Various and Sundry

Boldy Going: First Contact Day, 2022

Okay, I’ll come back and expand on all of this, but for the Trek fans among you, there are several things to celebrate First is that season 3 of Picard is going to get the band back together as they close out a certain British Frenchman’s story: Next, they have a glorious 4K restoration of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Paramount+. If you’re not already itching to see it, wait ’til I explain a…

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Various and Sundry

Go Boldly, Any Way You Can

I’m working on some more writing this week, so it felt like time to share this: In my own series, Rogue Tyger, the characters refer to an “FTL drive,” but they also talk about “jumps” so you can deduce that ships in the ‘Tygerverse’ use a form of jump drive. Visually, it’s probably best been represented with the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, but a major inspiration for how the drive works and the variations…

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Writing

Where do Ideas come from? David Lynch Edition

The post from the other week about how hard hobbies are to schedule time for made me think of something I recently saw regarding how to generate ideas… and from a man generally known for having some out-of-the-box type ideas: David Lynch. As many of you might know, I love using Workflowy, including for capturing ideas. I mean, I love the habit of always carrying around an old-school notebook to jot things down in –and…

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Various and Sundry

John Hodgman, John Cleese, and Some Great Conversation

Thanks to Workflowy, I have notes jotted down going back over a decade. When people mention a book, a film, a game, et cetera, I add it to a section called “Stuff to Check Out.” That section includes an almost inexhaustible supply of articles and random videos (different from films) I make note of to check out sometime in the future. Well, clearly I need check out stuff a bit more frequently because this comes…

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Various and Sundry

“It’s Trek Jim, but not as we know it.”

I’m well overdue to add to my Star Trek rankings even though there’s no end in sight for new series and new seasons coming out of the franchise making updated rankings something of a Sisyphean task. Not only that, I fully plan to continue adding “viewing guides” like I did for Enterprise, for people who want to boldly explore a Star Trek series or introduce someone to it: all without being bogged down in a…

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Various and Sundry

Shipping Ships and How Long Said Ships Ship

From the same folks who had the piece on the airline industry I posted back in January comes another illuminating piece about the container ships that dominate shipping via the oceans these days. One notion I found especially interesting was the one that posited that “perfect” systems –by which I read systems that are optimized as perfectly as factors allow– can be more susceptible to issues than imperfect –or non-optimized systems. That’s not necessarily an…

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Various and Sundry

Historical Gold from the Silver Screen

As I’ve mentioned various times, my dad made sure we saw many of the classic and not so classic films from bygone ages. I mean, I’ve seen pre-Russian Revolution films using stop-action animation of insects for crying out loud! Now, besides such curiosities and rattling good stories, these films provided de facto period pieces: they were recording the here and now of an era long past –in human terms– with details quite unknown to me.…

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