Under my desk right now, I have a stack of about 52 unread magazines, and when I say “about”, I mean I just crawled under my desk, did a shoddy job of counting, and am not confident enough to give an exact number. But there are 52 of them. I finished the September 2014 edition […]
Earlier this week, I was asked by someone visiting the Bay Area how realistic the HBO show Silicon Valley is. Well, I just checked my site analytics and surprisingly, only 10% of my website visitors live in California*, so I’m going to pretend like the rest of you are deeply interested in my opinion because you […]
Last November, I saw Interstellar in theaters and was surprisingly pleased by the use of physics to drive the plot. It takes creativity to turn time dilation into an interesting part of human relationships, and it takes even more to make it meaningful and compelling on-screen. The Martian, based on the novel by Andy Weir, goes further […]
In this age of binge-watching, I continue to be bad at watching TV shows with any haste. I’m actually quite proud that Julie and I finished watching all 4 seasons and 75 episodes of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) in about 3 years. Although I’m about 6 years too late, I have to talk about it. If […]
I once read that lists are a cheap way to write blog posts. They are easy to write because instead of composing 1000 words that flow together, you just have to write, say, 5 200 word snippets that fit together. From a writing perspective, this is true, but I have been thinking about this blog […]
I recently have been engrossed by storytelling. Finding stories everywhere has been awesome. My fascination started with joining a book club about 2 years ago. Before book club, I hadn’t read fiction since high school, and most of that was mandatory. In between, I read various nonfiction and enjoyed the epiphanies and moments of wonder. […]
Christopher Nolan has directed and written a lot of enjoyable movies: Memento, The Prestige, Inception, and all of the new Batman movies. If you have loved his previous movies but are skeptical about him making a space movie, I can assure you that Interstellar has that same Nolan touch should you know and love it. Interstellar is set in the not […]
Coming in at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, I was excited to see X-Men: Days of Future Past. Although it’s not part of the Marvel Studios-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, which I have become obsessed with through Marvel’s Agents of Shield, this storyline is particularly famous in comic book lore, where Kitty Pryde sends herself back in time from a […]
I have had a painful move out of psychology. Since I did research while I was still in school, I considered myself reasonably critical of experiments, basically fluent in psychological phenomenon, and quite up-to-date on recent findings. After I left school, I tried to keep in touch primarily through science writing, which I have actually […]
Before yesterday, I had never seen any giant monster disaster movies. Godzilla, King Kong, and other Kaiju never quite seemed appealing to me, but Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim seemed like a proper summer epic to see. In the trailer, giant monsters and giant robots beat each other mercilessly, and if that alone is enough to get you excited, you […]