The Great Geek Manual

Hardcover Book Releases

Blood Pact (Gaunt’s Ghosts) by Dan Abnett
Death Masks: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy
Elegy Beach by Steven R. Boyett
Eyes like Leaves by Charles de Lint
Heart’s Blood by Julliet Marillier
The Silver Mage: Book Four of the Silver Wyrm by Katherine Kerr
The Sisterhood of the Rose by Jim Marrs
Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Paperback Book Releases

Agents of Artifice: A Planeswalker Novel (Planeswalkers) by Ari Marmell
Asmodeus by Dawn McClure
Born of Fire by Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Captain’s Witch by Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Chasing Midnight by Susan Krinard
Code Geass Novel Stage 3 by Goro Taniguichi and Ichiro Okouchi
Corsair: Blades of the Moonsea, Book II by Richard Baker
The Fall of Highwatch: Chosen of Nendawen by Mark Sehestedt
Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
The Golden Tower: Book Two of The Warriors of Estavia by Fiona Patton
Heir to Sevenwaters by Juliet Marillier
The Lord-Protector’s Daughter by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Magic in the Shadows by Devon Monk
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1892
In LaPorte, Indiana, The Cushman Telephone Company (the Bell Telephone Company) launches the first automatic telephone exchange using the “step-by-step machine” invented by Almon Brown Strowger with about seventy-five subscribers. The event is commemorated with a ceremony, a special train run from Chicago, and a brass band to greet the guests. Strowger, the owner of a funeral parlor, invented the system to eliminate the need for an operator after discovering that his town’s operator had been intercepting calls for his competitor.

1929
The Marconi-Wright facsimile system, a system that uses super high-speed Morse telegraphy, is first demonstrated. With it, documents and images can be transmitted across the Atlantic in just three minutes. The earliest users of the system will be newspapers.

1937
Howard H. Aiken of Harvard University corresponds with J.W. Bryce of International Business Machines (IBM) to suggest constructing an automatic calculating machine for use in computing physical problems. This exchange will eventually inspire the creation of The Harvard Mark I, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the US.

1953
The first live coast-to-coast color television telecast in the US is made by Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
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The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift…

- Marshal McLuhan from an interview with Playboy Magazine, March 1969.

Art

• Here’s a chart of Common Methodologies of Monster Vanquishing.
• The Urban Collector is now selling Night Of The Living Kev Inaction Figures.
• WonderMark has a poster with an extensive list of Supernatural Collective Nouns.

Film

• Interview: George A. Romero appeared on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me to talk about zombies.
• News: John Rhys-Davies Not Interested in Dwarfing Up for The Hobbit
• News: Joss Whedon has written An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners.
• News: Original Directors Want To Make Their Own Blair Witch 2.
• Empire wonders How Scary Should Kids Movies Be? “Because both Coraline and Where The Wild Things Are (on its US release) drew semi-hysterical reactions from adults worried that children would be traumatised by the more intense and darker scenes in the films.”
• EW.com offers up a list of 16 Little-Known Horror Gems.
• Giant Freaking Robot explains Why The World Needs Ghostbusters 3.
• It may be a bit late, but for me, Halloween tends to linger. Here’s 10 Horror Films You Can Watch For Free Online.
• The LA Times has a dreamy gallery of Behind the scenes photos of New Moon.
• Martin Scorsese names his choice for the 11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time.
• Metromix names the Worst. TV shows turned movies. Ever.
• The Times online charts out Films by Genre over the Past 100 Years.

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When one experiences cyberspace as this extension of one’s mind – as a transitional space between self and other – the door is thrown wide open for all sorts of fantasies and transference reactions to be projected into this space. Under ideal conditions, people use this as an opportunity to better understand themselves, as a path for exploring their identity as it engages the identity of other people. Under less than optimal conditions, people use this psychological space to simply vent or act out their fantasies and the frustrations, anxieties, and desires that fuel those fantasies. As an internet traveller once told me, “Everywhere I go on the internet, I keep running into… ME!”

- “The Psychology of Cyberspace” by John Suler, May 1996.

1920
Westinghouse Electric launches radio station KDKA, which will later come to be commonly cited as being the world’s first commercial radio station.

1931
The DuPont Company, of Wilmington, Delaware, announces the first practical synthetic rubber, DuPrene, which will later be renamed Neoprene. The new rubber is expensive to produce, but it resists oil and gasoline, which natural rubber doesn’t.

1936
The British Broadcasting Corporation begins transmitting the world’s first regularly scheduled high-definition (200 lines) television service, the BBC Television Service, from Alexandra Palace, in north London. The service will later be renamed BBC1 in 1964. Its range is about thirty-five miles. Regular programs are broadcast twice a day, from 3 – 4pm, and from 9 – 10pm, Monday through Saturday.

1947
In California, Howard Hughes conducts the first and only flight of the Spruce Goose, the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built, over Long Beach Harbor in California. The Spruce Goose, which was formally named Hercules, is the first US plane with eight engines; it boasts a wing span of 319 feet, 11 inches; it weighs over two hundred tons; and it cost twenty-five million dollars to build. It’s named the “Spruce Goose” because its entire airframe and surface is composed entirely of laminated birch wood rather than the aluminum typically used in airplane design, due to wartime restrictions. Its flight lasts about a minute, and it only achieves an altitude of seventy feet.
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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Child Of An Ancient City” by Tad Williams at StarShip Sofa.
• Listen to “The Death of Blessed Terence Albert O’Brien” by C.P. Meehan.
• Listen to “Incubus” by Tim Pratt at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Infestation” by Garth Nix at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “The Man who Carved Skulls” by Richard Parks at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Something There Is” by Joe Nazare at Pseudopod.

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Read the flash fiction “Seven-Year Itch” by Joshua M. Reynolds at 52 Stitches.
• Six-Word Tales is an awesome blog featuring Illustrated Six Word Stories.

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It’s been three years since my first post! I can barely believe it!

As of this morning, I’ve published 2,370 posts and received 1,520 pingbacks, along with a handful of comments. Though my posts have been fairly evenly distributed over the three years, the response to the posts have increased fairly dramatically in the last six months. My Google pagerank has risen by a point and my daily pageviews have risen from about 1,200 to over 3,000. So, I must be doing something right.

I’d like to thank all of you who stop by to read my rantings and my sponsor, HostColor, which continues to support my on-going efforts with some really excellent free hosting.

Here’s hoping The Great Geek Manual will grow as much in the coming year as it has in the past year!