PlayStation Network 'Welcome Back' program offers free games Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation a masterful likable reboot of one the great sf classics Sound Byte Meet Composer Little Big Planet 2 Composers Winifred Phillips Superheroes bigbudget sequels perfect for geeky teens Wild Beasts Summer Camp at Y Theatre Leicester Leicestershire Mon 09 May Documentary 'Born To Be Wild' Spotlights Orphan Wildlife Projects Martian Robot Arms Cowboy Spacemen and My 90 Days with Phoenix Mars Mission Beltane In Hands Gamers Lament Outage South Pole Neutrino Detector Comes Up Empty Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights equal status Mother Earth GameStop's digital transition accelerates two streaming downloading acquisitions Martin Sheen Being dad Sochi chooses 3 mascots 2014 Olympics US game sales down 5% Black Ops tops again NPD News Test Drive Unlimited debuts UK number Obama Tries to Friend Chamber

PS3 and PSP owners getting two titles for each system; Infamous and Little Big Planet among console offerings while handheld fans can grab ModNation Racers, Killzone Liberation, more; free video rentals, Home items also offered. Last year, John Scalzi announced that he'd been commissioned by the estate of H Beam Piper to write an updated version of the classic sf novel Little Fuzzy. I'm very fond of this novel (here's my review of last year's award-winning audiobook adaptation), not least because it was the first sf novel I bought with my own money, from the used section of Bakka Books in Toronto (I was nine, and Tanya Huff was working behind the counter; she listened seriously to my enraptured discussion of the Asimovs and Heinleins I'd read from my Dad's shelves and went and got me the Piper. I never looked back). Scalzi's novel, Fuzzy Nation, came out last week and I read it over the weekend. I went to it cold, not sure if it was a sequel or what. There were two Fuzzy novels for some time (Piper having committed suicide before writing a third). Then there was a third volume written by another writer, and then, years later, they recovered a lost Piper manuscript for his own third book, making the whole sequence a little confused. It turns out that Scalzi and the Piper estate ... We speak to composer Winifred Phillips who has worked on Little Big Planet 2, God of War, and The Maw. Meet Winifred Phillips, composer of Little Big Planet 2, as she tells us how she got into the industry, what her process is, and some pearls of wisdom for aspiring composers. share: digg facebook twitter Superheroes, big-budget sequels perfect for geeky teens Preferably with a healthy allowance and an older brother who can buy tickets to R-rated movies. The summer movie season was never known for its plethora of presidential biopics or British costume dramas. [...] summer 2011, more than any other in recent memory, looks as if it were dreamed up in the mind of a violence-loving geeky kid who just went through puberty. Want a comic-book movie? Popular human film characters returning this summer include Capt. Jack Sparrow and Harry Potter. Popular vehicles returning include Lightning McQueen and Optimus There's also a "Conan the Barbarian" reboot, a "Planet of the Apes" prequel and a new movie by J.J. Abrams. In that spirit, this summer movie guide is aimed specifically at 13-year-old boys. Honestly, we can't keep track of what's going on in this series any more. The original "Pirates" director is gone, replaced by Rob Marshall, who is mostly known for making musicals. [...] the threat of multiple song-and-dance numbers is balanced by the addition of Ian McShane as Blackbeard. Every young teen remembers the first R-rated movie he watched in a theater. Based ... Today is a big day for **Wild Beasts**. Third album (and first since being overlooked by the Mercury judges nine months ago) _Smother_ finally landed in record stores this morning, and only four songs into the set, Tom Fleming is already admitting it feels as though a huge weight has been lifted. Oscar-winner Morgan Freeman narrates IMAX 3D film about dedicated teams working to save orphaned wild animals In the Summer of 2008, Brooklyn writer Andrew Kessler lived a space dream. He spent 90 days embedded in mission control on a NASA mission to Mars. His offbeat and often humous book, Martian Summer, captures the real-life drama of the mission and its passionate crew as they attempt to dig up permafrost on the North Pole of Mars. This excerpt is the first chapter of a three-month epic that changed our understanding of Mars and sheds a new light on the importance of curiosity-based research and NASA missions. For more information: Visit the author at his monobookist bookstore in New York City's West Village or online at Kessleronmars.com Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and my 90 days with the Phoenix Mars Mission Author's Note: This is a book about Mars and the humans that make rocket science possible. This is not the most accurate account of this NASA mission. For that you'll want to review the science papers or other Mars related literature. Instead, this is an account of winning the nerd lottery: The luckiest fanboy in fandom gets a shot to spend three months with unfettered access to mission control. It's just ... The Pagan celebration of Beltane, May first and second in the northern hemisphere, is a fire festival and also a very earthy and bawdy celebration of physical love and pleasure. It's easy to think of Beltane in big terms: huge... Gamers appear to miss their PlayStation games more than they might miss their money. After years of waiting, the world's biggest and best neutrino detector has started its search for the source of ultra-high energy cosmic rays that constantly bombard the Earth's atmosphere. And it's seen exactly zilch. In 13 months of observing with the half-complete IceCube detector at the South Pole, "we didn't see anything," said neutrino physicist Nathan Whitehorn [...] Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities". "It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. "It ... Late yesterday, GameStop announced acquisition plans for two digital gaming companies. Today, I'm at the Grapevine-based company's "Investor Day" in Southlake learning how the two corporate purchases will accelerate GameStop's drive into digital distribution. "We're definitely becoming a different company," chief executive officer Paul Raines said in an interview. "We are becoming a technology company." While that transition has been happening for a couple years internally at GameStop, only in the last several months have the results become visible to gamers and investors. The most recent acquisitions -- of streaming company Spawn Labs and game download company Impulse, a subsidiary of Stardock Systems -- are designed to put GameStop out ahead of the digital wave. While the Impulse acquisition has not yet closed, Spawn is already part of GameStop, and the company showed off an impressive demo Friday morning. Spawn is similar to OnLive, another game streaming company I've written about, but Spawn says it can deliver 720p gaming over a connection as slow as 2 megabits per second, whereas you need closer to 5Mbps with OnLive. During the demo over the Hilton hotel's network, David Wilson, former CEO at Spawn and now divisional vice president and general manager ... Martin Sheen stars in a new film, directed by his son Emilio Estevez, which is about a lost child. Inevitably, finds Joanna Moorhead, the subject of another of Martin's offspring comes up, the troubled Charlie Sheen They are sitting on the sofa opposite me; they appear close, friendly, at ease. Our conversation should be upbeat – a celebration of a father and son who have just been collaborating professionally. But as I switch on my tape recorder, we all know that a cloud hangs over this family team. And that cloud is Charlie Sheen. The duo on the sofa are Charlie's dad, Martin Sheen, and his big brother, Emilio Estevez. And even if you only rarely watch television, and never read the tabloids, you can't have failed to register the tragic, relentless one-man circus (or should that be horror show?) that is Charlie, star of Two and A Half Men until he was sacked earlier this month, reputedly the highest-paid actor on the planet, now imploding before our eyes, his drug-fuelled, alcohol- soaked spiral of self-destruction unravelling grotesquely on an almost daily basis. How does it feel – how _can_ it feel – to have ... _Tribune News Services_ MOSCOW -- Sochi's mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympics are a rad snowboarding snow leopard, a squeaky-voiced figure skating bunny and an earnest, slightly dorky polar bear. The unusual decision to have three mascots was announced by Sochi organizing committee head Dmitry Chernyshenko on Saturday at the end of a nationally televised gala to choose them. Viewers could vote from among nine candidates by phone calls and text messages. More than 1 million votes were cast, according to the program. When the candidates were introduced to the nation in early February, there had been 10. But one of them was a representation of Ded Moroz, the Russian analogue of Santa Claus, and on Saturday officials said he had been pulled out because the mascot would become the property of the International Olympic Committee, and it was unthinkable that the gift-bearing, white-bearded man would in effect belong to someone else. Ded Moroz was the early favorite, according to a poll conducted by the VTsIOM survey organization a few days after the candidate field was announced. The mascots appear likely to work well as a team. They encapsulate much of Russia's ambitious self-image. The top vote recipient was ... Sinking hardware, software sales send overall stateside revenues sliding; Just Dance 2, Dead Space 2, Little Big Planet 2, Zumba Fitness make top 10. Atari's Test Drive Unlimited 2 has taken first position in the UK chart on its week of release, with a significant skew in platform sales showing that 68 per cent of copies bought were for Xbox 360. Elsewhere in the top ten, Nintendo's Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Miniland Mayhem on DS climbed to sixth from eleventh in its second week on the chart, with Take- Two's Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition entering the table at ninth. Ubisoft's Dance Juniors comes in at twelfth in its first week. Dead Space 2 slips to second after two weeks at the top, whilst perennial top five titles FIFA 11 and Call of Duty: Black Ops holding third and fourth. Little Big Planet 2 falls to tenth after a releatively short stay in the upper eschelons of the chart. Read more... A warm speech in a cold room
Key Words: little big planet

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