Heights of Velahood or creative recreation. Make your call. But I honestly came to appreciate the cool of a Vampire as opposed to the skin ripping passion of a Werewolf. Look at it my way, a Vampire loves his job. Every being it bites into is a finger-licking treat. A Werewolf on the other hand, lives in constant dread of what he is. He turns into a power far superior to any that most mortals would ever have and is too taken by it to actually feel it.

Now there’s something that makes sense. I was beginning to wonder if it was only the Japanese that even had a modicum of appreciation for a moral machine’s potential. American Sci-Fi is always so “machines are going to kill us all.”

There are hundreds of thousands of machines today that can physically outperform human beings in particular tasks. Ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, the mental task, too, has become academic. Obviously this fact does not make Deep Blue better than human. However, consider a machine that is morally superior to man; that, in my opinion, could qualify as a machine that is better than human, in fact, superior to mankind.

I stole this bit from an Asur’s blog. He’ll never know *snicker snicker*

My uncle Shantanu used to treat the phrase with more courtesy than he ever showed my grand aunt, the great Hisara of the Kantharr dynasty. Even when possessed by supremely unsettling fits of rage, he had calm enough to summon his magical sword by closing his eyes and muttering the phrase as deep under his breath as possible and opening his eyes only after the golden blade (yes, he had a gold blade. mighty lucky in battle he was too) had simmered into solidity in his outstretched hand.

Some time in the not-so-far future, someone would get really pissed off with all existing religions and ask the same stupid question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” After trying some twenty three times to rephrase that question in order to get an answer that makes sense, he will decide to set things right by starting his own religion.

He would specify tolerance and peaceful co-existence as the benchmarks of his proposed faith. He would also, as an afterthought add a point about its being essential that the followers of this faith always greet each other with a smile. A token of their benevolence.

Funny thing about super powers, they always go to the other guy. You may be the most enthu candidate for the job willing to take up the whole saving-the-day business in full earnest, but it will always be the bloke from the doomed planet or the dud of a scientist carrying out an experiment in the middle of a god forsaken desert or a stupid, stupid teeny bopper who goes and gets himself bitten by a radio active spider who gets the super powers.

And then they have to make it sound like a ‘burden’ by using words like guilt and responsibility. Show offs!!

The adrenaline associated with filmed entertainment (even books for that matter) owes much to things going wrong. In Star Wars, you aren’t a hero until your ship malfunctions at the most crucial point in the battle. Think of all the heores who were forced to lunge forward with a rod (or something) when their handguns went kluck kluck at the opportune moment. Think of all the rickety spaceships that the heroic get stuck with when it came to going up against a galactic fleet of hyperspace cruisers. Think of all the ropes that snap when they shouldn’t.