Forgot to post this over the holiday weekend! It has been announced that I am adapting Eric Nylund’s novel HALO: FALL OF REACH for Marvel Comics. This is great fun for me since I’m a big fan of the games and the HALO universe as a whole. But what’s even more fun is that I get to expand on the universe here, and add my own touches to a story that I already enjoy. Also, it’s my first crack at an adaptation rather than a straight up superhero comic, so I’m learning quite a bit as I tackle that new challenge.

I did an interview with Newsarama that gets into more detail.

Matt Smith comes on stage with Orbital at Glastonbury to play the DOCTOR WHO theme song.

E3 in a nutshell.

I’m like the majority of you — two weeks ago, say “soccer” to me, and watch my eyes glaze over. “Too big a field,” I’d say. “Too many people going too many directions. And Tie games?! Who the hell can sit through two hours just to find out there was a tie?!” And then I’d probably say everything else Americans ever say when someone suggests soccer might be the greatest game on Earth.

So, yeah, apparently I’m all into this soccer thing all of the sudden.

Never watched the stuff for more than a few minutes before this week. Now I’m thinking maybe I ought to be a morning person for the next couple of weeks while World Cup games are on the TV at 7 and 10 am locally. I’m thinking I need to hit Best Buy and pick up FIFA 10. I’m trying to figure out, once this World Cup thing is over, how do I find MLS and Premier League games on TV here in the States?

As with anything new, you look for footholds. Okay, cheering for USA is easy enough. But when I’m watching Uruguay/France, I’m initially lost since I have no particular ties to either country. So I settled on being pro-Uruguay because a) going into it, everyone seemed to expect them to lose and I’m a sucker for the underdog, and b) I liked Anthony Bourdain’s NO RESERVATIONS episode in Uruguay. Those people know their meat, by god, and anyplace with that many carnivores is fine by me.

Anyways, back to football…

About the whole tie game thing–I have the same hangups on this as every other American when it comes to a tie game. A tie means Overtime is aout to begin. It means More Game is to be played. Baseball, basketball, American football–all of these games have Winners! The NHL even figured it out and got rid of tie games because, while the Canadians might be fine with a tie, their southern neighbors do not stand for that nonsense. Yes, we Americans don’t know how to deal with a situation unless there is a Winner and a Loser. It is our Way. Encoded in our cultural DNA since the end of the Revolutionary War.

But the World Cup has taught me to be okay with tie games? Why? For those of you new to the game (like me) — the matches are all worth points. A tie game, both side gets one point. If there’s a winner, it’s 3 points for them, nothing for the loser. Those points sort out who moves on to the next round, and the next, and then the finals. So, yeah, a tie still is not as good as a win, but it is Not Losing, and I’m okay with that.

Speaking of ties, the USA tied their first game, but it was in the moment that they tied that I realized I was hitting the levels of excitement with soccer that I usually only get from baseball and basketball :

So, Robert Green, while the men and women of England may be spitting as they say your name tonight, I guess I ought to thank you for making a soccer fan out of this Yank.

Here’s the deal — if you’re like I was and you wrote off something the rest of the planet likes, maybe open your mind and give it a shot. Pick a match at random (there’s three a day for the next couple of weeks!). Pick a team for any reason (maybe you like the color of their jersey). Then sit and watch and root for them. Listen to the commentators, you’ll learn what’s what with the rules/players/etc pretty quickly, and you might just be surprised how much fun it can be to discover something new.

I find a setting on my Airport Express. I don’t know what it means.

I look up the instructions and I find this (which assumes the consumer-grade product has a network administrator):

To recap, I should choose Node (which is not an option) or Tunnel, depending on which one the person who doesn’t exist told me to use.

99.99% of the time, Apple causes me no brain pain. This is that other 0.01%

Out there somewhere are other people named Brian Reed. They have a GMail address, just like me. They have an email address similar enough to mine, that they sometimes mistype said address.

I get sent their party invitations.

I get news of their car loans being approved (or declined… some of us Brian Reeds have better better credit ratings than others).

I get asked to be part of their home owners associations.

I get asked what I will be bringing to their church socials.

Today I got word of one Brian Reed’s “recrafting” order for his Allen-Edmond Shoes. I had never heard of Allen-Edmond Shoes before (some of us Brian Reeds have nicer shoes than others).

The coolest Brian Reed of us all is actually the guy who caught Saddam Hussein.

But I never get any of his email, which is a bummer, because I bet it’s more interesting than these other goons who get me on all their mailing lists.

Checking out the iPad Wordpress app. Not nearly as entertaining for you as it is for me, I’m sure.

There’s a spot of neurosurgery in the story I’m writing, so I started reading up on the weird and terrible things mankind has done to their fellow man’s brain meat over the centuries. I sort of love the fact that even though we know a lot about the thing that makes us us, we still don’t really understand it.

My favorite (read: thing that horrified me most) surgery of the evening is bilateral cingulotomyis

a form of psychosurgery, introduced in 1952 as an alternative to lobotomy. Today, it is mainly used as a last resort for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorderand chronic pain. The objective of this surgical procedure is the severing of the supracallosal fibresof the cingulumbundle, which pass through the anterior cingulate gyrus.

That’s from Wikipedia, and if you want the gory details here’s a look at the surgical technique that I ran across while looking for pictures of the procedure. The quick and dirty version is this: we drill some holes in your skull, then we poke in electrodes and heat them up to create lesions on your brain so you’ll feel better.

What I’ll be using in the story is a slightly tweaked (poetic license, and all that) version of this surgery. And because those “slight tweaks” really translate to “more horrific,” it’s one of those occasions when I almost feel like I need to apologize to the character I’m about to put through this ordeal.

Oh well, he got to do lots of fun things earlier in the story. Time to pay the piper, I guess.

My new AMAZING SPIDER-MAN mini-series has been announced:

Last summer, Harry Osborn turned his back on the “American Son” armor his father gave him in Amazing Spider-Man, denying both the opportunity to be a famous superhero and the bank account that went along with it.

Beginning in May, the American Son armor is back in use, as writer Brian Reed and artist Philip Brionnes take a closer look at Harry’s life after Siege in the four-issue mini-series Amazing Spider-Man Presents: American Son. But who is wearing the armor is a mystery, although all signs point to Harry.

As part of our “Monthly Webbing” series on Spider-Man, Newsarama talked to Reed about the mini-series and why he’s been writing so much Spider-Man lately.

For more, head on over to Newsarama.