Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: A FiveThirtyEight Look at Basic Income

I’ve been reading a lot about basic income over the past year or so, from activist like Scott Santens as well as actual studies that have been and are being done. So I was very pleased to see that the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight decided to do a feature length article about it. If you want to get an idea about what basic income is all about — and what we really know about what…

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Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: Of Paramount and Puppets

This is the 13th of the ongoing series about Star Trek’s future and its fandom. I’m as surprised as anyone it keeps going, but hey, that’s why tagging is so handy (or click on Crisis of Infinite Star Treks). So, a pair of links today. The first is an article by Marc Perton that appeared this afternoon in Newsweek. If you haven’t been following this story for months like some of us nuts, it does a…

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Producing

Recommended Reading: How American TV Gets Made (with a Case Study of The Americans)

I love to learn more about the nuts and bolts of how productions get made as it teaches me what I should do (and can conceivably do) for the indie productions I work on. So I found this feature article by Caroline Framke in Vox about how an episode of The Americans gets on the air quite absorbing. And I don’t even watch the series (yet).

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Various and Sundry

You can never escape the shadow of Star Trek V

This is the 12th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Trevor Law over at Nerd Union is worried about Star Trek and its future. There’s worries about how Paramount is handling the movie franchise and worries about whether fans will spring for the extra ducats required to sign up for CBS All Access. As I’m being reminded with all this “Saturday Morning…

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Various and Sundry Writing

Letting Go of the Canon

This is the 11th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Yes, we have gone to 11. Asher Elbein’s excellent piece in The Atlantic is worth reading just to consider the nature of pop culture –our modern mythology– and our ownership thereto. I’ve included it in the Crisis of Infinite Star Treks series because reading it helped distill two issues: If a ‘Star…

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Various and Sundry

Star Trek Fans: The Narrative Force Awakens

This is the 10th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. I’m happy this entry is much less in the crisis column and more in the infinite Star Treks column Last last night, I caught this article on The Mary Sue being shared among social media: the new Star Trek show will be an anthology series akin to True Detective and others, where…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: Requiem for a Video Store

Reading a recent piece reflecting on the demise of video stores, specifically independent video stores, made me reflect on the demise of Video Vault, an indie film mainstay in Alexandria that supplied film fans for a generation. Mike Musgrove’s article in the Washington Post about the Vault’s closing gives one a good idea of the pressures that made it close. That article is probably a good warm-up for the aforementioned piece on indie video stores.…

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