VAMPIRES, VULCANS AND VILLAINS DESCEND UPON THE GREEK THEATRE
FOR SPIKE TV’S 4TH ANNUAL “SCREAM”

Tobey Maguire Presents Tribute To Comic-Con Icon Award Recipient
And Comic Book Marvel Stan Lee

“SCREAM” Will Celebrate The Year Of The Vampire And The Phenomenal Popularity
Of The “Twilight” Saga With Cast And World Premiere Footage From
The Highly-Anticipated “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”

“True Blood” Cast And Creators Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer, Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgård, Sam Trammell And More Will Also Be On Hand

“Battlestar Galactica” Cast Reunites For Final Farewell And A Special Tribute To Horror Legend George Romero

Two-Hour Extravaganza Premieres Tuesday, October 27 At 10 PM, ET/PT

New York, NY, October 5, 2009 – As twilight descends upon The Greek Theatre, Spike TV presents “SCREAM 2009,” an evening where galaxies collide and genres unite for the ultimate celebration of all things sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comic book.  The 4th annual “SCREAM” is the first and only global event of its kind to honor and celebrate the hottest films, TV shows, comics, actors, creators, icons and pioneers who have influenced and shaped these genres.   “SCREAM 2009” will tape on Saturday, October 17 in Los Angeles, CA.  The two-hour extravaganza will premiere on Spike TV on Tuesday, October 27 (10:00 PM-Midnight, ET/PT).

Spike TV is proud to partner once again with Comic-Con International, the biggest comic book and pop culture convention in the world, to present real-life super hero Stan Lee with the Comic-Con Icon Award at “SCREAM 2009.”  Lee is the creator of such legendary super-heroes as Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man and The Hulk.  “Spider-Man’s” Tobey Maguire will lead the tribute to one of the most beloved and influential comic book legends of all time.

“SCREAM 2009” will also honor the godfather of the modern horror film, George Romero with this year’s Scream Mastermind Award.  This award is presented to a filmmaker whose unique vision of horror, science fiction and/or fantasy is both critically-acclaimed and culturally significant.   Romero, best known for his gruesome and satirical zombie masterpiece “Night Of The Living Dead” and its sequel “Dawn Of The Dead,” as well as the cult classic, “Creepshow,” will receive the honor previously presented to cinematic luminaries Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

“SCREAM 2009” will celebrate the year of the vampire and the phenomenal popularity of the “Twilight” saga with cast and World Premiere footage from the highly-anticipated “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”  In addition, fans will be treated to appearances from the cast and creators of “True Blood” including Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer, Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgård, Sam Trammell, among others.  The celebration continues with a “Battlestar Galactica” cast reunion for a farewell tribute featuring Edward James Olmos, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, James Callis, Kate Vernon, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco, Tahmoh Penikett and executive producer David Eick.

“SCREAM 2009” will present awards in 16 different categories.  J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi action-adventure “Star Trek” tops the “SCREAM 2009” list with 17 nominations including the categories of The Ultimate Scream, Best Science Fiction Movie, Best Director, Best Ensemble, Holy Sh*t Scene-of-the-Year and a nod in the all-new Fight Scene-of-the-Year category.  Comic book-inspired blockbusters “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and “Watchmen” each nabbed 13 nominations, big screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s best selling novel “Twilight” received 10 nominations, while HBO’s vampire-themed television series “True Blood” garnered nine nominations.  Fans can log onto scream.spike.com until Saturday, October 17 to vote for their favorites.

The official sponsors of Spike TV’s “SCREAM 2009” are Taco Bell, Subaru, Geico and Free Credit Report.com.

Casey Patterson, Michael Levitt and Cindy Levitt serve as executive producers for “SCREAM 2009.”  Greg Sills is supervising producer, Gary Tellalian and Austin Reading are producers and Hamish Hamilton will direct.

Spike TV is available in 98 million homes and is a division of MTV Networks.  A unit of Viacom (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B), MTV Networks is one of the world’s leading creators of programming and content across all media platforms. Spike TV’s Internet address is www.spike.com and for up-to-the-minute and archival press information and photographs, visit Spike TV’s press site at http://www.spike.com/press.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK (OCTOBER 7, 2009) — John Brooks, in conjunction with Battlestar Wiki and the Galapagos Art Space, invite fans of Battlestar Galactica to an engaging panel discussion event in Brooklyn, New York.

The panel will be held on December 8, beginning at 8 PM. As a follow-up to August’s successful event at the Hi Christina! art gallery, this panel will be lead by John Brooks, and features Ajay Chaudhary, Patrick Di Justo, and Shane Froebel to discuss all aspects of the Syfy Channel series, Battlestar Galactica, and its forthcoming prequel companion series, Caprica.

Ajay Chaudhary is an instructor in Columbia University’s core curriculum program, teaching classic works of philosophy and religion to undergraduate students, and a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures, specializing in 20th century Iranian Islamic political philosophy, religious political philosophy and comparative philosophy. He also plays in the country band El Diablo Robotico, named after a slightly obscure reference from Angel: The Series.

John Brooks is a seasoned fiction writer, pop culture journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in various pockets of the internet and print publications. He graduated from Ithaca College with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies, which he now puts to good use as museum educator at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he leads programs on medieval history, classical architecture, and comparative religion.

Patrick Di Justo is the author of the forthcoming “The Science of Battlestar Galactica”, which he wrote in close conjunction with the creative team behind the groundbreaking series.  Patrick is a contributing editor to Wired Magazine and his work has appeared in Popular Science, Scientific American and The New York Times.  He once accidentally gave a long lecture at the Haydn Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and, due to legal reasons, cannot tell you how the FTL drive works.

Shane Froebel is an administrator for the absurdly thorough Battlestar Wiki and the Chief Information Officer for FrakMedia! in addition to holding a self-accredited PhD in geekology.  Shane studied information technology and politics at Curry College.

The Galapagos Art Space is located on 16 Main Street in Brooklyn, New York at the corner of Water Street in DUMBO. Admission to the event is $10 per person.

Facebook users may confirm their attendance to this event by going to:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=150034651196

Updates will be made at the Battlestar Wiki blog at:

http://blog.battlestarwiki.org

####

Contact Information

John Brooks
917-703-1822
jbrooks885@gmail.com

Joe Beaudoin Jr.
772-766-9198
joe@frakmedia.net
www.battlestarwiki.org

A bit late, but better late than never…. Here are some recaps of the BSG panel that happened in Brooklyn in August.

• Shane’s Sit-Rep
• Patrick Di Justo’s Sit-Rep

There’s another panel scheduled for November 4th, this time at the Galapagos Art Studio in Brooklyn with the same participants as the Hi Christina! BSG panel—and hopefully a larger panel with some BSG alumni. More to come!

LA-LA LAND RECORDS & DARK DELICACIES PRESENTS

CD SOUNDTRACK SIGNING EVENT

Acclaimed BATTLESTAR GALACTICA composer Bear McCreary signs his recently-released 2-CD SET, “BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON 4”

CABIN FEVER/HOSTEL 1&2 composer Nathan Barr will also be in attendance, signing copies of his score to the hit HBO series “TRUE BLOOD”

At DARK DELICACIES
4213 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank, CA 91505
Sunday,  September 13, 2009, 2pm

La-La Land Records and Dark Delicacies invite you to meet, and get your CDs autographed by, composer Bear McCreary.

Bear will be signing copies of his newest soundtrack release… the 2-CD SET, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: SEASON 4.  In addition to his BSG releases, Bear McCreary has supplied the music for TV’s EUREKA, CAPRICA, TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES and the horror features REST STOP: DON’T LOOK BACK and WRONG TURN 2.

Bear will sign more than one item, but one of the items must be one of his soundtrack CDs purchased at Dark Delicacies.  CDs are available now at Dark Delicacies and will also be available for purchase at the signing.

Also signing at this event – composer Nathan Barr (CABIN FEVER, HOSTEL 1&2) will be autographing copies of his new TRUE BLOOD soundtrack release.

Can’t make the signing, but still would like to get autographed CDs?  You can order CDs from Dark Delicacies to be autographed and sent to you!  Check out their website www.darkdel.com for details!

In an attempt to keep up with the financial needs of Battlestar Wiki, I’ve decided to integrate Kontera in-line advertisements into the website. Some of you may have noticed them today.

If you visit IGN or other sites, like Airlock Alpha, you’ll note the use of such ads “in-line” with the text. The links are highlighted in a different color (an orange), rather than the yellow or red links of the default style sheet.

Undoubtedly, some of you might find them annoying. Sadly, I find them necessary in order to further secure the Wiki’s financial health for the interim.

For right now, the Kontera service is merely being tested. We don’t know what to expect in terms of revenue from this service, and will not probably know for a few months. If we run across any problems, we’ll shelve it.

Should you find them annoying, I do recommend buying a membership to the wiki (and to our Battlestar Forum). It’s all done through PayPal, so we don’t receive any of your financial information—just whatever money you choose to donate to us. By donating, you’ll be added as a member, and when logged in you will not be bothered with any advertisements! Once you’ve donated, make sure to e-mail webmaster@battlestarwiki.org with your user name on either (or both) the Wiki and our Forums, so we know who to apply the membership to on our end.

Thanks for your understanding, all! Feel free to comment here on the blog, via e-mail, or via the Fourm. I won’t throw you in hack.

For those wondering why the Wiki was in its “up-and-down” mode on Saturday—no, you didn’t miss the airing of a new episode of BSG. (The show’s still over, last we checked, sans “The Plan.”) It was merely Super Agent Shane working diligently on our Apollo server, upgrading it with the newest security patches, releases of PHP, MediaWiki extensions… and all that wonderful good stuff that you probably don’t really care about.

However, just to let you know, the only major change you’re likely to see is the sidebars are all uniform now. That is because the dynamic sidebar extension we were using, SidebarEx, presently no longer functions under the current MW installation we have.

Everything else works fine. (At least we believe so, anyway. If you disagree, just shoot us an e-mail letting us know of any issues you’re having!)

Battlestar Wiki now has a Tumblr blog. Yes, we know, why the frak are we doing that for?

Well, it’s a means of sharing BSG/Caprica/Galactica 1980 news, content, and all sorts of media to people on a pre-existing service. Stuff that we really don’t want to cover on the Battlestar Wiki blog, since the blog itself is meant for more “serious” business. It also allows other people on the Tumblr network to share our stuff, because we’re all into that Web 2.0 viral felgercarb.

Also, we’ll likely allow people to post their own BSG related stuff on there, as so long as it keeps in line with our ultimate objective: to cover everything canonical and official in the BSG universes.

If you’re interested in helping out, please e-mail us here.

We (meaning Joe, for now) will be adding Battlestar and Caprica news to our Twitter feed.

If you’re not following us on Twitter yet, then you best start getting to it, nuggets!

http://www.twitter.com/battlestarwiki

Good Twittering!

Just to let our followers know, Battlestar Wiki will be upgrading to MediaWiki 1.15 (and all extensions) sometime later this week—either beginning Friday or over the weekend. Some downtime may occur, however nothing too Earth-shattering.

During this update, we will re-implement the Google search in lieu of the MediaWiki’s default search.

As of right now, we have already updated the Battlestar Wiki Blog to Wordpress 2.8, as well as the plug-ins. This took less than 10 minutes without fail.

Now for what our immediate future holds:

• We will be creating mobile skins for Battlestar Wiki, thereby allowing the Wiki to be accessed via handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberries, and all those lovely web-enabled gizmos you kiddos like to use nowadays. Updates on this forthcoming feature as we have them.
• We are looking for one or two contributors to help us maintain our Twitter feed. Basically, we are looking for fans to tweet (or re-tweet) BSG and Caprica news, as well as fandom developments. If you are interested, please send an e-mail to webmaster AT battlestarwiki DOT org.

More to come! Now I’m personally off to bed. So sleep we all!

My longtime friend, Michael Hinman, operator of Airlock Alpha (formerly known as SyFy Portal before NBC-Universal bought the rights to the “SyFy” name) notified me by e-mail yesterday that Battlestar Wiki was on a list of 16 websites that were being considered for the category of “Best Website.” Of course, I didn’t say anything until Michael Hinman and the team at Airlock Alpha publicly released the “Long List” of Potential Nominees late last night. That list is here.

Now this list will be pruned down to five (5) websites that will appear on the final voting ballots. The “Final Five” nominees from each category will be announced on June 15.

Read more about Airlock Alpha’s 2009 Portal Awards here.

Regardless of whether or not we make the “Final Five” nominees for Best Website, I would like to take this opportunity to express how humbled I am that we were even considered for this honor. Further, as always, I would also like to reiterate that it is because of every contributor and visitor to this website that we are here today—without all of you, Battlestar Wiki would not be in the position it is presently in without your support.

So say we all.

I’ll be back full swing here in the next month or two, since I’m really worn out from Battlestar Galactica due to my previous involvement with the auction house that executed the two live auctions at the beginning half of this year. However, I’ve been given a few questions which I need to answer here, and they are mainly about the Wiki and our future.

I’ll go over the more common ones:

1. Will there be a “Caprica Wiki”?

Yes and no. While we have gone ahead and registered all the .org, .net, and .com domains for “capricawiki,” we will have those redirect to the battlestarwiki.org website. The Battlestar Wiki will encompass the entire universe of every iteration of BSG out there—the original, its 1980 spinoff, the re-imagined series, and Caprica—and the site will remain “Battlestar Wiki” in both name and function, since Caprica itself is in the universe of BSG.

While we could create a separate wiki dedicated solely to Caprica, this is unrealistic as this causes unnecessary compartmentalization and fragmentation of the user base. It is ultimately far more effective and worthwhile to keep everything on one site.

The same goes for the Battlestar Forum, which serves to encompass discussion of every version of BSG and its related spin-offs.

2. How long will you guys be around?

As long as there are humans around.

Realistically, we will be around as long as we can. Our resources are not infinite and we cannot hope to logically sustain two servers as their current level without new blood. While Caprica is on the horizon for 2010, and The Plan will air later this year, we will be around as long as the resources are available to upkeep the site. We are looking at downsizing our operations, assuming that we cannot find other sites to host to financially sustain having two servers. Times are tough and, despite the various streams of revenue we’ve received from ads, affiliate links and the memberships, the money still ultimately comes out of my pocket.

Therefore, if you have a well-trafficed website that you would like to find a new host for, feel free to drop me a mail at:

joe(at)frakmedia(dot)net

Having just said that, we do have sites that are interested in being hosted by FrakMedia!, which is the name of the “company” that we’ve assembled here. (We’re not really a company in the legal sense, hence the quotes.) We’ll have at least one or two announcements on that coming this June! Look for it!

3. Now that BSG is over, what new content can we expect to see on the website?

You can expect to see an increased emphasis on information from the BSG comics, novels, memorabilia—and even props that were auctioned off since the beginning of 2009.

Further, there is also Caprica and The Plan to consider as well. Yes, it seems like there won’t be much new information from the show itself, but there’s a ton of stuff that will still be documented by the hard working contributors who have made Battlestar Wiki possible.

Not to mention all the other languages that the Wiki can be translated into. German, Spanish, French… Exciting!

So that’s all for now! Take care!

Oh, and also, we now have a Twitter feed as well that I (and possibly other contributors) will be updating periodically. Follow us here.

The Writer’s Guild Foundation has asked that we share the following press release about a big event they are hosting on Tuesday May 5th from 7:30-9:30pm at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, California. If you live or will be in that area we strongly recommend that you attend the event.

AN EVENING with RONALD D. MOORE
Tuesday, May 5 – 7:30-9:30pm – At the Writers Guild Theater (135 S
Doheny Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90211)
Light reception included

Join us for this unique opportunity to learn from the writer, developer, and excecutive producer of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA… one of the most successful sci-fi series in a frakkin’ long time. Ronald D. Moore is one of the most successful writers of television science fiction working today. He is writer/executive producer of Battlestar Galactica. Previous writing and producing credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Good Vs. Evil, Roswell, and the acclaimed HBO series Carnivale. He is the winner of two Peabody Awards, an Emmy (plus many nominations) and a Hugo Award, as well as a WGA nomination.

Thanks,
Jonathan

Purchase tickets online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/63131 or call 800-838-3006

Prices:
$20 General Public
$15 WGA members
$10 Student with ID
(prices slightly discounted online)