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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In case you forgot, today’s the day you can binge all 20 episodes of Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2. I, for one, am ready for the cockamamie plans.
I’m no stranger to warning people about the 17-year cicada, including on this blog, but alas, I never have done a video as wonderfully engaging as this one. If you are in one of the areas of the United States who has had (or is having) a surplus of cicadas, here’s something to be thankful for: they’re not this big. Probably.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Internet for the past few weeks. No, not in the “What has the Internet ever done for us?” kind of way. More in the “Do I like the current cut of the Internet’s jib?” kind of way. I mean, the whole AI obsession has not abated since I mused about it last year. So this video struck me when I came across it earlier this week. This led…
Father’s Day is coming up next month and some kids are probably debating what tools to get their dad, but I’m thinking of some of the tools he gave me …in part because a spirited discussion about what constitutes the best multi-tool or if any multi-tool can be good has erupted on a techie forum I frequent. We all got a pocket knife around age nine or ten, similar to a pocket knife my dad…
I am in the evidently crowded camp of people wary of many a trailer because they reveal too much of the plot. However, I do still enjoy trailers that give you the feel of the film journey they want you to take: you have an idea of the characters, the genres, the tropes to be honored, the tropes to be subverted, and the overall tone. These days, the trailers that pull this off are usually…