OG’s BLOG

Fetch the Bee goes live today! You may have heard my fourteen-year-old son talking about his brand new strip in the latest Braincast. Well, he’s off to school, and excited to begin showing off the results of his work over the summer. Pop over when you get a chance, and check it out. I think his strips show a lot of promise, and I look forward to seeing more from him. And we both hope you enjoy them, too!

The latest edition of the Steve Ogden Braincast is up online. In this episode, I continue talking about creating and writing characters, focusing on characters who evolved from a narrative need, specifically Moon Town TV news commentators Triple Bee and Savannah Bonn. Also, I chat briefly with my son Thomas about his thoughts on character as he wraps up pre-production on his own forthcoming webcomic Fetch the Bee. Music – Can’t Fool Me and The Trees Ask, by Steve Ogden; theme to Cosmic Osmo by Tim Larkin.

Hello, dear Braincast listeners. For technical reasons too boring to go into here, I have had to make a new RSS feed, subscription feed, XML, whatever you want to call it, for the Steve Ogden Braincast. The old subscription address – steveogden.com/podcast/podcast.xml – will no longer be updated, and soon will be removed altogether.

If you’d like to keep up with the latest Steve Ogden blather, you’d better subscribe via the new address: www.steveogden.com/braincast.xml

Or, if you want to do it through iTUNES, click HERE. I apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to see you on the next Braincast, where I will talk to my son about character theory as he prepares to launch his own webcomic Fetch the Bee!

One of the nice things about living in the Baltimore/DC metropolitan area is that I don’t have to be in Arizona or somewhere to be close to really great space science. Right down the road from me is JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and of course the Smithsonian Air and Space museum is not far at all. Well, even closer than that for me is SkyWatch, a radio show run by Carol Christian and Jim O’Leary. Ms. Chrisian is science and technology advisor at the State Department, and Mr. O’Leary is senior director of the planetarium, IMAX theater, observatory, and SpaceLink and TerraLink centers at the Maryland Science Center. The two of them put on a very informative radio program here at local radio station WYPR, and generously rebroadcast it as a podcast. If you’re a space nut like me – and you know you are – you should check it out.

Tom Dell’Aringa asked me to do a five-page story for his upcoming Marooned collection “Out of Orbit”. Who am I to say no? The story is a five-pager involving the mysterious Lian Fisher, and is a lot of fun to draw. In fact, let’s make it six pages… Track progress on the story in my projects page, and track Tom’s progress on the book - and pre-order the collection when it’s ready, cuz this story won’t be available anywhere else in the forseeable future!

Oh my. For years I’ve been saying that Hollywood is bankrupt of ideas. When they began making old TV shows into movies, that was a sign (The Flintstones… what!?). When they began making amusement park rides into films, I thought the writing was on the wall (The Haunted Mansion… what!?). And of course, they’ve been making games into movies for a bit now, with such instant classics as Max Payne. WHAT!?

Enter the latest desperate grab for audience cash – films from games. No, board games. Yep, that’s right. Reportedly, directors as notable as Ridley Scott and Peter Berg have respectively signed on to big-budget versions of Monopoly and Battleship, and there’s even a version of Candy Land in the works. More from this report from Morning Edition. Wow. If the Hollywood decision makers continue the trend of never having to learn to read or think, maybe one day they’ll make a movie out of card games like Hearts or Bridge. Yay Culture!

Rupert Murdoch is going to shut down his Londonpaper in the UK as a cost-cutting measure while at the same time preparing to begin charging for news content online. A harbinger of things to come? Will people pay for online content? And is shutting down offline content part of the deal?

Source: CNN EUROPE

Jeremy Mayer makes incredible art out of old typewriter parts…

Interesting story from All Things Considered on the movement of many authors into ghostwriting for more successful authors.

What a great idea! 1884: Yesterday’s Future is a whacked-out Terry Gilliam-looking mishmash of techniques including puppets, 2D and 3D elements, all cobbled together to tell a tongue-in-cheek steampunk past-future comedic adventure story. Little surprise that the Tim Ollive and Dennis De Groot test footage spawned a Real Film Deal, and that the production has landed at Peculiar Pictures where none other than Terry Gilliam himself is Executive Producer.

Thanks to friend of the blog Michael Dowswell for the tip!