I'll be the Alien to your John Hurt

No posts all month long, but it seems my disjointed style lives on.

Holy shit, it's almost Free Comic Book Day! Go get comics tomorrow! Check out the website's comic shop locator if you need help finding your local peddler.

To keep abreast of developments at the Large Hadron Collider, I've added @CERN to my Twitter feed. Go on, take a look at that.

I started my Dragon*Con jar, so saving has begun in earnest. This seems like a good time to reiterate that all donations to the Get Erica to Dragon*Con Fund will be put to debaucherous, possibly even illegal, use. Just think, you could help me break the law! You could also help me see such exciting scheduled guests as Saul Rubinek, Michelle Forbes and Aaron Douglas. Hoping for David Hewlett and Tahmoh Penikett, but that would be too awesome so I'm not holding my breath. I've also begun thinking about costuming; lots of things sound cool and even doable, but I haven't really been drawn to anything. I'm kind of leaning toward the ridiculous, so something like a fairy from the Legend of Zelda games (a huge, glowing cottonball with wings) might be neat. That would also require some engineering (what would I make it out of? how would I make it glow?), which would be fun. I'm open to suggestions, so share your brilliant ideas... as long as no one wants me to be in the ass end of a tauntaun costume. That Alien idea might be fun, though.

Show me on the action figure where Q touched you

Not only The Most Badass Alphabet Ever, but also creepy and pretty fucked up. Yay! For example:

Like we didn't know.

Cool Distractions

Yes, well, I've been busy. That said, I do not have the words to express the awesomeness of The Periodic Table of Periodic Tables. My inner archivist hasn't been this aroused in ages.

Also, this is too cool & too useful to you (yes, you) to not mention. Have a look see at The Best in Armchair Astronomy, where popularmechanics.com offers a list of free and for-fee astronomy resources. There are amazing pictures of space all over the place and you should go look at them.

I should go back to whatever the hell I was doing before I got distracted.

Mad science

The mad scientists at the LHC haven't destroyed the world yet, but take comfort in knowing they're getting closer every day. And by closer, I mean the supercollider will be shutting down once again for many months, this time dealing with "design issues." The delay is okay, though - we want them to take their time and get it right, so that when the LHC reaches full potential, there are no screw-ups that leave parts of the world not destroyed. Can you imagine a future where the only place that survives is Upper Sandusky? The very thought makes me tremble.

In related news, crazy people are crazy.

Frakkin' cool

Galactica: Sabotage is a shot-for-shot homage to the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video, using Battlestar Galactica footage. Watch it, then take a look at a side-by-side comparison of that and the original. Very frakkin' cool. This came to my attention via MetaFilter, so thanks MetaFilter!

Incidentally, we know the future is awesome because "Sabotage" is playing during young James Kirk's car chase at the beginning of Star Trek.

[update: sorry to say, both videos have been removed because people are greedy bastards]

Space-time Addiction

Since I'm all excited about having just started following some NASA Twitter feeds, I'm compelled to recommend checking them out. NASA Astronauts is a consolidation of astronauts' tweets, and includes very cool things like exceptional photos from the ISS. There's also NASA, for agency news, project happenings and groovy pictures.

I swear I will not use it for evil (unless, of course, David Warner is Evil, in which case I'll do pretty much anything he wants) - kickass replica of the map from Time Bandits.

I enjoy my games, especially CivIII, and now that I have the N64, I've been playing a good bit of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Zelda, in particular, has all the hallmarks of a video game addiction, according to 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. For a cracked.com article to have substance is unusual enough, but this one's got actual information as well as links to other cool, interesting articles about how technology is ruining us. Pardon me now while I go save the princess.

As the Colonies Turn

I watched the pilot for the Battlestar Galactica spinoff, Caprica, a little while ago and I was underwhelmed. Cylons started out as an over-privileged, under-supervised spoiled teenager who got suckered into a religious cult? No wonder everything went south for humanity. If that sounds more dismissive than is justified, I have to admit to some negativity about the series before going in. The way the creators were describing it, it sounded like a nighttime soap, with all the social drama and intrigue you'd expect. That is, pretty much the opposite of what I want out of my scifi. Well, first impressions aside, I thought I'd give it a couple more episodes before abandoning hope. If nothing else, Eric Stoltz (Daniel Greystone) is... persuasive. I think it was around episode three when I decided I'd totally watch him and Paula Malcomson, the woman who plays Amanda Greystone, gettin' jiggy with it. Incidentally, you might recognize Malcomson from Deadwood, on which she played Trixie. I enjoy her quite a bit, so I'm glad to see her as a regular on something again.

Well I'll be damned, probably quite literally. It occurs to me that one of the things I'd like to see more of in my scifi - hot people getting as nasty as network TV will allow - is a staple of soaps. I'll just let that observation sit.

So, I'm not impressed with the annoying people hoping to convert the world to the one true god. In fact, I couldn't care less about their plots and their bombs and their secret little cabals. I was ready for that bullshit to be over with well before the end of Battlestar Galactica. Some of the religion on BSG was handled pretty well and added something interesting to the story, but most of it was uninspired dren. Thus far, Caprica looks no more promising in that regard. Well, if it all happened before and it'll all happen again, I'm probably just cranky from seeing the same worn out bullshit.

On the plus side, Jane Espenson is an executive producer and writer for the show, which bodes well. She's written and acted as executive producer for several shows I'm a fan of, including Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, and Warehouse 13. Though a few of the episodes she's written might not be my favorites, I think she tends to be spot-on with characterization, and I count her involvement with Caprica as a plus.

Then this most recent episode did nothing to convince me things are looking better. In fact, I thought most of it was not very good. Rather than bitch about it, though, I'll point out something I liked a lot - during the scene in the boardroom, there's one moment when Zoe looks at her dad and her expression is almost sexual. That perked up my Electra complex and piqued my interest. And it's a shame that's not a direction this show would go. This might be a soap opera, but I don't think incest is a popular theme even on soaps. Besides, our shiny toaster girl already has a real life boyfriend, in the tech who talks so sweetly to her.

I'll wrap this up with a few miscellaneous thoughts, in no particular order --

I'm envious of Caprica's maglev trains. Everything should be maglev.

I wish the show had gone in a different direction with the title sequence, because I get the style they're going for but I think it was damned poorly executed.

I like that the "alternative" relationships in the show - Sister Clarice and her family of wives & husbands, and Sam Adama & his same-sex partner - are presented almost banally.

So, Admiral Adama came from a family of crooks, thugs and harridans; no wonder he was such a badass.

When Amanda Greystone outed her daughter at the memorial at the end of episode two, she reminded me of the dad in Heathers who loved his dead, gay son.

Finally, John Pyper-Ferguson (Pete Hutter on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., the Pegasus CAG for a couple episodes of BSG) will be showing up for a run of episodes, and it always makes me happy to see him. Here's hoping Caprica's pretty people make it worth sticking around!

Further proof that physics is cool

And that we live in a crazy universe. The Odd Physics Video Archive contains short videos of interesting things.

Just a few things

I've been doing a lot of snowshoeing lately, which has left me with less time for geekery. It's an odd day when I'll choose exercize over, well, pretty much anything I can do while sitting on my ass, but there you are. Anyway, I still found a few things that I thought were worth sharing.

New comics don't often catch my attention, but I want this. I want this so much that I got a little drooly reading about it.

I was a little bummed by Obama's lack of support for the shuttle program, but I think things are actually looking pretty good. The International Space Station is almost finished, the US will still be sending up astronauts, and NASA will be able to put more resources toward other projects. About the ISS, I'm not sure what to say except holy fucking shit. There aren't a lot of things that genuinely make me think, 'wow, you built an amazing thing, humans!', but the ISS is one of them. Goddamn, do I want to go to space.

Instead, I'll watch this video again, because it's just that cool: Timmy O'Riley by L. Hadron and the Colliders.

Best use of South Dakota in a television series

So, I mentioned the Syfy show Warehouse 13 a little while ago. If you're not familiar, it's about a government department responsible for collecting objects of supernatural power and containing them lest they be misused by evil-doers. Think of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but designed by Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison and MC Escher (so they tell us). This is the thirteenth incarnation of the warehouse, it's located in South Dakota and it houses some of the most dangerous items in the world. While the show design is riding the popularity of steampunk hard, it combines the 19th century brass goggles aesthetic with a good assortment of 21st century gadgets. Some of it comes off as a little ridiculous (like Artie's computer set-up), but I've found that I really don't mind the ridiculous if it's done well, and in this case I think the effect is fun.

Unfortunately, I don't much care for two of the leads. They're a conventionally attractive, relatively young man and woman who rely on the pigtail-pulling method of flirting with each other. Rather than being cute and entertaining, it just comes off as irritating and unbelievable. They make it hard to swallow the idea that they're supposed to be trained US Secret Service agents.

Well, I don't watch for them. I love their superior, Artie, and not just because he's played by Saul Rubinek. I love his demeanor, his genius, his impatience and tolerance. I don't love that he doesn't bring some cast iron smackdown on the children he works with, but that's not his fault; he's written by people who think that kind of shit is cute, so what's he supposed to do? I like Leena, though she has me wondering if the mysterious and beautiful double-crossing innkeeper is a trope I just never heard of. Well, maybe we'll see something different when the show returns. Let's see, Mrs. Frederic and her shadow, Oddjob, tickle me every time they show up, some of the objects stored in the warehouse are super fucking cool, and did I mention how much I like Artie?

Warehouse 13 has been compared to a few shows, including The Librarian and Friday the 13th the Series. Indeed, it's not the freshest idea, but I think it has the potential to stand out if it can focus on the characters and let the objects be incidental to the real stories. Whackass-mystical-artifact-of-the-week only goes so far. There was some intrigue and vendetta business going on at the end of last season, so here's hoping that continues into its second season, which is due sometime this summer.