Caprica, or The End is Foretold

I've been wracking my brains trying to figure out why Caprica resonates with me in a way that Battlestar Galactica still has not. It's not that I don't think BSG was well-written, well-acted and well-produced - I certainly do. I always admired the show, but it always had the faint taste of medicine for me. 

Must-See TV: Cyberpunk Documentary from 1990

We saw clips of this for a recent William Gibson post, now here's the whole thing. Functions both as charmingly dated (g)nostalgia for disillusioned GenX'ers like myself and as history lesson for those who missed the movement the first time around. 

Immortal Ad Vitam: The Power to Procreate with the Gods

 

  Having cut my teeth on 70s comics, I can say that nothing that shows up in pop culture these days surprises me. 

Any weird esoteric or occult topic you can think of was yours for a quarter (or so) at your local spinner rack. There was a great innocence to it all as well - innocence being the lack of self-consciousness that took over the comics medium once it was banished from the newsstands. 

Alien Dreaming: Avatar

No one accused James Cameron of excessive originality with the screenplay to Avatar. But excessive originality is Hollywood-speak for "box office poison."

 

From Ausur to Oscar.

Well, it's that time of the year again. Yes, 3/7/10 is here, a clever little cryptogram for 3/17, the date of the death of Osiris. No surprise then that tonight we have the Ausurs Oscars, aka the Academy Awards.

 

Caprica, Call of Duty and the Descent into Virtuality

Caprica's Daniel Greystone is an alternate reality version of Jaron Lanier and vice versa. For those of you who don't remember, Lanier - like Greystone - became a techno-celebrity in the early 90s by selling an idea without an application. 

The HyperGnostic Apotheosis of Cyberpunk

Vancouver- where else?

Since we're rapidly descending into the dystopian future that William Gibson prophesied in his sci-fi novels- particularly the Bridge Trilogy- I thought it would be an opportune time to look back on those heady days when geeks got cool and cool went geek. 

Sync Log: Wormholes Apart

So the missus and I sit down to watch Caprica and I notice this random episode of The New Outer Limits that aired in January sitting on the DVR queue. I totally forgot recording it and had no idea what it was about. But there was nothing else on, so we thought what the hell and gave it a spin. A fortuitous decision.

Demeter Moore Mourns the Newly-Dead at the 2010 Ausurs®

 

I tweeted this during the Oscar broadcast, but just thought I'd mention here that Demetria Moore was given the task of ushering the honored dead into the afterlife, just as did her namesake in the Eleusinian Mysteries. 

Stairway to Sirius: The Oscars and the Spiral Staircase

The festivities opened with this interesting shot, giving us the blue and gold motif of the set and showing us stagelights vaguely reminiscent of an Udjat...

Ultraterrestrial Deconstructions: The Othernet

 

Well, a lot of you have seen the BBC Superpowers promo by now. It's fascinating not only on the face of it - meaning the alien subtext - but also in that it implies a separation of the human race between those who use the Internet and those who don't. 

There's a powerful yet unspoken posthuman subtext, but also a kind of techno-utopianism that I thought went out with the Quadra. But the spot also caught my eye since it seems to have been inspired by The Outer Limits, particularly the second series, which aired on Showtime in the 90s.

John C. Lilly and Extreme Psychonautics

John Cunningham Lilly was the inspiration for the book and film Altered States, which we've looked at in great depth in the Alien Dreaming and the Widening Gyre series. Here he talks with Jeffrey Mishlove, who also interviewed Michael Talbot on the holographic universe theory.

Secret Star Trek: The Prime Suggestive

 

In between the BSG, Caprica, and Fringe the missus and I have been geeking out on the Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns on SyFy (I've actually been sneaking/geeking in some SG:A too). Yes, we both hate adulthood. And consensus reality. 

Torchwood: (Suffer the) Children of Earth

Torchwood: Children of Earth is one of the most intense, jarring, unsettling and flat-out gutpunching television productions in recent memory. 

It's also one of the most important works of science fiction of our time. If you haven't watched it yet, you really should. Like, right away.