Custom-tailored Sweatsuits For Chilly Tanks. :3

Oh my god @wyattsalazar, I was just bouncing through deviantArt and I found this amazing piece by glucosefiction. I don’t know if you commissioned this or it was just fanart but I had to show it to you. Consider it a belated birthday present of a kind. ;)

Alien Covenant (2017)

So @wyattsalazar, I was listening to the first part of the first episode of Book Hell and I couldn’t help but notice you guys trying to remember the name of a book that had weird human-monkey people from the future in it. As it so happens, I know exactly what you were talking about.

The book you were looking for was called Man After Man, by the British paleontologist and author Dougal Dixon. As it so happens, Man After Man is the last of three books he wrote playing with the concept of “speculative evolution.” The first (below) was After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Published in 1981, it was an overview of life all around the world 50 million years from now, long after our extinction. If memory serves, there were a whole lot of rabbit-deer and rat-wolves running around.

The second was 1988′s The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. The premise for that was that the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction of 65 million years ago never occurred, and the dinosaurs (and a whole bunch of other critters) were allowed to survive and evolve in peace to the present day. Personally, I think it’s the best book of the three, but then again I have a pro-dinosaur bias, so interpret that as you will.

Man After Man came out in 1990, and it’s something of the black sheep of the trilogy. According to Dixon, his original idea for the book was to write a sequel to After Man in which humans, using time travel to flee the dying Earth of the modern day, arrive in the new world of 50 million years hence, and proceed to rebuild civilization and muck the planet up all over again. For whatever reason the idea fell through (though it did get reused for a space-colonization story that was only ever published in Japan), and Dixon wrote Man After Man instead, despite having no real desire to do so. I don’t like the book myself, partially because I feel it it delves too deeply into stock sci-fi tropes, chief among them telepathy, for a “serious” work of biological extrapolation, but also because I find the idea of creatures who wear the faces of humans but have the minds of animals to be...deeply unsettling. Still, it did give us a few good memes.

“He reminds me of that delightful FBI agent with the future-glasses from that old David Cage game.”

These aliens have names like Garvin, Skorin, and Talur. And this kid comes up with Jayden. The hell, writers?

Bane/Bad Sean Connery Impression: “Oi am Rehpublic Schity’s rehkoning.”

Daily Kuvira #132

You know I had to.

This is something Trek fans have been arguing about since Discovery was announced. While the high production values of a limited-run can’t be beat, there are a lot of areas where the storytelling style of serials struggles. With serials, you can’t really have many low-stakes “monster of the week” episodes or put different sets of characters together for an episode to explore their interactions. Everything in the show has to contribute to THE ARC. There’s also the problem where these shows don’t have the time to experiment or retool elements if things aren’t working. If a relationship falls flat on the screen or if an antagonist doesn’t come out right and you’ve built your scripts around them, too bad.

I think TV show producers need to stop making shows with 13 or fewer episode seasons. I don’t know why they think it’s such a good idea.

Notice that good shows like ATLA or Star Wars: TCW are longer 20+ episode seasons because they have more time to think and draw things out while 13 episodes feels like a rushed mess like Voltron and Legend of Korra.

This feels like a forgotten Federation track from one of the old Starfleet Command games.

EDIT: Damn, didn’t read the comment @velacity made. Eh, great minds think alike, and so such.

Guys?  My fellow Trekkies?  People?

Some of you know this already.  Some of you don’t.  But this song was almost the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

No, I am not kidding.  I’m serious.  It really was.  They almost used this as the theme to TNG.  It’s even on the first soundtrack, the one with the music from the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint” if you don’t believe me.

Yes, this song was almost the TNG theme.

Seriously.

I mean it’s not horrible horrible, right?  But it’s… it’s not the TNG theme, you know? 

It really is very 1980s though.  I mean, you’d have to do 80s visuals with it, you know?  Not just text.  Picard would have to come on horseback galloping over the top of a hill.  Riker would have to do one of those half-turn-and-smile manuvers.  Troi would have shake her hair like a shampoo commercial.  Worf would have to do a toothy growl as he chopped wood with a bat'leth.  Beverly would have to be fixing Wesley’s uniform collar or something before turning to the camera.  Geordi would do the two-handed point-and-grin like Guy in the end opening credits from “Galaxy Quest” and Data would totally be painting a portrait of spot before spot knocked over the paints…

Juliette knows exactly what she’s doing, doesn’t she? Between this and that old picture of her where she tore down that shower curtain when she was a kitten, I’m beginning to suspect this cat is an agent of chaos.

I ordered some clothes online, and the plastic bag they arrived in is the most exciting thing to happen to Leo and Ellie in a while.

Meanwhile, Julie is content to lie directly on the clothes themselves (and get hair all over them).

Following on from Esther’s little goof, For Honor technically could add “eastern Vikings” if they added the Varangians, Norsemen who moved and settled across central and eastern Europe, and who eventually formed the nucleus of the Byzantine army’s famed “Varangian Guard” and spurred the formation of Kievian Rus, the first Russian state. Of course, if you just want a group of teeming hordes from somewhere that isn’t Europe, you might as well use the Mongols. Hell, the premise for For Honor is so loopy that they might as well toss in the Maya, the Ghanaians and the Mississippian mound builders and just make game a big toybox full of medieval-era action figures.

Transmediacrity Episode 28: The Hidden Meltys

I wanted to gain world class Tekken skills... to Perfect my girlfriend.

Topics include: Gamer holiday EVO; Punchboy Punchfights; Smash Brothers at breakfast so we do not have to watch it; The Switch Bastard; respect Melty Blood, disparage Arcana Heart; disrespect Mortal Kombat; finals Elphelt; the 12 year old who killed Daigo; watching EVO; Tencent bringing culture to games; why it’s fun to watch DBFZ; He Came, He Saw, He Fursuited; Esther is back with the Shin Megami Tensei; the character Madiha likes; Press Turn on your phone; a 50% joke Lesbian character; Madiha played Metal Gear Solid 5; attention to detail; playing as a girl in a bodysuit; how to get a cold in MGS3; America delenda est; SEND US QUESTIONS; games we like that are bad; the most anime club anime. PLEASE SEND US QUESTIONS FOR NEXT TIME.

Send us questions and game jam submissions!! Rate us on iTunes!

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Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)

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Alternate title: “Ideology, A Triptych”

Paris during the 1937 International Expo

via reddit