Sci-Fi Storm

It is tradition on the Internet for false news stories – clever, uninspired, or just dumb – to proliferate on the Net on April 1st. It’s amazing how many are taken for the truth, but sometimes its hard to tell. Take for example the quite clever stuff at Coming Atractions, some of which I almost reported on before the caffeine kicked in.

Anonymous Coward writes “R. A. Lafferty, the prolific SF writer has died. He was 87. Obituaries appear in the LA Times and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most of his stuff is out of print these days but he was the author of quite a few good novel and shorts stories including Eurema’s Damn which won the Hugo award in 1973.”

Word is out on the street – on August 6th, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings will be released on 2-disc DVD set – but you may not want it – because a 4-disc set with 30 minutes of additional footage and a likely ‘R’ rating will be released in November, just 5 weeks before The Two Towers hits theaters.

I haven’t seen A Beautiful Mind yet, so I don’t know if it was better, but it beat out strong contender The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in all the big categories, seemingly showing the Academy is still unwilling to accept fantasy in the mainstream. The most mainstream category LOTR got was for Original Score, plus the usual techincal stuff (Makeup, Visual Effects, Cinematography). Dreamworks’ Shrek, however, took home the first-ever Animated Feature award, beating Disney/Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., who instead took Best Song for Randy Newman’s “If I Didn’t Have You”.

This has been around – apparently the I Am Legend project is back on, but now Arnold is just a producer, and there is talks with Will Smith to star; Director Brian Singer (X-Men) will make a cameo as a bridge officer on Star Trek: Nemesis; and we’ve reported about the possible return of Knight Rider – now David Hasselhoff is talking about it as a feature film, producing it with creator Glen A. Larson.

SCI FI Wire is back updating again, so here are a few of the headlines: James Cameron is set to direct the second-season finale for his show Dark Angel – the first time he ever directed a TV episode; Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to star produce and star in a remake of Michael Crichton’s Westworld; news is fast spreading on the net that Janet Jeppson’s It’s Been a Good Life, a condensed version of Issac Asimov’s autobiography, reveals the famed author died of AIDS in 1992, contracted from a blood transfusion in 1983; and Gerald DiPego (Message in a Bottle) and his two sons have been named to write the screenplay for a movie version of The Outer Limits.

According to Variety, Andrea Thompson has resigned from her position as primary anchor for the revamped CNN Headline News. The former actress (Babylon 5, JAG, NYPD Blue) became a local news anchor and then was brought in when CNN wanted to change the image of its Headline News channel. Now after only seven months, she’s decided for another change. No idea to what…

The nominees for the Saturn Awards, the Oscars/Emmys of the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror genres, have been announced. No suprises here: Harry Potter and The Fellowship of the Ring are up for top Fantasy Film, along with Shrek, Monsters, Inc., Spy Kids and The Mummy Returns. And plenty in the TV arena as well.

I finally have managed to take the time and update the site code to Slashcode 2.2.5. What was holding me back was the fact that they changed the templates, which give the look and feel, and I remember how long it took me to to create them in the first place. Fortunately the changes were relatively minor, and even those that changed still had some compatibility so I could cut and paste. Read More to find out what’s new.

Update: Of course, you can only see the changes when the internet connection is up. Not sure what the instability is yet.

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OK, I’ve worked out the bug that caused comment posting to break last time I tried this, so I’ve turn4ed it back on – now Sci-Fi Storm should load MUCH faster – the transfer of the bulk of the HTML has been reduced by 90%. For the technically-minded, I’m using the mod_gzip plugin to Apache to achieve this. Assuming a recent browser, all compressible content will be compressed on the server and transmitted. Let me know ASAP via e-mail to storm @ scifistorm.org if there are problems.