Matt Yglesias asks an interesting question: “If Elves, Hobbits, and Men can interbreed in Middle-Earth, aren’t they the same species?” I’m not sure if the ability to breed entirely defines a species (as Yglesias mentions, we interbred with Neanderthals, and I still think they’re classified separately, though some say otherwise), but I’d call it a… Read More On the Question of Human-Hobbit Interbreeding
I was done with you, you old dead grump. Yes, I liked the Hitchhiker series in my early adolescence. Early adolescence is the right time for silly stories finding the funny side of planetary extinction and philosophical fail. A send-up of the whole sci-fi genre was long overdue, and Douglass supplied them in witty style. The… Read More Geek Heresy Episode 2: Damn You, Douglas Adams.
Cracked has a good article (how many blog posts have started with those five words, I wonder?) about how awful nerds/geeks are as human beings. Read the whole thing, obviously, but in brief: We Feel Like We’re Owed Our Favorite Things … Forever We Secretly Hope Our Favorite Artists Aren’t Successful We Think We Have… Read More Getting Around the Nerd Behavior Paradigm
Yesterday I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years, organize and file my comic books. It took me the better part of a morning, but I’m terribly pleased with the general sense of imposing order on chaos. I am no more than a dabbler in comic books. I read them sporadically as… Read More November Comic Book Post: The Geek Returneth
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what he really wants to say is “Oh, for God’s Sakes. I did a movie. I acted. It’s coming out soon. It’s not high art, but it’s not bad. People will enjoy it. Stop trying to dredge for controversey, you numb-skulled little guttersnipe.” I suspect that deep down,… Read More Harrison Ford Hates Journalists
I’m one of those people. I’ve read all the books. I kept my mouth shut during the last season while everyone on Facebook was expressing hope that the Starks would somehow outwit the Lannisters. I still know things that the TV-only crowd doesn’t know (Lannisters always pays their debts). Since I don’t have HBO, I’m… Read More The Unremitting Torture That is Game of Thrones
If you’ve ever read George Lucas’ original script for Star Wars, you notice that it veers significantly from what we ended up seeing. Among other things, Darth Vader is a separate character from Annakin Starkiller, and Han Solo is a lizard dude. I skimmed it online amid the hullabaloo surrounding Phantom Menace and lost interest… Read More Ur-Star Wars to be Published On Dark Horse
I’m sure there was a premise to this, and I’m sure 90% of the people that knew it did not care. I remember this dystopian hawker from my childhood, and even had a penchant for warbling “M-M-Max Headroom-room” at inappropriate intervals during my elementary school years. Behold the horror: The past is truly unknowable.
Solar System Blues began as a spoken-word element of a band show for The Fest, a music and arts festival that my brother and his friends used to put on in Lancaster, PA every July. It’s the first thing I consciously created a First Draft for, and circulated said draft for comments from friends and… Read More My Daddy Drives a UFO….The Official Launch of Solar System Blues
I’m old enough to remember when being a geek was a bad thing. I remember the days when kids who were into sci-fi, fantasy, and other forms of alternative literature hid that fact from others if they had any hope of fitting in. Hell, I remember when knowing how to work a computer was a… Read More Geek Heresy: A Consideration of Popular Fictional Universes That Bore the Living Hell out of me – Episode 1: Dr. Who Cares?
