This week is pretty much the San Diego Comic Con edition. However, once again Haggard Hawks shares a priceless gem: Helluo librorum is a noun meaning “book glutton.”
2016 Logo
San Diego Comic-Con:
Comic-Con attendees were the first to see the first trailer of the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
From Kat, SFGate put together a Comic-Con cosplay photo album. (Be aware, there are lots of pictures.) I’m going to guess, just guess, that this photographer might have been male. I liked a lot of these, but three were memorable (in no order); Sharknado Elvis, The Day of the Dead witch with the big red hat, and the three pastel Wookies.
Marvel introduced the second Doctor Strange trailer at Comic-Con. (Thanks to Polygon.)
Tor highlighted the information on the upcoming Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.
FX and Marvel introduced the trailer for a 2017 TV adaptation of Marvel’s Legion. I don’t know anything about this X-Men spinoff or this mutant, but this is a stellar cast.
Even Rolling Stone Magazine got into the act, ranking the best and worst trailers at the convention.
On the Orphan Black panel the cast indulged in some “clone improv.” If you watch the show, you’ll be highly amused by “Alison and Donnie at a Trump convention.”
Books and Writing:
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is now the associate publisher at Tor. Congratulations! And John Scalzi says it better than I can.
Fireside Fiction paid for a study about the percentage of short speculative fiction by black people that markets are publishing. The results are interesting, disheartening, and important. Read about the report; and here are some other essays. Here is the link to N.K. Jemisin’s interview.
For many of us this is uncomfortable reading, but I encourage you to stick with it. And I hope this is the beginning of the discussion, not the end of it. (Hat tip to Kate.)
This is about writing, kind of, as Gizmodo shows off a predictive text generator that can help you write fanfic. It works likes your phone’s autocorrect, only weirder.
Kat will be happy to see that the Wall Street Journal defines audiobooks as surviving and thriving. More and more people listen to their reading material these days.
Games:
Coming Soon has photos, the first trailer for Injustice 2, and an article about Wonder Woman and Blue Beetle.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance is coming soon, and Marvel News interviewed the creator.
Comics:
Fresh from SDCC, Marvel has announced a spin-off of Black Panther, following various other characters in the Wakanda universe. It will be written by Roxanne Gay.
John Lewis, who already has the Congressional Medal of Freedom for his work on civil rights, now has an Eisner Award for the second volume of his comic series about the 1960 Civil Rights Movement, March.
TV and Movies:
Brie Larson will play Captain Marvel in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. But is she too young to be an Air Force Captain at 26? Inquiring minds want to know.
Locus gives us a spoilerish review of Star Trek: Beyond. I’d say read the first three of four paragraphs, which are interesting, and click away when you get to mention of Krall.
Many of us yearn for a Black Widow movie, including, it seems, Joss Whedon. IO9 wonders if he is the right person to create it.
Tech Insider likes Netflix’s Stranger Things, and as near as I can tell, so does everybody else.
Internet:
After Ghostbusters opened, a group of people deluged comedian and actor Leslie Jones (who pays Patty in the movie) with hate-filled racist comments on Twitter. This isn’t the first time, and Ijeoma Oluo says, and it isn’t random or spontaneous. This is a concerted, calculated effort to intimidate certain people off social media. In Jones’ case, she fought back by retweeting some of the comments and mobilizing her celebrity friends. After a full day of abuse, Jones and her supporters got Twitter’s attention and they finally expelled the ringleader from Twitter. CNET also provided a good brief article.
Wonder Woman is getting her own postage stamp in October, 2016, according to the USPS.
The Daily Mail reports that a cache of manuscripts about witchcraft collected by Heinrich Himmler during the Nazi period and WWII has been discovered.
Lego is seeking support for a Women of NASA collection. I have nothing more to say.
Ghostbuster action figures are selling well, reports Mattel.
Art:
Thanks to Kat for these fun steampunk images!
A little morbid but quite beautiful; this Japanese artist carves pearls into tiny shimmering skulls.
Earth:
German forest ranger and biologist Peter Wohlleben tells us trees have a “social network,” and they communicate with each other.
The level of detail in those carved-pearl skulls is amazing.
I know, right? I’ve seen bone skulls carved about that size, but never pearls.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, not Neil Patrick Hayden!
Fixed, Melita. Thanks for the catch.
And 26 is probably not too far off for a captain, if you were in ROTC in college or did the Academy. A friend of mine in grad school had done ROTC, so he was commissioned as an office at graduation. The AF then sent him to graduate school for a master’s. He did specialist training afterwards and became a captain when I was around 27 or 28 and he was a year or two younger IIRC.
According to the Marvel Comics canon, Carol Danvers is a full-bird colonel in the Air Force, meaning she is at least 40 years old. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe cast a 26-year-old actress, my guess is that they’re wiping most of her military history clean, which is a shame.