They seem to be a new trend - deliciously yummy cakes with a geeky spin on things. Here’s five of my favourites, inspired by the recent article at Kotaku.

Wind Waker Cake

credit: Kotaku

Mario Cake

credit: Su-Yin

Nintendo Cake

credit: cotepka

Optimus Prime Cake

credit: morgan-v

Bloody Mess Cake

The Vault Boy! Personal favourite.

credit: Kotaku

Science fiction fans are often proud of their individuality, particularly liking something that isn’t wholeheartedly embraced by the average person. I know this is true for me, and for many other sci-fi fans I’ve met over the years.

But is science fiction becoming more mainstream than it ever has before? There’s a number of works that I could easily say fit this description. The hit TV series Heroes is the first one that springs to mind. It has a huge fan following, and many of those fans aren’t necessarily lovers of sci-fi.

Now, it could be argued that Heroes isn’t a classic or contemporary sci-fi show, so it doesn’t count. It’s a superhero show, appealing more to the average joe than, say, a show about the dying human race searching for Earth whilst being persued by their biomechanical creations-turned-enemies. Yes, the remake Battlestar Galactica is more of your typical sci-fi series, but guess what? It, too, has a fan following consisting of many people who don’t necessarily love sci-fi. There’s also Stargate, Farscape, Firefly (that one has a story all of its own), Doctor Who, The X-Files, and the new Bionic Woman. There’s even Lost which, although not classic sci-fi, can still be shoved into that category, and has an insane amount of fans (though I do believe the numbers are dwindling).

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Mr. Average Joe is just starting to realise that science fiction works contain a lot of content that he can relate to, increasing his interest in it somewhat. This realisation may occur on a subconscious level. Sci-fi fans have known this for years - it’s one of the best genres to be able to encapsulate real-world issues and toss them about in as much detail as desired, without all the negative implications that come from raising issues that nobody wants to deal with. From the top of my head, I can think of several real-world issues that have been raised in Battlestar Galactica, such as politics, abortion, racism, religion and terrorism, and these types of issues are explored in many other science fiction works as well, dating back years.

Of course, this mainstream movement of sci-fi doesn’t just apply to TV shows. There’s also games that are more or less mainstream (or have at least been extremely popular, which warrants the ‘mainstream’ tag) such as all of the Quake and Unreal Tournament games to name a couple. Then there’s the movies; Star Wars, the Alien movies, the Back to the Future movies, Men in Black, The Matrix, and of course Serenity.

Personally, I believe it has a lot to do with marketing. The advertising definitely pays them tribute, and perhaps draws in a crowd who wouldn’t necessarily watch these types of shows or movies otherwise. As for the games, the popular ones are generally developed and published by major companies and have the funding to market them extremely well.

I highly doubt that science fiction will ever become completely mainstream. I don’t see science fiction novels breaking through to the mainstream market any time soon (even though many of the movies and TV shows are based on novels anyway). Nor do I see future Star Trek series or movies ever being mainstream. In the past, yes, because it was something new and exciting. But if I asked my teenage cousins if they’d like to watch some Star Trek DS9 with me, their likely reaction would be to laugh as if I was joking, then give a polite “no thank you” before walking away.

However, I do believe that producers of sci-fi works, especially for television, are purposely catering more for the average person these days than ever before, be it with the sex appeal of their characters/actors, editing and effects, humour, or the issues explored within.

Would it be such a bad thing if science fiction became mainstream?

In my opinion, definitely not. As a sci-fi fan, I can say that I’m sick and tired of sci-fi shows being canned or disappearing into oblivion because they’re not popular. Does anyone remember Earth 2? What about Space: Above and Beyond? They were great shows that deserved a much longer life span. And they’re far from the only ones. It’s a familiar story with many science fiction shows.

It still bothers me though, how someone can fall completely in love with a show like Firefly and the movie Serenity, but claim a firm dislike of all other sci-fi, as if the name alone has this stigma attached to it. It still hasn’t quite grown away from its ‘geeky’ and ‘nerdy’ connotations, despite the diversity of the genre. Perhaps it’s destined to remain this way.
Who knows?

Until recently, I always used Adobe Bridge + Adobe Photoshop for file management and photo editing. This meant that I relied on a good folder structure and strict naming conventions for both folders and files. I tried several different folder structures, and all of them felt clumsy and took far longer that I was ever satisfied with. The problem lay in simply relying on a physical folder structure, especially when I needed to store several different versions of the same image.

Inside the folder for each photo category (Landscapes, Portraits, etc), I would have a parent folder which contained a few other folders named ‘Original’, ‘Master’, and ‘Web’. The ‘Original’ folder would contain the original images, obviously, the ‘Master’ folder would contain multi-layered .psd or .tiff files that I have edited into the final copy, and the ‘Web’ folder would contain any exports I needed for uploading onto the web, eg: sending to Flickr.

Using this method, every photo had a place and I would know exactly where they were, but it would take far too long to file the images in the correct place and navigate to each folder. I knew there had to be a better way. I was after a simpler way as well, but not so simple that the structure wasn’t powerful enough. It had to be usable.

Then I found Aperture.

This is, hands down, the best application I have ever used for digital image work. It takes on multiple roles including a digital photo management system, and an image processor that works in a non-destructive manner. I can easily find all of my images and view them however I want to.

Each Aperture project can contain 10,000 images. With this in mind, it took me a couple of tries to finally figure out the best way to approach the folder structure in Aperture. But I’ve finally settled on this approach:

Each year has its own folder, and within each folder is a project for each month. If a project has a lot of images for that month, I will organise them into albums.

Obviously, this folder structure won’t work well for everyone. Especially if you take more than 10,000 images in a single month (yikes!). For me, it’s ideal.

I’ve been researching other people’s workflows to gain some insight into what would work best for me. Mine is still in progress, but I’ve figured it out for the most part. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Import photos from my card into Aperture. I haven’t automated this yet, but I soon will.
2. Add metadata and rate/reject photos. I use a three star rating system, five is unnecessary and generally just takes too much time and gets in the way. Zero stars I leave as unrated, so I know I need to rate them. One star is good enough to archive but not really show. Two stars are good enough to show people. Three stars are photos I’m really proud of. I’ll then delete all the rejects.
3. I go through the photos with two stars or more and make edits. Generally I don’t edit the one stars, but it depends (mostly on the quantity).
4. If needed, I’ll do further editing in Photoshop, which I can open straight from Aperture with no fear of destructive edits. Saving will create a new version in Aperture, from which to work with.
5. I’ll then export to a different format (jpeg usually) on an as-needed basis. I have a folder for all exported images that emulates my Aperture folder structure by going Year > Month > “photo” (or “project” and then “photo” if the photo was part of a series of shots)

I also need to work out the best system for high dynamic range (HDR) photos using Photomatix Pro, since you can assign only one external editor that is linked from Aperture as far as I know. This will probably just mean it will take more steps for an HDR image, but since it does anyway it’s not a big deal.

Well here we go. First post. I’ve spent a fair few hours just familiarising myself with WordPress and customising a few bits and pieces. I might get some time this holidays to work on my own custom designs, but it’s not a definite thing. There is homework to finish, and it sure ain’t gonna finish itself. For now, this theme will do the job, until I find some time.

I have a few topics up my sleeve, though I’m not quite sure what this blog will mostly consist of, or whether it will be a mix of all different topics equally. To be honest, it’s not something I’ve thought extensively about. But no doubt it will take some direction of its own once things get rolling. It was originally going to be a photoblog, a place to showcase my photos and discuss photography concepts. I decided Flickr does this well enough, and I’m too opinionated to never be able to talk about the stuff that’s going on in the world. A photoblog would bore me.

Now that I have my own little corner of the web, there’s nothing to stop me. :)