If you want to attend the Smithsonian’s Star Trek #SIBeamUp! on May 16th you probably want to get your applications in now, as attendance will be very limited. They will give the ten social media users who gain entry a closer look at the Star Trek goodies in the Air and Space Museum collection (including the Tribbles and the original Enterprise model), and the winners will be able to talk with the curators about the collection. If you want to attend you need to go to the #SIBeamUp! page and fill out and submit the form before noon tomorrow (Monday, May 6th). Winners will be informed by email on May 7th. The event will be held the morning of May 16th at the Air and Space Museum on the mall in DC, and even if you don’t win into the up-close-and-personal event, you can still attend the Star Trek’s Continuing Relevance symposium at 1PM at the Moving Beyond Earth exhibit in Gallery 113.
Happy New Year to one and all; if you are reading this, you made it to 2013, congratulations! I am happy to report there is no avatar of me in a diaper to use for New Years, so I am using this image of my avatar in London instead. I hope everyone gets to have the kind of quality year we all dream of, with lots of positive things happening for all of us!
Hope everyone is having a happy holiday season this year, and gearing up for another exciting round for next year. I thought I would share one of my favorite Elfbot images a good friend made of me. And before you laugh, trust me when I say this is no where near as silly as the one she made of me for Easter.
Yes, it is Worldcon time again, this time with Chicon 7, the 70th annual World Science Fiction Convention. It started on Thursday, august 30th, and runs through the holiday weekend, with an incredible line up of guests and events. One of the most important events each year is the presentation of the Hugo Awards, which has John Scalzi as Host and Toastmaster, and will be held at 8PM CDT tomorrow, September 7th. If like me you can’t be there physically, you can actually watch it Live on the Worldcon UStream channel as well as on the Hugo Awards CoveritLive page. You can go to the Worldcon UStream page now and watch last years Chelsea Awards, Hugo Awards, and a quite amusing presentation of Just A Minute that had me laughing up a storm. If I had a vote of what program out of this years offerings should also be sent out live or included as a recorded online video it would have to be the Filk Opera version of Tanya Huff’s Choice of Ending.
The target location being Woodlawn Park in Portland, Oregon. The team from Atomic Arts are doing live presentations of Journey to Babel as presented on screen by TOS (The Original Series, as if you didn’t already know). I will now be going through all the Con Event postings in my part of the country to see if I can find them performing at a venue a little close than the other side of the continent, since I would love to see this on stage.
The story itself was written by D.C. Fontana, and first published in the March 1953 edition of the pulp magazine Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder. J/K, because that’s the magazine from the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars in which the entire cast got to be humans putting out a science fiction magazine, one of my personal favorites from that series. But they posted it that way in Memory Alpha, and after I got done laughing I just had to pass the joke along.
A Cat Anime done with stop motion wooden dolls from Nekomacitta did a pretty good job of explaining to Japanese children the dangers of a nuclear power plant issue such as the one Fukushima and the surrounding countryside just suffered last year. It is a fairly balanced presentation which cites both the good and bad points of such a power generating system, apparently not driving one to a preordained conclusion but rather letting the audience weigh the options and come to their own conclusions. I say apparently because I have not had the opportunity to watch the entire 20 minute animation so far, but just the outtake presented here. Thanks to The Asahi Shimbon for the heads up on this one.