Nazis, genetic experimentation, and Corin Nemec? I am so there.
I was supposed to go out tomorrow night with my geek gang to see V for Vendetta again, but I'm sick as a dog, so I think I'll just stay home and liveblog SS Doomtrooper instead.
I'm such a dork...
It's so hard to get these little monsters to post for a photo:
But it's worth it when they do:
Sorta related: Mark Morford's column today is a valentine to his girlfriend's parrot:
Parrots, you should know right now, are enormously weird. Surreal. They bring with them a bizarre sense of wild and unfamiliar nature and you cannot feed them or watch them move and preen and waddle awkwardly down the hall without this sense of trippy otherness; you cannot hold a parrot in your hand and stroke their funky tiny pencil-thin neck bones and not feel like you are in the presence of something just a little out of the human range of cosmic understanding.
(Parakeets are basically little parrots, you know...)
I think I’ve pretty much settled on going the print-on-demand Lulu.com route with my Princess Bride book, the one that got orphaned when its publisher died. And even though I won’t be published through a traditional publisher, the traditional publishers are rethinking their way of doing business anyway, according to Business Week Online:
A new scheme set to be announced in early April, dubbed the Caravan Project, calls for books to be delivered simultaneously in five formats -- hardcover, digital, audio, print-on-demand, and by chapter....
Six nonprofit publishers (three are university presses), No. 2 retailer Borders Group (BGP ), a few independent bookstores (not Tome on the Range, however), and publishing wholesale powerhouse Ingram Industries are participating in Caravan. The first step: Publish 24 books initially across the five formats in early 2007. Funded by a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, the project is relatively small, Osnos admits. "But we don't have to be big," he adds. "We just have to show that this model is irresistible to everyone in the chain -- to authors, publishers, and booksellers. We can't continue to print 10 books to sell 6." Adds Tom Dwyer, director for adult trade books at Borders: "We never want to underestimate the public's desire for information and choices. This lets us put our foot in the water."
In honor of Apple putting, you know, volume controls on the iPod, herewith the spectrum of loudness: Hard Harry, who invited us to pump up the volume; Nigel Tufnel, whose amps go to 11; and your dad, who told you to turn that garbage down.
At this point, I think I’ll wait till tomorrow’s new episode of Doctor Who and then wrap up that one and last week’s at the same time. Meanwhile, though, check out Salon’s TV critic, Heather Havrilesky, and her take on the good Doctor.
She tries to shoehorn the show into a loosely defined theme she sees floating around the zeitgeist about “rugged individualists [who] subvert the dominant paradigm -- and are rewarded with angst, guilt and hard time in the big house.” Ho-kay.
The blockbuster -- or at least budget-busting -- Lord of the Rings musical hit the boards this week, way off Broadway, way off the West End... in Toronto. Critics have been about as kind as, oh, Sauron. Charles McNulty in the L.A. Times:
Had there been no film, the audience would no doubt have found it perplexing in the extreme. Of course, had there been no book, it would have seemed borderline insane to have sunk so many millions into what seems here like a crackpot chronicle.
Whoops.
Charles Spencer in the British Telegraph:
If you find a line like "As a hobbit might say, may the hair on your toes never fall out" deliciously rib-tickling then this is undoubtedly the show for you. If, like me, you find it insufferably twee, then you are going to find the show a penance
C’mon, that line turns even my stomach, and I’m a pervy hobbit fancier.
Most of the reviews state what should be obvious: that the fanboys will come out in droves and make this a hit. Then again:
Ming writes: I attended the LOTR stage show in Toronto this afternoon, and I regret to say that the Helm's Deep scene is still error-prone. During the performance I attended, Saruman's orcs were scaling the walls of Helm's Deep when, abruptly, they all left the stage (was there some kind of signal, I wonder?) and the raised platforms on the stage descended. I sat for a moment in bewilderness (though I had a very bad feeling about it, pardon the other-movie reference) before the voice of God announced that they were experiencing some "technical difficulties" and that we should remain seated. That announcement was repeated twice before the voice of God decided to have an "unscheduled intermission".
[from TheOneRing.net]
Double whoops. Then again, Ming had already shelled out his dough, and wasn’t gonna get it back:
I asked to speak to the house manager, from whom I requested a free pass to see another performance of the second act. Unfortunately, he said he didn't have the authority to grant such a request, and gave me TicketKing's customer service e-mail address. I will be going back to New York on Saturday morning so if I don't receive a favorable response by Friday, they're going to have one very disgruntled hobbit.
Sounds like they’ve already got one.
I’ve been wondering what the hell was up with those TV ads for the bank Washington Mutual -- since when do they call themselves “WaMu,” and don’t they realize that it makes the company sound like it’s a performing orca at SeaWorld? I assumed it was some sort of half-assed attempt to appeal to “hipsters” to make us all think there might be a bank that isn’t “square” and “The Man.”
And whaddaya know? Washington Mutual’s-- excuse me, WaMu’s ATMs are forced to be desperately cool, too:
Read the whole blog entry at Annie Barrett’s Diminishing Returns about the encounter with that ATM -- it’s piled on with snark.
It’s sorta sad, that ATM: it’s like a little monkey in pants forced to dance on a street corner for your amusement. Then again, it fits in with the performing-orca meme, so maybe that’s intentional. Maybe we’re meant to infer that WaMu is a bank that goes against its own banky nature to debase itself for your financial pleasure.
General Motors lost $8.6 billion dollars in 2005.
Lost.
$8.6 billion.
Billion.
Or maybe it’s actually $10.6 billion.
And GM is so fuckin’ desperate for your money, and my money, that it has launched an insidious TV ad to convince us that the company is so damn cool that you dare NOT buy a GM vehicle. You’ve probably seen it: it’s called “Then and Now,” and features a montage of retro footage of sock hops and cars with fins intercut with 21st-century auto-erotica set to the Everclear tune “AM Radio.” (You can watch the ad here.)
Just so you know, I'm giving away two DVD copies of the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries The Triangle -- which was just released today in a 2-disc set -- over at FlickFilosopher.com.
Previous geeky yakking about the miniseries can be found here and here.
It’s really sad, in a hilarious kind of way, to see a lumbering, clueless, desperately unhip mega-globo-corp trying to be spry and cool and buzz-y. I refer to Time Warner’s Office Pirates. Imagine what would happen if a marketing and PR agency focus-grouped creative spontaneity, wild postadolescent testosterone, and cubicle rage -- this is what you’d end up with, an unintentionally funny combination of obliviousness, polite impoliteness, and carefully corralled rebelliousness.
The commentary, for instance, frets over such things as the injustices of open bars at work parties and Chinese food delivery guys who don’t have change. You can send in your own “hate” rants, too -- maybe I’ll submit one about how it’s always ME who has to put more paper in the copy machine! (Man, I hate that!) (And I shan’t go into the fact that the site doesn’t even understand how to use blogging terms -- Blogebrity’s already done that for me.)
I’m not sure what to make of Office Pirates’ “galleries” -- maybe Time Warner thinks this is like a Fark Photoshop contest, only without the mess of user input of any kind and all the messy freshness and authenticity that goes along with that -- but someone should tell them that it’s really hard to get funny captions out of stock photography, especially when it’s the same let’s-not-offend-anyone mindset going into the captions that went into the images.
More? The “user comments” sound invented, and the e-cards -- excuse me, “beating cards” -- look like some sort of reverse on the demotivational items from Despair, Inc..
Business Week’s media and advertising guy Jon Fine, my new he-gets-it geek boyfriend, says:
It's admirable for Time Inc. to try something this bizarre, so it's a drag that Office Pirates seems very version-1.0. The programming is wildly inconsistent. What's perverse for Time Inc. is not perverse for the Web, and so it lies between freer-form sharing sites like youtube and gnarlier programming plays such as heavy.com (which is also readying a community platform). Office Pirates plasters its offerings with its name and logo. But for such content to work, "it's got to be organic and be emanating from something that doesn't appear to be overly commercialized," warns Laura Desmond, CEO of media buying firm MediaVest USA.
Bingo. There’s nothing genuinely angry or fed up about Office Pirates, just the faux naughtiness of wondering what is running through the empty head of the hot intern.
I’m off to I-Con for the weekend, so posting is going to be pretty much nonexistent, I think -- unless there's free wireless access at the con, which they tell me there isn't. Doh.
But I get to look at Kevin Sorbo in the flesh. Life is full of tradeoffs...
Cassie says: "Look what we have to put up with -- no food and ugly linoleum. Someone please call Amnesty International."
(No animals were harmed or mistreated in the making of this blog.)
In honor of the Isaac Hayes/South Park brouhaha, chefs: Julia Child, Chef, and the Swedish Chef.
This is not the official poster for the upcoming New Line movie Snakes on a Plane, currently scheduled for release on August 18:
But maybe it will be. Because based purely on the so-bad-it’s-good title and the fact that it stars geek icon Samuel L. Jackson, the geek community online has gone wild with creativity, as a Reuters article today explains:
Haunted by V for Vendetta like I am? I've seen it twice now, and I feel a desperate urgency to see it again. Been a while since I've fallen in love with a movie like this. The Lord of the Rings installments, sure, but before that, maybe The Matrix? These Wachowski Brothers, they vibrate, eh?
I dunno how expansive geekiness can be, whether I'm alone in appreciating the theatrical geekiness of Vendetta, but I do know that V's introductory monologue might be pretty atrociously written -- maybe; I'm not sure -- but it would not work without the theatrical geekiness of Hugo Weaving behind V's mask and supplying V's voice. That speech with all the V words... it's so thrilling because it's so convincingly delivered, however ludicrous it might be on its face. V is a seductive lunatic because he's funny -- he is, like all good geeks, self-deprecating:
This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.
One of these stories is honest-to-God real (culled from the San Jose Mercury News, actually), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?
Bush says he'd pull troops out if he wasn't optimistic about Iraq
Rumsfeld: Iraqis Now Capable Of Conducting War Without U.S. Assistance
“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.” (Agatha Christie)
Compare...
The TV series spin-off of the Stars Wars film franchise will run to at least 100 episodes, according to producer Rick McCallum....
The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga.
It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers.
[from BBC News]
...and contrast...
LUKE: It just isn't fair. Oh, Biggs is right. I'm never gonna get out of here!THREEPIO: Is there anything I might do to help?
LUKE: Well, not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest, or teleport me off this rock.
THREEPIO: I don't think so, sir. I'm only a droid and not very knowledgeable about such things. Not on this planet, anyways. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure which planet I'm on.
LUKE: Well, if there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.
[from your childhood hopes and dreams]
Looks like we’re all going nowhere:
(music swells...)
When did you get your first email account? I’m thinking mine was probably around 1991, maybe, and I had to dial in to CompuServe to use it. Certainly, we’re talking pre-Web here.
When did you get your second email address? Probably not too long after that, if you’re anything like me. Now I was dialing into Prodigy.
Next came the AOL address. Still dialing directly in. Still before the Web.
Not so for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which is partying like it’s 1989:
Following up on a story I mentioned last week:
A US federal judge has denied a government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample keywords, but required the company to produce some web addresses indexed in its system.In a 21-page ruling, Judge James Ware of the US District for the Northern District of California said the privacy considerations of Google users led him to deny part of the Justice Department's request
[from Australian IT]
As John Soat at InformationWeek points out:
Google really faces no downside by refusing the government's request to turn over search data. Even if Google loses the case and has to turn over some (truncated) amount of (very general) information about a (random) selection of searches, it still wins in the court of public opinion as a defender of personal privacy. As my colleague Chris Murphy put it, Google should take the court costs out of its marketing budget.
I love Google, I use it constantly all day long, I run Google AdSense ads on my sites -- I couldn’t live without it. But is it dangerous to be so reliant on one site, as both a Web surfer and a webmaster? Consider this:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.The civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, Friday by KinderStart.com seeks financial damages along with information on how Google ranks Internet sites when users conduct a Web-based search.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment but the company aggressively defends the secrecy of its patented search ranking system and asserts its right to adapt it to give customers what it determines to be the best results.
[from Reuters via CNN/Money]
Is it a mistake for us Web users to have put so much power into the hands of one site? Is there any way we could have avoided this situation? How do you avoid using a resouce that is so damn, you know, useful?
I don’t have any answers. But the questions need to be asked.
[crossposted at FlickFilosopher.com]
Or should I be asking myself, What color is the sky in my world? Is it me? Am I the crazy person here?
The reviews for V for Vendetta are running 75 percent fresh over at Rotten Tomatoes, but even the positive reviews don’t seem to really understand the film, its mythological underpinnings, and all the really powerful, primal stuff at work in it. (Maybe I’m the one totally off-track: judge for yourself.) It’s not necessarily about not understanding comic-book-ishness, the interplay of strong imagery and metaphoric dialogue... although even with the enigmatic metaphors and verbal playfulness of the Vendetta graphic novel drastically played down, many of the film’s detractors still curse V’s penchant for florid speech.
Cuz this is pretty typical: Eclipse Magazine’s Michelle Alexandria, who thinks Vendetta is “one of the most provocative movies in several years,” says this with an apparent straight face:
(scroll all the way down for links to discussion of other episodes)
see my brief overview of the DVD set at FlickFilosopher.com
I gotta tell ya, Doctor Who is deeply and completely intrinsic to my geekishness: it was the object of my first real fannish fixation. I videotaped episodes obsessively as a teenager (and, perhaps needless to say, watched them over and over), when they ran on my local PBS stations; I wrote fan fiction and published fanzines; I went to Doctor Who conventions. I was a huge Doctor Who dork.
Russell T. Davies, the guy heading up the BBC's revival of Doctor Who, is a fan (and an Xer), too... which may help explain why the show, in his hands, is so deliciously fannish. So much of what we fans saw in the subtext of the old series is now part of the, well, text of the new series, if the first two episodes, which finally aired in the U.S. on the SciFi Channel on Friday night are anything to judge by.
Like the genuine affection between the Doctor and his new traveling companion, Rose:
This is adorable. Remember that cool hairy blond lobster thing that was just discovered?
Well, Kuri at MediaTinker.com has created a pattern for a plush stuffed version. It’s the new Beanie Baby!
You can download the pattern and instructions at the MediaTinker link above. I wish I could sew -- I’d love one of these.
What a fantastic example of geek generosity, inventiveness, and playfulness. I love us. Go, us.
Late, late, late with Geek/Dork/Nerd this week. My head is so full of V for Vendetta -- which I saw two days ago; read my review here -- that I can think of little else. So in honor of Natalie Portman and her beautiful bald pate, here she is, along with Persis Kambata in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Sinead O’Connor ripping up the Pope’s picture on live TV. I sympathize with the sentiment , but the execution? Pretty nerdy.
For more bald beauties, check out by buddy Nathaniel’s History of Bald Women over his Film Experience Blog.
UPDATE: The New York Times had a longish piece on Moore a coupla days ago.
===
If you’ve been reading anything about the Wachowski Brothers’ film adaptation of the graphic novel V for Vendetta lately, you’ve probably noticed that lots of the articles and reviews just sort of drop in a casual reference to the fact that Alan Moore demanded his name be removed from the film, with no further explanation. It serves almost as little dig at the film, a goes-without-saying sign that the movie surely is V for Very Bad if its own creator wants nothing to do with it.
I had to go back almost a year to find, in a May 2005 story on Comic Book Resouces, a bit of an explanation for Moore’s actions. Some of it had to do with the Wachowskis’ film itself:
Alan gave some details about bits of the V For Vendetta shooting script he'd seen. "It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn't have got away with in Whizzer And Chips in the nineteen sixties. Plot holes no one had noticed."
Does the whole “Isaac Hayes is leaving ‘South Park’ because it makes fun of Scientology” thing ring a little false to you? Me too... and not just because my secret cinemastrology correspondent over at FlickFilosopher.com has a scoop about the flap. An excerpt:
The real story is that Parker and Stone were doing an episode making fun of cinemastrology -- I’ve seen the script and it’s all about how Chef turns to cinemastrology and starts serving nothing but coffee and cheese in the school cafeteria and talking all about Filamadamus’s prophecies and of course all the kids turn on Chef and make fun of him.
Or you could just has some fun with the South Park character generator I stumbled across while researching the Isaac Hayes thing. Here’s me, if I were a South Park kid:
Sure, Julius Caesar ignored his warning, but at least he got a warning. Just look at who else might have benefitted from a whisper of...
“Beware the ides of Spock...”
“Beware the ides of Cypher...”
My friend Mike reminds me that today is Pi Day -- 3.14, that is, which means, I suppose, that the coolest Pi Day in our lifetimes will be March 14, 2015, or 3.1415.
Learn more at Pi Day’s Wikipedia entry, have fun at the Exploratorium’s big page o’ pi stuff, send a Pi Day greeting card, and, of course, sing a Pi Day song or two in honor of the day.
Remember when Mulder told Scully that no one likes a math geek? He was wrong.
(The image is a pewter pi brooch for sale here.)
SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- A federal judge said Tuesday he intends to require Google Inc. to turn over some information to the Department of Justice in its quest to revive a law making it harder for children to see online pornography.U.S. District Judge James Ware did not immediately say whether the data will include words that users entered into the Internet's leading search engine.
...
The Justice Department downplayed Google's concerns, arguing it doesn't want any personal information...
[from the AP via CNN.com]
Yeah, right. Methinks the government doth protest too much, particularly when you see the government’s rationale for demanding this info:
The government believes the test will show how easily it is to get around filtering software that's supposed to prevent children from seeing sexually explicit material on the Web.
Well, damn, you don’t need Google’s records to do that -- you just need a computer with some useless filtering software, like SmartFilter.
Slippery slope alert. The government is coming for your Google searches. I recommend starting your surfing day as I do: with a Google search on this phrase, so that when pervy Uncle Sam comes snooping, he'll know exactly what you think of him:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Just bookmark this link. It’s fun!
One of my geek heroes and favorite political bloggers, Atrios yesterday invoked the spirit of Zork, etc., to smack down Senator Joe Lieberman and his bizarre theocrat-theories:
>>Ask voice "What happened?""What happened?"
The voice responds "I am sorry to inform you that you were raped and severely beaten. My name is Dr. Lieberman."
>> Ask Dr. Lieberman "Did I receive emergency contraception?"
Dr. Lieberman responds "This hospital does not provide that because of principled reasons. As long as you do something for what you call "principled reasons" you can do anything you want. Fortunately, you live in Connecticut so another hospital is probably a short ride away. I assume, anyway. Ta-ta.
It goes on and on. Funny stuff, and pointed, too. And as someone noted in the comments to that post:
Guess it separates the geeks from the, well, whatever other brands of folks there are, because it didn't even occur to me that anyone wouldn't get it.
The geek ethos continues to spread...
This continues to make me cry:
Is it easy being a shill, Kermit? Do you lie awake in the dead of night afeared that that rattling outside the window is the ghost of Jim Henson come to eat your soul? Or is your soul long withered and shriveled?
I ask merely for information.
Meanwhile, I choose to remember Kermit and the Muppets as they were -- over at FlickFilosopher.com, I'm giving away four DVDs of Muppet movies (you have to be a micropatron to enter) -- or as their spirit lives on in the hearts and minds of geeks. Like the 12-part (and counting) Seremuppety by walkerboh, over at deviantArt, which is, naturally, Joss Whedon’s Serenity as told in the Muppet style:
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12
Cuz it's not easy being Mal...
UPDATE: Great minds, and all that: Google Mars
We’ve got a brand-new eye orbiting Mars that’s gonna tell us all sorts of interesting new things about the Red Planet, and another eye far out in the Solar System has found liquid water on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, a tantalyzing clue to possibility of life on another world in our immediate neighborhood.
And a new-ish tool is rapidly changing how we see our own planet: amaetur geologist Emilio González used Google Earth to spot impact craters on the surface of our world that no one else had identified before. This is extraordinary -- suddenly, there is another scientific arena (like astronomy) in which dedicated amateurs can make genuine breakthroughs and discoveries.
But there’s an even more geeky-cool aspect -- as González says:
[T]he most important thing of this history is, probably, that using a free distributed software (Google Earth, but I'm also using NASA World Wind) anyone can search for similar structures.
If you’re in Syndey, Australia, and you couldn’t pay for your breakfast burrito with a debit card this morning, or your ATM was acting all funny, blame the geeks: they’re mad as hell, and they’re not gonna take it anymore:
So says the Sydney Morning Herald:
Computer technicans are threatening chaos at fast-food outlets, supermarkets, banks and airports unless they get a pay rise.More than 100 staff from NCR - a company responsible for repairing computer breakdowns at KFC outlets, Aldi supermarkets and Sydney Airport's baggage handling systems - are planning to to walk off the job on Monday morning.
"In terms of industrial action in the IT industry this is easily the most significant one we've had in Australia," said Australian Services Union secretary Sally McManus.
You go, geeks. Make sure everyone knows how vital your services are.
The homemade, downloadable-for-free Star Trek/Babylon 5 parody Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is officially the most successful Finnish film ever. The creators say they’ve been careful about the legal issues that can arise when you’re dealing with parody -- mockery can be a powerful weapon, one that the powerful don’t generally appreciate.
As one mocker in China is discovering:
The SG-1 team visits “Camelot”:
I was sooo waiting for Cam to snark out some reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- I mean, come on: he couldn’t work up a “None shall pass” at the mention of the Black Knight? It’s not like Cam hasn’t seen the film, right?
Luckily, tis but a flesh wound.
I missed the Stargates last night, but I'll be watching them tonight. Check back tomorrow for my reaction.
And it doesn’t want to. I mean, look at the guy they just hired to write their SF book reviews. Dave Itzkoff claims to like SF, but he doesn’t even pretend not to be full of self-loathing for doing so:
HERE'S a question I don't expect to come anywhere close to answering by the end of this column: Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?As that lone subway traveler who still occasionally rides to work brandishing a dog-eared edition of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" or "The Illustrated Man," I realize I'll never enjoy even a fraction of the social standing afforded to the umpteenth passenger who is just now cracking open a mint-condition copy of "The Kite Runner" or a fresh paperback of "A Million Little Pieces" purchased after it was discredited, and I don't expect this to change any time soon.
Ahhh, restful...
So, I managed to finagle my way onto a couple of panels at Lunacon in New Jersey next weeked. I’ll be there at the con only for the day on Saturday, March 18, talking about:
Saturday noon-1:00 p.m. Stanton (Dan Persons [M], Russell Handelman, John Ordover, Bob Stacy)
Monoliths, Soylent Green and Damn Dirty Apes
SF Films of the Mid-60s to Mid-70s from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star WarsSaturday 3:00-4:00 p.m. Yale (John Ordover, Toni Lay [M], Dan Kimmel, Bob Greenberger)
Star Trek: What Next?
And the rest of the day, I’ll be wandering around the con, checking out the art show and the masquerade and the dealers’ room and such. Please stop by and say hello if you see me.
The weekend after, March 24 to 26, for the whole weekend, I’ll be at I-Con on Long Island. I don’t yet know what my schedule there is going to be like, but I’ll let you know as soon as I know.
And, I’ve just been invited to attend WorldCon in Los Angeles (okay, Anaheim) in August, where I’ll be participating in panel discussions on movies and TV, hosting at least one room party, and more probably. More details on that as soon as they get settled.
You know what’s really pathetic? I’m actually totally stoked that I’ve made $3.29 from Google AdSense today... and the day’s only half over! I might pull in $6 by midnight!
And that’s combined revenue from Geek Philosophy and FlickFilosopher.com. Oh man, do I rule or what?
*sob*
Have you ever even heard of Calacanis.com? Cuz this is what they were boasting back last July:
If back in September when we started playing with Google Adsense someone told me it would turn into a $1M a year business I would have laughed. A million bucks without a sales person? Give me a break! However, yesterday we broke our $2,100 record with a $2,335 day. That’s an impressive number I know, because if we can take that number to $2,739.72 we’re at -- wait for it -- $1M a year.For some perspective, take a look at some averages:
January we did $580 a day on average.
March was a $737 a day average.
May was a $1,585.57 average.
Damn. I gotta gotta put some porn or something on this site. How’s this? See the FlickFilosopher/Geek Philosopher’s breasts!:
Shatner wants you! To worship him!
The conclusion is inescapable. FameTracker deems Shatner’s current occupation to be “Super-Indestructible Icon,” and his “deserved approximate level of fame” to be “Moses.” And if that weren’t enough, the FameTrackers geeks have this to say:
Shatner is so damned awesome, so abundantly unexpected, so fucking necessary, he's practically Biblical.
Also: Shatner is Canadian. You know Jesus would be Canadian today, probably a trendy Vancouver slacker-philosopher. So there’s more evidence that we are all on an irreversible course to the veneration of Shatner.
It’s something of a cliché, the geek hopped up on sugar and caffeine (and more recently, maybe Ritalin) and coding for 24 hours straight, or sitting up all night playing World of Whatever with some guy in Japan. Geekiness and legal drugs are inexplicably connected: there’s the Web comic Geeks on Caffeine, for one, and look: ThinkGeek has an entire section of stuff to buy called Caffeine, and there’s the famous caffeine-molecule T-shirt.
But maybe we’re starting to get worn out with the nonstoppedness of it all, as we Xers get older. It’s a lot harder to pull an all-nighter at 35 than it was at 25, caffeine or no. And so LifeHacker has some advice on quitting caffeine.
Google promised us it wouldn’t be evil, and then it was, choking its own service in China in order to get into that market. Yahoo! never promised it wouldn’t be evil, so perhaps it was easier for the folks there to rat out dissidents to the Chinese government. But hey: “Yahoo executives feel ‘horrible’ about political arrests of Internet users in China,” according to News.com. But they also believe it’s better to make a ton of money in a new market and take a few PR hits than not to make a ton of money. (I’m paraphrasing. They think this: “it's better to operate in that market and cooperate with authorities than not be there at all.”)
Mutants are cool again, with the remake of The Hills Have Eyes hitting theaters tomorrow. So here's The Human Torch, from last year's Fantastic Four, who really enjoys his freakish powers; the nuked Amazing Colossal Man, who has wit enough to wonder what sin a man could commit in a single lifetime to deserve such a fate as being made huge by radiation; and this guy, who actually believes the tripe put about by Homeland Security, that a piece of plywood would actually save a dude from getting his DNA scrambled.
Did you know that today is Get Over It Day? I had no idea until a friend sent me the link to GetOverItDay.com. It’s a pretty Xer-style smack in the face to stop wallowing in the pathetic pity that is driving your friends bonkers. Perhaps I will take this opportunity to Get Over the fact that my freakin’ book publisher closed up shop before they published my book. See, I’m letting it go right now... *deep breath... innnnnnnnn... oooouuuut*
Get Over It Day is from the same folks who brought us RejectionHotline.com, which I am constitutionally opposed to because it smacks of a passive-aggressiveness that deeply bothers me -- if you can’t tell someone to their face, “Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not interested,” then you’re a woos. Yet I must respect the combination of geek skillz and Xer entrepreneurship that identified this niche and jumped in to fill it, obviously very successfully. This gang must be doing something right, if they’re able to make this offer:
WE'LL GIVE YOU $100 CASH if you tell your favorite bar about us and get them to sign up as an Official "Get Over It Day Party Spot!"
Still feeling down? As GetOverItDay.com notes, whatever is bothering you “could always suck more.”
So, I’ve thinking about how we’re so messed up and how so much of why we’re so messed up is because of our reliance on fossil fuels, and I’ve come up with the solution:
I can’t believe no one else has thought of this.
</obvious>
Doug Savage nails the fundamental insanity at the root of contemporary American society with today's installment of his daily web comic, Savage Chickens.
I wanna laugh, but I have to cry.
Look, I’m not gonna deny it: I started out as a writer, editor, and publisher in the mid 80s with xeroxed science-fiction fanzines, with a primary focus on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, though I also published a Starman zine called Endangered Species that won a Fan Quality Award from the MediaWest Con people in 1989... though *sob* the con’s site mysteriously credits the zine to publisher “Mary Ann Bohling.” (Maybe I’ll post my Doctor Who fan fiction someday -- it’s really quite good, if I do say so myself.)
And holy crap, look at this! This Google cache of an email newsletter about Blake’s 7 fanzines from 19-freakin’-94 has me listed... at an address I haven’t lived at since that year:
Portals ( editor )
multimedia fanzine
MaryAnn Johanson --> 27 St. Mark's Place #4D New York NY 10003 USA
I, for one, welcome our new furry blond lobster overlords...
“Sunset” on the PATRIOT Act? Not so much.
Bigger hurricanes are coming...
...and we won’t know it until it’s too late.
Unless huge solar storms knock us flat...
...or the Dust Bowl returns.
There’s nothing we can do to avoid a flu pandemic.
We’re gonna be fighting over the last drops of oil.
Consumer finances are in terrible shape...
...but the national and even international economic situation is far worse.
There’s nothing quite like a metaphor-laden story about mutants with superpowers to strike a chord with disenfranchised-feeling geeks. Which is why the X-Men films are so damn cool, at least to those of us who feel like ostracized mutants ourselves. So how to parse, then, the very arty, very how-like-a-fashion-spread feel of these beautiful teaser posters for the third installment in the franchise, X-Men: The Last Stand? They’re extraordinarily eye-catching, yet they’re also very conservative in the same way that fashion photography is: it would like to think it’s daring, but it’s really just selling you overpriced clothing.
I’ve approached this X-Men image from a different angle over at FlickFilosopher.com, but it’s worth exploring here, too: Does the fact that these ads are not particularly geeky signal a sort of acceptance of geeky things, like, oh, genetic comic-book mutants who fight for truth, justice, and the American way? And is there some nugget of cultural awakening to be found in the “Take a Stand” tagline? Are we ready, as a society, to start taking a stand? Or are we content merely to gaze at pretty people?
Speaking of corrupt blogging practices...
Blogoriented is either the cleverest sendup of the state of blogging, or it’s a sign of the apocalypse:
Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords.
That was in August 2005. By the end of September:
Our blogforce is performing very well. We are currently publishing 150 blogs, the most popular of which have about 2,000 visits a day. We have had about 5% of our blogs be ‘outed’ as being written by an obvious non-english native. We are pushing products in about half of our blogs. We currently have our bloggers split their time btwn blogging and developing a strong rep. They participate in discussion groups and regularly comment on other blogs. We have hired a few language experts so our bloggers can refine their speech. Our goal is to have some of our top dogs engage in skype conversations with their new net buddies.
No updates after October. Gotta be a joke, right?
Look, Blogoriented works as satire because the Web is cluttered with faceless blogs written in bland voices with no distinct points of view or unifying principles that could, indeed, be produced by an army of underpaid non-native English speakers on an electronic assembly line. But it also, alas, works an not-satire for the same reason.
What a shock. It’s hardly a newsflash that companies front fake blogs and pay bloggers to mention products or services. But it’s always news when Wal-Mart gets in on anything. From The New York Times today:
Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. "All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills," he wrote.It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.
Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell's Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart's public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.
Ya say the Oscars left ya cold? Just not geeky enough for ya? Got a nerd jones to scratch while we wait for V for Vendetta? Then check out writer Will Carlough and director James Duffy’s “Robin’s Big Date,” which you can watch online for free. It stars Sam Rockwell and Justin Long, vets of geek films galore -- they were both in Galaxy Quest, for one...
There was a sense of the passing of a torch during last night’s Oscars. And not just because the first rap song to be nominated for Best Original Song actually won:
The SG-1 team goes on a “Crusade”:
Heh: possession is nine-tenths of the episode. You can't go wrong when your cast is this talented and your writers this clever.
I'm off to a "courtesy screening" of Ultraviolet: the film was not shown to critics in advance of opening day (and you know what that means), but the studio is nice enough to show it to us this morning. Which means that if I don't want to pay $10.75 to see this thing, I gotta haul my ass all the way downtown in time for the 10am showtime. When I'd really rather be sitting here writing reviews and blogging for your surfing pleasure.
But check back later, when I'll have some bloggy goodness for you. And later, over at FlickFilosopher.com, I'll have a review of 16 Blocks (if you're looking for something new to see this weekend, go see that -- Willis continues taking interesting artistic chances, and Mos Def is spectacularly good), my Oscar picks, and more... including, of course, my reaction to Ultraviolet.
Loves me some Bruce Willis, and so in honor of his return to fine form in 16 Blocks (which opens tomorrow; look for my review late tonight or early tomorrow at FlickFilosopher.com), herewith Bruno in all his glory: as snarky David Addison on Moonlighting, as a confused time-traveler in 12 Monkeys, and as a really confused hitman in the dreadful The Whole Ten Yards.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to bang my head against a wall -- the kind of stuff that told me there was a need for something like Geek Philosophy. Star-Telegram.com (of Dallas-Fort Worth) has a new piece up about Jon Stewart that seems to go out of its way to misunderstand its own conclusions about Stewart’s influence and importance in today’s culture. It starts out something like this:
American culture, it seems, can’t decide whether to classify Stewart as a comedian or a journalist.Stewart’s late-night newscast parody, The Daily Show, airs four nights a week in a time slot that makes it an alternative to local newscasts. Big-name media figures like Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers have indicated they respect his opinions and take him seriously.
And surveys show that an astonishing number of young people claim they get most of their news from watching The Daily Show.
Inconceivable! I just learned late last night that the company that was to publish my book Behind the Screen: The Princess Bride has gone belly up. No warning at all: I was waiting to hear from my editor about revisions and such, was planning all sorts of fun promotional stuff... and then it’s, Here’s your manuscript back, nice workin’ with ya, have a nice life.
I was stunned, as you might imagine.
Emmis Books’ Web site is still loaded down with happy horseshit like this:
Now in our third year, we believe that we are at the start of something good. As a small publishing company, we know that books won't be lost on lists and authors are an integral part of the process.
But I’m not bitter. No.
Anyway, I’m considering what to do with the manuscript, and I’m keeping everything open from trying to find another traditional publisher to doing it up as a nice PDF, letting everyone download it for free, and asking readers to pay me what they think it’s worth.
In the meantime, my loss -- and this is a real blow to me -- is your gain. I’m gonna share one of the little bonus bits that was to have been in the book, and now seems the right time to do it, since it has a little connection to the Oscars. Click here for Man in Black Meets Man in Black (it's at FlickFilosopher.com).
[crossposted at FlickFilosopher.com and Cinemarati]
I’ve mentioned before how Countdown with Keith Olbermann feels more like a blog than a news program, and by that I mean not only that Olbermann is snarky and smart but also that there’s a lot of passion in what he does -- there’s a real perspective to the show, and he doesn’t pretend that there isn’t.
Still, it’s notable that his number one story both last night and the night before has been the overlooking of legendary baseball player Buck O’Neill in the recent inductions to the Baseball Hall of Fame -- O’Neill was, according to Olbermann, a key figure in the history of the Negro Leagues and the eventual integration of the game. Now, I know almost nothing about baseball or its history or who deserves to be honored and who doesn’t, but this does seem like an absurd oversight.
But this isn’t about baseball: it’s about Olbermann’s promoting, blogger style, an underreported story, giving it the place of prominence it deserves. At first, I found myself wondering, Is this really the most important news story of the day? With Iraq falling apart and the Gulf Coast still a disaster area, is this the biggest thing we should be thinking about?
And then I reconsidered: racial issues underscore much of the mess this country finds itself in -- Olbermann found a new angle on that, chose to highlight an example of that that his audience might not have been aware of. Isn’t that one of the things that journalists should be doing, not merely rehashing the same old stories even when there’s nothing new to be said about them but bringing together disparate threads of the same larger story into a cohesive whole? You know, adding to the sum of human understanding and knowledge, not merely pandering to established biases?
But this isn’t about race any more than it’s about baseball, and maybe I’m reading too much into Olbermann’s choice of stories to highlight: he is a former sports reporter, after all, and have made a point, these last two nights, of saying what a baseball nut he is. It seems to me, though, that whether Olbermann is aping bloggers or not, he’s part of the new vanguard that is hauling journalism, kicking and screaming, back to where it used to be.
