Note: This post and the related links abound in spoilers for Ted Lasso, season 2. This past weekend, my wife and I finally finished the second season of Ted Lasso, the comfort-food comedy-drama that is nominally about soccer, but really seems to be a backdoor effort to assemble a Gen X mixtape playlist whilst making equal numbers of jokes and pop culture references every single minute. The gentle yet foul-mouthed comedy of season one remains,…
It could be because each micronation origin story is chock full of ingredients ripe for a quirky biopic, but I love learning about micronations. And there appear to be no end to them popping up. In fact, the Internet seems to have given some of them a new lease on life… or sovereignty. Over on BBC Future, Jessica Mudditt explores the ongoing existence of micronations, with some particularly deep dives into the origins of Atlantium,…
So, the news that Netflix lost subscribers last week has generated more online articles this week than… well, new shows dropping on Netflix any given week (spoiler: it’s a lot). It seems many people are delighting in the fact that the streaming disruptor is now finding its plans disrupted. Now, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber going back to when they were only DVDs by mail. In fact, I still get DVDs by mail in addition…
I’ve been offline for much of the past few weeks, but –in a sense– that’s okay, because the Internet can be dark and full of terrors… and terrible misinformation. Luckily, there are some energetic folks who have just may have found their calling, or a significant first act, learning how inane conspiracy theories and misinformation propagate on the Web. Learn more in this long-form article by Oscar Gonzalez for c|net. And stay curious… and skeptical.
Okay, I’ll come back and expand on all of this, but for the Trek fans among you, there are several things to celebrate First is that season 3 of Picard is going to get the band back together as they close out a certain British Frenchman’s story: Next, they have a glorious 4K restoration of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Paramount+. If you’re not already itching to see it, wait ’til I explain a…
Okay, so now that I think about it, maybe I haven’t always posted stuff like this, but if feels like a yearly update of “how to combat the time-wasting scam peeps spamming you on your phone” is warranted. This year’s edition is from Wired.
Part of the silver lining of experiencing a horrendous global pandemic has been people re-examining how they do things. I referenced Joe Pinsker’s article for The Atlantic last year, which is well worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already. Well, Alex Christian over at the BBC has an article exploring what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and some of the challenges of moving to a four-day workweek. The main issue is making…
Given last week’s post about David Lynch and screenwriting, I knew I wanted to do another screenwriting post. And then last night’s Oscar ceremony got me thinking about the film industry and its future and I remembered a column by screenwriter Billy Ray. It’s from 2016, but it doesn’t seem any less apropos in its calls to action. Note that the column is very much about Hollywood/mainstream film industry filmmaking, but it’s not like the…
Okay, I was going to post something else today, but then thanks to Andrew M. Edwards of Blue Police Box Music, you’re getting a short, but so, so sweet video. There was an online discussion of the upcoming ultra-HD release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and conversation, quite naturally, turned to the iconic score by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Now, Goldsmith loved “esoteric instruments” as this article points out — and for the noise of…
I’m working on some more writing this week, so it felt like time to share this: In my own series, Rogue Tyger, the characters refer to an “FTL drive,” but they also talk about “jumps” so you can deduce that ships in the ‘Tygerverse’ use a form of jump drive. Visually, it’s probably best been represented with the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, but a major inspiration for how the drive works and the variations…