Category: Not-politics

Book of the Week: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

We remove Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! from the list and replace it with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: it was almost going to be Escape from Hell, but this update reminded me of the Heinlein book, which is easily one of my top twenty favorites.

The depressing thing is that this is a necessary award.

(Via @IMAO_) Liber Ex Machina is quite right when it notes that “the pinnacle of internet literature is writing something more-or-less free of typos or bad punctuation.” For a given value of ‘quite right,’ at least. For a given value of ‘not even remotely right,’ check out… this.

I can’t make myself post to it directly.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Great Comic Sans Jihad.

It’s a Dune reference.  Chill.

(H/T: Fark) Anyway, there’s an entire section of society out there, and it’s dedicated to a war to the knife over a font:

Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will

[pause]

You just know that the editor insisted on the word ‘font’ being in the title.

Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.

Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.'” On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.

That would be Achewood.

Personally, I don’t see overmuch what the fuss is about, but there certainly seems to be a bit of one over all of this.  Just in case you were thinking that the political stuff got all the obsession in the blogosphere.

OK, two more bits of PPZ news.

Sorry, but these were too good not to mention.

First, I suppose that this was inevitable. “This” being Pride and Predator:

Pride and Predator to give Jane Austen an extreme makeover

The new film from Elton John’s Rocket Pictures will have the seven-foot extraterrestrial give the characters from Pride and Prejudice something more immediate to worry about than making advantageous marriages

…which is actually interesting, because of that scene from Predator 2 where Danny Glover’s character is given a black powder revolver as a sign of respect by the head Predator.

(pause)

We will pretend that I did not just write that, OK?

Anyway, moving on: fresh from the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the author has a new project going. Its title? “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Don’t laugh: Seth Grahame-Smith is getting half a million to write the blessed thing. The Cinematical author in the previous link is appalled, but I personally think that it’s long past since time that my target reader demographic got pandered to a little…

Moe Lane

PS: Some ‘suggested’ examples from the Cinematical link:

  • William Shakespeare: Necromancer? Sounds like fun; you could go all Prospero, or maybe A Midsummer Tempest. Get Neil Gaiman to write it. Hell, he’s probably writing it now.
  • William Wallace Versus the Werewolves? “I’m seeing it as Braveheart meets Wolfen! Blue fur and claymores! The kids will love the action figures!” Plus: “FREEDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!”
  • The Tudors as Voodoo Priests? No, no, no. Voodoo pirate priests. Tim Powers went to town on this with On Stranger Tides; and believe me, by about Wife #3 it’s not entirely unbelievable that Henry VIII might have been ready to try… unconventional… methods for acquiring an heir.

So I’m missing what the problem is, here.

They had me at “It’s Shelley meets Chandler.”

(via Ain’t It Cool News, via Nodwick) Mind you, I’ve never read the comic…

“I, Frankenstein” comic morphing into movie

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Director Patrick Tatopoulos, “Underworld” co-creator Kevin Grevioux and Death Ray Films are teaming to bring the comic book “I, Frankenstein” to the big screen.

“I, Frankenstein” is an upcoming Darkstorm Comic written by Grevioux that brings together classic monster characters, including Frankenstein’s Monster, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a contemporary film noir setting.

The Monster, for example, who has evolved and learned how to control his anger, is now a private investigator. Dracula, meanwhile, is a kingpin of crime, and the Invisible Man is a secret operative.

…but I am an absolute sucker for mashups like this, as my enthusiastic embrace of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies might suggest.  Noir works particularly well with horror, as Kim Newman demonstrated with his Chandler/Lovecraftian “The Big Fish” (found in The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club) and Tim Powers sorta-kinda did with his Cold War espionage/urban fantasy book Declare (you will enjoy that book, particularly if you are Catholic).  The image of the Monster dressed in a cheap suit and askew fedora appeals; it has a certain iconic feel to it that I can’t help but respond to.

Hopefully, it won’t suck.

One quibble on Ed Morrissey’s column on Dana Milbank’s column.

It’s a fairly good takedown of said column, but there was just this one point of Ed’s that I want to address:

At least this is better than some of your colleagues’ attempts to justify their position by holding up threats as badges of honor. That’s the “I must have been right because I got hate mail” response, after a dumb column provoked even less intelligent response from readers. All that means is that really stupid people read the column and couldn’t deal with disagreement in a cogent and rational manner, which has nothing to do with the source material. Threats prove nothing other than the intellectual level of the person who uses them.

Sometimes, that’s the goal. Not that it was Milbank’s, of course – but if you’re out there trying to illustrate that a particular group or faction can’t be trusted to come in out of the rain, it’s kind of handy if they obligingly send in proof about why you were right.

Besides, they splutter very entertainingly, sometimes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The 2007 Hipster Olympics.

I’m not exactly taking the day off, but I’m not really taking it seriously, either. It’s Sunday. Light and fluffy works for me.

For example:


Via American Elephants.

We used to call these people ‘slackers,’ back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Actually, we probably called these people ‘high school students,’ but that’s probably not their fault. Anyway, a couple of kids and a mortgage apiece should clear that right up for them…

Moe Lane