Various and Sundry

Them’s Fighting Films!

With films and film history very much on the mind from my post earlier this week, I was delighted to stumble (pratfall?) across this list from Vulture about the 100 Fights that Shaped Action Cinema. The work of multiple writers (and presumed cinemaniacs), this list goes back to the earliest moving pictures to the present day (it came out earlier this month). I not only appreciate it for its exhaustive scope, I’m very thankful that…

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Producing Various and Sundry Writing

Alternate Hollywoods

I’ve had the chance to catch up on a lot of Scriptnotes episodes over the past few weeks, which is always a good thing. Scriptnotes is a weekly podcast hosted by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin which has been going on for over a decade and continues to have things about and interesting to screenwriters. As I’ve been meaning to do some posts about the future of Hollywood following last year’s strikes and the…

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Various and Sundry

Farscape at 25

I’ve mentioned before how much I like the now firmly cult show Farscape and I see no reason to stop now, especially as its vision of a galaxy full of wonders and nightmares is a clear influence on the upcoming seasons of my own space opera. At 25, its best episodes still pack a punch and aren’t shy about embracing the weird. So if it’s checking out this retrospective by Ryan Britt for Inverse, backing…

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Various and Sundry

NASA Invites You to Roll for Initiative

When I heard about a NASA RPG this weekend, I had to look it up and quickly found articles from PC Gamer and Dicebreaker as well as a post on Reddit which gets appropriately wonky. And then I went to the NASA site itself, which has the adventure and a wonderfully classic map. Basically, a dragon has stolen the Hubble Space Telescope all the way to another world and dimension… and it’s up to a…

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Various and Sundry

A Savage Outlook on Work

A few weeks ago, I realized I could easily go back and re-watch a bunch of episodes of Mythbusters, which led to the natural rabbit hole of watching additional Mythbusters-related videos on YouTube which led to some of Adam Savage’s current YouTube videos originally recorded as a video/Patreon version of Reddit’s “Ask Me Anythings” (AMAs)… though, in truth, this seemed to be themed around work which, hey, works for my often work-focused Wednesday posts… This…

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Site Update

It’s a Blogiversary with Fine Pottery Among the Willows… or Something

Nine years ago today, I relaunched a personal website, something Internet denizens hadn’t seen since the days of Netscape Navigator. Depending on how you mark anniversaries, this will be the pottery or willow anniversary. Not as exciting as the Bronze Anniversary last year, but I guess folks decided that metals could use a break. As with previous versions of this blogiversary post, I’ll be looking at the posts that were popular over the past year…

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Various and Sundry

Beltalowda at the Bottom of the World

TL;DR? An Antarctic outpost has been shown to be developing its own English accent at what is, to my mind, a fast pace. You can read all about it in this BBC article by Richard Gray from last week. Yes, for those of you who got the reference in the title, this is sadly not some continuation of The Expanse. And for those of you who have not seen The Expanse and like hard sci-fi…

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Various and Sundry

The Hot Wing Torture Interview Method: John Oliver Edition

I’m a big fan of John Oliver’s investigative comedy on Last Week Tonight, so I’m happy that the show is returning this weekend. That does mean he’s making the rounds of media appearances, for example, he and Steamboat Mickey can be seen on Colbert from earlier this week. But the one that especially caught my eye was his interview for Hot Ones, which I confess I did not realize had been going on since 2015.…

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Various and Sundry

How Much Toil & Trouble is in the A.I. Bubble?

The hue and cry about “A.I.” –aka all sorts of machine learning and algorithm use– that exploded last year shows no sign of letting up this year. Not only that, this flavor of AI is creeping into all sorts of technology we use if it’s not there already. For example, iOS 18 will purportedly include a major overhaul including A.I. when it launches later this year. Now, my seven or nine regular readers might have…

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Various and Sundry

A Viewing Guide for Star Trek: Voyager

One aspect of Trekdom I discovered when I released my rankings of all the Star Trek series was how many people loved Star Trek: Voyager. Oh sure, I knew people were fans. And I became a bigger fan on my rewatch. But I hadn’t counted on the love. And just as with all Star Trek series, there are wonderfully Trekkish episodes to love here. So if you haven’t watched Voyager since the 90s — or…

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