I haven’t posted one of these in a while.

• According to Matthew Dessem at The Dissolve, digital film preservation is more complicated than I thought.

• Also at The Dissolve, by Matt Singer: It’s fun to speculate about movie mysteries, but it’s also important to keep in mind that they aren’t always intended to have definitive answers. I’d argue that discussing movies is fun because some questions have no definite answer; if we knew , for example, what Bill Murray whispers at the end of Lost in Translation it would close off part of the conversation about that movie.

  Around the time I read that article Adam Cadre posted a review of Certified Copy touching on some of the same issues.

• It’s never a bad time for a reminder that Dead Poets Society is the worst movie ever. Here’s one from Kevin J. H. Dettmar at The Atlantic and one from Noah Berlatsky at Salon.

• These days I don’t put much trust in SF awards, but the 2013 Nebula Awards shortlist actually looks pretty good.

• Half the time I read something by Cory Doctorow I find myself wincing over a muddle of naïve technophilia, but almost as often he comes up with opinions I can agree with. Here he is in Locus with a smart takedown of “The Cold Equations,” the iconic example of the pathological strain of SF that celebrates heroes who make “tough decisions”–“tough” meaning merciless and expedient. These stories never admit that it took a massive failure on someone’s part for the hero to wind up in a situation where such a decision was necessary. It’s just a Law Of Nature, or The Way The Universe Works. Jonathan McCalmont’s recent review of the Ender’s Game movie is also relevant here.

• According to the Les Leftovers blog people in the Middle Ages didn’t really drink alcohol because they were afraid the water might kill them.

• How the Northern Hemisphere wound up on top of our maps.

• A fascinating explanation of “parasocial relations,” and the difference between real people and the images we construct of them in our heads, and how people are not always careful to distinguish between the two when we interact with others online.