Geekdom - FishbowlLA

J.J. Abrams Set for MIT Media Lab Sit-Down

Richard Horgan — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 18:00:00 +0000

J.J. Abrams (Felicity, Lost, Star Trek) has done thousands of interviews. But chances are very few of the people he has been interrogated by possessed credentials on the level of MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito.

Ito, who will interview Abrams tomorrow as part of the Lab’s 2012 “Conversation Series,” currently sits on the boards of the Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and several other equally august organizations. From his truly humbling MIT mini-bio, there’s also this:

In Japan, Ito helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider. He was an early investor in more than 40 companies including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter and Twitter.

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Matt Groening: ‘If Life in Hell Were Still in LA Weekly, It Would Probably Have Kept Me Going.’

Pandora Young — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:13:07 +0000

When Matt Groening retired his weekly “Life in Hell” comic strip in June after 32 years, it was running in just 38 papers, down from 380 in its heyday. The low circulation numbers were a big part of why Groening threw in the towel, but as the cartoonist explains to Editor & Publisher, being cut out of his hometown paper was of special consequence:

It was particularly aggravating that I wasn’t being printed locally in Los Angeles. “Life in Hell” was cut out of LA Weekly, along with other cartoons.

I’d draw the strip, send it out, and wouldn’t see it reprinted anywhere. If “Life in Hell” were still in LA Weekly, it would probably have kept me going.

The LA Weekly dropped “Life in Hell” in 2009 as a cost-cutting measure. Cutting the strip saved the paper $18 a week.

Read the full interview, conducted by Rob Tornoe, at the Editor & Publisher website.

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Nerdist Heads to Comic-Con with New Ownership

Richard Horgan — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:20:32 +0000

Nikki Finke got the jump today on some very exciting news for the ebullient gang at Nerdist Industries. The website and affiliated operations have been acquired by early investor Legendary Entertainment:

My sources say huge comic book fan Thomas Tull will be stepping up his existing early investment in Nerdist and actually making an all-out acquisition. But co-owner Peter Levin (my pal) wouldn’t do a deal that stripped him and the other co-owner Chris Hardwick of autonomy for the editorial business. Now they will report to Legendary Entertainment COO Tim Connors.

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Chris Hardwick Set for Epic Star Wars Lightsaber Relay

Richard Horgan — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:30:05 +0000

This Saturday, July 7, something called Course of the Force will kick off at the Santa Monica Pier. For charity, various participants will walk or jog a specially made Hasbro lightsaber all the way down to San Diego in time for Comic-Con 2012, passing it from one participant to another Olympics torch-style in quarter-mile increments.

The event is a collaboration between Lucasfilm, Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist empire and Octagon. Hardwick and various co-hosts will broadcast the southbound progress at nerdist.com, and to frame the Make-a-Wish Foundation benefit trek, there’s also this cute short filmed at Industrial Light & Magic:

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LA Times Technology Writer Awarded Knight Fellowship at Stanford

Pandora Young — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:37:44 +0000

The recipients of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships have been announced, and of the 20 journalists who have been selected, one of them is a local. That would be David Sarno, technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times business section.

The John S. Knight allows recipients to pursue their ideas for innovative journalism at Stanford during the 2012-13 academic year. Sarno will work on creating “video tutorials showing journalists how to quickly build touchable, 3-D computer graphics for news.”

Other fellowship recipients from the golden state include Andrew Donohue, editor of the Voice of San Diego, Mary Aviles, editor of the EFE News Services in San Jose, and Kevin Weston, a new media entrepreneur from Oakland.

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LA Times Announces Hero Complex Film Festival Schedule

Matthew Fleischer — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:40:50 +0000

The LA Times’ Hero Complex Film Festival just announced the schedule for its third annual iteration at the Downtown Regal Cinemas at L.A. LIVE. The festivities kick off May 18 with a screening of Dawn of the Dead. Director Zack Snyder will be there for a zombietastic night with Walking Dead writer/creator Robert Kirkman.

The festival will close May 21 with a night with comic book legend Stan Lee. Other highlights include a screening of A Clockwork Orange followed by a discussion with Malcolm McDowell. There will also be Robocop.

Full schedule after the jump.

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Hero Complex Gets Its Own Geek Show

Matthew Fleischer — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:59:14 +0000

The LA Times Hero Complex blog is getting its own show on YouTube. Hosted by Times pop culture writer Geoff Boucher, Hero Complex: The Show will run on Nerdist’s soon-to-be-launched YouTube channel and will feature interviews on all things geek and/or nerd. Among other guests, Ridley Scott will be on the show to talk about Prometheus and Leonard Nimoy will also make an appearance to discuss long life and prosperity.

The Nerdist Channel makes its YouTube debut on April 2, while Hero Complex: The Show will premiere the week of April 9.

Press release after the jump:

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Happy Palindrome Day, Los Angeles!

Pandora Young — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:18:01 +0000

Today’s date is 11,02,2011, making the date a rare palindrome – meaning it reads the same forwards and backwards. Aziz Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Portland, spoke with the Los Angeles Times about what makes today’s date special:

Inan, who has taken on the discovery of palindrome dates as a sort of hobby, explained that there will only be 12 eight-digit palindrome days this entire century.

In addition to the automatic awesomeness of a date being a palindrome, Inan points out that Wednesday’s date is extra special because it is 1001 x 11 x 1001, or the product of a mathematical expression in which both sides are almost mirror images of one another.

Inan has discovered more amusing mathematical patterns in the date, which he shares in an article about the subject for the University of Portland’s student newspaper The Beacon.

We’re perfectly happy to celebrate today with music instead of math. The song “I Palindrome I” by They Might Be Giants, which includes word, letter, and musical palindromes, is after the jump:

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LA Times Reporter Dodges Kraken Controversy

Richard Horgan — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:00:11 +0000

The list of media outlets called out by Wired contributor Brian Switek is long and illustrious. Each one of them, he charges, fell hook, line and sinker for archaeological evidence of a “Kraken monster” presented on Monday at a Geological Society of America conference in Minneapolis.

Switek was one of the first to complain about this failure of science journalism. Today, he continues to point a non-squid like finger at everyone from Fox News to the Christian Science Monitor, which picked up the story from syndicate partner LiveScience:

Maybe I have things entirely wrong, but the disagreement seems to stem from the fact that I called writers who re-wrote the press releases for news sites “reporters.”

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Steve Jobs Wasn’t a Huge Fan of the Media

Marcus Vanderberg — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 06:00:31 +0000

Los Angeles Times media columnist James Rainey penned an excellent column on the late Steve Jobs and his relationship with the media.

As Rainey points out, the former Apple co-founder and CEO had a rocky relationship to say the very least with the media:

Conventional wisdom will vindicate Jobs’ media strategy. His products sold. His company grew to one of the biggest in the world. And reporters waited desperately for morsels about the slightest reconfiguration of the iPhone, iPod or MacBook. But because Jobs’ command and control paradigm worked at Apple doesn’t mean he was always right, or that his methods could be duplicated by lesser figures.

The tactics also created a perverse climate of breathless, under-informed speculation every time an Apple pod, pad or book was due for a launch or modification — which was essentially all the time. Addition of a data port on one device could draw oohs and ahhs in multiple stories..

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Comic-Con Attendee Writes About Her Meaningless Press Badge

Richard Horgan — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:00:56 +0000

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief at science-fiction focused website io9.com, has a solid lead-in to this week’s massive Comic-Con affair in San Diego.

Although the cynical view is that the event has been fully co-opted by Hollywood, Newitz begs to differ. She writes that the press are lumped in, as they should be, with the event’s more important core constituency of the fans:

This is one of the only cons I know of where having a press pass means almost nothing. As a member of the media, I still have to wait in those giant lines along with the fans to see the actors from Game of Thrones or catch some Spider-Man footage…

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New York Times Debates Pros and Cons of Comic-Con

Richard Horgan — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:15:49 +0000

What to make of the upcoming absence from Comic-Con 2011 in San Diego of Warner Bros., Disney, Dreamworks, The Weinstein Co., and possibly even Marvel Entertainment? That’s the question New York Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply tackled in a Sunday piece bound to be chewed over today by a thousand and one movie blogs.

Thanks to the ridiculously high expectations of attendees and this group’s ability to go ape on social media about any disappointment with previewed blockbuster and comic book movie elements, Comic-Con has become an extremely tricky PR proposition. The reporters wonder whether the absence of some of the big studios has anything to do with last year’s push-and-pull, which overwhelmed Sucker Punch, TRON: Legacy, Buried, and a certain Michael Cera flick:

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was the big alarm. That Universal movie was the belle of last year’s convention, and the studio spent heavily to make it so, draping the entire side of a skyscraper with an ad, for instance. Released just three weeks after the convention, Scott Pilgrim fizzled and the $60 million movie sold just $32 million in tickets.

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Two More Entities Join LA Geek Media Parade

Richard Horgan — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:30:28 +0000

As of yesterday, the LA version of GeekChicDaily.com’s daily email newsletter is up and blasting. The company — backed by such heavyweights as Peter Guber, Bob Pittman, and Joe Roth — also threw itself a little shindig Thursday night at Meltdown Comics on Sunset Boulevard.

In today’s mirrored website posting, the LA folks ponder potential Fantastic Four kill-off scenarios. For Jessica Alba‘s character, they suggest “forcing Sue Storm’s alter-ego to sit through a screening of The Love Guru. Death by embarrassment.”

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‘El Guapo’ Delineates Top Ten Movie Journalist No-No’s

Richard Horgan — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:30:01 +0000

LA freelance journalist George Roush, a.k.a. “El Guapo” (pictured), has a funny slide show piece today over at Comcast’s Movies.com. The title says it all: “10 Things Movie Journalists Should Never Do.”

Having once been regulars on the Hollywod press junket circuit, we’re amazed Roush was able to whittle it down to just ten. Although it’s about as winning a proposition as trying to get celebs to make interesting acceptance speeches, we applaud such Roush sentiments as his #8 no-no, “Ask celebs about their love life”:

This one is really annoying. I understand inquiries like this from international journalists because they don’t know any better and their readership likes that sort of thing, but it’s just stupid to ask… I doubt if dating advice from Topher Grace is going to get you laid, so just stick to the topic at hand, which is the movie.

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Homefront PR Stunt Backfires in San Francisco

Richard Horgan — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:00:48 +0000

As part of its ongoing and very subversive marketing campaign for the upcoming shooter videogame Homefront – the same campaign responsible for faux North Korean-themed LA food truck Pyongyang Express – THQ organized a noontime rally today at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference.

Along with an ex-CIA officer and expert on electromagnetic pulse, the phony human rights rally featured a live performance by The Dillinger Escape Plan. But people by the Bay were soon griping on social media about something else entirely – the release of 10,000 red balloons into the San Francisco environment.

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