Closet Sci-Fi Geek

A Really Great Book and DVD Trading Service

Just a heads up: On occasion you’ll see me review a book or DVD here and I’ll be giving it away for free. I’ll be doing this through Bookins, which is a fantastic online book/DVD trading service. What you do is sign up and then earn points for giving your used books and DVDs away. You can then use those points to get other books and DVDs. You just pay $4.49 for the shipping (ONLY when you receive).

I’ve been so excited about this service. It is beyond easy to use. The great thing is that if you have old books and DVDs to give away, you don’t have to pay to ship them out. You go to the website, print out a label with postage, and the receiver pays the shipping.

I’m on a mission to promote them a little bit more because I’d just like more people taking my books and DVDs. (OK, I do get some free “points” through referrals, but no cash.) If there’s one downside to this service, I find that some of my books can sit there for a long time without getting taken. So sign up using my link here and then when I have something available and post it here, you can be the one to get it.

Ghostly Photo Blog

Recently, more anomalies have been showing up in my photos…anomalies such as those mysterious “orbs” you may have heard about. While skeptics say they are just dust on the camera lens, others think they may be signs of the paranormal. Whether they are real or not, I find them to be a ton of fun. So I have put up a new photo blog to share pictures of orbs and other ghostly apparitions. Please check it out at:

http://www.orbsandghosts.com

A Few News Tidbits & Thoughts

Good news: Reaper and Eli Stone have been renewed! I was a bit worried for both (Reaper seemed to be very much on the bubble) and I am glad to see both will come back. Reaper is not high art, but it’s fun, with some really great moments. I have unfortunately not been able to keep up with Reaper as much as I’d like this past season due to all the scheduling changes and writer’s strikes and…my life, but I plan to catch up on all the episodes before next season.

Eli Stone has become hands down my favorite new show, surpassing even my other new favorite Pushing Daisies. (Pushing Daisies may creep back up again, however, once I start watching it again.)

Jericho fans are pushing SciFi to pick up the series…of course, SciFi will probably do the stupid thing and ignore them. Once again, Bonnie Hammer is going on about expanding the network to reach more than adolescent geeky boys. I guess this is one of the reasons why they don’t have spaceships anymore?

Excuse me, Bonnie..I am a 30something female, relatively attractive (or so I’m told), who does yoga and also happens to like spaceships. Please stop stereotyping women by suggesting we need “relationships” to get into a show!

I am so itching for new spaceship shows that I’m thinkly fondly of sci-fi gone by. Even sci-fi I didn’t like that much. I used to find Space: Above and Beyond a bit too shoot-em-up and not enough aliens…but I’m really dying over here to see SOME SPACESHIPS for a change, and now I look back on the days of Space: Above and Beyond, Star Trek franchises, and Babylon 5 with much fondness. Ah, the 90s.

Finally: Welcome to our newest contributor, LarryJP!

Site Upgrade…New Contributors

Phew! I just upgraded my installation of WordPress and installed a new template. Let me know if you have any problems reading it. I like the “space” theme but it’s always tricky with light on dark. (I already bumped the font size up a notch.)

I’m also excited to have a few new contributors coming on board. The first is Edwin McRae, a writer from New Zealand. You can read more about him here…welcome, Edwin!

Looking for Contributors

Hey all!

I am looking for contributors to Closet Sci-Fi Geek. This would be a labor of love, because honestly, with the Google ads I’m lucky if I make a buck a month off this website. But it’d be a nice way to promote your website because I do get a little bit of traffic here (you are welcome, for example, to link out to your website at the bottom of each post you add).

I’m looking for contributors who are decent writers with positive energy and a sense of humor. If you take your sci-fi SOOOO darn seriously that you get pretentious and offended over stupid little things, then you would not be a good fit. You are welcome to reprint articles from your blog or website here, as long as they are sci-fi related.

I’ve mostly covered television and movies, but I’d love to have more book coverage as well.

Please drop me an email with some writing samples. Send it to geek(at)closetscifigeek.com with a brief hello and a note about who you are and why you would be a positive addition to the site.

Thanks and I hope to hear from you soon!
Stephanie

New Green Technology Blog

Hi everyone,

Please check out my new blog on green technology…all about anything intersecting the environment and technology, including e-waste, positive environmental trends in technology, alternative energy, etc.

http://www.greentechgirl.com

I am going to attempt to add a new entry every day for a month to get the blog going, so it’d be nice to have some comments over there. It is always lonely when you are just starting something up. Please stop by and say hello!

Moving This Blog to a New Webhost…Possible Downtime

You may have noticed…the site has been sporadically offline for the past few days. This is due to a really crappy webhost that I am in the process of leaving. They started off just fine, but lately I can expect some major downtime every few months that will often last for up to a week. The sites will go down, they’ll say they have fixed it, and then the sites keep going down for the rest of the week.

I have a bunch of websites, and I got an account with Dreamhost a year ago to test them out and also for the additional bandwidth. So half of my sites have been on Dreamhost for a year, and the other half (including this one) have been on the crappy webhost.

Well, Dreamhost has won out for being more reliable and affordable. I know some people who hate Dreamhost, but they apparently haven’t tried my other webhost (which will go nameless). Dreamhost isn’t perfect, but what webhost is? With their amazingly good prices, their generous bandwith allocation, and their commitment to the environment, I am now moving all my sites to Dreamhost.

The process will happen over the next week and this site may experience some downtime or strange errors while I get everything set up again. Thanks for your patience!

Petition for New Leadership at the SciFi Channel

Well, after watching the whole Dresden Files clusterf@#$, and seeing how completely bad Flash Gordon is, I finally decided it was time for we the people to take our channel back from Bonnie Hammer.

If you agree, take a gander at this petition and sign and pass it on:

http://www.petitiononline.com/newscifi/petition.html

I Put More Ads Up

They aren’t too intrusive, but I put another set of Google ads along the left and some referral boxes on the lower right. The sad thing is, even though this site seems to get some decent traffic, I am lucky to make $3/month off of it. Woo hoo! I’m rich!

Great. My Site is Being Hijacked by a Sci-Fi Spam Site.

WARNING TO YOU SCI-FI BLOGGERS OUT THERE: YOUR WORK MAY BE GETTING STOLEN!

I shudder to give this site more traffic, but I was shocked to find out that this “blog” has basically gone out and republished stories from other sci-fi blogs (including my own) without permission. (Please, if you go there to check it out, DO NOT CLICK ON THEIR ADS!!!)

The Pod Bay Doors <===== EVIL COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS!
http://www.podbaydoors.com

Now let’s see if they are stupid enough to reprint this article using their bot. Meanwhile, I will have to track down their ISP and get them shut down for DMCA violation.

Geez. If they had just asked me and offered to give me free advertising in exchange for mirroring my content, I might have given them permission. I could use more traffic. The fact that they didn’t bother to ask is just plain stupid if you ask me. What is wrong with people?