I hate Fermi's paradox

So I was discussing extraterrestrial life with a friend the other day, and she brought up Fermi's paradox.

For those unaware: Fermi's paradox says there are no aliens, because where ARE they?

God I hate this dumb shit.

So, I said we should have ham for dinner, and I opened the door and we waited all night. No ham appeared. So, there must be no ham anywhere on earth right? Pigs are extinct?

Fermi's paradox takes no account of what the aliens want. It assumes they are just DYING to meet us.

I mean, why wouldn't they. We've achieved soooo much. And our standards of civilization and the habitability of our world *must* be universally appealing, right?

Some words are just ruined.

For the Darwin's World adventure I am currently writing, which you can PLAY at GenCon this year, but I digress, I have these armored buses with escape hatches in the top.

The idea being you crashed into a wall, soldiers come out the top, and scramble over the wall. I decided to call them "trojans" as in "the trojan horse".

After listening to my players chortle every time I mentioned "ghouls scrambling out of the trojan" I think I'm going to go with "battle wagon".

Traveler

I am reading Traveler for the first time.

Make of this what you will.

Thinking about ENWorld

In a thread over at CM, someone asked what you think about ENW.

As someone who has been posting product blurbs and connecting with fans through ENW for about 8 years now, my thought is that ENW is pretty awesome and I personally owe it quite a bit.

So I donated 5 of my books, my historical fantasy series (Clash of Arms: Cavalry, Clash of Kings: Nobility, Clash of History: Witch Trials, Clash of History: Guilds and Money, Clash of Arms: Infantry) to ENW for their subscriber program.

For those who don't know, you can support ENW for 3 bucks a month, and you get a ton of free PDFs to download when you sign up.

So now there's 5 more. If you were thinking about getting these books sometime, they would normally run you a whopping $6.25 to get all 5 books.

But, since they'll be added to the ENW content soon, I recommend you support ENW for two months and get them that way, along with getting a ton of other good stuff.

The Dreamer and the Dream

It's also worth noting that DS9 has a take on this concept, in what might be the single best hour of Star Trek television since "City on the Edge of Forever".

Season 6 has an episode titled "Far Beyond the Stars" in which Sisko has a delusion (or a vision from the Prophets if you prefer) of a black sci-fi writer in the 50's named Benny, who goes insane while writing stories about a place called DS9.

At the end of the episode, Sisko wonders if Bennie might be somewhere dreaming of him, just as he dreamed of Bennie, and the episode never really answers the question of whether or not Bennie is real. Certainly Sisko is, within the larger Trek universe.

We also know that Sisko is the chosen one of an immortal, non-linear race capable of existing at all points in time simultaneously.

Adding to the weirdness going on here, all the characters are played by actors from DS9, but they're all human.

And if you look close, the story titles on the sci-fi magazine covers in the show are Original Trek episode titles.

I just got a chill.

Wikipedia has a good article about this episode (not written by me I swear).

More Tommy Westphall thoughts

Another funny little tidbit is that, to the best of anyone's knowledge, Dwayne MacDuffie is the first person to expound the theory, in one of the articles I link to.

Which is funny, because MacDuffie is a big-time comics and animation writer, working on shows like Justice League and writing the Fantastic Four.

He relays the notion that, if character crossover equals a shared universe as a counter example, arguing for LESS rigid comic continuity.

The fact that so many folks love the Tommy Westphall hypothesis shows why MacDuffie is in the minority.

Humans love connections.

We see stars in the sky and play connect the dots. We see fuzzy lines on Mars and decide they're canals bringing water to a dying world from its poles.

This is why character crossovers in comics have always been a huge draw. People like it better when Batman can visit Superman, than they do if they're each in their own pocket dimension.

Tommy Westphall has a dream

I happen to think Homicide is the greatest TV show of all time. But before that, showrunner Tom Fontana ran a show called St. Elsewhere, which was also brilliant.

Now in the final show of St. Elsewhere, it is revealed that the entire show took place in the mind of Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of one of the show's doctors. In essence, it was a dream.

Then someone noticed something amazing: characters from St. Elsewhere had appeared on Homicide. Detective John Munch of Homicide has appeared on the X-Files and most of the Law and Order series.

As St. Elsewhere became the Kevin Bacon of TV series, there's a good chance your favorite show is also a figment of Tommy Westphall's imagination, up to and including Dick Van Dyke and the Andy Griffith show, which took place before St. Elsewhere.

This happened because Cheers crossed over with Caroline in the City, which crossed over with Mad About You, which crossed over with both Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith.

And of course, if one wants to include the Simpsons, then Tommy Westphall encompasses virtually every TV that has ever existed.

See how fun this is?

I don't know why, but I love this idea more than words can express.

More on the Tommy Westphall Grand Unification Theory of tv can be found here, here and here for the truly neurotic.