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nineveh_uk!http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/16433.h
ICv2's sales estimates for November 2009 have been released.
Buffy #30 sold 49,155; the Dr. Horrible one-shot doing excellent business, with 25,326 copies sold; this ends up being ahead of Angel #27, which sells 20,731. Angel: Only Human #4 picks up 11,995.
In graphic novels, After the Fall volume 2 and Buffy volumes 4 and 5 make appearances.
http://io9.com/5420137/top-10-science-fi
io9 considers Fox's decision to end "Firefly" (among other short-lived quality shows on the network) one of the top ten most disappointing moments of the aughts.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packag
Click to see which episode of Dollhouse made the list.
Time Magazine ranks Briar Rose as #4 in their list of the top 10 TV episodes of 2009.
http://www.reg.msu.edu/Courses/Request.a
AMS 450 - Major Themes in Pop Culture will be offered this spring at MSU with a focus in BtVS, The Terminator, and Aliens.
The description, which can be found through much tinkering at schedule.msu.edu, is as follows:
This course illustrates a variety of sci-fi themes: utopian and dystopian societies, relationships between humans, alien contact, post apocalyptic futures, female heroes and the metaphor of the vampire and the zombie. We will look closely at Aliens, The Terminator and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We will read fiction and essays by Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Bell Hooks, and others.
[ edited by Sunfire on 2009-12-09 05:03 ]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Helbe
Raise a glass to celebrate Mr. Helberg's 29th.
Tried to work in a Moist reference but my musings kept coming out dirty.
"Make it a Moist...."
"Here's to a Moist...."
[ edited by alcabongtv on 2009-12-09 01:20 ]
This is a terrible time of year for what's in the papers.
Multiplied to an even greater degree by end of decade.
Lists of, even whole articles about, the 'best of' proliferate. Yawn, yawn, yawn.
So not inspiring.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1144305.htm comments.
http://www.californiabrowncoats.org/?p=3
This special one of a kind auction is being organised by the California Brownooats and all proceeds will go to The ALS Association. ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.
http://www.macworld.com/article/144903/i
"Epitaph One" is included.
http://www.therialto.com/joomla/index.ph
2nd Annual NC Browncoat Christmas get together!
The Colony Theater present Serenity as a part of its Cool Classics Series this Thursday Night. Showtime is 8:00pm and the cost is $5!!!
Location: Levittown, New York, USA
Jasmine is two months old now. We adopted her from the Town of Hempstead Animal Shelter in Wantagh when she was barely six weeks old. She is a bundle of energy and brings a great deal of joy to our house.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journ
The latest issue of The Journal of Popular Culture has a couple of Buffy-themed reviews which are certainly an interesting read. You need to sign up / be a member of Wiley InterScience to read the whole articles, but can get the gist from the abstracts.
Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television and Buffy and Angel Conquer the Internet: Essays on Online Fandom
The Truth of Buffy: Essays on Fiction Illuminating Reality
I've noted a number of Whedon-themes articles in the title in the past and thought it worth pointing out as they are usually an excellent, thought provoking read.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/cont
It's part of Tim's new two-year deal with 20th Century Fox.
A thoughtful list of one fan's top 10 favorite Whedon TV moments, from Buffy to Dollhouse, with stops in-between.
http://www.mycharitywater.org/p/campaign?c
Sounds like a great cause. Nathan's tweet about this.
Even if you can't donate, you can retweeted Nathan's tweet if you have a twitter account.
Alyssa Milano has raised her goal. By raising the goal, together we will provide life-giving water for 10 communities, 500 families and 2,500 people. Saying "thank you," doesn't seem to be enough, but just know, my gratitude is endless.
Spoilers for other shows as well.
It's the penultimate question, right towards the end.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321509/
Ron Glass has been cast in American remake of Alan Tudyk's "Death at a Funeral," presumably in a different role.
Muppet Man Frank Oz is replaced by Wicker Man Neil LaBute as director.
http://www.thefutoncritic.com/listings.a
Marc Blucas guests in tonight's episode of Castle, titled "The Fifth Bullet".
http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/
Emily Nussbaum of New York Magazine writes of television in the 00s. "But for anyone who loves television, who adores it with the possessive and defensive eyes of a fan, this was most centrally and importantly the first decade when television became recognizable as art, great art." Several references to Joss.
Am currently being irritated by train travel sites where you have to put in some specific date and time for a particular journey to get any information.
What I want to know is:
Do trains run directly between X and Y, or do you have to change at Z?
How frequent is the service?
How long does it take?
Will concede that working out the fare-scale applicable to any given itinerary has always been opaque.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143953.htm comments.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/12/07/nobod
Maclean's argues that no one would ever want to become a Doll, apparently for the reason I've quoted for the post title here.
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that the wonderful Greyladies have been republishing several of these 'light romances' which Streatfield wrote pseudonymously to boil the pot, for serialisation in women's magazines and then to come out as books. They're delightful.
Admittedly, they are probably delightful for reasons other than the actual romances. Once does rather feel that Streatfield's own feelings were that it was a generic requirement to have boy meet girl, various difficulties arise, and eventually overcome to the prospect of wedding-bells, but that she wasn't entirely interested in the trope. As opposed to giving a vivid picture of the settings she uses and in particular work of various kinds.
Her male heroes are very nice - they are sensible, rational, kind, sensitive, supportive and protective. They do not brood angrily, nurture secret sorrows or dark secrets, insult the heroine, become violent; and this is surely not just changing times and styles because, Desert Romances! Ethel M Dell! and the romances by that woman (Violet Winspear?) who gave a wonderful description somewhere of how she wrote a hero (brooding, passionate, concealed hurt and vulnerability, etc).
Okay, there is one moody creative type in Poppies for England, but even he has a protective and supportive streak. And they do mostly expect the young women involved to give up their careers on marriage, though there is a male character, also in Poppies for England, who presents himself to the ambitious performer as an ideal candidate for marriage to an ambitious woman of temperament such as herself.
The issues of conflict that arise tend to operate around class difference (surely another generic requirement) or career/marriage issues, but we do strongly get the sense that Streatfield is not so keen on draaaaaama.
Anyway, Pirouette. I didn't relax into this in the same warm-bath way as the others, largely because it felt like an entirely different novel, possibly the sort that Streatfield wrote for adults under her own name (actually, it wasn't, was it? Don't I recall that she had changed it when initially going on the stage to avoid embarrassing her family?) was struggling to get out, or at least that the story could have been a whole lot darker without a lot of effort.
Judith is a nice docile young girl and a talented dancer in a ballet company, not yet doing solo roles, but starts getting picked for these during the course of the story. What we discover is that her mother is living out through her her own thwarted dreams of being a dancer, and we get both the pathos of this, and the absolute toxicity of the situation for all concerned, Judith herself, and her brothers who are deprived of the attention their mother focuses on their sister, the younger of whom slides into juvenile delinquency.
This wouldn't, of course, work as a light romance, but the story could quite easily have become one of a young girl who is dancing to the tune of her mother and Madame Tania, the head of the ballet company, and almost unconsciously falls in love - or responds to a man's interest in her - as a means of getting out from under: because even if her mother and Madame T think marriage is a trap and not to be considered weighed against her career, her father and society at large would consider marriage a perfectly legitimate reason for abandoning the dance.
It doesn't quite go there but there's a sort of shadow of it. There's also, more explicitly, the shadow of what happens to the girls who gave up their young lives to the discipline of ballet and then find that their talent is not enough or their bodies develop in the wrong way - too tall, too curvy, etc.
One of the excellent things about these books is the extent to which 'Chloe likes Olivia': there are friendships between women, mutual support, mentoring, etc, even if there is also the generic female rival for the hero. I am not sure whether one could detect hints of Madame Tania being a lesbian, or whether she is just consciously and deliberately encouraging young women in the hothouse environment of the ballet company to crush on her.
We are a bit bothered by the assumption that going out to Rhodesia is just the thing for young men who cannot settle into a conventional career in post-war Britain... though I do see that the plot rather demands that The Hero is likely to be going a long way away on a permanent basis, just to ratchet up some tension and make the choice acute.
But a good read, and raising these various questions as a result.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1143644.htm comments.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=a
Scott Allie gives a hint on Twilight's ID at the end of this article on the Obama parody cover
http://www.boxsetsshop.com/index.php?mai
Boxsetsshop.com has the Buffy box at $99.
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