This SNL skit may be Natalie Portman’s best captured performance yet.

Wearing this costume takes balls.

And I was tempted to categorize this under crumb catchers.

This is the first I heard about it, and there’s already a trailer. Richard Linklater (Slacker, Waking Life) has adapted the Philip K. Dick novel, A Scanner Darkly, to the screen in an animated film due out this summer. The bad news… the lead is the non-actor, Keanu Reeves.

I had little hope by it’s title, The Ten Best Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed. After all, most articles about the subject are by sci-fi literature fans, and they follow a formula. There’s usually a perfunctory nod to a sci-fi classic like Foundation or The Left Hand Of Darkness. There are often some token “hard sci-fi” entries like something from Niven or Haldeman just to show that he’s street (or the alpha-dork equivalent). Then the rest is filled with self-pleasing dweeb wankery. This tends to take the form of worshipping the latest Terry Pratchett excretion or Piers Anthony dingleberry. Yeah, cuz 400 pages of unfunny nerd puns translated to the screen mean critical or commercial success. The article linked above avoids these pitfalls. Just the right amount of geekery. It reads well and actually considers the challenges involved in making effective films. His entry for Snow Crash skirts the fringe of mainstream, but I feel that Snow Crash was written in a gritty cinematic style, so it could be translated to the screen, but I agree with his argument against it making money.

Guardian Unlimited has an interesting article on the last century of music plotted on a London Underground map. It’s got everything from The Clash to MF Doom.

Here’s the map.

Check this mashup:

Brokeback Mountain + Back to the Future = Brokeback to the Future

First off, let me say that I found this while browsing podcasts in the iTunes Store. Honestly, I swear.

It’s called Media Nipple. Naturally, that caught my attention, so I checked it out.

Reading on, it quickly became disappointing. It becomes apparent that the real content is legitimate social commentary. They explain that its name is a metaphor for the “deceptive practices of news media, and how easily we’ve all succumed to it, now requiring it for our daily nourishment.” What a let down.

But then, I checked out the standalone site (NSFW) outside of the iTunes Store. Good decision, me!

Everyone’s seen those spams that say shit like “Hot young co-eds eager 4 your member” then the link brings you to some site selling time shares. Well this is like that, but it does a second bait-and-switch making it a happy day.

I posted a while back about Video Games Live, an orchestral concert of video game music. They’re calling it quits. From Slashdot:

Video Games Live (‘The first major North American concert tour featuring music from some of the biggest video games combined with video footage, lasers, lights, and live action’) announced today that they have cancelled all tour dates in their national tour except for two scheduled for this weekend in Seattle and Vancouver. Fans across the country who have paid for tickets to these events must now manually request refunds and suffer convenience charges. The event was cancelled ‘because ticket sales were slow and did not reflect the great interest expected.

Coulda just said, “I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking.”