The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Random Steampunk Hotness
• Sexy Andorian Star Trek Cosplay
• Space Invaders traffic light
• Steampunk Ash (from Army of Darkness)

Cross-Media

• After the news that the city of Leicester was unprepared for a zombie invasion based off of public inquiry, the public decided to test the city by staging a zombie apocalypse.
• The twenty worst sci-fi wigs.
• Wheels turning on Steampunk culture

Film

• News: Green Lantern Box Office Results a Mixed Bag
• Characters That Comic Book Movies Got Wrong
• First reaction to 15 minutes worth of Avengers footage.
• Philadelphia residents are pretty pissed about losing a fifty million dollar boost to the economy when World War Z took the film overseas to Scotland.
• The Tech of Cars 2: How Pixar’s new 3-D animated film used new techniques on seemingly small things – reflections of lights on metal, the motion of water – to make it look almost like live-action. Pixar is the vanguard in computer animation, making new advances with every film, so their work is worth studying for anyone involved in animation.

Internet

• News: Netflix Suffers Outage: their Watch Instantly features were down for most of Sunday. They say it was “a technical problem,” but there’s speculation that they’ve been the latest victim of denial of service attacks.
• News: Spotify Could Launch in the U.S. In Two Weeks: the successful European streaming music service has been delayed by signing deals with record companies, but the company is promising those are almost complete.
• Copyright Crackdown Threatens Youtube Lip-Syncing
• Guy Who Invented Web: Net Is a Human Right
• J.K. Rowling’s ‘Pottermore’ with an insider’s look at the big reveal

Literature

• Interview: Charles Tan interviews Mira Grant of Deadline
• Interview: Geekscape was lucky enough to have Simon Pegg, prolific geek writer and actor, on their podcast to talk about both his new book, Nerd Do Well
• Interview: SFSignal interviews short story author Genevieve Valentine. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is available now from Prime.
• News: Borders Sale Likely By End of July
• News: British Library, Google in deal to digitize books
• The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History
• Kindle Store awash with auto-generated crap ‘books’ according to The Register.
• Religion in SF and Why Fantasy is More Popular
• Solaris, Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem, himself a fluent English speaker, was always scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of two film versions of the story, and decades of speculation, a new direct English translation has been released. Translated by American Professor Bill Johnston ‘The Definitive Solaris‘ is only available as an audiobook for the time being. Copyright issues, hampered by several, widely available, editions of the poor English translation may mean it is some time yet before a definitive print edition.
• Watch a book trailer for Nikolas and Company – A Creature Most Foul
• What Science Fiction Series Deserves the HBO 10-Episode-Per-Book Treatment?

Science

• More evidence of brain plasticity: Some blind people are able to use echolocation to perceive space and objects around them in surprising detail, even though the time differences in echoes necessary to do this are two small to be consciously perceived. An fMRI study by Lore Thaler, Stephen Arnott and Melvyn Goodale revealed that people who are especially adept at this use their calcarine cortex (a.k.a. V1 or primary visual cortex) to process spatial information from the echoes. The original paper. A shorter discussion.
• With an Artificial Memory Chip, Rats Can Remember and Forget At the Touch of a Button

Technology

• Harvard’s Kilobot project does swarm robots on the cheap
• Kevin Kelly describes how a clock designed to run for 10,000 years will function and the efforts behind its creation and building.
• New Rocketplane Could Fly Paris-Tokyo in 2.5 Hours
• NYU medical center goes sci-fi, scans patients’ palms
• Suspended animation is within our grasp: Mark Roth delivers a TED Talkabout his research, which inspired him to famously experiment with suspended animation. In association with others at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, he developed a startling method of depriving a zebrafish embryo of oxygen and keeping it alive for hours.
• Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins

Television

• Interview: Here’s a video of Summer Glau’s panel appearance from last week’s Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Good stuff. Sadly, no fight scenes.
• Interview: ‘Game of Thrones’ warlord Jason Momoa talks season finale
• Interview: Karen Gillan from Dr. Who on Craig Ferguson.
• Interview: Robert Kirkman excites the general public with another interview
• Interview: Watch Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Jon Favreau explain the philosophy of ‘Cowboys & Aliens’… you know, other than “blow shit up.”
• News: Falling Skies was this year’s most-watched cable premiere
• News: Neil Patrick Harris to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
• Premium stations are changing the way television is made

Video Games

• News: Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary To Have Kinect Integration
• 14 Years of Waiting Have Come to an End: Duke Nukem Forever
• Video: A Fast-Moving Video Game Played On Scrolls of Printer Paper

Writing

• Things I Learned About Good Writing from Playing Role-Playing Games

Want more? Check out Geek Art Gallery for more art links and eye candy. Visit Oneironomicon for more on book trailers, reviews,and writing links.