I’m a big fan of John Oliver’s investigative comedy on Last Week Tonight, so I’m happy that the show is returning this weekend. That does mean he’s making the rounds of media appearances, for example, he and Steamboat Mickey can be seen on Colbert from earlier this week. But the one that especially caught my eye was his interview for Hot Ones, which I confess I did not realize had been going on since 2015.…
The hue and cry about “A.I.” –aka all sorts of machine learning and algorithm use– that exploded last year shows no sign of letting up this year. Not only that, this flavor of AI is creeping into all sorts of technology we use if it’s not there already. For example, iOS 18 will purportedly include a major overhaul including A.I. when it launches later this year. Now, my seven or nine regular readers might have…
One aspect of Trekdom I discovered when I released my rankings of all the Star Trek series was how many people loved Star Trek: Voyager. Oh sure, I knew people were fans. And I became a bigger fan on my rewatch. But I hadn’t counted on the love. And just as with all Star Trek series, there are wonderfully Trekkish episodes to love here. So if you haven’t watched Voyager since the 90s — or…
I’ve already done a couple public domain posts this year, notably the one for Public Domain Day and one on Monday about how people are, predictably, already having fun with the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse which entered the public domain in the U.S. on January 1st. But if you just want to get deeper into the legal philosophy behind public domain and also how that particularly involves Mickey Mouse, I have a couple…
I didn’t post this last week, but I actually saw some news even as I was posting about Public Domain Day last Monday: people aren’t wasting any time, Disney’s legendary legal ferocity be damned. One Steamboat Willie-themed Kickstarter launched on January 1st, there are memes aplenty (see image above), and –of course– there’s a horror movie. There’s plenty more in the works, as Sian Cain details for The Guardian (which also touches on the horror…
I still should work on a wrap-up post regarding last year’s Hollywood Strikes, but one of the outcomes the unions were able to negotiate was visibility about the success of shows on streaming services. In what definitely feels like an effort to guide that narrative, Netflix released a heretofore unprecedented amount of data publicly in December regarding how many people watched what on their service. You can get a summary, watch a half hour press…
Earlier this week, I did a post about the what we’ve gained in the public domain as of January 1st, “Public Domain Day” becoming something I post on. Thinking of annual posts, I meant to do this last month, so here goes: TCM does a great montage of folks we’ve lost in the previous year (see examples from 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 for the most recent entries). This time around, I decided to do…
Last year I mentioned making a Public Domain Day post a tradition and so: Happy New Year to All! Plus, welcome to the public domain for so many goodies. For a great overview of said goodies on offer, check out this article from Aaron Moss over at Copyright Lately. Moss is an intellectual property attorney and is quite ready to delve deep into all things copyright. I appreciate that he goes beyond the much-covered fact…
So, the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, approved a tentative agreement with AMPTP on November 8th, but the agreement has yet to be ratified by the membership and there appear to be a lot of questions about how AI is being dealt with (actors’ concerns being similar yet different in some important regards than writers). So I’ll plan to write something post-ratification (and yes, the presumption is that the agreement will be ratified). But the ratification vote…
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about spaceships you may want to avoid, but this seems especially seasonal… and it may just give you ideas about some films to bump to the top of your queue: