This Power Grid is dedicated to all the little kids out there that managed to befriend the gamut of alien races and improbably survive because audiences don’t much like watching little kids succumbing to the true horrors of alien related deaths in science fiction.

No, the tropes at play in these movies are much more about friendship and accepting differences in others… except when they’re not, because the whole genre is being deconstructed by Jhonen Vasquez or K.A. Applegate. Or when the movie is just awfully, unforgivably, MST3Kingly bad.

But mostly, these extraterrestrially tinged bildungsroman play it straight, giving us some of the biggest tear-jerkers in kids' sci-fi. Enjoy!

>>>List at The Mary Sue.

Animation is a medium and not a genre. It seems to bear repeating, since many professional critics, filmmakers, and a vast majority of the cinema-going public still don’t see it that way. Thankfully, this opinion has begun to shift in recent years, thanks to foreign productions like Persepolis, or the Best Picture-nominated Toy Story 3. Still, this cultural attitude has also led to some unusual reviews of animated films (including one about Princess Mononoke suggesting it was for 9-year olds seeking escapism), and (when combined with a number of factors including, but not limited to, Disney’s significant dip in quality for most of the ’80s leading to some serious competition from other animation studios and the influence of anime finally arriving on American shores), some very, very interesting childhood movie memories for people now in their 20s and 30s.

The directors of these films simply had a more … expansive view of what children could handle, which sometimes landed them in hot water with critics and outraged parents. Sometimes, it left an indelible impression on the young guns that watched it, an impression that they’re all too happy to share with others who remember too.

>>>List at The Mary Sue.

May 25th, while not the most logical of dates on the face of it, nevertheless is a holiday known to many geeks as Towel Day.  On Towel Day, all of Adams’ fans are encouraged to carry a towel around with them, or to at least know where their towel is, following the great tradition of hitchhiking, traveling, managing, and adventuring laid out in his work.

Naturally, this got us to thinking about all the hoopy (really together guy) froods (really amazingly together guys) that we know in fiction that really know where their towels are. You know, the characters who you could drop off anywhere and anywhen in the space time continuum, and come back in an hour and they’d already be lounging in perfect confidence and opulence, knocking back something highly alcoholic. Any one who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a person to be reckoned with.
>>>List at The Mary Sue.

We’ve been in a vampir-ey mood lately. Perhaps its the success of Being Human on this side of the pond, the imminent end of the Twilight movie franchise, or maybe it’s Priest. …naaaahhh, haha, it’s not Priest. The Vampire is a mythological creature that can function as something of a Rorschach test: it is what you make of it. Vampirism has been a metaphor for pretty much any moral threat to the social collective. Originally, vampires weren’t sexy, pretty, pale people, tormented over their fate. (Or not.) Nor did they have a penchant for Egyptian jewelry or lying around on couches in cheap velvet listening to the Smiths. They were in many ways the original zombies. You know…re-animated bodies, crawling from the grave to feast on the blood of mortals be they sexy or no. Today, Vampires can be whatever we want them to be: recovering addicts, stunted children, sinners seeking redemption, or the object of everyone’s uncontrollable lust. Here we have listed, for your eternal pleasure, some of the most common, most famous, most versatile vein bursting bloodletters in our contemporary culture. And believe us when we say… they all suck. >>>List at The Mary Sue.

The problem with Norse mythology is that no one really knows that much about it. Most of what we do know was written down by Christian scholars hundreds of years after Wotan’s faith was a functioning religion, and so we’ve got a long time of hearsay and the biases of a bunch of monks standing between us and what actually went on back then. Which is probably what makes Norse mythology such fertile ground for things like the Marvel universe. The plot holes are so big you could drive a goat-drawn chariot through, and so nobody will get real mad if you leave out some stories that aren’t quite kid (or sanity) friendly. But that doesn’t mean those stories aren’t super entertaining, so here are ten aspects of Norse mythology that we’re not likely to see in Thor this weekend. And if we do… well, that’s going to super awesome to watch. >>>Check out the list.

We are all about Take Your Daughter to Work Day (or, as it is now known, Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day). In a time when it’s a struggle just to get people to acknowledge that something needs to be done about the underrepresentation of women in the sciences, academics, and business, it’s super important to remind young girls that no matter what they’re interested in, and no matter how “feminine” (or not) it is, they can totally do that when they grow up. So this Thursday, April 28th, 2011, take your son or daughter to work with you. … but not if your boss is a religous zealot, your coworkers are notoriously and fatally untrustworthy, or if devastating scientific accidents happen on a semi-weekly basis. In other words, but not if you work in any of the following places. >>>See the list.

This Friday is Earth Day, and more than that, it’s also Arbor Day (at least here in the USA). Trees line our streets and parks, sit in pots in our homes, and exist in vast hordes across many areas of our planet.

Here are ten of the most compelling reasons why you really, really should think twice about messing with those giant, green, tough, old creatures, judging by a vast swathe of fictional supporting evidence.

>>>List at The Mary Sue.

After directorial casting woes, a near workers strike, MGM’s bankruptcy, and even a studio fire; the primary actors, screenwriters, and director of both installments of The Hobbit have had their first script read-through at the Stone Studio’s location of the interior of Bag End. According to Ian McKellen, “having Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens inviting comments on their script so far ‘is as close to bliss as an actor can get.’” >>>Pics at The Mary Sue.

Well, this about ruins everything: Darren Aronofsky, citing his desire to spend time with his family, is not going to be directing The Wolverine after all.

Yes, Virginia, there are women on the Internet. Maybe the percentage of women working in tech-related fields is still low, but that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t already major female power players in charge of some of the most successful tech companies. Their achievements range from revolutionizing Wikipedia, hacking into everything, and — seriously — controlling the Internet. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most powerful women in technology that you might not have considered. >>>Full list at The Mary Sue.