Various and Sundry

And (Muppet) Mayhem Ensues, Holiday Edition

In case you just weren’t into the Star Trek holiday videos from yesterday, perhaps you’d enjoy the marriage of one of my favorite holiday tunes (and not just because it can be repurposed by Lovecraft fans) and my favorite pop culturally-impacting puppets (and not just because they’re part of one of my favorite TV series). Okay, it’s not as good as their take on the song everyone knows to headbang to, but it’s still fun. Plus,…

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Various and Sundry

TCM’s Verklempt Video, 2017 Edition

Turner Classic Movies (TCM), always releases their end of year remembrance a couple weeks early. Then they update it in case someone passes near the end of the year. I don’t care. I watch both versions. Even if you don’t recognize everyone, there’s always plenty to make you wistful… and remind you that a certain film or three is worth re-watching. Verklempt, right? And of course, they nailed the landing.

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Various and Sundry Writing

The Clarke Centennial

100 years ago today, in a small town in England, Arthur Clarke was born. Perhaps he’ll always be best known by the public at large for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is certainly how I was first introduced to his work. Later, when I had a chance to delve deeper into my Dad’s collection of 50s paperbacks, I came across Childhood’s End and later still, “The Star” — a very short story that nevertheless haunts…

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Various and Sundry

Fun with Nuclear Devastation

Growing up near Washington, DC during the Cold War left an impression on me. It could be that my dad, a physicist, had explained how the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals were large enough to reduce the world to dust and have nukes left over to shake up the dust. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbolae. My dad would probably qualify my sentence by pointing out that the nukes wouldn’t obliterate the entire surface of the earth……

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Producing Raves

You Don’t Know How Good Every Painting Is Until They’re Gone

They say all good things come to an end. In the case of podcasts and online video series, I suppose you don’t know how good a thing is until it’s gone. So it was with some sadness that I took the time to read the postmortem by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou explaining how their YouTube series, Every Frame a Painting had come to an end. A friend and fellow fan of the series sent the essay to me and…

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Various and Sundry

Time is Not on Your Side. It is Your Personal Rashomon

As the year draws to a close, people invariably muse aloud about how fast the year has gone. Strangely, November was far longer for me than October. I’m not sure yet how December will shape up. I decided to do some Internet digging about time and how people perceive it. I suppose I could go ahead and read some Marcel Proust since no one can properly summarize his masterwork, but I wanted something more on the…

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Acting Writing

Monday Motivation: You Doing You Creatively

I am overdue in continuing the “Monday Motivation” posts, so I thought it’d be an opportune time to note that sometimes it’s good to just do what you’re doing and keep on doing it. Especially for those of you in the middle of the slog that is NaNoWriMo: just keep truckin’. Don’t edit, write! As “they” say, the first draft is always garbage anyway and editing is another month. One thing I thought of in…

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