For fan film fans (say that three times fast) here's a new one: The Hunt For Gollum. It's a forty minute Lord of the Rings prequel that will be available for free download May 5. Two trailers are online already and it looks pretty good.

I also highly recommend Star Trek: New Voyages (from the second episode on) and Star Trek: Of Gods and Men.

Oh, and speaking of fan films, several people have linked to this, most recently slodwick, but if you haven't seen it yet: Henson's 11. It's Ocean's 11 with the Muppets.


Buy Indie Day

Friday May 1 is Buy Indie Day: The brainchild of author Joe Finder, May 1st has been declared Buy Indie Day. Joe's suggestion: buy one book—paperback, hardcover, audiobook, whatever you want!—at an independent bookstore near you.
Spread the word! If you don't live near one, there are plenty of indies that sell online, too.

For people who know Aaron Allston, great writer and great person, you may have heard that he had to stop his book tour to go into the hospital for heart problems. Here's a link (from lillian13) that gives more information about what happened.

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This weekend we watched one of the new Star Trek fan films, Of Gods and Men and really enjoyed it. This one was done in association with the people who do the Star Trek: Phase II episodes, and it had a big cast of actors from the original shows. Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, Alan Ruck, guy who plays Tuvok (who also directed it), guy who plays Harry Kim, guy who played Jake Sisko, plus a bunch of others. Uhura was the main character, with Checkov and Captain Harriman. It was a lot of fun and I highly recommend it.

Among fun things done this weekend:

We watched "Star Trek: New Voyages: World Enough and Time," the fan-produced film written by Marc Scott Zicree and Michael Reaves, that's up for the Nebula. I really enjoyed it. The special effects were good, the story was great, and they had enough real actors mixed in with the amateurs to make me not mind the amateurs so much. The neat thing was that they had tried to make it very close to the original, as far as the lighting, make-up, costumes, sets, the way the shots were framed. So it's weirdly like watching original Trek, only with some different actors and with the writers being able to do anything they want and not be handicapped by 1960s network executives.

We also watched the previous episodes, which weren't nearly as good. The learning curve and the improvement from episode 0 to episode 3 is enormous, though, and it's kind of interesting just to see their giant leaps forward in production.

(It's at www.startreknewvoyages.com)


We also got to see the game BioShock on the XBox on a 52-inch high-def TV. That was freaking incredible. The game really did the TV justice, and vice verse. It's set in 1960, and takes place in an Art Deco underwater city, built by a wealthy industrialist with Ayn Rand-like principles. The art direction is gorgeous (as morfin said, "I don't remember when this came out in the theater.") and you're discovering the story of the city and what happened to it as the game goes along, so it's really engrossing. I couldn't actually play it, because I was afraid it would screw up my bad hand again, but our friend played it for us for about an hour while we said helpful things like "You're out of ammo!" and "Hit it with the wrench!" I can't play it on my computer, which is a good thing because a) it would kill my hand and b) hours of time vanishing.