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This won't be your average animated series.

The post Jon Stewart Is Making A ‘Real-Time’ Animated Series for HBO appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Winter is coming… and it’s bringing souvenirs. With this month’s return of HBO’s Game of Thrones, it’s time to plan all the viewing parties or whatever your celebration ritual might be. Revels! Comics Beat was invited to get hands on with the sheer tidal wave of merchandise, both current and upcoming, for one of cable’s most rabid […]

"The gods won't mind. They spill more blood than the rest of us combined."

10 Days of Thrones: in anticipation of the new Game of Thrones season I’ll be posting a new illustration everyday… today is Ygritte!

10 Days of Thrones: in anticipation of the new Game of Thrones season I’ll be posting a new illustration everyday… today is White Walker!

10 Days of Thrones: in anticipation of the new Game of Thrones season I’ll be posting a new illustration everyday… today is Arya Stark!

For the first time, the television adaptation will outpace its source material in full

Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is currently developing three new television series with HBO and Cinemax.

Martin revealed the news on his blog, though he didn’t go into too much detail. Check it out:

Life is impossibly busy right now. I am wrestling with the Son of Kong (that is, working on THE WINDS OF WINTER), trying to wrap up a final round of edits and revisions on the twenty-third Wild Cards book (HIGH STAKES), developing three new series concepts for HBO and Cinemax, hiring writers and directors for three short low-budget films I am hoping to produce based on some classic SF short stories (more on that in the months to come), making my way through the Hugo Packet to prepare to vote, looking forward to opening JURASSIC WORLD at the Cocteay and to hosting a ten-author special event for the release of Steve Stirling’s new “Emberverse” anthology, THE CHANGE. In a week’s time, we’ll be flying off to Europe for long-planned appearances in Germany (Hamburg) and Sweden (Stockholm), en route to Archipelacon on the island of Aland, where I am to be the Guest of Honor…

– My favorite discovery from the 2014 television season has to be Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty, which takes the character relationship of Doc and Marty (more or less) from Back to the Future and transplants them into Doctor Who style adventures with some the sharpest humor I’ve seen in an animated program since Archer first hit the air. The series, created by Dan Harmon (Community) and Justin Roiland, has had its first season available on Blu-ray for awhile now. If you can handle some cruder, gross-out moments, I highly recommend it.

This week, Cartoon Network announced that Rick and Morty will return on Sunday, July 26th. Additionally, Roiland and Harmon guest-wrote the couch gag for the upcoming season finale of The Simpsons, which you can watch below:

– Speaking of The Simpsons, yesterday saw the news that Harry Shearer, the longtime voice of characters like Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, and many other members of the show’s rich world, would be parting ways with the series. According to some reports, there’s still a chance that Shearer may come to terms with the show’s producers, but the roles are expected to be recast at this point.

I haven’t watched The Simpsons in years, but I’m hoping this paves the way for a Spinal Tap reunion.

– From the set of Captain America: Civil War, via JustJared, here’s the first image of Crossbones’ costume:

– Seth Rogen tweeted out the first on-set image from AMC’s Preacher last night, which sees Dominic Cooper’s Jesse Custer talking with Ian Colletti’s Arseface:

– According to Collider, the sequel to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes now has a title: War of the Planet of the Apes. It’s a bit of a mouth-full, but I guess no one would go see a movie called “Monkey Fight”, which I was lobbying pretty hard for.

– Lastly, there’s a pretty great True Detective Season 2 teaser out now via HBO. I may be more excited about this premiere than any other show this year, even the Mad Men finale!

Kurt Cobain's life and art is brought to life by animation directors Hisko Hulsing and Stefan Nadelman.

I missed this Pulitzer Prize winning novel the first time around and after watching the first 15 minutes of the new HBO mini-series I know I had to read the book. Reading a book whilst simultaneously watching the television show has its own challenges but for the most part I managed to read behind watching […]

Game of Thrones fans –  your official season five trailer is here! Can we talk about that choice of music? The use of a “Heroes” cover here is basically perfect.

HBO published the official version of the trailer, previously only seen in the nation-wide IMAX showing, after a bootleg version made its way around the internet. The show’s fifth season premieres on April 12, on the heels of the current IMAX event, which put the show in the history books as the first TV series to be broadcast in IMAX format.

As a fan of the book series, I have concerns about the show’s fifth season based on the source material – the fourth book was the most difficult for me to digest – but between the depictions of Littlefinger, Tryion, Daenerys, and Cersei, there’s enough here to draw my attention.

by

Pam Auditore

Anyone who’s been keeping up with their reading of   George RR Martin’s  A Song of Ice and Fire opus, knows  Bowen Marsh, the First Steward of the Night’s Watch, is one of those side characters who becomes a player.  It’s now confirmed by actor Michael Condron’s agency  to Watchers On the Wall.com  he will be playing the part in HBO’s Game of Thrones .  The actor has also confirmed that he will appear in three episodes, directed by Mark Mylod, Michael Slovis and Jeremy Podeswa.  He has previously appeared in The Tudors and the British mini-series Fairy Tales.

By David J. Peterson

My name is David Peterson, and I’m a conlanger. “What’s a conlanger,” you may ask? Thanks to the recent addition of the word “conlang” to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I can now say, “Look it up!” But to save you the trouble, a conlanger is a constructed language (or conlang) maker — i.e. one who creates languages.

Language creation has been around since at least the 12th century, when the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen created her Lingua Ignota — Latin for “hidden language” — an invented vocabulary she used for writing hymns. In the centuries that followed, philosophers like Leibniz and John Wilkins would create languages that were intended to serve as grand classification systems, and idealists like L. L. Zamenhof would create languages intended to simplify international communication. All these systems focused on the basic utility of language — its ability to encode and convey meaning. That would change in the 20th century.

Tolkien: the father of modern conlanging

Before crafting the tales of Middle-Earth, J. R. R. Tolkien was a conlanger. Unlike the many known to history who came before him, though, Tolkien created languages for the pure joy of it. Professionally, he became a philologist, but he continued to work on his own languages, eventually creating his famous Lord of the Rings series as an extension of the linguistic legendarium he’d been crafting for many years. Though his written works would become more famous than his linguistic creations, his conlangs, in particular Sindarin and Quenya, would go on to inspire new generations of conlangers throughout the rest of the 20th century.

Due to the general obscurity of the practice, many conlangers remained unknown to each other until the early 1990s, when home internet use started to become more and more common. The first dedicated meeting place for conlangers, virtual or otherwise, was the Conlang Listserv (an online mailing list). Some list members came out of interest in Tolkien’s languages, as well as other large projects, like Esperanto or Lojban, but the majority came to discuss their own work, and to meet and learn from others who also created languages.

Since the founding of the original Conlang Listserv, many other meeting places have sprung up online, and through a couple of decades of regular conlanger interaction, the practice of conlanging has evolved.

Conlang typology

Conlangs have been separated into different types since at least the 19th century. First came the philosophical languages, as discussed, then the auxiliary languages like Esperanto (also known as auxlangs), but with Tolkien emerged a new type of language: the artistic language, or artlang. At its most basic, an artlang is a conlang created for artistic purposes, but that broad definition includes many wildly divergent languages (compare Denis Moskowitz’s Rikchik to Sylvia Sotomayor’s Kēlen). Finer-grained distinctions became necessary as the community grew, and so emerged the naturalistic conlang.

This is where the languages of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Syfy’s Defiance come in. The languages I’ve created for the shows I work on come out of the naturalist tradition. The goal with a naturalistic conlang is to create a language that’s as realistic as possible. The realism of a language is grounded in the reality (fictional or otherwise) of its speakers. If the speakers are more or less human (or humanoid) and are intended to be portrayed in a realistic fashion, then their language should be as similar as possible to a natural language (i.e. a language that exists here on Earth, like Spanish, Tagalog, or Cham).

The natural languages we speak are large, but also redundant and imperfect in a uniquely human way. Conlangers have gotten pretty good at emulating them over the years, usually employing one of two different approaches. The first, which I call the façade method, is to create a language that looks like a modern natural language by replicating the various features of a modern natural language. Thus, if English has irregular plurals, such as mouse~mice, then the conlang will have irregular plurals, too, by targeting certain nouns and making their plurals irregular in some way.

The historical method: making sense of irregular plurals in Valyrian

A contrasting approach is the method that Tolkien pioneered called the historical method. With the historical method, an ancestor language called a proto-language is created, and the desired language is evolved from it, via simulated linguistic evolution. The process takes a lot longer, but in some ways it’s simpler, since irregularities will naturally emerge, rather than having to be created by hand. For example, in Game of Thrones, the High Valyrian language Daenerys speaks differs from the Low Valyrian the residents of Slaver’s Bay speak. In fact, the latter evolved from the former. As the language evolved, it produced some natural irregularities. Consider the following nouns and their plurals from the Valyrian spoken in Slaver’s Bay:

hubre “goat” hubres “goats”
dare “queen” dari “queens”
aeske “master” aeske “masters”

Given that the singular forms all end in ‘e’, one has to say at least two of the plurals presented are irregular. But why the arbitrary differences in the plural forms? It turns out it’s because the three nouns with identical singular terminations used to have very different forms in the older language, High Valyrian, as shown below:

hobres “goat” hobresse “goats”
dāria “queen” dārī “queens”
āeksio “master” āeksia “masters”

Each of these alternations is quite regular in High Valyrian. In the simulated history, a series of sound changes which simplified the ends of words produced identical terminations for each of the three words in the singular, leaving later speakers having to memorize which have irregular plurals and which regular.

Conceptualizing time

Simulated evolution applies to both grammar and the lexicon, as well. For example, natural languages often derive terminology for abstract concepts metaphorically from terminology for concrete concepts. Time, for instance, is an abstract concept that is frequently discussed using spatial terminology. How it’s done differs from language to language. In English, events that occur later in time occur after the present (where “after” derives from “aft,” a word meaning “behind”), and events that occur earlier in time occur before the present. Thus, time is conceptualized as a being standing in the present, facing the past, with the future behind them.

In Irathient, a language I created for Syfy’s Defiance, time is conceptualized vertically, rather than horizontally. The word for “after”, in temporal terms, is shei, which derives from a word meaning “above”; “before”, on the other hand, is ur, which also means “below” or “underneath”. The general metaphor that the future is up and the past is down bears out throughout the rest of the language, where if one wanted to say “Go back to what you were saying before”, the literal Irathient translation would be “Go down to what you were saying underneath”.

Ultimately, what one hears on screen sounds and feels like a natural language, regardless of whether or not one knows the work that went on behind the scenes. Since the prop used on screen is a language, though, rather than a costume or a piece of the set, the words can be recorded and analyzed at any time. Consequently, a conlang needs to be real in a way that a throne or a 700 foot wall of ice does not.

It’s still extraordinary to me that in less than 25 years, we came from a time when many conlangers were not aware that there were other conlangers to a time where our work is able to add to the authenticity of some of the best productions the big and small screen have to offer. The addition of the word “conlang” to the OED is a fitting capper to an unbelievable quarter century.

David J. Peterson is a language creator who works on HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance, and Syfy’s Dominion. You can find him on Twitter at @Dedalvs or on Tumblr.

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Images: Game of Thrones Season 3 – Dragon Shadow Wallpaper and Game of Thrones Season 3 - Daenerys Wallpaper. ©2014 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The post How I created the languages of Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Perry N. Halkitis

On 25 May 2014 and nearly 30 years after first appearing on the stage, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart will be aired as a film on HBO. This project, which has evolved over the course of the last three decades, documents those first few harrowing years of the AIDS epidemic in New York City. The Normal Heart debuts at a time when much attention is being cast upon the early days of AIDS and the lives of gay men, who survived the physical and emotional onslaught of this disease in a society that often shunned us because we were gay and because we were afflicted with this disease.

Now a generation of gay men, my generation—the AIDS Generation—stands proudly as testament to our individual and collective resilience which has brought us all into middle age. Certainly there have been huge hurdles along the way—too many deaths to enumerate, the havoc that the complications of this disease wreaked on our bodies, the lack of support. Even today, darkness and disrespect lurks in every corner, and no one is immune. For some in our society, identifying what is wrong with us as gay men comes to easily. We are reminded of it daily as right wing zealots fight against marriage equality, as young boys take their lives. Despite these conditions, despite the inaction of our national and local politicians, and despite a large yet ever-shrinking segment of our society that continues to view us as weak and sick, we stand together as a testament to the fortitude of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

The theme of resistance or resilience permeates the words, the thoughts, and the actions of the protagonists in The Normal Heart and many depictions of the AIDS epidemic.

Taylor Kitsch as GMHC President President Burce Niles in HBO’s The Normal Heart. (c) HBO via thenormalheart.hbo.com

Behavioral and psychological literature has attempted to delineate sources of resilience. Dr. Gail Wagnild posits that social supports in the form of families and communities foster resilience in individuals. I also adhere to this idea. Although the sources of resilience are still debated in the literature, there is general agreement that resilience is a means of maintaining or regaining mental health in response to adversity the ability to respond to and/or cope with stressful situations such as trauma, conditions that characterize the life of the men of the AIDS Generation.

For many of the men of the AIDs Generation, grappling with their sexuality was closely tied to the development of their resilience. In other words, resilience developed in their childhoods as young men grappling with their sexuality as stated by Christopher: “I also think that wrestling with my own sexuality and trying to navigate through that in my teenage years taught me how to just ‘keep pushing’ and to do what needed to be done.” Some, including myself, found support among our families. Even if parents were loving and supportive, this did not ameliorate the burdens experienced being raised in a heteronormative and often-discriminatory world in which men were portrayed as weak, effeminate, and sickly.

As we watch The Normal Heart, we will be reminded of those dark, confusing early days of the epidemic. And while we must celebrate the resilience of a generation of gay men to fight this disease, we must also be reminded of our obligation to create a better world for a new generation of gay men, who despite our social and medical advances, need the love and support of their community of elders as the navigate the course of their lives.

Perry N. Halkitis, PhD, MS, MPH is Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Health (Steinhardt School), and Population Health (Langone School of Medicine), Director of the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior & Prevention Studies, and Associate Dean (Global Institute of Public Health) at New York University. Dr. Halkitis’ program of research examines the intersection between the HIV epidemic, drug abuse, and mental health burden in LGBT populations, and he is well known as one of the nation’s leading experts on substance use and HIV behavioral research. He is the author of The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience. Follow him on Twitter @DrPNHalkitis.

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The post The Normal Heart and the resilience of the AIDS generation appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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I have been completely and utterly addicted to (and obsessed by) True Detective so when I found out the show’s creator and writer had written a crime novel I had to read it. And what a cracking book it is. Using some of the same elements as his television show Pizzolatto has constructed a highly atmospheric, slow burning thriller.

Roy Cady is a bagman who has just been diagnosed with cancer and sent on a job where he thinks his boss has tried to have him whacked. Now on the run he must navigate his way from New Orleans to East Texas with a young woman and her sister in tow. Roy is conflicted between his own short-term survival and that of the two girls now under his protection.

Just like True Detective Pizzolatto shifts time perception to perfection, drip feeding you bits of information, past and future, that leave you craving to know more.The raw emotion of Roy Cady is brutally and poignantly displayed and the way Pizzolatto describes the gulf coast landscape is an amazing blend of desolation and beauty.

We already know from True Detective that Nic Pizzolatto knows how to tell a story. Galveston proves that this talent was evident well before his HBO series.

Via Buzz Feed A list of dark, weird, and southern gothic books that every fan of HBO’s True Detective should read.

Writing HBO AMERICAN GODS pilot with @tordotcom AMERICAN GODS playlist playing to keep me company. j.mp/SeMHHC

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 28, 2012

On Twitter, Neil Gaiman shared the fact that he is currently writing an American Gods pilot for HBO. We’ve embedded the tweet above.

Click here to read the first five chapters of the award-winning novel, “a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth.” The news of the possible adaptation emerged last year.

If you want to listen to the American Gods playlist on Spotify, follow this link. We’ve embedded the songlist below, a great collection of writing music.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Chronicle Books will publish the official companion to the Game of Thrones television series, Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones. Unlike most book trailers, this video visited the set of a popular TV show.

As of this writing, the trailer has received more than 36,000 views. The $40 book will be released on October 1st, containing 300 color images and photographs.

Series screenwriter Bryan Cogman write the book. Showrunner David Benioff partnered with screenwriter D.B. Weiss for the foreword. Series author George R.R. Martin also wrote a preface.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Daniel Clowes is in the news! So much going on.

§ HBO is developing a half-hour comedy created by Clowes called “The Landlord”, which he’s co-exec producing with John Lesher. The logline: “After inheriting a shabby apartment building in a remote California town, a volatile college professor with Utopian delusions drags his family into the unforgiving netherworld of small-town America.”

Yeah, we can see Ice Haven as an HBO show. The Little Miss Sunshine duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris is interested in directing. “We just looked over the script and it’s still very early, but we’re excited by trying to do something in TV, particularly at a place like HBO, where you can have nine hours instead of two,” Dayton told Variety.

Despite being the king of the literary comics world, Clowes has had a fruitful time in Hollywood. In addition to the GHOST WORLD and ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL films, Clowes has been hired to write several screenplays. And of course Alexander Payne, poet laureate of alienated losers, is developing a film based on Clowes’ graphic novel WILSON, the ultimate portrait of an alienated loser. Talk about a perfect match of material. Will they promote it at Comic-Con?

§ For a chance to see Clowes and fellow genius Chris Ware together, the two are in conversation TOMORROW at the Oakland Museum of California in conjunction with the soon-to-close Art of Daniel Clowes exhibit.

In a talk moderated by guest curator Susan Miller and Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman, Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware will be speaking at OMCA’s James Moore Theater on Friday, July 27, 2012 from 7-8:30pm. Seating will be limited and is expected to fill up quickly.

§ Finally, this Proust questionnaire-like “interview” with Clowesat The Guardian was subject to more than the usual editing:

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

ANSWER:
I’d like to think I’d go kill Hitler or verify the divinity of Christ, but really I’d like to see what my neighbourhood was like when my house was built in 1912. Or perhaps to hang out in Bodega Bay while Hitchcock was shooting The Birds.

PRINTED: 
I like to think I’d go kill Hitler. 

Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the hyped and critical darling HBO show Girls, spoke to the New York Times about what she likes to read and where she does it. Currently she is reading “Bad Behavior” by Mary Gaitskill (a collection of stories, one of which became the inspiration for the movie Secretary,) Diane Keaton’s memoir and “Having it All” by Helen Gurley Brown, among other things. It’s not surprising how well read Dunham is since it is evident in her writing.

What are your thoughts on Lena’s reading list? Have you watched GIRLS?

If you haven’t heard about HBO’s new show, “Girls,” directed by and starring Lena Dunham, you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past few weeks. It’s been years since we’ve seen so much virtual ink spilled over a television... Read the rest of this post

Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary), Greta Gerwig (Greenberg) and Rhys Ifans (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1) are in talks to star in TV adaptation of Jonathan Frazen’s The Corrections for HBO.

Gyllenhaal is up for the part of Denise Lambert, the talented bisexual young chef and family mediator. Gerwig would play Julia Vrais, middle child and Chip’s married girlfriend and Ifans would play Julia’s Lithuanian husband, Gitnas, in a cameo. Bruce Norris, playwright (Clybourne Park) and theatre actor is in talks to play Banker and amateur photographer, Gary Lambert.

The show, which will be written by Franzen, has already cast Diane Weist and Chris Cooper as Enid and Alfred Lambert. Ewan McGregor has also been casted to play the peter pan like Chip Lambert, the most outwardly screwed up member of the Lambert Family of St. Jude, Missouri.

It is rumored that the show will air in 2013 and will be produced by Scott Rudin (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)

Ben Stiller is going to produce, write and direct a pilot called All Talk to HBO. Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything is Illuminated) has been tapped to write it.

The pilot is about a Jewish family living in Washington, D.C. It has been described as“politically, religiously, culturally, intellectually, and sexually irreverent.”

Alan Alda is in talks to play Ben Stiller’s father, making the first time he’ll be on a series regular since M*A*S*H*.

Even though author Charlaine Harris will be ending the Southern Vampire novels, True Blood fans need not fret. Publisher IDW and HBO have announced that they will be adapting True Blood for an ongoing comic book series.

HBO show creator Alan Ball gave this statement in the release: “With this new ongoing series, Truebies will be able to find a new comic in stores every month. We’ll also have even more room to create in-depth drama and further explore the world of Bon Temps.”

The first issue of the new series is slated for release in spring 2012. So far, IDW has published three True Blood series: All Together Now, Tainted Love and The French Quarter.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.