Based on several standing meeting cancellations and trip pics on social media, I have deduced that Spring Break is in the air for many people. And Spring Break often means travel. And travel often means reading material. And such reading material is often… pulpy. So thanks to Open Culture, I now know that the Internet Archive has thousands of issues of the pulp magazines available for your reading pleasure. And now so do you. Use…
A few years ago, writer, media consultant, and avid Stoic, Ryan Holiday, decided to open a bookstore with his wife. What with being a writer who is very into philosophy and how one lives one’s life (seriously check out some of his books), he decided to share some thoughts about what he learned from running the bookstore. The 23 lessons are on the shorter side, but are thought-provoking and often link to longer pieces that…
On Saturday, I linked to an article about actor Michael Dorn and his long-running portrayal of the character of Worf across multiple Star Trek series and movies. Last week, the third episode of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season gave him a glorious (formal) introduction that is already spawning memes across the Interwebs. In fact, the whole season promises to give us a measure of closure with the TNG era on many fronts. There’s the main…
I never wanted a Next Generation (TNG) season eight out of Star Trek: Picard as many fans did, but I did want more satisfying closure with the Next Generation characters than was offered by Nemesis. With that in mind, I’ve enjoyed this latest and reportedly last season of Picard, still underway. As Dylan Roth explores for Polygon, perhaps no character deserves closure more than that of the quintessentially non-Merry man: Worf. As a huge Deep…
Going from fabled fictional cities last week to real cities this week, I went further in Afar and found this list of 11 lost cities now found that you can visit. I’m pretty sure there’s more than a few that you want to add to your bucket lists. Mind you, I still want to go see the Gruffalo.
Longtime visitors will note that I do post about Tolkien from time to time, even if I’m not the prime Tolkien fanatic in the family. I couldn’t even tell you who the first lord of Dol Amroth was, which I’m pretty sure is the level of detail one needs to be a Colbert-level Tokien fanatic. If I were, I would surely know the specific countries and landmarks Tolkien thought of in our world which he…
I continue to talk to people online and offline about machine learning and the current zeal for AI doing creative work and one of the writers, Chuck Wendig, who I linked to last month (and who, unsurprisingly, does not find AI-authored writing as a wave of the future to be surfed). One of his posts from last week drills down to one of the reasons I find the AI creativity craze so annoying: the fact…
Hey, if you think that’s a startling headline, the original title of the article by Cory Doctorow in Wired is not-safe-for-work. But it does touch on something you may have suspected or outright observed about social media sites and their lifecycle of desperately needing content and eventually not being that useful, but obnoxiously necessary. It may motivate you to think rather unsociable thoughts. In any case, I found it interesting and in line with many…
Common refrains I hear from sci-fi fans are both “I want the aliens to be more alien” (often when referring to certain film or TV aliens) and “You have to check this out: the aliens were really alien” (often when referring to certain books). The latter sentiment makes sense, because when you start considering how evolution might have taken place on other words, the bilaterally symmetrical humanoids that dominate much of cinematic science fiction seem…
I’m interested in the future of TV in an industry-watcher kind of way and, like many of you, my wallet also has a keen interest in what happens next, because it’s very much involved. Peter Kafka and Rani Molla over at Recode (part of Vox) delve into where the industry is going. Two big takeaways? First, the huge spending sprees investing in new content are at an end. Second, everyone is expecting some consolidation of…