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Showing posts from 2015

Awakening to Disappointment: Reviewing Episode VII

Warning : this is a spoiler-rich review. Proceed at your own risk. Viewed as a stand-alone movie, The Force Awakens is perfectly watchable and interesting, with decent dialogue, high production values, and a story that, if not compelling, is at least intriguing. And, hey, it’s co-written by Lawrence Kasdan. But TFA is not a stand-alone movie: it’s Episode VII of the Star Wars saga and, as such, it’s a disappointment. The biggest insult to fan loyalty is, of course, the death of Han Solo. Many people’s favorite character in Episodes IV-VI, Solo doesn’t get enough screen time in EpVII, and his relationships with the other characters seem developed in rather perfunctory fashion. Still, for anyone who’s cared about the characters for decades and valued the series since its inception, Solo matters, and killing him off is a brutal slap in the face. (Hardly surprising behavior, unfortunately, on the part of the director who annihilated Vulcan and canceled an entire time-line so he

Another DailyNerve test: Planned Parenthood and tissue sales

As we know, a great deal of attention has been focused on-line on the issue of whether Planned Parenthood locals have sold tissue from aborted fetuses. To provide another test of the DailyNerve platform: Suppose tissue sales occurred: how could Planned Parenthood most effectively defend them?

DailyNerve Test: Responding to deBlasio on Uber

I've been involved for several years in the work of BigNerve and associated companies. One of those companies, DailyNerve, focuses on "solution news." According to the site : "Have you ever read a piece of news and thought, “how hard could that really be to fix?” or better yet, “I know how we could fix that!”? Well, here’s your chance to get those ideas out there. At DailyNerve you are the think tank to the news. / We have one simple goal. We want to find ingenious solutions for common problems that plague people on both a local and a global level, and we want to utilise crowd sourcing to do it. That means getting those ideas out of YOUR head, and into reality.” DailyNerve works by inviting reader responses to question-centered contests, with reader-proposed solutions assessed through a sophisticated crowd-based technique. I'm testing the platform today with a question (framed, like all DailyNerve contest questions, in the subjunctive): How could activists