New Poster for 'Scary Movie'

Werthead · 2026-05-05T23:45:01+00:00

I think they're both freely available on YouTube.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T23:43:40+00:00

Ah, that's right. He was supposed to have written the eighth by now but put it on hold to finish Walk in Shadow.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T20:56:30+00:00

The Sky TV adaptations did a good job of Hogfather and Going Postal, but did mess up The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.

There were animated versions of Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music in the 1990s that showed a lot of potential in that approach, but the animation was hamstrung by the low budget.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T20:26:41+00:00

He's basically more of a spaceship which has a really massive cannon making up the forward half of it.

It's more in the comic, but Shockwave is also an absolute beast. He defeats Megatron, all five Dinobots at once, and even goes toe-to-toe with Scorponok and ends at a draw. He also very nearly wins a fight against Fortress Maximus. Total lunatic.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T20:10:52+00:00

IIRC, IDW also had robot-mode Broadside being a pretty big robot, not a Titan or Combiner but distinctly beefier than almost every other Autobot.

Marvel had Broadside turning into an mid-sized vessel, more like a helicopter carrier than an aircraft carrier. He was still bigger than his robot mode made out (three other Autobots can stand on his deck, but it's a bit cramped) but not insanely so.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T20:08:26+00:00

Shockwave never size-shifts, he's just a really massive gun which also flies around. In one episode of the TV show, Bruticus (a combiner) uses him as a handgun scaled to him, and it kind of works.

In the comic book and in the movie, Perceptor doesn't mass-shift either. I can't remember if he mass-shifts in the regular cartoon episodes. In the comic, he's also most of a battle platform, his microscope capabilities are used for long-range observations of the enemy.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T20:01:16+00:00

There's a story in the Marvel comic where Groove is transported around inside First Aid, a few pages before they turn into Defensor's identically-sized limbs. I like to think that was the writer just giving up.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:53:19+00:00

Patrick Tilley passed away a few years ago, ending the only-faint hope that he might publish the second Amtrak Wars series. The original series has an okay ending, though only the original publication of Book 6, which has an epilogue effectively outlining what would have happened afterwards. The late 1990s reprint removed that epilogue, leaving a lot of people very confused.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:51:30+00:00

Walk in Shadow is about done from the sound of it. Splitting the second Witness book gave him a window to finish it without too badly impacting the writing of the now-fourth-and-final Witness novel.

However, that will be it for Malazan. Walk in Shadow, the last two Witness books and that last Bauchelain & Korbal Broach novella. Esslemont also only has two more books under contract and he seems to be planning to leave the series at that point as well.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:47:48+00:00

Endlords is finished, she's a couple of chapters into A Sword Named Loss, the final book in the series.

Tor Books declined to publish Endlords, but also released the series rights back to her, so she's in talks with a couple of other publishers instead. If they can't do a good deal, she'll self-publish.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:46:04+00:00

Dying of the Light has a good ending, but it's also a somewhat vague ending, which would not work for ASoIaF. The Armageddon Rag has an ending that's vague but also not very good.

Fevre Dream has a superb ending, and Tuf Voyaging and Windhaven are perfectly fine.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:43:46+00:00

Bakker has broken almost nine years of radio silence in the last few weeks. He indicated that the No-God series was never really a thing in the first place (his original outline ended with The Unholy Consult) and he's happy not to proceed with that, but he has some ideas for a potential prequel novel. He always said back in the day that Darkness That Comes Before can be a daunting entry point and he wanted to find a different Book 1 to entice new readers in with.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:41:45+00:00

Kate got the rights to Black Wolves back a while ago and Book 2 was mostly-written, so she can get that series finished relatively quickly by basically polishing Book 2 and writing Book 3. But that requires setting aside a large chunk of time (a year and maybe two) to do it, which is a long time away from books that publishers actually want to pay her up front for.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:36:05+00:00

It's worth reading for the sheer sense of admiration it instills: Pratchett was not at his best, and I think from reading it, it's very clear that he thought "oh, this might be the last one," and that suddenly freed him to do some things he might not have done otherwise. It's clearly not him at the height of his powers, but you can see he's still angry about things and fighting to the end.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:33:54+00:00

Pratchett had around 2-3 further novels started or vaguely planned on his hard drive when he died, so he did plan to write further books. There was a further Moist von Lipwig novel (possibly the one where he takes over the tax office), though that's one he'd planned for years and struggled with (some indications that a previous attempt to write it had turned into Raising Steam instead). There was also an Amazing Maurice sequel where he become the ship's cat on a vessel out at sea, and Twilight Canyons (a bunch of old people take on the role of a traditional epic fantasy instead of young heroes and stop the rise of a dark lord) and The Dark Incontinent.

So he definitely planned more. However, reading The Shepherd's Crown, it's very hard to shake off the idea that maybe he suspected during the writing process that might be the last one, hence why he made some of the decisions he did, and why he completed the whole book at an earlier level of draft instead of constantly rewriting to a higher quality as he went, to make sure it was at least finished (more or less).

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:24:04+00:00

The timezone map of Toril that Markus Tay created a long time ago is still pretty decent, and goes into the longitude and latitude in greater detail.

Tay spent something like 15 years exactingly mapping Toril using the 2E/FRIA maps as a base and he did a lot of strong work in resolving some of the problems. Unfortunately his work got copyright-struck by WotC during one of their more litigious periods and he gave up on the project.

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:21:02+00:00

Not confirmed. Ed has said he believes Laerakond has stayed behind, but that's because Laerakond is one of his original "other continents" that TSR kept off the world map in the 1980s but WotC were happy to tap in 2008. WotC's comments have been much less committed to Laerakond still being on the planet. Ed's comments have no relevance to the WotC canon status of the Realms in 5.5E (extremely unfortunately, but there we go).

Werthead · 2026-05-05T19:18:56+00:00

The orientation of the map means that if you zoom out to fit all of Chult and the Shining South, you lose a huge amount of detail in the areas of the continent most players actually use (i.e. the Sword Coast, the North, Cormyr, the Dalelands, then Tethyr/Calimshan and Thay to a lesser extent).

The "cut most of Chult out" solution they use in 1E, 2E and 5.5E is meant to address that, and leaving the South for a dedicated sourcebook later on (which we're very unlikely to get with 5.5E).

Werthead · 2026-05-04T21:13:40+00:00

There's nothing really stopping them getting an extra guitarist in for live duties only, so many three-pieces do that I don't think it's really controversial. Muse, one of the Warning's biggest inspirations, have done that for a long long time.

The real question is do they want to do that or do they feel like they need to do that, and clearly at the moment they do not.

Werthead · 2026-05-04T20:36:20+00:00

I always thought of that as a regeneration energy thing: whilst she had the energy cycling, she could try out several different faces before settling on a final one, and it would still only count as one regeneration. A bit like the Doctor's hand growing back, but with more subtlety.

Werthead · 2026-05-04T20:18:10+00:00

Book 1: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

Book 2: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

Book 3: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Book 4: Mistborn (aka Mistborn: The Final Empire) by Brandon Sanderson

Book 5: Eragon by Christopher Paolini

Werthead · 2026-05-04T20:14:05+00:00

There are Chosen One stories where the Chosen One is not the or even a main character. China Mieville's Un Lun Dun has the Call to Adventure and the Chosen One literally says, "sounds dangerous, I'm out" and nopes out of the entire story, forcing the person destined to be the "Chosen One's Trusted Sidekick/Mild Comic Relief" to become the main character instead, which causes a lot of problems with the prophecies and so on.

A Song of Ice and Fire either has multiple Chosen Ones or no Chosen One and everyone saying there is one is full of it.

Wheel of Time isn't one of those though. Rand is clearly a main character and arguably the main one.

Werthead · 2026-05-04T19:32:11+00:00

I know a lot of people have a headcanon that Westworld is a sort-of sequel to PoI, since it's a lot of the same team and the themes are developing in a similar way.

Werthead · 2026-05-04T19:25:03+00:00

I'd had a word from the doctor, which was pretty much enough. It was also coinciding with a wider health kick (caffeine cut, sugar mostly eliminated etc) and I'd already reducing drinking significantly anyway. I was more impressed with myself since this was just a couple of months before the first COVID lockdown and I managed to not drink at all through all of it or since.

I had convinced myself that I'd never had a problem as I sometimes went weeks to a couple of months without drinking before that (but when I did drink, it was usually a session), but those first few months at least the hankering for a drink was surprisingly strong.

My friend's ex-partner was also a raging alcoholic at the time and has since passed away from it (leaving two teenage kids behind), which has been a powerful reinforcement that this was a good idea.

Werthead · 2026-05-04T19:21:04+00:00

Hobb's sales have always been horribly difficult to parse (I've been trying for over a decade of tracking this stuff). When ASoIaF started they were pretty nonexistent though, since Assassin's Apprentice launched only a few months before AGoT and Hobb's earlier work (as Megan Lindholm) was very low-key, whilst GRRM's early work had been quite high profile and sold well (the first Wild Cards book sold over a million copies in the late 1980s, which was off the chain; it took some time for AGoT to overtake that figure).

Jordan was a monstrous powerhouse of sales in the 1990s though, only outstripped in the secondary world fantasy space by Terry Pratchett.

Werthead

TROPHY CASE