New year, new episode of the Gnorb.NET incidental series, Le Linkage, where I collect some of the more interesting links I find through the Web and share them with you people, whom I’ve never met but who I feel the need to entertain and share stuff with. (I’m sure there’s more than one psychological study waiting to happen right there.) This is episode 13 (my favorite number), which I’ve dubbed “The Sci-Fi Edition,” since it features links for sci-fi and links for stuff that might have been sci-fi. Aside from one Star Trek related link, everything else here is original, so don’t expect any Firefly or Star Wars. Anyway, read on and enjoy.
######Star Trek Schematics: Space ships have always fascinated me, which is why I found this site absolutely amazing. Here you’ll find a collection of schematics for a number of Star Trek vessels and stations. Want to know what Deep Space Nine looked like, level by level? What about a Romulan Bird of Prey? You’ll find it here.
######Springtime On Mars: With all the stuff we’re sending to Mars, you have to wonder what it’s going to look like in a few years. Check out this funny video depicting that Mars — and its inhabitants.
######Futurismic Sci-Fi Stories: If you enjoy reading original science fiction, whether just barely sci-fi or far out adventures, this is a site I highly recommend. A number of (what I can only presume are amateur) authors submit their stuff to this site, and the result is one of the best free collections of original sci-fi on the net. Don’t expect any fan fiction here.
######Orion’s Arm: What’s the future really going to look like? Nobody knows, but this site is dedicated to creating a fictional future more realistic than any by basing it on what we actually know today. If you’re like me and you enjoy the actual technology and historical developments more than you enjoy character development, this is one for you. It’s like reading the history of Earth from the standpoint of someone in the year 12,000-ish.
######Top Ten Servers in Movies: Face it, in every sci-fi film where a human battles technology an evil mainfraim is inevitably at the center of everything bad that has been happening. This is a subjective list of the top ten servers in movies. And yes, it does include HAL.
######What might life be like 50 years from now? Can we expect robots voting? Will there be Chinese on the moon? While some of these predictions may seem outlandish now, let’s not forget that the technological singularity is predicted to happen sometime around 2045. (This date may change, but that there will be a technological singularity is almost without a doubt.) After that, AI may really be asking for voting rights, and as for the Chinese, I expect them to be on the moon — and start setting up colonies — much faster. (How they’re going to get stuff from there to Wal-Mart, I have no idea.)
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Meet Pleo (Is it alive?): The Wife’s been asking for a dog. I think I’ll get her one of these instead. After all, who wouldn’t want an android baby dinosaur walking around the house?
######Sci-Fi South Park: I know, I know. Not exactly what you’d call sophisticated, but South Park actually has a couple of rather interesting episodes for those of us who enjoy science fiction. The two linked here (one of which is 30 minutes, the other 1 hour, split into 2 videos) use elements from movies like
2001: A Space Odyssey,
The Terminator and
Akira to get the full effect. Funny stuff, if you can get past the overall crudeness of the series (and I’m
not talking about the animation style).
- Trapper Keeper: Cartman’s Trapper Keeper threatens to take over the world. After he’s done bragging, a stranger tells him that it will soon take over the world if they don’t destroy it now.
- Go, God, Go, Part I and Go, God, Go, Part II: What happens if we abolish religion altogether? This hour long episode, split into two parts, asks that question and attempts to answer it (insofar as South Park every attempts to answer anything) from the standpoint of the 26th century, where two atheist human factions and an atheist sea otter faction are vying for control of the Earth. Apparently, in this future, space travel hasn’t gone all that far, although flying cars have. !
######That’s it for this episode of Le Linkage. More episodes can be found in the
Le Linkage category page.
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