geekosystem

A small misunderstanding at Dinosaur High leads to a massive battle of universe-rending proportions in Dinosaur Laser Fight, the latest video from Ninja Sex Party. Not only does this video have dinosaurs, lasers, and fighting, it also features The Mary Sue editor Jamie Frevele! It's the must-see video of the evening. So, turn up the volume on this frenetic dance song, and put your feet up for the weekend. Or turn down the volume if there are small children are around because there's a lot of cussin'. (via The Mary Sue)

We've been asked along with The Mary Sue to help adjudicate the ThinkGeek's annual SysAdmin Pageant. Based off your submissions, we'll be choosing the best and most worthy SysAdmin King to reign for 2011. If you have a sysadmin that is in dire need of getting some recognition, be sure to nominate them! It's a painless process, honors a no-doubt hard working and under-appreciated person, and could win your SysAdmin (yes, yours!) some totally awesome prizes -- including $50 in movie tickets from Geekosystem. So get out there, and nominate! The contest is open until midnight on the 28th, so there's still plenty of time before a new SysAdmin King and Queen are crowned! With that in mind, we'd like to share with you some choice excerpts from the nominations, starting with this shocking look at what a SysAdmin likely deals with on a daily basis.

Picture if you will, your grandmother, Aunt Edith and your Amish cousin on rumspringa using a computer. Now bump that number from 3 to about 120 people and you'll find yourself at my place of employment.

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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, at The Mary Sue, our sister site tries -- and tries valiantly! -- to explain the actual rules to 10 of the most inexplicable games from sci-fi, comics, and assorted geek entertainment. Considering that the creators don't always seem to entirely know what's going on, it's no easy feat.

The rules of Calvinball are whatever the players declare them to be, at any point in the game. The primary and only permanent rule of Calvinball is that once you’ve played a certain way, you can never play that way again.

>>>Full list at The Mary Sue.

Over at The Mary Sue, Natasha Simons does a bang-up job questioning the truism that cult hero writer and director Joss Whedon is a feminist because his work features strong women. "He’s praised for his interesting and multiform characters. Why, in these very pages, I’ve given him a share of credit myself. He’s earned the moniker of feminist seemingly through just the creation of strong female characters alone. But ... “Having a girl beat up guys is not equivalent to a strong female character when they ALWAYS, CONSTANTLY depend on men.” So true! Let’s consider some of his body of work as we undertake the Topic that Made the Fanboys Cry: Joss Whedon’s feminism." (The Mary Sue)

Our sister site The Mary Sue is on the lookout for summer editorial interns for June-August 2011. Not only will their interns get great hands-on writing experience in a fun, dynamic new media environment, but they will get to inhabit the same offices -- that's right, the same enclosed physical space -- as the dashing, witty Geekosystem editorial team. (Oh, and The Mary Sue team too. They're cool.) Applicants must be available to work in NYC. Sound interesting to you? Hit up The Mary Sue to see what they're looking for in candidates.

A few days ago, Scott Adams, creator of the long running comic strip Dilbert, asked the commenters on his blog for a topic to write about, and the overwhelming vote was for him to take up the cause of Men’s Rights Activism for a post. I guess there are a lot of masculinists who also enjoy bland but occasionally funny cubicle farm humor? Never would have guessed. Well, let’s see how Adams handles the controversial topic:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

Well, shit. >>>Full story 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.

Calling all attendees of PAX East! We've got three sets of Harmonix goodies to give away, including hats, stickers, pins, bottle openers, wrist bands, track packs, some DLC codes thrown in for good measure, and signed copies of the very first software titles that the makers of Rock Band ever put out (hint, it's not Rock Band). How do you sign up? You find us. Well, me. Susana, the official The Mary Sue/Geekosystem PAX representative, at this weekend's PAX East, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Tickets are sold out, so I hope you've got yours already. How are you going to find me?

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.

Behold! Geekosystem's sister site, The Mary Sue, is live as of this morning, and we hope you will give it a look. The site will explore entertainment, fandom, and topics of interest to geek women with a greater depth than Geekosystem has to date. But Geekosystem is not about to become an all-boys club, nor will The Mary Sue be an all-girls club: For a more full explanation of the rationale behind the site, check out what Susana Polo, the managing editor of The Mary Sue (and, until a few weeks ago, my #2 at Geekosystem), has to say. Also check out the story behind The Mary Sue's name.

Enjoy!

[The Mary Sue]