After a few weeks away charging our proton guns and psionic powers, the Weirdsday Blog is back. We hope the holidays, however you celebrate them, were good ones. Now it is time to dive into our preview of the the Science Fiction track for 2019. First of course, our Quick Hits

- The Name
I cannot remember if this has been official yet, but I guess I am making it official. We are now the Science Fiction track. Unofficially you can use Rivets & Robots (or Robots & Rivets) if you wish, but officially we are just Sci Fi.

- Ancillary Read Along
There will be another Ancillary Justice Read Along blog this Friday. It will just be there to catch folks up and get them ready for the next week’s Ancillary Read Along. So catch up and be ready!

The Friday Fandom Smackdown
This will be our fourth year of the Fandom Smackdown and after some discussion, we have decided to make a few changes. Instead of listing those changes, let’s just talk about the basic rules.
- There will be six categories, covering six different Fandoms.
- There will be six teams of five players.
- All players will get a ribbon saying “Laid the Smack!”
- First & Second Place teams get medals
- General Trivia worth a set number of points.
- Each team gets the right to choose a question. If they cannot answer or get it wrong, other teams can get points for answering it.
The Fandoms
These are the fandoms that will be battling it out this year. Anything is game from their canon or canon-adjacent sources.
- Farscape
- Star Trek
- Star Wars
- Firefly
- X-Files
- The Dungeons & The Dragons – And before someone points out that D&D is “fantasy”, S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks establishes that D&D exists in a SF universe (spoilers: there is a space ship). In addition the space fantasy boxed set for 2nd Edition AD&D, Spelljammer, is well, space fantasy. So it fits perfectly in our track.
Next week, we take a deeper look into some of our panels.