Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Grommash.

Aaahoo, Warlords of Draenor, aahooo… On top of all the other busy-ness of late, WOW’s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor is now off and away as of last Tuesday, meaning more off hours shoring up the garrison and leveling my almost-nine-year-old rogue (and his army of alts) to all-new, rarefied three-digit heights. (I dinged 100 last night, with three more zones and lots more content to explore.) Aaahoo…

Deeper Down the Portal.

“When Flemmer gets wind of this he teleports to the theater (freezing Charles Nelson Reillly in time along the way) and takes control of the Truman puppet during the second act of Equus…[It] starts juggling bowling pins while playing the psychiatrist and Malkovich has seizures, levitates and breathes fire while playing Alan Strang. The Truman puppet turns into a giant swan, which bursts into flames, and then from the ashes of the swan the corpse of the real Harry S Truman rises and implores the audience to vote for Mantini.”

As seen at io9, Devin Faraci reveals the originally-planned ending of Being John Malkovich, and it’s out there alright. This reads like the textbook definition of “Too Many Notes” — I much prefer the filmed version, and especially its haunting final moment.

The Fields Under Lock and Key | In Eclipse.

“Miller, whose parents would rouse him in the wee hours to watch space launches, was awestruck by Launch Complex 19, where the manned Gemini missions took off. It was slowly rusting away, and Miller resolved to photograph it while there was still time. It took two years of haggling before he made his first images of Cape Canaveral…Since then, he has photographed sites nationwide, including Johnson & Kennedy space centers, the Marshall & Stennis Space Flight centers, Langley Research Center and many more.”

In Wired, photographer Roland Miller captures the decaying infrastructure of the early space race. “As launch pads were replaced, retrofitted or decommissioned, Miller was invited inside. By his estimate, 50 percent of the things he’s photographed no longer exist. ‘It’s not in NASA’s mission to conserve these sites,’ he says. ‘With shrinking budgets it’s an impossible thing to do.'”

***

“There’s not only last week’s deadly crash by Virgin Galactic, which hoped to launch widespread space tourism, or the unexpected explosion of a rocket headed toward the International Space Station. The United States also retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011. And…we now spend less on NASA — relative to the wealth of overall economy — than at any point in history.”

In very related news, and in the wake of Interstellar (which, on account of all the reasons I just mentioned, I haven’t seen yet), the Post‘s Zachary Goldfarb briefly surveys our current neglect of the space program. (Here’s what we’ve got planned at the moment.) “As recently as 2012, polling showed that more Americans than ever before thought that we were spending too little.”

The Lander That Could.

“‘Prior to falling silent, the lander was able to transmit all science data gathered during the First Science Sequence,’ lander manager Stephan Ulamec said in a statement. ‘This machine performed magnificently under tough conditions, and we can be fully proud of the incredible scientific success Philae has delivered’…’The data collected by Philae and Rosetta is set to make this mission a game-changer in cometary science,’ said Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.”

After traveling 4 billion miles, accomplishing an exhilarating landing on a 84,000-mph moving target, and, after 57 hours of work in an unfortunately dark location, successfully sending a valedictory round of data, the ESA’s history-making Philae probe falls into slumber. “We still hope that at a later stage of the mission, perhaps when we are nearer to the Sun, we might have enough solar illumination to wake up the lander and re-establish communication.” Rest well, little lander — ya did good.

An Infant System.

“[T]he most breathtaking aspects of the image are the rings and gaps in the disk, never imaged before in this much detail. The largest gaps likely contain protoplanets, which form by collecting gas, dust, and small meteoroid fragments, gradually clearing their orbit of that debris. The combination of those gaps and the young age of HL Tauri suggest planets may form more quickly than astronomers think.”

Also in space news, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captures our best look yet at potential planetary formation around a newborn star, 450 light years away. “The disk surrounding HL Tauri is much bigger than Neptune’s orbit, so any planet in the gaps would at least begin at a larger orbit than the major planets in the Solar System. Additionally, other gaps could be ‘resonances’: orbits where the combined gravity of the star and protoplanets drive matter out, concentrating it in the rings.”

Spectre in the Contraption.

“Since time immemorial, humans have traded stories about ghosts and wraiths — haunting presences that are strongly felt but never seen. Mountaineers often report feeling an unseen presence keeping in step beside them…Blanke was seeing the same phenomenon at work in his patient, but with one critical difference: he could turn it on and off.”

In a nifty experiment involving movement-mimicking robots and a brief time delay, scientists uncover a potential neurological basis for sensing ghostly phenomena. “The mismatched sensory and motor information confused their brains…If those…didn’t match up, my brain would revise its perception of reality to account for the discrepancies. Maybe I’m not inside my body at all, it might think. Maybe I’m over there.”

The Forgotten ‘Buster.

“The night before filming begins, however, I get this new script and it was shocking. The character was gone. Instead of coming in at the very beginning of the movie, like page 8, the character came in on page 68 after the Ghostbusters were established. His elaborate background was all gone, replaced by me walking in and saying, ‘If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.’ So that was pretty devastating.”

Thirty years after its release, Ernie Hudson opens up about his conflicted feelings on being “the fourth Ghostbuster.” “Winston wasn’t included in the movie poster or the trailer and all that stuff…I love the movie, I love the guys. I’m very thankful to Ivan for casting me. I’m very thankful that fans appreciate the Winston character. But it’s always been very frustrating — kind of a love/hate thing, I guess.”

Ready Player One.

“Dig Dug, Berzerk, Frogger, Tetris, Donkey Kong, Street Fighter II — they are all there.” In the spirit of preservation, killing productivity, and saving me trips to, and quarters spent, at the Columbia Heights laundromat, the Internet Archive — keepers of the always useful Wayback Machine — now offers 900 old-school, browser-ready arcade games for your nostalgic pleasure. “Firefox [is] best optimized to run these free games.”

Let’s Make Another One.

“‘It’s neat because the posters aren’t just something with a “2” attached to it,’ Gibson said during a recent interview while preparing to hang the show. ‘There’s concepts, and there’s actual story being developed here.'”

There’re actually sequel ideas they’re not using? The iam8bit gallery in Los Angeles features a fun exhibition of posters for sequels that never were, or at the very least, have not yet come to pass. (More here.)

No Strings Attached. | Legions Ahead.


Still catching up on unfinished business from Less than Zero, James Spader terrorizes Robert Downey Jr. and the rest of Marvel’s mightiest superheroes in the first teaser for Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. The sea of generic Ultron clones seems really close to the ersatz-Skrulls of Avengers and robot armies of past two Iron Mans, but everyone’s gotta have stormtroopers, I guess.

And in very related news, DC and Marvel have released their respective movie calendars for the next six years. The wanna-be contenders at Warner Brothers/Detective Comics are going with Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman and two Justice League movies, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman (set in the 20’s? I like it), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Shazam (with The Rock as Black Adam), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and — sorry, Ryan Reynolds — a re-booted Green Lantern.

As for the current champs, Disney/Marvel, along with next year’s Ant-Man, we have two more Avengers (Infinity War, 1 and 2, a.k.a. Thanos time), the next installments of Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America (Civil War) and Thor (Ragnarok), and new additions Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch? I still like Luke Evans), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Captain Marvel, and The Inhumans. Yes, we live in a universe that is actually going to have an Inhumans movie. Invest in Lockjaw dog costumes now.

Got all that? If not, the good folks at ComicsAlliance have made a handy infographic, below. And this isn’t even counting the gaggle of comic TV shows now on or forthcoming. Great Caesar’s Ghost, fanboy/fangirl nation, what have we wrought?