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Of Making Many Books There Is No End

By on December 19, 2014 1

I’ve just created two Patreon pages.

One is a per-month pledge page for several libertarian book projects I’m working on; these include:

marsgate

  • Austro-Athenian Foundations of Libertarian Ethics, the transcribed record of my 2006 philosophy seminar at the Mises Institute;
  • selections of material from my Free Nation Foundation / Libertarian Nation Foundation days;
  • collections of more recent online writings, from my blog and elsewhere;
  • a collection of translations of works on libertarian class theory by Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, Augustin Thierry, and Gustave de Molinari;
  • Frodo Shrugged, a book comparing and contrasting Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged;
  • a new interdisciplinary libertarian academic journal, the Molinari Review.

Details here.

The other is a per-post pledge page for my four science-fiction/fantasy blogs: on Star Trek, The Avengers (the UK one, not the Marvel one), Danger Man/The Prisoner, and the Oz books. These posts will also be collected as books. Details here.

Pledgers will have opportunities to get advance content, free signed books, and the chance to influence the order in which I tackle the various projects.

You can pledge as little as a dollar per month (for the books page) and/or a dollar per post (for the blogs page). Any help is appreciated; I have a lot of cool stuff I want to accomplish, but am in tight circumstances financially (and my home computer is on its last legs).

Show Me a Sign

By on October 7, 2014 0

The following two Agents of SHIELD openers – one from last season and one from tonight – seem, at a superficial level, tonally very different. But upon reflection, despite the frenetic explodiness of the first clip and the cheery calmness of the second, they really are doing very similar things: showing us a slice of the daily life of one of our agents, set to disarmingly eccentric pop music, followed by a twist that reveals the opposite organisational logo from the one we expected to see.

Life in a Northern Town

By on September 29, 2014 2

On September 8-10 I was in Manchester for a MANCEPT Workshop on the current state of libertarian political philosophy. Organiser Andreas Wolkenstein put an interesting group together; one of the participants was left-libertarian Billy Christmas, who will also be on the Molinari Society’s panel on privilege in December.

My own MANCEPT talk was essentially an historical introduction to left-libertarianism; I’ve posted the abstract previously, and I now post my powerpoint presentation as well.

In honour of Manchester’s industrial heritage (and also because it was cheap), I stayed at a former warehouse converted into a hotel. (It’s industrial! It’s radical!) I also enjoyed dining on the Curry Mile, a section of Middle Eastern and South Asian restaurants; Mughli was especially good.

William Morris woodcut

Touristic informations – Mancunian edition:

To catch a bus, it is not sufficient to stand by the correct bus stop with an expression of expectation. The bus will whiz right by you. You need to flag it down like a taxi.

Also the price for the same ride will be different every day.

In London, vendors are familiar with American credit cards; but they’re a puzzle for vendors in Manchester. They look for the chip instead of the strip.

The Lebanese version of baklava has halvah in it.

After the conference I squeezed in a couple of days in London: caught a beer at the Harp with Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood; visited the William Morris Museum; visited the graves of Herbert Spencer and Douglas Adams at Highgate Cemetery; walked around on Hampstead Heath; and visited Forbidden Planet and the National Gallery.

The New Rankin-Bass Hobbit DVD Is a Fraud

By on July 23, 2014 2

Famously, when the DVD version of the 1977 Rankin-Bass Hobbit was released, the soundtrack was missing lots of sound effects that had been included in both the original broadcast version and the VHS release. You can probably still find a correct version (with video from the DVD and audio from the VHS) downloadable online under the title “Hi-Fi Hobbit.” The sounds make a surprisingly large amount of difference to the ambience of the film; it’s especially noticeable in the Erebor flashback.

When a “remastered deluxe” edition of the DVD was announced this year, I naturally assumed that the soundtrack screw-up that fans have been complaining about for years would be fixed. I mean, isn’t that what “remastered deluxe edition” suggests?

Guess what? Not so much. The new edition has not restored the missing sounds. Remastering, my ass. They’ve just given us the same old crappy screwed-up soundtrack as on the previous DVD release. Just with uglier cover art.

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