Category: Pop Culture
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The Root of the Internet
My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64. The next was Hypertalk on a Mac. Hypercard was the beginning of a two decade career making multimedia (the term for audio-visual interactive experiences from 1990-2005ish). This video does a fine job of capturing the concepts behind Hypercard and the types of hippies that spawned…
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The Unstoppable War Machine
Did the producers at Netflix celebrate when the current U.S. President declared war (not war police action. Not police action, regime change. whatever) on Iran? You have to think one of them did, right? This is probably here nor there. The basic plotline: A soldier, still grieving the loss of his brother, takes part in…
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So long Star Trek, It’s been Nice.
I first watched Star Trek (now called The Original Series – TOS) with my father. He let me stay up to watch it. I was eight in 1966. We didn’t have a color TV then, so the crew’s yellow, red, and blue costumes and all the colorful blinking lights were lost on us. All those…
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So uh…
Wouldn’t that make Trump the Antichist? Military Leaders Say Iran War Is So Trump Can Bring About “Armageddon”
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Interstellar: Beautiful lunacy
Lunacy – from Late Latin lunaticus “moon-struck,” from Latin luna “moon” The yearning to reach the stars runs deep in Baby Boomers like myself. We grew up with the deep, ingrained, cultural mythos that we were headed for a moon base by the end of the 1970s and, after that the planets. Beyond that, the stars. But then the…
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Cordwainer Smith – The Sci-Fi Master You’ve Probably Never Heard of
When I was a teenager, my brother introduced me to a set of books by a writer with a goofy name, Cordwainer Smith. The first was a short story collection called The Instrumentality of Mankind, and the other was a novel called Norstrilia. My mind was blown. These stories, published in the 50s and 60s,…
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The Case for Astrology
Rational people will tell you that Astrology is bullshit. Astrology lovers will tell you it can be a profoundly accurate way to determine character traits in people and predict how they’ll respond to upcoming events. Rational people will respond with something like, the stars that make up the astrological signs are so far away their…