Various and Sundry

Registering to Vote, 2016 Edition

One area where I am very partisan is that citizens should be able to vote and have their vote counted. Besides my general Capra-esque take on civic duty, I served as an election official for a number of years (i.e. one of the people who check you in and staff the voting machines). In part because of those experiences, I was very happy to see today’s Google Doodle: It takes you to a tool which…

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Writing

Edward Albee, RIP

2016 really isn’t getting any new fans as our cultural icons continue to shuffle off this mortal coil in a manner that befits the most macabre dance number imaginable. Playwright Edward Albee is dead, as reported by NPR, the New York Times, and others. I suppose he wouldn’t mind, what with his work exploring death, gloom, and despair. He was also 88, which I’m sure actuaries would assure me is “pretty old,” statistically speaking. I…

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Acting

Gene Wilder, RIP

I meant to post this earlier, but life keeps on getting in the way. Or maybe it’s bills to pay, and I’m not as clever as Max Bialystock at how to pay them. As has been reported in the Washington Post, AP, Variety, and elsewhere, Jerome Silberman aka Gene Wilder passed away last month, on Sunday, August 29th. He was 83. 2016 has proven to be lethal to the cultural icons many of my generation…

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Various and Sundry

RIP, Carl Balson

I did the math a couple years ago and realized he was in his 80s, so I knew it might happen sooner rather than later, but I am very sad to learn Carl Balson, theater professor and all-around audio-visual wizard, passed away on September 8th at the age of 84. An obituary appeared in the Beloit Daily News, but we learned of it a couple days earlier on social media. Here are some of the…

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Producing

Schedule Management: Exceptions to the 0-50-100 Method

I realized I hadn’t been posting much about producing and project management this year, so here’s a series of short posts going over some of the concepts I cover in the project management training I do. Previously, I has talked about a method for managing your schedule: the 0-50-100 method of reporting and tracking completion percentage. Again, for context, this is all about how to report completion percentage for a (presumably baselined) schedule. In other words, first you do…

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Writing

Space Opera Tropes

Speculative fiction writer Charles Stross has written a blog post about space opera clichés which has been brought to my attention by one of the denizens of MOSF. I haven’t read too much of Charles Stross, though I like his imaginative and subtly disturbing short story, “Rogue Farm.” It sounds like he enjoys being a bit harder with his sci-fi and space opera than some, which comes through in this list. For that reason, I…

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Various and Sundry

2016’s Summer Blockbuster Wasteland

Now that Labor Day has past, we’re officially out of Summer, those who are wont to assess how the film industry did during its summer blockbuster season don’t need to wait to write what many were already musing about in early August: this year has been terrible. Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff details this in the site’s Winners/Losers style in a method that’s very focused on the facts of what did well and what didn’t (many articles…

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