This is good.

NASA footage. I think that's the same title font as used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

This comes from Neil Postman's foreword to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, comparing Orwell's 1984 to Huxley's Brave New World:

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. . . . In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Food for thought in this 500-channel, Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest world.

I miss Neil Postman.

Hard to believe I've been doing this blog for 10 years. Started it on February 1st, 2002. I'd actually started blogging in 1997, on the Nettle blog. (Strange: that blog went on to get a ton of attention for critiques of Netflix and movie theatres; in 2012, I am doing a startup called Nettle and its product is called MovieGoer).

Funny how that works.

For me, this scene, from the classic film They Live, epitomizes and defines what I have spent most of my last 25 years doing, trying not only to get investors to believe in my startups, but to simply fucking take a look. If only you could see what I see...! It is always, always the same. This scene always gives me hope because after a lot of blood and bruises, he finally gets the guy to take a look, and one look is all it takes.

Take a look, will you?

Fascinating interview with filmmaker/special-effects legend Douglas Trumbull over at The Hollywood Reporter. This long quote from him resonated so much I had to repost it below. But be sure to read his entire interview. I'm very excited to know he's working on a new, serious sci-fi film set 200 years in the future. Cannot WAIT to see that.

My experience has shown me that in spite of the fact that there’s incredible genius in this room, with these master craftsmen that are really holding up the tentpoles and making these amazing visions that everybody wants to see, the latest amazing thing, amazing monster, amazing place, whatever it is, there are some structural problems inside the motion picture industry and the entertainment industry, which is that the studios who are producing and distributing the content have virtually no technological infrastructure inside their management structure. They rely entirely on third-party purveyors of special services, whether they’re actors, directors, or special effects people, and so they don’t really understand the technology of their own medium. I think it would be not difficult to talk to the management of any major studio and ask them what a double-bladed shutter is in a 35mm projector and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. If you asked them how many foot-lamberts of brightness they see on the screen, they might not know what you’re talking about. On the exhibition side, we have a similar problem in that the owners and operators of theaters all over the country and all over the world also have no technical infrastructure and rely on their purveyors, their sound-system purveyors, to deliver projectors to their theaters. So there’s no continuity and no connective tissue that’s saying, how do we make movies better? How do we make this experience more spectacular? And I’ve been after this holy grail all my life of trying to say, well, we can do higher frame rates, we can do brighter images, we can do bigger screens, we can do all of these things, and it’s been largely falling on deaf ears because it’s largely a status quo industry. It’s a cookie-packing, manufacturing and production industry that doesn’t realize that the $200 million production value that they’re putting into a movie is actually not getting to the audience for various reasons that they don’t understand.

Again, be sure to read the entire interview over at THR.

My response to the notorious Kill Hollywood post by Y Combinator: Kill Y Combinator.

The entire year 2011 went by and I never watched a single TV show. We had DirecTV with HD and when we moved we decided not to move the service. Oh, DirecTV tried to talk us into keeping it but they were not persuasive. Far more persuasive was the idea of no television at all, being free of all the noise, the ads, the endless flipping of channels.

A year has passed and I don't miss TV at all. I never think about it. I think about the book I am reading. I think about the book I just read. I think about the book I'm looking forward to reading next.

If you've contemplated cutting the cable, I encourage you to do it. You will not regret it.

Posted a long rambling article over at the MovieGoer blog entitled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or, Why I Sit In the Front Row at the Movies.

Jack Goldman, 90, former Chief Scientist of Xerox and creator of what became Xerox PARC, died this week. John Markoff wrote the obit in the NY Times and there's a WIRED obit as well.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jack on July 30, 2003, over the phone, as part of my research for my book on the history of the PLATO system. I uncovered a story Jack had intended to keep secret, that George Pake was not the actual first choice to be director of Xerox PARC, but rather, it was someone else. I have a chapter on PARC in my upcoming book, in which the decades-old secret will be revealed.

During the interview, I casually asked Goldman, who, remember, created Xerox PARC which would inspire Steve Jobs to pursue the GUI interface for Macintosh, what he used personally: PC, or Macintosh. Here was his reply, in 2003:

I use only Macintosh. If you came into my home, I have -- I still have, I never throw them out, I have a Macintosh, a Macintosh 500, a Macintosh Plus, a Power Macintosh, a PowerBook, and now I just got a new iMac, because I wanted a 17 inch screen, and the easiest way to get one was to get an iMac.

And there you have it. The creator of Xerox PARC, a Mac fanatic. I think Steve Jobs would get a chuckle out of that.