except for Czerwona Mgła - Red Fog story. I also haven't written about them because I never read them but I read other stories from most of those authors and there wasn't a lot of results I could be happy with. I finally decided that one good thing about that this is a nice reminder that there are much worse things then Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. They fell into similar category of being widely beloved and nominated for awards but full of questionable content. Between Ziemianski's beloved trope of turning his "kickass strong woman" protagonist into object in her own story (I haven't read that one but I'm sure he manage to stick rape/sexual abuse/prostitution in there too) and Kołodziejczak's stories about how only normal families with men and women in their traditional roles of husbands and wives in idealised version of 1920s will save the world from being taken over by evil (literally, it stops it from corrupting souls - also singing patriotic and religious songs). The worst part about it that they are often have cool worldbuilding and they read really well. But only until your tolerance for the underlying message runs out and you turn away in disgust. Or, judging from those nominations, not.

The guy who got most nominations isn't as bad so I won't bother you with rant about him but I can't get over how he got all those short stories nominations. And I can't get over that only one woman got nominated. But I don't know the guy who won both categories. Maybe he is better.

I didn't want go so depressing and grumpy old woman on another post so now time for something nicer. And in English.

Steven Erikson wrote about his inspirations for his current trilogy and epic fantasy in general in On the Origins of Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson. He also proved once again that he is a writing machine because he had two week writer's exhaustion and then published another book year after the last.

Here's Neil Gaiman intervied by BBC at the age of 7. And Below is his talk with with Philip Pullman. I'm not going to say anything about first one because I already ranted today except that it so awesome they found it for him. The second one mentions Neil in badger costume:

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Entries tagged with news

British invasion

Good, sad and ugly

What you'll see in the future

Trying something ambitious

Eqinnox Eclipse

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...”

Webseries

More snow

Things I'm excited about

The bad, the sad and the ugly

Before I forget

The long waiting period

Happy Towel Day

Heartbleed

The Drizzle Warrior

Near and Far Future

For the good start

I'm back

News of interest

Relax, don't think and then you'll enjoy it