Category Archives: Miscellany

SpiderMouse

I was rather surprised to learn today that the Walt Disney Company is buying Marvel Entertainment for a whopping 4 billion dollars. (If that link doesn’t work at first, try it again and then click your browser’s refresh button.)

It’s certainly not a merger I would have expected, the images I have of the two companies’ products are just too wildly different. (Princesses on the one hand, Mutants on the other? Then again….)

One plus side I definitely see however is that Peter and Mary Jane Parker can finally take Aunt May on a trip to Disney World without anybody’s licensing department getting bent out of shape.

Update 9/2/2009: Thanks to Gavroche for pointing out the first of no doubt many Disney/Marvel cross-overs.

And sure enough, The Joy of Tech crossed over too!

UFO Detection

Well this is certainly good news. After decades of reported UFO sightings, Amazon.com is now selling a battery powered UFO detector. The device purportedly works by detecting the magnetic and electrical disturbances associated with UFOs. Seems like just the device for anyone wishing to make first contact or possibly avoid being abducted. Be sure to check out the customer reviews.

Also available from the same seller is the upgraded UFO-02 detector.

Neither product includes a battery, nor a tin foil hat. Regrettably, Free Super Saver Shipping is also not available.

When Zombies are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Eat Brains.

The Metro Clothing Company store in Seattle hosted a “Zombie Crawl” on Friday with folks show up at the store dressed as Zombies. There was a contest involved with the three best costumes winning passes to this weekend’s Crypticon.

Evidently the guy who won first place was a little too authentic. Someone who didn’t know what was going on called 911 and the police arrested the zombie. (They released him once the misunderstanding became clear.)

(A tip of the hat to Jim Romensko for noticing this story.)

Amusing Irony

I’m somewhat amused by this: One area con has an ad on their home page, advertising one of my competitors. The ad isn’t served up dynamically, and I have no reason to believe it’s a paid ad. (To be fair, the competitor’s site is a darn site prettier than mine and has content beyond the list of events.)

Not knowing the thought process involved, I won’t debate the wisdom of using your home page to serve up an ad that’s going to take people to another site.

But I can’t help thinking, if Convention X is going to put a link to a convention list on their home page (potentially sending people to other conventions), wouldn’t it make sense to link to a convention list that actually includes Convention X?

So what can you do if your favorite convention doesn’t appear on my list? Tell me the event details and there’s a good chance I’ll add it. (I’m rather pleased by my site’s reputation for listing smaller, local events in addition to the bigger name cons that everyone already knows about it. I’ll probably draw the line at My Little Pony events, though to be fair, I do list G.I. Joe cons, so you never know…)

And what if your event is already listed but some of the details have changed or incorrect? (The latter of course, that never happens. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) Drop me a line with the details of what’s changed and I’ll update it.

That way, maybe some of the traffic your site sends away will come back. 🙂

Come With Me If You Want to Live

Over the past few weeks, people have been growing increasingly nervous about the Conficker worm. All anyone’s knew about it until now is that it was going to start looking for a message on April 1.

It appears that Conficker has received its message, and it doesn’t look good for us.

Google has announced their new Artificial Intelligence, CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity).

I’ve already taken a look at CADIE’s homepage and YouTube channel and as far as I can tell, it’s indistinguishable from what most humans put on line. And if you can’t reliably tell an A.I. apart from a human, then the A.I. has passed the Turing Test.

Now we know what the Conficker worm is: It’s Google’s A.I. Or rather, it’s Skynet.

If you need me for anything, I’ll be hanging out with Sarah Conner.

Galactica meets the U.N.

I’ve been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica on Hulu. I’m a week or two behind right now*, but when I saw a Washington Post article about a Battlestar Galactica event at the United Nations, I decided to risk the potential for spoilers and dive right in.

Along with obligatory praise between the BSG people and the UN representatives, the article (and the UN event) also delved into some of the real-world ethical concerns the show raised. (e.g. Waterboarding a cylon as a proxy for a suspected terrorist.) I was also quite amused by the mention that Edward James Olmos apparently had a tendency to refer to the character of Admiral Adama in the first person.

All in all, it’s probably one of the best bits of news coverage I’ve seen for a Science Fiction related event.

*The last episode I saw was the one where it turns out Ellen Tigh is an utter bitch regardless of whether she’s a human or a cylon.