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Gadgetology Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Still Trekkin’, still talkin’

1 min read

This past weekend was the third annual (annual!) TrekTalks telethon, benefitting the Hollywood Food Coalition, and once again I was pushing the buttons that made the whole thing happen. And man, did a whole thing happen – just look at the numbers (as of a couple of days later when I’m writing this):

TrekTalks total

I could be mistaken, but I think that’s the best total yet for any of these events. That’s a lot of meals. That’s a good reason to sweat the details and add another day of live TV to the CV. … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Serious Stuff Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Trekkin’ and Talkin’ Times Two

2 min read

I’m still reeling a bit a day later, but this time yesterday as I write this, we were a little over halfway through the second annual TREKTalks event benefitting the Hollywood Food Coalition. HoFoCo is lucky to count among its membership John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox of Enterprise fame) and David Livingston (who has more Star Trek directorial credits than anyone else who’s directed Star Trek, and was also a producer on everything from The Next Generation forward). Add to the mix Bill Smith and Dan Davidson of the Trek Geeks Podcast, John Champion at Roddenberry Podcasts, and between all of these people you have this vast collective Rolodex of Star Trek actors and creatives, past and present. For year two, we added Yvette Blackmon of the Syfy Sistas both behind the scenes and as a panelist, and Bonnie Gordon (the voice of Star Trek: Prodigy’s ship’s computer) as co-host, and took what we learned from year one, and raised over $106,000 for a good cause.

I’m a really tiny part of this because, you know, if all these other folks don’t have the contacts and make the content that they do, I don’t have anyone to put on the screen for eight hours. My job is to make sure I don’t screw up any of their hard work, and to try to make it look like something. … Read more

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Funny Stuff Television & Movies

The unchanging playbook of the fandom menace

So I was looking for something and stumbled upon a directory of scans of a certain influential (and rather infamous) Doctor Who fanzine; I don’t remember when or where I got these. But… I wanted to show y’all something.

I chuckle (and sigh heavily) at “news sources” like Nerdrotic, Doomcock, Wegotthiscovered, etc. etc., all claiming to have inside scoops that a given show’s showrunner and/or star is being shown to the door, usually with some added insinuation that the reason no one else is reporting this is because it’s being done under a veil of secrecy, and (insert clickbait YouTuber of your choice) somehow has the inside scoop. And then they have to backpedal and cough up some B.S. story about how Alex Kurtzman or Kathleen Kennedy is being kept on board to “reassure shareholders” or some other such unlikely codswallop. The same claims are repeatedly made of Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker too, which is why this discovery of ’80s ‘zine scans was all the more delicious.

Behold as “DWB” – a.k.a. Doctor Who Bulletin – self-pwns in the space of two years, waging a campaign against Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner, and then reporting his ouster, and then having to admit that he’s not going anywhere. It’s kind of delicious. You can click on it to zoom in.

DWB montage

Now the same cycle repeats itself, except it happens at the speed of the internet.

Remember when fandom was about liking something instead of hating it? Sigh.… Read more

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Serious Stuff Television & Movies

Remembering Aron Eisenberg

1 min read

I’m still trying to process the news that Aron Eisenberg passed last night. The evolution of his Ferengi character, Nog, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a lot of personal meaning for me, as I think was the case for anyone who’s ever had to stand toe-to-toe with someone and say “give me a chance to prove I’m more than what you think I am.” … Read more

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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Of styro-stuffing, set-building, and starting to feel like home

1 min read

When we toured the house in Utah that we’ve wound up renting, the first glimpse of the basement – an area as big as the living room upstairs, but in a decidedly unfinished state without even so much as drywall in most places – there was talk of contractors coming and going for the first several weeks that we were there until the room was done.

Having come from a house that had, for several years, had bare concrete floors, I took one look and said we’d take it as-is. I saw exposed beams and rafters from which lights could be hung, places where a camera or two could be mounted, unfinished walls where I could put acoustic foam to make the space a better recording studio, and the floor was nothing new to me. I saw the studio that this space could be. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Heroes and Trek and Icons and Trek

1 min read

Greetings from Utah! I know it’s been a while since any blogging took place here, but things have been…busy. And crazy. The last blog entry here was in May. That was before the move to Utah…and sadly, it’s still before I’ve found even so much as a semi-permanent address in Utah. Me and the kids and the critters are now in week three in a hotel room – a very expensive proposition to be sure, and one that’s undoubtedly more expensive than finding a place. Other factors, however, have fought against landing even so much as a tiny apartment, so here we remain for at least another day or two. (I hope that’s all it is.) The room contains two queen size beds, a bathroom, and a television. It also now contains two bored kids and five cooped-up cats and one confused lazy dog. This is a recipe for a pressure-cooker environment in which everyone gets sick of everyone else rapidly. One of the few saving graces: we’ve discovered southern Utah TV station KCSG, a flagship station for the Heroes & Icons Network. … Read more

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Home Base

The Packening III: The Packening Continues

2 min read

As is generally well known at this point, once my house was mine alone (and my kids), I started taking great strides – well, as many as I could afford on a tight budget – to make the place my own in a way it hadn’t been before. When I was married, there was a kind of clenched-teeth agreement (or at least it seemed that way to me) that, since I wasn’t going to suddenly become a different person and shed all of my interests and hobbies, those interests and hobbies were not to be visible beyond the confines of the room I was graciously granted as a sort of man cave. I never really worked out what was acceptable as decor in the rest of the house, because it quickly became a hoarder’s paradise. (And to be fair: we both contributed to that.) Once she was no longer in the house, I pretty much reversed that, not so much as an act of rebellion as an act of preserving my sanity in the early post-divorce days: once properly cleaned up, the house just seemed big and empty. A few lucky on-sale Hobby Lobby finds let me put my true colors on the walls.

Signs of the times

Signs of the Time Lords

When the Art Of Atari Poster Book came out, and I figured out Wal-Mart had frames all but ready-made for prints of that size for five bucks, well, things just kind of went from there.

Signs of Spacetime

Oh, and don’t forget the handful of arcade marquees that weren’t donated to Arkadia Retrocade.

Fantasy

How will all of this play out in Utah, where I’ll likely go from being a homeowner to a renter who’s forbidden to drive a nail into the wall? Believe it or not, there’s a solution in hand for this problem. I’ll cover that in a future post. Until then…all of my smaller wall hangings are ready to be hung on another wall.

Wall in a boxRead more

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Home Base

The Packening II: Also The Packening

1 min read

Some further late-night packening ensued last night, and just as quickly abated because I was kidless and had an opportunity to actually sleep. But let’s look, won’t you?

Reference books

Sci-Fi reference paperbacks (small): “If I see further,” Isaac Newton is often paraphrased as saying, “it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” What you see here is just a very small portion of a pretty healthy selection of non-fiction reference books concerning the making of fictional universes, along with critiques and so on. These have been, and continue to be, incredibly valuable resources that inform my own writings on these very shows and movies. And then there’s irascible-but-not-quite-lovable Harlan Ellison’s two groundbreaking volumes of television critique, both very well-worn. (In case you can’t tell, all of these books have been read and re-read to death.)

These are just the small-format paperbacks. There’s a lot more where these came from. A lot. A site like this doesn’t spring up, unbidden, out of nowhere – it has a heap of source material.

Hopefully you’re enjoying this trip through, if nothing else, my bookshelves.… Read more