Such great heights…

Does Battlestar Galactica have the worst ending in the history of Science Fiction? This is quite possible though I wouldn’t go that far (though the linked piece makes a pretty awesome case that it is). That is not to say it wasn’t terrible but there had to be worst ending BSG’s – mean all of the Stargate shows had endings right?

As anyone who spoke to me in the hours after the finale can attest, I found the whole thing deeply upsetting.

My biggest problem with the ending is two fold: the whole thing ended up being a theistic claptrap and the whole anti-technology message.

Theism: The idea that entire show was some plan from god is so frustrating because it completely ruins the entire religious conflict of the show. The of the great things about Battlestar was its treatment of religion and religious conflict. It was interesting and different than any TV show I’ve seen before. Religion was a fundamentally human (or Cylon) creation in much of the show (particularly early).  People (and Cylons) – even those on share the same ‘beliefs’ in the abstract – are driven by their faiths in different directions. Again, it was a very compelling and “realistic” treatment of faith.

But all of this is undone by making “god” a concrete entity with its own terribly stupid plan. The multiplicity of faith in the series gone there is only one true god and this prattling head-angels. And you know, I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this if god’s plan even made sense in retrospect – but nope, it doesn’t in the least. Here “god” is a stand-in for everytime Ron Moore and his writers were sitting in the writer’s room drinking a few beers and said to one another “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this crazy improbable thing?”

Anti-technology: I just can not buy that a space traveling species would be so willing – and so easily – give up their technology to sit around and hang out with cavemen. I mean the whole thing is very sudden, Lee is like “Technology sux” and everyone else is like “Dude, you’re right!” It is so hamfisted that it is clear that Moore is hitting you over the head with the message stick. Moore is saying – to me at least -  that technology is the fundamental cause of everyone’s problems not their own actions. This is just wrong and like making everything “god’s plan” is a cop-out. Human agency – for good and ill – gone here and replaced with a basically good human nature corrupted by technology. If man could only run free we’ll all be ok! *yawn*

Basically, its clear to me that Battlestar and Ron Moore dropped the ball in BSG’s finale. It did a lot of damage to how the show will be remember. Personally, my love for the show has not disappeared but I do think a lot less of the show than I did before season 4.5.

(via)

You’ve had enough of two-hand touch…

Submitted without comment:

The iPhone has applications for almost everything, from helping people to choose the best wine for a meal to locating supermarkets in Holland. Now there is one to help them to stay chaste until marriage.

For just 59p, consumers can download an application that allows them to take a purity pledge and then display a silver ring on their phone to prove their commitment to abstinence.

Its creator, Island Wall Entertainment, claims the product will appeal to the younger generation and those people who have not already committed themselves to a life of abstinence and chastity.

The company’s director, Henry Bennett, said: “We’re not charging for the idea. We’re just covering our costs. It’s all about reaching a new market. If you wanted to buy a purity ring, you could spend as much as £100.”

The application has a pre-recorded pledge for both genders that the user must accept before being able to display their ring on a loop.

Bennett believes the digital purity ring will complement, rather than substitute, existing pledges and purity rings as well, as reach out to new demographic.

…

Asked whether the virtual nature of the ring might lead people to forget their vow of abstinence in the heat of the moment, Bennett replied: “If you’ve taken the pledge, you’re likely to follow it through.”

(via)

Daddy issues…

Submitted without comment:

Superman may be viewed as cinematic damaged goods these days, but the same can’t be said about his co-creator, Joe Shuster – His mob-funded bondage art past is about to become the subject of a major motion picture.The Gotham Group has picked up the movie rights to Craig Yoe’s wonderful Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster, which reveals Shuster’s work on the controversial BDSM underground comic series The Nights of Terror from the 1950s, during a time where he had become estranged from Superman’s publisher DC Comics. The comics – which feature lookalikes of Superman, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor in various scenes of S&M play – were named as an inspiration behind a crime spree of the era that involved murder, torture and humiliation of victims.

Tejas freedom…

Submitted without comment from our friends in Texas:

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

…

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good — and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good — and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.

The real tragedy is that your act is just boring and old…

For those of you still reading this blog is been pretty clear that there has been a content draught for the last few months. Yet again – and it was entirely my fault. There are many reasons for this – for example, I did not realize how physically exhausting working  full-time again would be. But these are just exuses. I dropped the ball – yet again.

So, yet again, I’m going to try and pick up the pieces. My goal is to have at least one item up here every weekday – even if it’s just a small submitted without comment or linkblogging piece. The aim is to start small and move on from there.

As always we will see where it goes.

the words she knows, the tune she hums…

Submitted without comment:

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks. But metal had its rivals for the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and metal’s own competing mutations. The competition forced metal’s leading edge to metamorphose into harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching its apex with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-80s. Death Metal was as violent, Satanic and musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so it seemed.

And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man character in this dumb, bloody saga, comes in. Norway is not only a completely humorless society (it banned Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for being too offensive, leading to ads in rival Sweden boasting that the movie was “so funny it was banned in Norway!”), but worse, a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland, caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which raises an interesting question: Do boredom and blandness “count” as real suffering, and if so, do they justify murder the way other forms of oppression make murder seem a likely, even understandable response? The Black Metalists of Norway think so.

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its own as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously had changed his name to “Dead,” offed himself with a shotgun. His friend and lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered Dead’s brains splattered all over their apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is run down to the village store to buy film, run back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead’s corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then call the cops. Now that is fuckin’ cool, dude.

…

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying contemporary America’s glorious imperial war machine right at the very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these grown-up war nerds are.

(via)

“But in the past ten years that’s really changed. Things like Japanese anime have really brought a lot more women and girls to the show.”

The ultimate submitted without comment:

I was more than a little surprised when my friendly neighborhood comic-book-store clerk told me she was looking forward to this year’s New York Comic Con because “conventions are all about the sex.”Yeah, right, I thought. In other news, the world is flat and simultaneous orgasms occur readily outside of Smallville fan fics.

“Really,” she said. “It’s all these people you see only a couple of times a year at hotels, you’re all into the same things, people are dressed up, you’ve been flirting online for months…It’s pretty hot.”

Hmm…it seemed logical, as Spock might say, but all those clunky costumes, those awkward people—was it even physically possible? There was only one way to find out: I had to don cape and cowl and infiltrate the nerd hordes to see for myself if these geek gatherings are actually hook-up havens.

There are more than 100 fan-based sci-fi-related conventions each year in the U.S., but the granddaddy of them all is San Diego Comic-Con. The not-for-profit show began in 1970 with 300 comic-book junkies gathering in the basement of the U.S. Grant Hotel, according to David Glanzer, the event’s director of PR and marketing. While notable guests did include legendary comics creator Jack Kirby (Captain America, the Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk) and sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury, it seems safe to say that that show was not “all about the sex.”

Its name and venue varied, but the event became an annual shindig, eventually finding a permanent home in the San Diego Convention Center. Other media have gradually moved in on the action, too, including the videogame industry and movie and television studios, all of which use Comic-Con as a launching pad for anything with a sci-fi angle. The show has generated bona fide star power in recent years, with actors making the rounds in superhero garb. Tickets for last year’s event sold out weeks in advance, and attendance reached 126,000, according to Glanzer.

Sure, but was that 126,000 paunchy men with goatees giving Vulcan nerve pinches and re-enacting epic lightsaber battles (the literal and, quite possibly, the figurative kind)? “It used to be pretty male-dominated,” says Glanzer. “But in the past ten years that’s really changed. Things like Japanese anime have really brought a lot more women and girls to the show. Last year attendees were about 40 percent female.”

…

“A friend I’d met at SDCC introduced me to this illustrator online and we started talking, mostly about graphic novels,” says Cathy, 30, a lithe brunette photographer who loves indie comics and attends several conventions a year. “At Wizard World in L.A. a few months later, I felt someone brush my arm from behind, and—it was so weird; we’d never met—I knew immediately it was him.“The attraction was instantaneous,” she continues. “Within an hour of meeting we were full-on making out behind the convention center. I went back to his hotel room an hour after that, which is something I would never normally do if I met a guy in a bar or wherever. We ended up dating for three years.”

A similar chemical reaction occurred between writers at rival comics publishers DC and Marvel when David Gallaher saw Valerie D’Orazio speaking on a panel at the 2007 New York Comic Con.

“She was this cute blonde, and I was just captivated by what she had to say,” Gallaher says. The feeling was mutual: When Gallaher, 34, stood to ask a question, D’Orazio says she made a silent bargain with God that she would never ask for anything again if she could get with Gallaher.

After the panel the two started chatting, and D’Orazio—a writer for Marvel’s upcoming Cloak and Dagger title—told Gallaher that she, uh, wanted to discuss some scripts. Gallaher, a DC writer currently working on High Moon, was a little slow to get the hint, but eventually the two got together. On their first date, they saw Ghost Rider—a movie based on the flaming-skulled Marvel hero. For date No. 2, Gallaher had an artist draw D’Orazio a custom picture of Supergirl. “Our third date was more intimate,” says Gallaher. “I don’t think any superheroes were involved.”

Two years later they’re still together, but not all hook-ups at these events have to blossom into true dork-love. After spending their convention days hawking illustrations in Artists’ Alley, or standing in line to get autographs from the cast of Heroes, attendees have a chance to get their intergalactic freak on once the lights go down in the exhibit hall.

The big cons—SDCC, NYCC, and Alternative Press Expo—all have VIP parties with open bars, which can lubricate the social interaction for sure. You’re not going to go home with Jessica Alba in her fuck-tastic Fantastic Four garb, but as Vic Holtreman of ScreenRant.com notes, “There’s a lot of hitting on people and flirting; there’s a feeling of community.” And any celebs in tow are well aware that a review from a popular fan site can make or break a sci-fi movie, so they’re at their most approachable.
The VIP rooms are nice, but percentages are better if you cast your line in more local waters. “There are a lot of hotel parties in people’s rooms. You just bring some booze; everyone is always really friendly,” says Eva, a 27-year-old who works in publishing. “My friends and I want to do things on the cheap, so we often cram a bunch of people—six or more—into a room, and sometimes we take shifts sleeping.”The Do Not Disturb sign gets a workout all weekend, says Eva, who was a very naughty elf at I-CON last year. (That’s short for Island Convention, an eclectic annual event held in Suffolk County, Long Island). “I’d been dressed as an elf from Lord of the Rings, and went back to this guy’s room,” she says. “All of our clothes were gone, and we were sort of crashing into walls, then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I noticed that I’d left my pointy ears on, and I just started laughing. It kind of broke the mood.” This, friends, is the fantasy-nerd equivalent of black dress socks.

Mary, an 18-year-old college student and longtime conventiongoer, sums up the Comic-Con hook-up phenomenon most succinctly. “People who are awkward feel more comfortable at conventions because they assume all comic-book people are awkward as well,” she says. “So they’re like, ‘I’m awkward, you’re awkward—let’s flirt.’ ”

…

“There’s no denying that you get hit on constantly when you’re in costume,” says Kristin, a 21-year-old paleontology student poured into the court-jester costume of Joker’s gal, Harley Quinn. “I love being able to wear interesting, sexy outfits that appeal to me aesthetically while also showing off my body. It’s the best of both worlds; you can be a geek and still look hot!”

Lauren, an investment banker who’s dressed in DC heroine Black Canary’s black leotard and signature fishnet tights, agrees. “It’s different than being out in the real world, even if you’re wearing something revealing, because people are assuming you’re a character,” says the 27-year-old. It also provides readymade opening lines. “One guy just asked for my number. He said, ‘I don’t see Green Arrow [Canary’s on-again/off-again love interest] around, so I figured you’re free.’ Hey, it’s better than, ‘What’s your sign?’ ”

A high school student named Jill spends a good ten minutes explaining that her costume—from some Japanese anime cartoon—is actually a variation of a male character’s costume, which makes the skimpy top a little confusing. “Guys find gender play really hot,” says the 16-year-old, with a frightening amount of authority. “I always hook up at conventions.”

And by doing nothing more than donning a feather boa (fandom unclear), Bill, who writes indie comics—and who, feather boa notwithstanding, is into girls—informs me that he met his “24-hour lover” during a preshow party the night before.

“She just came over and said, ‘Don’t you look fabulous,’ and then we went to her place,” he says. “I think she took ‘24 hours’ quite literally; we didn’t make it to the show until a 5 P.M. screening.”

(via)

Stay classy, Brian!

Brian Michael Bendis on Wonder Woman v. Spider-Woman:

Spider-Woman is cooler than Wonder Woman in every way possible. Wonder Woman’s got a pipply ass! she’s the pipply ass of comics!!

Here is Bendis expanding upon his argument:

Spider-Woman has better hair, better costume, frank cho implants and a fucked up origin. Wonder Woman is a walking std farm!!

I know this is part of the whole Marvel v. DC PR male privilege fanboy outrage machine something or other. But still. These sort of things are an insult to Bendis’ dignity.

Really, such things are just horrible – even about fictional superwomen.

(via)

Superman, optimism, & DOOM…

Did you know that optimism and Superman are DOOMED in America?

While, its true! Or at least Valerie D’Orazio and Erik Buckman would like you to think so. Here’s Buckman:

So let’s break this down into superheroes and its current trend in film. “Superman Returns,” the 2006 Bryan Singer dirge, didn’t fail because audiences no longer resonate with a super being that can fly, shoot heat from his eyes and is immune to bullets. It failed because Superman is the epitome of good morals and justice, which today’s audience find boring and childish.

It’s hard to give that kind of guy an edge unless he’s under some sort of spell. Perhaps if Clark picked up a crack whore and painted her with feces, then he’d be approaching “cool” again. “The Big Blue Boy Scout” as he is called by cynical fanboys and Guy Gardener, only works in a patriotic America. Changing him through some sort of rebranding effort or Warner reboot won’t make things different.

All of that seems a little (a lot?) shrill to me.

I mean, couldn’t Superman Returns have failed not because  Americans are over morals and justice but because Superman Returns was a shitty movie?

Could it be that people didn’t want to watch a movie where Superman spends most of his time stalking Lois Lane? Perhaps they didn’t want to watch a movie where Superman knocked up Lois and then left for space for like 8 years? Or maybe they didn’t want to watch what was essentially a remake – with better special effects – of the original Superman movie? Perhaps a movie about a man who has awesome powers yet barely uses them through the 2 hour + film isn’t going to be a blockbuster smash? And seriously, is a movie where Kumar beats the shit out of Superman really going to make waves?

Yeah. It was movie goers and the American people who failed Superman Returns, not Bryan Singer who failed movie goers. Optimism and morals are dead in America!

Or maybe things aren’t so bleak. Perhaps optimistic, fun movies can succeed along with dark, brooding films like The Dark Knight. Well, if those movies don’t suck.

If only there was a recent film that could prove my point… hmm…

Oh wait, there is.

Clearly, we are DOOMED.

Answer for what exactly?

Jim Cramer:

No one wants to suffer a beat-down. No one wants to be humiliated or embarrassed. I was shocked at [host Jon Stewart's] behavior. I wish he knew about my background, and I wish he knew about a lot of things that I had done, because I think he would’ve thanked me instead of attacked me…I think the attack on CNBC and the attacks on me were gravely misplaced. It was rather remarkable in that it was so clear that his goal was to just destroy me. One day he’ll answer for it.

If Cramer could provide a list of all of the great shit he’s done it would make things much easier.