What is the Bible? Part 1

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This is an examination of the popular Christian biblical canon of scriptures, and the manuscripts thereof. It acts uniquely as a short memoir and a spreadsheet of biblical books (I couldn’t find a list like this, so I made my own). This is not an interpretation of what the Bible means. The main reason I’m putting this together is help people come up with their own answer to, “What is the Bible?” As I was answering this big question for myself, it got very personal. If you want to skip that part, continue to Part 2, the more objective portion of this biblical study. The conclusion is in Part 3.

NIV Study Bible, 2002
My study Bible, published in 2002
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Last.fm listening history

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I recently discovered that Spotify can link up natively with Last.fm. I’ve been using Last.fm to “scrobble” music that I listen to from various devices since 2006. In the last few years, I hadn’t kept up with the lastest scrobbling apps, but earlier this summer I got it going again. Here are some screenshots from my library.

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Video clips and history of world cinema: 1928-1937

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10 Years 10 Films (10Y10F) is a project to display embedded YouTube selections of cinema history. This is Part Five of a series that gives the viewer a quick time-lapse view of how movie technology and style has developed throughout the world – one clip each year – from 1888 through 2017, starting with the foundations to see how filmmakers build or deconstruct them.

World cinema 1928-1937

Sound “talkies” and censorship are the huge cinematic changes for this decade. It’s hard to say how the Great Depression (1929, lasting about ten years) affected the film industry, but Nazi policies throughout the 1930s definitely had an effect until the end of WWII, and many German filmmakers and actors emigrated.
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Recent releases of Alice Guy-Blaché films (1897-1918)

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One of the world’s first film directors has been receiving some much-deserved attention lately, due to the 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968). Here is a list of just over 100 of her films that you can find pretty easily today on DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Alice Guy, 1906 (source)
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A Life in Film – my Letterboxd stats

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I was recently inspired by the stats visualizations on Letterboxd.com, a movie review website. The stats page is available for Pro subscribers only, but I’ve enjoyed Letterboxd as a free subscriber since 2013. Now that I’ve paid for a year of Pro, I can actually look at stats for each of the years that I’ve used the service.

This overview of Letterboxd stats will serve as my 2019 in review, but I’ll also point out some of the “all-time” stats features.

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Changes in the Hollywood Production Code

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Sex perversion. White slavery. Childbirth. Miscegenation. Obscenity. Salacious titles. These are just a few of the subjects that were forbidden by the “Production Code” that governed Hollywood on-screen morality from 1930 through 1968. It’s been a challenge to find a good summary of the changes in the Code, so included here are links to original sources as well as a downloadable quick-guide I created showing the three major changes to the code before it was strictly enforced in 1934.

Text of the 1934 Production Code
1934 Production Code from the Motion Picture Herald
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