The Future Is Quantity

George Lucas has a message for studios that are cutting their slates and shifting toward big-budget tentpoles and franchises: You've got it all wrong. The creator of "Star Wars," which stamped the template for the franchise-tentpole film, says many small films and Web distribution are the future.

GL is a genius, and I can't wait to see visuals from both upcoming Star Wars TV series. A 3D/CG Clone Wars will arrive first, then the live-action show (rumored to be comprised of over 50 hour long episodes) in a few years! Hopefully some pre-production art will make its way onto a forum or site soon, for fans to horde over. I hope Lucasfilm decides to spoil us first, I like nice hi-res, artifact-free pictures; not spy-cam or webcam frames or poorly scanned magazines >:(

Mars Face Makeover

NASA started it all back in 1976 with an image of an interesting mountain on Mars and a caption that described it as appearing to have eyes and nostrils.

Well, now it's pretty much been confirmed that there isn't a shred of decent evidence supporting the idea that the Face On Mars is a artificial construct. Just a tricky interplay of light and shadows, and the human minds thirst for recognizing facial patterns in everything it cognates. I had been convinced of that for some time now, but this is the final nail in the coffin, unless the HiRISE camera on MRO happens to pick up new details. Maybe some new, under-imaged region of the red planet will relinquish evidence of a Von Neumann probe, or some other monolithic construct left behind for us to discover.

Lots O' LOST Linkage

With the 3rd season of Lost premiering tomorrow night, I thought I would post some excellent links for those of you that can't keep up with all the theories out there currently. As far as wikis go Lostpedia is definately the best. It's contributers detail every aspect of the show, from the over-arching mysteries to seemingly mundane background props.

Also, an allround good site for show news is Lost-Media - they post updates regularly, and the forum is good too. A podcast I listen to faithfully is over at Lostcasts . These dudes are total geeks, but in the best way possible. They take the show seriously, but not themselves too much. And for the collectors, McFarlane Toys is coming out with statue figures soon, so start saving up now.