Joss Whedon's upcoming series Dollhouse is about people who can be temporarily programmed with any personality or skills. The Actives, as they're called, spend time between missions at a facility called The Dollhouse, where they have only rudimentary personalities of their own, and their names reflect this; the characters announced so are called Echo, Sierra, Victor, and November. Get it? They're named according to the phonetic alphabet.
James Lileks dug up an amazing bit of pop-culture this week: a TV commercial in which none other than Ray Bradbury appears, hawking Sunsweet pitted prunes. No kidding. Check it out:
At the end of his post (it's the most recent one at the moment, the permalink isn't working) Lileks writes, citing Bradbury's own words, "It's true: he didn't mention prunes in any of his stories." But is this true? The answer may shock you!
Having now seen the WeRobot shirt from ChopShop (via, via), I can't help but treat it as a quiz. How many of these robots can you identify based on their silhouettes? (My answers after the jump.)
Heads up, Firefly/Serenity fans: one of my favorite authors, Steven Brust, has released his Firefly novel My Own Kind of Freedom (previously mentioned here) as freely-downloadable fanfic. That's free as in beer! Now, I'm not the sort of person who uses the word squee, but I have to tell you, when I saw the novel had finally been released, it was a near thing. It always gives me a special thrill When Fandoms Collide. If only we could figure out a way to get the ghost of Robert Heinlein writing BSG fanfic...hmm, or maybe Buffy fanfic would be more up his alley...
I suppose confusion is understandable—the names are so similar, after all—but I think it's important that we get this straight once and for all. So pay close attention:
Over at Polite Dissent (previously mentioned here), one of the regular features is titled "Your Moment of Psychic Nosebleed Zen". In it, intrepid physician and medicine-in-comics blogger Scott writes about instances of a very common trope in comics and science fiction. To quote the TV Tropes Wiki:
Purely mental battles are hard to show with special effects. Therefore, when a character with psychic powers pushes them to the limit, or when a character is under mental attack, often you'll see a thin trickle of blood oozing from their nose.
Recently, Scott posed a question to his readers: what was the first appearance of the psychic nosebleed, in comics, literature, or film?
Check out this awesome video mashup. I hope you relish it as much as I:
Most linguisticky moment: "smoking caterpillar"—the edit is in just the right place to get you to reanalyze hookah-smoking caterpillar in the intended way. The "remember" bit is clever too—referencing a scene from Wrath of Khan by using a similar scene from TOS without breaking up the visual feel of the video.
It's amazing how close to the surface the drug subtext was in Trek. For a similar mashup addressing a different subtext, see Closer [NSFW].
I was too busy to write up a response the
first time I saw this
list of the 50 "most significant" SF books mentioned, but now
somebody else I know has written about
it, so it must be destiny. I bow to the inevitable.
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