Giant Freakin Robot

It feels like NBC’s futuristic adventure, Revolution, was here for a short time, then disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. Despite solid ratings, it took the network a while to place an order for a full season’s worth of episodes, and while Revolution is coming back, it won’t be for a while yet. We won’t get to hang out with the Matheson clan again until March 25th, after a four-month hiatus, but for now we have this new preview of the second half of the season to help us remember the show.

A few weeks ago, a plea from friends and family of a terminally ill Star Trek fan popped up on Reddit and was spread across the Internet like wildfire. The Reddit post indicated that the fan was dying of cancer and had only a few weeks to live. He wanted to watch Star Trek Into Darkness before its release in May. The post got the attention of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, who granted him his wish and set up an early screening of the film. Sadly, that Star Trek fan, whose name we now know as Daniel Craft, died last Friday at the age of 41.

As reported by Blastr.com, after a few failed attempts to take Daniel to see the first nine minutes of Star Trek Into Darkness playing before IMAX 3D screenings of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, his friends and family reached out to the Star Trek community to get the word out about his terminal condition. Craft’s wish was granted and he got the opportunity to see a rough cut of Star Trek Into Darkness. Grady Hendrix, a close friend of Daniel, wrote a follow-up post on Reddit:

A day or so after the thread began, Paige, Dan’s wife, got a voicemail from JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof that was very nice and very straightforward: a producer for the movie would get in touch with them. The next day, one of the film’s producers showed up at the door of their apartment with a DVD containing a very rough cut of Star Trek Into Darkness in his hands. Paige had made popcorn, Dan had spent the previous day resting so he could sit through the movie, and after signing about 200 non-disclosure agreements they watched the film and had a blast.

Of all the things Stanley Kubrick has been called over the years, in the excessive amounts of interviews people give about him, I would think the two rarest would be “corporate-caring” and “the ideal subject for an iOS app.” But neither one of those are accurate descriptions anyway. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has a large Kubrick exhibit going on until the end of June this year, and have released an accompanying app filled with videos, audio, and an excellent timeline of the artist’s life. And as for the other part…

The exhibit features a series of letters between Kubrick and colleagues which reveal the perfectionist director had more than just an inkling that IBM may take offense at the artificial psychosis that was HAL 9000, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because IBM played its part in consulting for the film, as well as having the company logo placed front and center of the cockpit’s command panel, Kubrick was worried that IBM might see HAL’s calculated malfunctioning as specifically targeted against them. Strange that the man’s eccentricity allows him to care more about an intangible company than the hundreds of people who suffered through his obsessive multi-take filming process, especially Shelley Duvall. But I guess that’s what makes his sense of genius arguable rather than universally agreed upon.

If it’s a “long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” then you might assume that there was a dearth (Darth!) of liberalism when it came to the way relationships worked out. From what we’ve seen, this is more of a love heavy universe than one where libidos are in hyper-drive. I can just picture Han Solo asking someone, “Hey there suns-shine. Would you like to have sex with a hairy, seven-foot-tall piece of muscle that doesn’t speak English? You do? Then I’ll tell Chewie to watch the door.”

Picture, if you will, your Solo-like character from Star Wars: The Old Republic using this bit of bombastic flirting on another male, which will be your choice once Bioware releases the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion pack in a few months. A new planet called Makeb will appear, and players will be able to flirt with same-sex AI and win their trust by performing missions with them to win them over. But don’t expect sleazy one-night-stands, as the same-sexiness aspect doesn’t go much past flirting and trust-forming, at least until a later update is released which allows the romance to flow.

A Bioware blog entry from Jeff Hickman, executive producer for The Old Republic, quells fans’ worries about the baby steps this project is taking. “I realize that we promised [same-sex relationships] to you guys and that many of you believed that this would be with a companion character. Unfortunately, this will take a lot more work than we realized at the time and it (like some other pieces of content we talked about earlier in the year) has been delayed as we focused on the changes required to take the game free-to-play. As we have said in the past, allowing same-gender romance is something we are very supportive of.”