- Giant prehistoric krakens may have sculpted self-portraits using ichthyosaur bones. “McMenamin anticipates that this theory will be met with skepticism.” Gee, ya think?
- Are DVD “special features” already a quaint relic of the past? Certainly, they seem to have quickly become a premium feature only.
- Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet [via]
- Typewriter cocktail machine [via]
- And finally, If Arthur Dent Was In ‘The Dark Knight’ Instead of Harvey Dent
funny
Wednesday various
- Obama’s Kickstarter Campaign to Solve the Debt [via]
- On a more serious note, an interesting look inside Kickstarter itself.
- Moore’s Law may soon be broken. Whither the Singularity? [via]
- If Male Superheroes Posed Like Wonder Woman. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but…well, that there is part of the problem, isn’t it? [via]
- And finally, Matthew Cheney revisits the movie Stand By Me:
When I was ten, Stand By Me felt like the apex of realism because I’d never encountered a character who seemed so much like me as Gordie did. Twenty-five years later, it feels real for opposite reasons: for its naked artificiality. It gets right the way we shore up our fading memories by turning them into stories, by setting a soundtrack to them, by finding just the right words for every conversation and just the right lessons for every walk down the railroad tracks.
Wednesday various
- Scott Tobias on Fast Five:
Fast Five may be lizard-brain escapism—and there’s something unsettling about how it lays waste to Rio’s desperately poor favelas—but nonsense this well-orchestrated is a rare and precious thing.
- Genevieve Valentine on Priest:
Basically, Priest exists as an example of what happens when a team of creative people all get a concussion at once.
- John Seavey on Smallville — and, more specifically, why it is not Doctor Who:
And then, the next night, I watched “The Doctor’s Wife”. And while I won’t spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven’t seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn’t. Instead of being an “epic game-changer” that really doesn’t change anything, not even really the things it’s obligated to change…this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.
Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It’s never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It’s a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That’s why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That’s why it’s still going and why I don’t think it’ll ever stop. Because it’s a show that can do anything…and one that will do anything.
- And speaking of shows that promise but don’t deliver on change, Zach Handlen on House:
It’s like a game, really. Each year, the writers have to come up with some new way to trick us into thinking that the show is moving on. And then, come next season, they have to find some way to undo all those changes, because in House-land, we can have the illusion of growth but not growth itself.
Everything I’m reading leads me to think that my decision to quit on the show at the start of this year was wrong only in that it came too late.
- And finally, Existential Star Wars [via]:
Wednesday various
- The end of an era: the last typewriter factory in the world shuts its doors. [via]
- How food breaks sway the decisions of judges] [via]
- Comics re-imagined as secondhand paperbacks [via]
- “The closure of the Japan-based factory that has the monopoly on production of a tape crucial to the TV and film industry has Hollywood insiders scrambling to cope with the shortage.” [via]
- And finally, an exclusive interview with the writer of Fast Five [via]
Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of “Fast Five”
Tuesday various
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