12 Awesome Things I'm Gonna Make With Graphene, the Strongest Stuff on Earth. You Know, After I Get My Hands on Some

See? The future isn't all that bad. 

At least they're working on making this graphene stuff, this strongest substance on Earth, and they made some kind of advances this week that means it'll be way easy to manufacture. Well, maybe not way easy, but possible. 

What it is is a single-molucule thick layer of carbon, bonded together in hexagons and such, and it's nearly unbreakable and flexible and I probably close to invisible. Stronger than anything. Oh, and it's flexible and can conduct electricity and save the world.

Totally gonna get some of that and make some awesome stuff.

Like what? Easy, like this:

1. Invisible bulletproof hoodie! That's right, and invisible hoodie that nobody can see! And stops bullets! Maybe I'll just weave that stuff into a regular hoodie. Point is, bulletproof.

2. Invisible bulletproof balaclava!

3. Invisible bulletproof Chuck Taylors!

4. Bendable iPhone! So it's all comfy in my pocket. And probably bulletproof, why not. 

5. A big-ass Dyson sphere! Totally using a giant ball of this stuff to encase the sun and trap it's energy to feed an ecosystem and platform for civilization billions of times larger than Earth's, securing the future of humankind and my place in history. Probably will be too thick to be invisible, but for real: bulletproof.

6.-12. You get the idea.

Anyway. Stuff is super cool and I want some. What are you gonna do with it?

Star Trek Bootcamp: How to Introduce Your Kids to the 24th Century

The only two things in this world I take seriously: (1) movies and (2) my kids. With this Star Trek Into Darkness thing coming out, I'm planning to take Zev, but needed to get him up to speed on the Federation and the whole history of the 24th century.

Introducing Star Wars, on the other hand, was easy. I've had that one worked out for decades (feel free to disagree, but know that you're wrong):

1. Watch Episode IV first.
2. Watch it again.
3. Then Empire and Jedi.
4. Take a long break.
5. Introduce the prequels.
6. Pretend The Clones Wars never happened.
7. Rewatch only Empire and Jedi.

Easy.

Star Trek is trickier. There's the original series, 7 seasons each of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and however much Enterprise, the original movie series, and on and on. There's no clear or easy way in.

Advice I got from two nerd-dad friends: Watch some episodes with Shatner, then maybe some TNG and perhaps Wrath of Khan. A greatest hits approach.

I ignored them and went this way, given that we're dealing with a 21st century kid with things to do and places to be:

1. We talked about why I love Star Trek, the vision for a spacefaring peaceful Earth where exploration, goodwill and curiosity drive galactic progress.  
2. Watched the first JJ Abrams' reboot. It's a good entry and set-up, to both the new stuff and the old.
3. Watched some of the best episodes of Next Generation, starting with "Q Who" and a few of the other Borg episodes. Going to move on to some Data-centric ones. The pacing of the shows is dated and slow, to be honest, but the sci-fi and characters are solid. I could watch it all day and all night.
4. Whatever's next. 

How did you do it? 

Minecraft Is a Virus and It's in My House

Like any amazing father, I'm super involved in my kids' gaming life. I play along. I join the Lego adventures and play the coop companion. I encourage and support, I look up cheats and hints. That's good parenting, right? Yes it is.

Usually, we're playing something we got into together (my all-time favorite coop: Portal 2), but Zev has started bringing this own tastes into our gaming. Skylanders Giants was all the rage with the second graders for a while, but that's worn off (plus, we beat it in like 2 weeks, and only fully upgraded one giant).

So now he's brought Minecraft into the house, and it's taken over everything. The thing is a virus. A truly awesome and social and brain-bending virus, but still.

We both have worlds going on the Xbox. It's on the iPhone, all the time. He's watching YouTube clips of advanced gameplay and elaborate (and very well done) music videos recasting pop songs into the Minecraft universe (loving "Some Items That I Used to Own"). He makes up his own songs now, too, and shares everything he learns about the world, constantly, with all the other boys in the second grade.

And that's the best part of the whole game for me: All the good stuff to know about Minecraft, you hear from friends. (Well, in my case, the wiki or the book.) And what could be more social than that?

This is how I even know anything about Minecraft, from all the second-grade gossip. It's not like the game tells you that you need to build a portal to hell, and collect some eyes, and find a hidden fortress, and defeat a dragon. The casual player would have no idea. At all. Not a clue. But the kids all know this, and they obsess about it and talk all about it, so now I do, too.

My wife calls it the game where I break rocks and kill cows, and that's true. There is a lot of breaking of rocks and killing of cows. But there's also fighting zombies with pig faces, and building flying castles, and…breaking rocks.   

But I finally made a diamond sword, and I'm collecting obsidian (it's hard!) for my Nether portal. Zev's keen on making an iron golem and building an underground city and only occasionally loses track of his house and gets so upset he can't play for a few days.

We have goals, agendas and we know how to get there. Hard work and patience. Again, good parenting, right?

Your Only Official Glenn Gaslin News Source

Here's the lastest on my work and projects. You know, just in case you're curious:

 

Digital Content & Editorial

I work as a digital content strategist, pop culture journalist and Big Idea guy with more than 15 years of editorial and marketing experience. Most recently as Director of Special Projects at NBCUniversal.

I'm on the LinkedIn.

Art & Monsters

My drawings and short stories can be found here:

Monsters With Issues.

Books & Writing

I'm a novelist and pop culture journalist, and my writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Slate.

My novel Beemer™ was called "a blisteringly funny satire" by The Washington Post.

At the moment, I'm writing a book about mythical creatures and impossible machines. I have a YA sci-fi adventure in the hands of agents, so we'll see how that goes. 

Here are my books.

Twitter

I'm on the Twitter @glenngaslin

My Day With Newt Gingrich. Or Rather, His Skull

Way back in 1995, when Newt Gingrich was at the peak of his power and making a whole lot of noise in Congress, I was a (very green) newspaper reporter in Virginia. I wrote a (very silly) weekly column with my colleague Ken Baker, and it only made sense that we go to Washington D.C. to mess with Gingrich.

I’m pretty sure we couldn’t get away with this today, but here’s what happened in 1995, as it ran in The Daily Press:

Straight Outta Palmdale (From the Archives)

NOTE: I'm collecting some of my all-time favorite stories up here. One in a series.

[Satire, originally published in New Times Los Angeles]

How renegade movie makers in a desolate patch of Mojave suburbia are building a film empire--and making Hollywood drool about the Next Big Thing

THE CITY OF PALMDALE, by any definition, sucks.

It lies at the edge of northern Los Angeles County, a long 70 miles from downtown, even 30 miles past Santa Clarita, the outermost suburb that most people considered habitable. Those who live out here and work in The Big City spend at least four hours a day on the freeway. Those who don't commute spend 24 hours a day in Palmdale, which is worse.

Sure, the place has a mall and all the big releases play here, just like anywhere else. Sure, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works will keep people employed building the next-generation space shuttle, the X-33, to be tested at nearby Edwards Air Force Base. And, at least, Highway 41 goes through town so the Denny's does OK. Oh, and there's a Metrolink stop.

But at its core, the town is a mistake, a clear argument that Los Angeles can and will come to an end. Less than a decade ago, city planners heralded Palmdale as the last, great frontier of Angelene expansion, the event horizon of growth, a place where a Ward & June could buy a chunk of America and settle down, a Mayberry in the desert, only hotter. But now the suburban dreamland boasts some of the nation's highest rates of domestic and child abuse, and ranks as the foreclosure capital of America. Entire developments of crisp, new tract homes lay vacant, like seas of silent orange stucco, and every half-empty strip mall has at least one storefront touting foreclosure auctions and HUD homes for a very enthusiastic "Zero percent down!"

To most of Los Angeles, Palmdale is a punch line, a big joke in the sand, which, some say, is what makes it perfect for a youth-born revolution in cinema.

And that's where the Biggs brothers come in.