This year, the question I replied to was:

INTRO: We’ve already talked about literary villains, so we asked this week’s panelists about bad guys (and gals) of the big screen:

Q: Who are some of the best villains in science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror film?
[I'm specifically looking for villains from movies, not TV or books]

To see all of our answers, and the comments in response:
MIND MELD: Bad Guys We Love to Hate: The Best Film Villains in SF/F/H (with Various Videos of Villainy)

This time, John reminded me in time, and it was a good thing… this was a question near and dear to my heart that I did really want to answer.

The question: What’s your favorite sub-genre of science fiction and/or fantasy?

Go and read our answers. I will say now that there’s more than a few series and books I didn’t include, and that was because I didn’t want to make a long long list.

The funny thing is, at the most recent CopperCon 28 back in August, I was on a panel about the very thing I put in my answer… “Sleuthing and Crime Solving in Scifi and Fantasy”. We came up with a long list of fun reads and favorites in that panel… it’ll take me forever to get to half of them.

Don’t send me and Twitter friend requests, or whatever the new social chatter thing happens to be this month. I’ll most likely ignore them, because if I don’t have the time to use them, I’m not going to bother checking them out. Same thing goes for Facebook.

I will admit that Shelfari and Good Reads have potential, and are more in line with the kind of information I’m more likely to use and need, I may wait a little longer before hopping on either of those.

I’ve been in the middle of a few systemwide changes to accomodate some FarPoint Media needs, as well as some needed updates and conversions to a host of show websites.

Some of them are rather involved, and no amount of Googling turned up the full solution to any of the issues I’ve been working on. So I’m going to eventually be posting the solutions I came up with, in the hopes that maybe they can help out someone else later.

The big tasks:
* getting Mailman to work on a subdomain of a Plesk hosted domain where mail for the domain is being delivered elsewhere
* converting several websites from Drupal 5.1 to Wordpress 2.5 directly

I think I’ve dabbled in and tweaked more MySQL in the past week than I have ever.

There were also some little tasks, that most likely won’t be posted here:
* customizing Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo2 theme to incorporate more image options
* getting Amazon’s pop-up link enhancer to work in Justin Tadlock’s Options theme (details may show up in the Options forums)

Anyway, this quiz is “What type of writer should you be?” I was betting that it would lean me more towards mystery-thrillers than fantasy, but like all good stories, there was a twist at the end.

You Should Be a Film Writer

You don’t just create compelling stories, you see them as clearly as a movie in your mind. You have a knack for details and dialogue. You can really make a character come to life. Chances are, you enjoy creating all types of stories. The joy is in the storytelling. And nothing would please you more than millions of people seeing your story on the big screen!

And yeah, writing for television and film is pretty much at the top of my list. So I surprised myself with this quiz, and it’s a good thing.

I now both love and hate Justin. I love him for this story, and I hate him for not writing 5 of them in this series before getting the first one published. But that’s easily forgiven, since he is writing more, and I have learned to be patient. I don’t have to always like being patient, but I can still be patient.

I’m writing a review of Black Magic Woman for Dragon Page. I’m also reading the book again for that purpose. Those of you who know me can take that as an indicator of how much I enjoyed this book, and I think I already mentioned how much I can’t wait for the next book in the series. Wait until December.

The other book I have to mention is actually a pair of books… the first two in a series. Here, There Be Dragons and The Search for The Red Dragon by James A. Owen. First two books in “The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica”, you almost have to read them a couple of times to pick up all the interwoven and cleverly hidden historical references, both real and literary.

This series is a proposed seven volumes, and will actually tie in to the graphic novels and some other work that James has done. The third volume will be out this fall, so I won’t have to wait too long… and I have to re-read the first book anyway, to catch some of the stuff I missed last year… stuff James mentioned during the interview we did.

I want more time to read, and to write. Lots more!

Anyway, go find these books… I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I just watched a marathon of all the episodes so far, and it held up, so yes, I definitely want some more.

Fox really needs to pick this up for the fall, and not leave us hanging.

I don’t agree with his statement that the nostalgia needs to be ditched, but continuing to fund mindless substandard programming and ignoring the smarter and far better options that are out there completely confounds me and millions of other scifi fans.

I noticed this thing of SciFi Channel aiming at the wrong targets, starting with missing out on acquiring Season 5 of Babylon 5 because they’d committed money to 3 seasons of First Wave sight unseen, and for some boggling reason, it continues to this day.

Why didn’t SciFi Channel try to pick up Surface or Threshold? Even as projects they could continue as movies or miniseries to conclude them? Threshold might have been a problem, but Surface was a property that their parent company already owned, so why not take advantage of that?

Same thing now for Journeyman. Everyone who’s watched this show gets hooked on it, which makes you wonder if the people calling the shots ever watch the shows they’re keeping and killing. There’s even a chance to give fans some closure on The 4400 and The Dead Zone, which were canceled just a few weeks ago by USA Network (again, same parent company as SciFi Channel).

Aside: and while we’re mentioning NBC Universal, I’d like to give them huge props for taking advantage of new Nielsen rules at the beginning of this current season, and rebroadcasting shows across their various channels to get as big a metered audience as possible. I also regret that I must land the equivalent of one of NCIS Special Agent Jethro Gibbs’ famous head slaps on them for cowering under the whines and complaints of the other networks who claimed it was unfair because they didn’t also have similar alternate avenues to take advantage of.

Okay, network cross pollination of programming to maximize viewership rant is now over.

One last plea, an appeal to your bottom line. If you keep giving viewers a steady stream of crap, eventually, they will stop watching altogether. There is a healthy and growing pool of independent content producers bringing good stories to life as film projects, internet video serials, direct-to-dvd, and audio dramas, and we can and will make use of those if we can’t get good programming anywhere else.

Oh, and did you notice that WalMart just sold off it’s online video rental service to Netflix? And that Netflix and LG are working on an on-demand system that will deliver a rental as a download you can watch on your TV, without needing a computer to handle the download?

Think about that when you hear about all the TV watchers who are renting and buying DVDs of TV shows to watch again, today because of the writers strike, but later, maybe because there’s nothing else to watch.

I haven’t been writing as much as I should, which is bad from the NaNoWriMo perspective, but good from the perspective that I’m writing at all.

I did find a brown widow spider in my garage again. It might be the same one that my roommate shooed away a couple months ago, or it might be a different one. But it made a web in the same spot as the other one. No egg sacs that I can see, but it’s definitely a brown widow. I would very much like it to find another home, though.

I found out this weekend that the AZ Book Festival may held it’s last festival.

The AZ Book Festival lost it’s usual space at Carnegie Center, and as a result will not be able to hold the festival in April 2008 as they have been held the past few years. They’re officially on hiatus, hoping for a new location for Fall 2008 or Spring 2009, but that’s not hopeful-sounding news.

I hope they manage to find a new home.