I’ve been thinking of writing a longer post about fandom and perceived ownership — all the more so with the launch of Star Trek: Discovery. Mark Evanier’s post, aptly titled “Creative Custody,” refutes the notion of fans “owning” comic book characters, but it can be applied to lots of other fan-beloved intellectual property (IP), such as IP that involves warrior races called Klingons. Much of what Mark Evanier says could be said by someone who hasn’t been an avid…
Note: This remains one of my more popular posts on the site, so if you’re here because you too are pondering about the future of TV, I’ve done several posts since this one under the unsurprising tag “Future TV.” Last night, CBS made its play to remain relevant in the streaming sphere by using Star Trek: Discovery as a carrot for viewers to sign up for its CBS All Access service (which has actually been…
This is the 31st entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. In some ways, I hope this is the penultimate entry. And so, in a few more hours here in the United States, we’re about to see the launch of Star Trek: Discovery, the seventh (!) Star Trek TV series (yes, I’m counting the animated series, too). I had planned on…
So now that summer is over, including that show with the dragons, you may be wondering, “What shows are actually coming back this year?” Jen Trolio and Caroline Framke over at Vox have answers. This is one of those perennial Vox pieces I’m glad they do every year, because there’s a lot of shows. In fact, some might say there’s a glut of shows out there, which has led to occasional questions of whether we’re…
Between Labor Day and chatting with some very bright people about the future of finance at Escape Velocity this weekend, it felt like a good time to post something about the future and universal basic income (UBI). One of the things I like about Dylan Matthew’s article in Vox about the Roosevelt Institute’s recent study on the potential effects of implementing UBI is that he explores the premises behind both the study and the critics of said…
Monday, August 28th (yesterday) marked Jack “King” Kirby’s 100th birthday. He isn’t still around to celebrate it, but we certainly have a tremendous body of work with which to celebrate his storytelling. I had made a comment on social media, but he seems to have cast a large enough shadow across pop culture that people may well be celebrating his centennial all week. One of his assistants, Mark Evanier, who also wrote the biography Kirby:…
Every summer –for at least a decade or more– the Hollywood film industry has been doomed. I would imagine they must get sick of all the doom, what with being doomed with the advent of television, the disintegration of the studio system, the rise of VCRs and video stores, online streaming, streaming services like Netflix making their own content — and possibly avocado toast. Nevertheless, within the traditional ‘doom’ narrative, there may be trends, so…
As the engines of disruption continue in the form of automation, one trend I keep following is the coming changes to transportation. No, I don’t mean the fabled hyperloop (though I’m following that too). I’m thinking of electric vehicles. Seth Miller over at an outfit called NewCo Shift hypothesizes that a major shakeup in the oil industry and our car culture is coming sooner than we might have thought — all based on replacing the…
Some of my past few Monday posts on motivation have been a bit on the grimmer side, so I wanted to share something that was more in the “You Can Do It” vein. On Scriptnotes a couple weeks ago, John August’s One Cool Thing was a physics paper about the power of dominoes to topple bigger dominoes. In fact, the domino the size of a sliver can start a process by which dominoes the size…
There will be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. And by “toast” I mean theater-related joy. And by “the neighborhood,” I mean “American theater.” And by “this morning,” I mean… well, I don’t know how long, but it’ll be longer than a morning. Actor, playwright, and director Sam Shepard has died at the age of 73. I first learned about it in a piece in Broadway World, which is worth checking…