Archive for May, 2005

The Last of His Kind - (A Clever SF Reference If Ever I Made One)

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

Excellent episode of Doctor Who last night!

Return of the Daleks, only not plural, one poor lost little Dalek named Dalek, the last of his kind after the Time Wars, just like the Doctor, held prisoner by a crazy-rich collector of alien artifacts, the owner of the Internet in 2012. Really.

Lots of cute little visual references, both internal and external, lines the kind of funny that context rescues from SciFi banal, great throwaway lines, nice Doctory complications, suffering, revenge, redemption, grace, transcendence, all that hooey stuff.

New companion for the Doctor and Rose, a computer genius, Tod from Coronation Street.

So much better than Enterprise, RIP. Not.

And stairs, there were stairs! ROFLMAOing my ass off!

Why Humans Are Better Than Cylons

Friday, May 6th, 2005

1) Humans don’t all make a religion of sitting around telling themselves how much better they are than Cylons. Some do, but they’re probably Cylon wanna-bes anyway.

2) Humans have a perfectly good system of religion and society that while, nowhere near perfect, has enough built-in safeguards and failsafes, that only goes really bad in the hands of a Jim Jones or Do.

3) Cylons all like to think they’re smarter than the other Cylon, and try to prove it. The other Cylons respond in kind. Sometimes it’s nasty.

4) Cylons are expensive with limited market share and most people don’t know what to do with them.

5) There’s only few models that look good, and the really human compatible ones are just occupying a niche that any species could have occupied.

6) They think all humans should want a Cylon OS because it’s patently better, but the upgrade’s a bitch and the learning curve is a cartoon.

7) The Cylon user interface takes a specialist to set up and maintain despite dreams to the contrary they share in Cylon magazines and websites.

8) Some of them just wish they were human.

9) They claim to do be able to do everything a human can do, and better, but there’s still way more humans than Cylons, and it ain’t all about marketing.

10) When Cylons have to act like humans, they get the vapours and act like they’re stepping all the way down from Heaven in brand new shoes.

11) They act like regular human languages are just too, too common, badly structured, old-fashioned, backwards and barbaric. They don’t get the concepts of evolution, natural selection, memes or even real life and getting on with things.

12) Cylons are as bad as a bunch of batty old lady Baptists from 1969 Georgetown going on about the Presbyterians’ Ladies Aid on Main Street, when it’s the Buddhist hippies out on the farm who really know what’s going on.

13) Cylons have an unearned sense-of-superiority about themselves, and no sense of humour about that.

14) If Cylons were humans, they’d be Marxists. Or, more likely, Mac users.