Each event has a different theme, revolving around a past era. Previously, Steam Garden did a Meiji-themed party — a fascinating time when Japan was opening its doors to the West, and fusing Victorian fashion with traditional kimonos and obis. This time, the code word was Celtic Fantasy. Luke describes it as “a blend of industry, fantasy, and epic adventure set to a soundtrack of exciting tribal and Celtic music.” -
Japanese Steampunk, complete with bagpipes, medieval food, fire dancers and wood elves.
posted by Artw
on May 18, 2013 -
7 comments
Vim Adventures . Have you always wanted to learn vim but were too intimidated by its vimness? Then give vim adventures a shot! Combining fantasy adventure with learning an archaic terminal program, this game is so nerdy you'll surely alienate friends and family. But who cares, you'll know vim!
[more inside]
posted by Alex404
on May 10, 2013 -
42 comments
Unsounded is an ongoing fantasy webcomic by Ashley Cope. Updates are Monday-Wednesday-Friday, the scope of the story is apparently enormous, the writing is great, the world is complex, well-planned, and full of fistfights, magic-fights, political intrigue, zombies, giant dogs as beasts of burden, diverse characters, and smoke eels from the great beyond.
Chapter 1 begins
here.
posted by little cow make small moo
on May 1, 2013 -
15 comments
"I should have known before Night Shade came to me with a deal that things were rotten. Instead, I got an email immediatley upon announcing that I’d inked the deal saying “You know they aren’t paying people, right?” Everything authors knew about the rotten abuse at Night Shade was shared in private. With a few exceptions (Moon and Williams, most notably) no one was talking out loud about what was happening. The SFWA was accomodating and gracious and gave them chance after chance. We should have spoken up. All of us."
Kameron Hurley talks about the culture of silence surrounding the problems at Night Shade Books.
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Apr 6, 2013 -
43 comments
Caldera. "Through the eyes of a young girl suffering from mental illness,
CALDERA glimpses into a world of psychosis and explores a world of ambiguous reality and the nature of life and death."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Apr 3, 2013 -
5 comments
"Disney goes to Anaheim late at night to help repair the animatronic Disneyland Lincoln, which has been malfunctioning and attacking members of the audience. Disney gets in an argument with the robot about blacks, and Lincoln goes crazy again and whacks Walt...." (
source). Starting today at 2 PM Eastern time (just under 3 hours from now) and for the next 90 days,
medici.tv will stream, free of charge, Teatro Real's January 22 premiere performance of
the new Philip Glass opera The Perfect American. It's based on the
novel of the same name by Peter Stephan Jungk, which the NY Times called "a surreal, meditative, episodic account of the last days of Walt Disney."
Four minute preview video. ENO rehearsal trailer. (Happy belated 76th, Mr. Glass.)
[more inside]
posted by maudlin
on Feb 6, 2013 -
21 comments
Sometimes you might find yourself sitting at a computer, wanting to read something. But you don't want something long. You're thinking, what about a short story, and possibly something in the fantasy or sci-fi realms? You're in luck! Here are four collections, for your reading pleasure:
Apex Magazine short fiction |
Baen Ebooks Free Library, which includes some short story collections |
Eclipse Online, from Nightshade Books |
Strange Horizons fiction archive, including podcasts of many stories. If this is overwhelming,
io9 has a pick of 5 short stories from January, with synopses. [Previously:
Plane of the Ecliptic, on the Eclipse series |
This isn't your grandfather's science fiction, where "Exhalation" is from the Eclipse series]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 5, 2013 -
15 comments
At a time when the Lord of the Rings didn't exist as a film
or a book trilogy, Fritz Lang created the 5-hour-long film
Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1924), based on the 13th-century poem Die Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs). A short clip of
Siegfried slaying the dragon was used as a trailer for the restored edition of the film.
[more inside]
posted by ersatz
on Feb 3, 2013 -
28 comments
H.P. Lovecraft, inspired by
Lord Dunsany (Wikipedia; Project Gutenberg; UPenn online library) and Edgar Rice Burroughs'
Barsoom (annotated stories online), created
the Dreamlands, in which he set the 20+ stories of
the Dream Cycle. The longest story was
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (
Wikipedia), completed in 1927, but unpublished in his lifetime. Comic artist, Jason Thompson,
started illustrating the story in high school, then re-drew the story after college, and that comic was
semi-animated as a feature-length film. He wrote up his influences for a hidden commentary on the DVD, and expanded it online as
The Annotated Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. More Lovecraft sketches and comics online in Thompson's
Mockman archive. [Previously:
Lovecraft comic adaptations]
posted by filthy light thief
on Feb 1, 2013 -
34 comments
For the release of the Hobbit,
Lindsay Ellis of the Nostalgia Chick (
previously) has decided to look back at all the LOTR films in order to analyze how they changed genre film-making, expected movie length, extended cuts, the problems of adaptation, and why Eowyn and Merry are made for each other. (
Fellowship Of The Ring,
Two Towers,
Return Of The King Part 1,
Part 2) Still need more? Then why not watch Kerry Shawcross and Chris Demarais of Rooster Teeth (
previously) try to walk the 120+ mile journey across New Zealand from the filming location of Hobbiton in Matamata to the filming location of Mount Doom, Mount Ngauruhoe in
A Simple Walk Into Mordor.
posted by The Whelk
on Feb 1, 2013 -
29 comments
Seven For A Secret - an anonymous fanfic author creates seven unhappy ( or at least, unconventional ) endings for Disney Princesses by placing them in proper historical, mythological, or thematic context.
posted by The Whelk
on Dec 27, 2012 -
53 comments
"Emma Stone was my dream best friend for a number of weeks. We'd see movies together. Get drinks and gossip. I remember one dream where we just texted. She resurfaced as my best friend last fall after I saw The Help. An actual friend of mine once told me a story about meeting Andrew Garfield's best friend, which meant Andrew Garfield and I were dream best friends for the following few nights. Again, there was texting." The Awl asks people:
What Was Your Weirdest Celebrity Sex Dream?
posted by The Whelk
on Nov 15, 2012 -
113 comments
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff, a podcast in which writer and game designer
Robin D. Laws (
Hamlet's Hitpoints,
The GUMSHOE system) and game designer and writer
Kenneth Hite (
Tour De Lovecraft,
GURPS Horror) (
previously) talk about stuff. Stuffs include:
Why vampires are assholes and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
stopping WWI and Beasts of the Southern Wild,
Margaret Atwood and the difference between a mystic and an occultist,
why no invented setting is as interesting as the real world and Woodrow Wilson,
Gencon and sundry RPGs,
Neil Armstrong, HP Blavatsky and theosophy,
the ebook prcing settlement, what big publishing could learn from RPG publishers, and the many crazy fictional possibilities of Charles Lindbergh and his UFO investigating chums, and
Dungeons and Dragons edition wars and Aliester Crowley.
posted by Artw
on Sep 30, 2012 -
30 comments
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, went on sale 75 years ago today. The first printing, by Allen & Unwin, was for 1,500 copies (which now fetch a
premium at auction); the first reviewer, the son of the publisher,
was paid a shilling. Through a contorted publishing history, exact or even approximate sales figures are unknown; "over a hundred million"
is often quoted.
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Sep 21, 2012 -
108 comments
What I wrote was unquestionably fiction — was fantasy. Among Others has magic and fairies. But I was writing fantasy about a science fiction reader who had a lot of the same things happen to her that happened to me. It’s set at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, and it’s about a fifteen year old just when I was fifteen, and from a family like mine and in the time and place and context where I was. I was using a lot of my own experience and memories. But this is Mori, not me, and she lives in a world where magic is real. Jo Walton, who as editor for tor.com
revisisted the Hugos 1953-2000, now has one of her own, taking home
the 2012 Best Novel Award for
Among Others. Other winners include
Kij Johnson for her Novella
The Man who Bridged the Mist (excerpt) and io9 regular
Charlie Jane Anders for her novellete
Six Months, Three Days. The Best Graphic Story award went to the webcomic
Digger by
Ursula Vernon. E Lily Yu took home the Bets New Writer award (technically not a Hugo) and was also nominated for her short story
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees. A couple of TV shows you have heard of also got awards. Links to many of the nominated stories
here.
posted by Artw
on Sep 3, 2012 -
51 comments
False Positive is a a short story, webcomic anthology, which author and illustrator Mike Walton
likes to call a stew, cooked from the gut, made with "a scoop of horror, a pinch of science-fiction, a dash of fantasy, and a bit of (To Be Determined)."
Mike says the language could be rated PG-13, and the visuals feature a varying degrees of comic book violence and gore. There are 10 stand-alone "chapters" posted now, and new posts are made every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Mike also made
a short trailer to further pique your interest.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 23, 2012 -
10 comments
Kirsty Mitchell's late mother Maureen was an English teacher who spent her life inspiring generations of children with imaginative stories and plays. Following Maureen's death from a brain tumour in 2008, Kirsty channelled her grief into her passion for photography.
She retreated behind the lens of her camera and created
Wonderland, an ethereal fantasy world.
posted by Arbac
on Jun 22, 2012 -
13 comments
Factum Arte in Madrid has made an
animation film based on Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione prints; and have also built many of
his pieces which shows the workings of his imagination, merging his architectural ambitions with his obsessive interest in antiquity.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a source of inspiration for, among others, Goya, Poe, Escher, Max Ernst, De Chirico.
[more inside]
posted by adamvasco
on Jun 13, 2012 -
4 comments
