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“Publishers are selling drinks on the Titanic."
Brad Stone writing on Amazon’s foray into publishing and the publishing industry’s fumbling defiance:Kirshbaum’s rivals predict, perhaps wishfully, that Amazon is about to get an education in the burdens of book publishing… The late-night phone calls from neurotic authors, the frantic edits on awful manuscripts—this is a business that demands more handholding than Amazon generally seems comfortable with. Then again, Amazon can deliver a trampoline or a 20-pack of ramen in 24 hours, so it’s fairly comfortable with complexity.
The Most Dangerous Lie
Stephen March:
Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true.
“Hey guys, it’s cool, we’ve got paper. No more need for canvas.”
Given how down I’ve been on Hollywood lately, you’d think I’ve just seen a new film. Pretty soon there won’t be such a thing.
American Beauty Revisited
Natasha Vargas-Cooper offers a timely reminder that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about: It’s not a tremendous shock, of course, that the Academy would pick a mediocre movie as the Best Picture of the year—this happens all the time. What is downright bewildering is how often American Beauty was identified as instant canon, an unflinching satire of American dysfunction in Clintonian times, and the piercing cultural coda for an angst-filled decade.
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."
William Gibson (via sabino)
The Movie Studios Hate Us
Marco Arment on the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America): The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us. Yet when we watch their movies, we support them. Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary. They use our support to buy these laws. So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform. It’s not “just a movie.” No matter what it is, no matter what your motivation for watching it may be, it’s never “just a movie.” Now more than ever. The MPAA is a hate-sink, a front to protect its members from negative PR. But unlike the similarly purposed Lodsys (and many others), it’s easy to see who the MPAA represents: Disney, Sony Pictures, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. (Essentially, all of the major movie studios.)
iFault
You don’t have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner 1984 bullshit; you can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They’re making your crap that way today.
That’s from the first half of this week’s episode of This American Life, where humorist Mike Daisey recounts his implausible, revealing infiltration of the Chinese factory where many electronic devices — Apple products, most notably — are assembled.
But the really killer part of this episode is what comes next, when the producers set about fact-checking Daisey’s story, and record it. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes TAL so good. It gets inside our thoughts. It is our thoughts.
It’s as though the producers knew we would hear that first half and demand verification — or maybe validation; some discrepancy in Daisey’s claims that would somehow make it okay for us to continue buying all of these devices. Something to reassure us that in spite of what we’ve just learned, it’s not that bad.
But it is that bad.
Sent from my iPhone
Update (1.26.12): It gets worse.
“Press” Start
The crew behind TumbleOn, a Tumblr photo-viewing app, was kind enough to feature my arcade blog as one of their staff picks.
The Edges
You never know how far is too far until you’ve gone there. (Source: twitter.com)
Nicholas Carr:Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.
Alexis Madrigal on the Kodak Way of Life
While the chemistry and technology in Kodak cameras were important, it was the Kodak life that people were buying…
You record your off-key voice and when you play it back, every note is perfect. That’s the triumph of Kodakery.
(Source: twitter.com)
