The Great Geek Manual

Art

• 13 insane foreign sci-fi movie posters
• Five Iconic 1st Edition AD&D Illustrations proving David A. Trampier is one of the best fantasy artists of all time
• The Geek Art Gallery has posted a gallery of the art of Andry Shango.
• New cool concept art for X-Men First Class
• Super Mario Bros Graffiti

Comics

• News: All First Prints of New 52 Sell Out
• A 7-Year-Old Girl Who Loves ‘Teen Titans’ Reacts Sadly to the New Starfire
• 12-year-old girl thinks DC’s reboot is about Transformers and strippers… So, she’s pretty much dead on. Smart kid.
• The Digital Age: Better Late Than Never
• DC Comics On Starfire Controversy: ‘Pay Attention To The Ratings’
• “The Secret History of Women in Comics” at SPX
• Things From Another World is holding a nick and dent sale.

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Art

• Cobblestone Keyboard
• Don’t miss this gallery of art on display at Gallery 1988′s Video Game Art Show
• Sumo Lake is a funny short film

Comics

• IGN names its choices for the Top 100 Comic Book Villains of All Time
• More comic-ready tablets coming soon
• Top Ten Comics to Share with Your Boyfriend and/or Girlfriend (That Aren’t Sandman or Y: The Last Man) is a fairly good list of comics that you might not otherwise think to use to lure “straights” into the comic fandom.

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Art

• Babes Vs Zombies

Comics

• Interview: Michael Green and Mike Johnson talk about the new Supergirl series.
• The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’
• ComicVine considers the Four Biggest Ways DC’s ‘New 52′ Changed Supergirl
• Interview: Batwoman Is the Black, Gay Sheep Of Batman’s Comic Family: Batwoman co-writer and artist JH Williams III discusses what may be the most beautiful — and adventurous — mainstream comic book on the market.
• Newsarama remembers 10 Great Comic Book Moments From the 1990s

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The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.

- Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, 2010.

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.

- Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, 2003.

“Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. […]

There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. […]

We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. […]

We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to. […] Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions. […] The most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. […]

“This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.

But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences. […] Because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.

No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. […] Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.

- “The Elusive Big Idea – ‘We are living in a post ideas world where bold ideas are almost passé’” by Neal Gabler, August 14, 2011.
Originally published by The New York Times.

This is what’s wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody ‘What’s the story on that?’ and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

- “Tom Waits: Dancing In The Dark” by Tom Waits, December 2004.
Originally published in The Dark Harp Magazine.

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Death And Michelle Jenkins” by Christopher Munroe at Dunesteef.
• Listen to “Dolly” by Elizabeth Bear at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “From Paris, With Regret” by Starla Huchton at Peculiar Occurrences.
• Listen to “The Island of the Immortals” by Ursula K. Le Guin at Lightspeed Magazine.
• Listen to “Killing Merwin Remis” by Jason Helmandollar at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Middle Aged Weirdo in a Cadillac” by George R. Galuschak at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Secret Identity” by Paul Cornell at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “The Troop” by Harris Tobias at x.

Comics and Graphic Novels

• Archaia offers a preview of Tale of Sand
• CBR offers a preview of Ghostbusters #1
• IGN offers a preview of Justice League Dark #1
• Major Spoilers offers a preview of Incredible Hulk #1
• SFx offers a preview of Beyond the Fringe #1

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Listen to the flash fiction story “Second Puberty” by Matthew Sanborn at Beware the Hairy Mango.
• Read the flash fiction “Silent Questions” by J. Scott Kunkle at Powder Burn Flash.

Novels and Preview Chapters

• Download an excerpt of Snuff by Terry Pratchett.
• Read an excerpt of A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber at Tor.com.
• Read an excerpt of The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers at Tor.com.
• Read an excerpt of Lord of Souls by Greg Keyes at Scribd.
• Read an excerpt of README by Neal Stephenson (Part 2) at Omnivoracious.
• Read an excerpt of The Sacred Band by David Anthony Durham at Suvudu.
• Read an excerpt of Shadow’s Lure by Jon Sprunk at Black Gate.
• Read an excerpt of The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot by Margaret McNamara at Tor.
• Read an excerpt of The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein at Tor.
• Read an excerpt of Vacation by Matthew Costello at Tor.

Poetry

• Buying the Muse by Jacqueline West
• Wallpaper by April Grant
• Year of Miracles by Liz Bourke

Short Stories

• Read “The Almost Last Voyage of the Wind-ship Escarpment” by Martha Wells at the author’s website.
• Read “Broken” by Ian Donald Keeling at ideomancer.
• Read “Convent Geometry” by Georgina Bruce at ideomancer.
• Read “Day One” by Matthew Costello at Tor.com.
• Read “The Hunt” by Julius Vagdal at Aurora Wolf.
• Read “If the Shoe Fits” by John C. Tremblay at Aurora Wolf.
• Read “The Island of the Immortals” by Ursula K. Le Guin at Lightspeed Magazine.
• Read “The Night Children” by Alexander Gordon Smith at Tor.com.
• Read “Three Damnations: A Fugue” by James Alan Gardner at Fantasy Magazine.

Vintage Fiction

• Read the classic 1844 science fiction novelette “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne at Sam Houston State University.