Category: Pop Culture
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Project Hail Mary: A clinic in screen adaptations
I read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary over a year ago and loved it. I loved The Martian and PHM had the feel of a sequel. All the elements that worked in The Martian are there—an isolated main character (Ryland Grace in PHM, Mark Watney in The Martian) with no game plan for survival up…
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Punching Angels
2010’s Legion, directed by Scott Stewart and starring Paul Bettany, is just a god-awful movie. How’s that for a subtle opening line? It’s not for want of a cast of talented actors. Though some in that squad are less than spectacular in this film, they’ve proven themselves worthy in other roles. Paul Bettany, cast as…
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Man on Man Violence
They would be funny if they weren’t terrifying. They would be sad if they weren’t monstrous. We would have sympathy for them if they didn’t show, at every turn, that they don’t have a sympathetic bone in their bodies. Today’s topic is the Manosphere, as brought to you by Louis Theroux in his new documentary,…
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Enshittification, Episode 1
This evening I was looking for a link to a simple web developers’ resource, a listing of all the native html elements. I know a listing like this exists, though I haven’t had to look for one in a few years. So, I entered the following search term into Google: “full listing of native html…
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The Face of Evil
A chess match, played by two brilliant but flawed opponents. Two narcissists hoping to manipulate the other into helping them achieve their own ends. For Hermann Göring, the goal is to cheat the hangman’s noose and show the world that the Nazi Reich was a just cause. For Dr. Douglas Kelly, the goal was to…
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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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Gorillaz – The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God
Simply beautiful.
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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”