This picture Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted is relevant as crap

Especially given recent events involving meteorites and flybys by asteroids.

Via Neil deGrasse Tyson's Twitter.

It's true too. We - not just the U.S. of A., but the entire world - need to pour money into getting off this rock and colonizing space. How about instead of each country having its own space agency, a truly international one could be established and funded/supported by any and all nations that can do it. Once we're a space faring species, nationalities won't matter anyways.

Plus, it would be nice not to have humanity and all life on Earth wiped out by a lucky shot from an asteroid.

Descent: FreeSpace is a great game worth playing

One of the best games I've ever played. I really need to finish playing it.



Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War was released in 1998 on PCs and developed by Volition, who would also create great games such as FreeSpace 2, the Red Faction series, and probably most famously, the Saints Row series. The game was published by Interplay, who also created the Fallout series and published Baldur's Gate. In the game, you pilot a variety of starfighters and perform missions.

Story-wise, FreeSpace takes place during a war between the Galactic Terran Alliance and an alien race called the Parliamentary Vasudan Empire. The first few missions in the game are focused on that war, but things quickly change when both species are attacked by an insanely powerful and advanced species dubbed the Shivan. Probably the most mind-blowing aspect of the Shivans is the Lucifer, the gigantic destroyer they deploy against humans and Vasudans both. Now, when I say gigantic, I don't mean "oh, it's pretty damn big", I mean "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD WHAT THE F*CK IS THAT THING!?" Basically, it's the biggest ship in the game. Needless to say, the GTA and Vasudans put an end to their war and buddy up to stand against the Shivans.

There are several neat things about the game. For one, you can earn promotions and medals if you do very well on the missions. You can issue commands to other fighters, such as ordering them to only target specific parts of an enemy fighter or capital ship. You yourself can similarly target subsystems and honestly, it's more fun than it should be to take out a capital ship's engines, weapons, sensors, and comms without destroying the ship itself. Another thing I like is the way the tutorials are set up as training missions. At the start of the game, you go through basic training to learn how to pilot the ship and fire the weapons. You're given the option to take further, more advanced training courses as the game progresses, each one showing you some new tricks.

You can still buy the game, even after 15 years, if you want to try your hand at it. GOG.com has it available for download for only $5.99. Not a bad deal.

Over 1,000 Russians injured by a meteorite!

Damn Bugs!
Via Popular Science.

So today a meteorite popped the atmosphere at around 33,000 miles per hour (or 44 times the speed of sound!) and exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. The shockwave shattered glass and 950 people were unfortunately injured by the flying glass. On the plus side, only about 112 had to be hospitalized and of those, only two are in serious condition.

I saw a report about this on the local news (which is to say that they were just showing a report from ABC News) and apparently some people in Chelyabinsk thought Russia was being attacked. Good thing the Russian government didn't or else we might be reenacting Fallout 3. :P

Pretty crazy though, especially with an asteroid passing close to the Earth at around the same time. According to scientists, the two events are unrelated.

"Hello, I'm the Doctor. Basically...run"

AKA one of the best and most badass moments in Doctor Who.



And yet, there are people who don't like Matt Smith or the Eleventh Doctor! One of my favorite things about Who is when they reference the Doctor's previous incarnations. It's a nice way of touching on the show's nearly fifty years of history.

[Updated] Is Google Reader and/or Blogger messing up for anyone else?

Because they both seem to be going through some sort of mental breakdown for me. With Reader, things that I've already read - sometimes days ago - are appearing on the front dash as "new" items. Going to the folders or the subscriptions themselves of course show that they've been read already. Another bit of an oddity is that feeds I've unsubscribed from (again, sometimes days or even weeks ago) are reappearing like ghosts! I have no idea if I should contact Google or the Ghostbusters for that one, LOL.

Blogger, meanwhile, is doing something similar on its dashboard, showing "new" posts from earlier today, even if they've been succeeded by newer posts.

I may have to perform an exorcism, folks, LMAO.

Edit: Looks like the Techpriests have been successful. Blogger cleared up at some point after this post and it looks like Google Reader is running normally again.

Which of course means that it will now proceed to mess up epically. WELP.

You think your world is safe - Star Trek Into Darkness Super Bowl commercial

"I am better."
"At what?"
"Everything."

I think there's some clues to the identity of Cumberbatch's character (I still think John Harrison is a red herring) in the video. First, he says "You think your world is safe". Notice how he says your and not our. Then a few seconds later in the video, Kirk asks who he was. The first implies that "Harrison" isn't from Earth and the second that he isn't in Starfleet. There was an assumption that he was because he was wearing a shirt with the Starfleet insignia on it. The thing is, however, that Starfleet didn't adopt the arrowhead as their insignia until after the Enterprise's much famed five year mission ended. At least, in the original timeline that's how it went. It's possible that what "Harrison" is wearing is just spare clothes they gave him to wear after they took him aboard/captured him.

So possibly not a native to Earth or in Starfleet, hmm. Yeah, I still have no clue who the character really is. I'm leaning towards maybe a Klingon. We know that they make an appearance in the movie, so maybe "Harrison" is a ridgeless Klingon made to look more human and sent into the Federation as a spy? Could he be a Romulan?

Post your ideas in the comments!

Hey look, Star Trek comics

Both from the webcomic AmazingSuperPowers.

Star Trek.

Replicators are one of four reasons why there will never be a zombie apocalypse in Star Trek (excluding the Borg, of course); they can just replicate the delicious human brains that zombies crave. The other three reasons are:

Transporters. Kind of hard to noms on people if they beam your undead ass into space.
Phasers and other directed-energy weapons. Screw headshots, vaporize the suckers!
Doctors McCoy, Crusher, Bashir, EMH, and Phlox. Each of them are likely to find a cure to whatever is creating the zombies before the episode even ends!

Klingons and Hirogen get honorable mentions, because those guys would just have a field day.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Comic.

This is why I said in this post that I would rather have Kirk as captain during a battle than Picard. Picard is great at diplomacy and whatnot, but Kirk is a fighter and just handles combat situations better.

Mecha Monday: It's a Gundam!

Also know as a minute and half long video of people crapping their pants at the sight of a Gundam. Fair warning, there's a bit of language near the end.




IT'S A GUNDAM!!!!