Since I'm a programmer, I've become acutely aware that everyone who isn't a programmer seems to think we all love Star Wars and Star Trek.

Not so.

I admit, I own the Star Wars box set. And one Star Trek movie (Star Trek II, better known as "The one where a lot of shit blows up real good"). I can take or leave the Star Wars movies. I don't mind the Treks where stuff blows up. I can't stand Treks where the holodeck runs amok.

Okay, that last sentence may give away a bit too much.

The one type of obsessed fan that has always confused me has been the Battlestar Galactica fan. Until I saw a posting on Slashdot over the summer that SciFi was doing a remake, I didn't even know the show had such a large fanbase.

Seriously, come on. Have you seen the original show? When I was drugged up over the summer with my broken wrist, I saw a few episodes on SciFi, and let me tell you, there isn't enough Vicodin in the world that would make Baltar seem like a convincing villian. Baron VonGreenback from Danger Mouse is a more believable villian.

And the space dogfights... let's just say that Battlestar Galactica isn't alone for sucking in this respect. Even Star Wars sucks in this respect. Instead of X-Wings and Y-Wings taking on Tie fighters, they may as well be Hurricanes and Spitfires doing battle with ME109s. There's just no respect to physics. I mean, holy shit, I'm a history major and I have a better idea of how stuff like this should work.

Which is why the remake of Battlestar Galactica was such a shock. They actually paid attention to stuff like physics (fighters used their forward momentum to continue moving forward while flipping themselves over to fire at pursuers). It was really amazing. And nobody used lasers.

Which is another pet peeve. They're fucking lasers. They move at the speed of light. Why do I constantly see people dodging lasers. If you're in a ship, and you have a computer that handles the targeting for you, you shouldn't be spraying the entire galaxy with misses. Physics people.

And the showed ships approaching each other at odd angles. Which brings us to the last pet peeve, the "battleships in space". Everytime I see some a show/movie showing a couple large spaceships facing off (and yeah, I'm talking to you Trekkers) they're always on the exact same level and face to face.

Uh guys, it's outer space. It doesn't have to work like that. They can be at all sorts of odd angles to each other. They can even be behind each other if they want to. It's space.

So the fanboys on slashdot were up in arms that the original would be ruined. Seems to me like they got a better show than could have been imagined.