Spoilers abound, tread ye carefully.

Nostalgia drops by for another visit.

Terminator 3 did not happen.

Thomas is pleased with this.

The War with the Machines is raging. Finally.

John Connor is a post-apocolyptic prophet. Or is he? (Of course he is. Spoiler!)

Marcus is a poor man’s Arnold.

Moon Bloodgood is an awesome name.

The Post Apocalyptic Rape Gang is pretty much mandatory, I guess.

Marcus SMASH!</hulk>

Thomas had to think about the HTML code for that </hulk>.

Kyle Reese is a punk teenager.

Loud Mechanical Groaning Screeches are bloody terrifying.

An Off Switch That Can Be Triggered By Broadcasting Anything on a Certain Frequency is a really stupid idea.

An Off Switch That Can Be Triggered By Broadcasting Anything on a Certain Frequency is a really cunning ploy.

Digital Arnold is back!

Thomas kermitflail!

SkyNet has some nice digs.

Thomas thinks he’s been in that building…

Thomas adds new software requirement: “don’t accidentally create SkyNet.”

The Future is not set.

Spoilers abound, tread ye carefully.

James T. Kirk is a troubled youth prone to emotional outbursts and acts of rebellion.

Spock is a troubled youth prone to emotional outbursts and acts of rebellion.

Thomas senses an Epic Bromance in the looming.

Uhura is fly.

Thomas really did just write that.

Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Checkov are spot on.

Sulu has a freaking expandable sword in his backpack.

Thomas wants a freaking expandable sword.

When Your Only Tool is a hammer.

Every Problem looks like a nail.

Nero’s Only Tool is a planetary-scale strip mining machine.

Nero’s Every Problem looks like a geological disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Transporters, Phasers, and Communicators are still awesome.

The USS Enterprise still makes me want to be an astronaut when I grow up.

Time Travel allows J.J. Abrams to make a sequel, a prequel, and a reboot, all in one movie. And it makes sense. And it’s awesome.

Leonard Nimoy does the greatest voiceovers ever.

Space is still the Final Frontier.

A few weeks ago (or maybe a few moths ago; my sense of time is all wonky), I saw a headline on the Fox News home page: Urgent: Somali Pirates Recapture Hostage. The article was about Captain Richard Phillips, who had been taken captive by pirates, and who had failed in a brave attempt at escape.

For Phillips, this was an urgent situation. For the SEALs that were tasked with rescuing him, it was an urgent situation. For the commanders calling the shots, it was an urgent situation. But for me, safe behind my desk in Rome, New York? It wasn’t particularly urgent. Nothing I could do could change the outcome of that situation. Nothing I learned would have helped Capt. Phillips escape.

The Swing Flu (which I call Piggy Sniffles, and which I refuse to call H1N1, because you don’t get a do-over when naming your crappy pandemic), has been in the news for weeks. Television and radio stations have assaulted us with information, the CDC had been all over it, and the World Health Organization has declared an official pandemic. But I don’t have Piggy Sniffles. I don’t know anyone who has it, either. And I’m pretty darn sure that this virus isn’t the way I’m going out.

And Terrorism, my God, the Terrorism. Everything is about the Terrorism these days. You can’t bring a bottle of water on the plane because of the Terrorism. You can’t take photos at the mall because of the Terrorism. The MPAA has actually argued for stronger copyright laws because of the Terrorism. But I’m more afraid of high cholesterol than I am of being bombed by a random extremist. I’m actually more likely to be killed by my car than by the Terrorism.

Here’s the thing: news channels and papers are in this business to make money, and the only way to make money is to get more eyes. And the best way to get more eyes is to make everything urgent, everything life or death.

But it isn’t. Somali Pirates and Piggy Sniffles and The Terrorism, and all of the other things that the media blathers on about? Chances are, it’s never going to affect you. The things people get all spun up about? Chances are, it’s just wasted time and wasted energy.

So here’s my humble suggestion: stop. Unplug the television. Turn off news radio. Don’t read the paper. Take a week, just a week, and stop listening to all of the voices telling you how you, your family, and your pets are going to die, unless you watch the special report at eleven.

Take a week. You’ll be amazed at how many things don’t kill you. And when that week is up, maybe you’ll discover that all of these things weren’t quite so urgent, after all.

So it’s been about a week since I took the Twitter plunge (and if you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you follow me @thomascgalvin, so that in addition to monopolizing you FaceBook wall and clogging your Google Reader, I can spam your Twitter feed into oblivion), and I think I’ve played with it long enough to have some coherent rantings about it.

First, for those of you who don’t know, Twitter is pretty much what happened when some guy in his parent’s garage asked himself “what would FaceBook be like if it was just status updates?” The answer turns out to be “pretty much life FaceBook, except no one is asking me to take another bleeding quiz, and I have to use TinyURL a lot more.”

One of the things that concerned me about the service is that it limits your posts to 140 characters or less, ostensibly because it’s supposed to be updated from your cell phone, and the guy who designed it didn’t know that SMS lets you use 160 characters. Or maybe those extra 20 letters were taking up lots of disk space, I don’t know.

Whatever the reason, tweets are short (and called “tweets”),and I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to play in those waters. I mean, some of my blog titles are longer than 140 characters. I think, though, that it’s actually forcing me to be more creative. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all, and kind of like a horror film, humor on Twitter is as much about what you don’t show. Anyone can write a five hundred word essay on the idiot ahead of them in line, but the reader gets to use their own imagination if I just write “a bag of candy and a box of rat poison? Really?” It’s like interactive media! Your mind is the movie screen!

I’m not sure how Twitter is going to work with my Things Than Make Me Angry. The threefold point to TTMMA is 1. to blow off steam, 2. to make people laugh, and 3. to make beautiful women fall in love with me, but the first point, the catharsis, is really where it all starts. When I see something truly dumb, like the guy who was trying to fix the blown transformer outside of our office with a ten pound sledge, I just have to tell someone. Usually, I’ll let the incident percolate for a week or so, and then let it all erupt in a torrent of vitriol and spite, but now that I can just tweet it, I don’t really have the chance to build up a good mad. I may have to be more selective about my tweeting.

God, I feel like an idiot for saying that I “tweet.”

And then there’s the Follower Frenzy. FaceBook can kind of turn into a friends race, but since you have to go digging to see how many friends you have, and how many friends someone else has, it isn’t that bad. Twitter, on the other hand, lays it all out for you on the front page. That little number sits up in the top right corner, mocking me. “What, an entire week, and you’ve only got twenty-five followers? What kind of a digital man are you? Neil Gaiman has 434,230 followers. What’s wrong with you?”

Also, I think it’s really funny that we’ve spent the last thirty years developing GUIs, so you can click on a friend’s name to tag them in a post, and now we’re going back to command line arguments like @someguy #ohlookshiney.

All in all, I’m still undecided. The interface is a lot cleaner than FaceBook (and curiously ad-free, which makes me wonder how they’re generating any kind of revenue), but the functionality is considerably more limited. Updating from my phone is nice, but I can do that with FaceBook, too. I think that a lot of my Twittering is going to end up linking to my blog, the same way my FaceBook does. I’ve got my Twitter and my FaceBook linked up through Selective Twitter, which is nice. Following someone I don’t know doesn’t seem quite as stalky as friending a random someone on FaceBook, and I’ve got a few Tweet-people (twitterers? Tweeps? What am I supposed to call these people?) on Twitter that aren’t on FaceBook, so that’s cool. On the whole, though, Twitter seems sort of redundant, but it isn’t onerous enough that it makes me want to drop it.

On the other hand, Twitter isn’t offering to tell me which Care Bare I am, so there’s that.

I love the internet. It lets me interact with people, get news, blow off steam… not to mention the fact that many of you would have no idea how witty, charming, and devilishly handsome I am if it wasn’t for my blog. The internet is my home, and I’m happy here.

But, like any home, it has its leaky faucets and unkempt back yards. One of the downsides of the internet is that it encourages people toward very shallow relationships, and very empty communication.

For every how-to site or epic blog, there are a thousand conspiracy theorists, fart jokes, and Perez Hiltons. For every well-crafted FaceBook profile, there are a hundred MySpace pages littered with embedded audio, dancing GIFs, and moving backgrounds. For every sage who posts a carefully researched, insightful, passionate article, there are a dozen AOLers shouting “me, too!”

Twitter, who was apparently designed by a guy who asked himself “what would FaceBook be like if it was nothing but status updates,” is one of the worst offenders. If it can’t be said in one hundred and forty characters… you should have more room to write, actually. It’s not like the internet is running out of disk space. But, no, some genius decided to take all the power of the internet and mix it with all the eloquence of a twelve year old texting his first girlfriend on his parent’s pre-paid cell phone.

But I’ve discovered something even dumber than Tweets: becoming a fan.

Every once in a while, I’ll see a little ad / blurb / whatever it is, saying something like “Skittles! 2 friends are fans. Become a fan!”

Now, Skittles are basically rainbow colored crack, so I’ll give that a pass, but I can’t give a pass to the idea that the internet is teaching an entire generation of people that building community is as simple as clicking on a bleeding hyperlink. Yes, I like chocolate chip cookies and dolphins, too, but that isn’t the basis for a lifelong friendship, and I don’t feel a deep sense of kinship with you just because you also happen to like nachos.

And the things I’m asked to become a fan of are almost always lame. For example:

Napping Yes, I do enjoy unconsciousness, and it is sort of thrilling to say “to heck with convention, I’m going to sleep while the sun is still up,” but I don’t really think I need to join a group to show solidarity with fellow nappers.

Laughing I’m starting a rival group: fans of sitting in dark corners and glowering. Also, fans of not having fun, fans of a joyless existence, and fans of The Cure. Yeah, that’s right, The Cure. I was emo before emo was cool, so step off.

Sarcasm Now, I love me some sarcasm. It’s one of my well-worne tools, fit comfortably to my hand and keen from frequent use. But I doubt that anyone with a highly developed sense of sarcasm would actually let themselves be caught joining a group in its name. We’re actually sitting back and snarking at the whole thing. On line.

Kittens With a picture of like a dozen kittens in an easter basket, with their little eyes closed, and one of them is yawning. Really? Kittens? In a basket? That are tired? Is there anyone that isn’t a fan of this? Are you really making a bold sectarian declaration by fanning kittens? And when did “fanning” become a verb? That didn’t mean “wafting with a large… fan-like… object.”

So, yeah, our fan options all suck. I’m proposing a few new objects from your undying love, affection, and / or stalking needs:

Not Getting Eaten By Bears Getting eaten by a bear sucks, and I, for one, am mad happy that it hasn’t happened to me. Am I right? I’m right. (Please don’t click that link.)

When that guy on the thruway blows past you at like a million miles an hour, and then, a few miles down the road, you see his car flipped over, in the ditch, on fire That might be a little too long to fit the ad space, so I guess we can abbreviate it Haha, sucker! Who’s winning the race now?

Republicans To piss off the Democrats.

Democrats To piss off the Republicans.

Whatever Party Keeps Nominating Ralph Nader To piss off everyone.

The Zombie Apocalypse When the dead walk the earth, I’ll be ready with a shotgun, a katana, and a month’s worth of food. What are you going to do? Besides scream “ow, ow, why is he eating my brain?” while your next door neighbor is eating your brain.

Also, zombies must have jaws like bear traps. I mean, the scalp is easy enough to get through, but the skull? That takes dedication.

Awkward Silences Everyone hates awkward silences. Except for me, because they give me the chance to say something like “wow, awkward silence,” or “quick, someone say something to break the awkward silence,” and then I get to seem all witty. And then pretty girls want to spend time with me. Speaking of:

Pretty Girls Except the stuck up kind. Or the ditzy kind. Or the kind whose daddy bought them everything they ever asked for, and now that they’ve graduated, they expect the rest of us to pick up the slack. Or the kind that thinks the universe owes them something because they’ve blessed us with their prettiness. So, let’s strike this one, and make it:

Pretty Girls that aren’t stuck up or ditzy, and don’t have a sense of entitlement, and can actually carry on an intelligent conversation, and get my jokes, and have ambitions, and dreams, and aspirations, oh, and aren’t already seeing someone So, yeah, let’s just make this:

Imaginary Creatures

Here’s a small sample of the conversations I’ve overheard this week:

“I found an entire pack of cigarettes in my car this morning!”

“Praise God!”

So, I have some issues believing that God helps you find your keys, but ignores the thousands of starving children in Ethiopia. Yeah, yeah, original Sin, His ways are higher, we have been given the task of feeding the poor, blah blah blah, I know. The point is, I have an even bigger issue believing that God ignores the thousands of starving children in Ethiopia, then gives your friend lung cancer, and you’re happy about it.

“Did you see that show about the midgets?”

“Yeah, that poor girl. Two and a half feet tall, and eighteen years old. It’s like being a baby forever.”

“Yeah, but they’re so cute!”

I’m sure that they will be pleased to know that you find them adorable. Maybe they’d like their cheeks pinched, too. Can’t hurt to try, right?

“Okay, so what if the Grizzly was a hundred yards away, and you had a .44 Magnum, and and it wasn’t a mother?”

Please, please, go out and the woods and test this for real. Empirical research is the heart of the scientific method! Do it for science!

“We can have the meeting in my office. I have a table. With chairs.”

There was a significant pause between “table” and “chairs.” Like five seconds. I just… I don’t…

“Gyygngh! Arrrrgh! Unnnnnnnnh!”

He was doing curls. With 35 pounds. The way the vein was popping out of his head, I thought he was going to have a face aneurysm.

“Good set man. Good set.”

Same guy. He was talking to himself. If he had said anything about “blasting” his “guns,” I would have murdered him on the spot.

“I can help whoever’s next over at register 12.”

No, really, you can’t. The person you’ll actually be helping is whoever wins the mad cart race / death match / suicide run to your newly opened register. Which is actually kind of fun to watch, so thanks for giving me something to do while I wait for the guy running my register to figure out how the barcode scanner works. Here’s a hint: run the barcode over the scanner. You’re welcome.

“No, it goes the other way. If you do it that way, they’ll know its wrong, and they’ll come and yell at you. Do you want them to yell at you? Dammit!”

She was also talking to herself. I have no idea what she was talking about, and I didn’t wait around to find out. I just backed away, slowly.

I hate absolutely everybody in the gym, and I hope they all die a slow, painful, almost comically grotesque death, an occurrence which I will be more than happy to facilitate.

For example, there’s the guys in the Playboy and Hustler t-shirts. These brave men are apparently proud to make the bold statement, “I pay for pornography.” Guys aren’t impressed by this, and I doubt that the women are, either, so I really don’t see the point to that.

And then there’s the idiots standing next to me while I did my overhead presses. I was doing that lift for more than twenty minutes, and I swear they stood there the entire time, never touching a weight or doing anything even remotely related to “exercise.” They just stood there, and talked. God, how they talked. About so many banal, stupid things that I’m amazed they’re able to work up the energy to get out of bed in the morning.

And then the one guy just had to tell the other about his night in Vegas. Which meant he had to tell him about the Really Nice Stripper he met. And how she was really into him. Yeah. The woman you were paying to take off her clothes loves you. The rest of the guys, she only wants their money, but you? You’re special.

And then he started talking about how he had to delete the pictures, before his wife found them. I nearly threw the weights at him, which would have been impressive, considering I was using a machine.

Anyway, this delusional fool finished his story just as I was finishing my presses, and he bumped fists with his buddy and said “okay, I’ve got to go blast my chest. See you tomorrow.” Because, God knows, the only important muscle groups are the chest and the biceps. Heaven forfend that you actually do something like a deadlift or a squat. You get all freaky looking if you do those.

I wandered over to the leg press. Some little Mexican dude and his son set up next to me, grabbing the 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 pound dumbbells, and setting them on the floor in front of the mirror. He was teaching his kid how to do drop sets, which is stupid for a 15 year old kid to do, and is even stupider when you call them “burning your guns.” Come on, people! Don’t spread the stupid to the next generation!

Anyway, this guy was halfway through his gun burning when his kid looked over at me and asked “what’s he doing?” This is a fair question, since the answer, “working me legs,” is kind of unusual in most gyms. The father stopped and went off on a dissertation on what the leg press is, and why it’s a great exercise, and why he “could do that much, but he wasn’t going to, not today.”

Then, then, the idiot comes over, slaps the weights that I was trying to lift, and asks how much I had on there. I told him 650, and he kind of grunted, and said “that’s not too bad.” I told him it was volume day, and that I was doing ten sets of ten. He went away, then.

Then I went to the store, to get some things or a party I was heading to. I really don’t know what it is about shopping carts that makes people forget that there are other people in the world. I mean, how exactly do you think to yourself “well, this aisle is just big enough for two people to pass side by side, but if I park right in the middle, and then camp out for the next twenty minutes while I try to figure out which brand of Spam is healthiest, I should be able stop anyone from getting around me?” And the people on those little scooters… don’t even get me started. They should have flashing lights and those bells that go off when a truck backs up. Those people are a bleeding hazard.

“Are you okay? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

“Um, so, you do realize that you look like you just smoked a big fat blunt, right?”

“What is wrong with your eyes?”

“God, when was the last time you slept?”

That’s just a small sampling of the conversations I’ve been having the last couple of days. So, for those of you playing along at home, no, I’m not sleeping well again, but that isn’t particularly interesting. What’s interesting is what happens when I do manage to hit some approximation of REM.

A few nights ago, I dreamed about Database Ninjas. These were full-on Ninja, with the black pajamas, the masks, the funny little split-toes boots, the straight-bladed katanas, the whole nine yards. They dropped down silently from the ceiling, concealed by their smoke bombs, and stalked silently through the forest, which had somehow been planted in my office. When they got to me, they bowed, slid in front of my computer, and installed Oracle on my laptop, then disappeared as silently as they had come. Also, this entire dream was a cartoon.

In another dream, I was out for a walk, enjoying the sunshine and birdsong, when a car fell on me. Yes, fell on me. I haven’t figured out how, exactly, the red station wagon became airborne, but it fell from the sky and pinned me to the ground. Contrary to popular belief (and several urban legends, only a few of which I am responsible for), I am not strong enough to bench press a Buick, though I did try mightily. I was relieved when I saw a friend walking over to me, since I assumed that she would call for some sort of help, but she just patted me on the head, assured me that I would be all right, and encouraged me to keep pushing. Stupid girls.

I also had a dream about Ultimate Frisbee, which isn’t all that unusual, considering how often we’ve been playing it lately. Of course, when we play, the opposing team usually isn’t made up of rabid wolves. Or possibly werewolves. I wasn’t quite clear on that point, and I didn’t get close enough to ask, what with the slavering fangs of doom and all.

So, yeah. Nighttime hasn’t been the most restful of times.

Wolverine and Sabertooth: fight in literally every American war ever. Despite being Canadian.

Deadpool: is an uber-sarcastic mercenary with katanas. This is going to be awesome.

Deadpool: disappears for the next 85 minutes.

Sabertooth: likes the killing a bit too much.

Wolverine: peaces out.

Many Many People: get stabbed.

Wolverine’s Girlfriend: also gets stabbed.

Wolverine: So, about that metal skeleton…

Wolverine: OW OW OW OW OW WHY GOD OH WHY OW

Many Many Other People: get stabbed.

Wolverine’s Girlfriend: Surprise! I’m not dead! But I was lying about being in love with you! Except I really wasn’t!

Wolverine: buys that.

Deadpool: is back. His mouth is sewn shut. The Merc with the Mouth’s mouth was sewn shut. Because:

The Script Writer: is an idiot.

Many Many Other Other People: also get stabbed.

The Movie: mercifully ends.