By now most of you will have noticed Tor’s shiny new Tor.com website, which is chock full of geeky goodness. What you may not have noticed is that through July 27, you can go download all of the free ebooks that Tor had released via its Watch the Skies promotional newsletter over the course of the last several months. So go download before they’re gone forever!
I’ll be attending Worldcon this year, which will be in Denver, August 6-10. While there, I’ll be on the following panels:
I haven’t seen program descriptions of these panels, but they sound pretty self-explanatory.
Also, on Worldcon Thursday, I won’t be at the convention itself, but will instead be going on a VIP tour of the NORAD facility at Cheyenne Mountain, which, as you may know, features prominently in many SFnal stories, such as Stargate and War Games, not to mention Jerry Oltion’s story in Wastelands, “Judgment Passed.”
UPDATE: I begged off the above-mentioned Mars panel due to it conflicting with the pre-Hugo reception for nominees (or in my case, nominees’ designated acceptors), and the fact that getting from the panel to the Hugo ceremony by the appointed time for nominees/acceptors would make things difficult.
In a comment, Mike Ray asked: “How did you resurrect TabMixPlus? This has been the bane of my online existence since I updated.”
Since this too was the bane of my existence, allow me to share in case any of you can’t wait for the developer to update.
As someone in on the FF add-ons page said, Firefox without TabMixPlus is not Firefox.
This song really amuses me, so I sought it out on YouTube to share it with you all. It’s really quite appropriate to do so, even though this clip is obviously an unauthorized version. Listen to the song and you’ll see why.
It’s a metal band, but this song isn’t really metal at all. Go ahead, try it. It’s by Edguy, and it’s called “The Life and Times of a Bonus Track.” As you might have guessed, it’s a bonus track on one of their albums. But what you probably wouldn’t guess is that it’s a first person account of the bonus track’s life.
Now wasn’t that amusing?
Went to see The Dark Knight this weekend and am happy to report that it is awesome. Not without flaw, easily the best Batman film. Heath Ledger’s performance is as good as I’d heard it would be, and now that talk of an Oscar nomination doesn’t seem so implausible.
Don’t forget that you’ve still got a week (til July 28) to buy a raffle ticket so that you can win one of the fabulous prizes in the KGB Fantastic Fiction Raffle, which I previously mentioned here. There’s lots of cool things, such as story critiques from Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, Tuckerizations, audio recordings, original art and so on. Not to mention an autographed copy of Wastelands.
Jeff Carlson (author of Plague Year and the soon to be released Plague War) has just released a book trailer entitled 4 Minutes Above 10,000 Feet. Jeff says "Shot in the Sierra mountains, this short film can only be described as Alive meets The Blair Witch Project meets the new Andromeda Strain. Scary and fun!"
You can also watch a hi-res version on Jeff’s web site at www.jverse.com.