By Lisa Fary – Mercifully, this episode was free of any mention of Soldiers of the One or Zoe’s undead drama. Really, if I want to watch paranoia toward a given religion week after week, I’d just watch Fox News.
Full Story »Finally, I Get My Jetpack
By Lisa Fary – I just knew 2010 was going to be my year. It’s the end of February and there’s a jetpack on the market.
Full Story »Toy Fair: Plushies
By Lisa Fary – I can’t help it. Even at my age, I’m still a sucker for a good, plushy toy and there were plenty of them at Toy Fair. Naturally, I had to wander into the Gund set up. Gund plushies were a really big deal among my classmates in the 1980s – if you didn’t have a Cabbage Patch Kid and a Gund bear, you may as well have been dead. My (prized) Gund bear was a chocolate brown Snuffles. For all the big deal I made of it, I can’t for the life of me remember what ever happened to that bear.
Full Story »Toy Fair: Robotics
By Lisa Fary – Growing up, the only positive robot role models I had were C-3PO and R2D2. Later, there was Data from Star Trek: TNG. Just about every other fictional robot I encountered went dangerously off-program or was a killer in the first place. HAL. Bishop from Alien. The Terminator. Replicants. Maximilian from The Black Hole. Cylons. ED-209. It’s a wonder I didn’t run screaming when confronted by actual robots at Toy Fair. From prefab robotic bugs to do-it-yourself robot army kits, here are the best of the Toy Fair (along with a 1 – 5 risk assessment of their potential for world destruction).
Full Story »Toy Fair: Science!
By Lisa Fary – One year I begged for a chemistry set for my birthday. This was back before I learned that xx chromosomes were an obstacle to science and that my life was predestined for English studies and a traditionally feminine helping profession.
I was also, however, a klutz of unmeasurable proportions. Any toy involving liquids, powders, glass test tubes and beakers was predestined to wind up on my mom’s braided area rug, in the fish tank, and in my hair (along with my bubble gum). Obviously, I didn’t get a chemistry set.
Lost: Lighthouse
By Lisa Fary – I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll pretty much accept anything. Jack has a kid, now? OK. Jacob has a magic mirror in a lighthouse? Whatevs.
Full Story »Me and My Two Minds
By Sylvia Bond – The announcement has come down that the CW has picked up Supernatural for a sixth season. If you can’t take my word for it, ask the CW. Or go ask anyone in the Supernatural fandom and they will tell you all about it, the reasons why it’s good, and the reasons why it’s bad. They’ll tell you how they’re so happy they can’t breathe, and can’t wait for the next season because it’s going to be perfect, while the same time they hope and pray that the opening title images are changed to something more suitable. Then there are the fans who are rolling their eyes and are planning on changing the channel the second Season Five is over, on account of it won’t matter any more, since Show will be preparing to jump the shark for real this time.
Full Story »Caprica: Gravedancing
In this episode, we not only get helpful PSAs, we also get an interstellar ad for Ford. When the rag tag fugitive fleet got here about 150,000 years ago, they brought the knowledge of the Ford Motor Company with them. You can throw the technology into the sun, but you can’t unlearn the design of the Ford Galaxie. You can only pass it down through the generations until it gets made for a brief period, and morphs into a minivan.
Full Story »Out of Ideas: Erector Set – The Movie
Since we’re going down the Erector Set movie road, what’s next? Here are five other toys that should never get movie adaptations (but probably will get made before the Jem and the Holograms movie I’ve wanted for years).
Full Story »Comics: Ball Peen Hammer
I get the feeling that I’m intended to like Ball Peen Hammer because it’s, as stated on the cover, a “meditation on art and human nature,” a thought provoking discourse on what it means to be an artist at the end of the world. The best comparison that comes to mind is that I liked Ball Peen Hammer the way I liked the French horror film Martyrs: deeply disturbing, but I can’t look away from what it says about human nature.
Full Story »Heroes: Brand New Day
By TrinityVixen – In case you missed my many, many, many slavish love notes to all things Robert Knepper, I’ll sum it up in two words: dirty sex. Imagine the most morally-affronting, dirty-wrong-bad thing that you still find crazy hot, and that’s Robert Knepper as psycho-carnie Samuel, the earth-shifter.
Full Story »Lost: The Substitute
By Lisa Fary – Here are some gratuitous pics of Josh Holloway, just because I’m really loving him right now.
Full Story »Supernatural: My Bloody Valentine
By Sylvia Bond – Both Sam and Dean are ridiculously pretty in this episode. I wanted to say that up front in case in the throes of discussing various things that I forget to mention it. Not that I would ever forget to see it, you understand, but it was one of the things that struck me about this episode. Not that the boys are ever not pretty, but this time around, there was something about the lighting and the makeup and (oh my yes) the hair that I haven’t seen this perfect in a while so I was rather blown away by the ridiculously ridiculously pretty boys.
Full Story »Toy Fair 2010: The Collectible Statues
By Lisa Fary – I spent Sunday being overwhelmed by Toy Fair 2010 at the Javits Center in New York. I’ll have a full report (and more!) when I get back to Philadelphia, but in the meantime, I have photos of some collectable statuettes.
Full Story »Did Captain America Hurt Your Teabaggy Feelings?
By Lisa Fary – The anger toward Captan America and Marvel is about the Tea Party movement’s self-consciousness about being so white. Sorry, but in my experience, if you get all defensive about not being racist, you’re probably a little bit racist.
Full Story »Love Around the Geek TV Landscape
By Lisa Fary – Even though I don’t do Valentine’s Day, I’m no longer harbor a dark rage toward it. I’ve outgrown the trinkets, the cards, the need for validation in the midst of a consumerist ritual. However, this time of year does get me thinking about the fictional relationships we see and all the ways the make me angry (or make me smile – that does happen occasionally). Here are my thoughts on some current pairings.
Full Story »Dollhouse: Epitaph Two: Return
By Sonia Aurora – This is the second review I’ve had to do on a series finale. I knew Pushing Daisies would be difficult, because the writer’s strike and the network (or Powers that Be) shirked its growth and then pulled it like a weed, without nourishing it the way it needed to be watered and cared for.I think, in some ways, Dollhouse didn’t get a fair shake either. The problems that existed in it creatively, however, did mark the downward spiral (something that Pushing Daisies never lacked). But when this show hit the mark it was on fire, really burning at its brightest the way great sci-fi stories do, rife with drama and technology and fantasy, with a little tongue in cheek humor as well.
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