From the Ain't It Cool News review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes this casting note:

Quote:

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(...) I think the producers were inspired finding this non-actress. Its almost like they literally held open Rowlings book and shook it until Luna Lovegood, in the flesh, fell out and asked to be called Evanna Lynch.

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Enjoy!

By Kate Nepveau on her LJ:
See it Like Saruman: Reconciling Fantasy and Progress.
Judith Berman, John Crowley, Ken Houghton (L), James Morrow, Michael Swanwick.
History is written by the winners. That explains why Tolkien never mentions that the destruction of Fangorn Forest and other efforts towards industrialization by Saruman significantly raised the standard of living for the wild men of Dunland, in fact creating (for the first time in Middle Earth) a comfortable middle class. While there is a natural opposition between the romantic and pastoral ideal embodied in traditional fantasy and the Enlightenment ideal of progress (especially in its modern industrial and technological modes), we don't believe they are completely incompatible. What works of fantasy have attempted to accommodate both? What interesting new direction might the heroic fantasy novel be taken if the true positive effects of modernization were acknowledged? Readercon hopes to put the audio recording of this panel online at some point after the convention.
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...tml#cutid1
The Case for Archetypal Evil in Fantasy.
Ellen Asher, S. C. Butler, Jeanne Cavelos, James Morrow (L), Joshua Palmatier.
The pervasive trend in modern fantasy is to give the bad guys moral complexity and psychological depth-good reasons to be bad. This approach stands in stark contrast to the legions of past Dark Lords who were utterly evil because, well, they were utterly evil. Tolkien, however, wrote pages of philosophy on the nature of Melkor / Morgoth (published in Morgoth's Ring), suggesting that our rejection of the old model was a reaction only to badly done Dark Lords. Is there an argument for making things at least somewhat black and white (how much psychological depth does a human sociopath have, anyway)?
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...ml?#cutid1
They're not exactly whole transcripts but they're interesting condensed reads.

The hollow plastic crunching sound that one of the neighborhood kids' big wheel makes rolling across asphalt..

...is the same sound my neurotic retard cat, Rev (erend, olution, olver, olt, your engine) makes when he's horking.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

Today's gaming was interrupted by severe thunderstorms deciding willy-nilly to take out the various nodes of my ISP and just plain being scary in general. Sad, sad panda Foxboy.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

Musician's Aid Society
Rumor has it that the Filkers are building or have completed building a space port-sized habitat for use as a kind of "Bardic College". Further rumors hold that this habitat is or will be named "Argo," solely so that the Federation can be banned from it.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

Something that's been percolating in my brain.
Edit: Argh! Tabs don't work.

An acquaintance of mine watches current anime in raw Japanese, and posts his opinions to Usenet. He's been giving most of the summer titles a thumb-down, but is impressed by the first episode of Code E. His full writeup's
here; I'll just quote part of it:

Quote:

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In 1997 an unusual meteorite lands in a lake in Japan. Twenty years later 17 year old megane-ko Chinami Ebihara leads a very, very low tech life, particularly when you consider that her dad is a techie and her mom an executive. But Chinami has none of the "necessities of life" - no cell phone, no pc, no smart cards - nothing electronic. This is because Chinami "interacts" at short distances with any electronic equipment, causing it to malfunction.
Chinami and her parents have kept this a secret, but this has made Chinami a very nervously self-conscious girl who tries her best to stay away from electronics and has developed a habit of apologizing to anyone very quickly. But Chinami lives in a Japanese city in a Digital World, and there is no way that she can do the "usual" things without interacting in some manner with all of the electronic and electrical infrastructure that is around her at all times.
Chinami transfers schools once again in 2nd year high school and fortunately for her she makes an immediate friend in classmate Keiko Komatsuna who shows her around the school. But problems start as the class techie-freak Kotaro Kannagi develops an interest in Chinami and "in her body".

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I was just reading a recent acquisition, The Magician's Arsenal by Lee Scott and it just taught me how to make ninja flash bombs. It's all actually simple gunpowder, flash paper and a simple detonator in the form of ball bearings and popcaps and aluminum foil.
Then it taught me how to make flash powder (aluminum powder and potassium dichromate) and flash paper (soak paper in nitric acid and sulfuric acid - leave out to dry)
That is so not definitely how I thought it would be made.
Then I saw in my head how that worked in Naruto. I can see pretty much every ninja in Naruto land being well-versed in practical chemistry - I can just imagine young Naruto experimenting with iron oxide and aluminum powder - oh yeah.
Then you throw chemistry in with all that chakra mumbo jumbo. My head spins.

Megajoule has posted what appears to be all extant parts of Faces of the City over on the Virtue Wiki.
For those who don't know about this, it's a story about the genius loci -- the living spirits --of the various neighborhoods of Paragon City; it follows the Spirit of Kings Row around as he/it pursues... well, why not just see?

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.