The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Check out this breath-taking imagining of a city of the future.
• Damned if this isn’t the cutest little kid cosplay I’ve ever seen.

Film

• Interview: Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski raves about 3-D and Daft Punk.
• News: China Pulls Avatar From Their Cinemas Fearing Civil Unrest.

Internet

• CoCo fans have seized control of the Jay Leno Facebook page, and they aren’t releasing it until he gets his time slot back.
• CreativeCloud has compiled some intriguing statistics into this infographic: If You Printed Twitter …

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1789
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth by William Hill Brown, is published in Boston, Massachusetts by Isaiah Thomas.

1888
Charles Babbage’s son, Henry Provost Babbage, uses the mill portion of the Analytical Engine he constructed from his father’s drawings to compute multiples of Pi in order to prove that the design is functional.

1920
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit organization that defends and the constitutional rights of individuals, is formed. The organization will have a significant impact on a number of fundamental issues surrounding the internet, the media, and the communication industry in general. Visit the official ACLU website.
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The global brain is the quasi-neural energy – and information – processing network created by six and a half billion humans on the planet, interacting in many ways, private as well as public, and on many levels, local as well as global. A quantum shift in the global brain is a sudden and fundamental transformation in the relations of a significant segment of the six and a half billion humans to each other and to nature – a macroshift in society – and a likewise sudden and fundamental transformation in cutting-edge perceptions regarding the nature of reality – a paradigm shift in science. The two shifts together make for a veritable “reality revolution” in society as well as in science.

- “Collective Intelligence: The Need for Synthesis” by Kingsley Dennis, November 13, 2009.

Art

• Fandomania has gathered Glee fan art from around Deviant Art.
• Katie Cook has released yet another batch of Star Wars sketch cards. [More and more]

Comics

• Entertainment Weeky revealed that Twilight: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 will be coming out March 16. It’s already cracked Amazon’s Top 50.

Film

• Interview: Director Peter Jackson speaks with the Telegraph.
• News: Campbell plans My Name Is Bruce sequel.
• Big Hollywood names the Top 10 Most Overrated Directors of All Time.
• Creative Fan has a gallery of 30 Incredible Matte Paintings from Famous Films.
• Film.com wonders Would the Oscars Be More Relevant If They Rewarded Mainstream Movies? The short answer is yes, but it’s still not gonna happen.
• Quentin Tarantino names Star Trek the year’s best movie.
• Yahoo! Movies has posted ten behind-the-scenes featurettes from Avatar.

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Above It All” by Carol Emshwiller at Fantasy Magazine,
• Listen to “All the King’s Monsters” by Megan Arkenberg at Clarkesworld.
• Listen to “Good & Faithful Servant” by Colin Davies at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “The Kiosk” by Bruce Sterling at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion” at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “The Starship Mechanic” by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake at Tor.com.
• Listen to “Turning the Apples” by Tina Connolly at Pseudopod.

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Read the flash fiction “Between the Wolf & The Dog” by C. Le Mroch.

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Art

• DZine has rounded up a collection of 35 Amazing Fantasy Art 3D Wallpapers.
• The Pocket “holy order” wraith dispatching kit circa 1869 is a beautiful piece of “original cryptozoological scientific art.”

Comics

• Interview: Felicia Day Talks About The Guild Comic.

Film

• News: Hustler’s Making an Avatar Porno.
• Ask Google: Will Avatar Really Win Best Picture?
• Cinematical looks back at The Good and The Bad of Gaming Movies.
• The Ferris Bueller’s Fight Club Theory makes watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off about a hundred times more interesting.

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1885
La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York is issued the first US patent for a roller coaster, the “Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway,” which he had built at Coney Island in New York City in 1884. (US No. 332,762) For five cents a ride, passengers sit sideways in cars that travel a six hundred foot wooden railway, at a top speed of six miles per hour. Thompson, who will later be dubbed “the father of gravity,” will earn back his original US$1,600 investment within just three weeks.

1929
The Fox Film Corporation releases the western film “In Old Arizona,” directed by Irving Cummings and starring Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Dorothy Burgess, to US theaters. It is the first full-length talking motion picture to be shot outdoors on location in the US. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

1930
The first episode of “Lone Ranger” is broadcast from radio station WXYZ-Detroit. The series will be enormously influential on future comic books.

1969
Astronomers at the University of Arizona establish the first optical identification of a pulsar, which is located in the Crab Nebula.

1981
The inauguration speech of US President Ronald Reagan is broadcast. It is the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.
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New technologies beget new perceptions. Reality is a man-made process. Our images of our world and of ourselves are, in part, models resulting from our perceptions of the technologies we generate.

- By the Late John Brockman by John Brockman, 1969.