• Well, it’s finally happened – Avatar didn’t come out atop the weekend box office. Dear John, the romantic comedy headlined by G.I. Joe’s Channing Tatum trounced the men (and women) in blue. It also performed a public service by beating the previous record for a Super Bowl weekend opening, knocking Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds off the record books.

• Enjoy every day, because it may be your last. The Large Hadron Collider is online, and even though it hasn’t cranked up anywhere near full power, the current collisions are producing an “unexpectedly high number” of mesons. We don’t know what it means, but anything “unexpected” with a machine theoretically capable of creating a black hole is worrisome.

• Emily Rose has been tapped as the lead for the new SyFy series Haven, based on the Stephen King book The Colorado Kid. The show revolves around an FBI agent coming to a small town to solve a murder, only to discover that the town residents have supernatural powers. So it’s Warehouse 13 with people instead of artifacts. How original.

• Regency and Fox are rebooting another comic book hero. This time it’s Daredevil, because that came off so well the last time. It actually looks like it’s just a $100 million way of thumbing their nose at Disney, who gets the rights to the character back if Fox doesn’t use it for so many years.

• The Secret of Kells is either a dull commentary on religion, or a fantasy action movie, depending on which trailer you watch. You can get flavors of Disney’s Kim Possible or Cartoon Network’s Samurai Jack. It’s got Oscar nominations though, so they must have done something right.

• I’ve seen a lot of PC casemods, but none are quite as disturbing as this one from God of War, with Kratos holding your gaming GPU as well as a sword. Perfect for people with not enough anxiety in their lives.

• Are we looking at Captain America, the Musical? It sounds that way. Since the superhero’s costume is basically an American flag, they’ve come up with a novel way to get him into that particularly garish garb (which didn’t look odd on the comics page, but might on movie screens): assign him to the USO to sing and dance. Not surprisingly, he can’t wait to get out of the costume.

• Terry Pratchett, author of my beloved, cracked Discworld novels, is fighting Alzheimer’s Disease. As an offshoot of that health battle, he’s coming out in favor of euthanasia in an interview with the Guardian. It makes me sad to think about someone who has made me laugh this much is thinking about things this morbid, but I agree with his logic.

• Do we package stories into genres like “science fiction” and “fantasy” based on rules the authors followed for world-building, or more as a blueprint for the reader on what the world should be composed of? Author Jo Walton thinks it’s the later. Think of it as boundaries for “suspension of disbelief.”

• Considering that Avatar took 14 years to make, it’s not a surprise that there’s an entire backstory and history on Pandora itself. Io9.com has gathered all the information from the movie’s designers into five separate articles here.

• Disney is reportedly so thrilled with themselves over Tron: Legacy, they’re already working on a sequel and a television series for Disney XD. There’s supposed to be a full 2:30 trailer appearing on March 5^th, which means they plan to launch it with Alice In Wonderland.

• The 37^th Annual Annie Awards have announced their winners, and Pixar’s Up has won Best Feature. At this point, shouldn’t Pixar pull a Candace Bergen and remove themselves from the running?

• In the “why didn’t someone think of this before?” category, Turbine Light is preparing to show their egg-beater style turbine that fits around light poles on highways and utilizes the wind off passing cars to power the lights.

• The new Dune movie will be a new Dune movie, from scratch, with incoming director Pierre Morel coming up with a new script and plans to go 3-D on everything, but especially the sandworms. How can a movie that’s already been made once for theaters and once (very effectively) for television, and is based on a book be so hard to develop?

• Author Neil Gaiman has confirmed that he wrote an episode of Doctor Who for Matt Smith’s doctor. The bad news is that it’s not for the season that’s currently filming, but the season after that. Considering how slowly Doctor Who produces seasons, we should see it about the time we make it back to the moon.

• Hasbro has been steadily developing game properties like Battleship and Candyland into movies. They just announced that Battleship was being pushed back a year to allow time for the effects. Now they’re announcing that Taylor Lautner, Mr. Twilight Werewolf, is going to play Stretch Armstrong. I may mock everything remotely related to Twilight a lot, but this I can see, based solely on The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.

• Someone call Dick Cheney, because the heroes of Avatar are really just a bunch of treasonous war criminals. Or that’s what the New York Times says some think about the heroes of a lot of genre films.

• It’s a good time to be a fantasy author, because sales are booming. And it’s all thanks to Twilight. Sales of genre stories are up 20% to the critical teen demographic. I’m all for kids reading, I just hope that Twilight is a gateway drug to better stories.

• In an effort to beat as many dead horses as possible, screenwriters have been hired for Enchanted 2 as well as for The Lost Symbol, which is basically a The Da Vinci Code sequel (Angels & Demons is, of course, a sequel movie, but a prequel book).

• Frank Miller has taken to Twitter to give us a new look at Sin City. Not content with just giving us 140 character story hints, he’s tweeting original artwork.

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