If I had a small daughter, I would try to wean her away from Edward Cullen and Miley Cyrus and towards such anime series as the thrilling steampunk saga Nadia: Secret of Blue Water — inspired by Jules Verne, conceived by Miyazaki and featuring a 14-year-old lion tamer/acrobat in 1889 Paris. And I would teach her to read subtitles, so she wouldn’t have to settle for naff dubbed versions. You want strong female role models? Anime’s got them in spades.
—The Guardian film critic Anne Billson (@annebillson), finally discovers something anime geeks have known for ages.
Trisha’s Quote of the Day: Why I read/respect some movie critics
If I’d been making The Last Airbender, I would probably have decided the story was so well-known to my core audience that it would be a distraction to cast those roles with white actors.
–Roger Ebert weighs in on The Last Airbender‘s “racebending… sort of (scroll to the third item).
Trisha’s Quote of the Day: Why some women shouldn’t fly spaceships
Wheaton: This is the first time I’ve ever been on the stage with a fellow Starship driver. I have never shared the stage with someone who has also driven a Starship.
Burton: And how does it feel?
Wheaton: It feels pretty good. It feels like we could talk in a shorthand that no one would understand or care about.
Frakes: You wouldn’t consider being on stage with Marina [Sirtis, Deanna Troi from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”] being on stage with someone who could drive the spaceship.
Wheaton: I don’t think so.
Burton: She crashed the ship the one time we let her drive, didn’t she?
Frakes: That was a huge mistake.
Wheaton: That was a bad idea.
Burton: Right into a planet, as I recall!
—LeVar Burton, Jonathan Frakes, and Wil Wheaton, together again on the bridge at a panel at the 2010 Phoenix ComicCon.
[Editor’s Note: Thanks, so much, Versus the World Productions for getting such great audio. You guys wouldn’t be going to Dragon*Con this year, by any chance, would you? – TL]
Trisha’s Quote of the Day: When flavor text goes wrong
Meanwhile, Wilhelmina the gnome wound up at the bar with a hoary ancient mariner, who had a very strange story involving albatrosses, and kept buying him drinks, with the end result that poor Kevin had to read most of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in character, which he did with great style, except that the gnome wouldn’t let him stop.
GNOME: This is fascinating! Tell me more!
GM: Now you’re just fuckin’ with me…
GNOME: I need to know more! I eat more chips and buy him another drink!
GM (wearily): One by one, by the star-dogged moon…
This continued on until after 11 pm, whereupon we called it a night. And then Kevin pinned my arm and insisted on reading another half dozen stanzas at me, because he claimed to be suffering from poetus interruptus.
Trisha’s Quote of the Day: Democracy, with a twist of British
One of the most puzzling features of the current unstoppable wave of political punditry that is flooding all channels and outlets at the moment (including this one of course) is the peculiar propensity of commentators to feel qualified to extrapolate from the election results the Manifest Will of Britain. “The people have voted for change”, “The people have told Gordon Brown that he has got to go” , “The people are saying that they don’t really trust any one party”, “The people have said that they want Parliament reformed, the tea room in the House of Commons redecorated, new carpeting in the women’s lavatory of the House of Lords and a vegetarian option in the canteen.”
—Stephen Fry, attempting to explain who won in the most recent general election in the United Kingdom.