Based on the news I read this weekend, there was absolutely no reason I was not going to share the glorious discovery of the original recording session that gave the work The Wilhelm Scream. You can learn a great background of the Wilhelm Scream on Mental Floss from 2018, recently updated with this latest news. Jim Vorel has a good article on the news for Paste, an article also referenced by Luke Plunkett for Kotaku…
So, I’m clearly not in tune with all fandom news because then I would have realized that the trailer I shared for the latest volume of Star Wars: Visions on Wednesday was but one output of a massive Star Wars marketing shindig last week (aka Star Wars Celebration 2023). There’s numerous articles about the various announcements made at the event, but I found myself interested in one 19-minute interview with showrunners Dave Filoni and John…
I know. For a blog that has quite a lot of posts about Star Trek, what am I doing talking about magical space wizards? Because magical space wizards are fun. As with plenty of other Gen Xers, Star Wars was a big part of my childhood. I also grew up with a lot of samurai films and anime (something else shared by plenty of Gen Xers I’ve met.). So when Disney announced they were releasing…
I haven’t gotten around to reading more about Jack Kirby’s life (Mark Evanier’s book is on my to-read list), so I found this article by Roy Schwartz about how much of Kirby’s life went into Captain America intriguing. For example, I didn’t know much, if anything, about Kirby’s service in World War II, something that I’d be interested in learning about all the comic creators of that era (similar to what was covered with the…
How I managed to miss this article last year is something I chalk up to the vast depth of the Internet, but still: I love The Expanse and part of that ardor is absolutely the multi-layered world-building. Those of you who have checked out my space opera Rogue Tyger and its ever-growing “Encyclopedia of the Imperium” will not be surprised at that fact. So I was all into this article by James Hoare for The…
Facebook is happily showing me posts from 10 years ago, which –more often than not– relate to The Broken Continent: a fantasy web series I and others produced back before you would instantly ask “what streaming service is the series on?” That would all begin to change in 2013 as the likes of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black made the industry take notice of “streaming” in ways it hadn’t. Honestly, considering…
To kick off this week, where I’m fitting in writing every moment I reasonably can, I’m thinking of an article I read last year, knowing I’d want to share it on the blog at some point. It’s a little quiet memoir of a piece, about a young student shepherding a visiting writer about the city of Rochester, New York. Is Alison Smith’s piece about wandering about town with Ursula Le Guin writing motivation? Maybe. Maybe…
Based on several standing meeting cancellations and trip pics on social media, I have deduced that Spring Break is in the air for many people. And Spring Break often means travel. And travel often means reading material. And such reading material is often… pulpy. So thanks to Open Culture, I now know that the Internet Archive has thousands of issues of the pulp magazines available for your reading pleasure. And now so do you. Use…
A few years ago, writer, media consultant, and avid Stoic, Ryan Holiday, decided to open a bookstore with his wife. What with being a writer who is very into philosophy and how one lives one’s life (seriously check out some of his books), he decided to share some thoughts about what he learned from running the bookstore. The 23 lessons are on the shorter side, but are thought-provoking and often link to longer pieces that…
As some readers know, despite focusing more on audio fiction these days, I still am keenly interested in how films are put together, especially when it comes to speculative fiction stories… as they almost always employ some tricks to show the fantastical with as much thrift as craft. Last year, I learned more about how the latest version of Dune departed from traditional blue and green screens. I’ve heard a lot about the “virtual sets”…