Are you a toaster?

Despite having five kids and two wives (my real wife and my job), I still find time to watch TV I’ve downloaded to my trusty iPhone. Recently a friend introduced me to Battlestar Galactica.

Holy Cow! It’s totally different from the 70s feel good  drivel I watched when I was a kid. It’s hard core and that’s not to mention  the intentional similarities between the current political climate and the rest of the world.

The re-imagining is set 20 year or so after the events of the old  series. The humans have settled new planets. The human’s mortal enemy, the  Cylons, have new upgraded centurions (or Toasters) and get this: they also  have a breed of cylons that look and feel like humans (or ‘Skin-jobs)’. This  appears to be a perfect recipe for human ass kicking and a cliff hanger.

Within the first 5 minutes of the new BSG series, an innocent baby is spared (by mercy killing) the (almost) annihilation of the planet’s  population (ethnic cleansing?). The survivors scarper looking for ‘Earth’,  whilst the ‘toasters’ clean up the mess and claim it as their own – now where  have I seen this before?

Just finished season three. It’s addictive. DAMMIT! I need to know who the next skin-job is!

Read Full Post »

Scalzi on Trek-no-logy and butter

I’ve just started following Sci-Fi author John Scalzi on Twitter and reading his blog.

The man’s very entertaining… having started reading him thanks to his Hugo Award nomination for The Last Colony (don’t start there if you’re interested, start here)…

Two posts that particularly caught my attention this week; first, his column on Sci-Fi Scanner, which has a look at a few sci-fi technologies we could probably do without. I’m with him on Star Trek’s transporter technology (“99.9 percent accuracy would mean you’ve been turned into a screaming lump of meat”) and flying cars (“We already know how badly people drive in two dimensions. Do you really want to add 50 percent more dimensionality to drive badly in?”)… but am a little bit more optimistic about humanity’s prospects for dealing with intelligent robots and warp drive.

The second post was this brilliant conversation with a stick of butter. It makes little sense and follows on from a poll he conducted on his blog, but is hugely entertaining and reminds of me Scary Duck, who is also Awesome.

Worth checking out if you like sci-fi, or things that are awesome.

H/t to Flashboy for introduction to all things Scalzi.

Read Full Post »