The Great Geek Manual

The internet is a beast, uncivil by corporal standards, rudely honest in its capacity to include any idea the mind can think of — and any voice, no matter how small, can ring loud in the internet’s ear.

The internet is not a country; it is not a belief system; it is not a government. It belongs to everyone, and no one, and by virtue of its existence, the internet has broken the bond of routine social contracts, conditioning our prejudiced perception of evolution and God. We are now on the path to a new human, our more ethereal counterpart…the Electro Sapien or e-sapien.

How the future supremacy of the Electro Sapien will play out is speculative, at best. Competing themes on how we came to be homo sapien, “modern man,” are still lost in interpretation. What we can infer, by way of all theories on the origin of the homo sapien — from the Aquatic Ape theory to unknown breakaway members of some homo antecessor-group, or a Homo Heidelbergensis / Homo Sapien tryst — is that many possibilities existed, and one survived.
Likewise, with over seven billion human beings living today, it is rational to assume that small, pre-Electro Sapien groups or types, directed by the species’ self-organisation, have begun to break away from the whole.

To establish who these new electro-types are, and why they will survive to establish the next level of species’ expansion, involves the discomfort of disputing or questioning the future validity of traditional interpretations of human purpose.

- “The Internet Messiah Has Arrived” by Thomas Easley, May 11, 2012.
Originally posted to Big Think.

Art

• Amazing homemade Star Trek Shuttlecraft Clubhouse
• Sweets: Dalek Wedding Cake

Film

• Interview: Alex Pappademas examines the increasingly complicated legacy of Stan Lee in light of the release of The Avengers movie.
• Interview: NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour discusses The Avengers, among other topics, and gives Andrew Wheeler’s “Gayness of Batman” piece a shout-out.
• Interview: Sense of Wonder interviews Gavin Rothery, VFX Supervisor on Moon
• The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb has a new Twitter account, which he’s so far used to tease images of Peter Parker chillin’ on a street light.
• The Ghostbusters Tour of New York
• Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.
• “We stuck your girlfriend on an island” 22 main characters dismissed in sequels

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The sole purpose of the latest clip from Prometheus seems to be to show off the movie’s titular spaceship.  It looks great and all, but I have my fingers crossed in the hope that this movie isn’t just an hour and a half of special effects.

I’m loving this new storyline, but that costume is a major downgrade from the Tobey Maguire version. It looks cartoonish. That’s not going to stop me from buying a ticket, though.

Whilst the pain of finding a parking space will dissipate into the cloud, the cloud will hide other, less apparent costs. The concepts of the “smart” car, “smart” parking and payment systems, and “smart” cities are interesting enough. But all are really just a smoke screen for a much deeper set of political and even philosophical issues that will impact urban dwellers in the near future, especially as more than half’s the world’s population will soon be living in cities. That set of issues centers around the delicate dance between public and private ownership of space, both in the cloud and on the ground.

- “The Networked Urban Environment” by Jan Chipchase, May 3, 2012.

So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.

- “Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age” by Sarah Weinman, May 10, 2012.

Art

• 5 Rules for Comic-Con Cosplay
• Colossus of Hattin Papercraft
• Amazing Dragon Cake
• Black Widow cosplay [More and more]
• Mass Effect Cake

Comics

• Interview: In an interview at ICv2, IDW Publishing CEO Ted Adams discusses the growth of digital comics to 10% of the publisher’s overall direct market sales, and how contrary to the expectations of some critics, print sales have actually increased 25% as digital sales soared.
• The Spandex Closet: Ten Superheroes Who Need To Come Out
• Top 5 Unsung Marvel Avengers
• Top 20 Avengers Comic Book Covers

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For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson