I pretty much nuked my July in preparations for the annual pop culture insanity known as San Diego Comic-Con. But at last I’ve recovered and can think about other things, like the dystopian Google/Verizon partnership and the social meaning of Max Headroom (now out on DVD!). I have also been obsessively researching the history of mass extinctions on Earth. The End-Permian period is probably the most intriguing mass extinction: That’s when nearly 95 percent of all life on Earth died off 250 million years ago.

If you want to know everything that happened at Comic-Con (and who wouldn’t?), you can see the io9 coverage here, including my ecstatic response to some footage we saw from next year’s alternate history epic, Cowboys and Aliens. You can also see some pictures of me moderating two awesome panels, the “Girls Gone Genre” panel (featuring some of my heroes, like Gail Simone, Marti Noxton, Felicia Day, Laeta Kalogridis, Melissa Rosenberg, and Kathryn Immonen), and of course the annual io9 “Scifi That Will Change Your Life” panel (featuring io9 staffers Charlie Jane Anders, Cyriaque Lamar, and Meredith Woerner, as well as Pyr Books publisher Lou Anders, comic book writer Marc Bernardin, writer and StarWars.com editor Bonnie Burton, and culture critic Douglas Wolk). And then there was this.

Until next year, San Diego!

This morning I had the pleasure of joining NY Times film critic A.O. Scott and SF writer and physicist Mike Brotherton on NPR’s “On Point,” to talk about the greatest science fiction films of all time. It was a good time, and you can listen to a tape of the show on at the On Point website.