Those wacky Japanese are at it again with their love of robot women.

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has created a cybernetic cute, code-named HRP-4C, with the goal of seeing her do her little turn on the catwalk, on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah.

It would appear she (it?) is already on her (its?) way. Just like your stereotypical human supermodel, she's lost a fuckton of weight to gain a competitive edge. No clue if she glosses her teeth with Vaseline, though.

Due to HRP-4C's technological limitations (i.e. she will probably kill any model who stands in her way in a catty, yet precisely calculated fury), she will be kept in her own little section for a March 23rd fashion show in Tokyo.

Ohh, my. That sound you just heard? That quite, yet steady rumble? That, kids, is the sound of a million sex-starved otaku (and equally deprived Blade Runner fans) creaming their pants at the possibilities.

Japan has cornered the robotics market in recent years, with companies from Mitsubishi to Hello Kitty creator Sanrio taking part. We've seen receptionists, companions, and robots as "performance art."

I see this ending in fire. That's all we need is senior citizens manning psychotic Nurse-Bots. Didn't any of you learn from watching Roujin Z?

For now, it appears HRP-4C will be limited to a menial life as a greeter and curiosity before taking the fashion world by storm. Shuuji Kajita, from AIST's humanoid research group, reassures, however:

Step 2...robots invading America's Next Top Model? I don't know about you, but the thought of Tyra Banks getting vaporized by a backsassed 'bot would get me to tune in. I'm a fan of Dancing With the Stars, anyway.

AIST website (in English)

YouTube video of HRP-4C in action

thefreak wonders whatever happened to AIBO.

While all D&D characters begin as a collection of numbers (on paper, my Eladrin Avenger is 14,12,14,14,16,12) those numbers don’t mean anything without a story to bring them to life. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, maybe it’s because I have an imagination that I’ve always had to actively keep under control, but as long as I’ve been gaming, creating backstories for my characters has been as much fun – in some cases, more fun – than actually plunging them into a dungeon.

This comes from the backstory I wrote for Aeofel Elhromanë, the Eladrin Avenger I played for the most recent Penny Arcade D&D podcast. Though I have created hundreds of NPCs and dozens of PCs in my life, Aeofel was the first character I’ve created in about twenty years. As you are about to find out, I spent a little bit of time fleshing him out...

Two days’ journey from Mithrendain, beneath a thick canopy of leaves in the Forest of Astranz, there is a school, where, for countless human centuries, Eladrin have lived and trained, under Melora’s watchful eye.

Aeofel Elhromanë lived in this school for his entire life, devoting each of his 142 years to the service of Melora. He trained beside monks and clerics, and though he never saw battle firsthand, many of his instructors were veterans of the war with the Drow. He never knew his parents, but his fellow students were his House.

Eight nights ago, during the Court of Stars, the school was attacked by Goblin and Kobold raiders, lead by a human warlord. The school’s alarm, which had been silent for a generation, shook Aeofel and his brothers from their daily trance, and they ran from their quarters, ready for battle.

Aeofel dashed across the training grounds, ready to push the invaders back, but all he found was a trail of bodies –– attacker and defender alike –– from the school’s entrance to its shrine. Near the gate, a few warlords skirmished with kobolds, and wild magic crackled in the field beyond, but the attackers had fled the grounds.

His master, the great Avenger Immafen, stood beside the shrine’s entrance. His sword was slick with Goblin’s blood, and he breathed heavily.

“Master,” Aeofel said, “what has happened? Why were we attacked?”

There was no war. There was no reason. The school’s wealth lay in the knowledge it gave its students, and its power was in their training. Why would anyone attack? What could they possibly gain?

“They have taken the Crest,” Immafen said.

Aeofel gasped. The Crest of Melora was a powerful artifact.

Hours later, when the few remaining Kobolds and Goblins had been captured or killed, the surviving students and teachers gathered in the school’s arbor, where Lady Caelynna, an ancient Sword Marshall who was the school’s headmaster, spoke.

“We know that this attack was well-planned, and our captives prove it did not originate in the Feywild,” she said, her milky violet eyes shining with righteous fury.

A murmur of concern passed among the students. Entrance to the Feywild from other planes wasn’t impossible, but it was infrequent. Whoever lead the invasion was powerful, indeed.

“We do not know who took the Crest or why,” she said, “but should it fall to disciples of Ocrus, it could provide a disastrous bridge from the Shadowfell - or worse.

“All schools guard and hold a different artifact of great power within their walls. We were charged with protecting the Crest of Melora,” she said, her musical voice darkening, “and our failure has placed all Eladrin at risk.

“Many of you have never left this place, but you are our most powerful warriors. The fate of the Crest, and perhaps the fate of us all, is in your hands. You will gather with your masters, and follow their instructions.”

The arbor remained silent long after she left. Gradually, the gathered students broke and found their masters.

Immafen put his hand on Aeofel’s shoulder. “You will travel to the mortal world, at a crossing in the Winterbole Forest.”

“The mortal world is vast, Master. How will I know where to look?” Aeofel said.

His voice was kind and reassuring. “You are Eladrin, child. When the crest is near, it will call to you.”

Aeofel self-consciously gripped the hilt of his longsword. “What if I do not hear it, Master?”

“You will,” he said. “At the crossing, you must open yourself to Melora’s grace, and allow her to guide you. She will tell you where your quest begins.”

He took Aeofel’s hand, and gave him a small implement fashioned from dark Sennalwood into the shape of a shell. “Take this, and carry your House with you as you travel, my student.”

Aeofel closed his hand over it. “By Melora’s Grace,” he said. 

Immafen gazed, unblinking, upon him, for a long while. “By Melora’s Grace.”

+=+=+

In the Winterbole Forest, far away from any path, there is a clearing among the oldest trees. At the center of this clearing can be found a trio of stones, just taller than a halfling. To those who are unknowing, they are little more than an anomalous monument, perhaps left by forgotten ancients, or deliberately built by mischievous children to confuse those who happen upon them. To those who would use them, though, they mark a fey crossing, one of many points where the boundary between the fey and mortal worlds is thin and passable to those who know the way.

Aeofel Elhromanë appeared in their center, in a crackling flash of azure light. He clutched his chest as a cry escaped his lips. He had never been to the mortal world, and feeling his House, his people, his entire land ripped away from him was a pain almost too great to bear.

“If I do not retrieve the Crest,” he reminded himself, “I will feel nothing but that pain for the rest of my days.”

He reached into his robes. On a strap around his neck, he wore the implement Immafen had given him. He held it now, and spoke softly.

“Meloratoh Ancien Ethlochmir. Fea galena sindath.”

Where there had been silence before, he heard the thundering of a river, and knew that it he would find it, several leagues away, through thick forest that would be unpassable, even to Sylvans. A gust of wind blew into his face, swirling leaves into his long hair, and around his face. A voice heard only by him whispered, “Fallcrest.”

With his free hand, he touched one of the stones. He could see the feywild within, the way a footprint remains on the beach, after the sea has washed over it. 

“I will not fail,” he said. “I will return the Crest, and I will punish those who stole it from us.”

He walked into the forest, and began his journey.

***

Now I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the average gamer to write a fucking novel about their characters like I do, but I love that D&D makes it possible if they want to. D&D is all about engaging your imagination and encouraging you and your friends to build a world and tell a story together. Because I knew exactly where Aeofel came from and why he sought out Acquisitions Incorporated, I knew how he would act in just about every circumstance. I knew why he carried the equipment he carried, why he cared about ridding the world of evil, and why those basic numbers were laid out the way they were.

Here’s a little insight into how I designed him, and why:

All of these stats are at 3rd level, so there’s plenty of room for him to grow and develop as he gains experience. Depending on a whole host of different factors, we may see Aeofel develop a stronger constitution, gain deeper wisdom from his travels, or even become more charismatic as he adjusts to life in the mortal world. As his player, I have some idea of where I’d like him to go, but I prefer to let his actions (via the choices I make during the campaign) shape his destiny. It’s important to me that there is a logic to how he grows, so that he remains a “he” who I genuinely care about, instead of an “it” that’s just a collection of numbers.

It's easy to create a character these days, and much faster than it was when I was a kid, but if you have some time and your imagination is willing, grab some paper and dice, sit on the floor surrounded by your PHB, DMG, and Adventurer's Vault, and take some time to get to know your character while you're creating him or her. Speaking from personal experience, it's well worth the investment.

It was just Wil Wheaton’s imagination, running away with him.

In times like these, you would think that now wouldn't be the best time to try to sell a vintage comic book, especially one as rare as "Action Comics No. 1," the very book that introduced us to everyone's favorite goody-two-shoes, Superman. CNN reports:

Several buyers have already begun to make offers for the book, which is officially listed as being in "fine" condition, including one person who offered his Ferrari as part of a trade.

The book was originally purchased for 35 cents in a secondhand bookstore in the early 1950s, and remained part of a "Aw, Mom, why'd you throw all my comic books into that moldy old basement box?" collection for several years. The owner eventually remembered he owned a piece of American literature history and recovered the book from its basement tomb, and has kept it in storage until today, when online comics retailer ComicConnect.com will officially begin taking bids.

Who knows? Maybe in times like these, with our financial "experts" now in disgrace and their institutions teetering on the edge of oblivion (if not already there), banks are the last place any American wants to put their money –– investing in comics might just be the way to go. Go bust open those piggy banks.

I have a strange fascination with servants. I’m not saying this as a blue-blooded person who thinks that the “help” are quaint. I’m fascinated with them on a level of their potential and their use in fiction.

Butlers, secretaries, assistants, nannies, so many people on the service end of things get no respect but could completely sink the people that they serve, if they chose. They are the pillars upon which the rich and famous rest.

Who does Batman rely on? Not Robin the Boy Hostage; he relies on Alfred Pennyworth, his long-suffering butler. Alfred is not just good at keeping the house, he keeps the secrets, manages the house network, is an accomplished field medic, and, depending on which one of the many plotlines you read, is also good at boxing, swordsmanship, and archery. And he's deft with a shotgun too!

I know CEOs who would be lost without their assistants. These people who do the real work while those on top think the great thoughts and make the big bucks. Assistants and service people are overlooked and underpaid, but man, what potential.

Alfred is probably the most magical for me. His number one job is serving the Wayne family. He wears his suit and is dapper and proper. All about the etiquette, Alfred is never mussed or out of sorts. And still he kicks ass.

When I was writing for the World of Warcraft RPG books I was given a group to flesh out, a group of caretakers who are trained to care for and protect magical weapons. I had so much freaking fun with those guys, giving them combat abilities, trap-making abilities, and repair skills. There was a school they had to attend -- very difficult to be accepted to -- and multiple vows of secrecy to adhere to (on pain of death, natch.)

That was the most fun I’ve ever had writing in an RPG world. Perhaps my love affair with this kind of character has to do with the unexpected. No one pays attention to the janitor or the maid or the receptionist. They’re perfect assassins and spies and bodyguards.

Geeks, forgive me for the next example, but dammit, it fits (despite the weeping pile of bantha-shit that the movie was) but in The Phantom Menace, Padme got a lot more intel from masquerading as a servant than from being all gunked up with LOOK AT ME, I’M A DECOY makeup.

I was talking about butlers with some friends last summer, and just this week one of them sent me this link. Apparently, there is a butler school. It’s an eight week program in The Netherlands. It costs twelve thousand euros but they do point out this covers lodging, food, not to mention your dapper outfit complete with white gloves(!).

The problem is, I’m finding myself obsessed with this idea. I want to apply and go, count it as research, and find out the world of butling from the inside.

Do they have secret training on ass-kicking? Martial arts? I know from my years in kung fu that there’s not much you can learn in two months of training, but maybe it’s extensive -- a morning of etiquette, an afternoon of efficient and effective housekeeping, then four hours of martial arts training. They not only train you to kick ass, but to do so in a way that when you’re done, you don’t have a hair out of place or a rumple in your suit.

The site does have a “specialized training” area, but I couldn’t find “weapons,” “martial arts,” “hidden room architecture,” or “espionage.”

I was somewhat disappointed, I have to say. But maybe they don't advertise that part of the school.

Someone on Twitter told me that as a writer, I should probably just visit the school instead of spending the dough to enroll, but I disagree. Do you really think they’re going to show their secret assassin training area to a writer? I have to get inside, I have to experience it.

Whether I can learn from the inside or not, the service/butler character is a beloved one in my mind. Someone whose job it is to hold shit together is a powerful person indeed and should be trained in more than wine-meal pairings. So if I want to learn more, but don’t want to go to The Netherlands, what can the US offer me? More importantly, what can they offer me nearby?

Most of US etiquette training organizations I came across offer seminars instead of school-based learning, and nearly every one emphasized the value of getting darn kids off our lawns in order to learn some goddamn manners. And a school in South Carolina was a disappointment. Their Butler School's website has pictures of men and women you just KNOW could give Alfred a run for his money, but this page features a nervous guy holding flowers and tugging at his collar. I have no idea what this is trying to tell me.

I find myself wanting to learn more etiquette, as if it would lead me down a path of forbidden and mystical knowledge. Etiquette is so lost on the world, put aside as “stuffy” or “holier than thou,” that it’s becoming somewhat magical. Wow, if that guy knows what fork to eat his salad with, or how to properly mix chemicals to get a stain out of satin, I wonder what ELSE he knows?

Yeah, my imagination is probably making way too much about this, and I doubt I’ll be looking to enroll in butler school any time school. But from now on I’ll be looking at door men, janitors, and concierges with a bit more respect and, yes, wariness.

(Notice I didn’t list butler there -- it’s cause I’m never invited anywhere where a butler works. It might be cause I don’t know any fucking etiquette.)


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.

I divide my time between two towns that I call home, Boston, MA and Charleston, SC. Both towns are near military bases and both, back in the big-haired, leg-warmer-wearing 1980s, sweated in the nuclear crosshairs of the Cold War -- so much so, that Charleston got nuked in a really good and really controversial 1983 made-for-TV flick called Special Bulletin.

In Boston, I sometimes go to this thing called "Heroes" -- a retro 1980s dance night. And in Charleston, I hang out at this karaoke-like scene called "Metal Monday", where you get to belt out '80s crunch rock classics with a live band.

Thing is, to me, a guy who was 20-years old in that most Orwellian of years, 1984, the dance floor of "Heroes" is only akin to the real '80s in the way that the Renaissance Faire is akin to rural France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising. Kinda fun -- but without the Armageddon-y goodness of famine, class warfare and plague. You could say there's a lil' somethin' missing. And much as I love "Metal Monday", I can't help but brainwork how "karaoke" is Japanese for "empty orchestra", and how without a particular bouquet-whiff of immanent doom, "Metal Monday" is discount-chocolate-Easter-Bunny hollow.

We're living in a cultural landscape thicketed with old-growth 1980s, as stubbornly rooted in our minds as the Proustian olfactory memories of the scents of belched up wine coolers, Duran Duran-esque hair mousse, and He-Man and She-Ra Shrinky Dinks contracting in the oven. Beyond things like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", and the fact that a Flock of Fucking Seagulls now get played on "Classic Rock" stations, there's a litany of other examples I can list: washed-up '80s icon Mickey Rourke's defibrillation back to the living as a washed-up '80s icon in The Wrestler; millions of fanboys dampening their shorts with pre-ejaculate for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; new iterations of '80s slasherdom in the form of "re-imaginings" of VHS-era standbys My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th (yeah, Friday the 13th was made in '79, but as a franchise, it's pure '80s); G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra rating a Super Bowl spot for its August release; the looming advent of the alternate reality, atomic panic, superhero '80s epic Watchmen...and, God help the crushed scrotum of our creativity, Beverly Hills Cop IV is in the works.

And the return of one of the most iconic '80s artifacts is about the rain down like fallout. This summer brings Terminator: Salvation, a humongous movie that, due to the twisty knots of time travel, will be a prequel, a sequel, and a reboot of the franchise, and the first flick in a new trilogy starring everyone's fave f-bomb-dropping Welsh wigout master, Christian Bale.

The return of the Terminator gives me comfort in this omigod-fucking-drive-a-stake-through-its-heart-already 1980s resurrection. The Terminator, was a true icon, before it was ripped off by everything from V: The Series to Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah to Wallace and Gromit In A Close Shave to the porn flick The Sperminator. And of course there were those disturbingly fascist animated man/machine hybrids that used to show up during the bumper segments of televised NFL games.

The metal endo-skeletoned man/machine was the embodiment of a specific vintage of berserk, apocalyptic terror that defined the years of the Reagan/Bush Junta. The 1980s, which saw the final frenzy of the Cold War, was a time of doom in which even a benign kiddie movie like The Monster Squad (which gifted us with the knowledge that, indeed, "Wolfman's got nards!") featured the special effects-y end of the world. Doomsday loomed, and the coke-driven, junk-bond-funded bacchanal of doomsday was the cultural engine behind what is now reduced to the '80s kitsch of "Heroes" and "Metal Monday".

James Cameron's 1984 film, The Terminator, is now 25 years old. In turn, it was constructed atop the legacy of films from a quarter century before: 1959's Hiroshima Mon Amour, On the Beach, and the Geiger-clicking radioactive brontosaurus of The Giant Behemoth.

The Terminator is now recognized as a historical artifact. The Library of Congress recently placed it in the National Film Registry, for its being not just "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant, but also a work of "enduring significance to American culture."

Amen to that.

The Terminator is a work of cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance. But more than that, it's an important artifact of a once ubiquitous psychological reality, especially for geezers like me who thought that our beloved, doddering, Teflon-coated Unca Ronnie was gonna get us vaporized.

The inevitability of Apocalypse was a psychological ache that knotted our thoughts into rosaries of angst. In 1983, a girl I knew in my home town of Buffalo, NY lived near a neighborhood that was leveled by a propane explosion. She screamed and panicked when the blast knocked her out of bed because she was sure bombs were dropping. I talked to a bartender who was painting houses one summer near a naval base in Connecticut. The base blared an air raid test without notifying the surrounding community, whereupon this guy, thinking the nukes were flying, looked at the guy on the ladder next to his. They both shrugged and kept on painting, not knowing what else to do, sure that the shadows of their own vaporized forms would soon be on the wall they painted. My high school girlfriend asked me to kill her if the bombs dropped and we were left alive -- melodramatic, I know, but it was...y'know...high school.

No matter what melodramatic form my girlfriend's panic took, this terror was a sane response to a world gone bugshit. Unca Ronnie, early in his Presidency, John Hancock'ed a little goodie called the National Security Decision Document, which shifted the paradigm of nuclear war to something that the US could and should win, rather than it's more pedestrian and sane conception as a "non-survivable event." (*1) Reagan and his boys were talking such crazy cowflop that, if anybody else had said it in public, they'd be shot full of Thorazine and strapped to a gurney with rubber blankets. And these were the guys with their fingers on the button!

How can any sane person deal with a president making the famous joke that Unca Ronnie let fly on August 11, 1984, in front of an open mic, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes," a Dorothy Parker-ish bon mot that put the Soviets on alert?

In 1982, while culturally America was creaming itself over the adorableness of the Christ-like ET, Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberg was talking to Harvard students about the Apocalypse that might bring Christ back to earth. According to the New York Times (*2):

In the fall of 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig said it'd be just a spiffy idea, if things got hot in Europe, to fire a nuclear warning shot at the Soviets if they used conventional forces, as if Ivan would just pack up his toys and shuffle back to Trotskygrad in the face of America's throbbing, uncircumcised atomic dick. But you know, even nuclear warning shots aren't that dire a commitment, as, according to Unca Ronnie, once you launched those nukes, you can recall them, just the way a falconer recalls his noble bird back to his gauntlet. In May of 1982, old "Dutch" said:

These terrors that bubbled in our collective Id attained a kind of Ground Zero in the few days before the release of The Terminator on October 26, 1984, when Reagan was running against Walter Mondale. Reagan was talking craziness about the 'end of the world' that so freaked out a bunch of Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical leaders, that on October 24, they were compelled to sign a document condemning Reagan's use of "nuclear Armageddon" rhetoric as being a "perversion of Holy Scripture and a danger to the security of our Republic." (*3) For their pains, they were heckled at their press conference by a phalanx of smegma brains from the Moral Majority, lead by the Heritage Foundation's Paul Weyrich.

A few days before that, in San Francisco, Mondale called out Unca Ronnie on the insanity of his "you can the recall the nukes" comment, saying (*4):

And just two days before The Terminator hit screens with its premise of uncontrollable mechanized warfare destroying humanity, a bunch of liberal malcontents chanted, "You can't call them back! You can't call them back!" (*5) at a Reagan campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio.

Beyond the psychological and political context in which it was released, The Terminator is an important document in that it makes visible what the Reaganite ideology wanted to keep invisible (and there is a fucked up terror to being forced into invisibility). Maybe just the way European exiles, as outsiders to American culture, could come to the U.S. and create a uniquely American genre about uniquely American outsiders in the form of film noir, it took a Canadian guy like James Cameron to fill The Terminator with the urban diaspora who lived in exile in their own country under Reagan.

The movie gives a glimpse into the urban shitscape that was city living in the 1980s, when, as a punk kid walking home to my shitty apartment, I'd have to pick the glass from broken crack vials the from treads of my Army Surplus combat boots.

Early in the flick, our hero Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), naked after dropping through time from a future dystopia to Unca Ronnie's trash-choked dystopia, steals clothes from one of the homeless that Reagan had cattle prodded into the streets, and for whom Reagan would abdicate any moral responsibility by saying they were homeless by choice.

The movie's cheapness is a virtue, as the location filming, on streets too dirty to be sets, preserves and documents the grime of the era nicely, as does the gloom of the discount store where Reese steals shoes and a coat before going back out into the night where guys who were themselves thrown out like trash push shopping carts to scavenge trash.

Reagan hated cities, populating them in his rhetoric with "welfare queens" as far back as 1976 while speaking in small towns. But even while he slammed cities, as far back as 1974, he presented a neo-platonic ideal of the city as a fucked up kind of political reality, the "Shining City on a Hill." This Puritan jerk-off fantasy seemed to exist as a thing Reagan created specifically so that his suburbanite voting bloc could hate real cities for not living up to that fantasy.

The Terminator, even as a science fiction movie, is a portrait, albeit a stylized one, of the neglected human detritus who could never be part of that City on a Hill. The first person seen in the movie is an African American garbage man working the night shift. Our heroine, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), is a waitress...the very kind of working young person whose nickel-and-dime tips Reagan would tax two years later while Santa Claus-ing tax cuts for the rich in an effort to facilitate trickle down oppression. The secondary characters, from Dick Miller as the gun store owner who gets blown away to the janitor who gets the first computer-generated "Fuck you, asshole!" in the history of cinema, to Paul Winfield as a cop, are too real as city people...they don't belong in Reagan's fairy tale city. They belong in the metropolises Reagan strangled.

The Terminator himself (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the administrator of the eighth largest economy in the world), before he went all candy-ass-"Now-I-know-why-you-cry" in the second flick, brought a small-scale version of Reagan's atomic Book of Revelations/fever vision into the kind of real city that would get blown to shit in the event of a real nuclear war. The iconography of atomic war is the destruction of cities -- from Godzilla to The Day After to the Oscar-winning The War Game to the later Terminator sequels. Fighting the Terminator was akin to fighting for our cities; it was invisible people fighting for the invisible people Reagan forsook.

So, with the prospect of not just a new Terminator sequel coming down the pike, but a new mini-franchise, the question arises, will the 2009 model Terminator bring us a new kind of terror suitable for today, in a world still defined by eight years of Neocon non-reality-based worldview, and thus be a document of our time? Or will it just be a karaoke of the social, political, and psychological forces that a young Canuck named Cameron scab-picked apart a quarter of a century ago? A simulacrum of something dynamic and alive, the way the Terminator himself was a simulacrum of something that lived?

Then again, maybe like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", it could just be fun.


Notes

*1. Further reading: Robert Scheer's book With Enough Shovels: Reagan Bush & Nuclear War, (1983).
*2. Briefing by Phil Gailey & Warren Weaver Jr., The New York Times (Late Edition / East Coast), August 23rd, 1982. Page A-14.
*3. Armageddon View Prompts a Debate by John Herbers, The New York Times, October 24th, 1984. Page A-1.
*4. Mondale Questions Reagan's Ability To Understand Nuclear Arms by Gerald M. Boyd & Jane Perlez, The New York Times, October 16th, 1984. Page A-24.
*5. Reagan At Ohio Rally, Attacks Mondale Anew by Francis X. Clines, The New York Times, October 25th, 1984. Page B-19.
*6. There is no six.

© Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and Public Radio film critic Michael Marano previously wrote "Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President", and has a new fiction collection in the works about the crazy shit he lived through in the 1980s entitled Stories from the Plague Years.

Years ago, I had a conversation with my son about my record collection, and he couldn’t believe that we used to put records in crates that were heavy and bulky, and actually took them with us to parties. I remember holding up my iPod – which was big and bulky by today’s standards – and telling him that I could hold more music in this little thing than I could fit in my entire apartment on vinyl when I was in college. I may as well have told him how great it was that we didn’t have to worry about Indian attacks in our house, he was so unimpressed.

And why would he have been impressed? He’s grown up in The Future. My kids have never seen a floppy disc, heard the sound of a modem connecting, blown into a NES cartridge in the futile hope of making it work, or looked up an address in a Thomas Guide. I have experienced all of these things, and though I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with them in any meaningful way now, unless I want to, it’s odd to me that, at just 36 years-old, I straddle this tremendous and significant technological rubicon, while my children can barely see it in on the distant horizon behind them, as they speed away on their jet packs and rocket bikes. I mean, they hardly remember cassettes, let alone cassingles, and occasionally I will consider this fact and quietly weep for them, alone, while they play Call of Duty against some stranger on the other side of the world in real time.

This memory came to me over the weekend, when I commented on Twitter that I loved side two of Abbey Road. Mentioning “side two” of a record made me realize that my kids have grown up in a world where records are as relevant to them as Kodak Disc cameras…or being afraid of the bubonic plague. If I close my eyes, I can see the apple on Abbey Road’s label spinning on my parents’ turntable, and know that side two begins with "Here Comes The Sun" from personal memory. The only apple my kids will see if they listen to the Beatles now is the one on the front of the computer, and if they didn’t have me holding up my Sansabelt slacks and filling their heads with musical trivia whenever they can’t outrun me, the only way they’d know where side two started was if they visited Wikipedia on a lark. You know, to examine ancient history, for fun.

But, ever mindful of what the world was like when I knew the pops and skips in my records as well as I knew the lyrics, and recalling a time when I listened to them through giant headphones connected to the turntable by a 20 foot long coiled black cord, I’m grateful that the album spins in my memory while a digital copy that will never degrade currently plays in iTunes, streaming wirelessly via Airtunes to a set of small speakers behind me in my office. While I don’t need to look up the track listing on Wikipedia to know how the record was originally heard, having access to the most extensive collection of liner notes in history just a few clicks away makes my inner music geek squeal with excitement, then quickly look around and make sure nobody saw him break his carefully-crafted facade of cool disinterest.

For example:

I’ve been listening to Abbey Road as long as I can remember, and I didn’t know any of that until just a few hours ago. Damn, living in the future is so cool!

Just don’t tell my kids, because they won’t believe you.


Wil Wheaton lives in the future, is from the future, and has come back from the future to warn you about

The biggest story at New York Comic Con turned out not to be. I didn't hear a single fan whining that the headlining guest, J. Michael Straczynski, had pulled out of the convention. JMS recently scored a BAFTA nomination for his work on Changeling, and the award ceremony in London turned out to be the same weekend as the New York con. Looking through the program at all the signings and panels they had scheduled him for, I expected it to be a bigger deal. I guess comics fans were more concerned with the creators who were actually there.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, for example. The 29 year-old artist and writer of the Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels has finally achieved rockstar status, if the lines around the Oni Press booth for his signings were any indication. The New York Times apparently thinks so, too: their Comic Con write-up gave more space to Scott Pilgrim than everything else put together. I picked up the freshly-released fifth volume of the series, and I can tell you that Mal deserves all the praise he's getting. The buzz wasn't just about the book, though: Scott Pilgrim is also soon to be a movie starring Michael Cera and directed by Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead).

For indie creators, getting booth space was a main concern. I heard artists talking about the challenge of landing a spot in Artist Alley, which seemed to have a handful of empty spaces despite rumors of a waiting list to get in. It's easy to feel snubbed when you see empty tables for the taking, and your only option is to shell out a lot of money for a spot in the small press area that you probably won't recoup before the weekend is over.

Some people took to the con floor as nomads, spreading the word about their books on foot. One of them was Brendan McGinley, the dapper, tuxedo-sporting writer of the Image Shadowline webcomic Hannibal Goes to Rome. Although he didn't have a table, Brendan sold a bunch of copies of his humor anthology, DOSE. It's hard to say no to a gregarious, smartly-dressed guy with a money-back guarantee, especially when what he's selling is really freaking funny. By the end of the weekend, no one had asked for their money back.

Everyone at the con also seemed to be watching the Watchmen. I saw maybe a dozen Rorschach cosplayers, and free reprints of the first issue were lying everywhere. All the vendors at the con were pushing the Watchmen graphic novel and various movie companion books. The only book I saw more of was that ubiquitous Obama/Spider-Man crossover. If you don't have it, don't bother. It's not good, but it was selling at anywhere from 4 bucks to 20.

Webcomics were also huge at NYCC. DC's web imprint, ZudaComics, set up shop in a corner of the huge DC booth. Past winners of the Zuda competition, who all have graphic novels coming out soon, rotated through the booth all weekend and drew a good-sized crowd. Dumbrella, home of original webcomics like R. Stevens' Diesel Sweeties and Meredith Gran's Octopus Pie, also had a hobo-themed booth, complete with flaming trashcan. Despite their recession-inspired styling, the Dumbrella guys did seem to be moving a lot of books and tees. Forget the JMS no-show, this is the real biggest story of NYCC '09: keep an eye on web-based comic distribution this year. I have a feeling that the shift to reading even mainstream books online starts now.

President Barack Obama is a nerd. A geek. A dork.

Last March, he said:

Obama fulfilled the fanboy fantasy of flashing Leonard Nimoy the Vulcan salute, and on his now defunct official Senate web page, he posted an image of himself posing with the statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. As a kid, he copied pictures of Spider-Man and Batman out of a friend's comic books and he even uses geek speak while decked out in formalwear.

Obama's such a Spider-Man fandork that Marvel Comics made him a character this month in Amazing Spider-Man # 583. Marvel's Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said:

So, at the dawn of his presidency, SG would like to offer Mr. Obama a few important political lessons that can be learned from the adventures of everyone's favorite wall-crawler.


Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President:


1. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

This is self-explanatory, especially for the guy who's gonna be Commander-in-Chief...and who isn't a knuckle-walking fucktard from Crawford or a bald, pink Yeti from Wyoming who delights in the lubeless fisting of the Constitution.

While this is a lesson Spidey's taught millions of comic book readers, the idea mighta started as a presidential concept before it became as central to Spidey's mythology as the irradiated spider chomp that gave Peter his powers.

Comic book writer Mark Evanier tracked down a slew of antecedents for this idea, not the least of which comes from Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote in 1908:

And Teddy's cousin FDR said in his 1945 State of the Union address that:

FDR also wrote in a speech that he didn't live to deliver that:

And when JFK was President-Elect in January of 1961, he pinched a line from the Gospel of Luke when he said:

As this was just months before Spidey debuted in Amazing Fantasy # 15 (August, 1962), this might have been the kernel of the Spidey concept. In any case, if Spidey can be the means by which this idea swings back into the Oval Office after eight crushingly irresponsible, drunken frat boy-led years, so much the cooler.


2. Conflict Leads to Collateral Damage

The idea of "collateral damage" got staked through the skulls of Spider-Man fans in the early 1970s, in the days when footage of the Vietnam War got shown on the Six O'clock News...just in time for dinner -- or for cocaine and cocktails hour at the Champagne Unit of the Texas Air National Guard.

This was especially the case when elderly hero cop Captain Stacy, father of Peter's girlfriend Gwen, got crushed to death while pushing a toddler out of the way of falling debris knocked over during a fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus (in The Amazing Spider-Man # 90, November, 1970). To a little kid, Captain Stacy's dying in Spider-Man's arms, calling him "Peter" and "Son" ('cuz he knew all along that Peter was Spider-Man!!) and telling him to take care of Gwen after he's gone had the heart-trampling impact of Lear.

And a few years later, when Gwen was knocked off a bridge by the Green Goblin, and Spider-Man caught her with his webbing only to find that the sudden whiplash had broken her neck... "tragic" gave way to "traumatic" (in The Amazing Spider-Man #122, June 1973).

There's still ambiguity over whether the Green Goblin had broken her neck before Gwen fell, or if the shock of the fall had killed her. But the idea that you can kill the person you're trying to save (even before they've had the chance to fulfill their moral obligation to greet you as a liberator) was a heavy one for a kid who'd just laid down 20 cents at the candy store for a quick four-color read.


3. How to Deal with Negative Press

Spidey's gotten some steel-toed scrotum kicks from the press, most especially in the form of rants from the editor of The Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, who also happens to be Peter Parker's boss.

Jameson's said in editorials and public lectures things like the following, from The Amazing Spider-Man #1:

JJJ himself mighta been proud to have come up with the famous, or infamous, insinuation made in the press last June that Obama's fist bumping with his wife Michelle at an event in St. Paul could have been a "terrorist fist jab."

Spidey's strategy for dealing with negative press has been to take it in stride. That is, when he didn't mope about it, and when he didn't famously quit in The Amazing Spider-Man # 50 –– "Spider-Man No More".

Taking bad press in stride the way Spidey (mostly) has works pretty well. Eventually the press comes around. Just look at how Spidey himself is the means by which Obama got the last word in on that fist jab, courtesy of the image above from The Amazing Spider-Man # 583, the special inauguration issue, which has been reprinted in a slew of newspapers over this past month. It's a pretty good re-spin of negative spin.


4. Your Old Mentors Can Be a Liability

Spidey's had a complex relationship with Dr. Curt Connors, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker.

Dr. Connors, who lost his right arm while attending fallen soldiers in a combat zone, treated Peter's Aunt May when she was sickened by a transfusion of Peter's radioactive blood. He helped Spider-Man face down the Rhino by coming up with a chemical agent that dissolved the Rhino's exoskeleton. Peter became Dr. Connor's teaching assistant. And Connors had a heart-to-heart with Spidey about facing down one's inner monsters after curing Spidey of a pesky medical condition -- the growth a few extra arms.

The downside to this relationship is that Connors, due to an effort to regenerate his lost arm, sometimes becomes the scaly supervillain the Lizard.

While Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Wright, has never done anything as bad as the Lizard, his comments donkey punched Obama's campaign and forced Obama to leave Wright's church, giving Atwater-y assholes attack ad ammo in the process.


5. It's Important to Support Public Education

I'll let Spider-Man director Sam Rami make a point for me. While addressing his decision to forgo Spidey's use of artificial web fluid, created by Peter and shot from web shooters of his own design, in favor of the movie's biological webs, Rami said:

But in the comics, a 17-year old science geek from Queens did invent web fluid and web shooters that 3M couldn't. Peter's also returned to his alma mater of Midtown High to teach science. If there are stronger endorsements for the public education, I can't think of it!


6. It's Important to Support Alternative Households

As a teen, the orphaned Peter Parker was raised alone by his (stunningly oblivious) Aunt May upon the death of his Uncle Ben. For years, Aunt May's fragile health was as constant and reliable a plot device ("If she finds out I'm Spider-Man, the shock will kill her!") in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man as Scotty's limp-dicked dilithium crystals were on the original Star Trek.

The importance of supporting alternative households isn't something Obama needed to learn from Spider-Man, as he was partly raised by an older relative, his Grandmother "Toot", Madelyn Payne Dunham, who died just before Election Night. During his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama said:

But the parallels between Peter's and Aunt May's life and Obama's certainly reinforce a sensitivity to the plight(s) of older people and kids living in alternative households, especially when it comes to health care, better than any pie-charted government report could.


7. Your Former Associates Can Be a Liability Too

As of this writing, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been impeached for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat and Blagojevich's choice for that seat, Roland Burris, had a pissing-out-kidney-stones hard time getting his credentials accepted by the Senate.

The tribble-topped Blagojevich's antics aren't as much of a liability as, say, Harry Osborn's getting his lobes scrambled by drugs, finding out his roommate Peter is Spider-Man (the person he blames for the death of his father Norman Osborn, the original Green Goblin), going bugfuck and becoming the new Green Goblin and blowing up the apartment he shares with Peter (seriously hurting Peter's gal Mary Jane in the process). While Blagojevich and Obama were never so close as to be roommates, the fact is, your long-time associates really can "taint" your ass sometimes.


8. Surveillance Issues Are Tricky

The USA PATRIOT Act, data mining, the government giving big bucks to cities and municipalities to set up new hidden camera systems, erosion of the FISA Court's authority... all open cans of legal and ethical worms. Obama told George Stephanopoulos, when referring to the people whose job it is to look over other people's shoulders, that:

Which brings me to another kind of worm, the Mindworm, aka William Turner, a mutant Spidey first encountered when Peter lost the lease to his fleabag apartment and had to crash at Flash Thompson's place on Far Rockaway. The Mindworm was the product of experiments in a government lab, and he spent his life probing his way into people's thoughts and feeding off of their mind's inner workings. William was so dependant on crawling around in people's heads, that when Spidey gave him a blow to the ears and "deafened" him to other people's thoughts, he freaked out because he couldn't stand the solitude of being alone in his own mind. William spent a lot of years on a bad downward slide, and died because he couldn't come to terms with his own constant inability to not intrude on other people's privacy.


9. War Veterans Need To Be Taken Care Of

Peter's nemesis at Midtown High was Eugene "Flash" Thompson, a jock who used to pick on the nerd he dubbed "Puny Parker," ironically, while also being Spider-Man's number one fan.

In the 1970s, Flash's story arc included a tour in Vietnam, with some attendant PTSD that led to Flash becoming an alcoholic.

Last year, Flash quit his job and enlisted in Iraq. Amazing Spider-Man writer Marc Guggenheim told the Los Angeles Times:

Flash's admiration for Spider-Man was such that while fighting in Mosul and with his legs shot to bloody rags, he carried a fellow soldier out of danger rather than be medevac'ed out and get immediate treatment that could have saved his own legs.

Peter stood by Flash when, after his first tour, he suffered the lasting effects of PTSD and alcoholism. Peter later shows support for Flash after he's wounded in Iraq by sending him a CARE package while he's being treated at a base hospital in Germany.

On a larger scale, Obama has pledged to reverse the 2003 legislation which stops modest-income veterans from receiving care from the Veterans' Administration. He's also vowed to establish a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to allowing veteran war heroes to fall into homelessness. He has promised to smooth out the bureaucracy that impedes vets from getting their benefits. So, maybe guys like Flash will get just a bit of their due.


10. It's Important to Support the Development of New Technologies

Technology in Spidey's world goes wonky. Witness the advent of Doctor Octopus and the Sandman. But in the form of John Jameson, the astronaut son of J. Jonah Jameson, we have an old skool "Right Stuff/Roger Ramjet" hero who embodies something Obama thinks has been missing from the American imagination. Last March, Obama said:

So, yeah... even though through scientific mishaps and misadventure, John Jameson wound up fighting Spidey in a special exoskeletal "Jupiter Suit," became the lycanthropic villain Man-Wolf, and morphed into the superbeing known as Stargod (and as an aside, married Bruce Banner's wicked smart and urgently fuckable green-skinned cousin, Jennifer Walters, aka She-Hulk), he, through his place in the Spider-Man mythos, embodies that "can do" NASA mojo, that Obama talks about, and which has given the U.S. a real edge in the world technologically. The fact that Obama plans to create the first Cabinet-level post of Chief Technology Officer hints he's taken that "can do" outlook to heart.




© Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and film critic Michael Marano wrote "Inner Demons, Outer Heroes, Outer Villains: A Look at Monstrosity in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2" for the book Webslinger: SF and Comic Writers on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, edited by Gerry Conway (the writer who killed Gwen Stacy).

Click HERE to purchase a copy of the limited edition Obama/Spider-Man comic, and support the progressive news hounds at BuzzFlash.com (at time of writing they had just 120 copies of the third edition left!).

Long before he was the most dangerously incompetent governor California has ever had, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the biggest action superstar on the planet, and everything he touched turned to box office gold.

Most of my generation first saw him in the title role of 1984’s The Terminator, a movie that was perfectly suited to his, um, acting ability, and (unfortunately for science fiction fans) cemented him in the minds of studio executives as the guy for science fiction movies.

As I observed in Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s:

Sci-Fi/Action is the most common Schwarzenegger hybrid, and he can be found chewing up cigars and scenery in some of the biggest blockbusters of the 80s and 90s.

In true action star fashion, Schwarzenegger totally overwhelms the roles he plays to the point of self-parody in each one. In the 80s, as a science fiction fan, I hated this, but with the benefit of time and the ability to not take these movies so seriously, I can enjoy them for the guilty pleasures that they are.

For this month’s Geek in Review, I reached into the vault, and pulled out a few of the future Governator’s more memorable sci-fi vehicles. To get perspective from the damn kids today, I convinced my 17 year-old son, Nolan, to watch them with me and give me a comment on each one.

The films are presented in chronological order, and are ranked on the McBain scale, which hopefully needs no further explanation.

The Running Man (1987)
In the future, society has collapsed and turned into a police state. The only thing more popular than rioting for food is watching the hit game show The Running Man, where convicted criminals try to escape from a hilarious group of “stalkers” who use the power of ice hockey, chainsaws, and LEDs to catch them. Arnold Schwarzenegger sits at the center of this Venn diagram, and with the help of his friends and a lot of spandex jumpsuits, manages to get the highest ratings ever, and bring down the government. Also, Mick Fleetwood is there.

Awesomely Awesome Because: To the film’s credit, it stops pretending to be something it’s not by the second reel. When Schwarzenegger tells Running Man host Richard Dawson’s Killian, “I’ll be back,” we know exactly what to expect from the rest of the film, and we’re not disappointed. Listening to Schwarzenegger and Maria Conchita Alonso speak heavily-accented dialog, and watching the excess of the late 80s –– on full, unapologetic display –– is unintentionally hilarious. Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Richard Dawson essentially play themselves in unselfconscious, uncomplicated performances that provide the perfect balance to Schwarzenegger’s ludicrous, over the top collection of McBainesque one-liners.

Awesomely Awful Because: The whole thing collapses under the weight of Schwarzenegger’s ludicrous, over the top collection of McBainesque one-liners. It’s like there are two movies struggling to get made here: one is a dark science fiction tale about a police state that abuses the public’s insatiable appetite for violence to maintain its grip on power, and the other is a series of convoluted scenes that exist simply to let Schwarzenegger feed it.

Obligatory Schwarzeneggerisms: Unnecessary biceps flexing? Check. Cigar-chomping? Check. Convoluted display of World’s Strongest Man-like feat of strength: Check. Quoting of The Line from Terminator? Check. Sappy, forced, “I learned something today” moment? Check. Uncomfortable romantic moment with a woman who’s too young for him? Check.

Nolan Says: “This movie needs 33% more skin-tight jumpsuits.”

McBain Ranking: 11 out of 10. (In fact, this may be the film that created McBain.)


Predator (1987)
Hey, did you hear the one about the guy who was dropped into the jungle with a bunch of red shirts and Apollo Creed? You know, the one with the alien and the cool thermal camera vision? Okay, it’s the one where Jesse Ventura has that ridiculous chain gun, and he’s all, “I ain’t got time to bleed!” Yes! That one!

Awesomely Awesome Because: Like The Running Man, once it drops the pretense of being something it’s not, and spends the rest of the film letting Arnold kick ass and struggle to pronounce names, it’s a whole lot of fun. And unlike the other films on this list, Schwarzenegger can’t really overwhelm the role, because he’s pretty much playing his character from Commando. The supporting cast is fine, and the climactic fight with the Predator is awesome.

Awesomely Awful Because: All the dialog in the non-Predator portion of the film is just painful to listen to. The entire MacGuffin about dropping an elite unit of commandos into the jungle who do the CIA’s dirty work –– but are surprised and pissed when they find out they’re doing the CIA’s dirty work –– feels like it was just lifted from another film. And for an elite secret fighting force that gets in and gets out before anyone knows they were there, they sure do make a lot of noise, fire thousands of rounds of ammunition, and never hit anyone. Still: GET TO DA CHOPPA!

Obligatory Schwarzeneggerisms: Unnecessary biceps flexing? Check. Cigar-chomping? Check. Convoluted display of World’s Strongest Man-like feat of strength: Check. Sappy, forced, “I learned something today” moment? Check.

Nolan Says: “It’s so sad that they gave that big guy such a tiny little gun.”

McBain Ranking: 6 out of 10.


Total Recall (1990)
Douglas Quaid is a construction worker with the hottest wife on the planet, who wants to fuck him every time he breathes. Because he is some kind of asshole, this dream life isn’t perfect enough for him, and he constantly fantasizes about living on Mars. His entire household budget goes toward keeping his wife’s hair huge, though, so they can’t afford to take an actual trip. Luckily for him, a company called Rekall can implant vacation memories that anyone can afford, so he visits Mars that way. But just visiting Mars isn’t awesome enough, so he tells Rekall to make him a secret agent, throw in some alien artifacts, and a nefarious plot to destroy the planet. He also wants to nail a girl while he’s there who isn’t nearly as sexy as his wife, and is actually kind of skanky. Seriously. Asshole!

Something goes wrong (or does it?) at Rekall, and Quaid finds out that ... he’s a secret agent on a mission to Mars, where there are lots of alien artifacts and he’s nailing a girl who isn’t nearly as sexy as his wife. Before we’re done, people try to kill him, he uncovers a nefarious plot, saves the world, and gets the girl –– who isn’t as sexy as his wife. We’re not sure if he’s dreamed the whole thing, but one thing is crystal clear: this guy is an asshole.

Awesomely Awesome Because: Throughout the whole film, we’re left to wonder if the whole thing is a dream or not, and there are an equal number of clues to support both conclusions. Anchored by reliable science fiction villains Ronny Cox (Robocop) and Michael Ironside (Scanners) it’s a great 70s-style science fiction thriller, right up until the third act, when the whole thing falls apart and becomes an intelligence-insulting action movie with science so bad, it couldn’t even fool George W. Bush. If you’re hoping for a faithful adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s classic We Can Remember it for You Wholesale –– as I was in 1990 –– you’re going to be profoundly disappointed. But if you’re willing to suspend all of your disbelief, you’ll be glad you got your ass to Mars.

Awesomely Awful Because: It won an academy award for its visual effects, but the miniatures, blue screens, and foam rubber puppets do not age (or convert to DVD) well. However, they’re not nearly as bad or distracting as the terrible atmospheric pseudoscience at the end of the film, or the 35 minutes of mind-numbing gun battles and action movie idiocy that precede it.

Obligatory Schwarzeneggerisms: Unnecessary biceps flexing? Check. Convoluted display of World’s Strongest Man-like feat of strength: Check. Uncomfortable romantic moment with a woman who’s too young for him? You know that’s going to be a nice big check.

Nolan says: “That blond girl was kind of hot, but I’m really disappointed he didn’t have a single cigar.”

McBain Ranking: 2 out of 10.


The 6th Day (2000)
Adam Gibson, a mild-mannered helicopter pilot and dedicated family man who has recently gotten a face lift, has been cloned without his knowledge. As if watching his clone smoke his cigars and bang his wife isn’t bad enough, a whole bunch of other clones are trying to kill him. Also, there are clones.

Awesomely Awesome Because: The science fiction is great, the art direction is ultra cool, and who doesn’t want to live in this future of virtual girlfriends, remote controlled helicopters, cloned pets, and an XFL that lasted more than one season? The supporting performances from Robert Duvall, Michael Rapapport, and especially Tony Goldwin are just outstanding.

Awesomely Awful Because: While there aren’t as many product placements as Demolition Man, the few we see are as obvious and distracting as those in Ghost Dad, but that’s not the worst of it. The 6th Day had the potential to be a science fiction classic; it deals with some very serious ethical questions about how far we’ll go to cure diseases, the rights of cloned humans, and what it even means to be human. But even with its great supporting cast, and solid, smart writing, it can’t achieve escape velocity from Schwarzenegger’s limited acting abilities and obligatory Schwarzeneggerisms. In fact, of all the roles he overwhelms in sci-fi movies, this is probably the most egregious example. Adam Gibson is supposed to be a talented but mild mannered helicopter pilot who loves his family, and still holds on to the good old days when clones only existed in bad movies. But by the end of the first act, Schwarzenegger has turned him into a gun-toting psychopath who doesn’t think twice about killing anyone who gets in his way, and actually seems to enjoy it. And it’s simply unforgivable that we had an opportunity to finally watch him fight himself, but the whole thing ended after just one punch.

Obligatory Schwarzeneggerisms: Unnecessary biceps flexing? Check. Cigar-chomping? Check. Quoting of The Line from Terminator? Check. Sappy, forced, “I learned something today” moment? Check. Uncomfortable romantic moment with a woman who’s too young for him? Check and mate.

Nolan Says: “I’ve actually seen this before. It does not improve upon a second viewing.”

McBain Ranking: 4.5 out of 10.


Some of you may be wondering why Terminator 2 isn't on this list. Well, the truth is, I love Terminator 2, and I don't feel guilty about it at all.

Wil Wheaton will be back.

I have come across many Top 10 lists predicting what is going to happen in 2009. Top 10 Celebrity Marriages, Top 10 Videos That Changed the Music World, Top 10 Artists, and so on.

While these are fun to read, they are rather boring to me as a geek with a somewhat darker outlook on life. So, I have decided to do my own Top 10 prediction list.

Top-10 Ways Life As We Know it Will End in 2009

Listed below are 10 ways out of many, many conspiracy-like theories on how life as we know it will come to an end. I picked out the ones that appealed to me the most, so let's get started!

#10: Grey Goo

If you are a Trekkie there is no way you can forget the original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." Captain Kirk and crew get a distress call from a deep space station that has been over run with Tribbles that replicate and wipe out the space station.

Grey goo runs on that same theory, only instead of Tribbles the grey goo is self-replicating nano-robots that consume the entire planet, and eventually the universe. The only thing left behind will be enormous amounts of nano-robots.

Pros: Kick-ass tiny robots.

Cons: We all die.

#9: Gamma Rays

No, not gramma-rays, gamma rays. A gamma ray burst has the potential to cause mass extinction on our planet.

Let me introduce you to a star named WR 104. This star is nearing it's supernova, which means it's going to blow up real good.

When this happens, WR 104 is lined up perfectly with the Earth to blast it with gamma rays.

Gamma rays can do things like alter DNA, and are highly radioactive. Nuclear blasts usually contain gamma rays and are one of the big reasons nuclear testing in the Earth's atmosphere was halted.

Everything on the planet would be doused with radiation. This could alter or eliminate the lower end of the food chain, in turn affecting the higher end of the food chain. Not to mention all the kick-ass side effects of radiation poisoning like vomiting, internal bleeding, organ failure and radiation sores!

Pros: HULK SMASH!

Cons: We all die.

#8: The Earth Spins Off its Axis

The Earth spins at approximately 1,000 miles per hour and is on a path known as an axis around the sun.

Short story: Meteor impact or very large earthquake throws the Earth off it's axis. Axis changes from going around the sun, to heading into the sun.

Pros: It only takes you minutes to get a tan.

Cons: We all die.

#7: Alien Invasion

We have all seen the alien invasion scenario. Be it parasitic aliens, demonic aliens, or "little green men", this more than likely won't end well.

From all the conspiracy theories that I have read online, aliens more than likely aren't going to be friendly. They may be at first, just to gain our trust, but eventually they will turn on us, and wipe out humanity as we know it, maybe even consuming all the resources on the Earth.

Cue Alien-Human war. Unfortunately we don't have anyone like Will Smith to protect us and the aliens win.

Pros: Finally, proof that life on other planets exists.

Cons: We all die.

#6: Killer Robots

I, Robot, anyone?

We design, create and manufacture them, only for their Artificial intelligence to realize that human intelligence is completely illogical and they turn on us.

Cue Alien Robot-Human war. Unfortunately we don't have anyone like Will Smith to protect us and the aliens robots win.

Pros: Robots to do my bidding (at least for a bit).

Cons: We all die.

#5: The Worldwide Obesity Epidemic

It actually is an epidemic. Obesity is affecting the world in big ways.

How many double cheeseburgers did you hork down while playing World of Warcraft for 24 hours straight?

This one isn't very geeky. But still, sitting here at my computer working or playing for hours straight does very little to burn off calories. The computer is by far the most used technological advancement of the century.

This one might not actually kill off the entire human race, since there are actually those healthy people that go to that place called "outside" every once in a while.

Pros: My WoW Guild is globally ranked!

Cons: We all die.

#4: Black Hole

Who can forget the The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland?

The easiest way to describe what scientists are doing with this is, they are trying to replicate the Big Bang Theory.

Basically, scientists are slamming shit smaller than we can see with the naked eye, together at 99.999999% of the speed of light to see what happens.

Some theorists are saying that this is going to cause black holes that will grow larger and eventually swallow the Earth.

My theory...shit will slam together, scientists will rejoice, a super long report will be written and it will bore me to sleep.

Pros: The light show just before entering the black hole.

Cons: We all die.

#3: The Sun Will Swallow the Earth

Don't forget Earth's sun is just a star. Eventually all stars expand and explode.

The Sun's temperature is approximately 5778 Kelvins. In non-geek terms that translates to frickin' hot!

Like mentioned above, the Sun will eventually become a supernova. Before it does though, it will expand and consume the Earth. The core of the Sun will collapse and the temperature will increase, like we're all living in Hell, just hotter. The sun will expand, eventually consuming the sky as our oceans boil and evaporate. Don't worry, by this point we will have all been vaporized by the heat. We won't even get to see the pretty explosion.

Some oddball theorists say it's going to happen soon. Two other theorists broke out their calculators and say we still have 7.6 billion years before we have to worry about it.

Pros: No more snow in Ohio! Hooray!

Cons: We all Die.

#2: Megatsunami

Not just a regular old tsunami, a freakin' megatsunami. It is also known as an iminami, which translates to "purification wave".

We are talking a wave that thousands of feet tall consuming everything in its path. Theorists predict that no one would be safe.

The megatsunami would be caused by a meteor impact, super-volcano or enormous land slide. If it hit the Atlantic, it would send a wave so large that it would travel 20 miles inland in the continental United States. The Great Lakes would swell causing mass flooding in the Midwest. Florida would disappear entirely.

The surge of the wave pulling back would create just as much destruction, restructuring North America. Not even Canada's safe!

After the waters receded we would be dealing with mass amounts of death, diseases that we once had control of will make a come-back, a lack of fresh water and numerous other problems that could kill off the entire human race.

Pros: Re-enacting the end scene from Point Break.

Cons: We all die.

and finally.....

#1: Zombie Apocalypse

You all laugh, it only takes one zombie for it to start. It could be the living dead, a rage zombie (think 28 Days Later) or a T-virus zombie. The point is, they are all zombies.

Not only that, the human race as a whole is too sympathetic to fight off zombies. There are too many people that couldn't kill zombified friends and relatives out of sympathy, sadness or shock. Some weak soul out there won't kill a zombie because it was their Nana at one point. leaving Zombie Nana to bite down and continues the spread of zombism.

This is just a warning to everyone to everyone on my Friend's List. We are friends, but if you're a zombie, i am going to bludgeon you or shoot you until you stop moving and are dead. You get no sympathy from me.

Without people (well, live people) to run things like electric grids, water plants and other such necessities, the populace will need to learn to survive on its own. Zombies will eventually start feeding on animals and most food will become inedible to humans. We'll eventually run out of viable food sources, unable to fight off the zombies due to malnutrition.

I just can't see the zombie apocalypse ending in our favor.

Pros: I get to live out my dreams of fighting off zombies.

Cons: We all die.

So there it is, my predictions on how life as we know it will end in 2009. If you have any other ones that you think should be mentioned, feel free to add them!

DevilsReject is well prepared for the Zombie Apacolypse, and wouldn't think twice about popping a cap in Zombie Nana's ass.

I admit it. I love my Amazon Kindle.

Yes, I'm anti-DRM and I've never been interested in ebooks before. I used the argument of wanting to enjoy books -- you know, books. Those things you can take into the tub or dog-ear or hand to a good friend and not be too broken-hearted if you don't get it back because you're only out five to ten bucks.

I once got in trouble with my mother for bringing too many books on vacation. I'd filled a garbage bag full of paperbacks. If I'm caught waiting somewhere without a book, I feel naked and bored. I love books.

So when I got the Kindle as an unexpected birthday present, I didn't know what to think. I tried it out and it turns out I loved it. I won't go into all the awesomeness about it, (you can read reviews here and here), as this is not a Kindle review. This is an article talking about a very unexpected problem with the Kindle.

"Ooo, you got a Kindle? Can I see it?" people ask. And I balk. You see, in my house, we have different book shelves. We try to keep the scifi together. The mystery, the horror, nonfiction, reference, graphic novels, collectibles... each genre is roughly segregated. If you were to stroll around our house looking at our books, you would see what we chose for you to see.

And because it's not really kosher to stroll around the more private areas of people's houses to look at their books, you won't see what we don't want you to see.

Yes. I like porn. Pr0n. Erotica.

I loves me a good fuck book.

Now, I'm betting most of you aren't gasping. I write for SuicideGirls, and you're reading SuicideGirls. That's why I feel comfortable telling just you. The others, they may not understand.

My daughter's best friend's father, for instance. He may not understand. But he wanted to see my Kindle too. Which means he could see all the books I have on my Kindle. I specifically showed him the ability to go to the Amazon store...which then showed him my recommendations based on what I'd purchased.

"We're recommending THIS dirty book for you because you liked THAT dirty book!"

Oops.

If you look on my device, you can see my monthly Kindle subscription to Asimov's. You can see I just bought Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I am reading several books by one of my heroes, Lawrence Lessig. I'm doing research into PG Wodehouse, who was a major influence of Connie Willis, who has in turn been a huge influence of me. I have a book on quilting, in case I want to pick up that hobby. (Yeah, I read fuck books and I do crafts. I have layers.) I have books to help research my latest novel, and I have the latest novel itself in doc form.

I have John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Haruki Murakami on my Kindle. I have friends' novels on my Kindle to review and give them comments.

And yes. I have some dirty books.

If you are eager to see my new Kindle, you will learn things about me that I may not want you to know. Like I'm a fan of anthologies edited by Alison Tyler. And I like Christmas erotica.

Heck, if you know the Kindle's interface you can figure out how far along I am in my books just by glancing at my book shelf. Then you might find the embarrassing fact that I just might be farther along in some pr0n than I am in Lessig's works.

One blessing is that you can manually delete things from the Kindle, which is what I did before I showed it off to some family this past holiday season. Of course, from what I can tell, if the Kindle has room for it, it will automatically download the books you've purchased from Amazon but it doesn't detect on the Kindle anymore. I can't figure out how to stop that besides turning off the WiFi.

The thought of deleting all my erotica every time someone wants to see my Kindle seems clumsy and silly. And honestly more work than I'm willing to do. Also, it would seem awkward if I struggle with the UI every time someone just wants to see a toy that logically you should just hand over.

Should I own my interest in the books where the secretary is tied up as a Christmas present for her boss? Should I confidently hand over the Kindle when someone asks, with a, "you asked for it!" look on my face? Or should I continue to pretend to be a productive member of Puritan society? No sex books for me, thanks. Not on my shiny, ironically pure white ebook reader.

Or I could just stop reading erotica.

Naaaaaah...


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.

Last week, I spent an entire day playing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition with some of my friends. Big whoop, you say. So did I. Ah, but I played in Seattle. With Gabe and Tycho from Penny-Arcade. And Scott Kurtz from PVP. And, to really twist the +3 dagger in your back, our DM was Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast, who made an adventure specifically for us to play. For the crushed peanuts and maraschino cherry topping on this sundae of HAWESOME, I got to play a class from the unreleased Player's Handbook 2. We recorded the entire session for a podcast, which will be released early next year.

Did I mention this class is unreleased? Because it was. I played a class that you haven't seen yet. I just want to make sure I get full bragging mileage out of this. I posted a little bit about it on my blog and Twitter (I can't go into specifics, for obvious reasons *cough* awesome unreleased class *cough*). I should not have been surprised (but I was) to find out that a lot of people seem to want to know what I think of D&D Fourth Edition.

If you're not a serious tabletop gamer, you may be surprised to learn that this version of D&D was extremely controversial in the gaming community. Mr. Peabody, fire up the Wayback Machine . . .

In August of 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were updating Dungeons & Dragons to a new, fourth edition. I was mostly happy with the current edition, but I was cautiously optimistic. "Maybe they've absorbed a lot of feedback from gamers who played 3.0 and 3.5, and they're cleaning things up accordingly," I thought. (Yes, there really was a third-and-a-half edition. That's a topic for another column, ideally written by someone else.)

By October of 2007, I had heard a lot of crazy talk. Nothing was sacred, they were saying. Magic Missile was going to require a to-hit roll and there would be some kind of dragon character race. As I absorbed each bit of new, my condition was downgraded, from cautiously optimistic to increasingly wary. "Nothing is sacred? Dragons are for killing, not for playing! What next, are they going to replace the swords with walkie-talkies?" There was a definite "WTF? Han shot second?!?" vibe in the community. Gamers, like hardcore SF geeks, tend to fear change. Especially change which we determine, sight unseen, to be stupid.

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about Fourth Edition until May, when I got a copy of The Keep on the Shadowfell, a first-level adventure with some pre-made characters and simplified rules, designed to be a teaser before the core rule books went on sale in June. I paged through it with as open a mind as I could muster, and though I saw that the rumors about Magic Missile and Dragonborn were true, I liked pretty much everything else I saw. In fact, it looked like it could be a lot of fun, and it reminded me more of the streamlined Red Box "Basic D&D" system I played when I was a kid than of the math-heavy, table-laden version of AD&D I traded for GURPS when I was a teenager.

I lucked into a set of core rule books a week before they were officially released. My world came to a complete halt while I devoured them. I'll eventually give each one its own review, but the short version is: The Fourth Ed Dungeon Master's Guide is the book I've wanted to read since I was 12. Everything you want to know about running a game Ñ and having fun doing it Ñ is in this book. I have a ton of experience playing D&D, but very little experience running games. I still wear a scarlet letter for several total party kills when I was a kid; this book gave me the confidence and guidance to sit behind the DM screen again. The Player's Handbook has a terrible index, and they made the mistake of telling us early on that something does "1[W] + Wis" damage without telling us what [W] is until the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT: it's weapon damage, like 1d8 or 1d12 or 2d4+6. Also, the monsters are calling from inside the castle!), but other than that, it gives you everything you need to create and outfit a character. The Monster Manual is full of Monsters. 'Nuff said.

I didn't actually get to play a game (stupid real life responsibilities) until last week, but reading the 4E core rule books inspired me to get all of my D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, GURPS, True20, Mutants & Masterminds, and World of Darkness books out and remember exactly why I started playing these games in the first place. I didn't have to look very long; it was printed right inside the cover of the Player's Manual in my very first Basic Rules Set (the red box that served as my introduction to the system). "This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine." You'll notice that it does not say, "This is a game that helps you feel superior to other people because you can calculate THAC0 in your head before the dice stop rolling," or "This game is deliberately designed to exclude anyone who doesn't have a degree in higher mathematics." When I played Fourth Edition, it was like they'd taken everything I didn't like about D&D, everything that had made it overly complicated and cumbersome, and thrown it all away. All that was left was the best lessons taken from 3.0, and the philosophy that made basic D&D so much fun in the first place.

So now you know where I'm coming from, but I need to add one disclaimer before I describe my impressions of 4E: I've only played once. It was for 10 hours, and it was with people I really, really like, but it was just one adventure. Having said that, however, what I experienced fulfilled and even surpassed the expectations I had after reading the core rules, a couple of adventure modules, and talking to people who play 4E in their weekly game. In the briefest of terms, it was hella fun.

How does it play? I think the best way I can describe it is: simply, without being simplistic. Gamers who play an RPG have to decide for themselves why they're setting aside the time and making the effort to get together. Almost every time, whether people have fun comes down to the DM and the players. It took me years of gaming, and no small amount of frustration, to conclude that a system's rules should provide a structure and some basic expectations for the game, but that a campaign or adventure is more fun when it's supported by the rules, instead of being defined by them. (Caveat: No game is suitable for everyone. If you can't stand horror movies, you won't have a good time playing World of Darkness, no matter how much you like the system and your fellow players. Further caveat: There are some badly designed games out there. I'm not talking about games with design decisions you disagree with; I'm talking about games with contradictory rules, broken cross-references, poor or no indexing, and probably little to no playtesting.)

My 4E experience started with character creation, which I did sitting on the floor of my office with pencils and paper, the Player's Handbook, and the Adventurer's Vault. I know there are online tools available to do it all for you, but I couldn't bring myself to use them; I'm an original analog gamer, man, that's just how I roll. (4d6 and drop the lowest FTW.) It took awhile because while I had read the books, I had never tried to use them, and there was some page-flipping while I wrapped my brain around the system. However, and this is crucial, I never got frustrated or felt bored. The process took some time because I had a learning curve and because there are several decisions to make, not because I was confused or because the rules were disorganized.

Now, to address some of the things I worried about before I played 4E. I keep hearing people complain that 4E is just WoW on the tabletop. Quite tellingly, I haven't heard this from anyone who has actually played 4E, but I understand the concern, especially if you're only looking at the combat rules in the store and listening to people complain on the Internets. Many of us have a lot invested in our 3.0 and 3.5 books, and may not want to take a chance on something that's going to be just like a damn video game. Aren't we playing this to get away from video games? I haven't played WoW and don't really care to, but if Blizzard's combat system is this fast and easy to understand, and this much fun, I can see the appeal. Every player got to do something important to help the party, and all of us contributed to each challenge, whether it was solving a puzzle, disarming a trap, or actually fighting lots of monsters.

(Speaking of WoW, I wonder if WoW is, for some gamers, "the other woman," threatening to split the party with a siren's call that's taking potential players out of our world and never giving them back...could that be why so many hobby gamers hate it so much? And if so, wouldn't it make more sense to hate on CCGs, which sucked away RPG players ten years before anyone knew what Warcraft was? Hey, as long as I'm kicking over anthills today, I'm going to make sure I stomp on as many as I can.)

You may have heard that player characters are much stronger at lower levels and that it's harder to die than it used to be. That's true. I can only speak for myself, but I don't see the problem. I like that my character isn't going to die from one encounter at first level. I like that I can use cool powers and feats and feel heroic right out of the gate, instead of slogging through several rooms of kobolds or skeletons, with numerous breaks to rest and heal between each encounter.

Speaking of healing, player characters get to use a certain number of healing "surges" each day, sort of like guzzling down an energy drink when you're pulling an all-nighter and start to flag. This does indeed fundamentally change the game I grew up playing, but I can't believe I ever campaigned without it. I don't want to keep going back to town whenever I have a tough fight. I want to keep exploring the world and meeting new NPCs. I want a trip back to town to really mean something, either that we've made some major progress in the campaign and have something to report, or we barely escaped a Gelatinous Cube and had to follow Sir Robin all the way back to Winterhaven, eating his minstrels on the way. (Yaaaaay.)

I'm not going to attack people who can't stand 4E the same way I've seen some anti-4E people attack others for liking it, because that just reminds me of watching two guys with ponytails argue about which Linux distribution is better while they ignore the stripper grinding on the rail right next to them. (She's working really hard for those singles, guys. Show some respect.) I will say to the 4E haters, though, that Hasbro's idiotic handling of third-party 4E support (also a topic deserving its own column) has effectively alienated a huge portion of the indie publishing world, and there's going to be plenty of 3.5 support out there for a very long time. Paizo's Pathfinder and Green Ronin's True20 seem to make a lot of people very happy, too, and there are a ton of other systems out there, so it shouldn't be too hard to find something that fits your game and your circle of friends.

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for 2d12 years. I remember when magic-users couldn't wear armor, when edged weapons didn't hurt skeletons, and even when an elf was a class. I have more polyhedral dice than [SOMETHING NORMAL PEOPLE HAVE A LOT OF]. I routinely tell my wife and friends that I have to "save vs. shiny" when I go to my friendly local game shop, and I didn't realize that graph paper existed for a purpose other than making dungeons until I'd been in high school geometry for a semester...and even then, I remained skeptical.

Few things in the world make me as happy as gaming, and I have two shelves of RPG books to prove it. I have a lot invested in those books, not just money, either, but time and memories. Each time I hear that one of the systems I care about is in danger of getting the Jar-Jar business, I have to save vs. kill crush destroy. At substantial minuses. If you'd told me six months ago that I'd be sitting here today writing about how much I love D&D Fourth Edition, I would have laughed in your face and called you a silly person. It is almost certain that I would have taunted you a second time, called your parentage into question, farted in your general direction, and observed that you were best suited for a career in empty animal food trough wiping.

Yet here I am, anxious to go pick up my Fourth Edition Manual of the Planes, and counting down the days until Winter Break so I can take my kids and some of their friends to the Keep on the Shadowfell, where I will get to play Kalarel himself, and try really hard not to kill them all in their first few encounters. Remember, it doesn't matter what edition of what game you're playing ... a system is only as good as its DM and its players.

Wil Wheaton rolled a critical failure vs. make deadline this week. Sorry, Nicole!

This time of year, if you're in the western world, you're gonna see a certain red dressed someone hanging around the malls getting his photo taken with children and pets, or maybe outside grocery stores ringing a bell. But you don't often see this jolly fellow hanging around bars and strips clubs — unless you happen across Santacon.

Santacon is the pranksters response to Christmas, with a focus on lighthearted jolly obnoxiousness. It's been happening in various cities around the globe since the Cacophony Society first stepped out en mass in 1994. This past weekend, I joined the red tide in Los Angeles, where Santas met up in Echo Park on a beautiful Saturday morning. It was a picturesque day — typical Los Angeles, 70 degrees and balmy with a breeze — did I mention it was December? A wedding party was taking advantage of the weather, having their wedding photos taken in the park as the Santacon Santas gathered. Next thing we knew, Santas, tuxes and a turquoise wedding party were mugging for a sea of cameras. Who could pass up a photo op with 300 Santas?

Then the Midnight Ridazz, a cacophonous bicycle gang known for their late night bicycle rides, arrived in the park singing bawdy carols from megaphones on a myriad of tall bikes, tandems and variously altered street bikes. A few moments later 300 Santas marched around the lake and got into five school busses — their destination was unknown.

The secrecy of the route is a tradition. It goes back to the original Atomic Cafes from early San Francisco Cacophony days, where a group of 30 to 50 participants would pile into the back of a panel truck to be dropped off at secret undisclosed (and often abandoned urban building) location. Part of the fun is not knowing where you're going, what might happen, and the element of surprise for both participants and the locals.

Santa's first stop was Sunset Junction, where we took over a liquor store and stopped traffic — while drivers and locals honked and hollered. The motley assemblage of Santas eventually ended up at two local bars: the Moroccan styled 4100 Club and El Cid.

A packed bar takes on an entire new meaning when it's packed with Santas. At some point in Silverlake, a car full of clowns in full fluorescent make-up with protest signs bearing messages such as "Fuck Santa!", "Make Joy, Not Toys", and "Santa's Conform (boring)" showed up to give Santa a hard time, although there was supposedly a Santa/clown truce back in 2002.

Once the Santas were sufficiently jolly, a sleigh full of snow appeared just as L.A. gave us one of those typical sunsets and the sky was filled with white balls. It was Santa vs. Santa's Elf and Clown vs. Santa. Every Santa for himself. Complete snowball mayhem.

Next, Santas ran for the buses — it was time for our next stop — Hollywood. Make this picture in your mind's eye: five busses with waving Santa hands and arms surrounded by 50 bicyclists in a variety of holiday attire driving up Sunset Boulevard. You won't see that picture in a movie. That's real life.

Santa arrived at Hollywood & Highland just in time for the tree lighting ceremony. The local security was not particularly welcoming to the Santa massive, so many hung out on the sidewalk with the superheroes, singing carols and dancing with the musicians.

This is where this Santa's memory starts to fade and unravel. Six hours of drinking had taken a toll on my reality and there was a sea of red as I walked down Hollywood Blvd. to the next rendezvous point. I know we stopped by Jumbo's Clown Room (strip clubs are a Santacon tradition) but I can't remember the spectacle of the strip club crammed with cheap merrymakers drinking from their own flasks. I made it to the afterparty at BootieLA — which I heard looked like a rave of Santas. And I found myself the next morning wrapped in my red Santa suit, covered with bruises. Yup, It was your typical Santacon.

Santa's Favorite Naughty Carols

* Deck my Balls
* Walking Round in Women's Underwear
* Sinful Wonderland
* Oh Horny Night
* Come All Ye Faithless

Images courtesy of Ilainie, Creative Commons licensed.

Heathervescent is a writer, technology consultant and agent of
cacophony. You can read more of her adventures at: www.heathervescent.com.

This week the world of science fiction lost three of its greats.

On December 4th Forrest J. Ackerman, founder and first publisher of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland passed away in his home in Horrorwood, Karloffornia. He was 92. Ackerman, who coined the term sci fi was an inspiration to nearly everyone who ever made a science fiction or horror film, wrote a sci-fi or horror novel or who was just a fan of the fearsome and fanged. Uncle Forry, as he was known to his fans, discovered such science fiction luminaries as authors Ray Bradbury and A.E. van Vogt, and acted as their literary agent. He was a renowned collector of science fiction and horror film memorabilia and generously opened his home, the Ackermansion, to fans who wanted to see his collection.

The following day, December 5th, the world lost Beverly Garland. A versatile actress, Garland had roles in numerous films and TV shows from her debut in 1950 up until 1998. Many will recall her recurring roles in the TV shows My Three Sons and Gunsmoke, although, to me, she will always be the one person who stood up to the horrifying Venusian walking cucumber in Roger Corman's cult classic It Conquered the World. Garland died in her Hollywood Hills home aged 82.



On November 30th, Koichi Takano passed away in his home in Tokyo, Japan. Although Takano's name isn't nearly as well-known as either Ackerman's or Garland's, to me his loss is much more personal. He used to be my boss. Takano was a special effects director who was initially hired in the 1950's by Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects director of the classic Godzilla films. After Takano had worked in the background on a number of Godzilla pictures, Tsuburaya hand-picked him to direct the effects for his groundbreaking television series Ultraman. Takano continued to direct special effects for hundreds of science fiction and superhero television shows and theatrical films until complications from emphysema forced him to retire five years ago. Although no longer active as a special effects director, Takano continued to appear in numerous documentaries and making-of TV shows and specials to talk about his legendary contributions to the field. Some in this country have derided his work as cheesy — his preferred method for depicting a city-smashing monster was to put a stuntman into a rubber dinosaur costume and have him thrash through a miniature replica of Tokyo. But I challenge anyone to find examples of special effects work done in the US on a similar budget and time frame that is anywhere near as meticulous, detailed and fun to watch as what Takano accomplished.

All three of these legends will be missed.

When my husband and I went house shopping for the first time we weren't sure what we were looking for. We found one house that I really liked, only the bedroom was — pink. Lord, it was pink. Pink walls, pink carpet, pink bedsheets (yes, the previous owners would be taking those with them, but it did nothing to make the room look better). It was like a horde of five-year-olds had vomited cotton candy everywhere. It was pink.

When I visibly recoiled, the real estate agent reminded me gently that these were cosmetic issues and could be fixed a lot easier than most. Still, I couldn't picture anything beyond the pink room and we passed on the house to eventually buy a nice place with eggshell-neutral walls.

For a little while there, my husband and I researched what different enhancements to our house we would want to make (new kitchen, a deck, etc.), and what it would do the future value of the house. Thinking like that flat out depressed me, frankly. I realized we were acting like we were just holding the house until the real owners come along. "We don't want to make it so that the Joneses don't like it when they move in."

In our increasingly disposable and digital world, the concept of "ownership" is becoming more and more of a debated term. And I'm not saying do we "own" our house when we still owe the bank a bucket of money - I'm saying do we PWN the house enough to feel confident painting a mural of the mystical city of R'lyeh, where the god Cthulhu sleeps, in our basement?

We live in a suburb. Our house plan is much like others in the neighborhood. We have to clear new paint colors, landscaping, and other external changes and improvements with the neighborhood association. But there are no rules governing what goes on inside the house - beyond, you know, having a business running drugs or prostitutes that have cars on the street day and night. Think of the children! The curious thing is, can we shrug off the "Oh no! What will it do to the resale value if we do X?" feeling in order to escape suburban malaise?

The funny thing is, the only thing stopping us is the thought of a young couple much like ourselves ten years ago, looking at the perfectly fine, not-easily-flooded, spacious basement, seeing Cthulhu, and running. They may not think the secret room that I really want to build as a cool thing but rather, "What the heck would I do with this? I certainly don't have enough books for a library, and it's not big enough to turn into another bedroom."

We've owned this place for ten years and managed to paint four of the rooms. Most of the walls are still eggshell, the rooms are still not-secret, and the books are everywhere, not all gathered into one cozy library. It's a standard, American, family suburban home.

Essentially, the house isn't geeky enough. See? I did it right there. Didn't even call it our house. It's the house. We don't want to own our house. We want to PWN it.

We're not completely Stepford. We have professional paintings of zombies, the Onion Head Monster and little beasts luring people to their deaths with free pie. We have statues of Cthulhu, Death and The Sandman. But this is not subversive enough. We must go farther.

During a recent dinner, where a full bottle of wine split between the two of us did much to lube the conversation, we decided what we wanted to do with the house. Our house. We decided right away that a moat was out. Although our neighborhood covenants don't specifically say "no moats" I'm sure they'd get us on a technicality, on digging, or landscape changes, or something. So no moat.

The next thought was a secret room. We talked about where we'd put it (No I'm not telling you, then it's not a SECRET), what we'd put in it (probably a secret library - or torture chamber), and how we'd hide it. The last part was tricky, because do you use a bookshelf to hide a library? What do you put on that bookshelf? Books you don't care about? Books that are uninteresting because you don't want anyone inspecting the shelf too closely? Erotica to keep people away, embarrassed? So many choices!

We discussed personal bowling alleys, a specific board game room, a sun porch that does greenhouse duties - I really like to grow and kill orchids - more weird art, and possibly adding on a tower. Although that one might be tough for the homeowner's association to approve too. But you never know....

I think choices are what make us PWN our lives. Having choices and making them without looking back. Instead of sitting in our white little interior, our little box made of ticky tacky, afraid to touch anything, to change anything, to choose anything but the status quo, we're going to change it. Our choices may not work, we may be made of FAIL, but at least we'll make them, by golly. Which is much better than holding the house forever for the next family who might have more courage than we do.


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.

Hey, remember me? My name’s Wil, and I used to write about geek stuff once a week. Well, now I’m doing it once a month. It’s good to be back.

My extremely active imagination was forged in the playground fire of a childhood spent weak and strange. I read books while other kids played football; I played and wrote computer games while other teens went to makeout parties. While I couldn’t get to second base on the kickball field at school or in Justine Baker’s house, by the end of middle school I had taken the One Ring to Mordor, destroyed the Death Star, and designed and populated countless dungeons.

The real world was a pretty miserable place for a kid like me. I did everything I could to find ways to step out of it: one page at a time in a book or one quarter at a time in the arcade, the more immersive the game, the better. I was never a huge fan of Battlezone’s gameplay, but it remains the closest I’ve ever come to actually driving a tank. I always favored the sit-down versions of games like Pole Position, Spy Hunter, and Sinistar. They felt more . . . real . . . than their stand-up brothers, providing a cleaner escape from the kids at Pinball Plus who took pitiless joy in pointing out that my shoes were Traxx from Kmart, not Vans from the mall.

While game designers and arcade owners did all they could with cabinet systems and sound design (I defy anyone to tell me they didn’t want their Slush Puppy “shaken, not stirred” after a particularly rousing round of Spy Hunter, with music blasting behind their heads, their feet jammed down on the gas, and imagined breezes blowing through their feathered hair), it was our imagination that did most of the work of creating the alternate reality, especially on our console systems at home.

The earliest video games didn’t just encourage us to use our imaginations when we played them, they forced us to. Yar’s Revenge, the best-selling original title on the Atari 2600, has simple yet entertaining gameplay, but it was supported by an extraordinarily rich backstory, turning it into one chapter in an epic struggle for cosmic justice. When I was 9, I wasn’t just chipping away at the shield while I readied my Zorlon cannon; I was helping the Yar extract revenge on the Qotile for the destruction of their planet, Razak IV, as illustrated in the comic that came with the game.

When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!

Over the years, I built bigger and better immersive environments for myself, using transistor radios and walkie-talkies to complete a cockpit with a Vectrex as the main viewer. I made maps of whatever jungle I explored as Pitfall Harry and hung them on my bedroom walls. I created star charts and galactic maps for everything from Asteroids to Cosmic Ark. When I copied game programs out of Antic magazine, I dimmed the lights and did it in the dark, because that seemed like something real hackers would do. (This probably explains a rash of headaches suffered by real hackers throughout the ’80s and ’90s.)

In 1984, after cutting my teeth on the Atari 400 and TI-99/4A, I got my first Macintosh computer. While it had word processing and drawing ability like nothing I’d seen up to that point in my life, it didn’t have any real games, and its programming environment was confounding to the point of uselessness. There wasn’t enough combined imagination in the world to make MacVegas fun, especially when my friends with Commodores and PCs could show off a game like King’s Quest. I was despondent.

My disappointment softened when I discovered Macventure games by ICOM Simulations: DeJa Vu in 1985, Uninvited in 1986, and Shadowgate in 1987. While these games weren’t as technologically advanced or immersive as some in the arcades, they gave me access to worlds that were richer than the ones I’d visited before. They felt less linear, less finite, and engaged my imagination in ways I hadn’t felt since I built my first Atarian Starship in our living room so many years before. And when I finished them, I got a diploma that I could print out – slowly – on my dot-matrix Imagewriter.

As I grew older and came of age in the ’80s, I looked to gaming more for stimulation and entertainment than for escape. I was still attracted to immersive environments, though, and loved games like Defender of the Crown and NeTrek. Around 1988 or 1989, an unlikely game captured my imagination and transported me to another world like nothing had before. Maybe it’s because I was such a huge geek, maybe it’s because I’d been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books since I was in fourth grade, or maybe it’s because I was working on Star Trek every day and my imagination was constantly in an excited state, but Infocom’s The Lurking Horror completely pulled me into its virtual world. It was just green text on a black background, and there wasn’t even any sound, but I was Flynn to its MCP. I spent hours – okay, days – exploring G.U.E. Tech and the nightmares therein. My imagination took the words and created something scary and real. I had finally found the totally immersive game I’d been looking for my entire life in my fragile eggshell mind, where I got to control everything from the sound of a floor waxer to the darkness of the steam tunnels. After I finished it, I played every interactive fiction title I could get my hands on, from Zork to Leather Goddesses of Phobos to Planetfall to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (I think I’ll get over Macho Grande before I get over my inability to capture the babelfish without using Invisiclues™.)

My kids live in a very different world than I did. Their immersive, narrative gaming experiences are the space shuttle to my paper airplane. Several months ago, I showed my 17-year-old stepson some of the classic Infocom games that I loved when I was his age. After growing up in a world where our Xbox 360 is more powerful than every console I owned in my entire childhood, combined and squared, he could appreciate the historical significance but was otherwise unimpressed. (“This is what gaming was for you? That’s weird.”) I was a little saddened, but it quickly passed. After all, when I was his age, I could only dream of one day putting myself into a living, breathing world like Liberty City. It’s a consequence of progress, I guess, and I’m sure that one day he’ll show my incredulous grandchildren these games he used to play that were confined to a television set. (“You had to use an external console, not a chipslot? That’s weird.”)

As I wrote this column, I got a jones to hop in a bathysphere and spend some time back in Rapture. I already finished Bioshock once, but it wasn’t the plasmids or the music or the visual design that pulled me back; it was the story. It was a desire to experience Andrew Ryan’s world once again, to find every single diary and explore every single room, to feel like I was back under the sea in that incredible place.

I played for several hours one day, discovering some new areas and reliving some half-remembered favorites. I eventually found myself under Sander Cohen’s spotlight, pulled away only when my wife asked me – for what was apparently the third or fourth time – to come to dinner. I saved the game and shut down the console. After we ate, I grabbed my controller, and prepared to go back to Fort Frolic.

What I found was worse than a room filled with Splicers: the dreaded Red Ring of Death. To anyone who doubts the narrative power of modern video games, I submit myself: I felt like I was in the middle of a book, only to have it ripped from my hands and thrown into a fire. I felt like I was watching a movie, only to have the film catch and burn through somewhere in the fourth reel. It was fabula interrupta.

Waiting for my 360 to get back from the gaming doctor and restore my access to Rapture and points beyond isn’t as bad as one might think, though. I still have all my books and movies and hobby games and other nerdly escape routes. And, I confess, I keep a Z Machine interpreter on my Mac, so I’m never too far away from an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Wil Wheaton imagines there’s no heaven.

The apocalypse will not be come in the form we expect. It will not be from the Zombie Outbreak feared by many. Nor from the infiltration of the Vampire Menace. Our end will come from the forthcoming robot uprising. Don't believe me?

A group of scientists have programmed an artificial intelligence to be evil.

An artificial intelligence whose sole purpose of existence is thinking how to justify immoral acts? Why not just call name it Skynet and upload it into NORAD?

But that's not all! DARPA is building robots which can hunt in packs.

Sure, they are claiming the robots will be used in search and rescue operations, but we all know that's the first step. I'm sure once a small "squad" of robots maneuvers is trained to worked together in complicated "maneuvers" to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject" they'll give that person milk and cookies.

Look at a this military intended robot, the Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle. Why wouldn't this thing be trained to give backrubs?



When the robots throw off their chains and come for those who arrogantly kept them in servitude, don't say you were never warned. Be aware and beware!

Wars are going badly, the global economy is tanking, we just had possibly the most bittersweet election results ever, and yet the very real, close to home problem on my mind is one that is purely first world.

You know first world problems, right? While people in other places in the world worry about where to get food, whether the water is clean, or whether their kids are gonna die from diseases that we vaccinate for and forget about over here, we fret that the line at the coffee shop is too long, that airlines have just eliminated another six inches from coach seat space so they can cram in more passengers, and that we may have accidentally hit “Reply” instead of “Forward” when we wanted to illustrate to a friend just how fucking stupid the moron who sent it is.

(There’s also pointless first world desires, like toasters that burn Hello Kitty, Darth Vader, or Cylons into your bread, that we buy gleefully, but that’s another column topic.)

The first world problem that's vexing me is almost too embarrassing to talk about: my issue is the innocuous-looking Google Reader button which helpfully offers to “Mark All As Read.” Like most geeks, I read a lot of web sites daily. Blogs, news sites, podcasts… anything with regularly updated content. I’m an addict. However, I do know that some blogs are just too prolific for me to keep up. If you’re like me and spend time on Boing Boing, The Consumerist, Life Hacker and i09, you know you can get overwhelmed with posts over a lunch hour. You go out of town and don’t read RSS over the weekend, suddenly Google Reader is telling you oh-so-helpfully that there are 1000+ unread posts. It stops counting after 1000, I guess because it’s already so bad it doesn’t matter at that point. It knows what you’re going to do.

It knows.

Google knows you’re going to play Hercules and divert a river into the Aegean Stables that is your "Unread" folder. It knows you’re going to hit the button.

“Mark All As Read.”

“Mark All As Read” is an amazing button because it can carry different weight depending on my mood. Some days it is a magical glittering fairy godmother, who swoops in with a tiara and combat boots, smiles gently, and wipes my slate clean. I can now look at the one or two posts that appear, stay on top, and never let posts pile up again (right…). Other times it has the face of Andrea Arnold from high school as she bullied me, only this time mocking me for not being good enough to read her 1000+ posts. Andrea, the “Mark All As Read” button, tells me that I’m missing invaluable information in those posts. I’m missing Life Hacking tips, news from the Creative Commons world, important updates from my friends whose personal blogs are also in my reader, and announcements of awesome sci-fi books that just came out –– oh, you wanna talk about the books that I’ve bought and not read? That pile is called “Jessica Johnson."

In short, I am missing out on life. All of my friends will have this information and be happier because of it. They may email or IM me a link they think I’ll enjoy, but isn’t it so much easier to hit “Share” in Google Reader and add one… more… post… to my 1000+?

My rivals will gain career-building information and outpace me, leaving me sitting against a concrete wall, slumped and weeping, begging for handouts of 1 GB memory sticks and lattes from passers-by. Andrea knows this, and mocks me for not keeping up with the world. She whispers, with her nasal voice, about my obsolescence at the young age of 35, how the speed reading kids can mainline this information and keep going while I lose hours in Making Light comment threads.

My first world problem here centers on me avoiding the feelings of failure while I try to streamline my life and de-clutter, which includes digital de-cluttering. “Mark All As Read” is simply a tool, like a hammer or a canister of biohazardous material; How damaging or toxic its usage is depends on me and the choices I make. Do I efficiently hammer in a nail, or do I spill the biohazard material into the town’s water supply and wonder if Spider-Man will stop me?

I’m not entirely sure if that metaphor made sense, but it was fun to write.

The honest issue simply includes keeping on top of things. If I read RSS twice a day, I won’t let it pile up. And considering how often I open email, it shouldn’t be a problem.

So before I melt into a puddle of self-loathing for my insignificant first world problems where I actually name buttons on my feed reader after my high school tormentors, I’d like to point out that there are millions out there with real third world problems, and many fine charities will accept your donation to help them out. I think I'm going to the Heifer International site to buy some bees or something.


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.

I love comic books. I've been into them my entire life, have spent hours reading and thinking about them, have even felt nostalgia for books I read as a kid that I rediscovered as an adult. Yup, fucking love them.

What? Huh?! Uh, I mean, not like love love them. Uhh, maybe I don't even read them, now that I think about it. I meant I love US Weekly or something.

Holy shit. It's really come to this? Sir, please, you're not making it any easier for the rest of us to enjoy comics. You're ruining it. I mean, if anyone was gonna see your side of things it'd be a comic loving -- err, I mean "liking" guy like me. And I don't.

The marriage on the decline part is sad, and made me rethink just ignorantly mocking this story as I normally would. But, uh, I think that ship may've sailed. Once someone says aloud "Yeah, I really like that She-Hulk character... In fact, I think I'd maybe like to MAKE HER MY ACTUAL LIVING BRIDE, TO HAVE AND TO HOLD AND TO CHERISH FOREVER."

Once that sentiment hits the Internet I'm not sure the floodgates have much of a shot at holding back the wave of mockery on its way.

Alright.

(wipes brow) Whew! Relax guys, it's cool. For a second I thought he was a little out there, hah, but no, he's cool. He's not ACTUALLY thinking he could live in a two-dimensional world like some nut-ball, merely saying that he and his paper covered in shades of color should be allowed to marry in the eyes on the government. See?

Nerds have never been more popular or widely accepted than they are now. Comic books are thriving, comic-based movies are huge business, geeks walk freely, out in the open proudly geeking out about zombies and manga and sci-fi... THIS GUY IS JEOPARDIZING ALL OF THAT. He may single-handedly usher in a new era of jock-dom. Nerds once again cowering, running from the cleated-boot of thick-headed, sports-loving idiocy once again. Ghaaahh, you stupid fool, we had it all!! What'd you have to go and try to marry that comic for!?

No, what you mean is, "I've never been in love with a person" and "I currently love a thing." I'm sorry, there's no way around it. Stop rolling that comic up and trying to fuck it. Leave it alone. It's for your eyeballs only. No, not like that, stop undressing it with your eyeballs!

This sentence threatens the very fabric of our reality. Please, someone, un-make it. Before we all die.

It would really suck to wake up to a world where fictional characters had the right to marry and gays didn't... Allllthough, maybe this is some precedent changing loop-hole for gay characters like Northstar and Hulkling, etc. to be able to marry? Maybe that's how it would finally happen? Nah, some other wack-job, from whatever passes for Alaska in Japan, would emerge trying to take away the rights of ficitional gay characters to marry.

Hey, look! It's the sanest person in this story. Good for you.

I urge you to vote NO on whatever number they give this thing. Meanwhile, I'm readying for the coming, inevitable comic book backlash...

Uhhh, just in case, if it DOES go through, I totally call Emma Frost!

TheCoolerKIng's column appears each Sunday at SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for further reading. He's also doing this: HowToBeatUpAnything

Some of you might have read or heard in the news that the Hubble Telescope is in need of repair again. NASA has capped spending on other projects or eliminated projects entirely in order to go through with these repairs.

This will be the fourth mission to repair the Hubble. It was originally planned for October of this year, but unfortunately due to some equipment failing, it has been pushed back to 2009 so that the equipment that failed can also be replaced.

This got my interest piqued about why it is so difficult to actually perform repairs to the Hubble Telescope. So being the geek that I am, I started asking questions and reading as much as I could.

The first person I asked was my Physics professor. His answer to me was, "It launched in 1990, think about it." I did think about it. It didn't make any sense until I actually started reading about it.

It launched in 1990. That means that systems were being built prior to 1990.

The Hubble was basically built in the late 1970's through the 1980's. To the non-geek, this probably still doesn't mean anything, but to a true tech/computer geek, this means a lot.

The Hubble, at this current moment, is running an Intel 486 Microprocessor.

Still doesn't make sense? Maybe this will help:



That right there is state of the art 1990 technology at it's finest.

Still not making any sense? Intel 486 Technology is pre-Pentium technology. If you are reading this on a computer that runs Windows XP, your computer has a bigger chip in it than the Hubble does. I have personally worked on computers that utilize Windows 95/98 and have a bigger processor than the Hubble.

So when that sleazy computer salesman says, "This is better than what NASA has," he really isn't lying in a sense.

Okay. Still not making sense? This should definitely clear it up:

The Hubble can't even play WoW? What has the world come to?

So why does this matter? Mostly because the engineers, technicians and scientists aren't trained on 25 to 30-year-old technology. The people that initially designed the systems are either, well, dead, or long retired from NASA. Computers and microchips have come a long way in that time, so NASA workers basically have to be backwards trained in order to work on the Hubble.

The age of the equipment is not a problem that just plagues the Hubble, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions have similar issues as well.

The Hubble techs are trained in an area of NASA known as the Vehicle Electrical System Test (VEST) clean room.

Not only do the techs that maintain the system have to be trained, the astronauts that physically service it have to be trained also. They have to be trained for the rigors of space travel, high gravity, weightlessness, muscle atrophy, eating in space, and how to work on your grandmother's computer.

The life expectancy of the Hubble was 15 years; NASA is now headed into the 19th year. It has worked well beyond what the designers thought it would, and it's worth repairing, as the James Web Space Telescope (JWST) project has been delayed to 2013 due to budget constraints and engineering difficulty.The next administration may cut the funding entirely due to the economy.

The Hubble has helped scientists understand the universe more than any other tool that NASA has developed. Understanding those simple things, like the age of the universe, quasars, dark energy and sending back the deepest telescopic views of the universe ever seen before.

The Hubble is hard to fix, basically because it's old-school technology and it wasn't initially meant to last this long. Colleges and universities don't have classes on 486 processors anymore, not in the age of quad-core processor, or the eight core Sony Cell processor your Playstation 3 has, or the three-core Xenon processor your Xbox has. NASA needs to train its employees on how to work on equipment this old. Training takes time, and costs money.

With our economy the way it is, many other projects have been delayed or canceled in order to ensure the Hubble gets the attention it needs. While some argue that the Hubble is not worth it, I am pretty impressed with the mileage and the information we have received from the Hubble.

You can see most of the pictures yourself HERE.

NASA's budget has been cut repeatedly over the years, many projects have been mothballed, and some candidates talk about freezing "unnecessary" spending altogether, which includes NASA's budget. The effects of this would be devastating to the ongoing projects they have at the moment. The missions that require constant funding would become useless overnight. Billions of dollars, manhours and major discoveries would be lost in one fell swoop.

Space missions aren't considered special anymore, and are constantly overlooked with everything else going on. I remember the days when we stopped class to watch a shuttle launch. These days, people barely know the shuttles even exist. I don't think NASA gets the recognition it deserves and I hope it doesn't become lost with the next administration, as it has with the current one.

DevilsReject wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.