The New York Public Library (NYPL) released a list of its most checked out books in its 125 year history (it was founded in 1895). Coming from a family that includes librarians, archivists, and avid history readers, this was delightful news. I learned about it as the NPR story covering it was shared widely among my social media channels. One curious note in the NYPL release: an honorable mention for Goodnight Moon, which I suppose…
I’m going to do one last post looking forward to this Thursday’s launch of Star Trek: Picard. The first link is to an excellent article by David Itzkoff in the New York Times about the future of Star Trek. It covers similar ground as my last Crisis of Infinite Star Treks post, but, you know, it’s a journalistic feature article with first-person interviews vs. my Internet-based observations, so I think many of you will find…
I promise not to endlessly post pieces about Star Trek: Picard as we approach its January 23rd premiere, but this longer piece in Variety (with accompanying video) was pretty interesting.
We’re just about a week into 2020, so people are doubtless hitting the gym, watching what they eat, reading more, or other laudable goals. I haven’t set any official resolutions this year, though I am trying to figure out some goals for the year (have a massive and varied to-do list/bucket list/bunch of other lists via Workflowy). Being a project manager, I’m trying to figure out what’s realistic and what’s a stretch. If you’re looking…
This is the 32nd and final entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. It was… fun. Way back in November 2015, I started musing about the state of Star Trek… and I kept on blogging about Trek so much that in 2016, that I retconned those early posts into what has become Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. There have been long posts…
(Well, at least for this particular 9-part saga). It’s not a far, far away premise that more than a few offices are down a worker or three starting their holiday vacation early to catch a matinee of Episode IX… or sleeping in since they caught a midnight showing. Roughly 42 years ago, the original Star Wars was probably the first film I saw in the theater. My dad talked to a co-worker about why it…
I began this year advocating creating art as a hobby and I tried to practice what I preached shortly thereafter. Most people who know me generally observe I’m pretty darn busy which is one of the reasons that I feel the need to carve out time that is entirely not productive. It’s hard in today’s “make every job a gig and make every gig a hustle” economy — and heaven help you if you want…
This past weekend, I was talking about the National Theater Institute of which I am quite a happy alumnus. They practice a maxim of “Risk. Fail. Risk again” which is kind of like the positive spin of the War Boys’ outlook in Mad Max: Fury Road. Same flamethrower guitars (metaphorically), less desolation. But that’s all artsy stuff, what about science? This is where David Noonan writing in Scientific American comes in. Apparently, some folks did…
If you’ve checked out any of the anthology series “Short Treks,” you’ll know the arguable standout thus far is the first season’s “Calypso” co-written by Michael Chabon. Chabon, probably better known to many as an award-winning novelist, also wrote this season’s “Q&A” and is the showrunner for the forthcoming Star Trek: Picard. When I saw a behind-the-scenes photo of Chabon and the Vasquez Rocks (a popular Hollywood “exotic” filming location and one very storied for…
For whatever reason, Big Data decided to show me a Vox video piece from 2016 about the Concorde the other day. It’s part of an article by Phil Edwards. For you young whippersnappers, the Concorde was a quite cool-looking supersonic passenger plane that heralded the future of air travel… until that future disappeared. Later in 2016 (and also in Vox), Brad Plumer noted that several startups and NASA were revisiting supersonic transport. He noted one…