So You Want To Join The Empire: Measure Twice, Cut Once

Last week, I started a series that will look at how one goes about building a set of stormtrooper armor. At that point, I hadn’t actually gotten around to doing anything: I had a box full of rough-cast plastic parts. This week, we’re doing something with that box of plastic: cutting and trimming. https://gizmodo.com/so-you-want-to-join-the-empire-building-stormtrooper-a-1718805318 When…

Dutch Has Mentor Issues In The Latest Episode Of Killjoys

In the latest episode of Killjoys, One Blood, Dutch gets caught between two mentors, testing her loyalties and putting those around her in danger. Killjoys had been pretty good about dropping a lot of information about the Quad throughout its run so far, and now, we’re starting to get some answers, or at least a…

Svetlana Savitskaya Became The First Woman To Walk In Space In 1984

On July 25th, 1984, Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space when she conducted an EVA outside the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station. A test pilot and engineer, Savitskaya became a cosmonaut in 1980, she flew two missions: flying onboard Soyuz T-7 to the Salyut 7 Space station on August…

French Design Firms Imagine An Arcology In The Sahara

French architectural design firms Nicholas Laisné Associés and OXO Architectes have put together a concept for a massive arcology for the Saharan desert. The La Tour des Sables would be a self contained city that rises 1,400 feet above the ground, and would be contain living, agricultural and working units. Sculpted to look like a…

How Thomas The Tank Engine Appeared In Ant-Man

In the trailers for Ant-Man, Marvel played up a funny gag: one of the fights featured a battle on a Thomas the Train Engine play set. Over on FilmSchoolRejects, director Peyton Reed talks about how that scene made it into the film. “I believe in Edgar [Wright] and Joe Cornish’s original drafts it was a…

A Fox Needs A Lift Home In Fly Me To The Moon

Miklós Felvidéki is a college student in Hungary, where he’s studying animation. The short film is a surrealistic story of a fox who wakes up on the moon. According to Felvidéki, this is his first film, and it’s something that he’s been working on for a while now: The story an the design itself was…

Can You Solve Isaac Newton’s Tree Puzzle?

This week’s puzzle is not about gravity, though you’d be excused for suspecting as much. After all, when most people read “Isaac Newton” and “tree” in the same sentence, they think also of falling apples. But this week’s puzzle, which is widely attributed to Newton, is actually an exercise in orderly arboriculture. Sunday Puzzles #42:…

Portland Monthly Magazine has an excellent profile of Ursula K. Le Guin, examining her career and legacy as a speculative fiction author. In it, they focus on her fierceness and activism for literature and the arts.

On Dark Matter, The Past Is a Minefield

For both the characters and for episode seven. There were two main plots this week, each with good bits. One was touching and the other funny. But these were not two tastes that tasted great together. Spoilers… So you know how last week, I was all about how we didn’t spend a ton of time…

This Fan Book Trailer For Max Gladstone’s Two Serpents Rise Is Wonderful

Max Gladstone’s novel Two Serpents Rise came out in 2013, but Glinda Chen has put together a wonderful animated book trailer for the first installment of his Craft Sequence novels. We reviewed Gladstone’s third Craft Sequence novel, Full Fathom Five last year, and this trailer perfectly captures his style and vision for the world he’s…

Mobile Suit Gundam Comes To The Tokyo International Film Festival

Mobile Suit Gundam is coming to the Tokyo International Film Festival this October! According to Variety, the festival will be screening the original movie directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, in addition to a number of television episodes. According to the Festival, this is the first time the franchise has been honored, and there’s quite a program…

Palm Rot Is A Strange, Surrealistic Animated Video

When a crop duster named Bill hears an explosion out in the Florida Everglades, he discovers a mysterious package, one that leads to some very, very strange happenings that he’ll come to regret. This is a neat, Weird little video that reminds me a little of Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X novels. It’s worth checking out.

Watch The First Soviet Science Fiction Film, Aelita: Queen Of Mars

Here’s something cool to watch: the first ever Soviet science fiction movie, Aelita: Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov from 1924. Based on the 1923 novel Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy, the film follows Los as he travels to Mars and leads an uprising against the totalitarian government , supported by queen Aelita, who had…

Learn How To Doof With Funny Or Die

Mad Max: Fury Road has certainly caught on this year, but one of the most memorable points of the film was the Doof Warrior, the blind rock star with a flamethrower guitar. Funny or Die has a funny short that teaches you how to ‘doof’. The most important thing to remember? Play the hits and…

Here’s the 2015 British Fantasy Award Nominees

Begun in 1972, the British Fantasy Awards (originally named the August Derleth Fantasy Awards) have been presented annually by the British Fantasy Society. The BFS just announced their finalists for the award. Here’s the nominees: Best Fantasy Novel (the Robert Holdstock Award) City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett (Jo Fletcher) The Relic Guild, Edward Cox…

Watch The History Of Aliens In Film Starting In 1902

Digg has compiled a really cool video that looks at how we’ve used aliens in films, starting with 1902’s A Trip to the Moon and going all the way to 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. This isn’t a comprehensive look by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting to see a bit of a…

Divers Discover Enormous Squid Egg Mass Off The Coast Of Turkey

Earlier this month, a team of divers swimming off the coast of Turkey discovered something unexpected: a 4-meter wide gelatinous mass of what turned out to be one of the biggest mass of squid eggs ever discovered. The divers weren’t sure what they had discovered, but once the video was posted online, they got a…

Explore 25 Lost Cities With This Video 

The world is a really big place, and throughout human history, we’ve built and then lost a whole bunch of major cities. Over on the Mental Floss YouTube channel, John Green assembled a list and a bit of background on 25 cities from around the world that have been lost. Most have been found by…

In a recent piece for Grantland, Sean T. Collins explores how Hellboy has been destroying the world since 1994, and how he upended the traditional superhero comic along the way. He traces a bit of history behind Mike Mignola’s comic universe, and how the story is drawing to a close.

Can A Home Drone Kill You? The Mythbusters Test With A Chicken Says Yes

Tonight’s episode of Mythbusters, Flights of Fantasy features two very different types of flying machines: drones and a Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Show hosts Adam Savage and Jaime Hyneman took a couple of minutes to chat with us about the episode and the rest of the newly-rebooted season of the show. Tonight’s episode sees the…