Category: Media

New at GeekyDomain: Shaver Mystery and Congruent Insanity

Over at my new favorite arena, GeekyDomain, I got the chance to dive deep into one of the great literary mysteries in fandom, the Shaver Mystery stories published in postwar Amazing Stories magazine. At first, it seems like the tale of a harmless nut who happened to be able to turn his hallucinations into a good story. But it grows into something baffling and just a little bit unsettling. Lemuria isn’t the only place with monsters roaming the landscape, it turns out, but the demons in our collective consciousness might be the scariest of all!

Click through for bonus content:

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You Gotta Fight For Right To Anything

Well, it’s revolution time in America again! What took it so long?

Around the nation, the Black Lives Matter movement has inflamed the nation and swept around the Earth. While I don’t hold out hope that much permanent will be gained, let me go on the record as saying I support it 100%, and Civil Rights for anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pictured in the banner: Graffiti in the Seattle “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” summing up the national attitude right now.

sitting_calmly

But in the meanwhile, I’m scrambling to select topics in my usual venues that are both on-point for the clients’ interests and relevant to today’s headlines. For instance, did you know that geek culture was founded on Civil Rights activism? From Star Trek to The Munsters to Night of the Living Dead, promotion of equal rights for all races, genders, beliefs, and lifestyles has been at the root of our most cherished institutions of sci-fi and fantasy fiction.

UPDATE: Actor Tim Russ gives his thoughts on what makes Star Trek tick, points out exactly the same parts I do without saying the phrase “Civil Rights.”

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Your CoronaVirus Reading and Gaming Update

New posts at GeekyDomain, in which I give up trying to avoid talking about CoronaVirus and face it head on:

Things CoronoaVirus Has Taught Me About Apocalyptic / Dystopian Sci-Fi

Now that I’ve seen what a real doomsday scenario looks like, I’ve drawn some comparison with classic sci-fi apocalyptic tropes. Those Mad Max biker gangs have to go! Ditto the heroic and adventurous daring-do; our greatest quest is for toilet paper. Also, you can stick anarcho-capitalism where the corona don’t shine. However, 12 Monkeys and Stephen King’s The Stand called the shots right on the mark.

If you’re ready for my characteristic dark humor to take the edge off the CoronaVirus pandemic, head there. I’m told that I’m good at this kind of thing.

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A Content Marketing Career: Expectations vs Reality

Over at 123ish.com, my satellite client, I’ve been asked to start talking about my own line of work. So I detailed how I accidentally became a content marketer for the web starting from a childhood spent reading books. Then I tackled a detail within content marketing for the web, with the top SEO factors that have nothing to do with the content.

Media changed everything over the last two decades, and it’s still changing everything faster than we can track it. In another century, I might have been a journalist, a historian, a columnist, or a hack scrivener for pulp fiction rags. I kind of regret missing the boat on that last one. But I am in this century, and so I am a content marketer.

That SEO post fits into my grand scheme of blog-rant TED-talks about how everyone overthinks SEO. Expect more to come, because there is no end of delusions about this pursuit.

 

What is Internet Filtering?

DISCLAIMER: This is an old post taken from my previous geeky technology blog. It is preserved here for hysterical raisins (it was popular at the time).

What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our point is that (a) filtering doesn’t work, and (b) if honest, law-abiding citizens find Internet filtering interfering with a legitimate task, it should not only be their right, but their duty, to subvert the faulty measure.

This information will also prove valuable to those within schools, businesses, and other organizations that filter Internet usage. Although, we of course can’t be held responsible if you get fired or expelled for using this information. And we can’t believe we just had to write that, but not everybody reading this is living in a free country.

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A Homage to the Typo Fairy

As texting on mobile devices continues to take the world by storm, more and more people are confronted with the complications of using an interface to communicate. And of course, cursing themselves for the mistakes they make.

Is this typed correctly so far? Let’s run a spellcheck: No, the word “texting” hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, nor has the word “speelcheck” for that matter. Whoops, we mean “spellcheck”. See, now how do we tell the difference between an omission in the dictionary and a fumble on the part of our fat, clumsy fingers? Continue reading “A Homage to the Typo Fairy”

Entertainment you might have missed at Geeky Domain

I’ve been a busy little penguin, inspired by this early spring.

First off, it’s the 100th anniversary of the coining of the word “robot,” in a Czechoslovakian stage play called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” written in 1920, in which robots take over the world.

To mark the anniversary, I pick out the villain AIs from film, gaming, and one Harlan Ellison short story that nobody’s forgetting anytime soon. While I am still rolling my eyes at predictions of AI taking over and shaking my fist at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel for leading doomsday cults, I have to acknowledge that when evil AI is done right in fiction, it makes for an especially chilling villain.

And then…

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A Look Back at the History Behind the Firefox Web Browser

Today, Chrome is the web browser that dominates the online market, by virtue of being the home browser for Android, which dominates the mobile market. Hooray. #AnyoneButMicrosoft.

But before that, the web’s browser was Firefox, which is still pretty solid on the desktop. Firefox is the progeny of Mozilla, and the story of Mozilla’s most successful product, the Firefox web browser, goes even further back into the history of the web itself. Interestingly, Firefox’s lineage brings it surprisingly close to other web browsers that it competed with – especially the web browser with a big, blue ‘e’ for its logo…

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New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.

 

GeekyDomain Round-Up: The Witcher, Green Gifts 4 Geeks, and Sci-Fi Novels That Need An Adaptation

It’s come to this: I’m so busy working for other people’s sites that I can’t get the chance to blog on my own, so I have to do digests. Probably for the best. I’m on three posts per week at Geeky Domain now, so the pace is getting spunky.

“If You Liked The Witcher, You Might Also Like…” explores the genre of the occult detective. Revisit Kolchak, The X-Files, and a cameo from Vincent Price because I’ll take any opportunity to insert him.

You see in the banner on that image that for a goof, I compared the “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” song to “Bravely Bold Sir Robin…” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Right after that, we lost Terry Jones, who co-directed same for the Python troupe. Sad loss, and another Python down.

“Gifts for Green Geeks” is a gift list for responsible geeks who want to carry on their geekery while adhering to a new standard of reducing their carbon footprint. Gives me a chance to continue my contrarian climate-advocacy views from old classics like “If Anybody Cared About Climate Change, We Could Have Solved It By Now.”

“Five Sci-Fi Novels Just Waiting To Be Adapted To Film” is a nerdrage rant about how Hollywood isn’t adapting anything quality anymore, get off ma’ lawn and all. But each of those five sci-fi classics I picked are all works with a strong argument for being potential box-office champions. We can do that or we can try to retread Spider-Man for another Uncle Ben death scene. Your call, Hollywood!

“Time is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans!” — John Lennon