Crooked journalist from The Wire to direct fantasy TV show pilot! Less sensationally, Tom McCarthy – director of The Station Agent and The Visitor and the guy who played Scott Templeton on The Wire -- is directing the pilot of Game of Thrones , the fantasy series based on the books of George R. R. Martin coming to HBO.

Crooked journalist from The Wire to direct fantasy TV show pilot! Less sensationally, Tom McCarthy – director of The Station Agent and The Visitor and the guy who played Scott Templeton on The Wire – is directing the pilot of Game of Thrones, the fantasy series based on the books of George R. R. Martin coming to HBO.

Trailer for Best Worst Movie, a documentary about the fans of and the people involved with the 1990 horror flick, Troll 2. During my high school days, we would often spend our weekend nights renting the worst looking VHS at the local Blockbuster and Troll 2 was probably our favorite, meriting repeat viewings. The existence of this documentary proves that our experience was not unique. (via fimoculous)

Trailer for Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s next film and the first original film he’s both written and directed since 1974’s The Conversation. This was the film he was working on in Argentina when his studio in Buenos Aires was robbed, resulting in him losing “15 years of computer data”. (via aicn)

Some more human landscapes from above photographs at The Big Picture blog, including six from Las Vegas – one featuring a colorful map of Nevada’s counties.

Nate at FiveThirtyEight looks at the potential effects on national elections if Texas were to split up into five states, as they are entitled to do per the agreement made when they entered the Union in 1845. Short answer: Democrats would do slightly better in presidential elections, Republicans would do slightly better in the Senate, and the House wouldn’t change much at all.

Shepard Smith, perhaps the only ethical person working for Fox News, finally tires of the network’s moral equivocation.

It’s tax day, so I’ll collapse two wonky links into one post. Kevin Drum breaks down tax payments by income and shows that our current tax structure is much closer to a flat tax than most people believe. And here’s former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich’s A Short Citizen’s Guide to Kooks, Demagogues, and Right-Wingers On Tax Day.

Trailer for Moon, the indie sci-fi film directed by glam rock offspring Duncan Jones that I wrote about two months ago. (via kottke)

Tone Matrix, a neat Flash-based sequencer. It’s easy to whip up a cool loop, although I wish there was a way to save your work besides taking a picture. Even the first one I tried sounded pretty good – here it is if you want to duplicate:

This Sunday is Easter and today is Good Friday, which is a good excuse for me to post some clips from an old favorite of mine, Norman Jewison’s 1973 rock-operatic film Jesus Christ Superstar. Here’s Judas, complaining about Jesus’ popularity, and here’s Jesus’ final encounter with Pontius Pilate. And of course no JCS post is a complete without a link to the Mr. Show parody of the film: Jeepers Creepers, starring Jack Black.

Stress rots your brain, literally.

While [depression] is typically defined in terms of its emotional symptoms - this led a generation of researchers to search for the chemicals, like serotonin, that might trigger such distorted moods - researchers are now focusing on more systematic changes in the depressed brain, such as reduced neurogenesis and increased cell death. What causes this neurodegeneration? You guessed it: chronic stress. Those same hormones that make you alert and escalate your pulse can also damage the brain.

NoiseAddicts’ 30 most controversial album covers -- some were banned, others were censored. Gotta love that Chumbawamba one. (via kottke)

Stop motion graffiti. This is nearly a month old – how did I miss it?

An interview with film critic Glenn Kenny about the three articles by David Foster Wallace that he edited while at Premiere magazine (covering David Lynch, Terminator 2, and the Adult Video News Awards held in Las Vegas). Kenny has some interesting insight into how Wallace worked and what motivated him. (thx, bill s)

A video interview of Trent Reznor by digg.com founder Kevin Rose. Reznor comes off as his usual thoughtful self, especially in the beginning of the interview where he discusses Nine Inch Nails’ business model. As an aside: Reznor’s twitter feed is worth following as well.

Wired on the recent meteoric rise of the German-style board game, with a focus on the creator of the popular game The Settlers of Catan.

Last year, Settlers doubled its sales on this side of the Atlantic, moving 200,000 copies in the US and Canada—almost unheard-of performance for a new strategy game with nothing but word-of-mouth marketing.

I myself have been on a German gaming kick in the past few years, often playing such games as Carcassonne and Alhambra. What distinguishes them?

German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat.

The article mentions that Monopoly has recently modified their instructions to emphasize the oft-ignored property auction, which evidently makes the game go faster and makes it more interactive.

What happens when Justin Timberlake gets together with a certain TV editing brother of crazymonk’s? MTV’s new reality series, The Phone. Here’s the trailer, where lots of things blow up.