ESP Goes to the Movies: All of the Reasons Anyone Would Not Want to See Guardians of the Galaxy

So, I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy last weekend... And then I went to see it again two days ago. Why? Because it's awesome. Duh. I thought it was the most wonderful, silly, funny, human, and all around happy movie I've ever seen... I may even have shed a tear or two when that one thing happened...and then, again, when that other thing happened, too. And it was just as great the second time around. Seriously.

Anyway, instead of telling you all of the reasons you should go see Guardians of the Galaxy, here are a few reasons you might not want to. If one or more of the 10 items on this list applies to you, you probably shouldn't go see Guardians. If not, you probably should've already seen Guardians. What's wrong with you? Anyway, moving on (no spoilers. Promise)...

Go see the movie. When you come back, you'll get why this is hilarious.

1. You have a rare disorder, and your doctor has told you that laughter is not, as was originally thought, the best medicine, but that it will, in fact, kill you. Even a chuckle.

2. Your parents were killed by raccoons. When you were 7. In front of you.

3. You break out in hives when you see Benicio Del Toro (but, really, he's not in that much of the movie, so you should probably suck it up and be itchy for a little while).

4. You hate fun.

5. Pretty green ladies stole your lunch money and gave you wedgies when you were in elementary school.

6. Talking trees give you panic attacks.

7. Fun '70s and '80s dance tunes remind you of your dead parents. The ones that the raccoons killed. In front of you. (That really sucks. I'm sorry.)

8. Chris Pratt continuing to be adorably goofy, despite his rock-hard abs and newly chiseled jawline, gives you rage issues. (Chill, dude. Your girlfriend is not leaving you for Andy Dwyer. I mean, she might, but April would shiv her with a spork, so... It's gonna be okay.)

9. You can't help but scream, "THE FRESH MAKER!" every time someone says the name Thanos. (Weirdo.)

10. I lied, I can't think of a 10th reason not to see this film. So, if you haven't been scarred for life by raccoons, pretty green ladies, talking trees, the idea of a buff Andy Dwyer, or your inability to laugh... Why haven't you already seen this movie?

Sci-Fi Character Grudge Match: Sarah Connor v. Tank Girl

“Two man enter – one man leave!” It’s time to get some Bartertown action up in this piece. In our Sci-Fi Character Grudge Match series, each episode we’ll pit two well-loved (or hated) characters against each other, run you through what we think the fight would look like, and how we think it would go. If you disagree, let us know. If you love it, don’t hesitate (we love applause). If you have two characters you’d like to see go at it, bring it on!

So, for Episode 1: First Grudge, we’ve brought you two ladies you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley…

Our Editor Wants to be an Action Hero

This is the first column in a series that ESP is doing in collaboration with House of Tactical's Feminine FirePower(tm) brand. We'll be following our editor-in-chief as she maneuvers through competing in defensive pistol matches and maybe even shooting some big guns, too. Check it...

Let’s start this thing off right, shall we? I’m Amelia. I’m a writer and editor. I deal in fiction, ad copy, and hilarious tweets and Facebook posts. I’m also a pretty big fan of the right to keep and arm bears… I mean, wait, crap… Anyway, I like guns and amendments and stuff, but I’m actually a very new shooter.

...which should be pretty obvious by this grip. This has been fixed. Don't hold your gun like this, y'all.

When Someone Told Our Editor that Science Fiction Was Dead...

A little less than a year ago, I went on a first (and only) date with a guy we’ll call Mr. Downer*. Mr. Downer met me for drinks at a bar near my apartment. After initial pleasantries and a drink order, he asked me to tell him a bit about ESP. I told him that we’re a new kind of science fiction publishing company and begin to tell him a bit about one of our projects.

Before I could get through just a few sentences about giant killer robots and forecasting themes in society, he stopped me with a wave of his hand. Mr. Downer had heard enough to know that my business was going to fail. Why? Well, it wasn’t for bad business practices, and it wasn’t because there’s no space at all in the industry for a new publishing company.

 

This pic is here because I just made my boyfriend watch Barbarella for the first time, and now he cringes whenever it's my turn to choose a movie...

Scribe Reviews: RIDDICK [spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers]

“There are bad days, and then there are legendary bad days. Today was shaping up into one of those.”

Yep.

The third installment in the RIDDICK franchise (let’s face it; this isn’t a trilogy)

opens on a pretty familiar scene: A sun-scorched planet, a beat-to-hell Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel, as if I needed to tell you), and instant death under every rock in the desert.

When the Cardboard Guys Shoot Back: A Twist on IDPA with Amelia

If you don't already know what IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) is, here's the brief... You go into a course that simulates a self-defense scenario. In the course, you'll find cardboard figures. Some are threats and some are not. Shoot the threats, not the non-threats, and you get a better score. Don't shoot anybody, and/or shoot the non-threats, and you get a worse score. Simple enough...  Well, our friends at the GA Firing Line have come up with a fun twist on the competition. What if -- as in a real self-defense scenario -- the threats actually shot back at you? (In this case, everyone was using Airsoft guns, not the real deal. No actual dead bodies allowed on the range.)

Last night, in the first round of (I hope) a whole series of these force-on-force courses, the good folks at the range set up two stages: one fairly straight-forward and "winnable", the other not so much. We'll get to that in just a moment...

So, let's set the stage. Some of the guys and gals at the range dressed up in padding, protective masks, and cardboard targets. They all had weapons (one particular AR-15 airsoft replica put a lot of welts on a lot of competitors, myself included), but some of them would only hold their hands up -- non-threats -- while others would start shooting at you the minute they saw you...

See those guys in the box-robot costumes? Those targets aren't usually so...mobile. Or...armed.

Spelly Goes to the Movies: THE WORLD'S END

Would you keep drinking to the end of the world?

Well, would you? Do you have what it takes, kid?

The final film in Edgar Wright's end-of-the-world trilogy, THE WORLD'S END pulls together so much of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ; it’s not even funny… Wait, no. What’s the opposite of that? Oh yes, it’s REALLY funny.

How do I put this without spoilers? Well, let’s see…

Simon Pegg plays Gary King, the former leader of a youthful crew of punkass rebels who, 20 years ago, attempted a 12-tavern pub crawl. To hear him tell the tale, it was the best night of all their lives. Half true. It was the best night of Gary The King’s life. The first we see of Gary, he’s telling the epic tale…in a meeting in rehab.

Cut to Gary convincing his four former compatriots – Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine), Peter (Eddie Marsan), and Andy (Nick Frost) -- to go for it one more time, to go hometo Newton Haven, to make it happen. As he makes the rounds, though, we find they’ve all grown up. They all have jobs, wives, maybe ex-wives…

Through his schmoozing and truth manipulation, as you might have guessed, Gary convinces all four of them to meet him to re-attempt The Golden Mile – making it to The World’s End pub…. They meet at 3:00 sharp at the station, and, of course, Gary is almost an hour late, but he has an excuse. Because Gary’s never wrong.

That’s about as far as I can go with the plot without spoilers, so I’ll say this before the break (where you will most definitely get some SPOILERS AHEAD), but I will say this before then… It was a real pleasure to see Simon Pegg play the delusional, gung ho (misled) dreamer and to watch Nick Frost as the unwilling badass. This really is Frost’s moment to shine.

Now, on to the SPOILERS…

Spelly Goes to the Movies: KICKASS 2

Last night, I took a trip down the street on my little red wonder bike, to see the premier of the much-anticipated KICKASS 2… 

I was pretty stoked about it, though I admittedly haven’t read Mark Millar's graphic novels yet (I know, I know. Bad geek girl! What can I say? I’ve been working). I was even a little bit nervous that I was only five minutes early when I got to the box office. Was I too late to get a ticket?... Nope. No problem. Then I got into the theater...

Now, Thursday nights aren’t exactly hoppin’ in theaters in Atlanta, but I kind of expected SOME turn out for opening night…

I rubbed my butt in every one of those seats.

Instead, I got the whole place to myself. So I sat my butt down, took a sip of my Diet Coke, and waited on the previews…

And, surprise number two of the night...There were no previews! The lights dimmed. The “Buy some snacks and get off your phones!” video played, and we went straight into the flick. Among the many joys of going to one of the few independent movie theaters left in the world, skipping the commercials and going straight into the main course is one.

Okay, before I get into this, go watch the film. Seriously. I was gonna try to avoid spoilers, but… No. Go watch the film. I know I did this to you with PACIFIC RIM, but, well, this ain’t GI JOE.

I will tell you this. This film doesn’t pull punches. It's bigger, bloodier, and all around more...well...Kickass than the original. Prepare to see characters you care about get their asses handed to them. Prepare to see them die. No one is safe. Oh, and it’s got a lot of Girl Punch. If you’re a geek girl with a good relationship with your dad, you may find yourself tearing up at a few points. I'm not too proud to admit, I did.

Okay, so now that I’ve gotten through that, go watch the film, come back, and we’ll talk. SPOILERS AHEAD!! You have been warned.

Fresh Off the (Digital) Presses!

For less than the price of a Big Mac, ESP's done it again! Spelly's short story "Any Company" is available now for $0.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Grab a copy now. Let us know what you think!

Spelly's Official Post-DEFCON Post! (told mostly in pictures because awesome)

So that whole liveblog idea got kinda, well, messy. I guess there are reasons people liveblog political debates and not raging four-day parties in Las Vegas... Oops. Lesson: learned.

ANYway, I can't tell you everything that Tasky or Cloudy did for most of their DEFCON21 experience, but I can catch you up on all the trouble I got into. Shall we begin? I think we shall...

That's one big ole sticker, I tell ya...

DEFCON21 (semi)Live Blog

(Warning! This is all Spelly's work, and she's kinda busy drinking, networking, and getting lost in Vegas. She'll try to keep this post as updated as possible. For up to the minute pics, check our Facebook and Twitter. But here goes...

Oh, and DISCLAIMER: I don't promise any of it'll be pretty till I get off my tablet and onto my laptop, but that's about half the fun, now isn't it?)


DEFCON21 Liveblog

Cloudy Scribe Went All Delphi On Us

Not too long ago in the greater scheme of things, we wrote a little story for DefCon21. You can find it here.

[TL;DR -- Set in 2034,"In Too Deep" follows Georgia Tech student Anthony Frederickson (who'd really rather you call him 3-d33p) on an ill-fated trip to DefCon42, the world's most (in)famous hacker convention... No spoilers, but a few months before heading out to Las Vegas, Anthony discovers that his nifty new blazer not only changes colors and images in time with music and its environment, but it can also activate an 0day hack, just by being in the room with a camera...]

All three of us worked on "In Too Deep," but -- as with so many of our stories -- this really is Cloudy's baby. And it's a pretty cool idea, right? He comes up with a lot of those, and we do a lot to turn them into stories y'all wanna read... Well, it turns out Cloudy's not just prolific, he's prescient, too! Check out this article about a (now-fixed) flaw in Google Glass. When Tasky saw it, he said, "Wow, dude. You're like the Oracle of Delphi... Except, not sexy." Haters gonna hate.

But, seriously, y'all. Check this out:

Google glass' camera scans all photos it takes for QR codes so that it can make Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections to a phone for internet access. So...

"Whenever the Glass software detects a QR code, it decodes it to see if it names a Wi-Fi network to connect to. It will do this even if the code does not occupy the whole of the frame - so a hacker could get a Glass owner to hack their own device just by standing near a printout of special QR code.

'We created a QR code that told Glass to connect to a Wi-Fi network of my choosing and started sending data to that,' Marc Rogers, principal security analyst at Lookout, told the Guardian. 'We could become the middleman, and if we needed to strip out the encryption on the connection. Then we could see the pictures or video that it's uploading. We could also direct it to a site on the web which exploits a known vulnerability in Android 4.0.4' - used by Glass - 'which hacked Glass at it browsed the page.'"

Sound familiar? Sound like something a particular Scribe might have come up with? Let's get down to brass tacks:

"Both the vulnerablity, and the way it was delivered, are unique to Glass - a consequence of it being connected," Rogers said. "I don't think anyone's hacked a device with an image before."

At least no one had done it in real life. Just another reason you might wanna keep an eye on us. ESP: Fiction or Premonition?

Spelly Goes to the Movies: PACIFIC RIM

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Guillermo Del Toro said,

"If you see my movies, I celebrate imperfection. I celebrate us being incomplete. I celebrate the fact that if we want to be complete, we need each other. In every movie I make, that is the prevalent message; the message that fragility is good, imperfection is good. And I think that you learn very little from perfection in life, and you learn so much from imperfection. And monsters are the patron saints of imperfection."

Thirty seconds after watching Pacific Rim, Spelly Scribe* said (out loud, to no one in particular), "That was EXACTLY what I needed it to be. Perfect!"

If you haven't seen it yet, go. You owe it to yourself. Del Toro considers this film his baby. In the same Vanity Fair interview, he says it's a very young film. At 48, he wrote it for himself at 12 years old. He wrote it for young boys and girls, to give them role models who do great things together. That theme of incompletion and imperfection? It’s everywhere, and it’s absolutely beautiful.

Rollin' Out that Fiction!

A dead body blocks entrance or exit to an apartment building. Sailors eat bruised apples and smoke cigarettes as their ship sinks. A young man tries to hitchhike to see his dying father. A young girl finds that she needs to cut something off any time she gets stuck.

What do they have in common? In this collection of short vignettes, Electric Sheep Press' Amelia Shackelford (Spelly Scribe) explores a variety of troublesome situations, how to get out of them, and what happens when you just can't.


Exit Wounds is available on Amazon Kindle for just $0.99. Something to hold you over till we release the next chapters of oSWAT and Fighting Fire! Check it out. Let us know what you think!

Fighting Fire: Fuel is free for the next two days

http://amzn.to/11YkLtb

Days after moving from Texas to California, fifteen year-old Alex Parker's family is killed in a botched police raid. Days later, officers involved with the raid start dying in freak accidents. Alex was kicked out of three different schools in Texas for alleged hacking. Could she be behind the killings?
FUEL, the first installment of FIGHTING FIRE sets the stage.

Good people make bad decisions, and we all know what paves the road to hell.

Defcon Short Story Contest

We entererd the Defcon Short Story Contest. Our story is called In too Deep and can be found here. If you like it vote for us in the peoples choice poll!

Thanks!

TopFic: 3D Printers is out!

TopFic:3D printers is a short read about the fictional issue of using 3D printers to make weapons! It is available on Amazon now as a Kindle download.

TopFic: 3D Printers

#3 - Remedies for the Supernaturally Afflicted: Evicting the Blob and Dating a Succubus

We have a very special edition of “Remedies for the Supernaturally Afflicted” for you today! While we only have two questions for you, we feel that they’ll more than suffice. Both questions hail from our own favorite city of Atlanta, Georgia (whatcanwedoforya?), and both have, let’s just say, some... legal ambiguities...

1. I have a big problem. And i mean BIG. My house has been taken over by what i can only describe as a "The Blob." 

So, I just moved into my first house, everything was going great until i got all moved in and finally got a chance to use the shower. I saw something work its way out of the drain, then it popped the screen and a reddish, gooey tentacle came out and made straight for my foot. 

So I make it out of the shower and the thing* kind of went back in the drain.  I went underneath the house and he was all up in the crawl space, I barely made it out of there too.  i found out later that before i bought the place, nobody was in there for over a year. So, i'm thinking he's just like a squatter, except he's a The Blob, so then i call the cops. 

Well, the cops tell me they really can't do anything if he's not being violent at the moment -it's not like they can taser the dude and drag him out in cuffs - so he's got to be legally evicted. First, i'm thinking: why are they treating him like a regular squatter, right? So the next day i call my agent, which leads to the lawyer telling me to go downtown and get everything documented…and it turns out that in the time the house was empty, The Blob moved in and he paid the fucking property tax for 2012! there's a check for $1,900 signed "The Blob" in county fucking records!

So I'm begging you guys, please help me. there's no way this guy gets "squatters rights" and there's no way i'm giving up my house, but I'm not staying there for fear that he absorbs me at night or something.

Sincerely,

Sleepless in Atlanta

"Come at me, Bro!"

Another Taste...

A little while ago, we gave you a taste of things to come, the first chapter in ESP's flagship novel oSWAT... We threw a lot at you in just a few pages' worth of material... With scenarios like a baffling brush war in South America and a monstrous killing machine, powered by the mind of a child, you probably came away with more questions than answers.

But have no fear! You're gonna come away from the next chapter with even more questions! And whaddaya know? The second taste's free, too. We are some seriously benevolent pushers.

2. SPIN, RITA, SPIN

Ten years later...

“Are you ready for them, Ms. Arrington?” he asks me, a wry smile creeping up the right side of his face.

“Mr. Bennett-Dyson, after that speech, I feel like you’ve handed me the Keys to Press City,” I laugh. The CEO of The Shining Corporation is a tall man with thick gray hair, a winning smile, and a smooth tongue. At least, that’s how he’s always appeared to me in our SoReal meetings. I assume reality is pretty close to projection. You don’t get to be the head of the world’s largest, most profitable corporation hiding behind a mask  and blundering over words.

“I should hope so!” He pats me on the shoulder and joins his security detail. He could just fade out, as most people do when leaving a SoReal session, but Asher Bennett-Dyson prefers to make an exit. I think “fading out” in any sense of the phrase is probably against his religion.

More coming soon! Chapter 1 is already available on Amazon at oSWAT: The Games Children Play

#2 - Remedies for the Supernaturally Afflicted: The Superhero Edition

We’ve noticed a trend in the questions coming across our supernatural law expert’s desk in the past few weeks. We’ve seen a great decline in issues with zombies, virtually no vampires or werewolves. We did get one very interesting question about the Blob, but we’ve gotten so many questions concerning issues with superheroes that we’ve decided to dedicate an entire issue of Remedies for the Supernaturally Afflicted to these issues. Maybe it has something to do with the impending release of Iron Man 3. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. We may never know, but what we do know is demand. And we’re more than happy to supply...

1. A superhero in a gold and red suit (I can’t say for sure, but I think it was [NAME REDACTED]) got into a fight with a self-proclaimed super villain. The “hero” threw my car at the “villain.” While that stopped the fight, I am now stuck riding the bus to work…

On Foot in New York

It's this guy, isn't it? You may not have a case...