Category Archives: Science fiction

Obi-Wan Kenobi cloak rediscovered

Film, Oddly Enough, Science fiction

[Adam says:]

Personally, I think garments’ lost travels are more interesting than the post cards you sometimes see of a garden gnome traveling the world:

The cloak worn by Sir Alec Guinness in Star Wars has been rediscovered after nearly three decades.

After Guinness wore the garment for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, it was returned to British costume firm Bermans.  The cloak was subsequently loaned to other films including 1999′s The Mummy, and even hired out as fancy dress.

It was identified in a stock check earlier this year and now forms part of a film memorabilia exhibition at the Harrods department store in London.

NaNoWriMo blog team go!

Fun, Literature, NaNoWriMo, Science fiction

K and I are going to give National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a try this year. It goes something like this: starting on November 1st, each of us has to write a 50,000-word (175-page) novel by midnight on November 30th. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; hordes of people finish every year, mostly by lowering their expectations from ‘bestseller’ to ‘will not make someone vomit’ (in the words of one of the organizers).

You can follow our progress along the way by visiting our NaNoWriMo pages; a handy pair of links is included in the sidebar here. I’m not sure exactly what they’ll contain, but at the very least it’ll include up-to-date word counts. If you decide (due to some mad urge) to join us and write a novel of your own, let me know your author URL and I’ll add it to the links.

the next wave of AI: fast food managers?

Business, Food, Humor, Oddly Enough, Science fiction, Technology

Sure, we always hear about our robot overlords, but who would have thought that the next wave would be… dun dun DUNnnnnnn… a chicken restaurant manager?

Hyperactive Bob, the kitchen production management computer system from Hyperactive Technologies, is now being licensed to Zaxby’s, a fast-food restaurant chain with locations in the Southern states. … This artificially intelligent computer system not only takes orders, it gives them as well.

Hyperactive Bob is frighteningly close to Manna, a science-fictional system proposed by Marshall Brain in his novella-length story of the same name. In the story, Manna is a PC-based system that makes use of sensors around the restaurant to gain information; it then instructs employees. … Hopefully, no one will tell the makers of Hyperactive Bob about the Manna story; it has too many practical suggestions for the enslavement of humans.

This isn’t really a surprise to anyone that’s seen how much fast food restaurants have come to resemble factories. However, it’s good to note how interested corporate chains are in reducing the role of pesky, unpredictable humans.

[Thanks for the links, Adam!]

BSG webisode factorial

Fun, Science fiction, Television, Uncategorized

So, you may or may not know that SciFi.com is hosting a set of ten Battlestar Galactica “webisodes” to lead up to the Season 3 premiere.  They’re being released every Tuesday and Thursday, and at 3-4 minutes apiece they’ll add up to (approximately) a full episode worth by the time they’re all released.  From the quality of the first one, I can guess that they’ll be just as compelling to watch as any episode might be.

So here’s the thing.  I just had a thought about how to watch them in true rabid-fan form: watch all of the released webisodes each time one is released.  That would mean watching the first two tonight, then the first three next Tuesday, and the first four on Thursday… and then watching the whole shebang on Thursday night before the premiere.  Is that insane?

I’ve already thought about re-watching the last few four or five episodes of Season 2 again, and that’s a lot longer than all of those webisodes put together.  Actually, with the factorial counted in, it’s about the same length.  Still, though…  what do you think?