In the wake of Battlestar Galactica’s awesome success, Fox asked co-creator Ronald D Moore to come up with something for them. He and another ex-Trek writer Michael Taylor came up with Virtuality.

It’s an unspecified time in the future, and we’re aboard Earth’s first interstellar ship, the Phaeton (under the command of a man named Pike!). This is a small crew of mainly researchers - much closer to our modern astronauts than the kind of quasi-military explorers seen in other series. They’re about to embark on a 10-year journey to another world, and the primary tension in the pilot is the “go or no-go”, ie. whether or not they’ll turn back, or commit to the journey and head outside the solar system.

The show has two main gimmicks. For one, the consortium running the interstellar mission is defraying their costs by turning the mission into a reality show, so we get many “diary room”-style bits of introspection by the crew. The other gimmick is the virtual reality environment the crew uses for recreation. Think the old “Virtuality” headsets rather than the Holodeck.

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Gah, don’t get your shit wet! too late.

The bird is the word.

Think of me as you drive past.

Let’s see.

EA is folding BioWare and Mythic into one … uhh… thing. id Software was bought out by Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda. Michael Jackson is dead, and Entertainment Tonight are frantically publicising photos of “the star dying!”

Oh yeah, and Iran continues to implode in the fight over which individual gets to not-even run the country.

Me, I’ve spent all week helping to put together something which, at absolute best, might provide 12 minutes of enjoyable distraction. Odd. Very odd.

I’m sure I’ve plugged this shit before, but I’ve been doing some work that has once again shown the benefits of this wonderful service:

DROPBOX!

Dropbox is online storage done very very right. The free option gives you 2gb of storage space to do with what you will. You can keep your files private (default) or you can share them with selected Dropbox users, or you can share them with everyone by placing them in the public folder. You can either access your files through the nice pretty website, or you can install the Dropbox client, which for a couple of reasons I would strongly recommend.

The translated lyrics are even funnier than the misheard ones

I predict nobody here liking this. But it’s my album of the year so far.