i love what technology allows us to do.

in this case, it’s not just satelite tv, but the scifi channel in particular. it’s my mom’s favorite channel, and one of mine as well.

while at home this last thankgiving, my dad and i made our usual attempts to entic emy mom into watching college football with us.

it never works, although sometimes she’ll sack out on the couch and read while the game is on. this always results in immediate exclamations of ‘what happened!’ whenever someone scores.

but this last thanksgiving, my mom refused and went drifting down the hall to her bedroom with exclamations of:

‘dem aliens, dey gonna ATTACK! least, it looks like it’

i don’t know which show she was talking about. but it made me smile.

i really like scifi.

they recently broadcast a miniseries the bbc had done on ‘dune’ and ‘children of dune’. the latter kind of incorporated both of the novels by frank herbert, ‘dune messiah’, and ‘children of dune’. i read 5 of the dune books while in high school.

i keep threatening to go back and read them again now that i speak arabic. i think i’ll get much more out of them.

they were really well done. much better than the piece of crap movie that came out in around ’84. i choose to not waste my time looking that garbage up. didn’t follow the book hardly at all.

but a few months ago, i stumbled across a remake of the battlestar gallactica pilot.

you younguns don’t know what i’m talking about? the cylons (villains) were no doubt some of the inspiration for the mech warriors video game series. potentially the borg from star trek were inspired by the cylons as well. maybe even the terminator. all machines gone smart, and bad.

can you say matrix?

there is a novelist named fred saberhagen (not the baseball player brett) who wrote some short stories in the ‘berserker man’ series. they were the original machine gone bad concept. at least that i’ve found.

so that’s basically battlestar gallactica.

bad machines.
bad machines kill people.
people flee into space.
bad machines hunt us.

the miniseries remake was awesome. they made a few changes. starbuck and boomer are now female. some of the cylons ‘look’ human. see the blonde up there? she’s a cylon (she killed a baby in the pilot). the battlestar (an aircraft carrier in space) looks a little different. their wepons are more like bullets than those phony green plasma things. and the old chrome cylon has been replaced with a more mech warrior looking dude.

cool by me.

the series starts in january.

i’m ready to set my recorder right now!

yeah, i’m a geek.