Weekend Reads: "Robotech," UFOs, "Braveheart," Gift of Gab (RIP), History's Greatest Hacks
Recommended weekend reading material for June 26, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
This one’s for longtime anime fans, especially those of us who grew up in the ‘80s: Funimation has announced a bunch of Robotech-related activity, including the first-ever release of all 85 episodes of seminal anime series on Blu-ray this fall (and they’ll be remastered in HD to boot).
Related: Robotech’s history is convoluted, to say the least.
I recently began rewatching Robotech with my kids. While some of the artwork and animation haven’t aged very well at all, transforming robots will never not be cool.
Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners has signed a production deal with Netflix.
Under the deal, Amblin is expected to produce at least two films a year for Netflix for an unspecified number of years. It is possible that Spielberg may even direct some of the projects. Netflix is expected to provide financing for some of these productions. That likely won’t include his next movie, an untitled, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story with Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams, which is expected to land at Universal.
The deal’s somewhat surprising in light of Spielberg’s past criticism of Netflix.
Speaking of Spielberg, I came across this Rolling Stone piece from 2017 espousing the virtues of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my favorite Spielberg movies.
You could argue that, while Spielberg would go on to make more notable works involving wonderment, aliens, families, paranoia and suburbia, respectively, there are few that distill everything that’s great about his filmmaking in such a pure, well-wrapped package. And seen four decades after it first hit theaters en masse, Close Encounters now feels like an incredibly pivotal American movie — the bridge between the intimate, grungy movies of the Seventies and the spectacular eye-candy blockbusters of the Eighties.
And speaking of close encounters, the U.S. government finally released a report on UFO activity, and their conclusion? UFOs remain a big mystery.
“The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP,” the report’s executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for “UFO” (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
You can read the government’s report for yourself right here.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez considers the ongoing influence of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart on American evangelicals and their approach to politics.
Braveheart wasn’t the most obvious choice for an inspirational Christian film. In an era predating computer-generated imagery, the film depicted violence on an unprecedented scale; many of the more than 1,800 extras ending up dismembered, impaled, or otherwise succumbing to a bloody onscreen end. Despite such graphic violence, and also despite the inclusion of “six obscenities… and two obscene acts,” the film met with the approval of Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission. Baehr saw the movie as “a rallying cry for the supremacy of God’s law” over the authority of officials who had flouted that law, a timely reminder with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.
Du Mez’s recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, has been on my to-read list for awhile now.
Hannah Anderson responds to a recent music video proclaiming that “modest is hottest” and its relationship to a line of thinking in certain Church circles concerning father/daughter relationships.
[H]is song is only superficially about fatherly angst. If you look closer, it exposes a limited understanding of the father-daughter relationship. And that understanding is rooted in a narrow nuclear family model — as opposed to the kinship model found in Scripture, which recognizes both the nuclear and the extended family. In our contemporary setting, we often equate daughterhood with childhood, which means daughterhood functionally ends when a woman leaves home or marries.
The Treble staff have compiled a list of the best albums of 2021 so far.
The year’s half over and it’s still hard to know what to make of it. After experiencing a year as troubling and disrupting to our lives as 2020, pretty much any change would probably be welcome. But one thing we do know for sure is that the music over the past six months has been better than we could have hoped for. It’s rarely a surprise to see albums on our year-end top 50 that also showed up at the halfway point, but don’t be surprised if most of these 33 albums stick around a while. It’s been a strong showing, and here are our 33 favorite albums of 2021 so far.
Sadly, Blackalicious’ Gift of Gab died earlier this week at the age of 50 from natural causes.
Gift of Gab formed Blackalicious with the DJ and producer Chief Xcel in 1992. The duo released its debut EP, Melodica, in 1994 via Solesides, a label and collective that also featured DJ Shadow, Lyrics Born, and others. By the late ’90s, Solesides morphed into Quannum, which made the notable compilation Spectrum in 1999; contributors to Spectrum included Blackalicious, DJ Shadow, El-P, Souls of Mischief, and Jurassic 5.
What a terrible loss. While he was most famous for Blackalicious (and understandably so), Gift of Gab’s solo material was also great. 2004’s 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up is a favorite of mine. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful album, full of hope and positivity.
Related: Blackalicious’ “Ashes to Ashes” was one of my favorite songs of 2015.
If you’re looking for a good, privacy-centric alternative to Google for your web searching needs, Brave has just released their own search engine.
Whether they are already Brave browser users, looking to expand their online privacy protection with the all-in-one, integrated Brave Search in the Brave browser, or users of other browsers looking for the best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine, they can all use the newly released Brave Search beta that puts users first, and fully in control of their online experience. Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks.
DuckDuckGo has been my go-to search engine for awhile now, but I’m a big fan of the Brave web browser, so I’ll definitely be following Brave Search’s development.
Related: My review of Brave 1.0.
History is littered with infamous and notorious — an ingenious hacks — but what’s the most significant hack of all time?
On some level, all of us are waiting for the big one — the hack that downs the internet, paralyzes infrastructure, maybe launches a couple nukes. If that day never arrives, it will be largely thanks to the legions of malefactors who, over the years, have hacked this or that government or corporation and thus forced those institutions to plug up their vulnerabilities, or at least try to. Some of these hacks have been staggering in scope — acts of sabotage and/or theft inconceivable in an unconnected world. But which of these can lay claim to being the most destructive?
From the Blog
I recently revisited one of the very first anime titles that I ever watched: Mizuho Nishikubo’s Zillion: Burning Night.
I suspect that Zillion: Burning Night is one of those ’80s sci-fi anime titles that many modern anime fans have never even heard of. But 1988, as it turns out, yielded a bumper crop of anime OVAs, with Appleseed, Demon City Shinjuku, Gunbuster, and Patlabor — to name a few — all coming out that year. Compared to those titles, it’s no surprise if Zillion: Burning Night rarely gets mentioned, much less recognized in the broader anime fandom.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, sneak previews, and podcasts. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.