1. Night Shade Books  Plans to Sell Their Authors’ Contracts; Uproar Ensues Night Shade, a publisher of science fiction, fantasy and horror novels from authors like Jeff VanderMeere, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Kameron Hurley is not doing so hot. The publisher is in dire financial straits, and the company looking to buy out their back catalogue raised some hackles by lowballing their initial offer. After many of the authors spoke out in places like Facebook and io9 spoke about being offered a raw deal, the buying publisher increased their proposed royalty rate. (via Twenty Palaces)
2. Scott Turow Laments the Decline of the American Author. According to the author of One L, fair use, libraries, and E-books have created a toxic cocktail of copyright poison that is slowly killing off the class of successful American writers and he has taken to the New York Times to complain about it.
3. I Ain’t Sayin’ He’s a Copyright Infringer. Producer. Rapper. Designer. Lover of Fish Sticks. Kanye West can  now add “Defendant” to his long list of titles, as he now gets to defend his song “Gold Digger” against allegations of copyright infringement in federal court. The issue is West’s use of  ”Get down girl, go ‘head, get down” which the plaintiffs claim infringes their copyright in a 1974 song “Bumpin’ Bus Stop” by a group called Thunder & Lightning. the complaint also includes a racketeering claim under RICO that West and Roc-a-Fella Records, Bad Boy Records, Stones Throw Records, Bomb Hip-Hop Records, Autumn Games, Activision, Caroline Distribution and The Island Def Jam Music Group have conspired in an “illegal copyright infringement scheme and criminal enterprise involving the unauthorized, willful sampling of plaintiffs original copyrighted music on a massive scale.”
4. The Mystery of the Disappearing Rights.  The game No One Lives Forever felt like Austin Powers, James Bond, Metal Gear:Solid, and the original Half-life were shaken together in a sterling steel martini mixer. It was a great game, but it looks like any reboot or long-lost sequel is hamstrung by the fact that no one quite seems to know who owns the rights to the franchise after 13 years of mergers and acquisitions according to Activision’s Dan Amrich. Looks like some legal intern will be digging through the basement archives this summer to run down the paper trail.(via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
5. The Saga Apple Doesn’t Want you to See. Last week readers of brian K. Vaughan’s kick-ass space opera Saga  were unable to buy the digital version of Wednesday after it was pulled from Apple’s main comic store app Comixology. Cries of censorship and corporate squeamishness accompanied what at first appeared as Apple refusing to allow a comic with semi-explicit depictions of gay sex. It turns out that Comixology proactively pulled the title from its submissions because they decided to save Apple the trouble. In the end, the comic went out to Ipad users, but the fracas highlights one of the dangers in the move to digital media for comics: no one can fully depend on their preferred format and provider to keep the comics coming.

2. Movie Trailers. Last week made me excited about the 2013′s film prospects, especially in the sphere of science fiction, comic book-y movies that let me stave off death by feeding my adolescent power fantasies and maintaining my arrested development. That sounds like a somewhat mature self-critique but on the other hand, GIANT ROBOTS! PUNCHING MONSTERS!

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Plus,SUPERMAN!

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And, KHAAAAAN! (maybe?)

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3. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. 

If the worst thing you can say about a movie is that it isn’t as good as The Lord of the Rings, then I guess it wasn’t that bad. Peter Jackson leads another expedition to Middle-Earth with the film version of the early adventures of Bilbo Baggins. Somehow, he has turned the lightest and breeziest of J.R.R. Tolkein’s tales into a six hour epic on par with the LOTR  films in terms of ass-numbing theatre seat occupation. While the earlier trilogy was a nearly flawless adaptation of a genre-defining work, The Hobbit  shows some serious seams where the source material was stitched together to create a trilogy worthy whole. Maybe it was because Jackson and his fellow screenwriters had to look at things to cut for the Lord of the Rings films and were forced to stretch the The Hobbit into a trilogy, but this movie dragged. There were several high points, but despite the enthusiastically varied showcase of beard-ery, axe-based ass-kicking, and people riding animals that are not ordinarily used as mounts (eagles, rabbits, reindeer, etc.) the movie felt like it could have lost about an hour of run time and still been packed with incident. The effect is somewhat surprising because in the previous trilogy, the film makers showed an admirable ruthlessness when it came to cutting parts of the story that had no place in a compelling, breathless on-screen experience. Things like the Tom Bombadil story were excised from The Fellowship of the Ring while there are many scenes and plot lines that should have been cut from The Hobbit. (I’m looking at you, entire sequence with Radaghast the Brown, Middle-Earth Middle-Managers Quarterly Report, and Troll chef trickery.) Still, the Riddles in the Dark sequence is appropriately off-putting and there wasn’t anything on-screen that I hated. There was simply too much of it.

1. The Walking Dead Season 3. I have been a longtime reader of the comic series that makes up the source material for this AMC drama. Robert Kirkman’s grim and unrelenting tale of the misery that makes up everyday life for a band of survivors following a zombie plague can occasionally become too dark and hopeless, but the strong characterization of Rick and company keep the comic from becoming too much of a slog. The television show, despite having moments of early greatness (Rick trapped inside a tank as a horde of walkers surrounds it, finding Merle’s hand, basically anything Darryl Dixon does) has never managed to really dig its hooks into me until this past recently-ended season. I blew through all 8 episodes in a short amount of time and the breathless pace uncompromising look at the practical relationships between these disparate people more than made up for the slog that was Herschel’s farm from last season. The show varies quite often from the comics, so I never totally know what’s coming but the presence of The Governor and his special brand of extra-strength crazy made me hopeful going in to this season and it delivered the goods. From Michonne’s katana-based bad-assery to the return of Merle, season 3 has delivered huge upticks in writing, direction, and performance that I cannot wait for the show to return. 

2. The John McAfee Saga. I read the Wired article as a Kindle Single, but I have been following the mad tale of former antivirus peddler John McAfee as he went on the run from Belizean authorities following a murder charge. Reading John McAfee’s Last Stand I was able to get a sense for how absolutely insane this story was even before the murder. Between his paranoia, massive arsenal, and unspecified lab on his tropical jungle compound, McAfee comes off like a Bond villain who’s gone off his meds. Learning that the so-called meth lab on his property started out as a research platform for a freelance biochemist to synthesize new antibiotics from rainforest compounds and that he bought a whorehouse to transform it into a family-focused Studio 54-themed restaurant makes him come across more like the mirror-universe version of The Most Interesting Man in the World, except instead of arm-wrestling bears he applies for asylum in Guatemala. It’s a fascinating story, and I have a feeling it is only going to get crazier from here..

3. Hobbit Week on The Colbert Report.  Last week Stephen Colbert doubled down on the Tolkein-love in advance of the new Hobbit film from director Peter Jackson. The entire Colbert Report set was decked out with Middle Earth-ian touches from wooden chairs to a stone-paved path. The guest list included all the main stars from Bilbo to Gandalf. Colbert was clearly living out his geekiest fantasies. He also get to play with the sword Sting, the One Ring, have his path barred by Sir Ian McKellan, and smoke some of that halfling weed. Whether or not Colbert makes a cameo appearance in The Hobbit, this was an awesome way to promote it.

So, somehow in between living out the ultimate fantasy job of travelling the world eating and drinking and getting really pissed at the Travel Channel chef-turned-author-turned-tv host Anthony Bourdain decided to write a graphic novel. Get Jiro! is the result, a near future tale that mashes up the worlds of organized crime and high-powered foodies. In the Bourdain’s vision of Los Angeles, a food obsessed populace have given celebrity chefs a kind of warlord status where they rule their neighborhoods with a blend of muscle and exclusivity. The two most powerful houses are run by a traditional french chef and a vegan locavore and they compete for territory. Into this mix walks Jiro, a Yojimbo-like sushi chef with the best knife work this side of the Pacific. He is a bad ass who decapitates a customer in the first scene for getting ricve into the soy sauce mixture. Both sides want Jiro for his skills with a blade and the freshness of his nigiri, but he has plans of his own. The comic was hilarious and based on an intriguing but ridiculous concept. Bourdain’s voice shone through in some of the narration, and the end result was a truly original comic.

2. Thanksgiving.

Stuffing.

3. Dishonored.

A video game that places you in the shoes of a failed bodyguard-turned-supernaturally-gifted-assassin Corvo and sends you sneaking and murdering your way through a steampunk dystopia, Dishonored hits all the right notes for me. The setting is incredibly well-thought out and the texture of the crumbling empire and its plague-ridden, downtrodden populace is palpable. There are strands of Bioshock, Thief, and Deus Ex sprinkled liberally throughout the DNA of this game. The game encourages you to find your own path through each mission. The game certainly encourages you to pursue nonlethal tactics. The load screen promises that if you can reign in your homicidal urges your endgame will be “less dark” although the morality mechanic is a bit too sketchy and unclear to be of use. The game doesn’t explain whether killing someone and hiding the body gives you higher or lower chaos than choking them out and leaving the body laying in the middle of the street. Still, the attempt to map practical considerations onto a morality choice is admirable. If you choose to allow the level-headed guard captain to die, there will be more low level mooks patrolling the checkpoints while leaving more corpses around increase the number of roving mobs of plague-infested rats.