8 Fictional Futurists We Love
At Nostradamical.com we love predictions. Our community is thinking about the future, mostly. So we were chatting this week on our fav time travel characters in popular fiction. Here they are…
1. Doc Emmett Brown (Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3). The wild eyed scientist played perfectly by Christopher Lloyd is obsessed with time travel and buggy space-time continuum problems. Back to the Future really introduced the whole ‘disruptive’ future events thing that was continued later in some of these other movies / programs. Nice little comparison against Harry Potter here (if slightly random). Visit his MySpace page here (?)
2. Hiro Nakamura (Heroes). The Japanese comic book nut with the ability to manipulate space-time is the moral backdone of the Heroes series. He’s funny, heroic and let’s face it, has one of the coolest powers in the Heroes clan. Oh and the latest series, ‘Fugitives’ has started…woo hoo!
3. Daniel Faraday (Lost). The mumbling scientist from the visitors to the Lost island initially seemed to be a malicious character. However it’s clearer now that he is more concerned with unravelling the mysteries of the island, whilst jumping back and forth through time. His experiments on time travel at Oxford seem to have lead the Lost heroes to his mother who seems even more mysterious…oooh
4. Doctor Who (Doctor Who). Much more child orientated these days by the BBC than it felt in it’s hayday. However you cannot deny Doctor Who as one of the original time travellers (Time Lords). Although he seems to change actors with the weather these days. Plenty of DW resources here and here.
5. Donnie Darko (Donnie Darko). This slow burning cult classic features a fantastic storyline based around time travel and alternative realities. The film starts weird but makes more sense as it goes on. And that bunny? Creep as hell. Love it. 
And a sequel is in production…eh?
6. HG Wells (The Time Machine), An oldie but a classic. Really one of the first portrayals of time travel in film, this is a great primer for later films like Back to the Future. However the 2002 remake sucked.
7. Bill & Ted (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure + Bogus Journey). Yes, two those crazy dudes that went back through time in the first movie to retrieve key characters from history, and then died in the second film…all this before one of them went on to save the world in The Matrix. This was ‘The Space-Time Continuum for Dummies’.
8. The Terminator (The Terminator). Arnie’s seminal 80s cyborg that spawned no less than 3 sequels and a fascinating universe of interconnected storylines…a great franchise with some truly great scenes, although T3 was a bit rubbish. Soon to hit our screens is the latest franchise reboot with Christian Bale as the leader son of Sarah Connor, this is a great franchise indeed. My fav being T2 of course. As he said back in 1984, ‘I’ll be back’.
Honourable mentions - movies and people:
- Timecop - Van Damme kicks his way through time.
- The Time Bandits - fun, cute and a little weird…but certainly a new spin on things from Terry Gilliam.
- Austin Powers - quite funny, sometimes
- Highlander - Not really a time travel movie, technically.
- Timeline - OKish time travel from the director of Lethal Weapon
- Millenium - Forgotten classic about an ailing future. Nice ideas.
- Star Trek: The Voyage Home & Star Trek: First Contact - The Enterprise crews runs out of storyline ideas so has to go back in time to find a solution, twice.
See a list of other time travel movies here. A useful discussion of time travel in movies is on Greencine.com.
Have a prediction on future events? Browse Nostradamical’s predictions here or publish one of your own. We’re a prediction market and a microblog at the same time. Oooh.
We’re getting real time social gossip from SocialMention.com
At Nostradamical.com we’ve started using the SocialMention.com API to pull in realtime blog posts, news, videos and comments against each one of our predictions in our prediction market. This makes it easier for our users to gauge the latest web opinions on predictions like, ‘Will Chris Brown do jail time before his 21st birthday?’, ‘Will California legalize marijuana with bill AB 390?’ and ‘Will Facebook acquire Twitter in 2009?‘.
SocialMention.com is a real time search engine that searches blogs, microblogs, news, videos, comments, etc and pulls items back giving your search terms a ’social rank’. It’s a great tool.
Got an opinion on current world events, news and gossip? Think you know what’s going to happen next? Publish a prediction at Nostradamical.com and compete to climb The Pyramid. It’s easy, fun and a great way to express your opinions.
Alternatively, browse our current predictions and make a forecast.
Announcing Facebook integration at Nostradamical.com
Login and get stated in seconds with Facebook Connect
We’ve added Facebook integration to Nostradamical.com using the wonderful Facebook Connect platform. This means visitors can now login to Nostradamical.com using their existing Facebook login, which is super fast and easy. It also means users can publish their Nostradamical predictions back to their Facebook profiles to share them with Friends.
To login and starting forecasting predictions like, ‘Will California legalize marijuana with bill AB 390?‘ or ‘Will Lindsay Lohan cave and finally strip for Playboy? ‘ just click the ‘Connect with Facebook’ button on our site.
The Facebook Connect platform, launched last year is Facebook’s step into the ’single sign on’ world and competes with OpenID for example, in that users no longer need to setup new accounts and passwords on sites that use Facebook Connect. FB Connect launched in mid 2008.
Making our site open and accessible
So this means our visitors can now login in seconds and start forecasting predictions on world events at Nostradamical.com. So it’s another step towards making our site open and accessible to multiple networks. We also have widgets for display you latest predictions on your site, blog or social networking profile. Oh yeah and we’re also connected into Twitter and Friendfeed.
Facebook-Connect-mania…
Mashable has a good write up on the top 10 best implementations of Facebook Connect at sites like Vimeo, Joost and CNN.
How we did it
So this part is for the tech heads amongst you…
Nostradamical.com is built on the excellent and highly intuitive Ruby on Rails framework. To connect in with Facebook we used Mike Mangino’s excellent Facebooker plugin for Rails and tutorials from the Elevated Rails group. Thanks guys!
There is also a great tutorial on implementing Facebook Connect with Rails and Restful Authentication here at MadeByMany.
For anyone interested in implementing Facebook Connect with Rails check out the above sites and the touch-down pages at the Facebook Developers Wiki. The Facebook Community Forum is also a good source of advice. For bloggers check out this quick guide.
What’s next?
We’re working on ideas to develop our Facebook integration to make a more seamless experience across Nostradamical.com. Got a suggestion? Send us some feedback.
Otherwise, browse our predictions and start forecasting. It’s easy, fun and a great way to express your opinions on current world events. Get it right and climb The Pyramid.
We’re also looking to integrate our Prediction Engine with One Riot to pick up the latest social data related to each prediction that our members post. Check back at our blog for more info.
