The Spirits of '79: Madness at the Movies

The ephemeral-yet-palpable strangeness of 1979 was well-documented in that year's cinematic offerings. Which is a bit curious, given that most of them would have been made in 1978. But 1978 was a pretty weird year too, just in a slightly different way. 

Blue Pill Poppers

This may be hilarious (if I don't say so myself), but the story behind it is no laughing matter. 

The (Secret) Space Force & the Never-Ending X-Files LARP

Just how weird are these times we are living in? Well, they're so weird that there's a new branch of the military in the works called the "Space Force." Now, I've talked quite a bit about "Starfleet Reality" and the Star Trek timeline but I never thought things would go this far this fast.

And by that I mean I figured all the toys they've been working on out in the Nevada desert would stay in the black until conditions necessitated their unveiling. Goes to show what I know.

Not a lot.

Dubai is Babylon 2.0

I get the feeling a lot of people still don't quite take Dubai seriously and see it as a weird artifact of a prolonged oil boom that brought shiploads of eff-you money to a bunch of desert sheikhs who never quite figured out what they wanted to do with it all.

Apocalypse 2Night: What Could Go Wrong?

A Silicon Valley startup that literally wants to kill you so it can preserve your brain for future digitizing and uploading? 

What could go wrong? Sign me up already.

X-Files: "They're All Mythology Episodes"

Mulder and Scully talk with nun 

played by XF vet Christine Willes

Recently Mike Clelland (author of The Messengers, which you should pick up as soon as you're done with this) and the good fellows at the Sync Book Press reported on the second episode of season 10 of The X-Files, "Founder's Mutation", written and directed by TenThirteen founding father James Wong. 

Does Anyone Remember the Future?

I've begun watching Extant, the CBS Halle Berry vehicle on Amazon Prime. Like The Whispers, it's another of Steven Spielberg's attempts to conquer TV (television was in fact Spielberg's first love, not movies), and also like The Whispers, yet another example of his alien obsession.

A Five Year Mission...

When I started this blog five years ago I had two simple goals in mind: the first was to promote my book Our Gods Wear Spandex by doing that dreaded "social media" thing so many authors have come to rue. 

Everything In Its Right Place

I'm of the opinion that genuine weirdness is usually an intimate affair. And as much as the capital 'S' Skeptics-- many of whom are in fact neurologically wired with various perceptive challenges-- yell and scream and rend their clothing,

Cyberpunk Reality: Escaping the Prison Planet

The operating philosophy behind my work is that whatever form it may take, pop culture is more resonant when it addresses "spiritual" issues or wields some variety of "spiritual" power.

Secret Star Trek: The Oldest, Deadliest Myth

 

You might think being a geek should prime you for the Transhumanism Revolution, but in reality it should also prime you against it. 

For every Six Million Dollar Man there's a race of Cybermen or Borg or take your pick. William Gibson's Sprawl novels presented Transhuman modification as a ubiquitous consumer product, but what part of "dystopian" do you not understand? 

Fringe and the SciFi Singularity

 

I'm not exactly sure why, but my passion for and preoccupation with sci-fi has become practically religious over the past few months. 

Secret Sun Picture Parade: The Joke's on Us

This story ran last week, but just caught my attention. This didn't run on UFO Mystic or Filer's Files, it ran on Reuters, one of the world's largest and most respected news organizations. 

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. 

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 Hyper-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. 

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...

TVOD: Caprica gets hardcore

Some fans have been complaining that Caprica was taking too long with the exposition. Not any more. 

Caprica and the Spi-Fi Ascendency

 

 OK, I need to rinse the rancid taste of Braintree out of my mouth...

A lot of you may have seen this already, but I'm so jazzed on this series I want to make sure the rest of you do as well. This is the prequel to the Battlestar Galactica revamp, but it's grabbed me in a way that BSG still has not (never fear, the missus and I have the first season DVDs and plan to dig into them soon).

The (Not So) Obligatory Avatar Post

I went to see Avatar at the same theater I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still. It's at the gateway of the New Jersey Skylands, in a once-enormous mall that has metastisized to an almost parodic size.