Various and Sundry

Salutant te omnes ioculatores!

Some days, you discover something and must share it with the world. You know that piece of rousing music you probably most associate with the circus? It often heralds the entrance of the clowns. I’ll let Marty the Zebra refresh your memory: Well, as it turns out, this particular piece of music was not written for the big top, but it was written with another circus in mind, a circus that takes it to the…

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Various and Sundry

A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

After all the viewing guides to date, we finally arrive at Deep Space Nine (DS9). While I love several other Star Trek series a whole lot (as you probably picked up on), this one remains my favorite for a multitude of reasons, not just for the root beer. No, this spinoff with no Enterprise –and not even set on a starship– is where the producers kept pushing the envelope for how much serialization they could…

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Various and Sundry

A Very Short Viewing Guide for Star Trek, The Animated Series (TAS)

Okay. Perhaps you read the viewing guides for TOS yesterday. Maybe you’ve been watching Lower Decks, which references the O.G. animated series enough that you feel like you need to see this oft forgotten Trek series for yourself. But do you need to see every episode? No. I mean, you could. Budget a relaxed day and you can watch the whole series that same day. It’s only 22 half-hour episodes that, since they were made…

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Various and Sundry

Viewing Guides for Star Trek The Original Series (TOS)

My post ranking every episode of the original Star Trek series remains one of the most popular on the site which means we’re well overdue to have a viewing guide. This year will mark the 60th anniversary of adventures of the starship Enterprise first appearing on television sets. There’s aspects of the show, like any show, that are of its time, but it also sets the tone echoed by future Trek series where the exploration…

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Various and Sundry

Robert Waldinger and the Happy Life

Reviewing works about motivation and fulfillment around the new year and it was easy to come across videos featuring Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been going on for 87 years now. As you might imagine, just like with studies that aren’t conducted over multiple generations, this study does have some insights to share. You may recall some of them yourself if you saw his TED Talk from…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Kickstarting Your 2026

It’s the new year and if you haven’t already locked in your resolutions and resolution-related plans, have I got a post for you: a 26-minute breakdown of 20 tactics to make for a better 2026 from Daniel Pink. I first read Pink’s work with Free Agent Nation and then later Drive, which sent me down the scientifically-structured rabbit hole of “flow” back in the day. So when the almighty YouTube algorithm served up Pink’s videos…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Public Domain Day 2026

Since the return of thousands of works entering the public domain again in 2019, I’ve been posting about it — and given site traffic and feedback, y’all want me to, so here goes this year’s edition (previous entries should all be tagged). Note that I’m specifically talking about the United States, where, as of today, creative works published in 1930 and sound recordings from 1925 are free to use without licenses or fees. If you’re…

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Various and Sundry Writing

Contemplating the Tail End

It’s the end of the year, so it’s a good time to be contemplative. And you know those novels or TV shows, usually fantasy, where some character opines that they have “fewer winters ahead than behind?” It’s in that contemplative mood that I looked through my stack o’ possible blog posts and found an article called “The Tail End” by Tim Urban. You probably know Tim Urban from his gloriously funny and insightful piece on…

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Acting Producing Writing

You, yes You, Should Be Making Art

It’s definitely time people start thinking about making New Year’s resolutions or otherwise mapping out things they want to get done for the year ahead. And I’m suggesting that, whatever those plans are, it should include some art. This should not come as a surprise. I have advocated this whole wacky “making art thing” on this blog multiple times as my seven or nine regular readers may remember. Whether it’s a post I did about…

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Various and Sundry

Your Online Bullsh*t Detector

Look, apparently the theme for this week is dealing with online crap (well, that and working through cinematic loss by adding to our “films to watch/rewatch” list). However, if you want to help figuring out things, you could do worse than physicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson has long been an advocate for critical thinking (the image above was one of many I found when searching), but this 15-minute guide for how to…

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