I don’t know how many of you have seen The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode that spoofs Stephen King’s The Shining but this news hit me like a go-crazy-Homer-with-an-ax this morning. King has apparently been working on a sequel to what is probably his most famous book. It’s going to be called Doctor Sleep. Hit the jump to read the synopsis. If you dare. 

Remember that time I said it wasn’t worth complaining about reboots because there was absolutely no way of avoiding them? Get ready to halt any complaining now, because it was just announced that the Star Trek screenwriting dream team Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman will be serve as producers on reboots of The Mummy franchise as well as Van Helsing. Because, as we have all figured out, there is no reason to create original characters anymore, just take old ones and write new scripts.

It’s fan fiction, everyone. Hollywood has officially turned into a factory of big-budget fan fiction. By the way: Van Helsing will star Tom Cruise, so now it’s fan fiction and celebrities engaging in cosplay. Yup. Go ahead — try to deny that’s what it is.

Bad news, Hulu users. It was revealed today that the streaming service is taking the first steps toward making you prove you are a pay-TV customer before being able to watch anything. Please don’t throw anything at your computer monitor, you still need it to read The Mary Sue. Editor’s note: We have some updated information on this news after the jump.

The big news on the Blizzard front yesterday was that they’d decided not to have a BlizzCon in 2012; that is, the large fan convention at which the titan (ha ha insidery Blizzard joke) of the gaming community makes the biggest of its big announcements. The reasoning was that with three games/expansions expected to drop within the next year and a half, the company’s time would be better spent working on them and, moreover, they just didn’t have anything really exciting and new to show.

But there was a tidbit of smaller news that we feel is still important to highlight. Blizzard was successfully pressured to remove “homosexual” and “transsexual” from the list of words that the in-game profanity filter of World of Warcraft automatically blocks.

One of these things is not like the other. The BBC has been running two year long series of twelve articles, each one profiling one prominent person of that month’s news. One series was for men, the other was for women from Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to Eman al-Obeidi, but it seems like the BBC just couldn’t quite find any notable women from the month of December.

So they profiled a female panda.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), or Protect-IP Act as it’s called in the House of Representatives, has been the talk of the internet-town (and regular towns) for  months. Once everyone realized the implications this particular bill, they got extremely nervous and concerned phone calls and letters started pouring into Washington. The matter is still waiting to be settled when Congress returns from their winter recess but a list has surfaced showing particular companies who are in support of the controversial bill. And one of them is Marvel Entertainment. 

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? If you guessed the “boys science” and “girls science” thing, then yes — that is what this post is going to be about. Oh, educational toy manufacturers! When will you get it through your smarty-pants heads that getting girls to become interested in science does not have to entail convincing them that “their” science has to be “feminine”? It’s not even the pink, you guys. It’s the segregation. Who’s to say that girls don’t want to take part in “boy science”? My heart weeps for the girls who want to make slime and the boys who want to make crystals.

The congressional victory for marriage equality in New York has been a beautiful and inspiring thing to see. And Sesame Street, frankly, should follow suit. But PBS would like us to be clear about something: Bert and Ernie are not gay. They’re not straight, either. They have no sexual orientation. But mostly: they’re meant to represent kids, kid relationships, kid desires, kid arguments, and children should not be getting married. Sesame Street is not a 17th century farming community. None of those monster-puppet children should be getting married to anyone.

South African archaeologist Francis Thackeray wants the world to know that he thinks William Shakespeare was a pot head. Based on “trace evidence of marijuana in pipe fragments found in what had once been Shakespeare’s garden,” Thackeray posits that Shakespeare wrote some of the most famous works in history while higher than a kite. To prove it, he wants to exhume the body. The body that’s been decaying in the ground for the past four hundred years. Yeah.

You see, when they said “teaser” they probably should have said “schedule announcement.” And not made it shorter than the ads that run in front of it.

Office quote: “That is the dumbest thing to ever dumb.”

(via The Daily Blam!)