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Happy Holidays!
Here’s wishing you a bright and joyous holiday from the whole O*W*C gang! What better way to celebrate an SF Christmas than with this version of “My Favorite Things?” Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion Apollo and Starbuck each smoking a Cylon Flash Gordon in a long swordfight with Ming These are…
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Amazing “Wrecked” Spacecraft
Sci Fi Scanner makes an interesting point about Star Wars, which I’ve never really thought much about: The portion of “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” we often forget — even though it’s the most important—is the “long time ago” part. Star Wars, unlike most sci-fi, is not about the future:…
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A Very O*W*C Christmas
Mad crafter FutureGirl recently created “Octophrost, Santa of the Sea,” a cute little octopoid ornament. A woman whom I can only describe as relentless requested the pattern so that she could make an ornament for each of her ninety-nine grandchildren and great-grandchildren (I guess I could also describe her as fertile). The result is a…
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B Movie Biology
The University of Chicago Library has an interesting article on the biology of B-Movie creatures such as shrinking men and giant ants. Sadly, the Cube-Square Law dooms Mothra to either buckled legs or serious instability in flight. Link
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HowTo: Elmo Cyborg
The ElmoSapien Project offers instructions for dressing a RoboSapien robot in the skin from an Elmo puppet like some sort of Muppety Ed Gein. The site includes “personality files” for the new hybrid, and even features a video of the thing in action. Just the thing to put under the tree for any small child…
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Quite So
Why Science Fiction is More Fun to Read Than Proper Literature: Link (via Second Effort)
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This Makes Me Endlessly Happy
There’s a Gary Larson cartoon (with which most of this group will probably be familiar) showing a caveman pointing to the spiky clump at the end of a stegosaur’s tail and saying, “Now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons.” The spiky clump on stegasaur tails is formally referred to by…
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Neat Drawing
Nick Derington is an artist and illustrator who seems to have captured the essence of SF in this single drawing. I’m really quite taken with it. Here’s a link to his site, and one to his his Flickr stream. He’s got a lot of cool stuff like this in his gallery. (via Wil Wheaton)
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Steampunk Etsy Shop
Despite an inability to spell “accoutrements,” Etsy member ratchet has some neat items for “the post-civilized.” Pretty! Link (via BoingBoing)
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Scalzi Does Creationism
Author John Scalzi recently visited the new Creation Museum, and has posted both a captioned Flickr set and a long essay about his experience. Good stuff. Did you know, for example, that Adam is responsible not only for the fall of man, but also for the creation of venom? It didn’t exist in the Garden…