Your hub for Blerd news, mobilized by AT&T.
Imagine a world where underground parks are the norm. That concept has become a real possibility thanks to James Ramsey. He’s the creator of the Lowline, a project that, if all goes well, will turn an abandoned trolley terminal on the Lower East Side into a living, breathing, underground park by 2018. Ramsey tells us how he hopes to create more green spaces in unlikely locations.
Source: Bloombergnews
Writer, director, and producer Roy Belfrey is at the helm of what’s being called “The Scariest African-American Film… Ever!” titled Matthew 18. Being a nitpicky pessimist for a moment, why can’t it just be the scariest horror film or thriller ever? What makes it the scariest African-American film ever? Aren’t perceptions of what’s scary and what isn’t subjective? You can’t make these blanket, click-bait statements without some thoughtful commentary with your potential audience. Especially considering I haven’t discovered an overflow of colloquiums on African-American horror films. But effectively enough, I suppose the line does capture attention. Here’s the breakdown:
Michelle Jamieson is too smart for faith. She has been raised in the tired traditions of her deeply religious family and is ready to expand her independent thought and stand in her logical, free will. When the opportunity arises for her to separate from her Washington, D.C., home and her Bible-thumping parents, she takes a scholarship for her sought-after medical program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Eager to base her beliefs in the proof of science and develop her life decisions on the tangible experience of medicine — where every effect has a root cause and miracles come in the form of prescription slips — she wisps across the country to find her path, her truth. But what she finds supersedes her natural existence – making her mortality vulnerable to the spiritual realm she so comfortably doubted. Michelle stays in a Minneapolis mansion, a family property dating back many generations. She begins to encounter strange and unexplainable occurrences. As she is forced to investigate, what she uncovers is a world of family secrets and unspeakable evils that God himself may not save her from. In whose name will she cry out now?
Judging from the synopsis and suspending my pessimism for a moment, I hope to see a film that’s intriguing as well as complicated. I hope to see Michelle have a layered arc and not some gimmicky, linear mortality tale. Please? Horror is too rich of an artistic space to see opportunities wasted. I’m not enthused by this trailer. But I am hoping to be proven wrong.
Source: graveyardshiftsisters.com
For its 85th anniversary, Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the most disruptive ideas of the past 85 years. In 1976, The Apple 1 computer goes on sale for a retail price of $666.66. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed that product, remembers the early days.
Source: BloombergBusinessWeek
A countertop garden with an automated light and watering system. Grow vegetables and herbs anywhere.
Source: Future Ideas & Technology
In the race to connect sensors and devices into an Internet of Things, Dell doesn’t want to get left behind. The company opened a lab dedicated to researching, testing and building Internet-connected systems for enterprises.
Source: CIO
AI is more than just a bad guy in sci-fi films. How close are we to creating computers that actually think on their own?
Source: The Verge
Dr. Mae Jemison describes her journey from space-loving girl in Chicago to astronaut looking down on Chicago and thinking about her younger self.
Mae Jemison is a physician, engineer, educator, entrepreneur and the first woman of color in the world to go into space – she was a NASA astronaut for six years. Currently Mae devotes much of her attention to the 100 Year Starship, which she says is “pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow to create a better world today.” In her spare moments, Mae is a lifelong and accomplished dancer.
Source: NOVA’s “The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers”
Technology could place the Caribbean’s youth on a level playing field and kick start the region’s stalling economies.
Source: Latin America and The Caribbean
Author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture” Ytasha L. Womack is embarking on completing her first trippy feature film, Bar Star City. After reading the description for myself, I got the sensation of experiencing one of those really late-night Adult Swim bumpers on a roller coaster. Or a fever dream of the Chalmun Cantina, with Black people:
A goddess, a war veteran and the captain of a spaceship meet in a bar…
We’ve all gone to bars and met unique, quirky personalities. But what happens when seemingly ordinary people are quite extraordinary? This film follows several not-so-ordinary regulars of a bar that’s become a home for the galactic and well-traveled.
A sci-fi film with Afrofuturist themes, Bar Star City looks at love, deception, memory and alienation among a group of bar regulars who just want a place to call home.
The Kickstarter campaign to get the funds to really make a cinematic classic piece of Afrofuturist history has 16 days left to raise $9,500. For science-fiction fans who dare to dream, this Bar Star City teaser produces an aesthetic; it asks questions and thrives on our curiosity with its images and soundtrack that is worth the investment.
Womack’s book on the movement is an innovative read that builds a case for Afrofuturism’s history, present, and daring future in our stadium of artistic expression. Bar Star City is such an exciting next step for Womack and Black science-fiction cinema. Donate, share, and rave about this proposal to your clans far and wide.
Source: graveyardshiftsisters.com
