The Great Geek Manual

Comics

• Someone put a lot of time into posting this gallery of the Superhero Drawings from Deviant Art. It features work from a lot of the top artists in the industry, as well as a few newcommers.
• Topless Robot points out The 9 Least Necessary Female Versions of Male Superheroes. You know who doesn’t make the list? Supergirl, because she is one awesome piece of eye candy.

Film

• I Heart Chaos names The 20 Best Bad Movies of the Past 20 Years, finally giving Robot Jox its due once and for all!
• Trailer Addict has posted 4 New Movie Posters for Harry Potter 6, and they’re the darkest batch yet.

Internet

• Finally! Pack your riffles and jump a plane Zombies have been sighted in London!!! (And Woody Harrelson isn’t even involved.)
• In honor of this week’s release of the new Star Trek film, The Sci Guy rounds up the 10 Weirdest Star Trek Videos.
• Who would win in a fight: Gandalf or Darth Vader? What about Neo vs. Harry Potter? “Heroes” star Milo Ventimiglia is set to co-produce “Ultradome,” a new scripted Web series where passionate fanboys settle hypothetical disputes in a special effects showdown.

Literature

• One considered Analysis of the Cost of Printing a Physical Book suggests that titles for the Amazon Kindle should be selling for considerable less than their current prices.

Television

• 30 Things You Didn’t Know About “Battlestar Galactica”
• Alan Tudyk says the pilot for ABC’s V has a Firefly link… or is all just a clever ruse to lure us in and break our hearts with yet another cancellation?
• Want To Save Your Favorite TV Show? Stop watching it on television. Slate explains the theory.

New Releases

After the relatively slow month that was April 2009, May kicks off with a bang. This week, the much-anticipated ninth book in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series hits shelves along with a new J.R.R. Tolkien novel.

The first eight books in the Sookie Stackhouse series, which begins with Dead Until Dark, have consistently surprised me with their ability to keep me, a twenty-something male geek, actively engrossed in a story clearly pitched more towards the Harlequin crowd. The key I think, is that every time the reader expects Sookie, the telepathic, vampire-loving, backwater barmaid to swoon or begin contemplating the vicissitudes of her love life, the story takes an even more bizarre turn.

I’d recommend sampling this series if you’re an urban fantasy or vampire fan, even if you are dude. The series has a lot of potential, and Harris hasn’t disappointed yet. (P.S. Don’t worry. It’s nothing like the t.v. series.)

Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
Ace Hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0441017157) Hardcover. Length: 320pp
The ninth book in the Sookie Stackhouse series. Except for Sookie Stackhouse, folks in Bon Temps, Louisiana, know little about vamps—and nothing about weres. Until now. The weres and shifters have finally decided to reveal their existence to the ordinary world. At first all goes well. Then the mutilated body of a were-panther is found near the bar where Sookie works—and she feels compelled to discover who, human or otherwise, did it. But there’s a far greater danger threatening Bon Temps. A race of unhuman beings—older, more powerful, and more secretive than vampires or werewolves—is preparing for war. And Sookie finds herself an all-too human pawn in their battle. (Release: May 5)
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Damn you, Paramount! Where is my heavy-handed morality tale?!! Damn you!

The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has only to do with ideas, and the application of its laws to the use of life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections of matter and the influence of accidents.

- Samuel Johnson in The Rambler, May 5, 1750.

To use a Southern euphemism, our space program has been snake-bit.

- Al Gore commenting on the failed launch of an unmanned rocket, shortly after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in a Nightline interview, May 5, 1986.

Today is Cinco de Mayo in Mexico and the United States, as well as Tango no Sekku (Boy’s Day) or Kodomo no hi (Children’s Day) in Japan.

1809
Mary Kies becomes the first woman to be granted a US patent. The patent is granted for a technique to weave straw with silk or thread. The technology will be used to manufacture straw bonnets.

1834
William Whewell writes a letter to Michael Faraday concerning names to describe the process of electrolysis which he was investigating. Whewell suggests the names Anode and Cathode. The terms are based on the Greek prefixes “ana-” meaning “up” and “kata-” meaning “down.” The chosen prefixes refer to the idea that that electric current flowed from a battery’s positive to a negative pole, in the manner that water would flow down from a hillside to a valley. He suggests the term ion for the two together, rather than Zetodes or Stechions. Faraday would later reply that he was “delighted with the facility of expression which the new terms give me and I shall ever be your debtor for the kind assistance you have given me.”
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From Around the Web

22 Professional Photoshop Image Enhancing Tutorials – You’ll discover plenty of tutorials that deal with enhancing images, adding unique and impressive effects, and recreating digital replications of popular traditional photography techniques in this article.

22 Sure Signs You’re a Geek – Love of gadgets, a fat wallet and extensive online social networks are just three signs that you’re probably a geek.

50 Tools Everyone Should Own – Love the fact that sledgehammer is #1, and that they managed to slip the word “elegantly” into its description.

85+ of the Best Twitterers Designers Should Follow – There are thousands of designers on Twitter (Twitter reviews) tweeting about everything from ongoing projects to their personal lives. But only a small percentage of those tweet about design topics of interest to other designers and design addicts.

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Programming on the Web – This is a great resource for learning to program. These tutorials teach JavaScript so that users can try things out right in their browser.

Blue Screen of Death Survival Guide: Every Error Explained – Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re sitting at your computer playing a game or working on a project when, suddenly, Windows freezes completely. All your work is gone, and you find a blue screen full of gibberish staring back at you. Windows is dead, Jim, at least until you reboot it. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Film

• Director Ron Howard claimed Sunday that the Vatican interfered with efforts to get permits to shoot certain scenes of his “Angels & Demons” religious thriller in Rome.
• It turns out that the Bestselling Movies are not the Most Pirated Ones.

Internet

• I’ve mentioned it before, but it deserves to be mentioned again. The forty-minute fan film The Hunt of Gollum is online, and it kicks ass.
• NPR reveals The Secret Of Google’s Book Scanning Machine.
• SFX shares The Top Ten Things I Learnt From Going To Sci-Fi Conventions, none of which is “Don’t make eye contact.”
• Where are you in the movie? If you started watching a movie on the day you were born, and stretched it over your lifespan, this is where you’d be in that movie.

Literature

• The Galaxy Express explains why The Only Thing Worse Than A Trashy Romance Novel Is A Bad Science Fiction Novel.
• There are several venues for micro fiction and prose on Twitter, called Twitter Literary Zines

Television

• If you watch Friday night’s episode of Dollhouse carefully, you can see that all that was required to “hack” into dollhouse security was to alter an HTML tag. Lame.
• Space-racism is bad: And 17 other not-so-subtle lessons learned from Star Trek.

Writing

• Becoming a good writer takes time and practice, but that doesn’t mean you can’t speed up the process. Here are 10 ways that you can become a better writer today.
• Jeremiah Tolbert shares 5 Books on Writing and Science Fiction That Made Me a Better Writer.

1536
Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi uses the @ sign for the first time in recorded history in a letter.

1780
The first US national arts and science society is incorporated. It is chartered in Boston, Massachusetts “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, dignity, honor and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.” The first society president is James Bowdoin. The original incorporators will later be joined by Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Bulfinch, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams, among others.

1884
The first photograph of a flash of lightning is taken in the US by W.C. Gurley of the Marietta Observatory in Ohio. The flash is about three miles distant from the camera.

1886
Three patents for recording and reproducing sound relating to a phonograph disk records are issued to Chichester Bell and Charles S. Tainter. (US No. 341,212-4) Alexander Graham Bell is a joint partner on two of the patents. From these designs, Bell & Tainter manufacture the first practical phonograph, an improvement on Edison’s original called a graphophone. What this new device lacks in sound volume compared with Edison’s tin-foil cylinders, it more than gains in clarity and reduced surface noise. Although more suitable for listening through ear-tubes, it also allows for greater recording time per cylinder by using a narrower groove pitch. It can be powered by foot-treddles or an electric motor, resulting in a more consistent pitch.
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