coffee and ink

10 icons from Acts II and III of Dr. Horrible, plus The Dark Knight and Maggie Gyllenhaal at my icon journal. :]

Teasers:

o1. o2. o3.

They say she works with the homeless, and doesn't eat meat. We have a problem with her!

Poll #1229755
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

The Evil League of Evil is Watching - choose the name wisely :)

The top choices are listed for your enjoyment with radio buttons on the left.  
have at fandom :) 

Click here for the source and more photos

I just have a thing for animated icons. Hope you like.

So, I totally made some icons.

( so that's, you know, coming along... )

http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/?p=507

There is a mini-cult of first lines among us writers. The first line is sort of like the lobby of the book: the first thing you see, coloring all subsequent impressions. It’s one place where you’re truly allowed to show off.

So we writers like to geek out on first lines. We get all excited about collecting and trading them, having top-ten lists and all-time faves. We even reveal our chapter first lines in advance as tiny spoilers.

As many people have spotted, Uglies, which begins:

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

pays homage to the opening of William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

I bring this up now because of this article on io9 discussing great science fiction first lines. It’s cool to read all these lines all together, and of course it doesn’t hurt that they include my adult novel, The Risen Empire, which opens with:

The five small craft passed from shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins thrown into sunlight.

Oddly, io9 calls this line “a little adjective-heavy.” Dudes, it only has one adjective, the word “small”!

So for the sake of deep analysis, here are all my YA novel first lines:

The Uglies Series
Uglies
“The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”

Pretties
“Getting dressed was always the hardest part of the afternoon.”

Specials
“The six hoverboards slipped among the trees with the lightning grace of playing cards thrown flat and spinning.”

Extras
“Moggle,” Aya whispered. “You awake?”

Midnighters Series
The Secret Hour
“The halls of Bixby High were always hideously bright on the first day of school.”

Touching Darkness
“At last, everything was sorted out.”

Blue Noon
“Bixby High’s late bell shrieked in the distance, like something wounded and ready to be cut from the herd.”

The New York Trilogy
So Yesterday
“We are all around you.”

Peeps
“After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah.”

The Last Days
“I think New York was leaking.”

Soon I’m going to expand on this post, and talk about why I started books with these lines. In the meantime, I’d be interested to hear from you about them

Plus: What are your favorite first lines? Pick any novel you want, except mine!

I made some .wav sounds from Dr. Horrible’s first blog entry.

( The Sounds )

If there are any LJers like me who don't have a Twitter, but want to watch the Captain Hammer Twitter, (nothing official, just fun, it looks like), I made a syndication acct you can add to you Flist. cap_hammer_twit

Had the Pap smear yesterday and the cheerful doctor (must find out her name and make her my primary provider) told me, "We're going to test for HPV at the same time." She started explaining what HPV was and I said "I know, I know", hopefully somewhat more politely. She checked out my vanilla sexual history and then explained, "If it's negative, we won't have to test again for three years." Me: "Wha?"

"99.9% of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV. It's possible to get cervical cancer for other reasons, but it's really rare, like cancer of the vagina." Nice to know. (ydebg got HPV from an insanitary clinic. That sucks.)

Hey, U.K. readers, is the PM really toast, or can he claw back?

I don't make icons often, so be kind.

Billy's Brand New Day Smile... animated

. .

ETA: Got on a roll, and added two other cropped versions.

Inspired by this quote:

Joss Whedon: We're not sure that we can accomplish it, but we want to have languages: French, Spanish, Japanese translated back very badly into English, classical Latin, and panther noises.

From this article,

I give you all of the lyrics from Dr Horrible translated into Japanese and then back into English using the Google language translator:

Didi you know that Dr. Horrible almost always translates into Dr. Awesome? *VBG*

( Muahahahahahaha! )

From here

Apparently Jed Whedon said there will be a Dr. Horrible Act IV

More updates over at Whedonesque from user deanna b:

Joss is older, and balder-slash-wiser than went they made Firefly. Any episode they make is a bonus,and any they can't, he can put on the internet now. This was a model for a new way to put out things, that are for us and not so much for *certain other people*. He works with studio execs, but...

And Doctor Horrible is about putting power in other hands. The wrong hands,

Neil came up with the "shoulder dance" during Freeze Ray. He did the magic thing with his fingers when he was bored, and they decided to use that.

Panel Review over at Io9

EDIT: They're also going to have a contest. They'll take video submissions for the Evil League of Evil. 3 minutes, like you're applying to be on Survivor. 10 best on DVD.

http://twitter.com/captainhammer

RSS: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15589616.rss

If you didn't know there's also official Dr. Horrible Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/drhorrible

And Felicia Day (Penny) has Twitter: http://twitter.com/feliciaday

So we've got a little discussion in a thread about tags. But I figured, why not make it's own post so anyone who wants to put in their 2 cents can do so.

First, if you want to see what tags we've got so far: http://community.livejournal.com/dr_horriblesing/tag

Second, if you have any suggestions for what other tags you think might be good here, please feel welcomed to post your suggestions. (But only if you won't take it personally if I don't actually make it a tag.)

Keep in mind that I am not a believer that there should be a tag so that there's an appropriate tag for EVERY entry. I think tags are good for things that people may want to search for stuff in the future, such as icons, songs, etc.

And now...? Suggest away!

Now, who said that Barrowman out-cheesed Captain Hammer?

Torchwood Star Up for Captain America?

He's got the voice if they want it to be a musical version... *g*

There has to be someone who RPs Doctor Horrible.

( Template - A Multifandom RP community. )

And then I read this, so now I must.

(via emily_shore)

And Starsky/PMG have now been mentioned twice, so win-win.

As you all have heard me whinge on about by now, I've been editing a short documentary about vidding for MIT's ProjectNML (New Media Literacies), with much assistance from Francesca Coppa and enthusiastic vidders everywhere. It is now just about done, and I'd love to have a room party where I screen it at the con.

The documentary is about 20 minutes long, and I'll be bringing it on DVD as .mov files and, hopefully, authored DVDs as well. I don't, however, have a laptop or DVD player I can bring, so I will need to throw myself on somebody's tender mercies for that. ::bats eyelashes::

I will also have in my possession a copy of MST3K 3x19: War of the Colossal Beast, preceded by Mr. B. Natural, the all-time best short they ever did. It's about 15 minutes long, and I'm curious if folks would like to stay for that, too.

( So, a poll! )

If there isn't sufficient interest in Mr. B. Natural, that's okay. I'm mainly bringing it for jarrow, because I expect its utter hilarity to KILL HIM DED.

"Blonde Roots"

A dazzling, imaginative reversal of the transatlantic slave trade in which Africans are the masters and Europeans are their slaves.

Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the world of Doris. One minute she’s this cute little girl playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone
puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World. When she finally arrives on a strange, tropical island, she discovers she is a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress.

Doris observes slavery from both sides. As an adult she becomes the personal assistant of her formidable master, Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She also experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun.

Doris dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, of returning home to her motherland: England.

Written with Bernardine Evaristo¹s customary wit and zeal, Blonde Roots is at once a biting satire, a tragic family saga and a testament to the strength of the human spirit.

http://www.bevaristo.net/books_info.asp?b=blonde&t=i

Well this ought to be interesting. I rather enjoyed her verse novel "The Emperor's Babe," look forward to getting this eventually.

I looked, but didn't spot this anywhere.

(x-posted from my journal)

From here:

Mahalo Daily talks to Felicia Day on Thursday at Comic Con 2008, and talked to her about her about The Guild, Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and more.

(YouTube Link)

( Video embedded behind the cut )

Yay for The Guild DVD! \o/ Not surprised she said she crushed on NPH. He seems to have that effect on people. ;-)

From the first page:

"An Internet musical about a lovelorn would-be supervillain and the video blog he records in his home doesn't exactly scream surefire hit, but that's just what Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog became in the wee hours of July 15. Viewers clicked so fast and so furiously at drhorrible.com to see the online production — created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer auteur Joss Whedon — that demand for the debut installment crashed the site (Acts 2 and 3 followed on July 17 and 19). This sweet and sinister tale about the eponymous mad scientist (Neil Patrick Harris) who battles his archnemesis, Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion, of Whedon's dearly departed Firefly), for the affections of the crusading civilian Penny (Felicia Day) also shot immediately to the top of the iTunes video chart, and was viewed over 2.2 million times in its first week. Not bad for a project conceived in the heat of the writers' strike and shot on a breakneck schedule this spring. Here's the Horrible truth about how it all came together, and why we probably have not seen the last of the evil doctor or his nefarious blog."

Click for an interview with Whedon and Co

Enjoy. ^^

And they're on clearance. For your Act III Dr Horrible costume, or maybe you could modify them and use them for Captain Hammer, they would need some flaring cuffs added at the wrist, etc.

Black gloves from MarketLab

Poll #1229576
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Neal Stephenson

Following on from a mutually surprising discussion last weekend:

Poll #1229575
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What is Neal Stephenson's best book?

What is Neal Stephenson's worst book?

Justification in the comments welcomed.

Anyone here know if the Otakon art show allows fanart? I thought it didn't, but I now can't find where I thought it said it didn't.

(P.S. rushthatspeaks? Your offer for handling the art for me still open? And do you want a print in return? :D)