Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet.

I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).

If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing.

What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!