Various and Sundry

A.I., Being Online, & Finding Your Tribe

Somewhat derailed by yesterday’s news, I pushed this post until today, but I wanted to offer a counter-balance to last’s week’s video tearing apart the tech industry mania of about AI with a thoughtful one from a different Adam. The video could be divided into two parts, one about AI and the other about connecting with people online (or the difficulty therein). And while there may not be a through-line at first glance, it flows…

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Various and Sundry

“DALL-E: make me a tech bubble in the shape of AI.”

This isn’t the first post I’ve done about artificial intelligence. It isn’t even the first AI post involving Adam Conover, but given last week’s post about the future of TV and tech companies’ hand in it all, it felt right to revisit AI. Also, I posted about the possible tech bubble of AI all the way back in February, so it feels right to revisit. Enter Adam Conover and this interview with Ed Zitron from…

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Various and Sundry

Donald Duck’s Latest Challenge: Hot Ones

I had to bump the post I planned for today after seeing this, because, while I can’t say it’s the best episode of Hot Ones (I haven’t caught up since realizing posting about it this February), it’s everything you would hope it to be. As a reminder, Hot Ones is an interview show where host Sean Evans asks well-researched questions that often get insightful answers from celebrities, often actors, while they both eat chicken wings…

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Producing Various and Sundry

From “Future TV” to “Does TV Have a Future?”

One of the first tags I created here on the blog was “Future TV” which seemed to best sum up the various articles and such I was absorbing about what was sometimes called “Peak TV” and sometimes a new “Golden Age” of television. In hindsight, “the streaming wars” should have been coined as a nod to the far more fun “cola wars.” That’s because it became clear that Peak TV and the “wars” were over…

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Raves Various and Sundry

Vikings on Horseback… as Anime!

Given my name and the fact that I’m a cinemaniac, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy seeing Vikings on the big screen. I mean, all seven or nine of my regular readers know I like to post about Vikings. And my brother and I have a particular love of the Rohirrim from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (whose film versions aforementioned readers may recall are always somewhere in my list of 50…

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Various and Sundry

An August Time to Think About Rome

As it happens, I haven’t been thinking a lot about the Roman Empire recently, but I have finally gotten around to reading the Honor Harrington series… which draws inspiration from the Horatio Hornblower series. And Hornblower was a big fan of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, so it’s clear he thought about the Roman Empire a lot. And that’s as good a reason as any to put down what…

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Various and Sundry

Getting Medieval with Your Answers

I’ve previously shared videos from Wired’s long-running series of “[Topic] Support.” This is where they have an expert on a topic usually far removed from tech support giving short, definitive answers to various questions on said topic. I gotta do it again, because Dr. Armstrong covers a far-ranging series of questions in just under 20 minutes from the general (“why is it called the middle ages”) to ultra-specific knowledge about names of swords. And, of…

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Producing

A24: You Sunk my Hollywood Battleship!

If I had a dollar for every time I heard or read about major studios being too risk averse, I could fund feature films to my heart’s content… or could I? Films cost a lot of money, which is why there aren’t 147 major studios and, as one indie filmmaker friend of mine is wont to say, money isn’t a thing, it’s the thing. So how did such a small non-studio become such a major…

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