GalacticMu

I recently came across this, scribbled on a piece of paper in an apparent drunken scrawl.  It took me a while to remember that it was written soberly, but rapidly; I was trying to write down what Halcyon was saying, as he said it:

Have you seen a Sherman tank?  It looks like a loaf of bread with a pencil sticking out of it.

Now a Tiger, if you see a Tiger tank coming you shit yourself.  It looks like a shark, you shit yourself and you cannot help it, it looks like a shark made out of metal.  On land.  With a big gun.

BattleGate pointed me toward this clip of the leaked “alternate ending” of the recent theatrical release I Am Legend. It will be on the DVD soon, which is why I guess none of the clips have been taken down or anything.

Here are my highly spoilery thoughts on it.

Did something hit the shuttle on launch, you ask?

Let me see, I will extract my sextant, my magnifying lamp and my Endeavour scale-model and — yes. The answer is yes, ABC, something hit the shuttle. Was it that white speck you’ve so dramatically circled in red? I dunno, maybe, and the honest answer is that it doesn’t matter.

And before you hyperventilate with my flippant dismissal of what could result in the untimely expiration of many brave scientists, I have this to say: something always hits the shuttle, and something always has. It is a part of the launching process. This had been covered ad infinitum by both NASA and various other news media organizations (probably even yourself, ABC), and no one but NASA seems particularly invested in reminding us that SHIT HITS THE SHUTTLE AS A PART OF NORMAL OPERATIONS.

To make matters less in your favor, the same article is pretty much a non-stop parade of NASA officials – trained scientists all – saying “Basically: no, it’s fine.” Of course none of them can confirm 100% that it’s fine, they are scientists and their greatest weakness is declaring anything with finality (these are people whom you can force a short-circuit just by bringing any subject at all around to whether or not this is all really happening). But with answers ranging from “It’s an optical illusion,” to “The shuttle simply wasn’t going fast enough,” somehow ABC, you still felt it prudent to headline with the fear-mongering “Did something hit the shuttle?” Gasp!

Did terrorists hit the shuttle with a piece of ice?

No, but it never hurts to ask the question, right? As a headline?

Did Obama’s lack of experience cause the shuttle to be hit with foam debris?

And I know that this is some world-class tantruming from me, but most days I am unspeakably pessimistic about the average American’s involvement in our own space program; this happens to be one of the speakably pessimistic days. I receive with a total lack of surprise that media interest is not at all in what the mission might be about (and this one is unusually interesting) but instead revs up the graphics for the next shuttle disaster. It’d be like if they failed to cover a university finding the cure for Alzheimer’s because they were too busy making graphics for the next big school shooting*.

I’d also like to clarify that I don’t think the Shuttle operations are totally safe. Clearly they aren’t. There are two terrible tragedies to demonstrate that they aren’t. But the astronauts know and accept this fact, as I know and accept it.  ABC, you pander to the self-righteous, ignorant segment of America that believes not only that one of the greatest scientific interests that mankind has ever undertaken is somehow subject to their critique, but also that they might know better. They know what we should be spending public money on. They know what is safe and what is not safe. They know what sciences are valuable to the species and which ones aren’t. Because they watched the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake with Nicole Kidman and they don’t want to be CG puked on by pod-people.

*I might be overdoing it a little.

Anyone up for some popular compliance? I don’t generally abide by these things, but since CmdrSue is an experienced space captain herself, I feel obliged.

It goes a little something like this:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I’m not sure about the tagging five other people part, because this is where memes come to die. We will, however, participate with the other four instructions.

Subspace

In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of marvelous green, set round with Nature’s own orchard-trees — crabapple, wild cherry and sloe.

‘This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,’ whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. ‘Here in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we will find Him!’

- The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame

Halcyon

“We are, yes. But you see yourself that your acquaintances do not object to giving over their egg,” he said, glancing anxiously at the Kazilik pair, who indeed seemed unconcerned at being parted from their offspring. But Temeraire dismissed this with an impatient flick of his tail. “Of course they do not mind that, they know we will take care of the egg,” he said.

- The Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik

BattleGate

Queers have been worked over by the female Senders. The are a reminder of what the Senders can and will do unless they are stopped. Also many of them have sold out their bodies to Death, Inc. Their souls wouldn’t buy a paper of milk sugar shit.

-Interzone, by William S. Burroughs

Quagmire

If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective’s a bitch, if you’re not used to it.”
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls.

- Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Aargh

“What about your house?” he asked.
“It was nothing like this,” she said. “We didn’t have a-”
“How did you protect your house?” he interrupted.

- I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

The headline for this article does well to summarize both its content and what I have to say about it:

“Nintendo to not release Holocaust-themed game in U.S.”

The game in question is called “Imagination Is the Only Escape” and is not, game developer Luc Bernard says, about concentration camps, graphic violence or… anything to do with the Holocaust, I guess. It is instead about a fantastic inner world that the main character, a child, must enter into in order to save himself from the psychological horrors he is exposed to. By my reckoning, is sounds a hell of a lot more like Pan’s Labyrinth than a war game.

I don’t find it offensive. The video game world is rife with questionable moral lessons, and for a long time now it has been perfectly acceptable to kill Nazis in WWII shooting games. After all, they’re Nazis, fuck ‘em. I think it’s just the word “Holocaust” that is throwing people. And “game” so closely thereafter. If he called it a “WWII-themed game” it’d already be doing well on presale lists.

Remember when they tried to market Concentration Camp Tycoon? That didn’t go over very well.

Over at GoNintendo.com, an unknown poster had this to say about the game:

“I have a feeling that some people may be offended with the idea of a game teaching about the Holocaust.”

Uh. Um. I guess that would be not Jewish people? I mean, I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but maybe that sentence should have been reworded to something like:

“My children are only allowed to play World Wrestling Entertainment titles because I don’t want them gettin’ smarter than me.”

This is America, after all. We don’t like thinking about feelings. We like shooting things. Especially things that might expose us to feelings.

It is no secret that I’m an atheist, though other members of GalacticMu vary. And this shouldn’t matter, except when I am doing something like watching this astonishing clip of a title sequence of a movie called 3:19 (and no, not the western, like I also briefly, sleepily, thought – 3:10, 3:19, what does nine minutes matter?).

I was sent into a fugue state watching the first half of the animation, enjoying it for one of those moments where, because I expect nothing at all, I am startled to my very core. And then I started to notice the religious implications. Oh, that 3:19, as in Genesis (no, I didn’t read the sidebar for the link until afterwards). God’s great mechanism, I get it. Everything of infinite and divine plan. Yawn.

From what I’ve read the movie itself is not religious as much as “faithy”. It sounds unappealing to me on a lot of levels, but largely because it apparently succumbs to the neo-dramatic mechanism of having everything connect, making for lumbering, interconnected failures such as Crash and Babel. I’d like to watch a movie about how nothing happens for a reason, about how no one action any of us takes affects the lives of anyone else around us. I’d like to see how the poor black girl working at the White Castle does not affect a affluent Swiss banker whose father was shot in the street by a cop who mistakenly identified him. That’d be a good movie.

Via Dark Roasted Blend

I am predictably obsessed with Pixar cartoons. An art-student Seattleite once said to Halcyon and myself after we’d just been to see Cars, “Isn’t that a children’s movie?” Yes, and mostly no. I asked her not to make my latte too hot.

Children, as you may know, are underdeveloped human beings. They have an underdeveloped stature, an underdeveloped taste in beer and an underdeveloped sense of what constitutes as entertainment. Through what I can only assume is torturous experimentation, Pixar is one of the few production companies ever to exist who have managed to make compelling, artful and genuinely touching movies that children manage to enjoy anyway. And while the subject matter has been only marginally of interest to me as of yet (though the recent Ratatouille veered the closest ), the up-coming WALL•E makes me tear up, and these are just the trailers. I have a bad feeling about the fate of my mascara when I get around to seeing the entire film.

As an aside, a true story: I went to see The Iron Giant in the theater, and I cried so hard I scared the children in front of me. Truth.

This is by no means breaking news, but it’s good enough to keep sharing: Pixar has made an absolutely GORGEOUS fake website for the fictional company that produces the eponymous WALL•E.

Called ‘Buy n Large’, the website is more a masterpiece of social commentary than a background for an upcoming movie. A children’s movie, if you recall. Aside from being visually flawless, the site is deep: every link goes somewhere, and almost every page has something worth reading on it. If you know what is good for you, you’ll read the tiny link to the Privacy Policy at the bottom of each page. Even if you are someone that has ever had to work on corporate websites or use stock photography of “perfect” employees, something about Buy n Large will make you want to simultaneously applaud for Pixar and shoot horse tranquilizers directly into your heart. Because the comedy? Very, very close to reality.

Once upon a time there were two girls. One of them was named BattleGate and the other one was named Subspace. One day Subspace was in an argument with a co-worker because Subspace wanted to listen to the Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack and the co-worker wanted to listen to the new Madonna album. BattleGate, an innocent bystander, overheard this and later asked Subspace: “So, you like science fiction?”

And that, folks, is history.

Well, wait. There’s more to the story. Not long after that, BattleGate asked Subspace if she wanted to go to a thing called Norwescon. Both of the girls were very shy and as you introverts know, making any new friend is as big a deal as asking someone on a date; things are hesitant, awkward, and there’s a terrible, lasting and fragile moment where you are absolutely certain that you’ve just made a fool of yourself and you’ll have to go back onto your diet of Suzy Qs and self-loathing. But fate smiled upon the two girls, and BattleGate brought her man-friend and Subspace, in lieu of a man-friend, brought her dad (listen – if anything I have ever said has ever granted me more nerd-cred than that last confession, I’d like to see it) and they all crammed into a tiny microcar of some foreign persuasion and thundered to a fantastic realm called SeaTac.

It was at Norwescon that Subspace and BattleGate realized they were the mythical Best Friends Forever. Like all true love, it was unspeakable and sacred. But what they really, really discovered was this: while watching the nerdiest of the nerdy, the dorkiest of the dorky, the geekiest of the geeky, they saw one another blush with a lightly embarrassed but mostly proud defiance. This is me, they seemed to challenge each other. Can you handle it? And more importantly, are you willing to take a shiv for it? That last part is largely hypothetical.

I’m going to switch to first person now, because I’m tired.

From that day forth I felt I’d passed a silent, secret test. Not just with BattleGate, but with myself. There is a boundary with scifi/fantasy/comi-cons that is too easily crossed, where you imagine yourself different from these people, you believe that you have perspective. But there is no purgatory between mocking and participating: you either are or you aren’t. An instant of mockery and I’d feel no hesitation hissing “traitor” at you before running off to sign you up for Scientology newsletters online. We might not all be comfortable being a chubby Slave Leia or a profoundly obscure Anime Cosplayer, but for those of us that are, I got your back.

All photos on this page taken by Apelad at Megacon 2008. All hail Apelad!

Between Dreamhost hiccups and a snowstorm, our communications laser is experiencing problems. Stand by while we crush some minion windpipes with our minds.

We here at GalacticMu are all poor poor poor, but we pretend it’s just a “character-building” phase by keeping voluminous bookmark files of items we’d like to accumulate.  Here’s a round-up of ideas. Click on the images to link to the items.

Sadly described as a “tongue-in-cheek” gift, these robot gloves are high fashion as far as I am concerned. Made from light gray suede, I wish they were fitted for daily use instead of heavy labor, but you know what they say: if wishes were rocket fuel, I’d be halfway to Betelgeuse by now. I’d also like to point out that they are described as “painted graffiti style on [the glove]“. Uh. Does this mean the paint is sprayed on with an aerosol can? Because it certainly isn’t “graffiti style” art. Terrible copy aside, they are not badly priced at $20.

If I had the freedom to purchase whatever I wanted (what do they call that again? “rich”?) one of the first things I’d get is this ring. There are a few different jewelers on the internet doing variations on the theme, but the folks over at Arizona Skies Meteorites seem to have the nicest. I can’t vouch for actual quality or anything, but I sure wish I could. In case what you’re looking at isn’t immediately clear to you, the center band is a unbroken ring of Gibeon meteorite, surrounded by a band of metal (in this case platinum). If the ring isn’t your bag, the same website sells items ranging from “heirloom quality” spacecraft models to fossilized bear teeth. Prices are not currently listed, but it has to be less than a diamond ring.

I generally don’t fall for that “let’s have everything in white porcelain” shtick all the cool design kids are pushing, but this 10-inch tall factory vase is appealing to me. I’m not sure it is $70 appealing to me, but nevertheless: Tolkien famously railed against the encroaching factory destruction of his country, now you can sculpt tiny Uruk-hai to complete the scene.

I’ve had my eye on these astronaut cutting boards for about a year now, and they’ve always been sold out. Some day, though… some day they will actually make some for sale. Apparently they hand-position the little astronaut and his flag for each board so that the flag seems appropriately placed in a knot/lunar lump. They’re made from acacia wood and decently large (9×13) for the $40 price tag.