Science fiction film: a rule of thumb

It seems to me that the greater the percentage of the action of a science fiction film or TV show that is set on a human-built spaceship, the greater the chance of the film being fundamentally stupid--and not just in ways relating to the spaceship itself.

Oh, I can think of counterexamples, as I'm sure you can too. But still, it seems like a useful rubric.

Technological progress

When I matriculated at Duke in 1982, the campus radio station (WXDU) didn't even have a transmission tower; it was "broadcast" AM over the West Campus electrical lines, which meant that you cold just barely get a signal on a radio from inside some of the campus buildings. The second year I was there, they finally got real FM signal, which I could usually but not always pick up on my car radio or my bedroom when in 1987 I moved back to my parents' house in Chapel Hill, a whopping eight miles away.

I thought of this yesterday when I drove to my weekly gaming group in Long Island. I was listening to the Memorial Day edition of Divaville Lounge, which I had recorded off the intertubes using the Relay AV software and then transferred to my Sansa Fuze, and then fed that into my car stereo through a tape cassette adapter. What a world!

(I note that my local radio station of choice, The Peak, is running ads which basically say "We know our radio signal isn't very strong, and if you live south of Eastchester, you get interference from a radio station in New Jersey--so listen to us on the internet instead!". Which really doesn't help when I'm driving, since I don't so much have an internet connection in my car.

And that in turn reminds me of a meeting when Crossover Technologies was making the transition to Unplugged. We were brainstorming applications for cell phones, back in the day when web and e-mail on portable devices were still barely extant, and I blurted out, "Radio! Wireless radio!" I was serious and didn't even realize the oroborosian silliness of what I was proposing; but internet radio is a very different thing, and better in many ways, than mere terrestrial radio, and it should be available on wireless devices.)

SheldonShirts

As nellorat has mentioned, we are chugging our way through catching up on The Big Bang Theory, which is unremittingly hilarious and which, unlike some works about geeks I could name, actually appears to be written and run by people who have actually met geeks and understand them. (It gets a few details wrong--for instance, Warner Brothers cartoons are very much at the heart of geek culture--but it get so much so right.)

I was particularly glad to discover SheldonShirts, which is a wonderful example of the type of thing geeks do when they love something: documentation of the marvelous array of t-shirts worn by the show's main characters, Sheldon and Leonard, along with some additional documentation (Wollowitz's belt buckles, the shirt-folding board Sheldon used in "The Bad Fish Paradigm"). Enthusiasm at its finest!

Comics, on the cheap

For the last fifteen years, my Friendly Neighborhood Comics Shop has been Cosmic Comics, in Manhattan on 23rd Street between Madison and Fifth. I started shopping there when I was still getting the vast majority of my comics by mail order from Second Foundation (now Chapel Hill Comics); besides being close to my office, Cosmic was the only store I could find in the New York area which carried the Capitol City Distribution catalog, Advance Comics, which listed a wider selection of small-press titles than Diamond Comics's Previews catalog. (This is, of course, why Cap City failed and Diamond endured: Cap City concentrated on selling comics, while Diamond concentrated on buying other distributors and reaching monopolistic agreements in restraint of free trade. But that's all water long fallen over the dam.) Cosmic has retained my business through a combination of reasonable discounts (a 17% customer-loyalty credit), stocking a lot of material, and being conveniently close to the Flatiron Building, where the weekly NYRSF meeting is held--not coincidentally, on Wednesday, aka New Comics Day. I go there still even though there's a branch of Midtown Comics across the street from my office.

Summer is traditionally a slow time for Cosmic, because a lot of their customers are students at one of the two nearby colleges--the School of Visual Arts and Baruch College. So, this summer, they're trying to boost business by giving an across-the-board discount of 30% from June 1 to August 31, on everything in the store.

If you find yourself in need of comics during the summer, and you're in New York--hey, you could do a lot worse than 30% off EVERYTHING EVERY gosh-dang DAY. Check it out.