As the last sentence in the description says: The Klingons have a word for this, most often translated as “trying too hard.”
Archive of posts filed under the Science Fiction and Fantasy category.
“How To Grow A New Joint Inside Your Body”
I think I’m jealous of future generations. They’ll grow up with all this neat technological stuff that we’re just hearing about now, like the ability to regrow a damaged joint in your own body. The stuff of science fiction to us will be taken for granted by them. On the other hand, they’ll have to [...]
“The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2″
This book sounds hilarious. I’ve always been a sucker for fiction mixing the physical world with a fantasy world. Things like Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series, in which a group of D&D players are transported to what they thought was their fantasy world by their professor-slash-Dungeon-Master, who turns out to be a wizard [...]
“Last.fm’s robots.txt”
robots.txt is a file used by convention to tell web spiders (systems like those at Google or Microsoft that “crawl the web,” indexing files for their search engines) to ignore certain files. It seems that someone at Last.fm has a geeky sense of humor… User-Agent: * Disallow: /music? Disallow: /widgets/radio? Disallow: /show_ads.php Disallow: /affiliate/ Disallow: [...]
“Cashless World”
Sometimes I think Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) is just throwing outrageous stuff out there on his blog, to provoke reactions. I can’t tell if this article, on getting rid of cash and making all financial transactions digital, is one of those though, or if he truly believes that it’s possible. It would offer [...]
“Quantum Time Machine Lets You Travel to the Past Without Fear of Grandfather Paradox”
It’s rather fascinating, and pretty non-intuitive. The intuitively obvious scenario is that, if someone could time-travel to their own past, there would be nothing to stop him from killing his own grandfather before his father was born. But there actually would be something stopping him: the fact that he exists to go back at all [...]
“Canadian man replaces his false eye with bionic camera eye, is putting eye video feed online for all to see”
This is the sort of thing I expect will become commonplace, as replacement body parts become a lot less expensive. (I’d love to claim credit for the prediction, but I’ve seen it before, in science fiction novels from at least two authors. One was William Gibson, the other I can’t recall the name of.)
Natural Lasers!
From the always-interesting forgetomori site: [...] But today I discovered at long last that there are natural lasers. This is quite a thing, as even if you already knew about that, I’ll say it also involves Martians! HG Wells! And Alien Abductions! [...] If you’re at all interested in how science and science fiction go [...]
“Terrorist Sorcerers Are Coming To Rape Our Cars, warns Florida senate candidate”
If this sort of thing appeared in a science fiction/fantasy novel, people might just blink and accept the premise. If it appeared in a history text, they’d shake their collective head over it and silently thank the deity of their choice that no one is that stupid anymore. But if it’s spouted by a modern-day [...]
“Solar Sail Hybrid Launches Today From Japan”
I can’t believe I missed this. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of solar sails ever since I first read The Mote in God’s Eye as a kid.