Monthly Archives: June 2011

Snapshots 65 M.P.H. Speed Limit

Posted on by

Here are 7 developments of interest to fans:

(1) Australian actors Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett will be reprising their LOTR roles in Peter Jackson’s two-film adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I wonder if the performers will have aged noticeably by the time they go before the camera?

The Hobbit, of course, precedes The Lord of the Rings so it would help if these practically immortal elves appeared as unchanged as possible. I’d hate for Jackson’s new movies to suffer the problems of Gods and Generals, the prequel to Gettysburg, where Jeff Daniels, cast again as a supposedly even younger version of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain unfortunately looked every bit of 10 years older (which he was) despite heavy makeup.

The first of the two films, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is coming in December 2012, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again, is due out in December 2013.

(2) Steven Spielberg told an interviewer from Aint It Cool News about the time he screened E.T. at the White House. When it was over President Reagan joked to the audience, “There are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.”

(3) Coming real (Bar)soon now, a new line of Marvel comic books about  John Carter, Warlord of Mars:

John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ other famous pulp creation, is having his stories told anew thanks to an agreement between Marvel Entertainment and the author’s estate that will return the Earth-born adventurer’s Martian adventures to comic books.

(4) Someone planning to kick off his new music blog by interviewing Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship, whose “Blows Against the Empire” was a Hugo nominee in 1971, asked Tony Lewis, that year’s Worldcon chair and Hugo administrator, for his insight into the relationship between fandom and rock at the time. Tony provided this insight: “I was never really into rock myself, preferring baroque and bagpipe music.”

(5) I enjoyed the facetious, fannish tone of Time.com’s news flash when CERN scientists recently created and trapped antimatter for over 16 minutes: 

Okay, so antimatter’s nothing like lightning, really, but bottling it in a kind of containment field? Doesn’t sound like the safest gig. More like something you’d catch Geordi La Forge trying during some wild hair zero-sum Star Trek plotline involving aliens, the Holodeck, rerouting power from life support, and a self-destruct sequence.

Thankfully nothing self-destructed when CERN researchers first created, then forced antihydrogen atoms to hang around for an unprecedented 16 minutes, 40 seconds.

(6) Got to applaud Bud Webster’s efforts to get writers to make provisions for their literary estates:

Do you want your intellectual property rights to be so profoundly screwed up that your heirs sell it off just to be rid of the bother, or so unutterably confused that it will take years to straighten out?  Okay, then, start thinking about what to do now, while you can still make phone calls, send e-mails and sign papers.

(7) Two major announcements at opposite ends of the earth made this a big week in comics scholarship.

Scotland’s University of Dundee launched the UK’s first degree program in Comic Studies. Dr. Chris Murray, who will deliver the course, has done research in comics and graphic novels, edits the journal Studies in Comics, and organizes an annual comics conference in Dundee. Nor is it lost on Murray that a person ought to be able to do something with the degree besides hang it on a wall:

“Employability is an important consideration for any postgraduate programme, and it lies at the heart of what we aim to do with this course. There will be practical advice on publishing and developing a career as a comics scholar, writer or artist, and we hope to arrange work placements for students.”

And Japan’s Kyoto Seika University will launch that country’s first Ph.D. program in manga studies next year:

The university says it has received overseas requests for an advanced center for manga research, and that the industry is in transition amid globalization and the growth of digital media. The university plans to enroll four doctoral students starting next year.

[Thanks goes out to David Klaus, John King Tarpinian and Andrew Porter for these links.]

Does Conreporter.com Have a Future?

Posted on by

Although Cheryl Morgan and Kevin Standlee’s Convention Reporter site has provided ambitious coverage of several conventions since its 2009 launch, there have been no new reports on anything since Aussiecon 4. Acknowledging that no volunteers came forward to cover Easter weekend cons, they’re now thinking of shuttering the site.

Cheryl Morgan analyzed why the project wasn’t more successful on her personal blog. She asked anyone interested in the site or the domain name to contact her, otherwise it will be going away.

[Thanks to The Crotchety Old Fan for the story.]

The Base on Mars

Posted on by

This story reminds me of when I was duped into making a last-minute addition to the 1990 Worldcon program that turned out to be a lecture about the “Face on Mars”:

Space.com reports a self-described “armchair astronaut” claims to have identified a human (or alien) base on Mars.

David Martines noticed a mysterious rectangular structure that appears to be on the Red Planet’s surface while trolling the planetary surface using Google Mars, a new map program created from compiled satellite images of the planet.

“This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident,” said Martines, the armchair astronaut, in a now-viral YouTube video. “I call it Bio Station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it.”

What he’s seeing — a long, pixelated, white object — is located at 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W. “It’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide. It looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” says Martines.

However, that intergalactic party pooper, Alfred McEwen, the principal investigator of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a powerful telescope currently orbiting Mars, says what Martines sees is not on Mars, only on the photo. It’s nothing more than a flaw in the image, a linear streak produced by a cosmic ray interfering with the camera.

The truth is out there – but this time, it’s not that far out.

David Cake Is 2011 DUFF Winner

Posted on by

David Cake won the 2011 DUFF race with a first-round majority reports Emma Hawkes, Australian Administrator:

ROUND            AUS     NA    Total
====================================
David Cake       69      11     80
Paula McGrath    33      24     57
Hold Over Funds                  1
Write-In                         1
No Preference                    9
                ---    ---     ---
                102     35     148

The third time was a charm for Cake, who rebounded from previous defeats in 2002 and 2009. 

[Thanks to Marty Cantor, John Hertz, Catherine Crockett, Ansible Links and all the ships at sea for the story.]

Update 06/07/2011: Courtesy of Marty Cantor I have a copy of Emma Hawkes’ e-mail with a correction, adding 1 vote to Paula McGrath giving her a total of 57, making 148 votes cast altogether. (No info on which region that last vote came from.) Marty also says he persuaded Emma to divulge that the recipient of the single write-in vote was Tess Williams. // Cantor writes that the vote must have come from Australasia, because he knows Hertz hasn’t contacted her since the first tally was announced. So I have updated the columns accordingly.

Pratchett Picks Prize Winners

Posted on by

The winners of Terry Pratchett’s Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now prize are Michael Logan for Apocalypse Cow and David Logan for Half Sick of Shadows. The two Logans, who are not related, will share the £20,000 award.

Pratchett justified his decision to pick a pair of winners:

“It was a long deliberation and although to some it might seem a cop-out to split a prize, we decided that since the existence of the prize was to find new talent then this was the happiest decision to make.”

More than 500 writers submitted entries.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Harlan Ellison’s Hang-Up

Posted on by

Burt Pretlusky’s theory, offered in his post on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog, is that producers didn’t realize how politically conservative he was when he wrote for McMillan & Wife, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, Family Ties, Rhoda, The Governor & J.J. and Bob Newhart, otherwise they’d never have hired him.

But when he wrote for Jack Webb’s strident cop show Dragnet, Harlan Ellison noticed:

I now recall that a few minutes after my first “Dragnet” episode aired, an acquaintance, writer Harlan Ellison, phoned me.  In lieu of “Hello,” he snarled, “I never knew you were a fascist!”  Then, in typical left-wing fashion, he hung up.  It’s very possible that was when my politics began evolving.  It is, after all, a prime example of the sort of fair and open-minded discourse I’ve come to expect from liberals.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

True Animation

Posted on by

Steven Spielberg wants his forthcoming movie The Adventures of Tintin, made with performance capture technology, to compete in the Academy Awards’ animated film category. Steven Paul Leiva argues that it is ineligible in his essay for the Los Angeles Times.

Leiva, last mentioned here as organizer of Los Angeles’ official celebration of Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday, has worked over 20 years in the animation field, as director of animation development for producer Gary Kurtz, president of Chuck Jones Productions and a producer on Space Jam.

Motion/performance capture typically samples the movements of one or more actors many times per second. Then this animation data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as the actor. Leiva says this process is alien from the true animation that the Oscar category is intended to honor:

In true animation, whether it be the vaudeville fables of the Looney Tunes, the fairy-tale romances of Disney or the deeply human performances in Pixar’s “The Incredibles” and “Up” life is created literally from scratch — the scratch of a pencil on paper — and should not be confused with the embellished documentation of life preexisting.

To include a performance capture film in the category of best animated picture would be a mistake; for it to be nominated and win would be a travesty.

So far so good. Why does Leiva still need to address this controversy, when Digital Acting reported in July 2010 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had announced that “motion-capture films are no longer considered eligible for the Best Animated Feature Film category”? Because a Paramount spokeswoman is still making Spielberg’s argument that Tintin isn’t a just a performance capture film, says the Kansas City Star:

“Tintin” relies on motion-capture performances for most of its major characters, including Tintin (played by Jamie Bell), a pirate (Daniel Craig) and a pair of bumbling detectives (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost). But animators are working with those performances — Pegg and Frost, for instance, who are physical opposites in real life, play twins.

And Bill Kroyer, a governor of the academy’s short films and animation branch, told a Star reporter:

“If it was intended to simply be a copy of a live actor’s work, then we would not consider it animation,” Kroyer said. “At the moment, we have not determined a way to make that decision. It lies with the intention of the director.”

So the controversy lives on.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

James Arness Dies

Posted on by

James Arness as The Thing

Actor James Arness, who gained fame as Marshal Dillion in Gunsmoke, died June 3 at the age of 88.

Fans will also remember that he appeared in two of the best known sci-fi movies of the Fifties (and these were definitely sci-fi). He played the title character in The Thing From Another World, his appearance transformed by costume and makeup, and was the FBI agent in THEM! who fought the surviving giant ants in the storm drains of Los Angeles til the flamethrowers arrived.  

[Thanks to Dave Locke for the story.]