Found the Bart Simpson Chalkboard Generator via Antick Musings.

EDIT to add: the youtube clip may get yanked at any time, I guess, so here's a link to the official trailer, which unsurprisingly is vastly better quality and really rather pretty. (Still got slight reservations about how well this is going to work as a movie, though ...)

Labels: Comics, Movies

So, the great big signed Bloodheir giveaway on Facebook has drawn to a close. To be honest, until I actually signed up for Facebook I was a bit of a sceptic about the whole social networking thing. I still don't think I'm really quite on the right wavelength, but I'm starting to 'get it' a bit more. I'm prepared to concede that they do actually offer a new kind of dynamic and structure to the whole internet thing that nothing else does in quite the same way. Anyway, now that the giveaway's done, I should mention, as I traditionally and predictably do at such moments, that signed and dedicated Bloodheirs are available to all sundry - socially networked or not - from Transreal Fiction. I quite like stopping by to sign them, so don't you worry about putting me to any trouble. It's a pleasure, really. So you're buying yourself a signed book, and me a little bit of pleasure. Everybody wins.

The latest must-read blog for sf/f bibliophiles: Enter the Octopus. Lots of good content, most significantly the huge, more-or-less daily, round ups of book-related links.

Pre-release reviews and rumours about this suggest that something interesting is on the way, and I'm gradually allowing my expectations to get high enough that I'm virtually inviting disappointment to come and stomp all over me:



Rumours abound that this chap is being lined up to be the new Dr. Who. Like him very much indeed as an actor, but Dr. Who? Maybe, so long as they went the not-too-manic route. Guess we'll see in due course. Or not, these being rumours of the plausible but entirely unconfirmed sort.

Strange Maps, which is one of those sites that pretty much justifies the invention of blogging software all by its lonesome if you ask me, has an interesting post on a wildly silly proposal to drain the North Sea, put forward in 1930. It kind of sums up everything I like about the blog: fun maps and loads of semi-obscure geographical and historical info.

Funny/Clever (via SF Signal, which unlike Enter the Octopus is a long-established must-read site for sf bibliophiles):

Labels: Clips, Movies, Signing, TV

Chances are, things will be quiet around here for the next week or more (not that they're exactly a hive of frenzied activity the rest of the time), while I concentrate on eating, drinking, caressing the many books I'll no doubt be given on the 25th (people know how to please me), wishing it would snow, and - because you can't let a little thing like a festive season get in the way - writing.

In the meantime, a little selection of treats and trifles:

For Movie Fans, the newly-arrived Hellboy II trailer:



I was a big fan of the first movie - plain old fun almost from beginning to end, I thought, and that's something not many movies can claim - and this one looks like it might be a worthy successor.

For Zombie Comic Fans (that's fans of zombie comics, rather than comic fans who are zombies), a tip: I'm way behind on this, since it's been going for ages, but this year I discovered The Walking Dead. I've only read the first collected volume so far, but it was up there amongst my favourite reading experiences of 2007.

It's the homely tale of a small group of ordinary people trying to survive in a world over-run by flesh-eating zombies. Good writing, good characters and the occasional gory zombie attack: what more could you ask? Recommended for those with post-Christmas book tokens to spend and an affection for quality comics. Or for zombies.

For Aspiring Writers, this is pretty old stuff, but it's well worth a read if you haven't seen it before: from the Australian fantasy author Ian Irvine, who's sold enough books to know what he's talking about, Writing Tips, Guide to Success, and easily the best of the lot, The Truth About Publishing. Not everything in there accords perfectly with my own experience, but that's no surprise as (a) Ian's writing from an Australian perspective, and (b) these things are bound to vary on a case-by-case basis. The important thing is that in broad terms there's a huge amount of good advice, truth and common sense in there.

For Anyone who ever wondered what a nuclear detonation at sunset looks like (likely a small subset of the global population, I realise):

Okay, so it's actually just the Sun going down behind a power station just outside Edinburgh, but it looked a bit like the Apocalypse to me.

Labels: Bloodheir, Covers, Movies, Photos, Writing

Contrary to the impression given by this blog in the last week or three, I have not lapsed into a coma or been stranded on a desert island without internet connection following some bizarre travel mishap. Just busy and not overly inspired as far as blogging's concerned. This hardly counts as inspiration, really, but I like the following combination.

I can get all childishly excited at the propsect of a new superhero movie, if it looks like it might be at least competently done. What's currently filling me with shivers of fanboy anticipation more than any other comic book movie propsect? Not (surprisingly to me) Watchmen - given the iconic status and astonishing quality of the source material, I fear disappointment is dangerously close to inevitable when the movie version arrives. I'm hoping for a work of genius, but I'm not expecting it (although these photos suggest an almost panel-by-panel recreation of the comic on the screen, which is encouraging).

No, what's got my hopes ridiculously, absurdly pumped up beyond all realistic prospect of satisfaction is this:



And I was never even a huge Iron Man fan. But this just looks ... great to me. Everything from the casting to the dialogue to the effects looks promising. And to prove that fact is never far behind fiction, here's a little something (via the TTA Press blog) that suggests it won't be all that long before we don't have to rely on comic books and movies for our iron-shelled superheroes. They'll probably be doing urban control work in a city not all that far from you - the Middle East is only a long stone's throw away, in global terms, after all - just a few years down the line:

Labels: Movies

A quick round-up post, just to demonstrate that normal service has been resumed following the brief digression that was that Blog Action Day thingy.

First, a nice review of Winterbirth at the book review site that has the name all other bookbloggers probably wish they'd thought of first: Bookgasm.

Second, I feel vindicated. I knew the movie of The Dark is Rising was going to be a turkey as soon as I saw the trailer (here's the proof of my grumpy prescience), and the BBC's film critic of choice, Mark Kermode, has confirmed my suspicions. He can be heard dissing the film, along with several others, in the podcast here (it'll be harder to find after the next few days but probably still there somewhere). For what it's worth, I'll second the nice things he says about Once: a sweet little film with good music.

Third, one of the best blogs in the whole wide world, Strange Maps, has been quiet for a while but had a flurry of updates in the last few days. The maps themselves are the main attraction, but there's loads of interesting stuff in the accompanying text. Some favourites amongst the recent additions: the map of the apocalypse, the Belgocentric map of Europe, the Sarajevo siege map, and of course Scotland - Land of Heroes and of Cakes.

Fourthly, I'm still fumbling about on Facebook, trying to figure out what all the bells and whistles do (and whether there's any point to the damn things). So here's a Profile Badge I made earlier. Meh. But hey, at least now I know what a Profile Badge looks like.

Labels: Movies, Reviews

So ... Edinburgh in August. Pretty much unlike anywhere else on Earth. Festival mania reigns. You've got the Festival, the Fringe, the Book Festival, the Film Festival, the Tattoo, and one or two minor hangers-on like the no doubt well-intentioned but, if you ask me, just plain spurious Festival of Politics.

I'll be taking in some potentially interesting stuff, including Beowulf, The Bacchae (with Dionysus played by Nightcrawler!), and Stardust. Half the fun, though, you don't need a ticket for. It's in the random blizzard of activity, and the sense of semi-organised and mostly good-humoured chaos that engulfs the city. And the dedicated performers going to great lengths to promote their shows:
And that, by the way, was not the first but the second person I saw lying in a coffin on the street within a hundred yards or so. Great minds evidently think alike, though I'm not entirely sure 'great' is the operative word here.

The streets heave with tourists, performers, the famous and the not-so-famous, turning the whole city into one giant show (and, supposedly, doubling its population). I'll be looking for Albannach, who are regulars at this time of year, and put on one of the best street gigs:



All in all, it's a fun few weeks. It turns out (I discovered via the Woolamaloo Gazette) that this is the last year that the Film Festival will take place during August. They're shifting it to June from next year. I really like the concentrated insanity that results from having all the festivals going on at more or less the same time. Losing films from the August mix is a bit of a pity. Not that there's exactly a shortage of other stuff going on, I suppose.

Labels: Edinburgh, Movies, Scotland

Me Not Happy. Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence was one of my best reading experiences as a child. Great story, tinged with loss and an unsettling sense of another world impinging on this one. The prospect of a big budget movie based on the same was a pleasing one. Now the trailer's out, and I am no longer pleased.



I know a brief trailer is not really a safe basis on which to start judging a whole film, but what the hell: they're trampling all over the garden of my childhood here, so I'm going to do it anyway.

So let's see. They've taken stories that were wholly and crucially concerned with the landscape, myths and folktales of Britain ... and set the thing in the US. The books depend for much of their cumulative atmospheric power on those intimate connections with a specific land and culture, but hey, it's the box office that counts. And apparently the ancient, insidious and often rather subtle magic that runs through the books appears to have been at least partially replaced with the kind of magic that turns your young hero into some kind of telekinetic, pyrokinetic, super-strength X-men reject.

Until someone tells me otherwise I'm going to jump to (and stick to) the conclusion that what they've done here is unceremoniously hollow out one of the central works in the last 50 years of British children's fantasy writing, stuff it with the entangled entrails of Night Watch, Tomb Raider and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and clumsily stitch the wound up again. All the while assuming that if they can get enough of the Eragon/Narnia crowd in through the cinema doors, no one will notice or care that they have discarded everything that made the original distinctive and potent. Bah humbug.

Labels: Movies