Various and Sundry Writing

Letting Go of the Canon

This is the 11th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Yes, we have gone to 11. Asher Elbein’s excellent piece in The Atlantic is worth reading just to consider the nature of pop culture –our modern mythology– and our ownership thereto. I’ve included it in the Crisis of Infinite Star Treks series because reading it helped distill two issues: If a ‘Star…

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Various and Sundry

Star Trek Fans: The Narrative Force Awakens

This is the 10th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. I’m happy this entry is much less in the crisis column and more in the infinite Star Treks column Last last night, I caught this article on The Mary Sue being shared among social media: the new Star Trek show will be an anthology series akin to True Detective and others, where…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: Requiem for a Video Store

Reading a recent piece reflecting on the demise of video stores, specifically independent video stores, made me reflect on the demise of Video Vault, an indie film mainstay in Alexandria that supplied film fans for a generation. Mike Musgrove’s article in the Washington Post about the Vault’s closing gives one a good idea of the pressures that made it close. That article is probably a good warm-up for the aforementioned piece on indie video stores.…

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Various and Sundry

Alpha Centauri or Bust

In a world obsessed with “maximizing shareholder value,” it’s nice to know that money can mix with imagination and do great things. Enter Yuri Milner, tech billionaire who wants us to get a probe to Alpha Centauri, stat. Okay, it’s more of a generational thing, but let’s face it: we have to figure out how to become more than a one-planet civilization sooner rather than later. Interstellar scouting missions don’t accomplish that, but they do keep…

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Raves

Speaking of that Forever Franchise…

While I was watching the today’s Internet frenzy, aka the teaser trailer for Rogue One, I couldn’t help but think of Adam Roger’s Wired article from last Fall which I talked about here. Like any good teaser trailer, my appetite is whetted so thoroughly I am loathe to watch any follow-up trailer as it will reveal too much. As it is, the trailer seems to be showing what the Clone Wars and Rebels TV series…

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Various and Sundry

Star Trek: Revenge of the Solicitors, er, IP lawyers, er, You get the idea…

This is the ninth entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Reece Watkins, over at Krypton Radio, has an editorial about the Axanar lawsuit. From this perspective, maybe things aren’t as dire as I was musing last month. I guess we’ll see. I’m much happier learning more about Beyond and the new TV series anyway.

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Producing

This Monday, an Un-Post

Mark Evanier has a time-honored inscrutable tradition of putting up an image of a can of mushroom soup when he’s too busy to blog — though lately even those have been full blog posts in and of themselves. I have yet to develop an inscrutable image or tradition in this regard, so I’ll simply point out that a lot of you know what I’m busy with today. Wish us luck even as we invite actors…

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