It's more geared to audio, but there's also
FOH Magazine.
And there's this great forum called
Controlbooth .. oh wait, we're here.
I think you don't so much need to keep up with the latest and greatest bells and whistles, but more so
build a solid
foundation to
build from. Good lighting design doesn't always (or ever, actually) have to use the newest toys. If you have a good background, you can do good stuff with almost anything. If the most crude thing you've learned is an
Express, then when you're faced with a slider patch cabinet or a
piano board, well...
I'm sure some guys, when they learned on the
Express at another high school in town, and came to try to use the Producer2 at my high school ten years ago said "What? There's no Go
button?"
Same goes for how stuff works.
PWM dimming is pretty much unchanged since the dawn of time, and patching and calculating loads and working with fixtures is also similarly unchanged. Even the fundamentals of control haven't changed significantly in the past 20 years. Sure, new boards and new programming syntax, but the end result is the same thing: 8-bit big-endian data bytes (or analog levels of some kind) that change when you push the big green Go
button or move some handles.
Just some thoughts from the crazy analog guy...