1000% Guaranteed Success in Anything

Posted on February 28, 2012 by Myles Patrick

Ran across the blog of one Jesse Thorn, Transom, via Boing Boing, where he reveals his 12 point plan for success in nearly anything. No revolutionary advice here but it is well written and filled with some great examples. Excerpt:

It took a few years, but now I make a good living from my show. I’ve got three full-time employees, and two interns. I also pay thousands of dollars a month to several teams of producer/hosts whose wonderful shows I’ve helped monetize. I’m not rich or anything, but when my wife had a baby a couple of months ago, I didn’t have to be all freaked out about it. Well, I was freaked out about it, but not so much about the money part. My business is stable, and maybe even thriving, despite the reticence of many parts our industry to embrace my show. I still love public radio, and am immensely proud to be part of it, but it’s a great relief not to have to rely on it to pay my bills.

Sci-Fi Roundup

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Myles Patrick

First up is a roundup of sci-fi publication news.

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has launched the Beta version, meaning primarily that any number of entries have yet to be fleshed out with content, but the underlying structure is there. Looks great but it seems like they’re trying to reinvent the wiki format and trying to shoehorn it into something that resembles the book when it should be the reverse.
Amazon has announced a new science fiction, fantasy, and horror publishing arm called 47North. They’ve got quite a bit of content coming out in the near future featuring works with Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Great news but I wish Amazon would ditch the DRM on it’s downloadable books the way they did with music and drop the prices of digital versions to make them more competitive with ‘real’ books.
Vernor Vinge has released the third volume in his Zones of Thought cycle, Children of the Sky, reviewed here on Boing Boing. The first two books in the series, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, are both excellent reads. I remember picking up Fire in an airport on the way to Jamaica and being absorbed by his dense and imaginative world while sipping banana daiquiri’s on the beach.

A couple of gems coming out soon to theater/video:

The animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel Batman: Year One, will be released a week from tomorrow according to I09. Casting includes Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as Inspector Gordon.
And if you haven’t seen it already, here is the official trailer for The Avengers below. Looks good; Loki is the only bad guy I can really identify.

Weekend Roundup

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Myles Patrick

This weekend we start with a little cooking and alcohol to prepare us for some movie news. Yet another reason to cut the cable/satellite cord and hope therein for cooking show junkies is the Youtube sensation, My Drunk Kitchen above.

In media news, Sherlock Holmes has been released and abridged into graphic novel form, review over at Boing Boing. My dad’s compendium of Sherlock Holmes stories was one of the first things I read and this looks well done.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is in pre-production to be made into a film. I’m not sure if it’s going to translate and expectations have to be really high. I hope they can pull it off though.

“There can be only one!” Highlander is getting financing for a remake. The original came out in 1986 but I didn’t happen upon it until the last week of my senior year in high school in 1988. Our last physics class our teacher let us pick and watch a movie. One of the girls in the class brought in the movie their brother had rented the night before on video cassette. I had never even heard of Highlander before but was immediately enthralled with the Highlander world. Seriously though, who are you going to find that can replace Christopher Lambert?