Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

The Dying Art of the Animation Cel

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.

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Coupland Uncovers the Future of Bell Labs and More in Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

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A Complete Unknown does justice to Dylan’s electrified 1965 revolution

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…

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Tales Before Tolkien confirmed my love for more modern fantasy

Douglas A. Anderson’s collection of stories gathered in Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy appears to be more from before Tolkien’s works were published than “classic stories that inspired the author of The Lord of the Rings” but I can’t fault the publisher for trying to drum up sales.

Of the 21 stories that make up this collection, there were only a handful I enjoyed and four that I truly loved…

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From Hiroshima to the Moon is an incredible atomic time capsule

Daniel Lang was a journalist and author for The New Yorker, and From Hiroshima to the Moon is a collection of his stories for the magazine about the birth of the atomic age and the space age, as written at the time of their origins. 

Lang is an on-the-ground journalist. These stories from the front lines of atomic scientists and rocketry geniuses are not only unique to other histories you may have encountered, but these are raw.

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