George Takei, who as helmsman Sulu steered the Starship Enterprise through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a biweekly Los Angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.
[from SFGate.com]
This is nice for George, but, c’mon:
It’s not like we didn’t know.
I’m not saying I have any inside information or anything, but watch for special announcements coming soon from:
Science fiction, no matter how far into the future it’s set or how bizarre is the alternate universe it inhabits, is always about its own time, about the cultural fears of the era in which it is produced. So, for example, all the invading aliens and giant bugs of the 1950s were expressions of nervousness and paranoia over the Cold War and Communism. Are those flicks scarier if you first saw them at just the right time in the culture as well as in your own life? If the golden age of science fiction is, as some wag noted, 12, and you were a 12-year-old kid at just the right time to be steeped in the anxieties of the 1950s, do movies like Them! and The Day the Earth Stood Still have a particular resonance for you that’s unique to your generation? I suspect it does.
So: I was 12 in 1981. I came of age -- as did all of Generation X -- in a world in which medicine and technology and advancing scientific knowledge were altering our understanding of how our bodies work, how they can be made to fail, and how we may be able to change who we are on a fundamental level, none of which were particularly pleasant lessons to learn. Not only could devices and drugs meant to help us suddenly turn on us, either inadvertently (tampons causing toxic shock syndrome) or by deliberate design (tampered-with Tylenol killing people with headaches), but we were playing with the stuff of life (test-tube babies) while our genes were reshuffling on their own to attack our bodies (AIDS).
Translation: Donnie Darko, who mumble-mumble-mumble on Halloween*; Jack Skellington, whose heart was too big for just one holiday; and Linus, who will never, ever give up on the Great Pumpkin.
*I don’t wanna spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it.
In my review of George Romero’s Land of the Dead, just out on DVD, I discussed the sorta despondent feeling that’s permeating pop culture lately, that we’re standing at the edge of a cultural abyss, and in relation to this terrific film, how the idea of a zombie apocalypse is actually pretty darn relevant -- at least in a metaphoric sense -- to the world today.
And it seems I’m not the only one who feels that way. The crack investigative reporting team at The Onion has uncovered the terrible truth about a Midwestern city:
I got no pix of my cats today. They know I need to them to be especially fascinating now that I’m catblogging, and so they have been perversely resolute in being wildly dull, or at least only weird and funny in ways that cannot be photographed. Mrs. Kennedy’s penchant for the night crazies, for instance, during which she zooms around the place at 2am like she’s hopped up on speed, does not lend itself to still photography.
Yes, it’s another of those silly tests. But you know you want to give it a try.
Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?
Turns out I’m:
Which means, I suppose, that mostly I’m pretty cool and a good leader but sometimes I’m an insufferable sanctimonious prick. I guess I got no beef with that. Still, it might be a good thing that, according to the test’s character statistics -- that is, the ranking of which characters show up in testers’ results most often -- Picards are a rarity. (Somehow I doubt, though, that the world is as full of Galadriels and Aragorns as the results suggest.)
Not so inconceivable: Geek touchstone The Princess Bride is coming to Broadway. Not sure how to feel about that... though I guess if Monty Python can make the transition intact, the Dread Pirate Westley can do it.
Game nowhere near over: Geek filmmaker -- and creator of many a cinematic geek touchstone -- Steven Spielberg is jumping into gaming as a hands-on producer. I do suspect that games are going to morph more into serious interactive fiction or a new kind of community art -- or both; think massive multiparticipant entertainment -- and the involvement of one of Hollywood’s biggest players could well be a step in that direction. I have no doubt that there will be great Xer artists whose medium is what we would consider “a game.”
Must-see skiffy: Writer John Scalzi has published his book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, in which he chooses his geek film canon, the 50 “most significant” SF films of all time. The list is posted at John’s blog, but you should buy the book too, cuz John’s a cool guy and has lots of interesting things to say about movies and SF. (I’ve been on panels at SF conventions with John, and have heard him speak about SF movies -- he knows his stuff.)
Remembered to Gallifrey, at last: The BBC is making a Doctor Who for grownups. About bloody time the Beeb realized which side its toast is buttered on.
As a counter to the cinematic assault of videogame-turned-movie Doom, hitting theaters this weekend, something a little more sedate. Can board games be geeks, dorks, and nerds? Of course they can.
If there’s been a bigger, more potent force for geeky goodness over the last 40 years than Star Trek, I don’t know what it is. The series had such a dramatic impact upon scientists working today who were inspired by Trek to do what they do now that you could write an entire book about the subject... in fact, it’s already been done: I'm Working on That: A Trek From Science Fiction to Science Fact, by William Shatner and Chip Walter.
So, while there’s no overt indication that this new breakthrough was inspired by the whale tank in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, it’s not unlikely that it was:
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFPN) -- Engineers here are testing a new kind of transparent armor -- stronger and lighter than traditional materials -- that could stop armor-piercing weapons from penetrating vehicle windows.
The Air Force Research Laboratory's materials and manufacturing directorate is testing aluminum oxynitride -- ALONtm -- as a replacement for the traditional multi-layered glass transparencies now used in existing ground and air armored vehicles.
[from U.S. Air Force AIM Points]
Well, Scotty did leave the formula for transparent aluminum kicking around back in 1986, didn’t he?
(For a nice roundup of how Trek has influenced real science and technology, see this article from last year on SFGate.com.)
Books are too charming and too sensuous to ever give up. Maybe people said the same thing about painting on cave walls, and I’m just revealing myself as a creature of my culture -- I dunno. But as useful as it is to read stuff on a screen, “curling up with a good PDA” just doesn’t have quite the ring to it that it should. I dream of a time when the visceral experience of reading a book merges with the practicality (and tree-saving-ness) of electronic books: In my fantasy world, people own one “book,” a gorgeous volume, beautifully bound, that’s comfortable and easy to hold, that you can take in the bath or into bed -- or up a tree -- with you. The pages of this “book” feel like paper, and you read by turning page after page, just like you do with a low-tech book of paper pages. But the pages in my fantasy book are rewritable -- you download text as you need it, and hopefully you could carry around your whole library in this one electronic volume. But even if a book could only hold one novel that’d get wiped out when you loaded the next one, it’d still be cool: your library at home could be stored on a single hard drive into which you plug your book when you need something new to read.
Google the term "geek party" and you get something like eight and a half million results. That’s a lotta geeks partying, and a lot of different kinds of geek parties. Some seem to be gatherings of RPGers or LAN gamers; some are just folks who call themselves geeks getting together. I have several friends who regularly host parties at which everyone plays board games. My pal Bonnie, a consummate hostess, is constitutionally unable to throw a party that does not have some deliciously geeky (usually literary or mythological) theme to it.
This past Saturday, it was a celebration of the anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe. (You thought I just pulled the theme of last week’s Geek/Dork/Nerd out of thin air?). Because, frankly, any excuse for a party, and, what? You’re gonna celebrate Poe’s birth? I don’t think so. In addition to much general drunken bacchanalia, we had a group performance of "The Raven," and I did a dramatic reading of "The Tell-Tale Heart"... though I was not wearing the raven hat at the time. Yes, that’s yours truly, quite late in the evening and after imbibing waaay too much Vampire Merlot.
In December, we do a Saint Lucia’s Day party, during which I, in my guise as the incarnation of Lucia (one of those pagan witch-goddesses who got demoted to sainthood when the Christians moved in), get my hair set on fire. It’s awesome. Come January it’s a Robert Burns Day blowout, featuring, among many other exciting earthy customs, a flaming haggis. (Burning stuff is big with us -- it’s very pagan.) Last year I threw a Leap Day party, for which I invented all the "traditional" festivities and foods and such, many of which had to do with the frog prince who rules the day and how he must be appeased in order to assure your own good luck for the coming four years until he appears again.
Perhaps I need to write a book about this stuff: The Geek’s Guide to Throwing Geeky Parties. But of course, the fun of these parties -- the really geeky aspect of them -- is the inventiveness and the creativity that goes into putting them together. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun, at least for me, if someone told me what to do...
Mrs. Kennedy likes to sleep on my pillow. Sometimes that means I get groomed. Sometimes that means I get a poke in the eye with an outstretched paw.
In honor of the anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe -- October 7, 1849 -- herewith the classic-horror spectrum: Bram Stoker, Edgar himself, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Newspaper headlines don’t get much more dire than this:
World Helpless Against Assaults of Nature
I mean: Wow. The Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward just kinda dives right into the deep end of the panic-and-depair pool:
WASHINGTON -- In a more hopeful time, buoyed by the promise of science, it was thought hurricanes could be tricked into dispersing, earthquakes could be disarmed by nuclear explosions and floodwaters held at bay by great mounds of dirt.
Such conceits are another victim of a year of destruction.
The planet's controlling forces romp over dreams like those. Usually the best that can be done is to see the danger coming long enough to run.
Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature's assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed once again.
And the bird-flu pandemic hasn’t even hit yet.
Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song.
[from News in Science]
And the word of the geek spreads to the other intelligent species on the planet...
There’s a bit of discussion going on in the comments of this posting about what shapes a generation’s collective personality, how it’s about larger forces at work in the culture more than it’s about the quirks and idiosyncrasies on the level of the individual. And I just came across (via one of my favorite bloggers, Atrios), an excellent example of how today’s children are being influenced by what’s happening in the wider society.
Generation Xers, as a reminder, grew up with stuff like this:
This is one of the most brilliant examples of geek creativity I’ve come across in a long time: it’s The Lord of the Rings told entirely through quotes from The Princess Bride. It’s hard to pick a favorite line, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, so here’s how it starts:
Prologue:
PETER JACKSON: Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up:
And then it’s just keeps getting funnier.
The dividing line between any two generations is of necessity going to be fluid -- it will never be a hard line. There will be a period of at least a couple of birth years around that potential border in which some people will identify more with the generation that’s come before and some people will feel more affinity with the generation just starting to be born. So pinning down the first birth year of Generation X is problematic. I’ve been thinking it probably isn’t earlier than 1960... and now a few things I’ve encountered recently are suggesting to me that it probably isn’t earlier than 1961.
First, there was a fascinating article about Bono, the rock star turned political and social activist, in The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago, that described him as "messianic," which seems to me to be a pretty fair and not at all exaggerated description, at least in the context of the article, which went into great detail about the enormous and positive influence he has been wielding in world politics of late. And the first thing I thought when I read that was, Generation X can and will be called a lot of things, but "messianic" ain’t never gonna be one of them. So I started thinking that the likes of Bono are the last gasps of the spiritually attuned Baby Boom, and he was born in early 1960.
If you’re interested in movies and you like my stuff, you should be checking out the Cinemarati blog, where I make a couple of posts a week about movie-related goodness. Those posts aren’t always Xer or geek related, but sometimes they are, if only obliquely, like the thing I just posted about the fake trailer for the film The Shining, which is a great example of how geeks take pop culture and make it their own. I have no idea who created the fake trailer, or what generational zeitgeist that person might identify with, but anyone who would make a fake trailer for a real movie that manages to be funny while commenting on Hollywood culture is by definition a geek.
I really worry about poor Sam. He’s so big it can’t be healthy for him, and yet he while he certainly likes his food, he doesn’t seem to eat all that much -- he just doesn’t move to burn it off. He also has this weird thing with his front paws -- his previous owner had him declawed, which I would never do, and he walks funny, which I’m not sure is a result of his weight or the declawing or a combination of the two... or maybe it’s completely unrelated. But he won’t let me look at his feet: he pulls away whenever I try to touch him there.
As if I don’t have enough to worry about, this cat’s health is always on my mind. Cuz he’s so sweet and so full of personality, and he deserves to have a long, healthy life.
In honor of the release of George Clooney’s valentine to Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck., the geek/dork/nerd spectrum of journalists...
Guess we’re still waiting for the geek revolution: Serenity, which last week I’d speculated might herald the coming of a new geek utopia, fared rather poorly at the box office this weekend, earning only a little over $10 million. Now, I hate the industry’s emphasis on opening-weekend numbers as pretty much the be-all and end-all marker of success, but the sad fact is that Hollywood will look at that paltry $10 million and conclude that audiences don’t want smart SF films, no matter how well the film does over the long run and how many damn DVDs it eventually ends up moving.
Maybe part of the problem is that folks just can’t get past the idea of geekiness as something to be laughed at. The review of Serenity in the San Francisco Chronicle starts off like this:
