Sci Fi message board poster "Rolling Paper" writes:

Soooo. Ron D Moore, Executive Producer of the series (as he constantly reminds us) said that Galactica would end when he lost his passion for the series. So the series has ended by his dictate as we all know. Ergo he has lost his passion for the series, ergo it will probably suck.

At least the other fans who think that it'll suck have a slightly better reason. Namely, the quality of the previous season:

Given Season 3, (and I can't think of one series that has managed to recover from such a mess), I give it a 98% chance it will suck big time.

Due to the suck called S3 my standard for S4 is so low that there's only a .00005% I will think it sucks because my expectations were lowered so much by S3 it's difficult to overstate. If continuity between lines is maintained I'll be happy, forget continuity between episodes... At this point that's a pipe dream.

Will Season 4 suck? [Scifi.com]

Other than those restrictions, the sky's the limit. Well, there is one other thing. According to the rules:

Use of a time machine or other similar instrument to stop the normal passage of time, giving you say 3 weeks to make a film in what seems like just a weekend to the rest of us - well, that is cheating and we won't stand for it - unless of course you use some kind of mind control and erase any knowledge of this rule or your cheating or the fact that the time machine was invented...

Winners get a video camera. What? No Dalek-shaped chocolate cake?

Sci-Fi London [official site]

Annalee: "If you guys had to get out of those costumes really, really fast, how would you do it?"
Spidey: "You mean like, if the building was on fire? I always build secret escape hatches in here, so you can just pull and they're gone."
Spider-Woman: "Yeah, they come off in about five seconds." (We think she winked after that, but it's hard to tell behind those huge white eyecovers)
Spidey: "I mean, when you gotta to to the bathroom, you gotta go."

Essentially, what Shadow Unit is, is a virtual serial drama—sort of a TV show without the actors or directors or Hollywood, for that matter. If you're familiar with the fanfiction concept of a virtual season, it won't seem that unfamiliar.

In addition to the site content (we plan to do eight novella-or-novel-length episodes a season, and Season 1 just started), there are also "DVD extras" (vignettes, goodies, artwork, cut scenes, clever bits of meta (a few pages from a crumpled shooting script that might have been used by one of the actors for this show that doesn't exist, for example)—and several of the characters have a web presence. Which is to say, in-character blogs that don't break the fourth wall.

It's all quite experimental.

Shadow Unit [official site]

• The first official (American, anyhow) "World Science Fiction Convention" (now known as Worldcon) was held in 1939, and followed by conventions in Chicago and Denver in the following years. check out the photo above of some fans posing at Coney Island during that first convention, on the top row on the far left is Ray Bradbury.
• The first British convention in 1937 attracted 20 fans, including Eric Frank Russell and Arthur C. Clarke.
• The WorldCon conventions were suspended after 1941 due to World War II, but resumed in 1946.
• WonderCon was started by John Barrett in the San Francisco Bay area in 1987, but has since been adopted and is now part of the Comic-Con International family of Cons. Sort of like the Shazam family.
• Comic-Con itself began in San Diego as the Golden State Comic Book Convention in 1970, and attracted around 500 fans. Last year the Con (now the San Diego Comic-Con or just Comic-Con) had over 125,000 visitors.
• There are now regional cons including everything from Eurocon to DeepSouthCon to Westercon.
• There are even specific cons that cover one range of subjects, like BotCon (Transformers), Costume-Con (costumes, duh), and FilkOntario (filk music, folks music with a scifi/fantasy twist).
• That's not even mentioning all of the cons for specific shows and movies that have sprung up, like Star Trek, Farscape, Star Wars, and plenty of others. In fact, the movie GalaxyQuest is completely con-centric.
• Our favorite title? The Wrath of Con in North Florida. Either that or the Comic Book Guy's Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. It's a toss up.

My favorite SF car, besides Corey's, is Katie Horn's Red Five X-wing car. It started out as an early 90s Toyota Tercel, then she gave it a new base coat of paint and then spray-painted on X-wing markings. But what puts her car over the top is the blast marks she spray-painted on.

There's also Shawn Crosby's A-wing car, which has been featured in Wired. Another fan turned his pick-up truck into an X-wing fighter, complete with R2DT in back. And then there was the Fiat that someone tricked out as a Hoth ice cruiser and tried to sell on eBay for $40,000.

Unfortunately, Star Trek fans have fallen short in the pimped-out cars category. The main Trek car seems to be the Seven Of Nine Car, which has a model of the Starship Voyager on its hood and pics of Jeri Ryan all over the body. Must try harder, Trek fans. Where are the cars with warp nacelles?

• The Starship Exeter: This Star Trek fan-made series comes from the heart of Austin, Texas, and looks like it was filmed alongside the original series. From the sets all the way down to the smallest props, its got the looks. The acting can be slightly hammy at times, but whoever said Shatner wasn't pure pork?
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• Time Distortion: If you can manage to build a replica of the TARDIS, then you've done 95% of the work required to make a Doctor Who fanfilm, mostly because the special effects budget for the BBC back in the day was probably about ten bucks. For the whole season. Kevin Hiley and buddy Jonathan Miles made an audio version of this story when they were both 13 years old, and 13 years later, they made a live-action version that captures the cheese, camp, and charm of the original Doctor Who.
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• Troops: 1977's Hardware Wars was the first-ever fan film that poked fun at the Star Wars universe but this one takes the cake as far as making something new out of something old. It's Cops with Stormtroopers, what more do you need to know? Oh, and it's hilarious. It helped spawn other Star Wars-themed comedy fanfilms like Trooper Clerks and Pink Five.
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• Batman: Dead End: While the Star Wars and Star Trek universes normally receive the most attention from aspiring fanfilmers, Batman has had some pretty decent entries as well. The best of the bunch is this 2003 short film that wowed director Kevin Smith and artist Alex Ross. It inspired other Batman fanfilms like Grayson, about an adult Robin trying to find out who killed Batman (excellent) and World's Finest, where Batman teams up with Superman.
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• Indiana Jones: The Adaptation: This is probably one of the most inspiring stories of labor, love, and fandom. Three twelve-year-old buddies saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and starting making a shot-for-shot remake with a camcorder. It took them seven years to finish it, and it premiered in Texas on the big screen in 2003. Producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to their story, and art house comic book favorite Dan Clowes is writing it.

The revelation that bad-assed Admiral Cain was not only a lesbian but a lesbian into sexy blonde Cylon Gina, was apparently underscored in the next commercial break by a sting courtesy of snack food supplier Quizno's. And it's that hot-girl-on-girl-action/sandwich combo that's upset fans on Sci-Fi's website:

I could care less who does what with whom, as that is not why I watch this show. My complaint is that the existence of a GAY relationship became so forced, after obvious—and I mean OBVIOUS—funding by Quizno's and glaad, that anything else in the show, including the modicum of an attempt at a storyline, were blasted into oblivion. Is this what we're all going to be subjected to now? Sexual preference is now pandered in BSG, paid for by third parties. Reminds me of a tobacco company strategy. I say 'now' not referring to the more common hetero content one sees on regular tv, but to the amount of paid advertisements during a show to express that the hetero relationships were specifically paid to be placed there. Basically, I'm offended that one of my favorite shows could not just include a relationship in the show like any other show we see, but had to take the time to show us it was bought and paid for.

Who made this episode? This was the worst BSG I've ever experienced.

it was...hmm...how do I put this politely....a good "solid" episode. But a jaw dropper? - what...that there are lesbian lovers on another planet? Anyone watching a promo commercial for Teens Gone Wild can see girls kissing, so Six and the Admiral's shoulder squeeze is a yawner...

The gay thing .. eh.. I don't see a point for it ... so yeah i agree it was a stereotype thing.. don't really see the point.... maybe just that tough bull dykes who "sorta" still look/act like a traditional stereotypical straight woman (sorta) .. the only thing missing from Cain's personality was a guy'ish short spikey military haircut and maybe an earring and a rainbow tattoo somewhere.

Too bad they had to shove the radical liberal gay agenda down our thoats.

We just finished watching Razor. And all we have to say to the producers is 'how dare you!"... seriously, how dare you leave us like this until March. And to show us previews to boot. It's rude, evil and now we know who the cylons really are.. YOU. You are ******* cylons and we do not appeciate it. As Melissa Linden, head of the Ghandi Group says, "Dont be the evilness in the world." No really... think about it...you entice us into your web, drain us of our vital life-blood and then spit out the remenents... we are those remenents.

Battlestar Galactica: Razor [Sci-Fi Forums]

As a whole these stories are far more inventive than most science fiction you see on TV or at the movies nowadays. I'm not here to bash all SF film and TV... but it seems there's an inventiveness, a vitality, in written SF that you don't see as much in TV and movies.

Unfortunately, that wild creation is long gone from written science fiction as well, says classic SF author Norman Spinrad:

Norman Spinrad in the SFWA Forum sees SF writers as becoming more conservative as their audience decreases. They are writing tired space operas and tedious technophilic "hard SF," retro science fiction for the graying, fannish core readership, rather than trying to reach out to the rest of the world.

In other words, the same thing ails science fiction in both books and movies/TV: an obsessive audience of aging fans, who prefer lovingly described toys and rehashed science fantasy plots to anything new. The solution isn't a different medium, but a bigger and/or smarter audience. Image by Annahiltunen.

Written Science Fiction [Balancing Frogs]
Reflections on science fiction, writing and the publishing business [Twin Cities Daily Planet]