When I say I’m a fan of the Joss Whedon TV series Firefly and its follow-up film Serenity, I’m not using the word “fan” lightly. I missed the show in its original on-air run, but bought the DVD set on a whim and ended up watching the entire 13-episode run in two days. The only […]
“We’ll be fighting in the streets, with our children at our feet And the morals that they worship will be gone, and the men who spurred us on Sit in judgment of all wrong.” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who If you know these words, chances are you’re a nerd. A milquetoast. A milksop. […]
Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be frozen in carbonite, just like Han Solo did in The Empire Strikes Back. What can I say, when you are six and a Star Wars fan, being imprisoned and kept as a keepsake by intergalactic gangsters seems like an awesome idea. Now, you don’t have […]
Tuesday’s announcement by startup Planetary Resources that they have plans to start a privatized asteroid mining operation seems the stuff of science fiction made reality. This is literally a plot point in countless science fiction books and movies, usually to get the protagonists in an out of the way location so all kinds of space chaos can break […]
At Game Developers Conference (GDC) Online in Austin, TX, I spent the majority of the first day listening to the writers of Blizzard talk about their process for developing narrative for their franchises. Their day-long group of talks was named, “The War of Worldcraft: Developing Franchise Narrative in the Transmedia Age”. Transmedia is a fancy […]
Just when you thought 3.5 floppies were utterly useless, in comes Polish Super Genius Paweł (SileNT on his website), who programmed two old floppy drives to play The Imperial March from Star Wars. [yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE’] Paweł tells us how it works: It’s nothing new and it’s very simple. The sound comes from a magnetic head […]
According to C-3P0, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are approximately 3,720 to 1. According to NASA, the odds of someone getting hit by a piece of falling satellite this week are slightly better, at 3,200 to 1. On approximately September 23, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), a dead six-ton satellite decommissioned […]
If there’s one thing I miss about the days before Google Navigation, it was tricking out my Tom Tom Navigator with custom voice prompts. Voices like Austin Powers, Sean Connery era James Bond, Darth Vader, and of course the obligatory KITT from Knight Rider were all the rage on the internet, from official paid downloads to […]
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LW8wgmfpTE’] As reported at NewScientist, smart-type people at MIT have made a huge leap in the possibility of real-time holograms. The MIT folks use, among other things, a hacked Kinect, proving once again that the Xbox 360’s controllerless controller is wasted on dance games. This is rather amazing technology. It’s extremely early, but it’s […]
