science fiction
« Previous EntriesReview: Serenity Found
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe
edited by Jane Espenson
Rating: 3 out of 5
What can I say? Meh. Another collection of essays (following the superior Finding Serenity) discoursing on the deep meanings to be found in the universe of Firefly, a short-lived TV series as well as Serenity, its major-picture [...]
Contata (2)
Thursday, June 26th, 2008So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it [...]
Contata (1)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via type) folk music — [...]
Star Wars at 31
Sunday, March 30th, 2008Apparently Spike TV is running all of the Star Wars movies as a “mega saga event” over the course of the next weekend. I happened to come across their “ultimate trailer” online, which stitches together bits from all six movies. And strung together like that, all those bits suddenly make clear what’s gone [...]
Lunacon 51 (2)
Saturday, March 15th, 2008Lunacon 51 (2)
Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.
The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that [...]
Lunacon 51 (1)
Friday, March 14th, 2008Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct [...]
Another propaganda poster
Sunday, August 26th, 2007As has been usual, this is another exhortation to “Work to Win”. My “study” of WWI and WWII posters indicates that almost all fell into the “Work harder” or “Buy more bonds” categories. True to form, this poster says, “Victory up here… begins down here“. Overhead are a Retro Rocketship and a [...]
The Mongrel Dogs at Sea (4): Review: Next
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007Insta Rating: 4 out of 5
OK, it’s a little odd to be reviewing a movie when I’m supposed to be off on a wonderful cruise. But as mentioned before I was pretty wiped out, so I decided to take advantage of the onboard movie theater and catch Next starring Nicholas Cage and Jessica Biel. [...]
New Poster: Ready?
Friday, July 27th, 2007I’ve got a new, rarer “landscape” poster ready. It shows two Zarkov rockets at a docking tower, with crew running to man the ships. A DV snub fighter is lifting in the background, and the ever-lovable jetpack guy has just launched himself. The tag is “They’re Ready to Do Their Part … [...]
New Poster: Loose Lips…
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007This is a variant of a classic saying from the Second World War: “Loose Lips Crash Ships!. Of course, in the original, it’s “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and the image is of a cargo ship going down beneath the waves. Well, cargo ship clearly becomes rocket ship… but then I was stuck. [...]
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