Heroes returns Monday, with a new creative team, and hopefully with an improved show. But even if it isn’t, rest assured I’ll still be here with a fresh batch of LOLheroes every week. In honor of the second half of the season, I’ve compiled the 50+ LOLheroes from the first half on one page, created a few new ones, and I’M GIVING AWAY A PRIZE.
In the comments, let me know WHICH THREE of these were your favorites. If I get enough votes between now and Monday, I’ll add them up, and let you know which were the top-ranked. Everybody who participates will be placed in a drawing for a free hardcover edition of the Heroes: Volume 1 graphic novel, which compiles all 34 web mini-comics from Season One.
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My latest web discovery is Modern Mechanix — a blog that specializes in posting articles and advertisements from decades ago that showcase all sorts of cool and weird glimpses at the current day, as well as a range of both wildly inaccurate and uncannily prescient guesses about the future. I can never get enough of chuckling over the kind of technology that people half a century ago believed we would have by now. With that in mind, here are few of my favorites …
You’ll Own “Slaves” by 1965 (written January 1957)
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/04/10/youll-own-slaves-by-1965/
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A friend of mine gave me a heads up about a television show I definitely plan to watch as soon as it makes its way across the pond from the UK. It’s called Being Human and deals with: “George, Mitchell and Annie, three seemingly normal flatmates struggling to keep their dark secrets from the world, and follows their struggle to fight both their curses and the enemies who want to bring them down.” Their secrets? Mitchell’s a vampire, George is a werewolf, and Annie is a ghost. I know, right? I’m betting I can even get my wife to watch this one with me.
BBC ran the pilot for Being Human last year, and it scored wild ratings. Now it’s back this month with a re-shot pilot (some of the original actors were recast) and five more episodes. If you search around on YouTube, you can apparently find the original pilot chopped up into parts. And if you happen to live in the UK (or have the software necessary to trick BBC into thinking you live in the UK), you can watch the first two episodes on the BBC site. If you do, let me know what you think.
This week on Battlestar Galactica, for better or worse, there is no talk at all of Earth or the Fifth Cylon. Which I’m guessing will piss some people off. But on the plus(?) side, Adama and Roslin DO shag, after Roslin rejects more chemo in favor of living what’s left of her life to the fullest. That’s right. Two old tore up people — one by alcohol, the other by cancer — doin the nasty. Try to get THAT visual out of your head. Fortunately, we only see them post-coitus. And is it just me, or did anybody else flash back to the bald chick from the first Star Trek movie there at the end?
Anyway, although Tyrol and Callie also presumably shagged at some point, it apparently wasn’t soon enough in their relationship to have made Tyrol their baby’s baby daddy. That honor goes instead to “that guy” we always see hanging around the hangar deck, whom a drunken and disillusioned Tyrol beats the frak out of and puts in charge of watching his sick not-kid. Which now officially makes Hera the only Human-Cylon hybrid on the show … that we KNOW of.
And in political news, Adama is pissing off much of the fleet — civilians and soldiers alike — by fortifying the alliance with the rebel Cylons and attempting to install Cylon FTLs on all ships. Tom Zarek & the Quorum (whose next gig will be at the Marriott off exit 40 in Parsippany next Friday) are fomenting anti-Cylon dissent from the top down, and one-legged Felix Gaeta (with Zarek’s guidance) is holding secret meetings and riling folks up from the inside out. And my guess is that it’s all going to get very ugly, very fast. Mutiny, anyone?
Freakgirl just turned me on to “Superuseless Superpowers”, a website dedicated to cataloging superpowers that would be particularly useless. Pictured below is “13th Bullet Bulletproof” …
Battlestar Galactica is back, for the first of the final ten episodes. The story picks up exactly where it left off last June (which, by the way, was about 3 months too frakking long), with the humans and Cylons standing on the shore of a seemingly ruined Earth. And as far as I’m concerned, it did not disappoint at all. As promised, questions are being answered and mysteries are being revealed.
Here’s the Top 5 for this episode …
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Every once in a while, somebody tries to recapture the genie in a bottle that was “Sci-Fi Movies in the 50s”. It’s not an easy task. Ask today’s “sophisticated” audiences, and they’ll tell you that one of the reasons “campy” movies like Forbidden Planet and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers worked so well in the 50s is that people simply didn’t know any better. They didn’t know what would one day be possible in a post-CGI world, and therefore embraced the best they could get.
As we sit and wait for the visual extravaganza that will be Terminator: Salvation this year, it’s easy to dismiss a movie like the original The Day the Earth Stood Still as simple and unexciting by comparison. After all, it’s in black and white, and the special effects are so OBVIOUS, and the alien looks like a normal man. And yet, while I haven’t seen it yet, by most accounts the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves was a huge letdown … despite being in color and having a multi-million dollar special effects budget. Likewise, I personally wasn’t all that impressed with Spielberg’s CGI-laden 2005 retelling of The War of the Worlds. Bigger and fancier doesn’t always equate to better.
All of which is my pretense for talking about an independent flick due out later this year, called Alien Trespass, produced and directed by X-Files alum R.W. Goodwin.
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Have you always suspected that your midi-chlorian level is high? That with the proper training, you could lift a large vehicle out of a muddy swamp? That some days, it almost feels as if you really COULD lift your boss off his feet and choke him with nothing more than the power of your mind? Well, young padawan, the time has come to stop being a poseur and find out for sure.
For the low price of just $90-100 (hey the fate of the galaxy might be at stake here!), you’ll soon be able to purchase The Force Trainer. For real. Kind of. With the help of a wireless headset, this toy apparently reads your EEG waves, and based on how focused your brain is, moves a “training sphere” (which looks suspiciously like a ping pong ball) up a tube, accompanied by some sound effects. It’s not much … but you know you want to try it!
What intrigues me about this more than anything else is wondering how long it will take for Nintendo to adapt this kind of technology to the Wii.
A good friend and occasional commenter here, Greater Czarina (a.k.a. Hildy Silverman), happens to own and publish and operate a great quarterly magazine called Space and Time. It’s been around for more than 40 years, and deals in what she calls “strange and unusual fiction, poetry, and art” of the fantasy, horror, and science fiction variety.
As somebody who mostly reads genre fiction these days, when Hildy bought the book a few years ago, I was thrilled by the news. I’ve really enjoyed reading the issues every few months, and really really enjoy knowing somebody WHO OWNS A MAGAZINE. Seriously, how cool is that?
Another personal bonus is that Space and Time gave me the opportunity to live out a lifelong dream — writing a comic book. Well … half a comic book anyway. A 10-page story that has played out over the course of a year, and was illustrated with much brilliance by Jeremy Simser, another good friend of mine who draws storyboards for a living. The final 4-page installment appears in Issue #106, which hits the shelves any day now. So visit the website — which I recently redesigned — and learn how you can subscribe to this magazine, read some great fiction and poetry, and support a fellow gagglefrakker.
(Note to self: “gagglefrakker” sounds like a really nasty word. Never use it again.)
Edited to add: I just added to the site the first 6 pages of the comic story. Enjoy!
