Saturday Items

Items:

• Currently watching The Complete History of America, Abridged from the tremendously erudite and clever Reduced Shakespeare Company. We saw them once doing their Great Books show. Recommended!
• Here's a bunch of recordings of Mercury Theater of the Air, best known for the Orson Welles-produced broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
• Here's a cool blog, Fan Cinema Today, all about fan films. I watched a movie the other night called The Sci-Fi Boys about how people like Willis O'Brien, Ray Harryhausen, and Forrest J Ackerman inspired a bunch of kids in the 1950s and 60s to go into the movie business. It included clips from these awesome homemade Super-8 monster movies they (the special-effects-pros-to-be) made when they were teenagers.
• Article on crowdsourcing research on image tagging via video games. For instance, The ESP Game.