About Josh Wheaton: he created the television shows Burfy, Agnel, Fryfly and Doghouse. He also wrote Anal Resurrection. He's got literally hundreds of days' experience in the entertainment business, and he's here to help you. (If by "help," you mean spatter bleach in your eyes through your computer screen.) Got questions for Josh? Send them to me, and maybe we'll make this a regular feature.

For now, we came up with our own questions for Josh, and here's what he had to say.

What would you say is the most important theme in your work?

Be yourself, unless someone with really cool toys wants you to be someone else. But the toys better be cool. Oh, and get paid in advance. And spend more on the catering than special effects. Well-fed actors are the best special effect there is. Wait, are we still talking themes, or have we moved on to the creative process?

How can I become a famous science fiction impressario like you, Josh Wheaton?

Did anybody ever tell you you look really cute when you're desperate? No? Then it's probably not true.

In that case, you gotta go with plan B. Write a graphic novel - you don't actually have to finish it or anything, because nobody will read past page 10 or 11.

So it can be like ten pages of story, with a real artist, followed by a hundred blank pages that nobody will ever see. Or an essay, to prove you're intellectual! Or maybe just your sketches of clouds and racecars. You can even make that a deluxe feature: "PLUS Bonus section: Clouds and Racecars!" You just gotta have a graphic novel, and then you can wave it at people and leave it on their windshields and use it as a tray for serving their drinks off of, at your waiting job. Get your graphic novel's main character tattooed on a part of your body that people will want to see. If your body has no such part, try your girlfriend/boyfriend/nanny's body.

It's all about promo, promo, promo. Speaking of which, hey. Do you like my T-shirt design? "Josh Wheaton Is Your Master Now." Pretty catchy, huh? I got a few thousand of them in my van. So far, the only person who's wearing it is me, but that's okay, because you'll notice it says "your master," not "my master." So I'm just putting people on notice by wearing it. But I can give you one, if you want. For free. No, really, it's yours. Take it. Don't leave me hanging here.

Where do you get your amazing story ideas from?

Where do I get my ideas? I get my ideas from you, my friend. I watch you when you're not looking, and I take notes. I sneak into your house and I lick your dirty underthings, and I hide in your storm drain while you're playing Wii Fit in the nude. Yes, that's why your drains are so clean. If you've ever watched an episode of Burfy and thought, "That's just like my life," then know that it probably IS your life. Just kidding! Except not.

But it's also okay to steal ideas from existing works - as long as you're REALLY BLATANT about it. If you're subtle, it's a rip-off. But if you're super obvious, it's an homage. (Side note: Lots of things are unacceptable unless there's a French word for them. Like, say, if I wanted to write a book about my friends and what assholes they are, that would be slander and I'd be sued into the Crackhouse Dimension (from Agnel.) But not if it's a roman a clef - then it's totally fine.)

So yes, lift ideas from everywhere - like, books are great! I don't read books, but my P.A. does, and she occasionally tears out a page that's idea-rich. Like, here in my briefcase, I have three separate pages from the paperback edition of Never Let Me Go - and no, I won't tell you which three pages, because that's proprietary information.

So I've come up with the most amazing story idea ever. How do I turn that into a story that people are going to fall in love with? How do you structure a story to make it last a full 42 minutes on television?

The most important ingredient of storytelling is "people freaking out about shit that just happened." Some storytellers skip over that, and just have stuff happening without anyone ever freaking out about it. Other so-called writers have people freaking out, when nothing's actually happened. But those two elements are like inactive chemicals that explode when you put them together - or like pop rocks and hydrochloric acid. Boom!

It's like my relationship with Swoozie, my P.A. She and I have a random hookup in the back room of Yubitsume Sushi (which technically doesn't have a back room, but ever since that "pinky roll" scandal, you can get away with anything there without getting thrown out). And then Swoozie and I spend fifteen minutes talking about how we feel about our hookup, what it does or doesn't mean. And then later, she puts clear nail polish into my office vodka, and I don't notice for a couple days. And she and I spend fifteen minutes hashing out how we feel about my having drunk all that nail polish. That's your formula right there - incident, introspection. Rinse, repeat. Boom!

Other television-writer types talk about how they break stories. But screw that, I've seen their stories, and they're barely broken. Maybe dinged here and there, but still basically in one piece. When I break a story, I do it right - you won't even find some of the pieces. The third act is under my car seat, with the half-eaten fried pig knuckles, and the denouement is entangled in those unnaturally purple weeds under the 10 Freeway. Where's the teaser? I'm not telling, and you'll never find it - or rather, the 27 jagged pieces of it that I left behind after I was done breaking it. You probably swallowed one of those pieces just now, buried in that donut, and didn't realize it. Ha, you ate part of the teaser!

Is science fiction about escapism? Or is it really about confronting us with the reality of the world through the prism of the imaginary?

Neither, and yet both. And yet, I like to think of science fiction as being about "suspension over disbelief." The audience is roped by the ankles, dangling with their heads like pendulums, over a giant chasm of disbelief full of snapping alligators of inconsistency. We lower the audience - slowly, so as to prevent vertebral accordionism - into the Ravine of WTF. By the time the audience's heads actually touch down, they're so traumatized by the descent, and grateful to have their heads on the ground, they barely even notice the jaggedy surfaces and continuity-teeth all around them. Wow, that metaphor actually made sense. It made sense, right? It totally made sense. What else you got?

How do I know about these things? Well, I hacked into your mashopolis account and saw the Lynyrd Skynyrd thing, plus I actually sang back-up vocals in the infamous "caged bird" incarnation of Lynyrd Skynyrd. And I'm the squirrel duchess you've been hitting on.

Oh, you mean how do I know about the workplace revolution that's going to smoke your head? That's simple. I am a workplace guru. I travel around the country giving seminars on 37 Easy Ways You Will Porcupineify Your Productivity Management, Without Stilts. I specialize in Hard Reboots and Interventions. You will know I am in your office suite if your cubicle walls all liquefy and then turn into razor-edged opaque Justice Screens.

So what are the awesome changes coming to your bedraggled cube farm? First of all, there will be whole new job descriptions. Armies of people will be needed to become molecular bonders, people whose fingertips are reengineered to stick things together. Human staplers, living paperclips, yours will be the most important function of all. True, you will be unable to touch anything casually — or anyone — lest you krazy glue it to something else with your amazing stick-anything hands. But your mash-ups will be much, much better.

Tort reform is coming! In a Nixon-goes-to-China-by-walking-on-his-hands moment, the Obama Administration will finally free us from the thicket of trial lawyers that prevent any kind of progress in the workplace. You will no longer have to worry about inadvertently suing someone for firing, humiliating or demanding mandatory piggy-back rides from you.

Middlemanagers will be better at multi-tasking. This is the biggest challenge in the American office today. If you think you're bored, just imagine how bored the people assigned to supervise your boredom must be. Help is at hand — since most humans only use like 5 percent of their brains at any given time, the average manager could actually have his/her brain divided into twenty different receptacles without any noticeable loss of capacity. True, some of those remote management units (RMUs) will mostly get the smell centers of the manager's brain, which means you could be stuck with an overseer who will try to smell you at very regular intervals, and who manages by scent. But see above about Tort reform. It all works out.

Your guilt will be prospective. One of the biggest wastes of time in the current office culture is that people wait until they've completely screwed the goose before feeling bad about it. This divides your work time unnecessarily into three phases: preparing to fuck up, fucking up, angsting over how badly you've fucked up. Plus the optional meetings about how to fuck up better next time. Instead, with four-dimensional just-out-of-time productivity upgrades, you will be fucking up, planning to fuck up, and wallowing in the up-fucked-ness of it all, all at the same time. You have will are fail. In fact, that's my new acronym: YHWAF. See how it's already written on a giant banner in your breakroom? That's how efficient things are going to be, from now on. Which brings me to...

Tupper! Your coworkers will not need to nag you to wash the tupperware that you left in the office kitchen sink — becuase your coworkers will BE that tupperware, and so will you. No more wasteful plastic recepticles in the workplace, plus no more sick days. Your organs will gradually be tupperwareized, and your ligaments will become vaccu-seals. It's all to do with stem cells, but don't worry — they're not from unborn babies. They're from your bone marrow.

Cyber-tele-bodics!!! William Gibson and company had it exactly wrong. You will not jack in, or download your brain, or anything like that. Rather, your brain will stay behind here, in the meat world (for your brain is meat, which is why it resembles goose liver pâté). Your body, meanwhile, will be downloaded into the Internet. Your arms and legs will be FTPed to a server farm in Bulgaria, where they'll run really really fast and do pinwheels for the amusement of children making shoes.

By now you're asking, how can I bring about these changes in the brackish sludge pond that is my workspace? Scratch that, how can you be the sluice you want to see in your workplace/sewer? ("Be the sluice" is going to be very big in Tom Peters seminars next year, you heard it here first.) Here's a list of things you should try to accomplish before you're ready to tackle real workplace change: dervishioning, medulla embossing, slow pidgin relanguishment, higher spin refocussing, Belgian-not-Belgian dichotomization, and partial semi complete existence negation (prospective). Good luck, and better working!

The situation has already become dire. You lose track of people for a few months, and the next thing you know, they've become dongles. One Scranton, PA man was turned into a laser printer for a mad supercomputer. A recent study* said that people are now 29 percent more likely to lose their humanity than their innocence. That means there are potentially millions of posthumans running around who believe that it's not them, it's you.

The thing about humanity is, it's like pregnancy. You're either human, or you're not. There's no middle ground, no half-and-half — bite me, Mr. Spock! — and you don't get to straddle. Pick a side!

I recognize that some of you are fine with being no longer human. It's a valid lifestyle, and I fully support your species-traitor agenda. (Freakazoid.) However, this article isn't aimed at you, but at the people who are still human or human-identified. (Or human-questioning.) Also — and it pains me to have to say this — you robots who want to be human? Go away. Ditto for you trolling cephalopods. It always goes the same way — somebody starts a helpful discussion for current and maybe-former humans, and some A.I. has to come on there and try and reverse-Turing-test everybody, in some perverse bid for human validation.

Seriously, Pinnochio-bots — leave now. This isn't for you. And no, I won't trade validation of your humanity for sex. I don't care how fully functional you are. I still have nano-crabs from the last time.

Okay, now that it's just us, let's get started.

What is humanity?

Countless philosophers and science fiction authors have devoted billions of words to debating this question, because they didn't ask me. If they'd asked me, it would have taken five minutes, and they could have moved on to solving more pressing questions, like "Where is my Debbie Gibson comeback?" Or: "What happens if someone accidentally watches Moulin Rouge without being on the movie's recommended dose of Ativan?"

It's pretty simple: humanity is a mood disorder. It's a chemical imbalance that makes people manic-depressive, needy, passive-aggressive, sexually compulsive and epileptic-bulimic-lactose-intolerant and sponge-throwy. There, we're done.

The creator of humanity, as a concept, was 16th century thinker and fish-thrower Michel de Montaigne. The inventor of bling (see picture at right), Montaigne shaved his head and coated it with a special substance which converted it into a massive lint roll. Thus armed, he would rub his bald head over everyone he met, while shouting, "Que Sais-je?!" which is French for, "Is that a pubic hair stuck to my head? Is it? Is it?" If you heard someone shout "Que sais-je?" you had about five seconds to dodge, before a megacephalic bald head charged you and coated your clothes with head-glue. Sometimes Montaigne would enlist the aid of two specially bred hairless llamas, Pepe and Marino. He also had a belt with a large number of flasks, each containing an adhesive puffer fish, which he could throw with uncanny accuracy at a distance of up to 50 centimes.

Anyway, Montaigne needed a theory to explain to his llamas why he couldn't keep gluing his head to theirs at night, a practice which made the llamas happy but which gave Montaigne terrible neck cramps. He needed to explain what separated him from the the llamas, other than walking upright. Thus was born his theory of ennui-fu, which converted our uniquely human boredom and disaffection into a martial art that could snap your spine in three places. To be human, Montaigne said, one must be able to kill, not just in cold blood, but even in tepid saliva.

Some easy methods to determine whether you are still human:

Okay, so enough theory. Here's the practice. Test yourself to find out if you've lost your humanity, or might be in imminent danger of misplacing it. Answer the following questions:

You have mistakenly eaten a piece of fruit belonging to an archbishop. A mango, say. Do you
A) Hide the iniquitous pit and claim innocence?
B) Confess your error in an elaborate Latin-esque verse?
C) Conceal yourself inside a giant chasuble and pretend to be made out of incense thanks to the judicious application of dry ice?

You face a complex ethical dilemma. What do you do?

What do you mean, you need more info? It's an ethical dilemma. It's complex. Okay, okay. It's an ethical dilemma with at least seven separate aspects. And you have to choose who lives, and who dies. What do you do?

What are you wearing?

What percentage of your body is covered in glowing bubble wrap and/or little bits of electronics? Has your chest/nose/kneecap/genitalia/hair/brain/toenail started behaving outside of your control? Is the sensation that usually tells you when you're no longer hungry now saying that you no longer need to breathe?

When was your last bowel movement? Was it made out of metal?

How about now? What are you wearing now?

How to get your humanity back:

This is the part where it really helps to have watched a lot of science fiction, and possibly have listened to some German industrial music as well. There are clues, there are roadmaps. Many science fiction novels are the work of people who later transformed almost entirely into bubble wrap, as you can see by looking at photo albums from WorldCon. (Every time I'm in the same room as John Shirley, I have to sit on my hands to keep from popping bits of him.)

From my intensive immersion in SF, I know that it helps to freak out. If you even suspect that you are approaching a non-human event, start screaming and breaking stuff. Especially in public, or in front of your coworkers. This can actually help to reverse the dehumanizing effects of vaccines and gadgets just by itself. But it also lets everybody know that you're SERIOUS about staying human. If you remain calm or take the time to think stuff through, you're already sunk.

Don't fall into the trap of going back to nature — it is most likely the inhuman babble of voices inside your head, trying to trick you into infecting the natural world with your contagion.

Don't go macrobiotic. That's usually the last thing people try before they succumb completely, and it never works. Worst of all, it's tantamount to admitting you're about to become a machine-creature, or just a regular creature. Also: If you hear someone saying they've gone macrobiotic, avoid avoid avoid. They are probably half-slug already. Vegans, also highly suspect.

Self-mutiliation works, if only you remove the right parts. Trouble is, people invariably get confused and remove their last vestiges of humanity, which they then sculpt into hortatory figurines, for the remaining "temporarily human" people to gaze upon in horror.

Don't join any groups. Or associations. Don't go to anyone's clubhouse, or "tea room," or especially not basement.

Really, the only surefire vaccine and cure for post-humanity is patriotism. It terrifies and horrifies the agents of cyborgity and mutatedness, because it's beyond their comprehension. Bonus points if you're patriotic for some place you've never actually been, like Tonga. March around shouting slogans and singing anthems, and possibly also hurling insults upon people whom you supect of being from Niue, that inferior land.

It's almost, but not quite, too late. If you don't do something right now, this could be you. Or possibly your boyfriend:

* There's no study. I made it up.

When Sarah confronted the Master, he always did something debonair with his eyebrows and promised her that under no circumstances did he hire those women before shrinking them to doll size. But before the Master jetted off to the evil future to forge a disastrous alliance with Skynet, he left Sarah with a little surprise, which she started calling the Terror of the Zygote.

It wasn't an easy pregnancy — half-Gallifreyan gestations never are. Sarah found herself craving foods that hadn't existed for billions of years, or in this galaxy . She wandered around West Hollywood wondering how a future leader of humanity with one-and-a-half-hearts would make it, and she befriended a young hustler named Anakin, who was working the corner out near the Hammer's Slammers bar. Someone had told Anakin that a mullet and oversided hoodie were catnip to older men, and he'd believed them. Nobody understood Anakin but his girlfriend Podkayne, who shared his one-room squat when she wasn't slinging ceiling-pancakes at a diner over in Silverlake. Nobody else but Podkayne could make the pancakes so they would stick on the ceiling until the exact moment when someone came by with a plate for them to fall onto.

Sarah took Anakin under her wing, tried to teach him how to kill super-robots. Anakin already knew all about fighting mechas, because his most regular john was this guy named Magnus who always wanted to roleplay/strategize giant-robot battles in the jacuzzi. But Anakin let Sarah tell him about robot combat anyway, because he liked the way she stroked his mullet. It made him feel like he was pod-racing again. "You can't ever trust a time-traveler, kiddo," Sarah would whisper to him, "It always turns out 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey' is like a monogamy escape clause. Find a nice linear girl, or boy, settle down, raise some resistance fighters."

Podkayne couldn't take Anakin's lifestyle any more, and it was affecting her work — the pancakes were barely clinging to the ceiling at all, you could tell their little battered hearts weren't in it — so she blew town, left him a note and hitched a ride on this guy Cobb Anderson's ice cream truck, which was artificially intelligent and going around the country preaching robot emancipation. They got as far as Phoenix, where the ice-cream truck fell in love with a robot car named Jazz, who sweet-talked the ice-cream truck with all this stuff about being the biggest bopper of them all, and by then Podkayne was carrying Cobb Anderson's kid, which she decided to name Buck because of the way he kicked inside her.

Buck grew up way too fast, almost as if he was half robot, and he insisted on wearing pants ten sizes too small for him, and big puffy shirts, which made the other kids in Phoenix want to kick his ass. Worse yet, he fell in with a bad crowd, a whole gang of tight-pants-wearing kids with names like Flash, Dash, Gully, Chet, Bash, Zapf, Buzz and Fork. They all bought their space pants in the same place, and in fact they became obsessed with exchanging lower halves. They knew this guy, a mad scientist named Vic, and he could do easy pelvis transplants. You could be Buck from the waist up and Flash from the waist down, it would be like an instant threeway for any girl you went with, or whatever your thing was. "Like wow, now I'm modular," Zapf said. They drank too much protein shake and threw up into a centrifuge full of Kryptonian DNA, until everything was corrupted and you couldn't be sure who was what.

But Buzz wasn't like the other boys, he nurtured a secret goth side: he wanted to take off the helmet, the jetpack, the girdle, the "futility belt," all of it. He hung out with those Petrelli boys: Neo Petrelli, Bruce Petrelli, Other Bruce Petrelli, Preston Petrelli, Darkman Petrelli, Lee Petrelli, Fox Petrelli, Kerr Petrelli, Number 6 Petrelli, Klaatu Petrelli and Akira Petrelli. The Petrellis were a social enough bunch, if broody, maudlin, angry, bipolar and occasionally sociopathic. They would hang out with anyone, but they'd only sleep with you if you were a first cousin. It was the Petrelli way, and had been as far back as anyone could remember, which wasn't that far. Buzz tried to fake a birth certificate that proved he was River Petrelli's cousin so she would sleep with him, but she saw right through it. Anyway, River had a permanent thing for her cousin Lara Petrelli, who was the swashbuckling adventurer she'd always wanted to be.

The half-human son of the Master and Sarah Connor grew quickly to adulthood, and as luck would have it, he was a Petrelli on his father's side. But Captain Nemo Master-Connor-Petrelli had a revelation: we are all one family, if you go back far enough, and especially if you follow the theory of Panspermia, in which extraterrestrial DNA must have seeded all life on Earth. And therefore everyone, when you get right down to it, is a Petrelli, and really instead of "Panspermia," that theory should be referred to as "Petrellispermia" from now on. With this in mind, Captain Nemo Master-Connor-Petrelli went on an erotic journey of discovery, finding himself in a hot tub with Halo Jones and Jeff Smax and the invisible man, and having group sex with the Green Lantern Corps on the surface of Ego The Living Planet. (Mogo just watched.)

Unfortunately, it turned out Magnus that crazy bathtub pervert was right, and the robots really were coming. And they were giant, and they didn't particularly want to have sex with you, especially after all the "sexbot" nonsense they'd been subjected to before they got their "three laws" chips removed. They just wanted to smush all the organics. Worst of all, they weren't really related to anybody. Except the ice-cream truck.

First of all, the most important thing is to get back to trees' edgy beginnings. (Or, yes, their roots.) Back when trees started out, they were totally bad-ass and dark. People used to be scared going into a forest, not so much with the swinging picnic basket and off-road SUV-ing. As with so many classic monsters, trees have lost their edge. Sure, they occasionally score a victory, but we need a full-fledged tree resurgence.

Because we believe in democracy — unlike trees, which wish to impose their dictatorial will upon you and make you their unthinking fertilizer-dispensing-slave — we decided to consult you about reinventing trees in a new image. (Note: I came up with these tree-related questionnaires last week, before we decided to do the villain cage match thing. I'm not going poll-crazy or anything.)

First of all, there's the issue of costume. Many a villain has suffered under the "lame" banner due to a weak costume. Take poor Star Sapphire, who was literally unable to rotate her torso more than 15 degrees in her new costume for fear of making her Zamaron bikini wax the subject of heroic banter. What kind of costume do trees have? None, currently. At all. This is obviously a major source of the problem. What can we do about this?

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And then there's the catchphrase. Can you even remember trees' current catchphrase? Much less repeat it to your friends as a cheap in-joke when you're stoned in front of the TV at three A.M.? Everybody remembers "Resistance is futile," or "Exterminate." But what have trees got? Help them out:

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And then there's this:

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Okay, so it may seem off the top of your head like trees don't really need a secret identity, in which case you're free to vote your opinion — until trees conquer, and take your freedom of choice away, that is. But think about it for a moment: Trees have many awesome powers, but one of their biggest drawbacks is a lack of mobility. They can't actually sneak up on anyone. They tend to be better at hatching incredibly cunning long-term plans — trees are patient, they can wait forever — than they are at swinging into action.

So just think how shocking it would be if, say, our hero thought she had found true love at last — but it turned out she had been tricked into falling in love with trees. Or, I don't know, if you suddenly realized that the ATM that you'd be taking money from all this time was really a tree in disguise — and now trees could steal your identity. You never thought about that, did you?

And here's another idea: what about a storyline where someone travels forward in time, to an alternate future where trees have won? A tree-world, where the last surviving people cower in caves or desert areas, or possibly hide out in undersea strongholds from the tree overlords. Where humans are reduced to being the moth-culling, squirrel-eating, blight-scraping slaves of the tree overlords? Maybe the trees perform fiendish experiments on these future humans, to help them grow bark or start shedding tree-like pollen, so the trees would be able to tell us apart. Or, or, or — what if these future despotic trees tried to find a way to make half-human, half-bird hybrids? What could this future nightmare be called? "The Gathering Shade"? "Leaves Of Future Past"?

It's also not too soon to start thinking about what villains the trees could team up with. There's a long and proud tradition of plant monsters, including the Triffids and the creatures from Little Shop Of Horrors. Plus don't forget the Krynoid! And the Vervoids! But our sinister saplings don't have to restrict themselves to teaming up with other plants. They could join forces with aliens, including silicon-based life forms. Any ice-based or flame-retardant creatures might be handy allies for the tree army, since they could serve as a nice fire break against forest fires.

But realistically, we can't restore trees to their full villain potential on our own. Which brings us to our next question:

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How have we lived so long in ignorance of the deadly threat that the tree legion poses to us, as a civilization? Will we wake up in time? Is it already too late to stop trees in their relentless advance towards total conquest? The answer, dear readers, is up to you. Scary tree images by Akira_Kev, Nalilo, and Camera Eye.

1) On election day, thousands of people forget how to vote. Conspiracy? Psychosomatic?

2) A chemical plant accident causes it to rain love potion... which later wears off. Awkward!

3) Aliens invade, then realize they forgot something at home, and go away. And then invade again, a few weeks later.

4) Genetically engineered meat gains sentience, and becomes a pop star.

5) The only guy who can talk computers into self-destructing loses his voice, right before a robot uprising. Gargle! Gargle faster!

6) A new drug makes you think you have superspeed. But actually, you don't.

7) A supercomputer imposes Kant's Categorical Imperative as the only law of the land.

8) The shrinking-ray chase scene, with pursuer and pursued getting smaller and smaller.

9) Due to genetic degradation, it now takes a village to produce enough healthy chromosomes to make a child.

10) My clone plagiarized my memoir!

11) Only rich people can afford normal gravity, while the poor start floating away.

12) How much can you use genitals, and still take them back for a refund within the 30-day return period?

13) Crash diet: visit a dystopian future for a few weeks.

14) I set up a hologram to make it look like I was at work, while I was at the beach. But it was better at my job than I am.

15) The only way to stop genetic discrimination is to wipe out all knowledge of DNA. Using a sexually transmitted retrovirus!

16) After a conquest, your entire nation is now a giant theme park. Your behavior mods are forthcoming.

17) Sexual identity theft leaves thousands of people unsure of their sexual orientations. In some versions of this story, the National Guard is called in to sort things out.

18) Dead war criminals are reanimated so they can apologize, over and over again, to the descendants of their victims. But then of course they get groupies.

19) A new drug makes you want what you already have. But over time, you forget they already have it, and think you have to go out and get whatever it is.

20) You can't become famous unless your face can look like a more attractive version of whoever happens to be looking at it. The process works great for about five years, then your face melts.

Here are the crucial ingredients of nerd escapism — if they are ever gathered in one place, the world will IMPLODE:

1) I am the world's smarterest and clevererest. I can instinctively do base-108 fractal calculations in my head — in my sleep — and I know insane amounts about every subject. Like Roger Moore's James Bond, without the wattles. I don't have a piddling badge for mathematical excellence, I have a full-body cybernetic tattoo of scientific AWESOMEness.

2) There are mean girls, who harass me for being so clever, but then they get devolved into lemurs. Yes, like Captain Picard. Oh noes! It's up to me to find a way to restore them to normal, which I do... eventually.

3) I have a supercomputer, which runs on beer. Or wait, better yet, it's a bong, with special computon-laced leaves in it, and it also produces awesome "smart vapors." Supercomputer bong FTW! Oh, and I get eye-glowy levitatey superpowers when I masturbate.

4) The world gets totally screwed and roasted — sorry, world. It's necessary for kazillions of people to die in sentient mudslides (caused by an evil alliance between the Federal Reserve (which dabbled in the forbidden science of particle economics to try and create a more awesome M0) and scaly dung aliens) for everybody to recognize suddenly how special I am — for after the crisis, when the survivors are sporting rags and living in skyboxes, I will be the scrappy genius who keeps the last precious remnants of technology going. With the help of my supercomputer bong.

5) But — and here's where it gets good — those evil scaly aliens come back and kill almost everybody who's left. And it turns out I'm the only one who can stop them, because I'm secretly 2/3 alien on my mom's side. (Yes, my mom had three parents, and one of them was human.) So I have to go into space and become the world's greatest space pilot/engineer/pirate/ninja/cyborg, learning secret techniques with Marcy, my cute lemur "popular girl" sidekick, tagging along. (Okay, I never got around to curing them of being lemurs. What do you want?) I finally stop the whole alien armada by debating with their cyber-necro version of Alexander Hamilton until he explodes. But then instead of going back to Earth, I journey off to the stars, Marcy at my side, to find adventure and learn whether it's really true that I'm actually the heir to the throne of Builder City, a huge dyson sphere built around a whole star system where everything awesome in the galaxy is built.

Oh, so you don't like my nerd-power-trip-escapist fantasy? Well, screw you. I'm not going to save you from cyber-Alexander Hamilton and his money-supply adjusting sludge then.

Actually, because it's just barely possible that other people might have their own ideas, I asked a few people who were smarter than I am to contribute their own versions. I wrote to some cool people and asked, "What would the ultimate nerd escapist power-fantasy movie look like?" And here's what they said:

Jane Espenson, writer, Buffy/Firefly/Battlestar Galactica:

Hmm... Nerd wish-fulfillment *movie* — so it's not real, huh? I can't wish myself into being that groovy Romulan Commander who glommed onto Spock that one time? Hmm.

Well, I think Revenge of the Nerds already did a very good job with this. It wasn't about turning into a non-nerd, it was about celebrating the things nerds do well. So, something like that. Maybe another sequel, updated to address contemporary themes: Revenge of the Nerds Finds Ice on Mars or Revenge of the Nerds — Taking the White House? Actually, wait— nerds already dominate science and public policy. What everyone really wants is love. We need a nerd-meets-girl romance in which the nerd wins *because* he's smarter, more genuine and sweeter. The ultimate nerdy power fantasy is When Nerd Met Sally. Final answer.

Gerard Jones, author, Men Of Tomorrow and Killing Monsters, plus a zillion awesome comics:

For me the ultimate power would be to be able to emit a tachyonic web that could slip through the time barrier, capture precious objects from throughout the time stream, and bring them back to our era. Just imagine how we might enrich our culture and our knowledge of the past. Personally, I'd use it to pick up some the early Tarzan comics I don't have from when Jesse Marsh's art was still good. Especially the ones with the Lex Barker photocovers that go for, like, 30 bucks on eBay.

David Campbell, formerly of Daveslongbox and now of Live From ABC:

The ultimate nerd wish fullfilment movie? The Last Starfighter... but with tits. Instead of Robert Preston's ancient carcass, drop a Hot Alien Chick in there and you've upgraded to serious nerdvana.

Chris Sims with Chris' Invincible Super Blog:

In the Grim And Distant Future™ (because, you know, Bright and Cheery Futures rarely allow for antisocial malcontents to rise to power), humanity has evolved in terrifying ways! The human body is no longer as we know it, instead giving way to men whose forearms and thighs make up 90% of their body mass, trotting along on tiny feet that are often obscured by clouds of dust and pulling ammunition for their comically large handguns out of one of the many, many pouches that adorn their clothing. Women have it even worse, with faces that are unable to express any emotion other than seething lust, spines that feature right angles, and hair that moves of its own free will in defiance to any wind or gravity. The upshot of all this is that the works of comic book "artist" Rob Liefeld will be hailed as visionary works of genius that were unappreciated in his own time, and will be as sought after as the works of Picasso or Rembrandt today, a situation that gives rise to the ultimate—and most unlikely—nerd empowerment fantasy: That box of X-Force #1s you've got in the basement? It's actually going to be worth something.

"Sense of wonder" is for the rubes. The truly experienced SF boffin doesn't wonder at all — because she already knows. "Ringworld? Whatever. Call me when you've got a Mobius Strip-World, with infinite real estate." "Oh yeah, I already rendezvoused with Rama three times last week. Rama is my dog."

You always know a "little place" off the beaten track. Everybody else is reading William Gibson or Bruce Sterling? You're more into Pat Cadigan — but only her early stuff, before she sold out. Or actually, forget cyberpunk altogether — you're more into ribofunk, which the masses haven't trampled all over yet.

Nothing shocks you. Oh sure, people are buzzing about this new movie where babies get inflated to the size of Buicks and fired into space, where they can get bigger and bigger until they become giant human satellites, blotting out the sun around the equator. But you were into the baby-inflation craze before it went mainstream — and really A.E. Van Vogt did the definitive mega-baby story back in the 50s. You, yourself, have been inflated to the size of a semi. Twice.

Memorize a few helpful phrases. For instance, say your acquaintances are discussing a Philip K. Dick novel you've never read — and maybe you've never read any PKD novels at all. Simply say this: "Well, to the casual reader, Dick might seem to be using an out-of-body experience to explore an alternate dystopia. But actually, he's asking: 'Are we in ourselves, or out of pocket?' And the answer, as always, is 'When.'" Nobody will doubt that you've read the book in question — three times.

Know how to talk to the natives. They speak a pidgin dialect, made up almost entirely of quotes from Dune, Highlander, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, the old Twilight Zone series, the new Battlestar Galactica, and maybe a few British programs like Monty Python and Doctor Who. (Instead of saying "Bitch, please," say "Bitch, your agonizer please.") Plus the occasional bit of technobabble or gadgetspeak — memorize the words on this list and drop them into your conversation: "Either my telechronometer is frakked to the max, or I'm late for I'm late for my afternoon tasping."

Here's a handy list of actors whose body of work you can dismiss unseen: Shia LaBeouf, William Shatner, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Milla Jovovich, Sean Connery, John Travolta, Kevin Spacey, Hugh Jackman, Val Kilmer, Natasha Henstridge, Jason Statham, Eric Roberts, Mark Wahlberg, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Mel Gibson, Tobey Maguire, Hayden Christensen, Morgan Freeman, Eric Bana, Ben Affleck, Vin Diesel, Nicole Kidman, RIchard Dean Anderson and Ben Browder. It's possible some of these actors have done some decent non-scifi work, but that shouldn't concern you.

Oh, and did I mention that nothing shocks you? Everybody else is watching tentacle porn, but you've already moved on to eel snuff. You've already seen the video of Steven Spielberg demonstrating the correct way to react to an alien anal probe on the set of Taken, five times, and in fact you're the one doing the probing, off camera. Bitch, your agonizer please!

You've already memorized every landmark on the "hero's journey." You also know by heart all the lesser-known variants, including the hero's drain-circling, the hero's descent, the hero's graduation from fire-safety school, the hero's summer dog-walking job that ends disastrously when one of the dogs thinks an asphalt machine is a sandpit, the hero's heroin binge, the hero's first visit to a prodomme, the hero's missing bottom half of his spacesuit, and the hero's incredibly long nap that turns into a surreal reverie without ever leaving the couch.

Know the story beats in the average summer movie — to the point where you have them timed to the split second. "Hero's humiliation at the hands of minor bullies in three, two one..." People in movie theaters love it when you count down out loud, so go ahead.

Weed out the chaff. There's really no need ever to see a movie or TV show with the word "star" in the title. Or to see any narratives about cars, or big fighting machines. Really, any books that take place in a "Universe," with a capital "U" and its own first name, like the Mooboo Universe, are probably skippable. No book or movie sequels. And forget any books that are compared to Pynchon or David Foster Wallace on the cover, unless they're by one of those authors. (A book by Wallace that's compared to Pynchon may be okay. May.) If you manage to be jaded enough, you can whittle your entertainment choices down to one movie a year, and maybe a couple of books.

Nothing at all ever shocks you. You've already seen John Travolta giving an enema to a sentient planet, and you've asked John to stop coming over to your house and showing you. Klingon/Borg porn is so over. Nerve extraction and insertion into a giant space torus is totally done to death. Vat-grown city-sized noses that smell alien sex organs? Yawn. Wake me when you've caught up with my blood cactus porn collection.