Last night I found something hyper-cool online, so today I'm just taking my lunchbreak to post it:

part 1, part 2

Watch it before YouTube yoinks it as being copyrighted. I tried to do this as an "embed" but some bug in either FF, YT, or LJ meant that one of the videos kept replacing the other.

To explain what you're looking at: Larry Niven is one of my favourite authors. "The Soft Weapon" is on of his better short stories set in his "Known Space" universe.  This episode of "Star Trek: The Animated Series" is a near word-for-word adaptation of Niven's original story, but with TOS Enterprise crew in place of the original characters. It's remarkable that the story isn't changed further, since the various Known Space concepts of Slavers, Kzinti, etc. are totally out-of-place in the Star Trek universe, but are included anyways.  Weird to see a story I used to read over and over done up as a campy animated ST episode.

For more information, a Wiki article on the episode over at the Star Trek Wiki, Memory Alpha.

It's late at night and I got up early this morning, and I'm not even tired. Usually this is frustrating. Tonight, it's not.

Three subjects today.

First, my job. I'm currently working in Stratford. My employer has contracted me away from the normal in-house developing to work there. The commute is hard - Stratford is 1.5 hours away at best. If I were paying for my own gas this would be horrific - the Altima guzzles $20 per day with that trip. Something is wrong with that car. The time out of my day is hard, but it's okay since I know it's temporary and then I get to go back to biking to work.  But either way, the time in the car is giving me plenty of time to think, and to listen to music.

Second, music. Benjamin Gibbard is Jesus.  I listen to The Postal Service and suddenly I'm 5 years old again, sitting on my bunkbed playing C64 games with my brother.  I went through Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism album like five times today in the car - every song boils away my nerdly cynicism into pathetic romanticism.

Third, Hyperion.  I just finished the fourth (and final) volume of Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. 

• Hyperion (1989)
• The Fall of Hyperion (1990)
• Endymion (1996)
• The Rise of Endymion (1997)

Good, good books.  Simmons has a gift for Tolkienesque "this sword is a thousand years old and forged by the hand of Olsindrul before he slew Orthoth at Ugluk'num" sort of thing, and making it believable.  Everything is catastrophic, final, and spectacular.  It's all about poetry and death.  The only catch is that he started at the top - Hyperion is a wonderful science-fiction version of The Canterbury tales, which tells each story in a unique, distinct style.  It's the closest thing I've read to science-fiction poetry.  The Fall of Hyperion ends the short-story approach and puts the whole thing together into The Big Epic Story of Epicness, and does it well.  It has a good, solid ending, as it was meant as an end to the series... so you can stop reading there if you like.

The latter pair, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, are the perfect classical messianic epic... but it loses a lot.  It's heavily laden with 20th-century references, repetitious long-winded speeches on the metaphysics of the setting, and near-constant retconning.  Still, this is the story everyone desperately wanted Herbert's Dune series to be (instead of accepting the Dune series for what it is).  Where Dune became a terrifying morality play about ecology and religious stagnation, Endymion remains a high-flying space opera soaked in philosphy, poetry, and romance - complete with the kind of perfect tragically sappy ending that only a sci-fi concurrently peddling human salvation and anti-entropic-force-fields can provide.

So in short, I'm thoroughly buzzed in that way that you can only get by absorbing piles and piles of romantic, maudlin culture can give you.

So, in short, good night and feel the love.  Choose again.