GalacticMu

I would like this to put on my car STAT, okay?

Crafted by GalacticMu’s very own Halcyon “Mike” Snow/Peterson/Ragnarök, aka The Rat, aka Many Names MacGuff.  If you don’t know what it means, I suggest you start by visiting the Space Bat Memorial and move on from there.

Almost two months ago, some teenagers from Spain launched a camera into space with a weather balloon.  Yeah, that’s right.  They recovered their camera, published the photos and are now dining at the long, laden dining table of Scientific Gluttony.  I’m painfully jealous, of course.

Jordi Fanals (not a teenager), Gerard Marull, Martí Gasull, Jaume Puigmiguel, and Sergi Saballs rest easy in the knowledge that they’ll never have to dance for erlenmeyer flask money again.

One of my favorite websites, The Big Picture, has a selection of the kids’ photos up today, as well as a link to the kids’ Flickr set of of images should you want to peruse them.  I think the second comment on The Big Picture page captures the sentiment of the moment: “SCIENCE!”

[The Big Picture's "Scenes from 30,000 meters above"]

[The kids' Flickr page (all in Spanish, naturally)]

¹At my high school, attendance at football pep rallys was mandatory.  I found this to be unfathomably torturous, so I pretended I had principals and sat outside reading a book instead.  When I was caught, I announced I would stage protests until such time that the school found it prudent to hold science or art pep rallys in addition to the football ones.  I was sent to detention.  In the library.   Morons.

It should come as no surprise that of the few soft areas left in my heart, one of them is for Carl Sagan.  If it’s been a long time or – don’t even tell me if this is the case, my rage glands will burst – if you’ve never seen it, now’s your chance: Sagan’s seminal Cosmos is now playing at Hulu, all 13 episodes of it.

Carry on, Space Buddy.  Carry on.  <–Just to give you an idea of what a nerd I am, typing that just unexpectedly made me cry.

[Update: and Quantum Leap and Dark Shadows! The Dark Shadows remake!]

I’m certain every jackass and their dog will weigh in on the Sci Fi/Syfy Channel reveal, so we here at GalacticMu of course got straight to it, though our dog is a slow typer and will take a little longer.

Dead.

If you haven’t caught it yet, the Sci Fi Channel has rebranded themselves as just Syfy, a move that triggers extreme suspicion on our part.  In fact, I’m having such a hard time keeping my thoughts wrangled that I need to start a list.

1.
Rebranding is almost always a bad idea.  Rebranding often comes in the face of waning interest, an attempt to catch up with the public’s new tastes.  This is most often seen in a product that hasn’t grown with it’s audience, allowing itself to become dated.  However, the network claims to have had it’s best year ever and thus, it has decided that it needed the phrase that makes my eyes shoot ochre jelly, the dreaded “reboot”.  This leaves us to ask, what for?  The problem with encouraging viewer/customer loyalty is that you can’t just go switching it all around every time a focus group says “duh”.

2.
The resounding implication that science fiction is lame.  How else are we to take it?  Sci Fi Channel’s own press release repeatedly throws around the phrase “imagination-based entertainment,” a phrase, I’m disturbed to have to point out, that just means “fiction”.  There’s an argument they seem to hover around making that science fiction just isn’t enough, pointing out that they are opening themselves up for programming that contains “(…) fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure.”  That sounds fine.  Except these things are all, with the exception of “reality” which triggers a Jonesie-vs-Alien hiss in me, still capable of being science fiction.  In fact, what they are implying is that scifi can’t be mysterious, or that scifi can’t be adventurous — which is totally wrong; science fiction is almost by definition mysterious, and has a long, rich history of adventure, action, the supernatural and the fantasic.  I’ve read the press release over and over again and what I keep coming away with is “We don’t want to be seen with you nerds anymore.”

3.
The Sci Fi Channel has pulled this shit before.  Remember, these are the people that canceled the popular and award-winning Farscape out of a grudge match and just last year announced that the whole channel needed to be “human, warmer, friendlier” in order to attract more female viewers.  (Meanwhile, Ghost Hunters, a profound piece of shit of a show, has been greenlit for a 6th season.)  On one hand they offer actual money for science fiction TV to be made (Jane Espenson [Buffy, BSG] and Rockne O’Bannon [Farscape] are teaming up this year on Warehouse 13, for nerd-boner example) but they don’t actually have a personal interest.  The idea is to have a hit, however they can aquire one.  There’s nothing stopping them from making a reality dating show, and I’m sure it’s a matter of months before that’s actually the case.

4.
Syfy?  I just don’t know, guys.   As friends of mine know, this is eerily close to my personal email address (sort of), but I wasn’t planning on launching a TV network with it.  I wish I could say I expected better of you, but I’d be lying.  Perhaps even worse is the new tagline, “Imagine Greater.”  First off, “greater” is a weird fucking word and no one wants to see it.  Secondly, imagine greater what?  Programming?  You guys are digging your own hole here.

Ultimately, I just don’t see these guys living this down any time soon.  Every time someone says the word Syfy they are going to draw it out in consonant-embarrassment, syeee-fyeee.  But I guess this is what happens when we let our shameful geek-habits out of the basement.

This pleases me deeply.

And work. And hospitals. And malls. And so on.

Pure, distilled fluorescence.

Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
Galactic Mu

[Captain's Note:  I could also hear it, and found it so irritating I could only tolerate about five seconds of it.]

• So… remember all that smack I talked about Dollhouse?  Yeah.  I take it all back.  Episode 2: The Target, was excellent and really felt as though it were intended to be the real pilot.  It was grim, sad, gruesome, violent (man, no one has faked tired and terrified as well as Dushku since Veronica Cartwright’s Lambert) and surprised me by creating a strong seed of compassion between Echo and her handler, Langdon – I went from not giving a shit about any of them to really wanting to see how the Buffy/Giles Echo/Langdon relationship pans out.

• Did you miss seeing Blindness?  You shouldn’t have.  While good writing can put a reader into any headspace, seeing the frenetic, identity-killing effects of mass blindness creates a tension that is unparalleled.  A bit of trivia: the actors often wore contact lenses that literally blinded them, making their frustrated, hesitant bumblings genuine.

• After reading an interview by Elizabeth Hand expressing approval of the James Tiptree Jr. biography, I checked it out from the library and haven’t been able to put it down since.  It had been enough for me to know that Tiptree was really a woman posing, successfully and famously, as a man in order to publish her science fiction, but to no one’s surprise but my own there’s a hell of a lot more to the story.  The woman behind Tiptree, Alli Sheldon, was a fascinating, strange, broken, brilliant creature with one of the more bizarre life stories I’ve ever read about. Highly recommended, even with the increasingly pedantic musings on Sheldon’s sexuality.

• Quagmire, our resident space-hobo, gleefully pointed out the hilarity of the military realization that programming robots to kill some humans and not others is harder than it sounds.  Instead of Asimov’s three laws, which prohibit harm to come to a human being, the military has whined for the need of a very Sun Tzu-sounding “warrior code”- one which would allow robots to kill people, but according to certain ethical standards.  The best part?  You can read the 112-page military report yourself!  Really, truly excellent reading, including the discussion of what they’ve termed “rampancy” — robots gone wild!  Oh, the entertainment value!  Seriously, print this thing out, take a drink of bourbon every time you LOL while reading and you’ll be drunk in 5 pages flat (the phrase “a robot’s lack of true Kantian autonomy” made me blow tea out my nose).

As you pass through distant and uncharted galaxies, it is important to remember that alien species often have different cultures than the one you are used to. These differences will almost certainly extend to the realm of culinary choices. Try to remain open minded, even if it means ingesting an ensign.

Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
Galactic Mu

Occasionally I offend even myself, which is why I haven’t published anything about the much-awaited pilot of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.  I made many attempts, to be sure, and none of them came close to the kind of straightforward summary that I can finally achieve:

It was okay.

I feel like a traitor.  I don’t know what else to say; it was just alright.  It felt like a pilot episode, which is to say: it felt grossly overworked and expository, and sadly I can think of recent television pilots that engaged me more (Lie to Me was instantly entertaining to me, for example, despite having similar flaws).   While watching, I distinctly remember thinking, “This is good,” and then immediately afterwards thinking, “Except, kind of not.”  Days later, I’m still in that headspace: it appealed to me in parts, and turned me off in others.

One of my thoughts was regarding the genre of shows where a large, rich clandestine operation exists wholly outside of the public eye.  And my inability to submerge myself into these stories.  My suspicious, conspiracy theorist side knows that in fact the great bulk of governments and corporations are totally occluded from the public eye (for each Enron scandal that makes CNN, how many go their quiet way?) but while watching Dollhouse I still mentally groused “What is stopping these millionares from spilling the beans about the Dollhouse when they’re drunk?  When they want attention?”  The whole scenario felt precarious and fragile, and I am already tired of the constant ‘will they be exposed – find out in the next episode of Dollhouse!’ plotline that is bound to follow.

Oh, these?  There’s no real story.  I tripped, there was an electric fan, you can see where this is going.

There are characters I expected to like and didn’t – in fact, I didn’t connect with anyone.  For example, I like Amy Acker as much as the next Angel fan, but her acting/character was weird.  Was that supposed to be sexual tension between her and Echo?  Because it also felt like she couldn’t remember her lines, which seems unlikely.  Between her gloomy, drifty whispering and the facial scars, I really would have preferred to enter the scene and announce, “Hi, I’m Dr. Mysterious – I mean Saunders, haha, Saunders.”

The question now lingers: did I end up being influenced by the pervasive online negativity?  Who knows.  The important part is that I’m wasting precious mental resources on it.

One year ago today the crew of GalacticMu sat at the cockpit and wondered if they should press the red button.

“Do it,” Sunday said.

“But the rebustable bolsters aren’t online,” Leesa warned.

“Whatever you guys want to do,” said Mike.

“I want it!” Sunday yelled.

“Okay fine, press the button.  I hope you’re prepared for a full plasma purge.”  Leesa tapped at the mainframe keyboard.

“Well, I don’t have a course prepared yet, anyway.”  Sunday pulled out the heaps of maps and glared at them.

“Maps?  No one said there were going to be maps,” Mike said in a shrill voice.

“Captain, I’m an engineer, not a – oh, there we go.  They’re online.”  Leesa smoked two cigarettes at once in celebration.

“I guess we don’t need to know where we’re going just yet.”  Sunday’s eyes drifted back to the button.  “And we’re fully stocked with Dorritos and kippers.”

“And coffee.”

“And puppies.”

“Oh, fuck it.”