Author: admin

Geekly Speaking About… “The Geek Chick Backlash”

Behind the scenes, co-editor Jill Pullara and I have been recording podcasts while we work on something fun for our upcoming vidcast series, the first installment of which will be up in an hour. This particular one was recorded on May 7, 2011, and thanks to us finally getting some technical details worked out, it’s ready for public consumption. After the jump, I’ll give you the show notes:

If you’d like to download this show, you can go to the show’s home page at TalkShoe. I have to stitch the next podcast together, so expect that one to go up in maybe a week or so? Comments, questions, and kudos can be left here.

Final hours for GeekingOutAbout.com birthday contest!

Hemingway would be very disappointed if you didn't enter this contest

As a reminder, you have just 12 more hours left to enter the first annual GeekingOutAbout.com birthday contest! The deadline is midnight Eastern time tonight, and once again, here are the entry instructions and rules:

1. Write an original short story of exactly 50 words in length. Yes, “original” means no fan-fiction. You can enter as many times as you like, but each entry should be in a separate email, and only one of your entries can count as a winner.
2. Send the story in the body of an email to geekingoutabout@gmail.com, with the words “50 Word Story Contest” in the subject of the email. If you want to give your short story a title, you can also do that in the subject line of the email.
3. Tim Sevenhuysen, co-editor Jill Pullara and myself will be picking three winners, all of whom will receive an eBook bundle containing all of the electronic versions of Fifty-Word Stories: Volume One . One Grand Prize Winner will receive the above and a $25 dollar USD gift certificate to the online retailer of your choice.

Once the contest is over, we will be evaluating all the entries and the winner should hopefully be announced by no later than June 7, with the winning entries posted here in the blog.

Good luck, and may the best short, short story writer win!

New edition of Munchkin to hear the lamentations of your women

On Saturday, Steve Jackson himself went onto the stage at Comicpalooza, a comics convention in Houston, Texas, to announce that their wildly popular card game was getting a new booster set that’s themed to Conan the Barbarian. Drawn by original Munchkin artist John Kovalic, there will be 15 cards in the set from Steve Jackson Games including items such as the Mask of Acheron and characters such as Khalar Zym and Marique.

Munchkin Conan joins a group of booster card sets that already includes such wildly diverse themes such as Fairy Dust, Santa’s Revenge, and Marked for Death; however, this will be the first time that a game booster set has been themed to a specific property that isn’t in the public domain.

Priced at $5.95 per set and currently still in production, this seems like a no-brainer when it comes to adding to your collection. Pulling out an artifact that brings things back to life? Sounds like a perfectly Munchkinly thing to do. And if you end up being able to play Munchkin Conan while in line for the movie on August 19? Even better.

Reminder: Write a short story, win a fabulous prize!

"Overcoming Writer's Block" (c) Stefan Mueller

Just a friendly reminder to let you know that there are only six more days remaining to enter the first annual GeekingOutAbout.com birthday contest! The deadline is May 31 by midnight Eastern time, and once again, here are the entry instructions and rules:

1. Write an original short story of exactly 50 words in length. Yes, “original” means no fan-fiction. You can enter as many times as you like, but each entry should be in a separate email, and only one of your entries can count as a winner.
2. Send the story in the body of an email to geekingoutabout@gmail.com, with the words “50 Word Story Contest” in the subject of the email. If you want to give your short story a title, you can also do that in the subject line of the email.
3. Tim Sevenhuysen, co-editor Jill Pullara and myself will be picking three winners, all of whom will receive an eBook bundle containing all of the electronic versions of Fifty-Word Stories: Volume One . One Grand Prize Winner will receive the above and a $25 dollar USD gift certificate to the online retailer of your choice.

Once the contest is over, we will be evaluating all the entries and the winner should hopefully be announced by no later than June 7, with the winning entries posted here in the blog.

And if you’re curious as to what a fifty-word story looks like, here two of my recent favorites of those posted by Sevenhuysen at his site:

Broken Lines

She stood at my door
one black glove, one red
and a lacy half-veil

Good evening, ma’am
icily

I didn’t want what she was selling
but my kids did

Of course, they hadn’t heard
the asking price
the surcharges
the cost-to-benefit ratios

Just the allure
the affect

I’ve been there

and

The Warm Numbness of Hypothermia

A final luxury granted to the condemned: “How would you like to go?”

He contemplated deeply, finally requesting the warm numbness of hypothermia.

In this land of sun and sand, his choice spoke to a greatness of spirit that moved the tribunal’s hearts.

But it didn’t move them that far.

Happy writing, everyone!

Trisha’s Video of the Day: “FCU: Fact Checkers Unit”

Never let it be said that 1990s heartthrob Luke Perry (Dylan from “90210”) doesn’t have a sense of humor about himself:

Luke Perry thinks his house is haunted in "Paranormal Factivity" (c) NBC/Universal

[Note: I had previously embedded the episode in question here, but thanks to NBC and its penchant for creating pop-ups when you embed their videos, I’ve decided against it. Please click the image above if you’d like to view the video on their own site.]

Based on an original short from 2008, “FCU: Fact Checkers Unit” stars Brian Sacca and Peter Karinen as fact-checkers for a fictional magazine. The series got a second life on the NBC Internet portal as an advertorial for the Samsung Galaxy S, but please… don’t let that put you off from enjoying it. What I like about FCU is that it seems to take itself seriously and not-seriously at the same time. I really appreciate how in the videos, it establishes the personalities of some of the magazine staff as well as lets the guest star shine in an extended bit.

The part about the Galaxy S being able to record a whole night’s worth of video and audio? That could probably be something for the gang at “Mythbusters” to investigate.

Trisha’s Take: Midnight in Paris review

Midnight in Paris

Directed (and written) by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Rachel McAdams, and more
Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking

When I revealed earlier in the evening that I’d never seen an entire Woody Allen film, no less than five different people from all across the country (and Puerto Rico) and spanning in ages from younger than me to older than me were in shock. How is it that I, as a transplanted New Yorker, have never seen Annie Hall? Or Hannah and Her Sisters? Or even Mighty Aphrodite or Deconstructing Harry?

Believe me, I’ve wanted to. Back when I first moved to the East Coast, I rented Annie Hall on Netflix, and couldn’t finish it. My reaction at the time was this:

How am I supposed to cheer for Alvy Singer, a neurotic man who constantly puts down his lovers? He’s upset with his second wife for being so into intellectuals, and yet tries to get Annie to take college courses to become one.

However, I am not one to let one bad impression of a movie that came out the same year I was born keep me from seeing what writer/director Woody Allen brought with him to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And unlike L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan (whose review I accessed yesterday but is dated with today’s date) who deliberately was coy with the details of the plot, I’m afraid I have to let loose with a ton of spoilers.

Midnight in Paris could be called a love letter to the capital of France, and it’s the same kind of letter I could have written, as I have also loved the idea of Paris ever since I was a teen in Madame Hornacek’s first year French class. The letter-writer in this case is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) a successful Hollywood screenwriter of dubious quality who is working on his first novel. He and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) have tagged along with her parents who are on a business trip. Neither Inez nor her parents seem to really like France all that much, but Gil is in love with the city, and specifically the idea that the best time to be alive was Paris in the 1920s.

Unsurprisingly, in a Somewhere in Time-style twist, Gil finds himself whisked away to 1920s Paris, courtesy of a vintage Peugeot which takes him to a wild and rockin’ party where he just so happens to run into F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill). And from there and over subsequent nights, he meets other such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) who all in their own way reinforce the idea in Gil’s mind that he is not living the life that he needs to be living.

Other critics have remarked that as the surrogate “Woody Allen” character, Wilson’s Gil is not as neurotic or frantic as Allen himself would have portrayed him, and perhaps that’s what I liked about Wilson’s portrayal. At the same time, for someone who is experiencing something which a more normal person would call a hallucination, Gil is perhaps a bit too eager to throw himself wholeheartedly into the delusion. It doesn’t hurt that Inez, her conservative parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and the former college crush (Michael Sheen) who just happens to be in Paris at the same time are portrayed in such a way as to make you wonder why Gil proposed to Inez in the first place or why he ever thought that he would be accepted by her family and friends. It’s a poor love match to start with, and even if their characters were hateful, McAdams, Fuller, Kennedy, and Sheen were such great antagonists that it makes it easier for Gil and the audience to want the magical fantasy to be real.

Other than that misstep in logic, the movie was written very well and conveyed its themes very clearly. I must warn you that it wouldn’t hurt you to bone up on who the cultural elite of the day were; otherwise, just as it was in the theater I was in, as people are introduced and names get dropped, you will not understand why the rest of the audience is laughing. Perhaps the best parts of the performances by Stoll, Bates, Brody, and more is that Allen lets them bite into their historical roles with relish, and by the time they’re done, there is very little scenery left. I was also pleased with the direction of the romance between Gil and Adriana (Marion Cotillard) because though it was predictable to start with, the way it resolved itself was more true to the story.

Above all, this movie is about not settling for what is easy and conventional, which is pretty easy for one to do if you have the kind of money Gil Pender or his fiance’s family has. For the rest of us who can’t afford to jet off to France for weeks on end, just watching this movie will have to suffice for now.


Midnight in Paris which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over a week ago is currently only in Los Angeles and New York starting today. Whether or not it will come to a theater near you depends on how much people in your state (or country) like neurotic Americans in Paris.


Trisha’s Video of the Day: “Guess What’s on the Curator’s Desk?”

Any guesses?

“Guess What’s on the Curator’s Desk?” comes to us courtesy of The Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, who would like to remind you that ever since humanity has sought to cure what ails it, the instruments we use to do so and the results of that science are truly, truly frightening.

Find out exactly what this and other fascinating finds from this museum are every Thursday.

Thanks to Tubefilter for this find!

Trisha’s Links of the Day: And this is why the law profession gets a bad rap

Joseph Rakofsky has a problem with the Internet...

Too lengthy for Failblog.org and perhaps too technical for the Phailhaüs, I bring to you the story of one Joseph Rakofsky, a 33-year old lawyer who made a huge series of mistakes:

1. Having never tried a case in court before, Rakofsky accepted the job of being the primary trial lawyer for one Dontrell Dean, a 21-year old who was accused of murder in 2008.

2. Rakofsky botched up the trial so badly that a mistrial had to be declared.

And here’s where Rakofsky erred the most:

3. Rather than lick his wounds and attempt to become a better trial lawyer, Rakofsky decides to sue the Internet for defamation, specifically the journalists and bloggers who wrote about or referenced to the mistrial.

In the amended 82-page lawsuit (embedded below), Rakofsky and his attorney Richard D. Borzouye, Esq. name such entities as the Washington Post (who first reported on the mistrial), AbovetheLaw.com (a prominent law blog), Carolyn Elefant (a small-firm law blogger), and even some email addresses and screen names of people who publicly spoke ill of Rakofsky’s competence to try the case, thus defaming him.

Rakofsky v. Internet Amended

What is surprising to me is that many of the writers and bloggers named in the suit didn’t specifically make Joseph Rakofsky the target of their ire. Most of the blog entries about the case center around the ethics of the case, the problems with attorneys advertising their services, or even the law school where Rakofsky got his J.D. It’s only in using the mistrial as an example that Rakofsky’s involvement and comments on his competency as a lawyer get called into question.

And I am definitely not a lawyer, but one of my friends who is one is already eagerly awaiting what will happen during the first day of court when Rakofsky and Borzouye find themselves up against the legal teams picked to represent “the Rakofsky 74.”

But perhaps Eric Turkewitz (who is also named in the suit), said it best in his official Answer:

One of the demands Rakofsky made is that the defendants not mention his name. Or use his picture. Which is truly bizarre. He seems desperate to scrub the Internet of his follies.

I am tempted to write, in response to the suit, “Go shit in a hat and pull it down over your ears.” But that doesn’t sound very lawyerly. So I’ll say it in Latin. Vado shit in a hat quod traho is down super vestri ears.*

OK, maybe I used a translating website for that. You don’t really think I write Latin, do you? I suppose, for future reference, we can just call it the GSIAH defense. Or VSIAH if you like the pseudo-Latin that came out of the translator and you want to wow your friends with your knowledge of the Internet’s hottest new acronym.

Yeah, I digressed. But that was worth it, no?

Yep, totally worth it.

Take-Two stock rises with release of L.A. Noire

For gamers who also play the stock market, Tuesday was a good day. After all, not only did L.A. Noire hit the market, but stock prices rose for studio Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive.

According to Conrad Zimmerman at Destructoid.com, the price of shares rose as high as 10% of their starting value on the NASDAQ, before finally settling on a price of $17.10 at the close of business yesterday, netting an overall 7.75% increase.

This is all due to the successful launch of Noire, which currently has a MetaCritic score of 92 for the Xbox 360 version. Even the picky French site GameKult.com had decent things to say about the gameplay differences between Noire and its other open sandbox gaming cousins:

Globalement moins drôles et plus répétitifs que les à-côtés d’un Grand Theft Auto ou d’un Red Dead Redemption, les délits de L.A. Noire ont tout de même l’avantage de faire découvrir certains coins un peu paumés de la ville et d’offrir des points d’expérience supplémentaires.

or:

Overall less funny and more repetitive than [the extra missions in] Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the crimes L.A. Noire still have the advantage of discovering some bewildering corners of the city and provide additional experience points.

L.A. Noire is available on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Trisha’s Take: Jane Pratt is back, but is she relevant?

Jane Pratt - Then and Now (c) xoJane.com

Way back when I was a wee geekling, a series of books helped shape the notion in my head that I wanted to come to New York City and be a writer/publisher. One of them, a romance novel by Judith Krantz, was about the magazine publishing industry and a mythical new magazine called B&B which promised to its female readers that it would never condescend to them, never make them feel worthless (as much of the beauty and fashion industry does), always makes them laugh, and always have the right hangover medication ready when needed.

When Sassy magazine founder and wunderkind Jane Pratt and several of her other now-unemployed writers and editors founded Jane magazine in 1997, I was both elated and angry that she did so, because it felt as if Pratt had reached into my mind and stole the idea I had to bring B&B into the real world. Jane was a great and well-written magazine, which is why it came as such a shock to so many when publisher Conde Nast pulled the plug on the publication in July 2007, two years after Pratt “either quit or was forced out.”

Now, Jane Pratt never really went away. According to her Wikipedia page, Pratt had a child, miscarried two children, and is doing a call-in talk show on Sirius XM Radio Fridays at 6 pm Eastern. But you can’t keep a good publisher down, and yesterday, Pratt made her Internet publishing debut with xoJane.com.

And I should be totally ecstatic about that, right? Except, I’m not.

To get it out of the way, the fact that Pratt has been able to be the founder of three publishing ventures (so far) within one lifetime while I’m working on my first has left me with a feeling that comes very close to being described as “sour grapes.” I can’t deny that Pratt was smart and savvy in her early 20s, choosing a Communications major and being able to get an internship at Rolling Stone. In contrast, I chose to major in English so that I could learn more about how to write and understand different genres of literature. My post-collegiate career consisted working a regular part-time job booking reservations and travel packages for the Disneyland Resort in California in order to pay off some debts that I incurred during my first serious relationship.

But pushing aside those feelings, I have a few serious concerns and reservations about Pratt’s new venture, the source of which can be found at the very bottom of every page:

xoJane.com is where women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.

A perfect example of this philosophy can be found in Pratt’s first editorial, a blog entry which was originally written in November 2009 but published for the public for the first time on Monday. In it, she describes what she overheard when eavesdropping on two receptionists in a high-priced salon:

[Karen the receptionist] said so many nice things about how the writers in Sassy and Jane seemed like real people with unique voices and points of view. How political and outspoken and opinionated we were. Then she started to say that another difference was that I’d put lots of pictures of the staff in the magazine and that we would be involved in every story ourselves. And it was around that time that I got a feeling in my stomach that I’ve had before: flee because I am about to hear something that I really don’t want to hear (other times I’ve been surprisingly eviscerated behind my back). But I stayed, as I always do, and then heard this:

KAREN: “She just looks soooo much older.”

Other (potentially clueless) receptionist: “How old do you think she is?”

KAREN: “She must be mid to late forties.” (I’m 46.)

Other: “Really??!? She looks sooooo much older than that! I would’ve guessed 60’s.”

KAREN: “Well, partly I think it’s because she was 28 or something when she started Sassy (I was tempted to yell out “24! I was 24!”, but didn’t). So it is shocking to see her with so many wrinkles and just looking like an older lady.” This is when I walked down the rest of the stairs, though they were just getting started, already crying and hands shaking, so I don’t know exactly everything they said after that but that was plenty.

Being upset about someone saying you look older than you really are isn’t terrible, nor is it selfish. I’m luckier than Pratt in that because my parents are from the Philippines, I may still end up looking like I’m in my 30s when I’m 46, thanks to the aging process of Asian women. However, as some of the first commenters to the article pointed out, it was a bit rude of her to mention the employee by name because (if she hasn’t left the salon already) she could be fired.

There are other examples of this kind of selfish thoughtlessness in the magazine, from tech editor Natalie Podrazik’s reasons for why she can’t date a guy who doesn’t have a smartphone to managing editor Emily McCombs’s reasons why she’s so excited to get free make-up (while telling us their editorial policy on the products they’ll be plugging), or McCombs again on why she thinks women like watching “Game of Thrones” (she was alive when New York Times writer Ginia Bellafante got eviscerated for her ill-written review, right?), or Boardwalk Empire actress Paz de la Huerta mentioning in their fashion spread that actors who have Down’s syndrome are childlike and entertaining

That is not to say that there isn’t great stuff being posted at xoJane.com. While she took a misstep on the “Thrones” piece, McCombs knocked it out of the park when she detailed how she had a conversation with a man who raped her in her teens and had contacted her on Facebook. More pieces like that could tip the scale back into the “Jane Pratt is a publishing genius” column.

Ultimately, it’s just too early to tell what, if any, impact Pratt and her 20-something editors will have on an already crowded blogosphere. Until then, I’ll just bide my time and hope that by the time I’m ready to make my own move, there will be enough audience left for me.

Geeking Out About.com’s first birthday comes with presents for readers and writers

My first love has always been reading and the written word, so I was pleased to receive this guest post from Tim Sevenhuysen about microfiction. And after I finished formatting it for the website, I thought, “What better way would there be to celebrate GeekingOutAbout.com’s first anniversary (which was May 1), but with a creative writing contest?”

With gracious sponsoring from Sevenhuysen, we’re pleased and proud to announce the first-annual Geeking Out About.com birthday contest, and here’s how to enter:

1. Write an original short story of exactly 50 words in length. Yes, “original” means no fan-fiction. You can enter as many times as you like, but each entry should be in a separate email, and only one of your entries can count as a winner.
2. Send the story in the body of an email to geekingoutabout@gmail.com, with the words “50 Word Story Contest” in the subject of the email. If you want to give your short story a title, you can also do that in the subject line of the email.
3. Tim Sevenhuysen, co-editor Jill Pullara and myself will be picking three winners, all of whom will receive an eBook bundle containing all of the electronic versions of Fifty-Word Stories: Volume One. One Grand Prize Winner will receive the above and a $25 dollar USD gift certificate to the online retailer of your choice.
4. All entries must be received by midnight EST on May 31 in order to be eligible for a prize.

If you have any questions about the contest, reply to this post and we’ll answer them as best as we can.

Good luck, and good writing!

Summit Entertainment gets financial boost for Highlander remake

When we first announced last year that the Highlander movie series would be receiving a remake/reboot courtesy of Summit Entertainment, Gordon McAlpin’s source told him that the budget would be from $80 to $100 million USD. Now, it looks like part of that financing has been completely secured.

In his article at the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog, Jay Fernandez wrote that RCR Media Group will be co-financing the project with Rui Costa Reis and Eliad Josephson as executive producers.

If you’ve never heard of RCR Media Group, then you must not watch a lot of of direct-to-DVD movies, of which RCR has produced plenty. Completed films on their slate include sequels or sound-a-likes to S.W.A.T., Stomp the Yard, and Wild Things, featuring veteran actors like Robert Patrick and Jasmine Guy, and pretty unknowns like Jillian Murray.

The script’s first pass was done by Iron Man co-writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg has also worked on it as well. With the remake’s director Justin Lin’s Fast Five still in the top three on the weekend box office charts, the additional bump to the budget could mean that the new Highlander could afford to hire some additional top quality talent.

Just as long as Christopher Lambert, Adrian Paul, or Peter Wingfield get cameos, right?

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: PlayStation’s latest “game” gets rave reviews

The [Firmware] game features a robust moral choice system, where your actions really do affect the world. Do you accept the User Agreement, or don’t you? This was an agonizing decision, since you never know what could happen later. I remember that unbelievable moment in Firmware 2.0, where I accepted the User Agreement and the Kaz Hirai was harvested for delicious ADAM. Is that right? It’s been so long since I did anything but download Firmware on the PS3 that my memory is a little hazy.

—Jim Sterling at Destructoid makes the best of a necessary console update, in the wake of last month’s credit card security breach of the PlayStation Network.

UPDATE: And… apparently, the influx of PSN fans who updated their firmware and wanted to game crashed the network, forcing parts of it offline again. How is it that Sony didn’t anticipate that?

Thor hammers the U.S. box office, but is it enough?

As per the numbers from Box Office Mojo, this weekend’s release of Thor from Marvel Studios made it the number one movie in the U.S., grossing an estimated $66 million USD, beating out the two new counter-programming romantic comedy releases of Jumping the Broom and Something Borrowed (which 9is based on a chick-lit book), distributed by Columbia TriStar and Warner Bros., respectively.

The reviews are also fairly solid, ranking a 78% fresh on the Tomatometer, and with that kind of good word of mouth, I can easily foresee that it will be able to make back its $150 million USD budget, and then some.

Perhaps the best news of all is that if the story of one of Marvel’s lesser-known heroes can muster this kind of box office, then things are looking up for the rest of the non-X-Men-related superhero movies on the studio’s plate.

The gravy train will continue with Captain America: The First Avenger, out on July 22.

Trisha’s Short Video of the Day: Simon’s Cat in “Hop It”

I don’t know about you, but with both Sarah Jane and an Academy Award-nominated director dying in the same week plus perhaps one of the most depressing Catholic and Christian holidays being today, perhaps you might need a little pick-up. And what better way than with being introduced to a little new animation?

Simon Tofield is a British animation director who started putting up little Flash videos on the ‘net, and his success on the web lead to a book deal and a daily cartoon in the Mirror, a popular British newspaper.

What I like about this short is that it reminds me that hand-drawn animation will always have a place in the great animation lexicon and that there’s great value in the love of simple, classic silent-movies.

Check out all the books here.