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Books
by Posted on 21-10-2010 06:23 AM- Categories:
- Books
In anticipation of Tron Legacy, Marvel will release a slew of variant covers that depict famed Marvel superheroes as Tron characters. Check out a block-clawed Wolverine derezzing a foe, Ghost Rider on a lightcycle, and Moon Knight tossing discs.
No Deadpool, Punisher or Dr Doom. Fuckers.
Also, they're doing this.
...by Posted on 08-10-2010 09:20 AM- Categories:
- Books
The calendar, called "Vladimir Vladimirovich, We love you. Happy Birthday Mr Putin," features twelve women wearing only underwear and pouting at the camera.
The Russian women are all named as journalism students at the Moscow State University and a spokeswoman for the faculty confirmed to AFP that the models study there.
Clad in a black lace negligee, Miss March, Lena Gornostayeva, wishes Putin a happy birthday with the message: "You put out the forest fires, but I'm still burning."
I don't care how much of a cunt he is, he's still the world's most awesome currently-serving politician.
...by Posted on 07-10-2010 04:56 PM- Categories:
- Books
Andrew Fraser's book Snouts in the Trough was withdrawn from sale yesterday afternoon (6 October) in Victoria, after the book's publisher, Hardie Grant Books, was informed by the Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions that the book breaches suppression orders.
"We are currently working out what we can do about this," Hardie Grant Managing Director Julie Pinkham told Lawyers Weekly. "After talking to you, the next person I speak to will be our lawyer."
Andrew Fraser was a high-profile Melbourne criminal defence lawyer with a client list that included Alan Bond, the Moran family and underworld figure Dennis Allen, who was linked to many deaths in Melbourne in the 1970's and 1980's.
While working as a criminal lawyer, Fraser developed a cocaine addiction and was convicted of drug trafficking in late 2001, serving five years in prison. Upon his release, Fraser turned to writing, with the publication of his first book Court in the Middle selling nearly 50,000 copies.
Aren't all lawyers criminal? ...by Posted on 05-10-2010 12:29 PM- Categories:
- Books
This week, we give you ten science fiction novels that have been or have been threatened with being removed and banned from libraries and schools. Some of these are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They've told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don't follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. Have a good Banned Books Week. Read something.
I'm sure there's more than ten that should be banned.
Source ...by Posted on 21-09-2010 06:25 AM- Categories:
- Books
English fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett says he was so excited after being knighted by the Queen that he decided to make his own sword to equip himself for his new status.
It was not enough, however, simply to find some metal and get a blacksmith to bash it into shape.
Pratchett, believing the sword would not truly be his own unless it was made from metal he had produced, found a field with deposits of iron ore near his home in Wiltshire, west of London.
He gathered the deposits and smelted the iron ore himself.
Pratchett, who has Alzheimer's disease, also said he had thrown in "several pieces of meteorites — thunderbolt iron, you see — highly magical, you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not".
Actual sword may not match photo.
...by Posted on 01-09-2010 04:59 PM- Categories:
- Books
Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.
A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years.
The dictionary’s owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form.
The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240.
“The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,” Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times. Asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: “I don’t think so.”
Almost one third of a million entries were contained in the second version of the OED, published in 1989 across 20 volumes.
Source ...by Posted on 27-08-2010 09:44 PM- Categories:
- Books
Mentioned only in passing at last year’s Hitchcon, the first* TV adaptation of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency has now been officially announced by the BBC for their autumn/winter season. What do we know? That it’s going to screen on BBC 4 (not BBC 3 as originally planned), and that the plot will see Gently try “to solve the disappearance of a cat from an old lady’s house” – ie. it will be an adaptation of Adams’ first Gently book, at least in part. The script is by Howard Overman, creator of Misfits and Vexed, and according to his agent, the runtime is 60 minutes.
At the moment, the show is set to be a “one-off pilot” only, but healthy viewing figures and a good level of audience appreciation should change that quickly enough. They can count on me and Rich to be tuning in, I’m sure. Might this end up being the niche-channel Sherlock?
Source ...by Posted on 13-08-2010 10:38 AM- Categories:
- Books
Comics titan Alan Moore once called his Watchmen series “unfilmable.”
But, with Zack Snyder’s three-hour-plus director’s cut hitting store shelves Tuesday and Watchmen’s international box office slugging its way past $180 million, that claim has surely been laid to rest.
So, which revered books and comics are next up for the film treatment? Try these five geek sacred texts on for size, then add your own “unfilmable” submissions below.
Nothing's unfilmable. Now, filmable without losing the plot and/or everything that made the story good is another thing entirely.
Source ...by Posted on 12-08-2010 09:24 PM- Categories:
- Books
What would the world be like without Islam? In A World Without Islam, former CIA official and historian Graham Fuller says it wouldn't be much different from the world today.
According to Fuller, the West's fraught relationship with the Middle East isn't really about religion — and actually predates the spread of Islam.
Fuller tells NPR's Neal Conan that he found "deep-rooted conflicts that still exist over ethnicity or economics or warfare or armies or geopolitics [that] ... really don't have anything to do with Islam, and indeed, existed long before Islam came into existence."
Source ...by Posted on 19-07-2010 07:17 AM- Categories:
- Books
Most people wouldn't describe the periodic table of elements as gripping. But Sam Kean makes it just that in his new book, The Disappearing Spoon.
The book tells the histories of the elements in the periodic table, and in the process, gives a history of famous thinkers, war, literature, protest and more. Kean spoke with NPR's Guy Raz about how he made the periodic table exciting.
Growing up, Kean says, the science teachers that captured his attention most were the ones who explained science through stories. He uses the same technique for his book.
Looks like a good read.
Source
...by Posted on 17-06-2010 10:03 AM- Categories:
- Books
Two titans of the comics industry are locked in a mortal struggle in a Wisconsin courtroom. Hanging in the balance: control of a popular character and lucrative royalties.
The case pits Todd McFarlane--who was at one time the No. 1 artist in the business--against Neil Gaiman, a writer who has won numerous literary awards and was recently lambasted by the Star Tribune for having the temerity to charge for a speaking engagement at a local library (a fee he donated to charity).
Back in the early 1990s, McFarlane's hyper-detailed, anatomy-defying renderings of Spider-Man made him a fan favorite and the first of a new breed of rock star artists, a group that also included Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee. Recognizing their market value, the trio decided to break away from Marvel and start their own company, Image Comics.
McFarlane's contribution to the imprint was Spawn, a supernatural superhero who visually combined the best elements of Spider-Man and Batman--two books on which he had previously worked.
Within months of launching the book, McFarlane decided to bring in some other notable comic creators as guest writers on several issues. Gaiman, the creator of DC's popular Sandman, was tapped to write Issue #9. Gaiman's story introduced a version of the titular character from the age of knights, called "Medieval Spawn," as well as"Angela," a scantily-clad woman who hunted Spawn.
These turned out to be great ideas and important contributions to the Spawn mythos.
There was just one problem: McFarlane didn't own them.
Source
...by Posted on 25-05-2010 07:52 AM- Categories:
- Books
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
Hollywood are already in talks with the dead writer over movie rights. ...by Posted on 19-04-2010 08:43 AM
An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." Penguin Group Australia's head of publishing, Bob Sessions, acknowledged the proofreader for the Pasta Bible should have picked up the error, but called it nothing more than a "silly mistake."
The "Pasta Bible" recipe for spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto was supposed to call for black pepper.
"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," he told The Sydney Morning Herald for a story printed Saturday.
Serve With Asian People Sauce
...by Posted on 07-04-2010 08:36 AM- Categories:
- Books
It starts with a young woman being murdered. Miraculously, a secret deal means she lives again within the Culture. Now, she vows to return and kill her own murderer. Meanwhile, a war in heaven is brewing. Or rather a war between the Heavens. Heavens are the network of uploaded consciousnesses - a cyber life after death. But where there are Heavens, Hells soon follow. Wars between these realms are formal digital affairs, but now there are rumors of secret factories building warships and all signs point to the factions of the long-dead and digitized. One man holds the key to making this war manifest in the Real. And a young woman wants her revenge on him.
Iain M Banks has finished another Culture novel. (yay!)
The bad new is that it won't be released till February 2011.
source (IO9)
...by Posted on 18-03-2010 10:59 AM
Quirk Books has released a blood-soaked book trailer for this month's release of the prequel Pride And Prejudice And Zombies: Dawn Of The Dreadfuls. Witness the Bennet sisters chopping heads, firing flintlocks and taking undead names, Jane Austen style.
Dawn Of The Dreadfuls is a coming-of-age tale that follows the Bennet sisters as they evolve from English country lasses to undead-smashing slayers.
"They might be dead, God damn it, but they're still Englishmen!"
Source
...by Posted on 08-03-2010 11:12 AM- Categories:
- Books
We've been dying to know more about Microsoft's Courier tablet / e-book device ever since we first caught wind of it last September, and while our entreaties to Mr. Ballmer went unanswered, we just learned some very interesting information from an extremely trusted source. We're told Courier will function as a "digital journal," and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. That's a lot smaller than we expected -- this new picture really puts it into perspective -- and the internals apparently reflect that emphasis on mobility: rather than Windows 7, we're told the Courier is built on Tegra 2 and runs on the same OS as the Zune HD, Pink, and Windows Mobile 7 Series, which we're taking to mean Windows CE 6.
Source: Engadget
This looks ridiclously awesome. I've been thinking of getting the Barnes and Noble ebook reader (the Nook), but this looks so much more awesome. Full article and pictures and such at the source.
...by Posted on 01-03-2010 01:25 PM- Categories:
- Books
The Guardian has a great article about writing novels. Or, more precisely, how to NOT write a novel. Taking the idea from Elmore Leonard's book "10 Rules of Writing" the newspaper collected ten tips from a host of noted authors that include Michael Moorcock, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman, Annie Proulx, Will Self and Jonathan Franzen.
Of course Elmore's rule No. 1 cuts right to the heart of the most famous bad opening lines in noveldom: Never open a book with weather.
Ten rules for writing fiction
...by Posted on 26-02-2010 09:10 PM- Categories:
- Books
One reason why most countries don't find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked "Atlas Shrugged" as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after The Bible.
Nasty Evil Capitalist Source
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I walked out of Some girl with a dragon tattoo the other day. I can happily not waste my money on...
Operation Black March - Do it.
rosenth 06-02-2012 04:06 AM
Yeah for those that missed it, at 0.44 there's a CG yoda which is why GL should be jailed....
This is why George Lucas should be jailed
Up_All_Night 06-02-2012 12:53 AM
It could be as much better than the first Blade Runner asTerminator 2 was compared to 1, and there...
Harrison Ford to return as Rick Deckard?
Scythe 05-02-2012 09:40 PM
An immigrant who's anti-immigrant?
Is that like a self hating faux-jew?
Aussie government paying $100,000 for NBN propaganda
That_Bloke 05-02-2012 07:29 PM
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Thread Starter: thingyI confess stuff.
ezer 05-02-2012, 09:38 PM