HowStuffWorks gets serious about having fun.
by Tracy V. Wilson
November 16th, 2009
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I’m probably not the best person to be giving advice on how to find a good boyfriend. I’m much better at spotting a bad boyfriend once somebody’s gotten hold of one. When it comes to heartthrobs who make tween girls swoon, Edward Cullen of “Twilight” fame is at the very top of my list of bad boyfriends … and his heart doesn’t even throb.
November 11, 2009
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It’s a good news/bad news kind of announcement: Fox is canceling “Dollhouse.” In spite of storytelling that picked up in the last half of season one, the show’s ratings have been poor, even with DVR results factored in. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. As if reports that Joss Whedon would be treating the season finale as a series finale weren’t enough, the show went on hiatus during November sweeps — presumably so it wouldn’t pull down Fox’s average. The good news (if you’re a “Dollhouse” fan) is that the network plans to air all 13 episodes of the second season after the show returns from its hiatus.
November 9, 2009
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I’m a nerd who loves music, which means “A Glorious Dawn,” the video created with pitch-corrected clips from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” is one of those things on the Internet that seems to have been made just for me. So when I saw that the video had blossomed into a whole project called The Symphony of Science, I jumped at the chance to ask Boswell for an interview. He graciously agreed.
Today would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday — a perfect time take a look at how this project came to be and what’s coming up in the Symphony’s future. If you haven’t seen “A Glorious Dawn” or “We Are All Connected,” I highly recommend them — they’re embedded in this post as well.
November 6, 2009
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While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I briefly wandered in range of a cell phone tower and got a text message from my globetrotting brother, sent the night before. He said he might be going to W00tstock, and my response was not entirely kind. I’d been following the news about W00tstock — a three-night geek spectacular featuring Wil Wheaton, Paul and Storm, Adam Savage, and a range of special guests — since it was first announced. But since I live out on the East Coast, I didn’t, until that moment, know anyone who was actually going. I instantly went from being vaguely jealous of random, unknown people to being insanely jealous of my brother.
The awesome thing about W00tstock — aside from the fact that it happened — is that it was released under a Creative Commons license, and lots of technophiles were there. That means that if you, like me, were forced to resign yourself to living vicariously through your sibling instead of attending the show, you can still see a lot of what went on with minimal effort, like a search for W00tstock at YouTube.
November 4, 2009
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Roland Emmerich’s latest foray into all things end-of-the-world, “2012,” hits theaters next week. And, like his last big-budget disaster flick, “The Day After Tomorrow,” it promises to be a visually frenetic hodgepodge of as many types of natural disaster as possible. It has volcanoes. And earthquakes. And tsunamis. It doesn’t — at least from the look of the previews — depict the resulting flood flash-freezing and somehow not expanding to crush everything in its path, but that probably would have been anticlimactic in the wake of a tidal wave big enough to capsize an aircraft carrier.
October 30, 2009
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Our last vampire is fighting an undeniable thirst. The kind of thirst that leads to hallucinations when left unquenched. And they’re not just ordinary hallucinations . They’re flashsides — someone else’s flashbacks. Maladict, from Terry Pratchett’s “Monstrous Regiment,” is a lance corporal in Borogravian infantry, but his flashsides are full of jungles, Charlie and the sound of helicopters. So what’s so awesome about Maladict that he winds up in the top spot?
October 29, 2009
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Nowadays, the vampire hunter Blade is most well-known because of the movie trilogy that came out starting in 1998. But he’s been kicking around comics since the early ’70s, so he’s older than any other character on this list. His place in the world of abstinent vampires is a little tricky, though, and it’s not just because he’s more of a dhampir — a vampire’s offspring — than a true vampire. He has some supernatural abilities, but exactly where they came from and how they affect him depend on whether you’re watching movies or reading comics … or which comics you’re reading.
The basic story, though, is that he picked up some vampiric traits when Deacon Frost fed off Blade’s mother during his birth. Eventually, Blade grew in to a man who can walk in daylight and is immune to vampire bites. Even though he’s not a true vampire, he’s on our list of abstinents because he has, in most of the more recent depictions, an unshakable thirst for human blood. He quenches his thirst through everything from feeding on rats (comic) to dosing himself with a home-brewed serum (movie).
October 28, 2009
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When I started pulling my ideas together for this list last week, I sent a message to my Triforce of geek culture at HowStuffWorks.com — TechStuff’s Jonathan Strickland, ScienceStuff’s Robert Lamb and editor Chanel Lee — asking if they had ideas. I had a pretty clear idea of where I wanted to go, but I wanted to know if they’d seen something I missed. Among their responses was a note from Jonathan about a movie I’d never heard of, called “Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat.”
October 27, 2009
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Unlike Angel and Edward Cullen, the whining, self-loathing days of Bill Compton are mercifully behind him. While the “True Blood” vamp certainly — spoiler spoiler spoiler — wallowed in guilt over being a monster, even to the point of threatening to stake himself, he got over it. His era of brooding martyrdom ended well before the synthetic vampire food known as Tru Blood hit the market.
October 26, 2009
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When I was in elementary school, after years of trick-or-treating in a Wicked Witch of the West costume, I decided to be a vampire for Halloween. With the very silly exceptions of Bunnicula and Grandpa and Lily Munster, vampires were monsters back then, and monsters were what Halloween was for. I ran around in a cape, plastic fangs and a drawn-on widow’s peak, hollering, “I van to suck your blood.” Because that’s what vampires do.
Rather, that’s what vampires did. Now it seems like the average vampire has, for one reason or another, decided to abstain from drinking blood. Monsters are still what Halloween is for, though, so I’m going to spend this week looking at these abstinent vampires (and whether they’re still at all monstrous).
October 16, 2009
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Last night, abandoning practicality in favor of a movie I’ve been eagerly waiting for, I went to a midnight showing of “Where the Wild Things Are.” In the weeks leading up to this movie, I’ve spent a lot of time watching trailers and clips, looking at stills and listening to the soundtrack, in part to write about it in this blog. Based on all of that, I was ready for a movie that was whimsical, exuberant and bittersweet.
Here’s where the spoilers start.
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