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Hmm… story idea

A man holds a tentacle of a ‘Arcciteuthis Dux’ squid on La Isla beach, in northern Spain, September 15, 2003. Scientists are trying to find out what caused two enormous squids, one of them 40 ft long, to wash up dead on Spain’s northern coast this week. ‘It’s not a natural death and it’s not the Prestige,’ Luis Laria, president of marine protection agency CEPESMA said, referring to a massive oil spill from the Prestige tanker late last year. He declined to speculate on the cause.

Could have been lifted right off the front page of the Arkham Gazeteer.

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How have I not heard of this?

Gaiman summarizes:

Avalon
is a remarkable film — it looks astonishing, is haunting, deep, frustrating and magical in equal measure, like an art-film version of the Matrix, or a middle-European Philip K Dick structure created by a Japanese director more to unsettle you then to excite you. In a grey, futuristic world, people enter a consensual reality run by computers to play illegal war-games, and the finest player is a woman called Ash. There are hidden levels to the game, and to reality. It doesn’t look like anything else: it’s like an SF tone poem, or a mood, as much as it is a story.

Coming out December 9th, along with a zillion other things I want. :P

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Bitter Aftertaste

Firefly wins TeeVee Awards ’03: Most Unjust Cancellations Award.

But we still must wail against the cancellation of Firefly. Granted, the show’s first aired episodes were a bit shaky. But those who saw the final part of its run (as well as the pilot episode Fox refused to air until it was far too late) saw the strength of its writing, its premise, and its fantastic cast.
A sci-fi western, Firefly really began to work when it more deftly mixed genres, shifting from western to action to techno-sci-fi with ruthless efficiency. It was uncompromising in its quirks — all the outer space scenes were silent, since there’s no air (and therefore no sound) in space — and that idiosyncracy probably didn’t help it with your average TV viewer.
But people who say Firefly was a flop probably didn’t watch more than one episode. And many uneducated folks simply look at its sudden cancellation and jump to a bad conclusion: that after his success with Angel and Buffy, Whedon couldn’t reach his built-in audience with Firefly. The problem with that reasoning is, more people watched Firefly than either of Whedon’s other two creations last year, combined. It’s just that the ratings bar is set a bit higher on Fox than it is on UPN and The WB.

Fox has cancelled more good shows than UPN and The WB have aired in their combined existences: Firefly, The Tick, Undeclared, Andy Richter Controls the Universe just in recent history.
Why? To bring us Joe Millionaire 2, coming this fall.