Halloween party, 2005

From Eerie to Bloomington...

Southern Vampire

"a new HBO series based on Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire book series"

Pattern Recognition

Our book for October 20 2005 was Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Peter Kuchera facilitated the meeting, and John Gallman attended for the first time in a while.

Pattern recognition
John 8 (for effort)
Dru 8
Chris 5
Peter 7
Alek 6
Raja 5
Ignacio 3

Ignacio was misled by the cover art to believe Cayce had black hair and maybe looked like an asian girl. But then he looked up (warning: Link Not Workplace Safe!) Jane Birkin, to whom Cayce is compared in the first pages of the book.

Which Serenity character are you?

GF Moment (Kung Fu Monkey)

Kung Fu Monkey: It's a "Global" Frequency now ...:

(...) One quick story: There's a sequence in the show, when Aleph gets everyone on the Frequency, and they figure out what the problem is. All these citizen-experts, pitching in to save strangers' lives. To get a good feel for the timing, all the actors were kind enough to show up on that shoot night (Aimee shot separately) at 3 am and do their parts LIVE. So it played out, just like on the show -- the call went out, people responded, voices chiming in, all in one, long flawless take ... like it was actually happening.


It was incredible, one of those alchemical moments were it stopped being television, stopped being a performance, and actually took us to another world.


Nelson calls "cut". I step into the set, basically this glorified warehouse, and realize that there's a weird silence. Cast and crew are spooked. Some people are tearing up, I actually hear a little sniffling. I turn to one of the show staff and say "Hey, you okay? What's wrong?"


And she bursts into tears. "I was just ... what if it were real? Wouldn't it be beautiful if people could really ..." And she fades out, wipes her eyes. Whispers: "It would just be so amazing if it were real."


That's right. For two glorious minutes in a waterfront shed in Vancouver, the Global Frequency was real. And it destroyed people. For just the chance at that, I'm glad I tried.

Recalibrating DC Heroes for a Grittier Century

Interesting piece in the New York Times (!) about the big shakeup underway in the DC Universe right now. (It's got a minor spoiler if you haven't read the "Sacrifice" crossover.) As far as I can tell, after the end of "Infinite Crisis", DC plans to jump the storylines forward a year, then have a 52-issue weekly comic to backfill.

52, the weekly series that begins in May, will be a story-telling and production challenge. A weekly series leaves little room for delays in writing, illustrating or printing, and the "real time" concept means no inventory story can be dropped in to fill a gap in the narrative.

The commitment of resources "scared a lot of departments," Mr. DiDio said, adding, "This is not just an editorial risk; it's a company risk."