There’s several feature film ideas incubating in various corners of my brain from fanciful takes on family history to delving deeply into local history… and now I have another idea that anyone is welcome to take, but by gum I’ll have to write it if someone doesn’t: a tale about the wild zebras of Maryland. That’s right. Zebras. Creatures more familiar to African savannas and grasslands have found that the state just below the Mason-Dixon…
I’d previously pointed out that this week is the ALA’s annual Banned Book Week where you to can stick it to censors by reading books they feel would be better left unread or perhaps burnt to a cinder. There’s so many books to choose from, you may wonder where to start, so I’d suggest checking out the ALA’s list of most challenged books that goes back over a decade. You’re sure to find a book…
It took a little doing, but the corporate marketing machine has finally gone to warp in trying to create Event Days for Star Trek, with “First Contact Day” earlier this year and “Star Trek Day” honoring the first broadcast of the original series lo these 55 years ago. Case in point, this slick, satisfying montage: I’ll come back and update this post with some highlights, but in the meantime, here’s the schedule, conveniently staged for…
Nowadays, there are so many different types of timewasters online, but sometimes it’s nice to enjoy a classic. I had been reminded that one of the quintessential games of my generation, The Oregon Trail, was available to play for free online. It seems just and right to play it on a site dedicated to Oregon tourism. Enjoy and, remember, trade to get food and always get help crossing the river.
Evidently, this month had gotten away from me –at least in term of blog updates– so this is most definitely old news, but remember how I noted that Netflix was getting into podcasts? Well, apparently they’re getting into video games as well. Per the Vox/Recode article, they’re looking to start with games based on their existing properties (e.g. Stranger Things) and their hire of a former Oculus executive may bode a move towards virtual reality…
One of my favorite bits of acting training has been learning accents, not in the least because it dovetails nicely with some of the linguistic anthropology I studied back in the day. Really, it’s those times where deciding to study anthropology and theater really pay off. Despite such ardor, I couldn’t tell you when us treasonous colonials gave up our British accents, but Matt Soniak and the ever-intriguing site Mental Floss are here to fill…
Not for the first time and not for the last, my dayjob is undergoing a re-organization. That means that, not only have I had many conversations with people who are changing jobs or looking for new ones, but it’s an opportune time to examine what the heck I’m doing — and invariably here in the U.S., that seems to bring up questions of “the dream job.” I’ve written about this multiple times on this site,…
What better way to kick off the work week with a theory of creativity including why it doesn’t occur at work as much?
The podcast hills may soon be alive with the sound of Netflix. That’s what I’m gleaning from this Bloomberg article about the new Netflix executive in charge of podcasts. N’Jeri Eaton comes to Netflix by way of Apple and NPR. An award-winning storyteller, she has roots in documentary filmmaking, something near and dear to many a DC filmmaker. While that’s all cool, the big surprise from the article for me was that not only that…
It could be the parts of the web where I roam, but I’ve been reading a lot more about privacy, whether it’s Apple’s recent efforts to make their iOS more inherently private (see pieces in Bloomberg and The Verge) or the growing rumblings of government regulation (see pieces in CNBC and in Recode/Vox). By virtue of simply being online, all of us have been inducted into one or more Big Data Mining ecosystems whereby not…