Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

No, I know I said I'm not doing birfday posts anymore. But this was too synchronized to be believed and must be justly celebrated: Ender's Game now a reality

Last June, David of Gaming Today interviewed Orson Scott Card and discovered many interesting facts. Our article was picked up by many media outlets and really put the gaming spotlight on the possibility that Orson Scott Card’s books were worthy of becoming video games. A little more than 6 months later, Chair Entertainment has announced a partnership with Orson Scott Card to start working on a game. They have purchased the rights to use the Ender’s Game series of books to create a gaming series based on the writings of Orson Scott Card. I’m not sure how much our articles had to do with this decision, but we certainly were the catalyst for the idea receiving plenty of attention in the video game world. We look forward to seeing what direction Chair takes with this.

Okay, I'm finding it harder and harder to hate JJ Abrams. I'm sure I'll find a way, though.

A Carnegie Mellon University instructor -- you know, the guy who gave his "last lecture" (Google Video link of the whole thing) staring down the barrel of a terminal prognosis of pancreatic cancer -- gets to be in the new Star Trek movie.

Well, got caught up on some movie-watching over the frighteningly-brief break:

-- Hot Fuzz: Very yes. Entirely fun, needs a second watching.
-- Stardust: Muchly enjoyed, even DeNiro.
-- The Simpsons Movie: ...Meh. I'd heard conflicting opinions as to its quality, and I found it to be...about equivalent to an overlong but good episode of its current run. Certainly not of the caliber of its mid-'90s seasons. Worth the rent, but not the new release cost.
-- Spider-Man 3: The completeness kicks in. Yes, I feel the need to complete the trilogy, and...maybe I should've fought that feeling. About 20 minutes in, all the characters are replaced with idiots, and I found myself watching the DVD player timer more intently than the movie. Fail.
-- Blade Runner: I first saw this movie in 1997 (shut up) and immediately thought it could be released in the theatres that moment. Ten years later, I'm sticking with that feeling. A lot of what it popularized (maybe not "invented") is now cliché, or at least familiar, and yet it's rarely done as well.
-- Ratatouille: Classic Pixar, of course -- excellent animation and timeless storytelling.
-- Bender's Big Score: This is how you do the TV-show-turned-movie trick, kids. It's not Shakespeare, and the time-traveling-causality gets a little woogy in spots, but the plots and characters are well-crafted enough to hold it together. And it's consistently funny. (And, in one sequence, adorable.) And it's got a heart to it. Pleasantly surprising.

At some point, I'm going to have to watch The Matrix: Revolutions as part of that completeness urge again. I'm not looking forward to it.

Strangest thing. I rewatched the Iron Man trailer a few times, deeply enjoyed it -- but strangely, not the armored bits. Robert Downey Jr. is just terrific as Tony Stark (based on the glimpses we've seen so far), just pitch-perfect in delivery. It helps that Stark himself is miles away from your typical hero, drowning in hubris (even before recent events), and that's a potentially very interesting character. Suddenly the movie intrigues me, but probably for the wrong reasons -- pretty much all the mundane, non-superheroic bits.

Okay, I lied -- the sonic boom bit at the end was pretty neat, too; we don't see that enough in superhero movies. While I've never been a big fan of the character (even before Civil War), I'm kinda looking forward to this. And relatively low Paltrow content, too. Hrm.

Fiiiinally got to see 300, making me the next-to-last person on Earth to do so. What a joyous romp. (I admit to enjoying "SPARTAAAA" far too much, but was caught up enough to let "dine in hell" slide.)

And the 6:40 featurette on the first disc with Zach Snyder on the adaptation process was amusing, interesting and heartening -- if they take a third as much of an effort in the Watchmen adaptation, that's just going to be glorious. (And we know they already have Rorschach test footage from the 300 trailer....)

Never again am I eating an entire Pizza Shuttle pizza in one sitting. Was up for most of the night, doing very little constructive. I did some fonts done (more on that later), but my mind was too fried to do any real work on the one project that needs doing ASAP. Gah.

Worse, just when I'm getting to bed at 3 am, I hear the distinctive tinkle of the birds' swing-perch, which is big enough to not ring unless it's being significantly moved, which means the birds were freakin' out and having a night-fright. Just when I think Moosie's done bouncing around the cage, I open it to take him out and comfort him when Moosie decides to freak out! yet again (I'm not very bright, you see) and there's two birds circling the room, one landing in the halogen lamp and another completely missing and silent. Takes me a few seconds to fish Muffin out of the lamp before he gets burnt and find Biscuit who's landed behind the kitchen computer and is baffled and panicked. I was worried most about poor Moosie, who seemed kinda dazed afterward, but checking on him now he's on his perch and moving around, so he's okay. Actually, they're all pretty kinetic this morning. Unlike me.

Got a phone call from one of the faculty this morning who wanted to know what the symptoms were of having a virus and I swear to God it took me thirty entire seconds before I realized that he didn't mean a biological virus. But he's worried that he does have a virus on his home computer. Difficulty: it's a Mac. Hey, it's not impossible.

Watched Much Ado About Nothing for the first time since seeing it in the theater. ( Ruminations on the interim.... )

Tonight: 300, I think. Though the "dining in hell" bit was obviously more apropos last night.

As seen in the most recent picspam, but worth repeating: Harry Potter meets Fight Club. Magic, mayhem, soap.

Finally got around to watching Superman Returns. Wow. Acting decent (I don't buy Bosworth at all, but Marsden was depressingly earnest), effects interesting, but God, what an awful script, and they managed to make it...boring. Bad premises, uninspired execution...no, won't be watching that again. Hell, it's making me miss the last two Reeve movies, and those were...not good.

It doesn't help that I dug out my copy of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? last night. For the non-comic-geeks, before Superman's history got "rebooted" in 1986, they wrote one last "imaginary story" using his continuity which spanned back to 1935, a two-issue story drawn by consummate Superman artist Curt Swan and written by some guy called Alan Moore. It's the perfect coda to the old Superman, really -- bittersweet but apropos, many long-time characters meeting their ends, but never losing track of what makes Superman what he is. Certainly didn't get that from Superman Returns -- too much focus on the soap opera, on chemistry I couldn't find anywhere on the screen. Disappointing.

The ancient battle of Thermopylae was the stuff of 2007's first certified blockbuster as the bloody action tale "300" debuted with $70 million over opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.

That's about $233,000 for every one of the legendary 300 Spartan soldiers who fought off a much larger Persian force in the epic battle.

"On a Spartan-by-Spartan basis, that's a lot of money," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "Summer came a little early, because this is a summer-style opening."

The number of movie-goers for the Warner Bros. epic "300" outnumbered crowds for the rest of the top-10 movies combined. If the estimate holds when final numbers are released Monday, "300" would break the record for best March debut ever, topping the $68 million haul for "Ice Age: The Meltdown" last year.

Haven't gotten to see it yet, but looking forward to it, moreso now.

Also, don't miss 300 on the NES.

So apparently there's ten seconds of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer online.

Yes, this is what it's come to -- the trailers now have trailers.