Tag Archives: HSFFU

Who Really Wants Armed Bears?

  By Phineas Delgado | February 2, 2013 - 6:02 pm | , , , , , , , , , ,
4 Comments

*** UPDATE – 9 April, 2013 ***

I’m not normally one for updating posts, but this issue is important. This morning, a student at Lone Star Community College in Cypress, TX, went on a stabbing spree (I’ve never heard the term, so I get credit for it), wounding at least 14 people, some of them seriously, before being subdued by authorities.

Why is this important? Because what we have is a mass murder attempt that was made without a gun. It deflates the argument that guns or access to guns, semi-automatic or otherwise, is the root cause of gun violence and mass murder. What we have here is evidence that someone like Adam Lanza or James Holmes can still inflict a large number of casualties even without a gun. People intent are harm will commit harm. It shows that despite a leaning in this country to ban guns and rifles, they aren’t the only weapons available. Anything can be a weapon when someone is properly motivated.

I’m inclined to wonder, though… would this attacker have been so bold if he thought that one of the people he was attacking might be armed with a gun? Lone Star College System doesn’t permit firearms on their grounds, except as allowed by law (read: only police and military). On the flip side, if one of them HAD been armed, it’s likely that the assailant would have been killed rather than placed in police custody. None of the people he’s attacked are dead as of this writing, but 2 of the 14 are in critical condition. The attacks seem to have been carried out with a box cutter or Xacto knife.

So what will we ban next? Pocket knives? Baseball bats and lacrosse sticks? Power tools?

-PD

******

Since the tragic events of December 14th, 2012, when Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and unloaded an array of semi-automatic weapons into the staff and children, there has been a great nation debate about firearms and the American People. I thought, since I hadn’t written in a while, I would toss in my thoughts.

Sandy Hook - Red Dawn - Gun Control

Who didn’t want to be a Wolverine?

I spent the evening discussing this on Facebook with a friend from high school, and in doing some research, I’m shocked at the irresponsible nature that this has been reported. There have been conflicting reports and apologies about what guns where found where, and what people are supposedly actors. I mean the Conspiracy Theorists have had a field day with all of this (some people actually think the whole thing was staged in order to disarm us). So, I spent some time last night looking into the facts and arguments and I felt like a few points needed to be clarified.

  • The guns on site were all semi-automatic, and widely available for purchase. Adam Lanza was actually denied when he attempted to purchase a rifle himself, which is probably why he killed his mother – to get her guns
  • “Assault Rifles” are long barreled automatic rifles designed for military use. “Assault Weapons”, as defined by US Law, are just about any weapons they decide to put into this category. Currently, depending on state, this category can include all semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and handguns… basically almost every gun on the market
  • The police are reporting it correctly – the media is getting it wrong
  • One of the guns was an AR-15 “Bushmaster”. This is the gun from which the M-16 was derived and was specifically designed for law enforcement use.
  • The Bushmaster was equipped with a 30-round magazine, which is a standard size for this weapon. Compared to the 60 and 100 round capacity magazines available for the AR-15, 30 rounds hardly seems “high capacity”

The amount of misinformation surrounding this event isn’t just astounding, it’s alarming. If we can’t rely on our news outlets to supply us with good information, how in the world are we supposed to know who and what to support. Not that we should be relying on them to tell us these things, but invariably we do. At least you would think they would try to take that responsibility to heart, but instead they just sensationalize things to make people want to watch. It’s not about the truth anymore, it’s about what hooks viewers. And while I’m not a Conspiracy Theorist, it isn’t hard to see how easy it would be for the government to use the media to manipulate the masses. I mean we accused the Soviets of doing it for decades, so we know it can be done. Why is it so far-fetched that we’d use it on ourselves? I mean 4 Americans die in the Embassy attack in Benghazi, and you barely hear about it, but some kid from Notre Dame makes up a girlfriend and it’s headline news for two weeks. Really?! Our priorities are a bit out of line, I think.

But that’s only part of the equation in this even, isn’t it? There are a multitude of cultural issues to deal with here, but we really seem preoccupied with the Second Amendment argument. Of course, when the Second Amendment was written, it was common practice for governments to forbid it’s citizenry from having weapons, or more commonly, for them to oppress the people because they were too poor to have weapons. In America, though, because of the frontier nature of the colony, guns were practically a necessity. It’s bred into us, this need for guns. Don’t you find it funny, though, that the only Amendments you ever hear about are the First and Second? Every now and then, when a white collar criminal is on trial, you’ll hear about the Fifth (or more specifically “pleading” it). We know about “illegal search and seizure”, but why is it illegal? Which Amendment was that? Do you know them? Probably not, but I would say, “why don’t you?” How can we be good stewards of our own destinies without knowing from where our freedoms derive. I mean most people go around quoting the Declaration of Independence, but that document doesn’t have legal ramifications – it was simply a very strongly worded (and signed) letter to King George III.

There seem to be two main sides to the Second Amendment argument: the NRA and its supporters (who seem to think that we need to worry about our own Army turning on us), and those who think guns should be outlawed altogether (which just isn’t realistic). Actually, there is a third side, which includes people like me, who understand that while it’s probably not necessary for someone to use an AR-15 to defend their home, the problem really isn’t the guns – it’s our culture. As a trained shooter (I was in the military) I know that a hand gun is far more effective for home defense, and that there should be a certain amount of training involved for anyone trying to own a gun. I mean we force people to train to drive cars, why wouldn’t we force them to train to own a gun. Cars are just as dangerous. Probably more so. I also often hear about using them to hunt, but then I remember that the earliest Americans hunted mammoth and mastodon with simple bows, spears and rocks. BOWS AND SPEARS PEOPLE! If you need an AR-15 to hunt deer, you’re doing it wrong. Period.

So, would things have been different if Adam Lanza wouldn’t have had access to those guns? We can’t answer that. What we can do is look at the data, and understand that if he wanted to hurt those kids, there are hundreds of other ways he could have done it that don’t involve guns. We could also say that things could have been different if his mother accepted his illness and dealt with it appropriately… and didn’t own guns herself. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have had the right, I’m saying that it was irresponsible of her to have them knowing her son was unstable and could have access to them. Of course, we’ll never know for sure because she’s gone too.

What I DO know is that countries that have banned guns have much higher instances of violent crime per capita than the US does. We may have more gun-related crimes and deaths (duh), but guns are equalizers, and criminals know that. They are less likely to attack someone they think MIGHT have a gun, than they would be knowing the person was unarmed. Home invasions in Australia and Great Britain are significantly higher than in the US because the criminals know that there’s very little chance they can be confronted inside the home with a weapon. You see criminals will use knives and bats and pipes and whatever else they can get their hands on. Victims, on the other hand, usually don’t fight back if confronted with an armed assailant. We would be trading one sort of violence for another because, let’s face it, we are a violent species.

The truth is that bad things happen, and it sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it. We always look for someone to blame, because we can’t believe that we ourselves can be at fault. I think it’s clear we are. We ignore the mentally ill. We favor guns over common sense as we cling to the fears of bygone days. I blame Red Dawn. It “proved” to us that one day, foreign (or domestic) invaders will give us a need to have these powerful military-grade weapons in our homes. It’s perpetuated by cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic concepts like the Revolution and Road Warrior. We’re taught that if we don’t have weapons, we become easy prey to those who would take advantage of that weakness. I mean every kid I knew either wanted to be a Goonie or one of the Wolverines.

Does this mean I get to blame Patrick Swayze?

We the People…

  By Phineas Delgado | November 7, 2012 - 1:31 am | , ,
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Today was the day that we as Americans flexed our Freedom and elected our leaders. Once every four years, the Executive Office, the entire House of Representative and one third of the Senate can potentially change hands. That’s actually pretty special. There are plenty of places in the world where this doesn’t happen – some of them because of us.

The American political system has become a quagmire of idealism, partisanship and lobbying. And somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost what made us great. And I’m not talking about family values or any of the theocratic crap fed to us by the Christian Right. I’m talking about real ingenuity and problem solving. Let me give you an example:

Would we have to choice NOT to vote for him?

At the end of the day, I have to say, this couldn’t have been a worse choice than what we were offered…

My grandfather is on in years – he was born in 1928. His parents survived one of the pivotal disasters in local history – The Great Flood of 1913.  Ohio has always been particularly prone to flooding. Before the last ice age, the rivers flowed north toward what would be Hudson Bay today. After, they all flowed south toward the Gulf of Mexico. However, in Ohio, the glaciation created higher elevations to the south, through which those rivers flowed. That means, in the spring, when we get most of our rain, the rivers were prone to flooding, and in 1913, there was more rain than usual. Most of southern Ohio was under water, but Dayton, the city where my grandfather’s family lived, was hit hardest because it sits on the conflagration of the Mad River and the Great Miami River.

So, here’s Dayton, under 20 feet of river, washing away. Parts of the city burned relentlessly because the gas lines had ruptured and the fire brigades couldn’t get to them. When the waters finally receded, more than 350 people had died, just in Dayton and more than half of the population was displaced. That’s something like 65,000 people.  Now before you say anything, I know that’s nothing compared to a disaster like Katrina, but in 1913, it was unheard of. Here comes the best part.

There was no FEMA in 1913; no Federal Disaster Areas or anything like that. Hell, the Red Cross was still in its infancy. The National Guard was sent to help with the recovery, but that was about it. Dayton’s recovery was led by the community leaders. People like John Patterson (the founder of National Cash Register), and Charles Kettering (an inventor and founder of Delco and the reason we don’t have to crank start our cars). The people of Dayton came together and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and rebuilt their city with their own money and time.

I lost count of how many times he told me the story, and honestly, it’s done a lot to build my opinions as an adult. Hurricane Sandy left a wide swath of damage over the northeast, and after it was over, I started seeing a disturbing trend on Facebook. I used to live in New Jersey, which was hit particularly hard, so I still have a lot of friends there. What I saw were things like “I can’t believe Burlington County isn’t a disaster area – why can’t I get any money?” and “My house was damaged – why can’t I get help too?” And when I asked them if they had home owner’s insurance, the response was always “yes, but I should get assistance too”. So, people who have insurance, and whose insurance will pay for their damage, still want Government money because it’s there to have. There’s something wrong with that.

At what point did we stop trying? When did we decide it was OK just to have the Government – OUR Government – step in and take care of us? I suppose my problem with the entitlement philosophy is that the people think that the money they get is free. In other words, since they don’t pay for it, it doesn’t cost anything. Of course that isn’t true, and anyone who gets a paycheck knows that. We’ve crippled ourselves and we don’t even know it.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that programs like FEMA are important, and as a small child, I subsisted on food stamps and welfare when it was just me and my young mother. But she didn’t teach me that we needed it to survive. On the contrary, she taught me that it was a bad thing to be on it. Not because of a social stigma either. But because it wasn’t meant to be a way of life. And now, we have an entire generation of people who think that they can’t survive without it.

This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats – it’s about forgetting what made us great. This was just a single example. I could devote an entire series of articles on this subject – but I won’t. I’ve said my peace and honestly, I’m thankful I won’t have to see another political ad for two years.

Until then… Be nice to each other.

How We Failed Science Fiction

  By Phineas Delgado | June 14, 2012 - 1:27 pm | , , ,
3 Comments

This is a difficult piece to write. I struggled with a title because honestly, Science Fiction hasn’t failed us on this particular topic, but boy have we been a disappointment all on our own. This is going to be a frank and open discussion about hate, misogyny and free speech. There will be offensive language below, so be warned. I know I’ve talked about how the anonymity of the Internet has created a new breed of douche bag, but I really just scratched the surface. This is a topic that’s being given new light because of issues that range from online bullies to virtual hazing and flat out harassment. I know I don’t have as many readers as some of the other blogs, but I feel this is important enough for me to talk about.

There’s nothing about this that anyone should hate. Disagree, maybe, but not hate.

My friend Natali (@UberDorkGirlie on Twitter) always posts great stuff. She’s a strong single mother with realistic feminist ideals. She never promotes hate; only equality, love and positivity. Seems somewhat contrary to the way feminists are presented to us by the media (it’s a shame that stereotypes exist, but they do because someone exemplified them). Specifically, the post was a link to an article that appeared on the New Statesman website about one of my new heroes, Anita Sarkeesian (the article Dear The Internet, This Is Why You Can’t Have Anything Nice, was written by Helen Lewis and posted on June 12th). Go read the article, but just to summarize, Anita is a pop culture critic (and a good one), and one of her specialties is the treatment of women in popular media. Her video series, Tropes vs. Women, has been used by educators, parents and other interested parties, to show how as a society, we’ve been pigeon-holed into viewing women a certain way. The six tropes she mentions are the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (a female character that exists only to pull a male lead character out of a funk), Women in Refrigerators (the trend of prominent female character, particularly in comics, being killed off in meaningless fashion primarily to add value to a male counterpart or lead), the Smurfette Principle (which is the phenomenon of having many male characters and a single female character of prominence, despite that not being indicative of most groups), the Evil Demon Seductress (which is the supernatural version of the “Black Widow” – a creature disguised as a woman using seduction to lure men to their doom), the Mystical Pregnancy (the story device in which women in science fiction and fantasy are often impregnated against their will – or against the will of others – with supernatural offspring), and finally the Straw Feminist (an archetype that demonizes feminist ideals because in the fantasy world of film and print, all people are equal and feminism is no longer needed). You don’t have to agree with her, but you should respect her position, and at the very least the fact she’s putting herself out there for the scrutiny of the world. Not many of us can say the same.

But my article isn’t about feminism or about how women aren’t treated equally in popular media. Honestly, as a man, I find I’m under-qualified to talk much about the subject. I’m for all people being equal. It’s not right that women get paid less than men. It isn’t right that they pay more for health care than men. It isn’t right that their armor only covers their “mommy parts” and would be as effective at protecting them in battle as cardboard. Our world could use a little less testosterone. This article isn’t about that. It’s about … well… I don’t know what to call it.

When Natali introduced me to Anita’s story, at first, I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. Then I started really digging into it. I was appalled at how Anita was being treated simply because she was questioning the perpetuation of the stereotypes presented in popular media. This time, she wanted to go over the tropes presented by video games, and it opened the flaming floodgates of douchebaggery. Please pardon the language, I’m going to be quoting directly from the comments on her YouTube page. Here’s what the people at large had to say about her idea:

D4gI3 wrote: “All of these feminist whores need to shut the fuck up.”
Derek Thompson wrote: “This bitch is a fucking scumbag…Sexism in video games goes both ways. Both Men and Women are stereotyped in video games stop acting like Women are the only one portrayed poorly. This bitch is just taking advantage of how stupid feminists are and you faggots who get a massive erection every time you see a girl gamer. ”
stabmycock wrote: “I CAN DONATE ALL MY SEMEN IF YOU AGREE, PLEASE RESPOND”
Ln192 wrote: “I wish I could just wipe out humanity by pressing a button thanks to people like this kyke. The fuck is wrong with humanity… I’m seriously considering becoming a sharia-supporting muslim because of women like you.”

You’ll note that all but one of the examples were written by people who choose to hide behind an alias.  Here’s the thing. There are THOUSANDS of comments like these. Most of them question the validity of Anita’s Kickstarter campaign (she asked for $6,000 to produce the videos; she’s been pledged over $117,000), but honestly, that’s a poor excuse for this level of abuse. And that’s what it is. You can hide behind the First Amendment, you can hide behind your computer screen, but the bottom line is that this type of speech is purely and simply… ABUSE. I would bet dollars to dimes that none of these “men” would say any of this to Anita’s face. She doesn’t make a bad point, and even if she did, she is entitled to her opinion. And while the same could be said of her detractors, she isn’t threatening their lives, using racial slurs against them, or threatening to rape them. I am forced to ask the question, where does one person’s right to speak their mind end? Does it end?

So what would you call the types of comments made above? Defamation? Well, by definition, in order to claim Slander or Libel (read as “spoken defamation” and “written defamation”), you must prove that a statement is not only untrue, but that you were harmed by it and that the person defaming didn’t research the truthfulness of their statement. In this case, any harm would have been purely psychological because she beat her fundraising goal by nearly 20 times. So Defamation is out. Hate Speech? In the United States, “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment unless it’s inciteful or calls for violence (which makes it fall into the little known category of “Fighting Words”). What’s more is that “Fighting Words” are a crime that’s enforced state-to-state, meaning that without a Federal statute, there is no way to enforce compliance on websites because which state’s laws would apply? Those of the user? Those of the host? What if the host is off shore? A slew of questions that aren’t easily answered. And to be honest, it doesn’t help that sites like 4Chan and 9Gag encourage this type of behavior (it’s thought that 4Chan is where the vitriol for Anita began).

So I pose the question again: Do we censor abusive speech like the examples above, or allow it to continue on the premise that it is protected speech. It’s not an easy question to answer. I would call myself a Libertarian, so the concept of “free speech” is practically sacrosanct to me. For decades, people have tried to put an end to parades and displays made by hate groups like the KKK, but without specific threats of violence, they are protected, as they should be. Like it or not, they have a right to their opinions, no matter how ignorant and uninformed as they may appear. Interestingly, the same people (along with some of their “friends” in hate groups) have been trying to put an end to pornography since… forever… and failed because again, it’s protected speech. The girls are paid, some very well, and many of them enjoy what they do. Further, no one is forcing people to buy the stuff. If there wasn’t a market, it wouldn’t exist. I could say the same about the tropes about which Anita is complaining. They are used because they sell video games/movies/TV shows/white bread/*insert anything here*. It isn’t right, but neither is Jersey Shore and we can’t seem to get rid of that either.

Frankly, this type of behavior pisses me off to no end. There’s no excuse for it, and honestly, there should be no place for it in out society. I’m firm in my belief that the only reason it happened is because it was online and the posters can’t be identified and confronted face to face. It’s the same with online bullying. Something about the Internet makes people think that they can say whatever they want, and that it’s OK because it’s only words. Mechwarrior 4 was the first game I played where I was communicating with other people while I played and the first time I was cussed out by what was likely a 12-year-old. This isn’t behavior we would accept on a playing field or even in a public arena, why do we accept it online?

So we come back to my chosen title. We failed Science Fiction, my friends, because, let’s face it, WE are the Internet and we are letting this happen (or worse, are participating in it). While the progenitors of modern Science Fiction didn’t always agree about how the future would look, I’m sure most of them thought that by the 21st century, we wouldn’t be targeting a well spoken and intelligent woman because she thinks popular media presents her sisters poorly. We’ve handled their ideas poorly. Kirk was a womanizer. Padme and Leia are the only women of real prominence in Star Wars (movies here, folks, don’t flame). Anakin Skywalker was a “virgin birth” and his mother only existed  to give birth to him and die. Tasha Yar died a meaningless death, then was made into a villain later.Buck Rogers in the 25th Century had two prominent female roles, a sidekick (Colonel Wilma Deering – Buck’s Rank was Captain… unless he’s in the Navy, she outranks him, otherwise they are the same rank) and the evil seductress (Princess Ardala whose goals were to destroy Earth and, of course, make Buck her consort). I know men are poorly represented as well ( I mean who can live up to the image Kirk sets), but at the same time, men aren’t dealing with centuries of being treated as property.

It’s up to all of us to put an end to this kind of hateful activity. So, to start, I’m giving you homework. I want you to go to Feminist Frequency’s YouTube page (found here: FemFreq) and see what Anita has to say. There’s a website too (It can be found here: Feminist Frequency). She’s good at what she does, and she deserves a little respect. If you really like what she’s doing, there’s still time left on her Kickstarter too (You can back her here: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games). I would add that you should follow her on Twitter too, but for God’s sake, be respectful. You can find out more about Natali on her blog (Life in Monkeyland) and her awesome business the Uber Dork Cafe (based in Milwaukee). She’s also a co-host of The Power Geeks (a podcast which can be found here: The Power Geeks). Natali is one of my dearest friends online. Respect these women or I will find you and hurt you in your genitals.

Now go and play nice.

Zombies… ‘Nuff Said.

  By Phineas Delgado | June 3, 2012 - 8:16 pm | , , ,
2 Comments

Lately, the media has been assaulting the public with stories about the upcoming presidential race, the upcoming Olympic Games and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (which doesn’t make much sense seeing that I’m not in the U.K. or Canada – but I like the Queen, God save her). But then this story comes out of Miami that suddenly makes me pay attention. The details of the story are frighteningly familiar to fans of horror-type science fiction; a naked man in Miami was seen eating the face of another naked man and when approached by Police, he stopped only long enough to growl at them. Read that again. HE WAS EATING THE OTHER GUY’S FACE. Not just biting him. Not tearing off pieces and spitting them out. He was eating the other man’s face as if it were his last meal on Earth – which it ended up being.

He didn’t follow Rule #2

It got me to thinking about the impending zombie apocalypse (mainly because, well, we let our imaginations run wild – and the media dug up every cannibalistic story from the last decade), and what it means to us. Now, some of you might be saying, “But Phineas, Zombies are part of the horror culture and have nothing to do with Science Fiction.” See, that’s where you’re wrong. Practically every “zombie apocalypse” follows the same basic path: Some unknown (or purposefully hidden) event has cause the dead to rise (or the living to turn “undead”) to feast on the flesh of the living, which in turn adds to their numbers. It’s the catalyst for the creation of the zombies that pushes this out of the realm of the supernatural and into the world of science fiction. It’s just that in this case, Science Fiction hasn’t failed us, I think we might be over-prepared). I’ll explain that more in a moment.

First , let’s take a second to look at how zombies entered our collective consciousness. Unless you lived on the Bayou, you had probably never heard of a zombie until the release of the classic 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. In it, the corpses of the dead (presumably only those still composed enough to be ambulatory) were brought back to life by radiation brought back from space by a probe that exploded over the East Coast of the U.S. It’s a story idea that’s been mirrored and copied countless times and was itself inspired by the 1954 novel, I am Legend (which popularized the concept of human annihilation by disease rather than nuclear war or alien invasion). That movie spawned  FIVE sequels of its own (1978′s Dawn of the Dead, 1985′s Day of the Dead, 2005′s Land of the Dead, 2007′s Diary of the Dead, and 2010′s Survival of the Dead were all set in the same universe), and countless copies, most notably movies like 28 Days Later and the homage film Shaun of the Dead, not to mention the video game franchises Resident Evil and House of the Dead (which themselves spawned movie franchises).

Our collective image of zombies (again, unless you live in Louisiana) was largely formed by two men, George Romero and Dan O’Bannon. George A. Romero created Night of the Living Dead with John Russo, but the two differed creatively and went separate ways. Russo retained the rights to “Living Dead” titles while Romero retained the rights to the actual story premise. O’Bannon worked with Russo on his film Return of the Living Dead. Romero imagined zombies as plodding, unthinking engines of death that craved only human flesh. O’Bannon’s are thinking, conniving creatures that crave brains and only brains. For whatever reason, while Romero’s overall image has been the lasting one, O’Bannon’s brain-eating was attached to the iconic zombie image. Even if you haven’t seen the movies, you know what it means when you hear, “Braiiiinnnnssss….”

What we learned from Romero, though, was that Zombies need their heads destroyed (or their bodies burned) to be stopped, and a single bite is enough to infect another human being. So not only do we need to worry about the dead, we need to worry about the living. In I am Legend, the zombies weren’t called zombies yet, and there was a distinction between the dead that had been infected (called “Vampires” in the book ) and the living, which by the end of the book were dealing with their sickness and actually rebuilding a new society (which the protagonist realized that he would not fit in and that he was as legendary as Vampires had been previously; hence the title). All of these book and movies have prepared us for an impending attack of mindless zombies, but my favorite “preparation” came from Zombieland: The Rules. With them, the film’s protagonist shared with the audience, for the first time, some of the basic concepts behind being a survivor in a zombie infested world. And while the film was very tongue-in-cheek in it’s presentation of the zombie apocalypse, the Rules have stuck.

So let’s take an unusual step into the real world. As I mentioned at the beginning, the past week has seen some… interesting… new points, among them the face-eating attack in Miami. So here we have a naked assailant under the effects of some seriously mind-altering, lying naked next to another man (also naked) and eating him. He was so far gone that he didn’t react to being shot. Of course it feeds the imagination when we hear tales like this one. There was the woman in Texas who ate part of her own child in 2009 as well. Of course we didn’t hear much about that one, but it was dredged up my the media because of the popularity of the other story. The idea of the inevitable zombie attack was so popular that some people chose to debunk the idea of zombies altogether. The humor e-zine Cracked even took the time to debunk the idea of zombies being a threat at all. You should take a moment to read their 7 Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail. At the end of the day, The Centers for Disease Control even put in their two cents and assured the public… *ahem* publicly… that there was nothing to worry about. Of course, I trust a government agency about as much as I trust clowns. Of course, they are the CDC, and they tend not to… I’ll let the picture say it.

The CDC’s business cards say it all…

Of course there isn’t a Zombie Apocalypse in our near future, but we all like to dream a little don’t we? Of course we all assume that WE’D one of the few immune, or one of the few with the skills to survive, which means that our bosses, politicians, the guy who cut you off on the highway last week, and the bully from high school would all be brain chomping undead. But as prepared as we all might be for the actual combat involved, I don’t think I care to think about the effect it would have on day-to-day life. I mean did Kevin Costner look happy in Waterworld? Did Mad Max ever smile? Will Smith smiled in the modern adaptation of I am Legend, but he also flirted with a mannequin, so he was a bit cracked. I don’t want that.

Somebody better tell the Miami Police about Rule #2.

Building Better Games

  By Phineas Delgado | May 29, 2012 - 9:40 pm | , , , , ,
3 Comments

Since my last post was somewhat controversial, I decided that I’d have a little fun with this one. Thank you to @michaelwpg for the great idea.

So, like every other person in the world, I’ve been playing Diablo 3, the latest installment in the epic tale of the mythic land of Sanctuary. It’s been nearly 11 years since we last visited our friend Deckard Cain and heard him utter those iconic words (in his best Sean Connery accent), “Stay a while and listen…”. I’m not going to turn this into a bitter diatribe about how impossible it is to get into the game sometimes, or how a mutil-billion dollar company like Blizzard should have this sort of stuff worked out before launching what is essentially a single player game for many people. But I digress.

Virtual Reality? More like a Virtual Attempt. We can do better than this.

As I play this game (when it IS possible), I notice that despite being visually stunning, it’s really not any different than the last one. It is “different”, but the basic premise and mechanics are the same. I suppose it’s a good example of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but I’m disappointed at the lack of a truly 3-D environment. For pity’s sake, the game took 10 years to develop (yes I know they didn’t USE all that time, but that’s their fault not mine), and they still couldn’t manage to have a true 3-D world. The same applies to another long-awaited return, Duke Nukem Forever. That game took even longer to develop (first being announced in 1997, on the heels of the wildly popular Duke Nukem 3-D (which itself was a continuation of the original side-scrolling favorite of early PC gamers). But as I played, the game felt all-too-familiar. It felt like after 15 years, I was playing the same game, just with updated texture maps. Shame really.

That gets me to thinking about gaming in general. Now, I’ll admit. The last console I purchased for myself was made by Nintendo (I wanted something I knew would be all right for my young daughter – I’ll also admit I’ve owned every Nintendo console; they used to be good). the last non-Nintendo console I purchased was the PlayStation (the original), and frankly I preferred the games and low load times of the Nintendo 64 to the higher graphics and volume of games available on the PlayStation. Even still, I spent more time playing Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III (or VI… or whatever). And as I reminisce, I recall suddenly that I never finished Final Fantasy. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m playing Diablo and Call of Duty:Whatever and everything else, but I know for a fact I enjoyed Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger better. Hell, I even bought the new version of Chrono Trigger for the DS. I loved that game. Sidebar: if you love those old games as much as I do, then you should visit 1 More Castle and follow my friend ‏ ‏@Nintendo_Legend.

Aside from the new motion capture attachments with the platforms (which is based on old technology), there hasn’t been any REAL innovation in video gaming since the leap from 2D to 3D and calling that an innovation is being kind. Fighting games are the same. Platformers are the same. First Person Shooters are the same. Every time I get a kill in Call of Duty I hear “Mein leben!” in my head. I wouldn’t call the creation of MMO’s (Massively Multiplayer Online games) an “innovation” so much as an “exploitation”. Multiplayer games have been around since long before the Internet was popular, they just required you to be in the same room with the people you were playing with (serial games were the best). I wasted many hours playing Doom 2 and Heretic over serial connections. Adding the Internet to the equation justmade gamers out of the people the gamers didn’t want gaming. Remember the douchebag frat boys in Revenge of the Nerds? Well, they play HALO now.

In Back to the Future 2, the Marty from 1985 goes into the 80′s cafe in 2015 and is confronted with an old first generation gun shooter. The kids nearby, rather than being impressed with his skills, lament that the game itself requires hands to use. Now we actually have that, but in all honesty, I don’t want a game that’s a workout too. Swinging the Wii controller around is quite enough. I don’t think of this as an innovation either (as I mentioned before) because they took technology that already existed and applied it to video games. Where are the holograms? Where are the immersive helmets? Where is Virtual Reality? I think we’ve advanced gaming AI to a good enough point that this stuff should be doable, so why don’t they try it. Well, they sort of did. Ever hear of the Virtual Boy? If you were born after 1990 I wouldn’t be surprised (It was released in 1995 and un-released the following year). It was the first attempt by a game maker to immerse players in a virtual world that wasn’t in an arcade (remember those?). At $180, it was actually less than the original Game Boy at its launch 6 years earlier, which shows how little faith even Nintendo had in the platform. And it could hardly be called “VR” because it was monochrome. And worse yet, it was in red; and as I recall, it wasn’t the easiest to see. When I think VR, I think of Lawnmower Man, or for a more modern reference The Matrix or Surrogates, not the Virtual Boy.

That would be innovation.

So why don’t they do it? Probably for the same reason we don’t have electric cars; there’s plenty of money in it, but there’s still money in the old way. Sure, you could well a system for $1,000 and $100 a game to about 5-10% of the current gaming community, or they could keep slinging crap at us for $200 a console and $40-$60 a game. They make a ton of money on us. We can look at Blizzard again as an example. At one point, there were 11 MILLION people playingWorld of Warcraft. That’s greater than the populations of all but 7 states. Or, to put it in greater perspective, greater than the combined populations of Wyoming, Washington D.C., Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Hawaii. They charged at least $12.99 per month (if you subscribed for a whole year – $14.99 if you payed monthly), so do the math. Here, I’ll do it for you. It’s $28.6M, at a minimum per month. That’s enough to run an Eastern European country for pity’s sake. And somehow, they still can’t get the stinking servers up on time. They still have to take them down to do maintenance. They still get people on the east coast excited for a midnight launch even though they can’t play the game until 3AM, because god forbid people in New York get in the game before people in Irvine. Take some of that money, Blizzard, and innovate. Make a real jump.

And while you are, I’ll be playing Diablo 3.

How to Fail at Government

  By Phineas Delgado | May 24, 2012 - 5:44 pm | , ,
2 Comments

I normally don’t wax political with these, but I’ve noticed some things lately that I wanted to talk about. So, before we begin, I’ll lay down some ground rules and give you some background on me so that we can be adults about this.

Before you make any comments, I want you to remember these rules:

  1. Be respectful of other people’s ideas. I don’t care if someone posts that they eat baby brains for lunch because the Fuzzy Rabbit god tells them to, BE RESPECTFUL. This is my space in the Universe, not yours, and that’s not too much to ask.
  2. We can agree to disagree. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind here, but healthy debate is… well.. healthy.
  3. You are my friends, and I expect you to stay my friends. If what I post here offends you to the point that you feel the need to unfollow me, fine, but keep it to yourself. I don’t need you poisoning the well because you don’t know what “being adult” means.

There, now that we’ve settled that, we can proceed.

American Politics by Party

Which one are you?

I should start by telling you that I do not define myself by a political party (If I did, it would be Libertarian – they most closely match my set of principals). I don’t affiliate myself with one ideal or another either. The reason I don’t is because honestly, the actual definitions of the parties and affiliations themselves are so narrow that only a very small group of people would fit within them. You disagree? Here, let me prove it. Say you’re Catholic; should you identify with Democrats or Republicans, Liberals or Conservatives, Progressives or Traditionalists, Constructionists or Functionalists? You think you know? I bet you don’t; you might think you do, but there’s a lot more than meets the eye here. See, as a Catholic, your faith tells you that you should be a forgiving and charitable person, which means you should support the socialist policies of the Democrats. But the Democrats, as a party, support a woman’s right to choose, which is completely verboten. So how can you elect someone you know will violate your core principals? The GOP will tend toward traditionalism, which meets with Catholic ideals, but as a whole frown upon much of the entitlement programs that aid the poor, which the Catholic Church generally supports.

So who do you vote for? Who bests represents YOUR ideals? That said, with the direction our government is heading, I felt that it might be appropriate to examine how Science Fiction, the source of so much inspiration to our generation, viewed government.

The most famous representation of future government is probably in George Orwell’s dystopic vision, 1984. BUt it’s hardly the only one. Logan’s Run, Farenheit 451, Minority Report, The Running Man, and most recently the very popular The Hunger Games all represent somewhat dystopic visions of the future in which government has a much larger presence than they do today. In fact, I would say that dystopic visions of the future outnumber utopic ones by quite a bit. But the problem is that we have an entire generation of people (our parents and to some degree us as well) that for a large part, watched TV instead of reading. Early TV Science Fiction (when it didn’t involve alien invasions or giant monsters) presents the future with an unsettling amount of optimism. I suppose they were trying to take people’s minds of the very real threat of nuclear annihilation, because as that threat lessened in the 90′s, the science fiction became more and more dire.

Here’s where I have issue. Shows like Star Trek present this perfect ideal future society where there is no hunger, no want, no need, and most importantly, no money. People who grew up watching that (guilty) see this future and want it to be real. Hell in 1992, I was waiting for CNN to announce the rise to power of a certain well known warlord had risen to power in Asia and that eventually we’d fight a war and they’d board the S.S. Botany Bay and flee into space. It was that real to me (and lots of other people). Those people… are now in charge of the country. People who watched Star Trek  and Lost in Space and Back to the Future are trying to steer us in the path of a the perfect Utopic society, as envisioned by people like Sir Thomas More and Karl Marx (not to imply that anyone is a Marxist). Hey it’s a great idea; everyone shares what they have and we all are better for it. I like the sound of it. I’d wager you do too. But there’s a problem.

Money.

That’s right. Currency, and the trading of it for goods and services. That’s what keeps us from being able to pull of Socialism/Communism or anything like it. If you look over our recent history, and compare successful societies to unsuccessful ones,you’ll see that in the first world (read: developed nations) Socialism is bankrupting nations because they still have to use money to pay for goods and services (free healthcare isn’t FREE – someone still needs to be paid for it). It does, however, work in the third world – and very well I might add – because money isn’t involved. Small tribes of aboriginal people still trade goods for goods, or goods for services, or services for goods and share in the collective work of gathering food and building shelter. Everyone succeeds or everyone fails… because there is no law of “supply and demand”. We’ve seen so-called “Nanny States” like The former Soviet Union and most of Europe falter under massive debt brought on by the need to pay for all the “free” goods and services the state provides to the people. You can’t expect a baker to provide bread for free if he has to pay to get his eggs and flour. You can’t expect the farmer to give away eggs and flour for free when he has to purchase feed for his livestock and equipment with which to sow. You can’t expect the people who make feed and farm equipment to do it for free because at some point in the chain, somewhere, something is coming from a place that still uses money. Everyone in the world would have to be on the same page in order for this to work properly… or you’d have to completely isolate yourselves, which in today’s world is exceedingly difficult.

So why do I bring all of this up? The other day, a very good friend of mine, Kylee (@KyleeLane, @LuxuryLaneSoap) ranted on Facebook, then on her own blog (http://kyleelane.com/ – check the post titled “Rage Politics”) about entitlement programs in her State. Her specific point (I’m not going into a lot of detail, I’d rather you go check out her site and follow her on Twitter) is she and her family don’t have much, but she feels they are better off for struggling to make ends meet rather than holding out their hand and taking the money. Myself, I try not to judge people on assistance because there was a time in my life when my mother and I needed that help. But in hindsight (and mind you, I was a baby), I wonder how it would have been different had I been born a decade or two earlier, or better, a century. In Ohio (where I live) a family of four gets almost $600 in food stamps. They eat better than I do… and if you’ve seen me you know I eat well (but that’s really a separate issue). We’ve created a never-ending system of entitlement that has progressed to the point that people actually refuse to better themselves because they know that doing so would eliminate the “free” assistance they get.

A co-worker of mine (@Greg_n_Cincy – he’s a hard line conservative Republican, so be warned) tells a story that applies here. One of his previous employees was receiving government assistance. She did great work for him, and he was prepared to give her a substantial raise to thank her, but he wanted to surprise her, so he didn’t tell her first. When she got her paycheck the next week, she came to him and asked him to correct it immediately. When he told her that it was correct, and that she’d gotten a raise, she demanded that he make it the way it was, because if she made more money, she would lose her assistance. So, even though she would have had more money when all was said and done (even after taxes… it was a big increase), she refused to take the money because she had been “trained” into thinking that it was better to take the government’s “free” money. That’s just broken thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-assistance; I’m anti-lazy. And I hate the fact that I have to work harder to provide for my family because I pay so much in taxes to take care of people who should be taking care of themselves. And the kicker is that I would gladly help them if they asked me. But they don’t. They demand. They expect. And that’s wrong. I believe as human beings, it’s in our best interests to help one another, but we shouldn’t need the government to force us to do it. What we don’t think about when we look to Star Trek and the other sources of this Utopic ideal is that it usually takes some sort of massive disaster to bring the people together. In Star Trek it was a series of devastating wars. Do we really want to go through hell to get to heaven?

So the way I see it, there’s only one plausible solution.

He’s Our Only Hope

What Space Program?

  By Phineas Delgado | May 21, 2012 - 1:19 pm | , , , , , , ,
2 Comments

Yesterday, the southwestern United States experienced a rare Annular Eclipse of the Sun (an event where the moon doesn’t perfectly cover the solar disk, making it appear as if a ring of fire surrounds the moon), so I felt it would be appropriate to talk about vast void that surrounds us. From the dawn of human thought… possibly even before that… we have been obsessed with the heavens. I have the most knowledge about the Greek version of that obsession, but it is a concept that crosses cultural barriers more than any other. It’s not hard to feel the awe and wonder that our earliest ancestors must have felt when looking at the night sky, or at an eclipse. But thinking about that made me think about where we are placing ourselves in the cosmos.

You very well may be looking at the last government employee in space.

Science Fiction takes two routes on this. I know there are some exceptions, but these seem to be by far the most popular choices. We’ve either sealed our own doom by indicating our readiness to be conquered (by sending out probes that tell everything about us, radio signals welcoming visitors, or even the penultimate, actually traveling to other worlds), or we become off the dominate players on the galactic stage (usually meaning the fate of the universe rests in our hands). I’d like to think there are more options than just those, particular since neither one of them is entirely positive. But upon closer examination, and mind you I’m no expert, I think that even if there is intelligent life out there capable of traveling here, I think they would give us a wide berth.

Or wipe us out before we even knew they were there.

We all have this need, though, and wonder, built into us. I don’t know how anyone could look up and not wonder what’s going on up there. More, I can’t imagine anyone honestly believing that we are alone. It’s like Carl Sagan said (paraphrasing Thomas Carlyle), “If we are alone in the universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space.” I don’t really think it’s like Star Wars or Star Trek out there, but I hardly think that we’re the only intelligent life in the cosmos (considering that we’re really not all that intelligent). Considering some of the places we’ve found life on our own planet and the number of times we’ve redefined what “life as we know it” actually means, its a certainty to me. I’m sure I’m going to get some hate mail for this.

By default, then, I think our science fiction has a tendency to use space as a medium, almost as its own character, because its unknown, unknowable, and… let’s face it, it sells. We have an almost romantic ideal about what it means to live in space, made popular by shows like Star Trek and Lost in Space. Even the cartoons of the late 60′s and early 70′s used outer space as a setting. Some of my personal favorites were Star Trek: The Animated Series, Space Ghost, and The Herculoids. I won’t even bother talking about The Jetsons because they were obviously very tongue-in-cheek about the concepts, but even still, all of these franchises presented living in space as a given. And they made it seem almost hospitable. Pressurized Space Suits were rarely, if ever, shown on screen, and the characters were often shown traipsing around the alien planets with no concept to the possible dangers. In Star Wars, when the Millennium Falcon was inside the space slug in the asteroid belt, they opened the cabin, and walked around (in a presumably very low pressure environment) without any suits at all; they just had oxygen masks covering their noses and mouths.

Science Fiction has made a habit of both being horrifyingly realistic, but also stupefyingly idealistic in its representations of life in space. On one hand, movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Event Horizon show that the human body doesn’t explode (or invert) when exposed to the vacuum of space. Those movies also showed realistic movements and explosions in space too. A personal favorite is the scene in Serenity, when they were moving back through Reaper space and Mal shot at the Reaper ship; you heard a muffled thud, as if Mal were mic’d, then you heard nothing when the other ship exploded – which is exactly what would have happened.

The on the other hand, how many explosions have we seen in space? For that matter, how many have we heard? Some of those sounds have even become iconic (we all know what a TIE Fighter sounds like). But Ridley Scott hit the nail on the head when he said “In space no one can hear you scream…” It’s almost comical to hear the hard core nerds in the audience decrying what could and couldn’t happen in a scene that takes place in space. I have my own scene I can’t stand. The one in Total Recall, more than once, actually, they depict people being exposed to the atmosphere and low pressure of Mars by cartoonishly expanding their eyes and tongue, and making them appear to suffocate rather painfully. And then there’s the final scene, where the windows of the domes were blown out and everyone’s marveling at the new blue sky… never mind the fact that Mars’ mean temperature is well below “comfortable” norms, and even though they were likely in the Northern hemisphere, and it could have been summer, the likelihood that it happened to be short sleeve shirt weather on the day they decided to save Mars is highly unlikely. I have a hard time suspending my sense of disbelief for that… even though I own the movie.

Of course none of this will matter, because it never occurred to any of the creators of these great stories that we wouldn’t have a space program to bring it to reality. And we don’t. That’s right, this entire post was because I’m ashamed that we no longer feel that exploring space is important; that we no longer look at our science fiction and say, “That’s awesome! We should figure out how to make that happen.”

Shame on us.

How Hollywood Failed Science Fiction

  By Phineas Delgado | May 9, 2012 - 9:12 pm | , , ,
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Most of the time, my articles come about because of interesting conversations I’ve had with my friends and co-workers. As I was writing the last piece (The Fans), part of that discussion led to the question of whether Science Fiction was to blame, or simply Hollywood. Then that got me to thinking…

A dangerous prospect, really.

Science Fiction fans fall into two specific groups, with some overlap between them: Readers and Watchers. And while those descriptions might be self-explanatory, I’ll take a moment to clarify. Readers are those people who cut their teeth on Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and know that Total Recall was based off of the book We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. They prefer the written word to the action on-screen and at the end of the movies, they critique the changes. Watchers are those people whose idea of good Science Fiction requires someone to spend 13 hours a day in makeup. They can name every character on Stargate SG-1, name all the planets in Battlestar Galactica, and question whether or not we really ARE in the Matrix. Mind you, while most people are exposed to both, classification is based on preference not on exclusivity.

Are there ANY original ideas left?

I, myself, am a Reader. I enjoy sci-fi movies and shows, hell, I’m a Trekkie, but I think there’s something about the written word that movies just can’t capture. My brain is far better suited for imagining the look on David Bowman’s face (in 2001: A Space Odyssey) when he flies over the Monolith, and for painting his experiences afterward. No discredit to Stanley Kubrick; he made a marvelous film. But we all see things our own way, and when we see that movie, we’re seeing what Kubrick imagined. That’s what film-making is all about, and why some people love Ridley Scott, and others prefer Joss Whedon (I happen to love them both… but then, I’m a Reader).

I bring this difference up because modern Science Fiction fans seem to be predominantly Watchers, mainly because that’s where I society has gone. We raise our children with televisions rather than story times, iPads instead of books. I’m sad to say that increasingly, we don’t imagine for ourselves. There is plenty of media that stays true to the original literary sources, but more often than not, movie-goers and television viewers want flash over substance. I’m guilty of it, too. We all are.

Now that I’ve established this, on to my actual point. Hollywood is part of the reason Science Fiction has failed us. It’s all so clear now. As I look back at all the books I’ve read, and I compare them to the movies they inspired. Hollywood just can’t leave well enough alone in most cases. Now, please don’t misunderstand; I am and always will be a fan of great science fiction shows and movies. What I’m saying that there’s something about the medium, particularly in modern times, that just doesn’t stimulate those parts of the brain involved in independent creative thought. Of course, that’s just my opinion. But I base in on experience. Here’s an example: The Running Man a 1982 novel by Stephen King (writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) is a story set in 2025 about a dystopian future. In it, the protagonist, Ben Richards, desperate for money because he’s been blacklisted from his trade (and because his wife has taken to prostitution) agrees to participate in a popular game show called The Running Man. He is given money for every hour he stays alive, along with $4800 and a 12 hour head start. He can go anywhere in the world, but he is being chased by Hunters. Winner have to survive 30 days, and they win 1 Billion New Dollars.After 10 days, Richards is offered a position as Head Hunter, but he discovers that his wife and daughter were brutally murdered. So instead, he steals a plane and flies it into the Games Network building, killing himself and Dan Killian, the shows producer.

Sound familiar? Have you seen the 1987 movie by the same name? Aside from the names and dystopian setting, the two have very little in common. That’s the problem in a nutshell. It isn’t just about the director presenting his version of a story (like in 2001 – Kubrick’s vision evolved alongside Clarke’s as the book and screenplay were written at the same time), it’s about producers thinking that they know what we want better than we do, and as a result, completely changing the intent and meaning of a story. The movie version of The Running Man is so different than the originating material that most people have no idea it was based on a book, let alone a Stephen King book. Don’t even get me started on Clash of the Titans, as if the actual MYTH wasn’t epic enough (Perseus was such an important figure to the Greeks that the Greek people were often called Danaans – after his mother, Danae), they had to make it even more epic by adding creatures that don’t exist and changing the story. Why write your own story when you can just rewrite someone else’s.

Now we get to the failing part. Movies and Television are all about suspending your sense of disbelief. If you don’t believe that what your seeing is possible, even a little, it won’t work. There is very little exception to this. But these people aren’t scientists, and many times, in an effort to add drama or action, they completely ignore the science. It is SCIENCE Fiction, you know. Here’s a prime example: in the movie Total Recall, more than once, people are shown suffocating on the surface, with their eyes and tongue bulging comically. Of course, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of physical science knows that even though the pressure is extremely low, and surface liquids would boil away almost instantly, breathing out and tightly closing all the orifices would keep you from looking like this:

Movies and books like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Event Horizon show that the human body can be very resilient (and even better, their representations are base don scientific evidence and not just speculation). The only reason I even mention this “bad science’ is because it’s something they made up for the movie, purely to add drama. While the stories were similar, the original work did take place on Mars; there were only references to a past event. I actually think the original work is a better story, but, like Minority Report, it’s a short story, so there isn’t much to work with. Still, there’s so little of the origin piece left that it’s nearly unrecognizable. And in the end, what purpose did the additions serve, other than to paint the pictures for us. Total Recall is one of my favorite movies, and it’s an innovative piece of work, but as a story-telling device… I prefer its predecessor.

It makes me wonder, if my book is popular one day, and Hollywood takes an interest, how much of MY story will be left?

We The Fans…

  By Phineas Delgado | May 7, 2012 - 3:24 pm | ,
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The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine (@JediJayne… you should follow her if you aren’t already) about my old Star Wars v. Star Trek article. I noted that I was surprised that it was still getting attention nearly two years after it’s publication, even during the period when I wasn’t active. It been, by far, my most read piece, and the one that generated the most traffic and comments. I just answered one two weeks ago, in fact. There is a lot of passion on the topic, more than I realized. So I started thinking about the fans of science fiction, and how rabid we really are.

Yes I said “rabid”, as in the foaming-at-the-mouth, crazed-look-in-the-eye, incoherently-babbling kind of rabid. And it’s been this way, well, since Star Trek. I mean I imagine that it’s the natural offshoot of how that generation felt about comic books (while they weren’t the original generation of comic book fans, they were the most populous – we’re talking Silver Age comics as a time reference); and as they matured and turned to movies and television, they took their ideas about fandom with them. These are our parents, really, the generation of kids that grew up on Star Trek and raised us on the reruns. And we grew up with so much more, and seeing those images come to life, and now we have children of our own. And now, with the internet at our disposal, and thousands of pages devoted to the science fiction genre of your choice, fandom has taken on a whole new meaning.

Now, imagine that these were actually fans of “Days of Our Lives”… You can’t, can you?

So what is it about science fiction that makes us love it so dearly. I mean there are conventions all the time, but people don’t dress up in costume for them. And let’s face it, the American Dental Associations convention doesn’t hold a candle to Comicon or Dragon*Con (though there probably are more shiny objects at the ADA show). And it goes beyond just “loving” a show or concept. People take their fandom seriously, both in the form of man-hours spent on a project (like a costume or website) or in the defense of their love. Here’s an example: I went to Dragon*Con in 2003 and I came across (for the first time) Firefly fans. They were having a discussion when one of the people involved chimed in “You seriously can’t compare Firefly to Star Trek…”. I thought it was going to come to blows. No, seriously. The Firefly fans banded together and began to defend their faith in the short-lived enterprise against the megalith that is Star Wars. And they were adamant about how important Firefly is, not only as science fiction, but as commentary on our lives today. And the other guy (presumably a Trekkie… sorry, Trekker makes you sound like you spend 14 hours a day on a bike in the Andes, and lets face it… none of you do), just kept saying, “I just don’t see it… it’s just the Old West in space…”. Of course, that statement is dripping with so much irony it’s leaving a rust stain on the floor, but that isn’t the point.

What is my point? I suppose I’m trying to figure out what makes science fiction different than, say,  fans of action franchises, or romance franchises. Soap Opera fans can be very loyal and dedicated, but they didn’t organize conventions to meet and share ideas and dress up like their favorite characters. Comic Book fans are almost as bad, but there’s a certain amount of common ground to be had, so the rules of a “fight” between characters can be easily rationalizes. Superman beats The Hulk, Batman beats Wolverine, etc. What is it about Science Fiction that draws in the obsession in people to the point they become belligerent? I mean, I love Greek Mythology, but I’m not willing to throw down with you because you think Zeus isn’t as cool as Takhisis.

There are even fights WITHIN groups of fans over what the universe’s “canon” actually is. I get this all the time on my Star Wars thread (because Lucas, the creator (and in my eyes, the end-all-be-all in terms of what is canon, since it was his idea), has gone on record as saying that he only views what happens on screen as “canon”. However, Lucas doesn’t “own” Star Wars anymore, and LucasArts, the company in charge of those rights, says that they try to include ALL ideas into “canon” provided that it doesn’t conflict with something that Lucas himself created (i.e. they won’t “canonize” a story in which Luke is killed by Vader during their first confrontation because that contradicts Lucas’ own story… but they were forced to accept midichlorians… tsk tsk tsk… shame really). With Star Wars, Roddenberry himself was the problem. He would come up with an idea, then when someone (or even he) came up with an idea he thought was better later (even if it was years later), he would retcon everything to include the new idea. Let’s face it Star Trek’s continuity is worse than Marvel’s or DC’s… and that’s actually saying something.

I recently had a discussion with a co-worker where he commented that possibly the works themselves are the cause of the problem. If we look to two of the modern “fathers” of the genre, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, even they disagreed on the subject matter. The now-famous “Clarke-Asimov Treaty” was devised, mostly in tongue-in-cheek fashion, so settle disputes about their work easily. It states that Clarke is the better Science Fiction writer while Asimov the better science writer. Do you see the distinction? They were making fun of us and we didn’t even know it. But it speaks to the power of science fiction to pull at us emotionally.

I wonder, if maybe it’s the fantastic elements that make us obsess. I mean it’s really only the positive (or mostly positive) franchises that have such obsessive followings. I should probably take a moment to establish what “positive” and “negative” mean in this context. Those franchises that have a generally happy feel and ending, or present the future/genre in positive light are… well.. “positive”. Anything dystopic, cyberpunk or apocalyptic would fall into “negative”. So Star Wars, Firefly and Star Trek are each generally positive, while Terminator, Alien, and Blade Runner would be “negative”. And for the record, BSG is “positive” because even though humans faced annihilation, they did with honor and hope. If that’s not “positive” I don’t know what is.

So back to my thought – only the “positive” franchsies seem to have this effect on people. You just don’t see Terminator fans arguing with Mad Max fans over which future is more bleak. I suppose it could have happened once… maybe twice… but it just isn’t the same as Star Trek Fans arguing with Star Wars fans over whether Q is stronger than The Force (that’s actually been said to me).  Or worse, bickering over who would win in a fist fight (in their prime), Kirk or Picard/Riker. As if they would ever fight. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that there are dozens of websites (again painstakingly cared for by said fanatics) that give all sorts of information on the “technical” aspects of the universes in question. The problem is that most of these, even when they are cited, contradict other information, and let’s face it, anybody can put anything on the internet. What makes matters worse though, is that the anonymity the Internet provides makes these discussions degrade into name-calling affairs rather quickly, and they tend to involve many more than just the truly faithful fans. I call these people “pseudo-fanatics” because they aren’t really fans and “fanaticism” in my experience, is usually incited by people who aren’t really faithful to the cause, but rather just like causing problems (or having power over others).

So, in closing, I offer this: maybe we are just meant to be raving lunatics when it comes to our favorite science fiction. But can we at least play nice about it? After all, it’s bad enough that we have so many stereotypes about a lack of girlfriends/boyfriends, hygiene and social skills. We don’t need to add internet trolling and hating to the list. On Twitter, I follow Wil Wheaton (@wilw), Nathan Fillion (@NathanFillion) and Carrie Fisher (@CarrieFFisher) and my brain doesn’t melt and run out my left ear. I promise.

Besides, in a fight between Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, BSG and Stargate, we all know who would win…

The Zentradi would.

Thus begins the true accounts of Phineas Delgado, Man of Action…

  By Phineas Delgado | April 12, 2010 - 12:48 pm | , , ,
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Well, I’ve finally done it. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to try my hand at the 21st Century version of the mix tape. Since I’m carving out my own little corner of the Internet, I suppose I should get a few things clear first. Most of you will already know that I am a regular contributor at Geek Shui Living, to the extent that I even have my own link on the front page. This blog will not end that relationship. In fact, I hope that it strengthens us both. This will be an outlet for my every day thoughts, and eventually, a means for me to communicate myself better than I can on twitters (with its limitations) and the article (which is themed).

With that said, allow me to introduce myself. I am Phineas Delgado, and I am a Man of Action. Don’t let my calm and collected demeanor fool you; I’m like a caged tiger, ready to pounce!… I couldn’t even write that with a straight face. The truth is, I’m a geek, like most of you, and I enjoy, nay I revel in my geekness.

I think that this space will be a place for you to get to know me better, and hopefully, to prepare you for the epic novel I am writing. I will be linking “How Science Fiction Failed Us” here, as well as anything else I find interesting. Maybe this will work out after all.