The Great Geek Manual

Film

• Director Ron Howard claimed Sunday that the Vatican interfered with efforts to get permits to shoot certain scenes of his “Angels & Demons” religious thriller in Rome.
• It turns out that the Bestselling Movies are not the Most Pirated Ones.

Internet

• I’ve mentioned it before, but it deserves to be mentioned again. The forty-minute fan film The Hunt of Gollum is online, and it kicks ass.
• NPR reveals The Secret Of Google’s Book Scanning Machine.
• SFX shares The Top Ten Things I Learnt From Going To Sci-Fi Conventions, none of which is “Don’t make eye contact.”
• Where are you in the movie? If you started watching a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you’d be in that movie.

Literature

• The Galaxy Express explains why The Only Thing Worse Than A Trashy Romance Novel Is A Bad Science Fiction Novel.
• There are several venues for micro fiction and prose on Twitter, called Twitter Literary Zines

Television

• If you watch Friday night’s episode of Dollhouse carefully, you can see that all that was required to “hack” into dollhouse security was to alter an HTML tag. Lame.
• Space-racism is bad: And 17 other not-so-subtle lessons learned from Star Trek.

Writing

• Becoming a good writer takes time and practice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t speed up the process. Here are 10 ways that you can become a better writer today.
• Jeremiah Tolbert shares 5 Books on Writing and Science Fiction That Made Me a Better Writer.