The Great Geek Manual

I do think New Year’s resolutions can’t technically be expected to begin on New Year’s Day, don’t you? Since, because it’s an extension of New Year’s Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year’s Day isn’t a good idea as you can’t eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.

- Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, 1996.

Comics

• ComicBook Resources names the Best 100 Comics of 2008. Yes, the top 100. I don’t think I read sixty comics the entire year, which means that there’s about fifty on this list that have been transferred to my shopping list.
• Lists of the Best Comics of 2008 from: Comixology, Creative Loafing, Daily Cross Hatch, Newsrama, NPR, the Village Voice, and Wizard.
• Newsarama interviews Dan DiDio on matter of the DC Universe.

Film

• The latest Batman rumor is that Philip Seymour Hoffman may play the Penguin.
• SciFi Wire takes a behind-the-scenes look at Coraline. The work that went into producing the “The first handmade film shot in 3D.”
• Slashfilm is confident that Warner Brothers won’t kill the Harry Potter series early.

Internet

• FBTB Forums announces the winners of its Steam Wars contest.
• Hold off on the wrist-slitting! io9 provides you Five Reasons To Stay Alive Until 2010 At Least.
• io9 rounds up a gallery of Costumed Crimefighters Who Share the Spirit’s Sense of Style.
• Slice of SciFi takes a moment to remember SciFi luminaries who died in 2008.

Literature

• Lists of the Best Books of 2008 from: Adventures in Reading, Amazon.com, BookGasm, The Detroit Examiner, Fantasy Hotlist, io9, Publisher’s Weekly, Stephen King, Torque Control,

Television

• SF Signal has posted a somewhat bogus list of The Top 8 Time Travel Television Episodes. It dubiously omits Dr. Who episodes and chooses “Yesterday’s Enterprise” rather than “All Good Things…” as the STNG episode of choice.

Video Games

• The Escapist names the Best Videogame Trailers Of 2008.
• Lists of the Best Video Games of 2008 from: Fidget, GamesRadar, Metacritic, New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Seattle Times, SFGate, Showcase, and UK Telegraph.

2008 was a pretty good year but the Geek culture is on this rise, and 2009 can only be better. After a week of reflecting on the past year, I’ve finally drawn up my list of New Year’s resolutions, and here they are.

10. I really will read a book that isn’t fantasy, science fiction, or a technical manual.
It won’t be an Oprah selection, but I might pick up a book of comic book philosophy.

9. I will not rant about the new Trek film outside the Trek community.
It’s not cannon, so it doesn’t count anyway.

8. I will take up a hobby not related to computers, to better relate to others.
In a related resolution, I will level my tabletop RPG characters much further this year.

7. I will move out of my mother’s basement.
I’ll also invest some time in redecorating my father’s guest bedroom.
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New Year’s Day — Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.

- Mark Twain in the Territorial Enterprise, January 1, 1864.

1818
The novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley is first published. Many will consider it to be the first fully-realized science fiction novel. Read or download Frankenstein at Project Gutenberg.

1845
After having poisoned his mistress with prussic acid in Slough, England, John Tawell escapes by train to London, where he is caught by police on arrival because an electric telegram arrived before him. The event will generate an enormous amount of publicity for the new technology.

Samuel Morse opens a fifty mile electric telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, using his code for messages.

1902
The first radio broadcast demonstration in the US is given by Nathan B. Stubblefield at Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. His voice is the first to be carried on the air-waves during a public exhibition in which he transmits his voice to a receiver a mile away. He will keep the details of the invention secret until he receives a patent (US No. 887,357), but he will ultimately be unable to obtain a suitable buyer for his invention.

1927
In the “Discussions” section of the January issue of Amazing Stories magazine, editor T. O’Conor Sloane uses the term “science fiction” in the modern sense for the first time. In the column, he wrote, “Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare of science fiction, and we would feel derelict if we did not give his stories in our columns.”
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