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Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The Fate of the Universe (as told by Wikipedia)

The universe is expanding. The universe looks (from our vantage) like it's expanding in every direction. No, we're not the center of the universe. It's like we're a raisin in a ball of rising raisin bread dough.

Even more creepy... The expansion is accelerating. It's as if the vacuum of space has a magic force that acts to push things apart, and is stronger than gravity over great distances. As the gaps get bigger so does the vacuum energy. So one day the universe will rend itself apart.

But don't let that prevent you from sleeping at night. The universe will have used all of the high quality energy leaving only borderline useless heat energy. Burnt out pulsars, black holes, frozen planetoids, and other bits of deary randomness will be all thats left. But before that the sun will have long since swollen up; either cooking Earth to a crisp or cooking it and then eating it.

That might be a blow to the positive thinkers in the crowd. Cheer up! This may not be the only universe around.

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# posted by Max : 11/28/2006 12:20:00 AM 0 comments

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Neo-SciFi

Star Wars is over. Did you notice? This leaves a big hole in the universe of new SciFi content. I don't have TV, so I'm certainly not up on all the latest offerings but I do see a glimmer of a trend. I'll call it Neo-SciFi. Why? well because I want to coin a popular term (though it already seems in danger of being shortened to Neo-Fi). But I digress.

What is this Neo-SciFi you speak of? Its SciFi but with a new direction. Old SciFi is often typified by bad cliches:

  • False Drama - "Gads the Robo-Mutant-Aliens are attacking, again!".
  • One Dimensional Characters - the Dashing Idealistic Captain, the Buxom Nurse/Doctor/Psychic, or the Brash Loner Rebel
  • The Magic Episode Reset Button - "Last week I got my stomach blown out, but this week I'm great!".
  • Idiotic and Impotent Bad Guys - Week after week supposedly dangerous bad guys unload massive stock piles of ammunition and take heavy casualties; all while not putting a scratch in the good guys.
  • Next Time on a Special Blossom - Uh oh, all the episodes are mostly the same! Better throw in a moral lesson episode. It's wrong to borrow without asking. "Glue, I need Glue!".
  • Laser Pellets - Space fighters fly like jets, there is lots of sound in space, everyone and everything has a laser/photon/blaster on it. Lasers shoot pellets instead of beams, All planets are just like earth, all aliens are just people with bad acne.
  • Uh, Its The Radiation - All this crazy technology, but because the gewiz-a-ma-hicky could solve everything and leave you with no episode; either we have to conveniently forget we have it or its magically disabled by an ion storm.

It's no wonder that female readers (and a good fraction of the males) probably stopped reading as soon as I said Star Wars. Further, its no wonder I don't have a date tonight.

Neo-SciFi is more drama and less SciFi. Like a good drama its motivated by characters, the interplay between them, the choices they make, the consequences of those choices, and how that forms a feed-back loop to the characters themselves. Further, in a good drama this is largely grounded by some gist of reality. This new trend is typified by Serenity/Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and to a lesser extent Enterprise.

My blurb Here is unlikely to convert anyone. But If your on the edge about sci-fi you might want to add the first season of Battlestar Galactica and the Serenity movie to your Netflix cue.

Oh, and when the first Oscar for "Best Neo-SciFi" is given out you'll remember that you read it here first.

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# posted by Max : 1/19/2006 06:17:00 PM 0 comments

Montana Bloggers:

This great list was stolen from A History of Montana by Kodak.
Welcome to MikeAbleXray. You look like you could use a drink.