Two days until the opening day for Arrival—I am so excite!
And because interplanetary communication can feel like a chore, here’s a classic, slightly relevant Sesame Street clip:
Sesame Street: The Martians Discover a Telephone by Sesame Street
Some things are just too silly not to share!
Did you see this amazing stained glass Dalek already?
Producer / director / writer Jamie Anderson worked with designer Chris Thompson to help make the lead and stained glass Dalek a reality. It’s based on a Doctor Who audio drama script by Mike Tucker called Order of the Daleks.
Thompson describes the making-of process:
“My main thought process was to create a “Gothic” Dalek and replace all the flat surfaces with glass designs. My initial sketches had palisades, crowns, spikes and other gothic elements, but we decided to dial a lot of these back for story reasons. In the episode itself these Dalek casings are made by very primitive monks so the focus needed to be on the stained glass and not the metal elements.”
The detailing is absolutely exquisite. There is, of course, more to the design than that—visit Jamie Anderson’s site for the full story and the meaning of some of the elements.
Found via Tor.com.
Image via Jamie Anderson
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
This skeleton lounging with a drinking vessel in its hand, sitting next to bread and an amphora of wine is definitely very apropos:
Known as the skeleton mosaic, the panel is part of a triptych discovered in the dining room of a house in Antakya, Turkey (ancient Antioch). The accompanying words (‘euphro’ + ‘synos’) have been translated as “be cheerful, live your life,” presumably to remind diners of the briefness of life.
Found via Colossal.
Happy Halloween to those celebrating!
Image: Anadolu Agency via The History Blog (Antakya [Antioch], İplik Pazarı district, Hatay, Turkey; probably 3rd c. CE; mosaic)
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
“There is something about talking in the night, with the shreds of sleep around your ears, with the silences between one remark and another, the town dark and dreaming beyond your own walls. It draws the truth out of you, straight from its little dark pool down there, where usually you guard it so careful, and wave your hands over it and hum and haw to protect people’s feelings, to protect your own.”
– Margo Lanagan: Tender Morsels
The magic of night-time works in many ways.
Lanagan, Margo. Tender Morsels. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 307.
(This quote comes from my 21 new-to-me SFF authors reading project.)
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
A new Arrival screen ad is out! (Published today, in fact!) In an atypical move, the trailer (if you can call it that) starts with several completely unrelated clips of people in an experimental situation:
Arrival (2016) – “Common Ground” – Paramount Pictures by Paramount Pictures
…except that, of course, the clips aren’t unrelated. They show two strangers with no shared language trying to figure out what they have in common. It’s quite clever; see for yourself.
Two weeks to go till opening night!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
It’s now just over a week until Doctor Strange opens. (Gosh, November is so close!) There are a bunch of trailers on the InterTubes, for instance the official ones by Marvel:
Marvel’s Doctor Strange Teaser Trailer by Marvel Entertainment
Doctor Strange Official Trailer 2 by Marvel Entertainment
The tv spot from the end of September, however, is my favorite:
Doctor Strange TV Spot by Marvel Entertainment
Kaecilius: “Mister…?”
Strange: “Doctor.”
Kaecilius: “Mister Doctor.”
Strange: “It’s Strange.”
Kaecilius: “Maybe. Who am I to judge?”
Harf! 🙂
I have to say I know next to nothing about Doctor Strange. The character was referred to from time to time in the translated X-Men I read in my youth in Finland, but “odd name” and “magic user of some sort” was pretty much what I got out of them.
The cast is something to look forward to. I loved Chiwetel Ejiofor in Serenity and The Martian, and Benedict Cumberbatch should be marvelous (I’d listen to him pretty much just reading a phone book). Mads Mikkelsen looks like the quintessential bad guy. Perhaps too much so; I fear I might find his character too corny, but we’ll see.
Tilda Swinton I’m conflicted over. I’ve enjoyed her past performances. Her character in this movie, The Ancient One, has been gender-swapped, which is really cool. However, apparently the role is whitewashed. I guess we’ll see.
I also know nothing of the director Scott Derrickson; again, we’ll see. It’s been such a slow latter half of the year, movie-wise, that I’m looking forward to Doctor Strange even if I’m not sure whether it’s exactly my cup of tea.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
“As he watched the TV, he remembered a lecture in his second year of college by a professor of environmental science. The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as ‘immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens’ or ‘all mental patients deserve our respect.’ That in the workings of, for example, an agency, you could, with effort, discover not just the abstract thought behind it but the concrete emotions.”
– Control (John Rodriguez)
That… sounds like sociology or anthropology. Clearly environmental science has more connections with humanities / social sciences than I’ve previously thought!
VanderMeer, Jeff. Authority (Southern Reach Trilogy 2). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, p. 147.
At some point when I wasn’t looking, it got to two months till Rogue One. The second official trailer is out:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer #2 (Official) by Star Wars
“They are requesting a call sign.”
“It’s a… rogue. Rogue One.”
Whee!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
“’I will make you some toast. The bread is three or four days old, I am afraid.’
“Aragorn and his companions sat themselves down at one end of a long table, and the hobbits disappeared through one of the inner doors. […]
“’And you need not turn up your nose at the provender, Master Gimli,’ said Merry. ‘This is not orc-stuff, but man-food, as Treebeard calls it. Will you have wine or beer? There’s a barrel inside there – very passable. And this is first-rate salted pork. Or I can cut you some rashers of bacon and broil them, if you like. I am sorry there is no green stuff: the deliveries have been rather interrupted in the last few days! I cannot offer you anything to follow but butter and honey for your bread. Are you content?’”
The Hobbits and their friends make a decent meal out of the remains of Saruman’s stocks after the destruction of Isengard. This month, we dine along with them on roasted ham with sliced apples, bread with honey, and a cup of wine.
A simple oval plate and a turned wooden tumbler are set on a worn wood surface (old table leaves). There’s a plain wooden knife for spreading butter and honey on toast, and an iron eating stick for spearing the ham and apple. On the side, one of our sushi sauce bowls masquerades as a honey dish. A stack of extra plates in one corner and two candlesticks with candle stubs in the other help with the mood.
Check out what’s it about in the introduction, or read the how-to!
Images by Eppu Jensen
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
“Sometimes undercover work as a Librarian involved posing as a rich socialite, and the Librarian in question got to stay at expensive hotels and country houses. All while wearing appropriately high fashion and dining off haute cuisine, probably on gold-edged plates. At other times, it involved spending months building an identity as a hard-working menial, sleeping in attics, wearing plain woollen dress, and eating the same food as the [boarding school] boys.”
– Genevieve Cogman: The Invisible Library
That’s a different kind of library gig all right!
Cogman, Genevieve. The Invisible Library. New York, NY: Roc, 2016, p 2.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
Co-Geeking 