Various and Sundry

Okay, I might believe a man can fly…

I’m still not sure what movies I’ll be able to see in theaters in the last two weeks of the year, but as for selections next summer, DC is clearly bringing a Gunn to a superhero knife fight: Come on. You thought “oh yeah, this is Gunn” the moment you saw Supes whistle… because you knew Krypto was going to appear. So yeah, it looks promising enough to check out in theaters… something I can’t…

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Various and Sundry

2024 Additions to the National Film Registry

Looking at my film history posts, I evidently only remember to talk about the National Film Registry when I’m working on my biennial Favorite Films post. However, the Library of Congress designates 25 films every year deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Over 900 films are on the registry now, even if you go through the whole list, you’ll think of more that could be added (and which you can nominate). So it’s always nice…

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Various and Sundry

My 50 Favorite Films: Prep for the 2024 Edition

Last weekend, in between calculated periods of doing nothing and Thanksgiving leftovers, I started work on my biennial Favorite Films sort. I’m a lifelong movie buff and have watched literally thousands of movies. Not all of them are good. Some of the good films are, nonetheless, not my favorite films. Behold the “Cine-Venn” diagram! The entire stack of films I sort through every few years numbers around 500 films or so. There’s usually something of a lag…

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Various and Sundry

Wait! Are We the Dystopian Future We Want to Avoid?

Ray Bradbury once said he wasn’t trying to predict the future with some of his tales of a dystopian or apocalyptic future, he wanted scare people. Basically, warning society “If you don’t watch out, this is what could happen.” Well, apparently we didn’t get the memo, per Yuval Noah Harari, author of the excellent Sapiens. In his latest book, Nexus, he traces ‘information networks’ from pre-history to today… and he’s not entirely rosy about humans…

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Various and Sundry

A Moment of Closure, Star Trek Style

A new short film, using CGI technology that would make Forrest Gump blush, is making the rounds amongst the various Trek groups I frequent. It’s called 765874 – Unification. It packs in more references to more iterations of Star Trek than you might expect, involves a lot of old Trek hands, and is very emotional for a lot of Trekkers. Take 11 minutes on the biggest screen you can find and see what you think.

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Various and Sundry

Kurt Vonnegut has a Board Game?!?

I’ve posted about celebrated author Kurt Vonnegut a couple times this year, most recently relating to Banned Books Week, so perhaps the Internet algorithms were primed to show me this but, per Charlie Hall for Polygon, he dabbled in game design before his writing career took off and created an abstract wargame called GHQ. The article itself delves a bit more into the game, including images of the original rules and notes. You can also…

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Various and Sundry

Real World Scares: Escaping a Sinking Vehicle

Now’s the time of year where many of us muse about what we’d do when entering a darkened room, basement, or forest, especially if there’s creepy background music playing. But what to do about the very real world, very freaky possibility of being in a vehicle that’s sinking into a body of water. Whether it’s been caused by a man wearing the face of Captain Kirk or not, if you find yourself in this situation,…

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Various and Sundry

The World’s Newest Purpose-Built Capital

It could be all the games of Civ and SimCity, but I find the real-life construction of dedicated national capitals to be fascinating, from Brasília to Canberra to, oh, yeah, Washington, DC in my neck of the woods. Well, there’s a new kid on the purpose-built capital block, and its name is Nusantara. After over 70 years of Jakarta being Indonesia’s de facto and then de jure capital, the government made its first concrete steps…

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Producing Various and Sundry

When the Video Toaster was Punk AF

There’s a meme going around that generations should now be divided by “Too old to know Homestar Runner/at the right age to know and love Homestar Runner/too young to know Homestar Runner.” Admittedly, this is rather prejudiced towards knowing Homestar Runner, but seeing as I do (and seriously Stwong Bad, he’s the bee’s knees!), I don’t find this a problem. In part, because I think anyone at any age can discover the sparkling majesty of…

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