A Post Wherein I Kick Your Ass At Life.

EDIT: Also, there’s a new article up over at Atom regarding supervillainy and the internet, which is somewhat redundant. My day to update is Tuesday, if you feel like following along in the future. If you like it, please Digg it, Stumble it, Reddit it, Corndog it, Hackeysnack it, ‘Stache-bash it, Whorehose it or, if you like, I guess you could just read it. I may have made up some of those options. It is up to you to decide which.

So maybe I’ve been dropping hints here and there, but here’s the big announcement, officially:

I just sold my first book!

It’s going to be called Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: A Complete Compendium of the Many Ways Your World Will Die, and it’s all about the apocalypse. It is also, inexplicably, a humor book.

This is the project I’ve been working on for the past few months, and it is also the initial reason that posts were scaled back to once a week. So though I’ll be writing this book over the next year, the post frequency should stay about the same. One thing I want to stress, though, this is not “I Fight Robots: The Book.” It’ll all be %100 new content and %100 real. I’ve been doing exhaustive research on every way the world has actually almost ended, the most viable threats that could end it in the very near future, and the most dangerous experiments just emerging now - that’s the kind of stuff this book is about.

There is also, of course, my hyperventilating, fear-mongering commentary and hyperbolic narrative, and I think it’s turning out to be pretty damn funny so far. The book will be published by Three Rivers Press, a trade paperback division of Random House, whom you may recognize from their other books - like Max Brook’s Field…

Advanced Tactical Laser: Plausibly Denying Mysterious Fiery Death from the Sky

EDIT: New article over at Atom, wherein I gush over Ice-T’s magnificent floating head. Please digg it, stumble it, reddit…it, or just melt it into some butter for a simple, but delicious pasta sauce!

Ranking right up there with ninjas and getting to touch a boob, lasers were a very prominent fixture of my male adolescence. They combined the instant power-trip of gun ownership with the classy sophistication of high science; they were pure, microwave murder, that just happened to go well with spandex; they were a god-like power that paired beautifully, somehow, with both robots and aliens. But sadly, the reality of lasers has always disappointed. They’ve been too pricey, too bulky, and too weak to be effective weapons. Much like the flying car and teleportation, lasers seemed to always be relegated to ‘the future,’ and far beyond our grasp. Well, don’t say the government never did nothin’ for you… because that would be a double negative, and poor grammar is the first step on the slippery slope to perversion. But also because the United States Military is all over that shit, son:

The Advanced Tactical Laser is a stand-alone weapon meant to be mounted on the belly of a Hercules class military transport plane. It has an effective range of over 20km, in which it can cause ‘catastrophic destruction’ with absolutely no traceable munitions fragments left at the scene. It was developed by a division of the US Air Force called the Directed Energy Directorate, which manages to sound both absolutely terrifying and retardedly redundant at the same time.

“So…you direct the directed energy?”
“Yes. I’m the director of the Directed Energy Directorate.”
“Oh. I see. You direct the directed directorate.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the direct energy dire-”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP.”The chief engineer, Cynthia Kaiser, states that the most enticing aspect of the weapon is its ‘plausible deniability,’ citing that…

Science at the Improv 2: Science Harder

I am intensely lazy, and so it is time again for Science at the Improv! Where instead of one long writeup about a tech story, I give you a series of articles followed by short commentary, so that I devote more of my time trying to beat Mega Man 9, because Flame Man is a fucking cocksucker.

Camoria

The Camoria is a camera that’s rigged to shoot pictures in reaction to your emotional state. Its controller is worn behind the ear, and triggered to shoot with specific settings when the user experiences certain emotions. For example, if you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, the camera will snap a shot like this:

If you’re feeling naught but bilious rage, you’ll probably get this right here:

And if sometimes you have to cut yourself, just to feel something again, you probably just took this picture: