What’s Up with The Orville?

Critics may have misread the sci-fi comedy series, missing the underlying tribute to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision.

First we had two weeks devoted to music, and now two weeks I’ve covered sci-fi TV shows. It’s a coincidence, I promise. Anyway, The Orville is a sci-fi comedy-drama masterminded by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, which debuted in the fall 2017 season alongside its drama counterpart and heavyweight franchise contender, Star Trek: Discovery. Here is a trailer:

Altered Carbon and Electric Dreams: Cyberpunk Revival?

Elements of the dystopian sci-fi subgenre have bled into pop culture throughout the last decade, but the return of mainstream cyberpunk is now beyond a doubt. Question is, do they get it right?

Yes, that’s right, cyberpunk.

Canadian sci-fi/fantasy author Crawford Kilian described cyberpunk as a subgenre about a future in which capitalism is “triumphant but not necessarily benevolent.” Typically, the cyberpunk setting often involves towering super-cities, morally grey characters and anti-heroes, and sometimes no discernible morality at all. Mega-corporations may function as authoritarian governments, serving as a background Aesop regarding modern consumerism. And of course, it wouldn’t be cyberpunk without humans implanting or plugging electronic things into their bodies, or at its most innocuous, street urchins capable of effortlessly hacking together machines that present-day engineers can only dream of (although that is less the case now than it was during the genre’s genesis in the 1980s). Hey, sounds quite a bit like our own foreseeable future, doesn’t it? Almost like the genre is meant to serve as a warning for where we might be headed or something.

Nature Rejoices When The Biscuit Merchant Cometh

Welcome back, everyone. I didn’t want to do two music posts in a row because I didn’t want you to think that’s the only topic I’ll be covering here, but I have gotten my hands on a new album a couple weeks before release, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to introduce Nature Rejoices by The Biscuit Merchant:

I Have Seen the Future, And It Is Funky

If it ever makes it out of its small corner of the Internet, future funk could become “the next big thing.”

Hello all! Welcome to the first official blog post of The Nerdy Millennial (tentative title), oooh how exciting. Let’s cut right to the chase:

If you’re like me, you try to give a little flow to the workday by listening to music while at work. Your source for workplace music may or may not be YouTube, and if so, maybe you noticed a recommended video or two depicting an anime character that looks like they’re from the Eighties or Nineties…something like this: