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…
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…
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…
Being proud of our Norwegian heritage and an above-average amateur historian, our dad made sure we knew from an early age that real Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets. But why do so many people think so? An article in Vox gets to the root cause. Dang costume designers. Growing up, we didn’t have a wealth of Viking drama, so it was inevitable that the family would seek out what they could. That inevitably led to that…
I’ve been reading and commenting a decent amount about automation this year, enough to make it seem inevitable. A popular topic with journalists and feature writers has been the impending automation of transportation which I noted back in May. Just recently, Vox ran another article about self-driving trucks and pending unemployment. As the topic appears to be developing into a “future trend trope,” I was very intrigued to learn about the work of Robert Gordon, which Vox also…
This is the 25th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. So, after June 23rd’s astounding reveal by CBS/Paramount about their fan film guidelines, I took in a lot of the reactions (reactions you can see back on that post, btw). But even though it’s now decades later in Internet time, I wanted to comment on the guidelines, in part because, in…
So between the bombshell that was CBS/Paramount releasing their fan film guidelines yesterday and the upcoming Escape Velocity science-meets-science-fiction convention, this seems like an appropriate topic. Lawyer (and film producer) Seth Polansky gives an overview of common misconceptions and arguments for IP infringement at pop culture conventions… and what we might do about it. I meant to post this earlier (and apparently it’s already caused a modest stir around the Interwebs), but y’know, getting Escape…
This is the 24th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Well, I was going to make sure I updated my last post about CBS/Paramount’s response to Axanar’s counterclaim in everyone’s favorite intellectual property (IP) lawsuit, but then CBS/Paramount had another surprise today. They released the fan film guidelines. The announcement is here and the guidelines are here. In terms of timeline,…
So, I’ve been really busy working on this convention coming up next week, which means I haven’t been able to blog as much. One of the things I wanted to do was follow up on my occasional posts about basic income. Switzerland voted on whether to give all its citizens universal basic income earlier this month. The vote failed, but as Dylan Matthews mentions in Vox, it might set the stage for progress on basic…
This is the 23rd entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. So, remember an event now way back in May where the Axanar lawsuit was “going away” in a few weeks and some people thought that meant it was being “dropped?” Well, as I indicated when covering Axanar’s response to CBS/Paramount’s complaint and Axanar’s counterclaim, the court of law will tend to move…