Man, the RIAA takedown did a lot of good - these guys are like geek rockstars now!

The pirates have since moved the Bay’s hosting back to Sweden, where they’ve built technological bulwarks against another takedown, law-hardening the Bay’s network architecture with a system of redundant servers that spans three nations. Shutting down the site in any single country will only cripple the Pirate Bay for as long as it takes for its fail-over scripts to execute, a gap measurable in minutes.

The various servers’ locations are obscured behind a load balancer configured to lie, the crew says. Once the failsafe is triggered, a determined adversary with an international team of litigators might be able to track down the servers, but by that time — according to the plan — the pirates will have deployed mirrors in even more countries. In theory, the corporate lawyers will eventually tire of this game of international copyright Whack-A-Mole.

With all that in place, crew member Fredrik Neij says he welcomes the possibility of another raid. “I really want the pleasure of it being down three minutes, then up again.”

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Joe Q may have told the crowds at San Diego that he was nervous about appearing on The Colbert Report, but he handled himself well, discussing Civil War and how the Marvel Universe reflects our reality. A good interview that, shockingly, doesn’t focus at all on the Spider-Man unmasking and has some fantastic looking sound effects.

Check the video after the jump.

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Oftentimes, the biggest names in comics break in through the most low key gigs. Kurt Busiek’s first job was a Green Lantern back-up piece. Devin Grayson’s first gig was a short Batman origin retelling. The list of artists who have gotten their big starts with a simple fill-in issue is seemingly endless. Tom O’Connor’s first comic writing gig is coming up shortly with an 8-page story in the Brendan McCarthy issue of SOLO. He happily agreed to talk to KFR about it.

OK, Tom - can you give us a little background about yourself?

I’ll keep it short —- I’m a Massachusetts-grown guy. I grew up in Western Mass, moved to Boston after college (a crazy ‘experimental’ sort of place called Hampshire College). I’ve worked in Television production pretty much since 1988, starting in Boston, doing everything from sweeping up to editing to writing/producing for sports networks, documentaries etc, while I played bad guitar in a string of truly awful and completely forgettable punk rock bands. I moved to Southern California ten years ago and just like everyone else, I’ve been hammering away at writing, or at least trying to improve my writing, doing comedy and scrambling for freelance gigs of any and all sorts. Some years I’ve been able to put “writer” in the occupation line of my tax forms, other years I haven’t. …but that’s the way it goes. Right?

Brendan McCarthy has been a comic book artist of some renown for a number of years. How did you hook up with him for your first comic book writing assignment?

I was originally introduced to Brendan by a mutual friend — gads — five? Six years ago? Because we worked together she was pretty familiar with my written work (a lot of which is “un-credited” re-write & punch-up sort of stuff, so not many people have really read “me”) and because we were friends she had also seen me perform my own material etc. She had known Brendan for a number of years also and so she thought we should meet and that maybe we had some of the same artistic sensibilities etc. Brendan and I met, and hit it off, he read some of my work – mostly screenplay and TV-type scripts, and I, of course, got to see a lot of his work, which is pretty dang amazing.

So a few times in the past couple years Brendan has been nice enough to hire me on to a few of his various projects. We all have ‘projects’ of all sorts, don’t we? And then, I didn’t hear from him for quite a while (he had moved back overseas, I believe)… until a few months ago when he called me up, said he was living in Southern California again, told me about his SOLO deal with DC and asked if I would maybe like to contribute a story. Does anyone say ‘no’ to an offer like that? I sure don’t.

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I’ve had this interview emailed to me 4 times in the last 24 hours, but I just can’t sit through Harry Knowles’ idiocy long enough to know if there’s anything of substance to be read. The two things I’m certain of is that Brandon Routh is apparently a big Worlds of Warcraft fan, and Knowles has got to be legally mentally handicapped, or damn close to it.

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This is our final piece of X3 promotional clippage, unless we run across something completely aweseome. On Friday, a chunk of the cast was signing autographs and appearing on stage at the Today Show for one last blitz of promotion. Jackman, Berry and Kelsey Grammar got the A-list treatment with both Couric and Lauer cowtowing to them, while the younger mutants (Rogue, Iceman, Angel and Kitty) got stuck with that walking eating disorder, Al Roker, who proceeded to make painfully bad jokes and inane comments. Frankly, after seeing what Paquin put up with the last week, I’m thinking she needs a better agent.

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Last week’s whirlwind of X3 promotional interviews got out of hand, so we’ll wrap up with two more then call it quits. Today, we have Hugh Jackman’s appearance on Today, where he talks about the flick, getting Punk’d by Brett Ratner and they wrap up the interview with a clip from Jackman’s Broadway musical. Of all the hollywood types I’ve seen interviewed over the years, Jackman’s one of the few that seems to genuinely be thrilled to be famous, and honestly appreciative of his fans and good fortune. The guy’s just plain likeable, which makes his ability to portray the Canadian killing machine so effectively that much more impressive.

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It’s amazing what a difference a decent interviewer makes. Hugh Jackman’s visit to the Conan O’Brien Show is by far the most entertaining X3 promotional interview to date. In addition to talking about the X-Men flick, Jackman discusses his love scene with Rachel Weisz in “The Fountain,” and we’re treated to a surprisingly badass clip of Wolverine just wasting soldiers right and left.

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