We just got back from a mandatory (but with Baskin-Robbins ice cream) staff meeting at the Daily Press, where Publisher Stephan Wingert announced that Gretchen Losi, formerly the DP’s Hesperia reporter and now doing a bang-up job on education, was the DP’s Employee of the Month, for her leadership in the newsroom while the paper temporarily was without a city editor. Well deserved, even if this is half a step towards management, Gretchen.
Bards and Sages has just announced that the Koboldnomicon, with material by yours truly, among others, will be released in July.
No word on distribution methods, but going by history, it’s a pretty safe bet it’ll be available through RPG Now at the very least.
This was a really great story on NPR yesterday:
At many newspapers, the top priority is how best to prop up revenues. But the family that owns The Anniston Star in Alabama is quietly planning to devote the paper’s profits to training new generations of reporters.
The Star is a small daily that packs an outsized punch, situated in a town west of Atlanta. The paper has a circulation of just 27,000. But under the leadership of publisher Harry Brandt Ayers, it fights above its weight class. It campaigned for racial desegregation at a time when much of Alabama was brawling to keep it out, and it has uncovered pollution and government corruption. The newspaper has maintained a staff that is twice as large as what industry consultants recommend.
The Star has long served as a training ground for aspiring journalists. Rick Bragg and Jim Yardley went on to win Pulitzers at The New York Times. Others graduated to the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.
The audio version has more to it than the text sample on the NPR site.
The Anniston Star sounds like a great paper. I wish every community in America had a paper like that.
There are movies that merit running more than two hours, where the filmmakers fill every second with cinematic gold. Unfortunately, Tristan & Isolde
isn’t one of them. The movie drags from the beginning, as we see 20 to 30 minutes of background that could have been explained with some background text. Each scene, then and after, moves at a leisurely pace, as though people were not dying and nations were not at war.
Worst of all, James Franco — surely there were attractive young British actors that could have played Tristan — seems to be sleepwalking through every scene with his co-star, bringing an abject lack of chemistry to the proceedings.
This is a workman-like film, but it has really nothing to demand that the viewer watch it. A rental, and nothing more.
Although I enjoy all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (I’ve read all of them in paperback except for the latest kid’s one), some characters and settings I like more than others. I quite like the witches of Lancre and the wizards of Unseen University, for instance, while I’m lukewarm at best to Death.
But, perhaps because they’re not being designed as franchise players, I seem to like Pratchett’s standalone story characters best. Sure, we see that the journalists of The Truth are still around and there are enough references in the other books to let us know the events of Small Gods happened, but for the most part, those characters were created to stand on their own, and that focus, if that’s the right word, really makes them shine for me.
And so it is that another one of Pratchett’s apparently standalone works, Going Postal, has turned out to be one of my favorites, especially its condemned conman turned Postmaster General, the uncomfortably named Moist.
Pratchett has always had a real ear for conmen and hucksters, and Moist is an engaging protagonist faced by a series of obstacles, magical and mundane, including Discworld’s heliograph system, the Clacks, finally taking center stage after being mentioned in several books.
The author also restrains himself, and doesn’t throw too many ideas into the cooking pot at once. Other than giving Moist a very film noir femme fatale figure to relate to, the real world parodies and references are kept to a minimum this time, helping the book with its narrow focus.
Going Postal gets the highest possible recommendation for fans of Discworld, fantasy or, heck, stamp collecting.
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