Ooh! A new version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is in the works!
Netflix is producing the 6-episode adaptation. Author Dolly Alderton will adapt and Euros Lyn direct. Of the cast so far announced are Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet—which will be a fantastic performance, I’m sure—plus Emma Corrin as Elizabeth Bennet and Jack Lowden as Mr. Darcy.
At this writing the new P&P series is only in preproduction, so lots of unknowns remain, including release date. According to Netflix, production is slated to start in the UK this year, but that’s all so far.
Wow, I’ve been wanting another Jane Austen adaptation for a while, so this is great! Not necessarily P&P, though, it’s been done so many times, but I’ll take it. 🙂
As I said, I firmly believe Colman will be great, and I seem to remember good things about Corrin (Princess Diana in The Crown and Cassandra Nova in Deadpool & Wolverine). Lowden, however, is completely new to me; I have no idea what kind of an actor he might be.
Another complete unknown to me is writer Dolly Alderton. However, I’ve seen the work of director Euros Lyn in Doctor Who and Torchwood as well as Broadchurch and Sherlock (the latter with Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch). Broadchurch, especially, was fantastic, and he and Colman worked together in that.
Very promising! Looking forward to hearing more about this adaptation.
The article is definitely worth a look, especially since (at this writing) it has more photos than IMDB. Way more. And they look great! I mashed up some of them into a collage, below, mostly for my own enjoyment:
We still don’t see much of the company or Corporation Rim even in these first look photos, but it looks dark and imposing (top left in my mashup). I assume the other spaces with orange accents are either the Preservation Aux habitat down on the planet or their hopper, or (less likely) the DeltFall survey habitat.
Readers of Murderbot books know that Preservation is everything Corporation Rim isn’t when it comes to human rights and comfort, and it’s fantastic how the set design has implied that with a paler, more cheerful color scheme and with plants (bottom right in my mashup). Looks like some of them are edible, but some look decidedly decorative.
A tidbit that’s definitely not from the first Murderbot book is revealed by the first look article: “One of the funniest sequences in the series involves […] a human indentured servant who has been alone too long in the reaches of space and makes the mistake of trying to seduce the uninterested security unit.”
Err. Hm. I could see why they’d want to include the scene (as a further hint of how SecUnits in general work), but mostly I can’t see how it could add more than confuse. We’ll have to wait for the series to dissect it further.
The clip doesn’t reveal much, just that Murderbot doesn’t have a bellybutton or nipples.
But the trailer!
(Confession: My very first thought was ‘Murderbot has a stupid voice’—sorry, Alexander—followed by ‘but I’m sure I’ll get over it’.)
The writing team has included Murderbot’s favorite show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. For real: we’ll actually get to see some of the show, and it looks fabulous! And what a cast—according to Vanity Fair, Sanctuary Moon stars John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise.
Also, they’ve kept Murderbot’s inner dialogue—woot!—and the Preservation team looks and feels absolutely bang on. They even have colorful rugs on their mission! Plants and rugs lugged along on a planetary survey—if that doesn’t tell you anything about Preservation’s attitude towards life in general, I don’t know what will.
I’m ridiculously excited about the Murderbot series. (I had to force myself to go back and delete a whole bunch of exclamation marks from this post, if you can believe it!) I really, truly hope it’ll be good, and no-one’s marketing-directored it to death. So far it’s looking promising!
Have you heard of fridgescaping? The phenomenon apparently started on TikTok, and in a nutshell comes from “landscaping” your fridge.
Sounds like some people got into it during the covid lockdowns. There are various approaches to decorating the inside of your refrigerator, and ways to organize are, of course, as varied as the creators.
All of the above are still mainstream. Lynzi Judish (lynziliving) takes fridgescaping to another level. Hers designs are very pretty, lushly styled, and themed. There is, for instance, a Beetlejuice…
However: I have A LOT of questions! I’m not on Instagram or TikTok, and plan not to begin just to do a bit of research. But, like—
I see a lot of snack-type produce. Where do the fridgescapers store their actual food? Food food, the cooked food? (Surely they do cook warm meals…?) Or leftovers?
Are the containers food safe? Please tell me they all are!
Are they ruining the books or photos or decorative boxes placed in the fridge?
Why does everything need to be decanted? (Yes, I know why—it’s the look. However, all those themed empty containers are just more clutter to store elsewhere and more $$$ down the drain.)
How do they keep re-arranging their fridges without wasting an inordinate amount of energy?
Also: While I do enjoy a (thoughtfully) decorated space, for me, function has to come first. It absolutely must; I cannot live otherwise. I have to have a home that works; if it looks good, too, that’s great! But I must be able to use things I need when I need them, not after five minutes of digging or setup. (Which is also why I must have a dedicated sewing room with the machine on a table, ready to go at a moment’s notice.) If a space or area isn’t useable, it’s a source of frustration for me, which isn’t worth it, especially not for everyday functions like the fridge.
One of the most prominent topics currently is artificial intelligence. Of course everyone knows—or should know—it’s not real intelligence as we generally understand it. The term seems to have some real staying power, though.
Regardless of what one wants to call the current iterations, machine learning or algorithm-based systems appear to be here to stay. People are starting to figure out what they could be used for in everyday life, not just at the office or lab.
One popular sentiment among creatives goes along the lines of: I want AI to do the dishes for me so I can create, I don’t want AI to create for me so I can do the dishes. I hear you, fellow creatives, and agree! This post talks about what I’d want those systems to do for me. (Eventually. We still must solve several issues, e.g. how to program them without egregious copyright breaches, to mention just one.)
(Please also note: I do realize that computing takes a lot of energy and materials, and that energy production and extraction of minerals aren’t unproblematic processes. Also, the ethics of the current generative models need serious attention; I’m still fuming over Meta’s massive book pirating as revealed by The Atlantic. The point of my post is not to dwell on the problems, however. This is basically just a random, long-winded wish list.)
TL;DR: My preferences boil to complex tasks, specificity instead of generic sludge, and effective analysis of massive amounts of data.
Below is a non-comprehensive list of some specific tasks I want done better, whether by “AI” or not, in no particular order.
For a while, there have been rumblings that World of Warcraft characters will get a new home base of sorts, perhaps a little like garrisons in the Warlords of Draenor expansion. This new system has been dubbed housing.
In a news article “A First Look at Housing” from February 2025, Blizzard describes some of their design priorities: customization (adjusting the widest possible range of features in your house), ability to socialize (unlike garrisons, player housing is supposed to encourage interacting), and longevity (like pet battling or transmog, it is here to stay).
In addition, it’s designed to scale with the player’s interest, namely spending as little or as much time as you want on housing. However, they didn’t yet say whether it’s possible to skip entirely. If, as it’s likely, there will be introductory quests to unlock housing, it should be a simple matter to just not do anything house-related.
I mean, I am one of those geeks who will want to dive in right away and fine-tune things to my heart’s content. But not everyone cares about the same kinds of gaming. (I’m still miffed at Blizzard trying to force pvp on all players. Nope, that won’t happen; I refuse, and if it means I won’t see some of the story or get certain rewards, then I won’t. Anyway.)
To begin with, Alliance will apparently have one housing zone (inspired mainly by Elwynn Forest, with some Westfall and Duskwood sprinkled in) and Horde another one (inspired by Durotar, its coastline, and Azshara), with “more possible places to live in the future”.
It’s still unclear how the system will work exactly. For example, how players will access their zones and the houses within has not yet been revealed. What we do know is that “[y]our houses are also shared amongst your Warband with your different characters being able to come and go” regardless of faction, and that “[h]ousing rewards are also shared across your Warband”. But does that mean we can have, say, multiple Horde houses and no Alliance ones at all? They do use a plural in your houses. Or are players limited at launch to one on the Horde and another on the Alliance side?
It seems there are also two decoration themes, one dubbed folk (which looks a little more Alliance-flavored) and the other rugged (more Horde style). Whether we’ll be able to mix and match items between the themes is still unclear, though. It’s reportedly been confirmed that players will be allowed to mix and match aesthetics.
The ability to visit your friends’ or guildmates’ houses sounds fabulous. But in addition to housing zones, there are also neighborhoods, which are instanced and can be either public or private, with room for 50 houses. That raises more questions—what about houses within a public neighborhood? (Or private, for that matter.) Is just anyone able to walk right in, or will there be some limits at the plot boundary (like in a real-life town)? Will we be able to name our private neighborhoods? Or houses? What will happen to cities—will everyone just decamp to housing zones when not conducting, say, auction house business, visiting a barbershop, or training? Can we pull out mounts in housing zones? Will there even be a reason to visit an auction house in a city, if your mount can provide for you?
Currently decoration edits are divided into two modes, basic and advanced. While the basic mode allows you to quickly place items in a, well, basic order, the advanced mode barely restricts you: the post “A Look at Housing Interior Design” from March 2025 says that “[i]nternally using this, [Blizzard] employees have taken bushes and made them into garland [sic] for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens.”
There’s a short compilation video of some work-in-progress customization options:
Looks absolutely fantastic! Even if all of the assets might not work exactly like this in the final version, it looks like there will, indeed, be a massive amount of details you can tweak, from floorplan to moving windows to placing objects on top of others to adjusting some of the colors, and more.
Another fantastic (literally!) feature is that the house interiors will not be limited by the exterior footprint. (Think of the mage tower in Stormwind.) Apparently the inside can also follow a different style than the outside, but more than that we do not yet know.
I find this concept of player housing very exciting! I’m tracking the release info, so I’ll know when to block time off in my calendar and what real-life events I might have to work around. At the moment there’s only speculation, though. The most specific I’ve seen so far is prior to the next expansion (WoW: Midnight) maybe around mid-December, while “winter 2025” is confirmed but still aggravatingly unspecific.
It’s currently also unclear whether players will be required to purchase Midnight in order to access housing.
Ohwell. As long as it’s actually a good system, I can wait. But it would be a treat to get to play in new housing over the Christmas break, wouldn’t it?
Artist Suzie Grieve harvests materials from the local woodlands and fields in the Lake District, U.K., with a focus on the weeds and invasive species, and weaves baskets out of the fibers. And they are very neat and beautiful:
The twist? Some of her baskets are not just neat and beautiful, and they’re not just small, they’re tiny. T I N Y!
Even if these baskets were of a more typical size, they would be impressive: the careful selection of materials to create stripes from naturally different colors, the planning and placement of patterns to create a pleasing whole, and the high quality of the work.
Then you shrink everything down to mere millimeters and centimeters, and the challenge grows larger. MUCH larger! I’ve done enough small-scale sewing to comprehend some of the challenges involved when scaling down the size of a project.
This is seriously impressive work requiring skill, imagination, and dedication. Kudos!
If I ever heard of a Red Sonja reboot project, I must’ve immediately forgotten it, for the fate of movie projects is unknowable and often fickle, and that is multiplied for genre projects starring women.
Now, though, it sounds like Millennium Media’s Red Sonja is due for release later this year in the UK and Ireland. This version is directed by M.J. Bassett and written by Tasha Huo and Roy Thomas on the basis of Robert E. Howard’s original comic book characters. Matilda Lutz plays Sonja.
I hazily remember the previous adaptation from 1985 starring Brigitte Nielsen. ‘Twas the time when there were so few SFFnal movies and tv series in the boonies where I grew up that you pretty much had to see everything coming your way if you wanted to see anything. If I recall, it was like the 80s Conan adaptations—Conan the Barbarian in 1982 and Conan the Destroyer in 1984—which is to say pretty campy, but attempting very, very, very earnestly to bring epic fantasy to screen.
Bassett’s version is filmed in Bulgaria and Greece, and reportedly will have a different tone from male-gaze versions of the character. While both of these details sound promising, and while I would love to see more genre projects led and directed by women, somehow I seem to doubt the movie will be released on the big screen here in Finland. We’ll see.
The first two installments of the 10-episode series will be streamed on Friday, May 16. This double feature will be followed by new episodes every Friday through July 11, 2025.
They also released the first two photos of actor and executive producer Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot, one with helmet on and the other with helmet off.
There really isn’t much detail in these photos; I wish there was a little more. Stylistically they’re not too far off of what I imagined on the basis of the books, except that Murderbot’s armor looks too flimsy. (Maybe they’ve written in a reason for that?)
This February’s press release also describes the series as a comedic thriller, which is interesting in itself. Yes, there are comedic elements, and yes, there is suspense and combat—in fact, I remember being flabbergasted when Murderbot exploded into action literally on page two of All Systems Red. I mean, it wasn’t a surprise that some fighting would be involved, but that quickly? It was an unusual attention-grabbing move to barely introduce your main character, never mind the world, before sweeping your readers into a fray with large hostile life forms with big teeth. Not to mention the trouble at the DeltFall survey site and the threat of EvilSurvey that steadily mounts through the book. Makes me wonder exactly which aspect, the comedy or the thrill, has Apple TV decided to focus on, or if both feature equally, whether they’ll be able to pull off a nice balance.
The IMDB entry for Murderbot reveals another two tiny tidbits: there will be a spaceship named Twodor and a named side character Venenek, neither of which appear in Martha Wells’s original writings. I’m sure IMDB will fill in more info as the release draws nearer.
One thing is sure: this spring will be a great time to re-read Murderbot. Not that there’s ever a bad time. 🙂
My favorite of Alice’s four collages is the first. It shows her versions of the Shire, Gandalf, and Erebor:
The Lonely Mountain Dwarf ensemble is fantastic: the little touches of fur in her boots and the edges of the vest, the embroidery on the tunic, the warm-looking leggings, the knit armwarmers and chunky cardigan, they all contribute. Add to those the puffy shorts (or skirt?) plus the fairly simple leather accessories with brass-colored metal accents and visible, chunky topstitching. Very nice!
The third mashup is also very neat, with the three principal human cultures of the Lord of the Rings—the rangers, Rohan, and Gondor:
Gondor is perfect, so austere and bleak. Her version of the rangers I find too dark for my liking—not a fan of black, even if it has its uses—but the profile I agree with.
Alice reminds the readers that her outfits aren’t cosplays, but her styling the contents of her wardrobe. And why not, if you can do it this well! While at times I don’t have exactly the same readings of the various Middle Earth cultures as she does, I do appreciate the combinations of elements from our mundane world and the suggestions she’s able to create through the careful selection of details. Makes me want to look at my closet with a new eye. 🙂
We’ve probably all seen endless examples of stereotypical fantasy Elves: those slim, tall, tranquil, ethereal, Art Nouveau-esque figures that glide effortlessly through a major convocation or battle field carnage alike. The type that for example various Weta artists immortalized for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
I’ve been hankering for something slightly different for a while. (At least in depictions of taller Elves; ElfQuest Elves and other Elves smaller in stature already start with some variety.) Here’s what I’ve come across.
Some illustrators make their Elves with non-stereotypical weaponry or gear. Pavel Hristov’s Steppe Elf carries a whopper of an axe and chews on a stalk of grain. There are also tassels hanging from the piece of cloth on his waist; those don’t seem to go with the Elf stereotype.
This Elven marksman explorer by L3monJuic3 has more typical weaponry—bow and arrow—but unlike her, stereotypical Elves are rarely seen carrying backpacks loaded with mundane items like shovels and cauldrons. Elves do typically eat and presumably have other bodily needs, right, even in the more highfalutin high fantasy worlds?
I cannot think off the top of my head any tinkerer nor wanderer type Elves (except for Drizzt Do’Urden in Forgotten Realms), but I don’t consider myself terribly well-read as far as fantasy goes. Anyway, for me these alternative takes were delightful.
Closest to my heart, however, are illustrations of Elves in non-stereotypical environments, especially among birches, in addition to ones showing different body shapes and happy demeanors.
This birchwood Elf by Andrius Matijosius may be a little scruffy-looking, but I love how his cape mimicks birch bark and arrows resemble leaf-topped trunks.
The Gate of Forest Elf Castle by ZAHD&ART also features fall colors. I love this birch-lined alley. A forest of birches with their white trunks lined up always looks so striking.
Moving to physical characteristics. Un Lee’s illustration of an Elf company is marvellous! Lee wanted to create a varied group much like the Dwarves in the Hobbit but with Elves instead.
Besides uniform body shapes, stereotypical Elves come in a fairly narrow range of moods. This portrait of an ancient Elf by eccentric_bee is serene on the surface, yes, but it looks to me that there’s joy underneath that’s often missing in depictions of Elves. Love it!
In Making Stuff we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
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