Chris’s Very Sci-Fi Christmas!
Hey, we're back online! Over the weekend our server decided to take a Christmas vacation, but its back on the job now, plugging away like a trooper, just in time for all of us to brag about our sci-fi/fantasy Christmas presents. Come on in and tell us what you got - we'll show you ours if you show us yours!
"… I will have this site backed up so that all I've got to do is wiggle my fingers over the keyboard and everything from this moment will be restored…"
-Quentin Wayne Baker, Monday, 5 December 2005, 8:53 PM
This is now my very favorite Q quote in the whole universe, and I plan to use the power of these words to tease him mercilessly. Thirteen months ago, Q decided to update his website, the QDP, and issued this piece of wisdom to ensure his readers that when it came to data backups and the safety of his treasured blog, HE WAS TOTALLY ON IT. Read it again and dig his utter confidence. "Wiggle my fingers" he says. TOTALLY ON IT. Fast forward to Christmas Day, 2006.
Very early Christmas morning, about half past midnight, I left my uncle's house in Indiana after spending a wonderful Christmas Eve with my family, playing with kids, holding babies, talking about the glories of Christmases past, and watching the Cincinnati god damn Bengals fuck up what should have been a routine snap, in all probability torpedoing their final chance at the playoffs. As I traveled back into my cell phone's range in the wee small hours of the morn, my phone pleasantly chimed me a merry Christmas greeting to let me know I had missed calls, one of which was from Q know who. He had called me on Christmas Eve, but left no voice mail.
WARNING: WHEN Q LEAVES NO VOICE MAIL SOMETHING IS HORRIBLY WRONG.
Seriously, even when he has nothing at all to say, Q'll just make noises into the phone. I'm not kidding. He always leaves messages. The only times he leaves no voice mail is when something awful has happened which he is sure will send me into a fit. Also, Q will not call just once about an issue; he'll place dozens of calls within the span of minutes. He must have a wonderful cell phone plan, because he uses that motherfucker like it ain't no thang. That is, once again, unless something untoward has happened. And sure enough, there was but a single call from Q, and no voice mail. Although it didn't occur to me at the time, I'm sure he expected whatever ill news he was going to give would cause me to immediately boil over into a bloodlust berserker rage of Biblical proportions, during which I would most surely rain fire and salt and frogs and lightning and sulfur down upon the land, lo thou hast thine plagues of locusts and such. Because it was Christmas I decided not to 
call him back, because I was simply not in the mood to want to be in the mood to kill anyone. Joyeux Noël, and all that.
Fast forward to December 26. I come into work because I was dumb enough not to schedule days off in advance like everyone else in the world did. I get online to see who has enjoyed our little Pokémon Christmas article, and the site ain't there. Its just fucking GONE. And the pieces all fall into place. I email Q about the problem and the news was dire. I'll let him tell you:
"I've been trying to get ahold of you about that. Yes, the server is down in a big way. Hard drive crash, possible complete data loss. My site, yours, Vickies, all 12 of the companies hosted via [private company name deleted by Chris] - all possibly gone the way of Kaiser Soze. That's the worst case scenario which is a very real possibility… I'm on the phone with their tech support right now actually, again, for the fifteenth time since the server went down Saturday @ 4pm."
As bad as this sounds, I didn't freak out at all. I was too busy being amused by my favorite part of his email: "I've been trying to get ahold of you about that." That roughly translates to "I tried once to get a hold of you, and I am indescribably happy that you didn't answer or call back, because that one call means I have fulfilled, however minimally, my obligation to attempt to deliver bad news that will cause me to unfairly become a target for your unreasoning animal wrath, you fucking psychopath."
Firstly, I felt bad because he clearly thought I was going to fly off the handle. Based on my behavior over the past few months, I'm ashamed to say, it would not have been completely out of character for me. It was not an unreasonable expectation. Also, he clearly felt bad that all my work had been totally obliterated… or so he thought. Third, after calling him and hearing his tone of voice, it was obvious that he was devastated that his own website, which has been the sole repository for all of his most personal memories since he started the thing way back in 1998, was in all likelihood gone and unrecoverable. You see, even after he made his little proclamation about backing up the site, he made some upgrades, and, as folks usually do when all goes well, Q carried on with business as usual. He never made that backup of the server. As far as he knew, EVERYTHING he had poured his heart and soul into had been wiped clean from the face of the Earth. Even if I had lost everything, being angry at Q yesterday would have been like being angry at a puppy with a broken leg; even if it pisses on your foot, you just can't do it.
Unlike Q, I am maniacally obsessive about data backups. My own private data, as well as anything that goes on the site, is backed up redundantly and stored in multiple locations on multiple media. I'm a bit wacko about it, but I don't apologize, 'cause it has saved my ass on many, many occasions. Making CDs, DVDs, hard drive, floppies, and paper hard copies is easy; rebuilding years-old research and text from my memory is not. So when he told me The Sci-Fi Guys was gone, I immediately knew that every piece of data I had ever written for the site, as well as most everything anyone else has ever written, was safe in the seven dozen places I had saved and stashed it. I guess it was making him nervous that I was so okay with everything, because the calmer I spoke the more on edge he seemed to get. I think maybe he thought the calmness was a sign that I had finally completely snapped and was going to crawl through his window while he slept and eat him and his family and wear their skins to work the next day. But then all of a sudden the server was repaired and everything was restored - IT WAS A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! Anyway, me being the steady one and Q hovering on the edge of a complete freak out yesterday was an interesting reversal, and I suspect I enjoyed it a lot more than he did. It was Q's unintentional Christmas gift to me, which is the best segue I can come up with to let you know that this article is no longer an explanation of why the site was down over the weekend, and from this point forward will be about all the great sci-fi stuff I got for Christmas, yo.
I don't know what the deal was this year, but I got HOOKED UP. Ma and Pa Sci-Fi, Frog Boy, and Moose asked for pricier, big ticket items, so they were either handed just one box, or a thin envelope full of impersonal gift-cardery. Not me; Sci-Fi Girl and I asked for stuff. The fam all told me that they had found some great sales on things that were very much me, which means that I got WAY more stuff than I ever thought I would. At the end of the day, when they were all sitting there with an envelope or two each on the coffee table in front of them, I was giddily building myself a cardboard fort out of all my Transformers boxes and DVDs. I judge the success of Christmas rake-ins by overall present volume and raw tonnage, and this year I totally kicked my family's asses.
Unlike any other Christmas, I asked for a lot of stuff this year that I had never, and still haven't, seen in a store. I got a lot of presents I honestly can't tell you prices for, and I'm not going to do any research into costs, because honestly that just feels rude. If someone got me something really nice and thoughtful, I'm not going to cheapen it by sticking a mental price tag on it. While this may make it hard to tell you if these things are worth the price or not, it does leave me free to judge these items based purely on their inherent awesomeness. The first of these such gifts was from Ma and Pa Sci-Fi, and is one which I will still be enjoying anew well into the New Year, because I simply don't have time to squeeze all of it in before the First. Its "Superman: Ultimate Collector's Edition."
My Christ in Heaven, this thing is ASTOUNDING. Fourteen DVDs worth of The Man Of Steel. FOURTEEN GODDAMN DVDS! They're all in a big metal box, which makes them hella cool before you even tear the damn shrink wrap. Here's the DVD breakdown:
- Disc 1 - Superman: The Movie (1978)
- Disc 2 - Superman: The Movie (2000 Expanded Version)
- Disc 3 - Superman: The Movie bonus material
- Disc 4 - Superman: The Movie bonus material
- Disc 5 - Superman II (1980)
- Disc 6 - Superman II bonus material
- Disc 7 - Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)
- Disc 8 - Superman III (1983)
- Disc 9 - Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987)
- Disc 10 - Superman Returns (2006)
- Disc 11 - Superman Returns bonus material
- Disc 12 - You Will Believe: The Cinematic Saga of Superman
- Disc 13 - Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman
- Disc 14 - Bryan Singer's video journals (shot during production of Superman Returns)
I've never even heard of Superman: The Movie expanded version! I'm not sure where, but the old Superman cartoons from the '40s are supposed to be in here somewhere. The only DVD I've watched so far is Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, which is a brand new cut of Superman II featuring almost entirely unseen footage that was scrapped when the producers fired director Richard Donner for wanting to make a good movie. This is the version of the film he was trying to make in 1979, or at least as close to it as was possible to reconstruct from extant footage. I'd need to go back and watch the original version of Superman II to tell you all the differences, but I don't remember most of what I saw, so I think the online hype about it being an almost entirely new movie is very accurate. I'm going to eventually give this set a review all by itself, but for right now just understand that Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut is a damned great film, and THIS is the version of Superman II that Superman Returns follows so closely. Honestly, if you (wisely) ignore parts III and IV, and just consider Superman Returns as the direct sequel to the Richard Donner Cut, you'll see how those two movies fit together seamlessly. This is just amazing. I'm in love with this boxed set and I've only seen one DVD so far. Ma and Pa Sci-Fi really kicked some ass on this one. Merry Christmas to me!
Okay, that's all you get for today. I'll fill you in with more soon, but I want to hear what YOU got. If you got any great sci-fi/fantasy goodness under the tree this year, tell us about it. I'm going to post a New Year's article Friday, but keep checking back to this page, loyal readers. I want to hear about all of your sci-fi Christmases, or lamentable lacks thereof.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:23 am
80 GB iPOD
Holds up to 20,000 songs or 100 hours of video including books, games, movies, and TV shows or any combination of the above.
Plenty of space to load all kinds of SCI FI goodness.
’nuff said.
December 28th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Just to be clear and to save some face here - I do make frequent backups of the data and content of the sites - I just didn’t have that backup moved offsite; the backups were more of a protection against hackers and an upgrade gone bad than the possibility of hardware failure. But otherwise, Chris fairly well hit the nail on the head with everything else. And you can rest assured, this site is now “backed the fuck up“.
(Do you have any idea how long it takes down download a 14GB archive?)
December 28th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
I imagine it takes somewhere between 3 seconds and 90 days. That, I feel, is a safe guessing range in which I will not be proven incorrect.
By the way, folks, all the teasing of Q is meant purely out of love. Well, a wee mite of schadenfreude, but mostly the love.
An 80 gig iPod?! Do you even have that many songs? By the way, I’m not sure that counts as a sci-fi Christmas present unless you’ve got some sci-fi stuff on there. Quick, click the pic and download the Paul Oakenfold remix of the TransFormers: Cybertron theme to your new iPod.
December 28th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I guess that depends on how you look at it. 40 years ago, if you told somebody they could store and play back 20,000 songs on something the size of a wallet they would have looked at you like you had a third eye.
Rest assured though, there will be Sci Fi content loaded in the near future. Hell, I could put the whole Firefly series on there and still have enough room for 10,000 songs. That’s pretty damn impressive by any standards.
December 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
That being said, concerning the definition of 'sci-fi': we are NOT going down the old "40 years ago" road, because that train of thought leads to only one logical conclusion: that every invention ever crafted by the hand of mankind was at some point science fiction, and is therefore valid for inclusion on this site. NO DICE. Sci-fi is the realm of the as-yet unreal. For example, planets that transform into giant robots in order to kill other planets that transform into giant robots.
Meet Cybertron Primus. I stole his pictures from Seibertron.com because I didn't have time to take pics after removing him from his 70 lbs. of packaging this morning. He transforms into the planet Cybertron, and while his planet mode is passable, there is also a goofy-ass battle station mode which I will not waste server space by uploading a picture of. Grammar am hard.
The best thing about this guy is that he is one of the special edition versions that comes with the severed head of Unicron, which has been orbiting Cybertron ever since Rodimus Prime unleashed the powah of The Matrix and blew Unicron all to hell in 2005. Thank you, Ma Sci-Fi!
Occasionally I get sci-fi foodstuffs as presents, and I usually love them. This time, though, not so much. Ma Sci-Fi has a yearly tradition of giving me peanut M&M's for Christmas, but this year I asked for dark chocolate instead. Along with the big purple bag 'o love I got two tubes of Star Wars mini M&M's, of which the candies inside promised to either be Lava Planet or Yoda color coordinated. While the Chewie and R2 tubes themselves are totally great, the mini M&M's inside the R2 tube smelled like plastic melted in acetone. I dumped the R2 tube right in the trash, and opened the Chewie to find that it didn't have the same funk. Thinking it was safe for human consumption, I popped a few. I can't describe to you the taste. It put me in mind of M&M's covered in no fewer than four coats of semi-gloss acrylic house paint. The chemical flavor was horrendous. I think I got through two actual chews before the whole mouthful was spit forcefully into the garbage can. Parents be warned: while these little guys may look totally cool, the candy inside tastes more like two-cycle gasoline than chocolate. Never feed these to anyone you care about. I would have been better off eating the tubes. Fortunately, the delicious, smokey, sex-in-my-mouth dark chocolate M&M's were there to save the day, and they are da bomb. The only complaint I have with them is that they do not make a 55-gallon drum sized dark chocolate M&M's package. At least I don't think; I'll have to check the candy ailse at Wal-Mart next time I'm there.
Sci-Fi Girl and bj got me this excellent Titanium Series Snowspeeder, so's I can display my love for the very bestest movie of the Star Wars franchise. This thing is not a great toy, which is okay, because its not supposed to be. Its a great model. And as a model, I have forced it to pose for me under unusual lighting in various uncomfortable, unnatural positions so that I can more easily exploit its natural good looks for my own photographic pleasure. Check 'em out:
Speaking of the Titanium Series, here are my two new Titanium Series Optimus Primes. The one on the left is "The War Within" version, and it came either from the parental units or Frog Boy and Moose. To be perfetly honest, they gave me so many Transformers so rapidly, I don't remember. The one on the right is the classic version of Prime and comes from Mark and PopRox. And while two Optimus Primes would be enough for most people, my little bro knows me well enought to know that I need more. Below are the two newest versions of Optimus Prime, one a recolor of the Armada Optimus, and the other a recolor of Beast Wars Optimus Primal. Frog Boy, you're my hero.
I really meant what I said before about open comments, and I'll prove it by showing you this:
Keep your eyes peeled. There's more to come…
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:08 pm
You ever get a present you expect to like, but wind up being completely floored by how much more over-the-top fantastic is is than you were ever expecting? Welcome to Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose. This album is fucking unreal. Its too bad you have to be a talentless black felon or a 14 year old white slut to get a video on TV these days, because if young audiences could hear this we'd have a whole new generation of hard rock fans on our hands. God fucking damn it, this is so good. Jim Steinman is God, and Meat Loaf is his voice on Earth. Amen.
Up and coming ridiculously fuckable Norwegian hot-body and damn good rock vocalist Marion Raven sings with Meat on "Its All Coming Back To Me Now." You may rememer this as the song that Céline Dion tortured the world with in 1996. Jim Steiman wrote it and its just now being recorded properly, with Meat at the mic. The way Meat Loaf and Marion Raven turn that song into a rock n' roll love anthem is truly insiprational. Seriously, I heard the Céline Dion version just a few days ago, and it sounds almost silly compared to this. Just amazing. Turn your PC speakers up to 11 and click the pic above to go to Marion's website, where you'll be treated to her new single "Heads Will Roll" followed by her and Meat Loaf on "Its All Coming Back To Me Now." You're welcome in advance.
January 8th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Why doesn’t anyone leave comments anymore?
Found this label right on the bottom of the 8-track player. Wiring problem resolved.
Need to give some credit here, both to Frog Boy who bought these for me, and to Hasbro for making them. While Smokescreen is cool, I really want to talk about Unicron. Back when Hasbro was releasing the Powerlinx TransFormers, they released a scaled down version of the Optimus Prime cab as a separate, lower priced toy. I'm not privvy to Hasbro's reasoning, and it really doesn't matter, because when all was said and done it meant that parents who may not have been able to afford a $45 Optimus Prime for their kid were able to buy a smaller version of Prime for $10. The net result is that a kid who otherwise might not have had an Optimus Prime would be more likely to have one. I am a BIG fan of that, and Hasbro's done it again. If the giant $50 Unicron is out of reach, this smaller Unicron tank is available for $10. It even has a cool backstory that ties in with the 1986 animated movie to explain why he's not a planet anymore. I'll cover this more in depth on my upcoming Unicron article, but in the mean time, I'm sending out a big heartfelt thanks to Hasbro for releasing this one in time for Christmas; this is good for families down on their luck, its good for collectors, and its good for people like me who are just crazy about Unicron. I now own two of these little guys, and I can testify that its a great toy. Big huge thanks, inappropriately gropey hugs, and sloppy wet kisses to Frog Boy and Hasbro. I ♥ mini-Unicron.