Weekend Reads: "Star Trek: Lower Decks," Truly Unique Movies, Purity Culture, Web Nostalgia
Recommended weekend reading materials for March 6, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
When Geoffrey Reiter writes about sci-fi and theology, you better believe I’m going to read it. For instance, his recent review of the Star Trek: Lower Decks animated series.
Because Star Trek: Lower Decks has situated itself as a descendant of TNG specifically, its format generates some dissonance. As a comedy, it highlights its characters’ faults and foibles, though Roddenberry wanted those kept at a minimum. As an adult comedy, it focuses on flaws that may be pronounced or significant — not dark ’n’ gritty, necessarily, but flaws that, if immature at times, are targeted toward mature audiences. And it thus raises an important question: what do “little” sins — peccadilloes, to use a quaint term—look like in a utopian environment?
I thoroughly enjoyed Lower Decks, which provided me with plenty of chuckles mixed in with the steady stream of TNG references. Suffice to say, I’m definitely looking forward to season two.
Another streaming service enters the fray: Paramount Plus replaces CBS All Access and combines the archives of CBS, Nickelodeon, and MTV (to name a few) with Miramax and Paramount Pictures. The Polygon Staff have picked 11 of the best movies that are available on the new service, which launched earlier this week.
Related: When I see the increasing balkanization of the streaming service market, I often find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with this sentiment.
David Sims has compiled a list of 30 movies that provide truly unique movie-watching experiences.
The word unique has to be one of the most overused descriptors in show business; if every movie that got touted as one-of-a-kind by its marketing team actually was, there’d be no further complaints about Hollywood creativity. But every once in a while, I’ll have a cinematic experience that feels genuinely unprecedented, when a work plays with the medium and its modes of storytelling in ways I didn’t think possible. The 30 movies I’ve gathered below — all of which are available to watch online — are singular, whether they’re experimental documentaries, visionary works of animation, or labyrinthine epics. Each is unforgettable, and a reminder of cinema’s potential to flout narrative convention, subvert visual traditions, and find new ways to express timeless themes.
Sims’ list is incredibly diverse, spanning genres and styles from arthouse and experimental to documentary and comic book adaptations.
In her book, Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality, Rachel Joy Welcher explores how “purity culture” failed the Church.
When secular society framed sex as a need or right, purity culture said the same thing — at least to men — and taught a generation of women that they existed to fulfill this need. When secular society suggested that one could not live a meaningful life without sexual activity, purity culture said the same thing but went the extra step of dooming countless unmarried, celibate Christians to second-tier status. Not for being unfaithful to traditional Christian sexual ethics, but because their status made them unfaithful to marriage and thus sex itself.
The Kings of Leon will be the first band to release an entire album as a non-fungible token (NFT).
The Grammy-winning rock band’s new album, “When You See Yourself,” will release March 5 via streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, but also as a NFT on YellowHeart, a streaming platform based on blockchain. The album will mark the first time that fans can purchase an album on blockchain the same day as its traditional release on other platforms.
The Verge offers an explainer of what NFTs are, how they work, and what they mean for artists and consumers. As is the case with most things blockchain and cryptocurrency-related, there are parts of this that seem really cool and exciting from a technology perspective, and other parts that seem really absurd and wasteful from a human perspective.
Meet the vocal coach who works with metal singers to help them develop their blood-curdling screams.
It’s not opera, but metal singing is a seriously athletic activity and has only become more so as its vocals have grown more extreme, even if its fashion sense has not. As classically trained singer and actress Melissa Cross — the “Queen of Scream” — relates in the video at the top, she first became a metal vocal coach when a producer friend called her in dismay: the singers he was recording couldn’t get through a session without coughing blood.
As services like Google and Facebook know more and more about us, it comes as no surprise that privacy is becoming a more important issue for many. Look to more companies to release pro-privacy products, like Brave, which is working on a privacy-focused search engine.
Brave Search, the company insists, will respect people's privacy by not tracking or profiling those using the service. And it may even offer a way to end the debate about search engine bias by turning search result output over to a community-run filtering system called Goggles.
Via Daring Fireball. Although it hasn’t entirely replaced Chrome as my default browser, I’ve nevertheless been really impressed by Brave — read my review of the Brave 1.0 release — and the company’s other endeavors. (For instance, Brave makes it easy to support bloggers like yours truly via the “Brave Rewards” program.)
Neal Agarwal offers a glimpse of what several popular websites (e.g., Apple, Amazon, CNN, YouTube) looked like 10 years ago. (Agarwal has several other neat little projects, including one that shows you how fast you’re traveling through the universe and one that lets you spend Bill Gates’ money.) Via 1440.
The recent landing of the Mars rover Perseverance is remarkable, and so is the story of the woman who became the mission’s flight director.
The landing only marked the beginning of Perseverance’s stop on Mars, but playing a leadership role in the historic mission to find life there was decades in the making for Trujillo. Her dreams of reaching space and wanting to understand the universe came as a young person in Cali, Colombia. Her parents were divorcing and as a 17-year-old, she decided to go to the United States, arriving with only $300 and not speaking any English. She worked housekeeping jobs to pay for her studies and later joined NASA in 2007.
If this isn’t an American success story, then I don’t know what is.
Finally, a random discovery in 1936 rewrote California history — until it was revealed as a hoax 40 years later.
The find “may remake California history,” the newspaper trumpeted. And it did. California history books changed to reflect the possibility that Drake, not Portolá, was the first non-native person to sail through the Golden Gate. Bolton was pleased as punch.
There were whispers, though, that something wasn’t right. It was all very strange, almost too serendipitous. A few experts in Elizabethan English said the writing didn’t match the spelling or semantics of the era. A Princeton chemist doubted the metallurgic makeup of the plate matched anything produced in the 1500s, and he wrote a private letter to UC President Robert Sproul expressing his concerns. Sproul apparently kept the letter a secret.
From the Blog
Hong Kong Express and Dream Catalogue are two of the biggest names in the vaporwave genre. The latter is ceasing operations as a record label, and Hong Kong Express’ latest album is one of the label’s final releases.
L.Y.F bears little resemblance to what most would probably consider vaporwave. (Check out Black Banshee’s latest release, instead, for some more “traditional” vaporwave.) Instead, Hong Kong Express’ latest has much more in common with Russo’s 2814 collaboration as well as “Speak to Me,” the song that he recorded for the Ghost in the Shell movie trailer back in 2016. In other words, think slow-building, highly atmospheric compositions that have a very cinematic aspect to them as opposed to chopped up and slowed down samples of ’80s city pop and ’90s R&B grooves.
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