Hot Nerd Girl

Month: February 2011

  • Malcolm Reynolds vs. Han Solo

    As the pressure heats up for Fox to let Nathan buy the rights to Firefly, I realized that there too is another never-ending battle that shall live on in the annals of sci-fi history: Why Malcolm Reynolds is better than Han Solo….. and vice versa.

    I was going to take sides, but then I realized that I’d be happier to take a tour around the galaxy with either of these bad asses.  But in the name of science, SCIENCE I TELL YOU, I will put my personal feelings aside and concentrate solely on their attributes.

    And maybe their tushes.  But only a little.  And I make no promises about what I’ll concentrate on once I’m finished writing this post.

    Let us proceed.

    3 Reasons Why Han Is Better Than Malcom Reynolds

    Study up. There will be a test later.

    1) Han Has A Better Bucket: While Serenity is quite the ship, with folding toilets and all, it still lives in the shadow of the mother of all ships. In the Millennium Falcon we trust. Both have their issues and are pretty much giant buckets of bolts but the Millennium Falcon can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Not even Kaylee can make Serenity do that. Plus Joss has even stated in the Firefly extras DVD that Serenity IS his Millennium Falcon. Gotta give credit where credit is due.

    Point Han.

    2) Han’s Got A Wookie: While Mal flies around the universe with 8 other people, Han only needs one. And why would you need anyone else? With Chewbacca by your side people will be too intimidated to even think about messing with you. Plus, no offense to Jane and Vera, but Chewie’s weapon of choice is a crossbow that shoots lasers. LASERS. “Oh, look, he’s got a cross bow, isn’t that quaint? HOLY SHIT, IT’S SHOOTING LASERS!”

    Point Han. (And Chewie, cause sometimes you gotta let the Wookiee win).


    3) Han’s Got Leia: Unlike Mal, who can’t seem to get his shit together when it comes to the girl he’s crushing on, Han grabs Leia’s heart with little more than a smile and a swagger. She’s just as hot disguised as a bounty hunter as she is sporting her (albeit forced on her) gold bikini. But regardless of how she got it, gold bikini Leia loves him and really, does anything beat that?

    Point Han.

    (BTW you should join the “Help Nathan Buy Firefly” fan page!)

    3 Reasons Why Malcolm Reynolds Is Better Than Han Solo

    1. Mal Shoots First: Anyone that has ever watched Firefly or Serenity has never had any doubt that Mal, when cornered, will always shoot first. Whether it be kicking a bad guy whose hands are tied behind his back into Serenity’s engines or shooting an unarmed Operative of the Alliance, when he knows he’s right he’ll end you. That makes him hot. Han’s good name has now been so sullied by the Lucas re-edit where Greedo shot first that people feel compelled to make shirts about it. Yuck.

    Point Mal.

    2. Mal Wears a Trench Coat:     The Firefly-verse is a western, sure, this I’ll grant you, but I will counter with the fact that so is the Star Wars verse, at least on Tatooine. Han’s vest is a relic of the influence from the 1950s westerns, hence the fact that his vest is black. It makes him look cool and edgy.  Mal’s brown makes him look rustic and able to blend in better when he’s, you know, riding horses.

    Point Mal.

    I will never get tired of this photo…. ever…

    3. Mal Gets Naked: I’m sure that this means a whole lot more to the lady readers than it does to the male readers but I’m a lady and it’s my blog so there.  Sure, sometimes he’s getting tortured when he’s naked but even encased in carbonite, Han is fully clothed. A wasted opportunity, if you ask me.  Don’t get me wrong, Han is damn sexy but I simply can’t judge him accurately without seeing a little more skin.

    Point Captain Tight Pants.


    Oh, and did I mention that you should join the “Help Nathan Buy Firefly” Fan page? Oh good.


    Decisions, decisions…

     

  • Star Trek: The Exhibition

    Epic adorableness

    It is universally known that I have the most adorable nephew on the planet.  If you were not aware of this, then you need only meet him to realize that I am absolutely correct when I make this declaration.

    Now that we’ve established his awesomeness, you can see why I would try to hang out with this little bundle of rad every opportunity I get.

    So when my brother discovered that his local museum was doing a Star Trek “where science meets science fiction” exhibition, he immediately texted me and said that we had to go.  I had a wedding and its various festivities on Friday night and Saturday so that left us with Sunday.

    Brother + nephew + Star Trek = ftw!

    Having been to The Experience in Las Vegas many, many, many times and The Tour that made its way around the country a couple years ago, I had high hopes for The Exhibition. 

    Meh.  It was ok. 

    It turned out to be a small collection of stuff that I’ve already seen only this time it was poorly displayed and poorly labeled (poor Troi and Riker, their wedding picture was toppled over inside a plastic dome and no one could be bothered to fix it).  The big draw was supposed to be never before seen items from the latest movie…of which I saw exactly 2 items.  What made it fun was seeing Zeke react to it.  Turns out the kid has a thing for phasers and women that take pictures of you surrounded by Tribbles.  He shows true nerd potential and if I have anything to say about it he will grow up to be a nerd to be reckoned with.

    I have no idea why the Enterprise is flying across the bridge

    The major bummer?  All photographs were banned except for the craptastic ones you had to pay $10 a pop for (see above).  Whatever.  I’m a rebel.  I took some pictures with my iPhone on the sly.  My brother; however, is the perfect Marine and refused to take pictures of me.  Rules shmules Michael!

    We got through the whole thing in about an hour and a half (and that’s with my brother reading every single caption).

    If you’re in the Riverside area, this weekend is your last chance to see Star Trek: The Exhibition. A guy that had worked some kind of effects on Star Trek: TNG was there and said he was hoping to get some of the background actors to show up on Saturday.  He didn’t seem too enthusiastic that any of them would actually show up though.

    I say we all pool our money and get The Experience back open. 

    I’ve got a major hankering for a Klingon Encounter.

    Q'apla bitches!

  • Star Wars Slave Leia Photoshoot

    Depending on how long you’ve been following, you may or may not remember that we raised money to get me into a bikini like the one Princess Leia wore in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

    The donations came in and the costume was purchased.  It took a while to line up the photo shoot but it happened this past Sunday. Consider this a late Valentine’s Day Present from your favorite Hot Nerd Girl.  A big thanks to my friend Jessica for doing my hair and taking the pictures and an even bigger thanks to everyone who donated!!

    If you have any suggestions on what the next costume/photo shoot should be, let me know.

    Enjoy!

    HNG

  • No caffeine makes Hot Nerd a dull Girl

    My cat and I say EFF YOU CAFFEINE!! OkIgobubyenow

    I’m giving up caffeine.

    I’ve decided that I’m far too dependent on it and I will be controlled by no one and no thing.

    So how’s that working out for me?

    Well….today is the first day and I have decided that I’m going to figure out a way to pull my brain out of my head through my left eye socket and toss it in a blender because anything has got to feel better than the agony I’m in right now.

    To be perfectly honest, I’m a little surprised I can form complete sentences at the moment.

    Oh, Dr. Crusher, I need you and your magical little hypospray.  A quick little scan with your medical tricorder and all would be well in the universe.

    No seriously, shoot me up with something Beverly.  I don’t care what it is as long as my head stops throbbing.

    Captain Janeway feels my pain:

    Captain Janeway: Coffee. Black.
    Neelix: Uh, sorry Captain but we’ve lost two more replicators this morni—
    Janeway: Listen to me carefully, Neelix, because I’m only going to say this once. Coffee. Black.

    I’ll admit, coffee isn’t my thing.  I like the smell but can’t stand the taste.  My vice is brown pop.  Coke, Pepsi, RC cola, whatever, I don’t care as long as it’s not diet and it can be pumped directly into my veins.  I drink it every morning without fail.  Red Bull and Rockstar got me through college.  “What Professor, you need a 20 page paper about the burial practices of the Xinguanos tribe by Friday?  Excuse me while I whip out my 40oz. can of Monster and I’ll be right on that.”

    Captain Picard goes for Earl Grey tea (hot, in case you didn’t know).  It’s a black tea and is therefore caffeinated albeit less so than coffee or Coke.  I’ll drink it in a pinch but I gotta say that it tastes like ass (sorry Brits).  I’ve gagged down two mugs of the stuff today in an attempt to lesson the effects of my caffeine hangover and so far it hasn’t helped a whole lot.

    The irony here?  I’ve never had an actual hangover.  It’s true.  It’s my Super Power.  I can get liquored up to my hearts content and feel fit as a fiddle come morning.  But a day without caffeine and I want to shoot myself in the face.

    Go figure.

    So yeah, with the exception of a few Star Trek references, this isn’t exactly a nerdy post semicolon however coma it’s pretty much all I can think about at the moment so I’m going with it.  I’ll let you know if I succeed or fail in my anti-caffeine mission.

    FML.

    Remmick, I know exactly how you feel

  • Let’s do the time warp again

    Hot Nerd Girl circa 1930

    I attended a friend’s birthday party over the weekend that had a 1930’s theme.  Next thing I know, I’m in a room full of gorgeously dressed gorgeous people in authentic 1930’s formal attire.

    Naturally that got me thinking about time travel.

    Time travel via giant donut

    Because, really, what nerd brain wouldn’t go straight to Captain Kirk in City on the Edge of Forever or Captain Picard on the holodeck in The Big Goodbye or Vic Fontaine crooning to the crew on any given episode of Deep Space Nine?  It’s only natural.

    Time travel is a common theme in science fiction.  It’s a convenient story line that can take up an entire episode or movie and be self-contained or expanded into a multiple episode story arc.  The possibilities are endless and the hardest part is making up some kind of space-time fluctuation to get our heroes to the time period needed.

    Back when Gene Roddenberry first envisioned his “wagon train to the stars,” he got together with some of the greatest scientific minds of the time to hash out all things science-based on his show.  He wanted to know exactly what could be done and how it could be done that was accurate and feasible.  In other words, he asked these scientists to look into the future and dish the dirt.

    The result has been the precursor to the cell phone, the hypospray, the modern computer, and so on and so forth.  Their predictions were so accurate that NASA named one of its space shuttles Enterprise to acknowledge the fact that Roddenberry and his cohorts were far ahead of their time and deserved to be recognized for it.  Every time I read an interview with an astronaut they claim to have been inspired by Star Trek.

    Fake astronaut, meet real astronaut. Real astronaut, meet fake astronaut.

    But what about their ideas on time travel?  Some of the earliest evidence of exploration on the topic comes from the 700’s BCE with the Sanskrit Epic Mahabharata.  In it, King Revaita travels to the heavens, meets God, and returns to discover that many years have gone by on Earth since he left and everyone he knows is long dead.  The Japanese tale Urashima Taro and Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle contain the same basic storyline of a lone traveler leaving and returning to find themselves in the future.  Even A Christmas Carol is a study of time travel. 

    Time travel in science fiction is often a paradox, a confusing mess of “what if’s.”  If I step on a butterfly in the past, will I alter human life in the future?  If I altered human life in the future, how could I have stepped on the butterfly in the past?  It’s a classic chaos theory or “butterfly effect.”  I’ve seen wormholes, time dilations, subspace temporal distortions, a transwarp corridor and a temporal casualty loop all used in the name of story telling.  But is time travel real?

    That'll do Scott Bakula, that'll do.

    Time travel does exist, just not in a way that is convenient for us to go back and tell our 20-year-old selves not to get drunk and sleep with so-and-so.  According to the theory of relativity, if I board a spaceship and start traveling away from Earth at a relativistic speed and then turn around and come back after a few years, more time would have passed on Earth than did for me on the spaceship.  Therefore, technically, I would be traveling into the future.  Einstein also theorized that it would be possible to travel into the past using specific types of motion in space. Folds in space time are another popular theory.  If space folds in on itself, then why can’t we skip from one fold to another?  One of my favorite books, The Last Legends of Earth by A.A. Attanasio goes into this in depth.  Ancient magic has been the inspiration for many time travel stories as well.  From Claire Randall going through ancient Druid standing stones in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, to Hermione’s Time Turner in Harry Potter, the possibilities are endless.

    It's true.

    Physicists all tend to have their own theories of what is and isn’t possible.  Stephen Hawking has been one of the biggest naysayers of most time travel theories.  Ironic, since science fiction writers like to use black holes as a time travel source and Hawking is the world’s leading expert on the phenomenon.

    If I could go back in time and attempt to change something, I’m not sure that I would.  I would love to have prevented some deaths I feel were unnecessary, but who am I to make that decision and change the course of history ala Quantum Leap?  Is it even possible to change it?  Maybe it would simply result in fate finding a way like in Final Destination.  Given the choice, I would much rather travel to the future.  I would love to see what the human race is able to accomplish 100, 200, 300 years from now.

    I promise I won’t step on any butterflies.

    Credit to ewallpapers.biz