I loved Alien. Loved Aliens. Love Predator. But Paul WS Anderson’s mash-up movie was really boring.

Thankfully first time directors Greg and Colin Strause are taking the best they can do with both franchises and turn it into a real gore fest. I’m not sure this trailer isn’t merely spoiling all the best parts, but it at least shows they’re trying and not turning in a weak PG13 non-event like the last one. This is what happens when you let visual effects artists control the movie. One of the female leads even looks like Ellen Ripley, which makes me mad when I think about Sigourney Weaver in that DirecTV commercial.

Today is the birthday of Declan Patrick MacManus, better known to the world as Elvis Costello.

In celebration, Powet presents some of his finest moments as captured on YouTube. I named my cat Veronica, so you know I’m serious.

The legendary performance that got him banned from Saturday Night Live and NBC.

And his triumphant return with the Beastie Boys.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Cory Doctorow is an authority on copyright law and a huge oppoenent to DRM. Among many many other things, he is also an author and a comic book fan. Newsarama put up a interview with him a while back and I thought it was important to link to it. He has some very intelligent things to say and offers up his own solution. I highly recommend giving this a read. Here are a few juicy excerpts:

I don’t think that downloadable comics substitute for printed comics. I think that downloadable comics entice people to but printed comics. The key calculation you have to make when you talk about digital distribution versus physical distribution is how much it entices and how much it substitutes.

But there’s a much larger audience of people who are, not price sensitive, but are time sensitive, or have other aesthetic or design considerations that come into play when they think about what kind of media they’re going to consume. For example, people who love seeing movies in a big cinema, or people who love holding books, or people who take their comics home in a Mylar bag with a board behind it, and then buy a second copy so they don’t get fingerprints on the first one. For those people, the question becomes does having a free online edition that they can sample, and, more importantly to me, be moved about on the internet in a social way from friend to friend on recommendation – does that create more sales than are lost by allowing a few cheapskates to get their copies for free?

Comic book stores, when they hook you, have a Wednesday audience. There are so many people who will come to a comic book store every Wednesday and, while they’re only in there to buy a three dollar comic, many times they walk out of there holding a twenty dollar graphic novel with a much higher margin than that three dollar comic. That’s an amazing position to be in, and it’s something that almost any other kind of retailer would give anything for. But the problem is the audience for comic book stores is not growing. The growth in the industry seems to be coming from trade editions sold in traditional retail outlets. People who will go into bookstores are still not a huge mainstream audience.

Go here to read the whole article and see Cory’s proposed solution.

On August 10th, Lego celebrated its 75th anniversary.

Parties were due to take place around the world Friday for Danish toy firm Lego as its 5,000 global employees prepared to celebrate the company’s 75th birthday. Master carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen started the company on August 10, 1932 in his studio in the town of Billund in Jutland. The headquarters of the global toy giant are still located in Billund. Christiansen created the word “Lego” in 1934 from the Danish words “leg godt” (play well).

Source: EarthTimes.org [via MAKE]