Luxander, one of our awesome bloggers at FtB, is trying to raise a few dollars to start a video gaming channel (in case you don’t recall where Lux is blogging, they are a co-blogger with Zinnia Jones.) They’re requesting a pittance for what should be a unique startup.
I chipped in a bit, although to be honest, I’m just hoping Lux will remember me when they’re rolling in all that PewDiePie money.
All day long, my social media have been pinging with jubilant people repeating the message that a new Star Trek series is coming out in 2017. Now don’t get me wrong — I was once a 9 year old boy who begged his parents to let him stay up late to watch Star Trek — but I felt a despairing groan deep inside me.
Let it die.
The series came out 51 years ago. We don’t need another rehash, reboot, repeat, whatever of the same stories. It’s not as if this is the only science fiction future we can imagine, it’s not even as if this was the best framework for telling stories ever. Inspire me with something new. Do something brash and wild and surprising.
I know, this is commercial television, which lives for the predictable and bland, the lowest common denominator that will draw in the largest audience. I will point out two things: 1) in its time, Star Trek was that weird wild card that network executives didn’t understand, and 2) now its virtue to television producers is that it is an entirely known quantity with a built in audience, and is therefore the precise opposite of what good science fiction ought to be.
This thread is for general discussions of arts, crafts, music, movies and hobbies. Caine is your curator.
This patent was filed 94 years ago.
Surely by now they’re in mass production. Where can I buy one? I’d kind of like to retire to the ocean floor today.
It’s only a few days before Halloween, and just now I find out how easy it is to make giant tentacles for my house?
I have no time now. Maybe I could decorate for Christmas, instead.
Finally, after a long, exhausting day, I get home to discover that someone has revealed The Truth™ of humankind’s evolutionary destiny.
I, for one, look forward to our aquatic, tentacled great-great-great grandchildren.
I also look forward to going to bed now.
A cup of coffee, and the haka.
He was a mechanic, and his hobby was drawing and painting, so Renaissance paintings recreated with auto mechanics would have been perfect.
Although he’d probably be saying all these guys need a shave and a haircut.
Paul Kix explains the essence of the Midwest — he starts with the inevitable discussion of the movie Fargo, which is how most outsiders are exposed to our exotic inscrutable ways.
What Fargo nails, in other words, is Midwestern Nice, the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace that appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.
Read the whole thing. I’ve been living here for 15 years now, and I’m only sufficiently familiar with the culture to be simultaneously entranced and horrified. It’s even: I sometimes seem to shock the natives with my blunt and awkward ways, too.
To be fair, though, at least I had a transition. My mother was born in Minnesota, and her family were all tried and true Scandinavian Minnesotans, so I moved here as a sort of mongrel Midwestern/Western hybrid. I also see a lot of my mother in that essay: she’d never say an unkind word about anybody, and tends to be quiet rather than snarky. Not that she’s unaware, though — she always knows exactly what’s going on.
I always notice these things at the last minute, and I should pay more attention to all the excitement that goes on around Morris. I just learned that the Prairie Gate Literary Festival starts tomorrow.
We hope you will be able to join us for the 5th Annual Prairie Gate Literary Festival this weekend, October 23-24. Events start on Friday night in Briggs Library with a reading by Hugo and Nebula award nominee Emma Bull at 7pm. Saturday morning sign up for a writing workshop with one or two of the writers and then stick around for lunch with them (included in the registration fee). Saturday afternoon starts with a panel discussion/Q&A session with the authors and is followed by a reading from YA writer Eric Smith at 2:30pm, Translator Ebba Segerberg will share her work at 4:15pm. After dinner stop by at 8pm for a reading by Minnesota Book Award nominee John Hildebrand and poet Vandana Khanna. All readings are free and will be held in Briggs Library.
Whoa, Emma Bull is going to be in town? I know where I’ll be on Friday evening.
