Showing posts with label entertainment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entertainment. Show all posts
Monday, June 04, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Cliche What?
In case anyone thinks that there isn't a horrible lack of creativity in the video game market, just go to Steam's website and look at the promoted games on the homepage. I did that and found this.
 |
| Man with gun. |
 |
| Man with swords. |
 |
| Men with guns. |
 |
| Men with guns. |
 |
| This one appears legitimately inventive. Good show. You'll notice that this is the only game with a mustache. Coincidence? I think not. |
 |
| Man with gun and small sword versus zombie. |
 |
| Man with sword. |
 |
| Cars. Derivative, certainly, but not for the purposes of this comparison. |
 |
| Man with gun. |
 |
| Man with gun versus another man with a gun who is also holding breasts prisoner. He is obviously a terrorist because only terrorists hold breasts prisoner. |
 |
| The only other legitimately inventive game. And again! A mustache! It's a sign. Also, breasts. |
 |
| Epic ships in space flying toward you. |
 |
| Epic ships in space flying away from you. |
 |
| Man with nail gun. |
 |
| Zombies. One assumes there is a man with a gun nearby. |
Friday, March 30, 2012
Mass Effect 3 Disappointment Was Expected
As this article, weirdly on LiveScience shows, some people seem to think that video games are a new form of story telling. They are not. They do not "free" story telling from the shackles, because story telling is inherently a one-way street. If the person listening to the story becomes involved, they must be involved within limits else it turns into role-playing... which is why role-playing games are called role-playing games. If the ending changes, it is not the same story.
World of Warcraft is not a story. Yes, there is an overarching story that drives many of the major events, but millions of players have nothing to do with that. They spend all of their time wandering around the open world, "writing" their own story. Yes, there is a narrative to it, but a story must have a purpose; it must have some end. And in games, that some end must be pre-determined. And even with games where there are multiple endings, there is always one ending that is counted as the true ending, which is usually the one that takes the longest to achieve and must match a set number of variables in the game. Unless you count Silent Hill's "dog" ending.
For example, if we wanted a game to be a real interactive story, there would never be something like a "game over" state. All endings would be a true ending. But in many games, you can die within the first thirty seconds of game time. To call that a legitimate ending would be absurd. There must be limits. In a real story, there are no limits, only a creative vision. It is obvious why this is so: a player can easily exceed the limits of a created world, because any created world must necessarily be finite.
Games will never be pure stories because they must be within the limits of game rules. For example, I love Halo. I read the Halo novels like Fall of Reach. While far from sci-fi genius, they were decent fluff. The problem is that the stories didn't make ANY sense in relation the game. The description of the super-soldiers (of which you play one in the game) is so beyond anything, that they would have been an unstoppable juggernaut. Strong enough to lift cars. Can run at 60mph.
Perhaps a more famous example, at least in the world of video games, is that of Final Fantasy VII. This was an era-defining game. It is frequently held up as the first truly cinematic attempt at making a video game. It also includes one of the most famous deaths in all of video-gamedom: Aeris. Only, according to the rules set out by the game, it doesn't make sense. On any given play-through, Aeris could have died dozens of times; you could always resurrect her with a spell.
Why should her scripted death be any different? Because it was required by the story. There are some games that try to get around this, by making in-game deaths permanent, one that sticks in my mind is the (old) game Gain Ground. But that was part of the game. Everyone understood the rules because they were communicated explicitly to the player. In a narrative game, if deaths are always made permanent, the player is left in a state of confusion. Should they restart? Is this death avoidable? Is a death at this point necessary?
You'd have crazed players replaying the same part of a game over and over in an attempt to save everyone's life. Conversely, you can have players who charge through a game with reckless abandon, and are left with no one alive, crippling the possible story in that way.
No, I'm sorry. Games are and always will be an imperfect story medium. They are no more liberating from the shackles of story requirements than Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Granted, there are advantages to this. A game should not be seen as a story. It should be seen as a game with rules where certain narrative bits are essentially rewards for completing tasks. To go back to the Silent Hill example, that dog ending doesn't make any sense. It's absurd beyond reason. And that's great! In a real story, it would be bound by the limitation of having only a single ending, which in the terms of a story isn't much a limitation, but it's still a limitation as regards entertainment. In a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of concept, the author can write tons of endings, some of which make no sense, simply because it's funny.
Working toward surprises, hidden rewards, undiscovered narrative elements, it's all part of experiencing a set narrative more fully. For example, people love to discover unfinished versions of books or movies. Deleted scenes, unfinished scripts, all of them are gobbled up by dedicated fans of something. They do this because it is the exact same process as going through a game and finding hidden bits of the story. It is a narrative that isn't simply delivered. It is a narrative discovered. That is what makes games both less and more than a book or a movie.
World of Warcraft is not a story. Yes, there is an overarching story that drives many of the major events, but millions of players have nothing to do with that. They spend all of their time wandering around the open world, "writing" their own story. Yes, there is a narrative to it, but a story must have a purpose; it must have some end. And in games, that some end must be pre-determined. And even with games where there are multiple endings, there is always one ending that is counted as the true ending, which is usually the one that takes the longest to achieve and must match a set number of variables in the game. Unless you count Silent Hill's "dog" ending.
For example, if we wanted a game to be a real interactive story, there would never be something like a "game over" state. All endings would be a true ending. But in many games, you can die within the first thirty seconds of game time. To call that a legitimate ending would be absurd. There must be limits. In a real story, there are no limits, only a creative vision. It is obvious why this is so: a player can easily exceed the limits of a created world, because any created world must necessarily be finite.
Games will never be pure stories because they must be within the limits of game rules. For example, I love Halo. I read the Halo novels like Fall of Reach. While far from sci-fi genius, they were decent fluff. The problem is that the stories didn't make ANY sense in relation the game. The description of the super-soldiers (of which you play one in the game) is so beyond anything, that they would have been an unstoppable juggernaut. Strong enough to lift cars. Can run at 60mph.
Perhaps a more famous example, at least in the world of video games, is that of Final Fantasy VII. This was an era-defining game. It is frequently held up as the first truly cinematic attempt at making a video game. It also includes one of the most famous deaths in all of video-gamedom: Aeris. Only, according to the rules set out by the game, it doesn't make sense. On any given play-through, Aeris could have died dozens of times; you could always resurrect her with a spell.
Why should her scripted death be any different? Because it was required by the story. There are some games that try to get around this, by making in-game deaths permanent, one that sticks in my mind is the (old) game Gain Ground. But that was part of the game. Everyone understood the rules because they were communicated explicitly to the player. In a narrative game, if deaths are always made permanent, the player is left in a state of confusion. Should they restart? Is this death avoidable? Is a death at this point necessary?
You'd have crazed players replaying the same part of a game over and over in an attempt to save everyone's life. Conversely, you can have players who charge through a game with reckless abandon, and are left with no one alive, crippling the possible story in that way.
No, I'm sorry. Games are and always will be an imperfect story medium. They are no more liberating from the shackles of story requirements than Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Granted, there are advantages to this. A game should not be seen as a story. It should be seen as a game with rules where certain narrative bits are essentially rewards for completing tasks. To go back to the Silent Hill example, that dog ending doesn't make any sense. It's absurd beyond reason. And that's great! In a real story, it would be bound by the limitation of having only a single ending, which in the terms of a story isn't much a limitation, but it's still a limitation as regards entertainment. In a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of concept, the author can write tons of endings, some of which make no sense, simply because it's funny.
Working toward surprises, hidden rewards, undiscovered narrative elements, it's all part of experiencing a set narrative more fully. For example, people love to discover unfinished versions of books or movies. Deleted scenes, unfinished scripts, all of them are gobbled up by dedicated fans of something. They do this because it is the exact same process as going through a game and finding hidden bits of the story. It is a narrative that isn't simply delivered. It is a narrative discovered. That is what makes games both less and more than a book or a movie.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thursday, January 05, 2012
SOPA and PIPA Would Destroy The Entertainment Industry
The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is so far-reaching, and so wildly inappropriate, that it is actually becoming part of the conversation of people outside of copyright law circles. This is quite the achievement. I'm very much against both it and its sibling, The Protect Intellectual Property (PIPA) Act.
What hit me today, though, is not that the RIAA, MPAA, and anyone else who supports this is borderline-evil, it is that if these acts go through, and the various organizations who want to stop file-sharing actually succeed, it would destroy their business.
I listen to tons of music. Almost all of it is on TheSixtyOne.com. All of that music is free, much of it is free to download, and still more of it is Creative Commons. I have not listened to music from a major artist in years, excepting when I cleaned out an old hard drive and had to delete music that I no longer wanted.
Likewise, most of the good songs from any given major album are released as singles, and are thus available on YouTube. So if I really want to, I can listen to them, there. The only reason why I, and while I know that my social circle is not exactly representative, most of my friends even know about most major releases is because we can get the songs for free online. If we couldn't, we not only wouldn't want them, we wouldn't even know they existed.
This aspect of the argument is, I think, ignored because of the belligerent and confrontational nature of the debate. The various media companies are wrong. Basic economics proves them wrong. But those same economic arguments mean that if the media companies somehow succeed -I don't think that they will, but hypothetically speaking- they will quite literally be the harbingers of their own destruction.
The basic economic mechanisms by which the music industry is growing today would be circumvented, thus propelling the music being made at the fringes of the industry, indie music and self-produced bands, directly into the lime light. Truly, the success of the MPAA and RIAA would be the greatest boon in history to smaller groups trying to get heard, since they would no longer have to fight with the big boys for market space.
I don't think that this will happen, of course, since both PIPA and SOPA are catastrophes of legal garbage. Still, it's funny to think that if they did manage to get through, it could be the final nail in the coffin for the very industry that is so desperately trying to pass them.
What hit me today, though, is not that the RIAA, MPAA, and anyone else who supports this is borderline-evil, it is that if these acts go through, and the various organizations who want to stop file-sharing actually succeed, it would destroy their business.
I listen to tons of music. Almost all of it is on TheSixtyOne.com. All of that music is free, much of it is free to download, and still more of it is Creative Commons. I have not listened to music from a major artist in years, excepting when I cleaned out an old hard drive and had to delete music that I no longer wanted.
Likewise, most of the good songs from any given major album are released as singles, and are thus available on YouTube. So if I really want to, I can listen to them, there. The only reason why I, and while I know that my social circle is not exactly representative, most of my friends even know about most major releases is because we can get the songs for free online. If we couldn't, we not only wouldn't want them, we wouldn't even know they existed.
This aspect of the argument is, I think, ignored because of the belligerent and confrontational nature of the debate. The various media companies are wrong. Basic economics proves them wrong. But those same economic arguments mean that if the media companies somehow succeed -I don't think that they will, but hypothetically speaking- they will quite literally be the harbingers of their own destruction.
The basic economic mechanisms by which the music industry is growing today would be circumvented, thus propelling the music being made at the fringes of the industry, indie music and self-produced bands, directly into the lime light. Truly, the success of the MPAA and RIAA would be the greatest boon in history to smaller groups trying to get heard, since they would no longer have to fight with the big boys for market space.
I don't think that this will happen, of course, since both PIPA and SOPA are catastrophes of legal garbage. Still, it's funny to think that if they did manage to get through, it could be the final nail in the coffin for the very industry that is so desperately trying to pass them.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
X-Men First Class And My Issues With Comic Book Movies
I just saw X-Men First Class. I liked it. It was well-directed, stylish, and some truly excellent performances. But I would never watch it again.
A great review of a movie explains perfectly why the critic did or didn't like said movie. For example, Roger Ebert's review of Dark City made me go back and watch it again, and it is now one of my favorite sci-fi's. My partner, Danielle, ruined the movie Aladdin for me by asking where the hell the narrator/salesman from the beginning of the film went.
Likewise, a great review, by whom I've forgotten, for the first X-Men ruined the film for me and further drove home the importance of keeping comic book worlds and the real world separated. Basically, the whole use of mutation as an analogy for racial undertones and bigotry is just amazingly stupid. Fear and hatred of black or Asian people is wrong because they're just people, they just look slightly different. Fear and hatred of someone who can level whole cities with their mind is very, very legitimate. Even mutants should be terrified of other mutants.
As it is with X-Men First Class. They place the movie during the early 1960's and have the X-Men stop World War III by being the actual reason the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't come to guns. First problem, this opens up a metric-crap-ton of historical inconsistencies, but disregarding those, there are issues on the story's own terms.
For example, people don't know about mutants? How did WWII even happen? You're telling me that not ONE of the people that the Nazi's massacred wasn't a mature mutant? There are just now, spontaneously, millions of mutants? And ALL of them are in hiding? No. I'm sorry. Some of them would turn into superheroes and some into supervillains. And that logical requirement works just fine in comic books, because that's what comic books are: heroes and villains.
It is impossible to shoehorn in comic book logic (I refer to as a cause-&-effect system) into real-world logic. It was the reason why I found both new Batman films insufferable. Batman Begins took itself gravely seriously, and its climax centered around a microwave gun that magically doesn't effect the 80% of the human body that is water. It was stupid.
First Class isn't that stupid, but every second of the movie has logical issues with its setup, logical issues that I just couldn't get past to fully enjoy the film.
I think the reason why my favorite recent comic book film is Iron Man is that the director, Jon Favreau, understands the nature of comic book movies perfectly. When interviewed about the upcoming Avengers film, he said he didn't envy the producers of that film since they had to try to merge the technological world of Iron Man with the magical world of Thor. He said that comic book movies have to operate in their own worlds, disconnected from others, for them to work. Why so few directors understand this is beyond me.
It's not just comic book films, though. It's all of Hollywood. When critics refer to jarring shifts in tone, usually in a derogatory sense, they're frequently referring to shifts in cause & effect. For example, a movie that was borderline unwatchable for me at times was the 2008 film Hamlet 2. There were scenes of slapstick C&E, scenes of real-world C&E, scenes of uplifting teen drama, Saturday Night Live, and genuine attempts at pathos. None of these can live together in a film.
As a filmmaker, you must know precisely in which universe of cause & effect your movie is going to live. All characters must then follow that system. You can't decide that you want some drama, and suddenly have everything shift to a dramatic system in hopes of wringing out a tear or two. You'll end up like Family Guy, which, regardless of its quite genuine humor and inventiveness, is horribly written.
As a writer, this is difficult, which is probably why so few do it. You must think out the complex network of effects that any event in your story would have within the world that you've chosen. This is the reason why so many super-dramas are very tightly scripted. They only write a few characters, and what they do, who they are, and where they live is highly limited. It allows the writer freedom to concentrate on the characters about which they actually care, and not have to worry about potential inconsistencies and plot holes involving hypothetical outside variables.
Unfortunately for those lazy writers that don't want to do go through the trouble, this is what makes good writing. Without it, you may as well not bother. Stop clogging up the gears of movie production with your shitty scripts and make room for story tellers who have something worthwhile to say.
A great review of a movie explains perfectly why the critic did or didn't like said movie. For example, Roger Ebert's review of Dark City made me go back and watch it again, and it is now one of my favorite sci-fi's. My partner, Danielle, ruined the movie Aladdin for me by asking where the hell the narrator/salesman from the beginning of the film went.
Likewise, a great review, by whom I've forgotten, for the first X-Men ruined the film for me and further drove home the importance of keeping comic book worlds and the real world separated. Basically, the whole use of mutation as an analogy for racial undertones and bigotry is just amazingly stupid. Fear and hatred of black or Asian people is wrong because they're just people, they just look slightly different. Fear and hatred of someone who can level whole cities with their mind is very, very legitimate. Even mutants should be terrified of other mutants.
As it is with X-Men First Class. They place the movie during the early 1960's and have the X-Men stop World War III by being the actual reason the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't come to guns. First problem, this opens up a metric-crap-ton of historical inconsistencies, but disregarding those, there are issues on the story's own terms.
For example, people don't know about mutants? How did WWII even happen? You're telling me that not ONE of the people that the Nazi's massacred wasn't a mature mutant? There are just now, spontaneously, millions of mutants? And ALL of them are in hiding? No. I'm sorry. Some of them would turn into superheroes and some into supervillains. And that logical requirement works just fine in comic books, because that's what comic books are: heroes and villains.
It is impossible to shoehorn in comic book logic (I refer to as a cause-&-effect system) into real-world logic. It was the reason why I found both new Batman films insufferable. Batman Begins took itself gravely seriously, and its climax centered around a microwave gun that magically doesn't effect the 80% of the human body that is water. It was stupid.
First Class isn't that stupid, but every second of the movie has logical issues with its setup, logical issues that I just couldn't get past to fully enjoy the film.
I think the reason why my favorite recent comic book film is Iron Man is that the director, Jon Favreau, understands the nature of comic book movies perfectly. When interviewed about the upcoming Avengers film, he said he didn't envy the producers of that film since they had to try to merge the technological world of Iron Man with the magical world of Thor. He said that comic book movies have to operate in their own worlds, disconnected from others, for them to work. Why so few directors understand this is beyond me.
It's not just comic book films, though. It's all of Hollywood. When critics refer to jarring shifts in tone, usually in a derogatory sense, they're frequently referring to shifts in cause & effect. For example, a movie that was borderline unwatchable for me at times was the 2008 film Hamlet 2. There were scenes of slapstick C&E, scenes of real-world C&E, scenes of uplifting teen drama, Saturday Night Live, and genuine attempts at pathos. None of these can live together in a film.
As a filmmaker, you must know precisely in which universe of cause & effect your movie is going to live. All characters must then follow that system. You can't decide that you want some drama, and suddenly have everything shift to a dramatic system in hopes of wringing out a tear or two. You'll end up like Family Guy, which, regardless of its quite genuine humor and inventiveness, is horribly written.
As a writer, this is difficult, which is probably why so few do it. You must think out the complex network of effects that any event in your story would have within the world that you've chosen. This is the reason why so many super-dramas are very tightly scripted. They only write a few characters, and what they do, who they are, and where they live is highly limited. It allows the writer freedom to concentrate on the characters about which they actually care, and not have to worry about potential inconsistencies and plot holes involving hypothetical outside variables.
Unfortunately for those lazy writers that don't want to do go through the trouble, this is what makes good writing. Without it, you may as well not bother. Stop clogging up the gears of movie production with your shitty scripts and make room for story tellers who have something worthwhile to say.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Netflix Subscribers Abandon The Service.
I find the large exodus of customers from Netflix following its price increase to be of immense interest. I've been ranting for over the past ten years that media is actually worth very little. What has been valuable has always been the medium by which the media is transmitted. Television shows weren't valuable, television itself was.
In this day and age of nearly limitless claims on our attention, no company can safely say that their media is so valuable that people would seek it out. Obviously, that is not the case. Take, for example, me. I pirate. I pirate just about anything that I want to see, which is very, very little. I haven't "stolen" a movie for over a year. The few movies that I have watched I've done so through my Netflix account. Piracy isn't the issue, it's something else.
We can argue about what's causing this, but that's an academic issue. People are, for whatever reason, assigning an ever-decreasing value to movies and television. But even I had no idea how far that had gone. The huge drop in subscribers confirms that it is much further along than I think anyone had initially assumed.
When you think about it, the price increase was actually rather small. As a function of percentage, yes, the increase was very large. But in absolute numbers, it was small. Most people are paying an extra eight dollars per month. If we place the average American household income at $50,000, that means that for 70% of American families, that increase is almost invisible in the grand scheme of their budget.
Yet, still, we are seeing an ever-growing customer loss. While those in the media industry would like to believe otherwise, I think that this confirms what basic economics would tell them: the value of media is approaching zero. ECON-101 will tell anyone that the cost of something will drop to the marginal cost of producing a copy of that thing. With data such as movies and music, that marginal cost is, near as makes no difference, zero.
Netflix is unfolding as a massive economics experiment, one that doesn't bode well for the traditionally modeled media companies.
In this day and age of nearly limitless claims on our attention, no company can safely say that their media is so valuable that people would seek it out. Obviously, that is not the case. Take, for example, me. I pirate. I pirate just about anything that I want to see, which is very, very little. I haven't "stolen" a movie for over a year. The few movies that I have watched I've done so through my Netflix account. Piracy isn't the issue, it's something else.
We can argue about what's causing this, but that's an academic issue. People are, for whatever reason, assigning an ever-decreasing value to movies and television. But even I had no idea how far that had gone. The huge drop in subscribers confirms that it is much further along than I think anyone had initially assumed.
When you think about it, the price increase was actually rather small. As a function of percentage, yes, the increase was very large. But in absolute numbers, it was small. Most people are paying an extra eight dollars per month. If we place the average American household income at $50,000, that means that for 70% of American families, that increase is almost invisible in the grand scheme of their budget.
Yet, still, we are seeing an ever-growing customer loss. While those in the media industry would like to believe otherwise, I think that this confirms what basic economics would tell them: the value of media is approaching zero. ECON-101 will tell anyone that the cost of something will drop to the marginal cost of producing a copy of that thing. With data such as movies and music, that marginal cost is, near as makes no difference, zero.
Netflix is unfolding as a massive economics experiment, one that doesn't bode well for the traditionally modeled media companies.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
I Hate Tablets
I hate tablets. I don't like the iPad, I don't like any of the Android examples, I don't like the Blackberry. I hate them all.
I hate them because all of the tablet fanatics out there, perhaps intoxicated by Steve Jobs exaltations, believe that tablets will one day be the predominant form of computing. At least for now, this is total nonsense.
Every time you talk to a developer, they talk about one of two things: "specific considerations" of tablet development, if they're careful about the words they use; or "limitations" of tablet development, if they aren't. I prefer to use the term "limitations" of the tablet platform. Essentially, until we have neural connections with our computers, tablets are a much more limited form of communication between user and device. That is undeniable. There are simply fewer channels of interaction.
Moreover, the media community and even the tablet developers continue to make those limitations even worse! First was Apple's exclusion of Flash, which was a real bummer, since the iPad's best at media consumption, and that means Flash. Then, it was the media companies trying to block pretty much everything from the mobile browsers. Even on Android, you can't watch music videos on YouTube. You can't watch Hulu.
That is in no way a comparable experience. It's not even different. It's inferior.
When Windows is on tablets, I'll bite. That way, a tablet will be an actual computer. Not a toy.
I hate them because all of the tablet fanatics out there, perhaps intoxicated by Steve Jobs exaltations, believe that tablets will one day be the predominant form of computing. At least for now, this is total nonsense.
Every time you talk to a developer, they talk about one of two things: "specific considerations" of tablet development, if they're careful about the words they use; or "limitations" of tablet development, if they aren't. I prefer to use the term "limitations" of the tablet platform. Essentially, until we have neural connections with our computers, tablets are a much more limited form of communication between user and device. That is undeniable. There are simply fewer channels of interaction.
Moreover, the media community and even the tablet developers continue to make those limitations even worse! First was Apple's exclusion of Flash, which was a real bummer, since the iPad's best at media consumption, and that means Flash. Then, it was the media companies trying to block pretty much everything from the mobile browsers. Even on Android, you can't watch music videos on YouTube. You can't watch Hulu.
That is in no way a comparable experience. It's not even different. It's inferior.
When Windows is on tablets, I'll bite. That way, a tablet will be an actual computer. Not a toy.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Two Ism's And Some Games
Where is Ai Weiwei, and why is the United States pathetically silent on his disappearance? How can armies for the past 2,000 years all have been retarded? And are video games from 15 years ago better than those today?
Saturday, March 26, 2011
More Good Music
A recent study indicates that there is just as much good music floating around today as there was before Napster destroyed the world.
Anyone who has ever used TheSixtyOne knows that there's lots of good music being produced. So much, in fact, that it's impossible to listen to all of it. Services like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone review as many albums as they can, but even that is a tenth of the albums that they receive. When I worked at a radio station in the early to mid 2000's we had a team of four people listening to albums for broadcast. We listened to dozens of albums each week and it was still a small fraction of what was sent to us.
Anyone who has ever used TheSixtyOne knows that there's lots of good music being produced. So much, in fact, that it's impossible to listen to all of it. Services like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone review as many albums as they can, but even that is a tenth of the albums that they receive. When I worked at a radio station in the early to mid 2000's we had a team of four people listening to albums for broadcast. We listened to dozens of albums each week and it was still a small fraction of what was sent to us.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
No Dilemma At All
I already hate the upcoming move The Dilemma. Why? Because some fat fucks have thin, hot wives. Vince Vaugn is looking more and more dead as time goes on, and Kevin James' entire shtick is being a fat fuck!
Yet in The Dilemma, Vaugn's character (himself married to the luminous Jennifer Connolly) discovers that his brother's wife is cheating on him. Who plays the wife? Winona Ryder. Yeah. There's a good reason why she's cheating on him. She's thin and attractive, and he's a fat fuck. James has an attractive wife in real life because he's famous. If he wasn't famous, for example, if he actually was Paul Blart, mall cop, his wife would be as fat and unattractive as he is.
Look at Kevin James entire oeuvre! Grown Ups, wife: Maria Bello. Paul Blart: Jayma Mays. Hitch: Amber Valletta. And of course, we have The King of Queens, which practically refined the "fat fuck/hot wife" cliche into an art form.
I am so done with this. My girlfriend thinks it's a massive conspiracy to convince women to lower their standards. I'm forced to agree.
Yet in The Dilemma, Vaugn's character (himself married to the luminous Jennifer Connolly) discovers that his brother's wife is cheating on him. Who plays the wife? Winona Ryder. Yeah. There's a good reason why she's cheating on him. She's thin and attractive, and he's a fat fuck. James has an attractive wife in real life because he's famous. If he wasn't famous, for example, if he actually was Paul Blart, mall cop, his wife would be as fat and unattractive as he is.
Look at Kevin James entire oeuvre! Grown Ups, wife: Maria Bello. Paul Blart: Jayma Mays. Hitch: Amber Valletta. And of course, we have The King of Queens, which practically refined the "fat fuck/hot wife" cliche into an art form.
I am so done with this. My girlfriend thinks it's a massive conspiracy to convince women to lower their standards. I'm forced to agree.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Marketing People are Retarded
This subject is near and dear to my heart: Suits and ties and marketing people.
These people are the scum of the universe. They go out, get degrees in whatever, feel self-important, learn a vocabulary of impressive-sounding words, then weasel their way into positions of power
People like the guys in PBS's early 2000's Frontline, Merchants of Cool. They talk like they know what's going on, labeling behaviors, both group and individual, with semi-scientific sounding words, but their actions say that they don't. Their actions say that they don't have a fucking clue.
Why do these marketing people fail? Why do they not understand people? Well, because they're stupid. The merchants of cool have no idea what cool is because they themselves were NOT COOL when they were young. They were the freaks and geeks. That's the reason why they've become so obsessed with what is cool. They've dedicated their lives to trying to quantify the nebulous qualities that they so sorely lacked when they were younger.
Do you want to know what cool is? I'll tell you right now, and you don't even have to pay me. It's confidence and sexiness. That's it. You're selling them what they don't have. They aren't confident with themselves and they don't feel sexy. If you market like that and have a quality product, you're golden. It's that simple. Any marketing guy who says otherwise is saying so because he doesn't want to lose his job.
This isn't directly connected other than being the brainchild of retarded business people. Video game companies are raising prices and using tricks associated with online content to try and force more money out of people. Why would they be doing this? Why wouldn't they be using the wonder of the always-on digital age to try and create even more value for users? Why wouldn't they expand into services that the old paradigm of physical media didn't allow?
Because they're retarded, that's why. Books written ten years, reworked, edited, and finally published two years ago, don't have answers for the problems of today, and no matter how much time you spent in MBA school, that reality is inescapable.
For example, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 are two games with downloadable content that is unavailable if you buy the game used. Game companies hate the used game industry, so they're trying to step over it.
Instead of, I dunno', raising value or decreasing prices, they're trying to squeeze more money from the balls of consumers with downloadable content that costs extra or by raising the prices, thus making used games even more attractive.
What will the $15 extra, to access the online content, mentioned in this recent lawsuit do?
Well, it will immediately drop the value of the used games a further $15. This on top of the $5 discount from buying used. So $20 off. Instead of $60-$70, the game is $40-$50. And even worse, the reduced value of the used copy will reduce the value of the new copy for hard-core gamers who frequently sell back games to buy new ones, just like cars. You pay more than a Kia for a Honda, but you can later sell it for more than the Kia, either equalizing the equation or, frequently, making the Honda actually cost less.
This is not a difficult concept! This is Econ 101 at a community college taught by Sloth from The Goonies! What the fuck!
These people are the scum of the universe. They go out, get degrees in whatever, feel self-important, learn a vocabulary of impressive-sounding words, then weasel their way into positions of power
People like the guys in PBS's early 2000's Frontline, Merchants of Cool. They talk like they know what's going on, labeling behaviors, both group and individual, with semi-scientific sounding words, but their actions say that they don't. Their actions say that they don't have a fucking clue.
Why do these marketing people fail? Why do they not understand people? Well, because they're stupid. The merchants of cool have no idea what cool is because they themselves were NOT COOL when they were young. They were the freaks and geeks. That's the reason why they've become so obsessed with what is cool. They've dedicated their lives to trying to quantify the nebulous qualities that they so sorely lacked when they were younger.
Do you want to know what cool is? I'll tell you right now, and you don't even have to pay me. It's confidence and sexiness. That's it. You're selling them what they don't have. They aren't confident with themselves and they don't feel sexy. If you market like that and have a quality product, you're golden. It's that simple. Any marketing guy who says otherwise is saying so because he doesn't want to lose his job.
This isn't directly connected other than being the brainchild of retarded business people. Video game companies are raising prices and using tricks associated with online content to try and force more money out of people. Why would they be doing this? Why wouldn't they be using the wonder of the always-on digital age to try and create even more value for users? Why wouldn't they expand into services that the old paradigm of physical media didn't allow?
Because they're retarded, that's why. Books written ten years, reworked, edited, and finally published two years ago, don't have answers for the problems of today, and no matter how much time you spent in MBA school, that reality is inescapable.
For example, Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 are two games with downloadable content that is unavailable if you buy the game used. Game companies hate the used game industry, so they're trying to step over it.
Instead of, I dunno', raising value or decreasing prices, they're trying to squeeze more money from the balls of consumers with downloadable content that costs extra or by raising the prices, thus making used games even more attractive.
What will the $15 extra, to access the online content, mentioned in this recent lawsuit do?
Well, it will immediately drop the value of the used games a further $15. This on top of the $5 discount from buying used. So $20 off. Instead of $60-$70, the game is $40-$50. And even worse, the reduced value of the used copy will reduce the value of the new copy for hard-core gamers who frequently sell back games to buy new ones, just like cars. You pay more than a Kia for a Honda, but you can later sell it for more than the Kia, either equalizing the equation or, frequently, making the Honda actually cost less.
This is not a difficult concept! This is Econ 101 at a community college taught by Sloth from The Goonies! What the fuck!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Too Much Good Music (And Too Little Brains)
I just watched Gorillaz newest music video, "Stylo." I'd embed the video from YouTube, but I can't. The record companies won't let me. Why? Because they have decided to abandon Econ 101 and just pretend that the world works the way that they want it to.
Semantics
After seeing the music video, I immediately went and pirated the album. I downloaded it from someone, somewhere, for free. The music companies have been trying to convince people that this is stealing. That is wrong.
Stealing is the deprivation of something finite from an owner. If you have a lamp, and I take it, you no longer have a lamp. What is happening is copyright infringement. That's why no one has ever been arrested for file-sharing. They can sue, which they're doing, but it isn't doing much since file-sharing is more prevalent now than when they started this stupid crusade ten years ago against Napster.
The various entertainment companies are trying very hard to equate copyright infringement with stealing, with limited success. It's easy to see why, since old laws and legal vocabulary were written long before anything like the internet had even been dreamed up. Laws assume scarcity. Economics is the study OF scarcity. If there is no scarcity, such as with digital information, the old words fall apart. They are inadequate to describe the world as it is now. Instead of realizing this, the companies, and truly the courts too, are trying to shoehorn old words into the new world and somehow make it work.
Well, guys, it's not working.
The Concept
Generally, copyright didn't cover actually copying things since, at first, there was no need. It was difficult and expensive to copy things, so copyright primarily dealt with the profiting from copyright work. I only infringed someone's copyright if I copied their work and then tried to sell it. As copying technology advanced, the issue of whether the mere act of copying was in fact illegal needed to be addressed. This issue came to the fore back when VHS tapes and audio cassettes were introduced.
Back then, the entertainment industry hemmed and hawed and sued a lot of people over the assured destruction of the industry that this copying technology would bring about. The interpretation that knocked down the industry's arguments at the time was that the devices had legitimate uses aside from just copying, so the legality of the copying itself wasn't really touched upon. But since then it's been generally held that people have the right to make copies of their crap, otherwise known as "backups." Where things get squiffy is then distributing those copies. For if I am not profiting from the distribution, what's so different from me copying a book and giving it to my friend or simply letting my friend borrow it when I'm done. The end result is the same, all that's different is the nature of the distribution network.
Instead of trying to deal with this head-on, everyone simply side-stepped it with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, usually referred to as the DMCA. There are lots of details to the DMCA, but the primary point of it is to make illegal the circumvention of things meant to prevent copying. So, let's say that you buy a DVD. Making a copy of that DVD is technically legal. But if that DVD is wrapped up in something meant to prevent that copying, circumventing that is illegal. You can see how this is more than a bit stupid. It's illegal to get around something meant to prevent you from doing something that's legal. It would be like making it legal to drive on the highway, but illegal to use entrance ramps.
Why would they ever do something this ridiculous instead of directly addressing whether copying is legal or not? Because rationally, econmically, and freaking logically,the issue only becomes a problem when people try to sell those copies. It's easy to see why; if someone buys a copy of Indiana Jones from me, that means they would have likely purchased a copy from the actual creators, thus depriving them of a sale. Copyright is directly concerned with this theft of sale.
The entertainment industry is now adapting this argument for modern times and in doing so have abandoned any semblance of logic. The argument is that if I could not have gotten the Gorillaz album for free, I would have bought it. This is wrong in every way imaginable.
First, there is a fundamental difference between something that is free and something that costs anything. Economics, and thus business, are concerned with things that cost something. Something that is free is disconnected from this mechanism. It can come into play in different ways, but in the raw dynamic of a transaction, it doesn't add up. It's the equivalent of dividing by zero.
Basically, you can't include something that is valueless into equations involving things of value. Before, a copy of Indiana Jones and a legitimate copy of Indiana Jones were both finite and both had value. In this situation, one is valueless and infinite. Someone downloading something for free does not mean that they were a likely sale. If anything, since free is going to bring out the maximum number of possible consumers, it can be assumed that the vast majority of those downloading would have never bought. Again, to say that this logic is incorrect is to reject the concept of a demand curve, which is kinda' sorta' the foundation of all modern economic theory.
The Old World
The world used to work the way the record companies liked because of the nature of data distribution. Data are essentially valueless and infinite. The data's nature is dependent on its distribution network. Ever hear people complain about the death of theater? There's a reason for that. At one time, theater and live music was very valuable because it was the only way to get it. You could hear a local band, but very good live music and theater was expensive because it was so rare.
The distribution network was very limited. The data was theoretically infinite. Once I heard a song, I could sing it, perform it, even write it down as sheet music. But the network for accessing the original work was so limited, music was thus valuable. The emergence of recorded music reduced the value of performed music, so we saw the loss of many of the small, local theaters that used to pepper the towns of America. Living in Rhode Island, I have five or six old theaters within fifteen minutes that have been converted to antique stores, or offices, or condos.
Strangely (or not), this had the opposite effect on good music. The music that was good enough to warrant being recorded and distributed increased the value of live performances. We started to see the emergence of music superstars, whose tickets would go for large sums of money, who attracted massive followings, and saw their revenue stream increase by orders of magnitude. Look at modern band tours. What are they but traveling minstrels with a fan-base in multiple areas? This was all possible with recorded music and not before.
Sadly, though, the recorded good music brought down the value of average or poor live music to its level, i.e. fifteen bucks for a CD. This was untenable for most live venues and we saw the aforementioned death of all of those theaters. The ones that survived were the ones that were in an area of sufficient density that the reduced market still brought enough consumers through the doors. Life couldn't have been better for the consumer, though. Recorded music made good music cheaper than it had ever been before. More musicians were able to reach the big time, more money was being made, and the entire industry increased in size. The cheap availability of the music meant that more fans were created.
We are now seeing the same thing happen again. The value of music has dropped. Free recorded music is bringing down the value of ALL recorded music to its level. But, like the theaters of old, this means that the old infrastructure must die. It's an unfortunate fact of basic economics. Lots of people are going to lose their jobs, a big, hot mess is going to be made, but in the end, there will be more good music, reaching more fans, generating even more money.
This is a critical point missed by many pundits and industry reps: this isn't a zero-sum game. More music creates more fans, which creates more music, which raises the value of finite goods. Live performances will becomes even MORE valuable to more performers. Free completely democratizes the music. Anyone who wants it can get it and become a fan. The barrier of entry, the cost of the CD, is no longer. Music is free.
I'm sure we'll hear arguments like "artists need to make money!", and "these companies have a right to sell their product for a profit!" Those are correct, I guess, but just because artists need to make money doesn't mean that they will. Theater owners of old needed to make money. Actors back in they day had a right to be paid for their performances. It didn't matter. What they did no longer had value. It's called progress. We don't hear a moral cry when those poor wagon wheel makers were put under by the automotive industry.
A World Without Piracy
The cry of the record companies is juxtaposed with TheSixtyOne.com. Tens of thousands of songs, if not hundreds of thousands, with dozens to hundreds being uploaded every day. Many of the music if available free for download, and LOTS of it is excellent.
With that in mind, think about the argument du jour of the record companies: if I couldn't pirate Gorillaz, then I'd be forced to buy. When there is a massive resource that is literally screaming for me to use it, and is totally free, and if I couldn't pirate Gorillaz, then I'd simply not listen. Paying for Gorillaz means that it's valuable enough to buy over all of the free alternatives. The vast free alternatives.
If I truly like music, I don't even have enough time to buy. There's so much good music out there, I can't pause to spend money. I don't want to bother going out to the record store. The "next" button always has the possibility of good music. Hell, even when the music is free, I don't linger on a single artist for long. The potential for another good musician always has me pressing the next button. The promise of discovery makes the world of music so much more exciting and enticing. I'm no longer limited by the shelves of a record store.
The Last American Model
The recorded music model used to work because the record labels controlled easy access to good music. They were literally the only game in town for global distribution. You could either pay, or rely on finding good local bands. And heaven help you if you lived outside of a major city. The local bands likely weren't very good, and the few bands that were good probably left for greener pastures very quickly. You could move to a city and listen to all of the good bands congregating at the urban venues. But there, the good ones were likely selling CD's to drive up the value of their tickets, thus making listening to the best bands an ever-increasing expense.
You can see why paying for recorded music was a great value opportunity in that world.
But now that model no longer works. Not because people are stealing, but because there is so much friggin' music out there that we can actually get that the old model has lost value. Scarcity of new music was the reason albums were valuable. There is no longer scarcity. Even IF we all stop file sharing, there is still no scarcity. People, like me, will just move to sites like TheSixtyOne and Uvumi and listen to all the bands giving their music away in hopes of getting me to come to a concert.
Unlike before, the record labels are not the gate keepers to quality music. What they have is high-quality, certainly, but so is the stuff that is being given away for free.
The New Old World
Watching the Gorillaz music video, I thought about the economic realities for much of the music biz. First, a description of what record companies do. Record companies send out scouts to find the next big band or sift through demo tapes sent in by hopefuls. After a band or musician is selected, they front the money to hire a high-end producer, put them all in a studio to record an album, and then pay for very expensive things like media manufacture, advertising, and music videos.
Think about that. There is a LOT of stuff of great value in that. They are a scout and arbiter of taste. In an era of thousands of musicians and bands forming every year, an arbiter of taste is a great idea. More than a review outlet like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, but a company willing to seek out quality and nurture it. I worked in a radio station for awhile. We got so many CD's every week that, even with five people listening to them for hours every day, we never got through so much as a tenth of the total pile.
Even if we assume that with fantastic off-the-shelf production software, bands can create all of their own music and rely on the internetpipes to provide criticism and direction, we're still left with the many things that require a large initial investment. Gorillaz's Stylo has Pixar-level CGI, a car chase in the desert, and Bruce Willis. You can't do something like that on a shoestring budget.
But, no. The record companies just continue to tilt against windmills. And it's only getting worse. As mentioned, before, if I was a band, I had to hope the record labels would take me to be a success. I had to move to a large venue, a city, and play my heart out to be noticed. There was no distribution network. The record labels provided that. No wonder the labels treated most musicians like shit. The musicians needed the labels more than the labels needed them.
Now, a good band can be heard anywhere. A great band from Berlin is right here on my desktop. All of the good music in the world is just a click away. And back to my hypothetical band, now that they can hand their music out anywhere, when they come to a city that they've NEVER played before, they have an audience that will pay to see them.
What the record companies used to do that was so valuable, distribution, is no longer valuable. But the other things that they do are suddenly more valuable. Everything that they do aside from the distribution is valued according to the abundance of music. If good music is everywhere, putting forth money and time to get the great music above the din is incredibly valuable. Advertising, filtering, and management are still worth money. Only, now, the record companies need to foster good relationships with musicians, as opposed to just screwing them. This will obviously be difficult.
Oh, and in the end, I found the Stylo video on some French website. Fuck you, EMI.
Monday, July 05, 2010
There Will be Another Abbey Road
In a review of the book Fortune's Fool, the New York Times goes over all of the same issues that aren't issues as everyone else who doesn't understand the economics of the music industry.
"Is this a good thing? I have had numerous conversations with musicians — both famous and obscure, but all of them doing important work — who lament that they are making much less money now that the major labels are on the ropes."
I don't know to what musicians he's talking, but if you talk to any of the musicians on TheSixtyOne, who are only making any money because of the internet. In the era of the major labels, they wouldn't have been musicians.
Money is always made with t-shirts, and touring, and posters, and other crap. Most musicians never made money from albums. This article is confusing the music industry with the CD industry, which are entirely different.
Even Mick Jagger argues that musicians never really made money through album sales. The album companies made money through album sales. Want more evidence? How about Metallica earning less than 5% of their money from album sales, and they're a major band. Want to bet that smaller bands, who are still indebted to the record companies, earn ANY money from album sales? I'll take that bet and have you buy me dinner.
"Sure, they have released mountains of Top 40 schlock. But it paid the bills and enabled them to put out less-profitable music with real cultural value, like jazz, opera and all sorts of esoteric rock ’n’ roll.
They can’t afford to do that anymore. Now it’s pretty much all Lady Gaga all the time. No offense to her ladyship, but is that really progress?"
YES! It's lots of progress! For one thing, Lady Gaga is great, just wanted to throw that out there. For another thing, none of these guys have ever partaken in Pitchfork.com, the army of indie labels releasing bleeding edge music, or the services like Uvumi.com or TheSixtyOne.com that let you hear all of the future Radioheads that the labels can only give a chance after they've selflessly covered their costs. Fuck this argument.
These guys, the author of the article, the author of the book, and sure-as-hell the executives at the companies don't know shit about shit. They've proven it. The world is changing around them and they continue to tilt against windmills. They are classic executives. Men (primarily) who got to where they were and did nothing. The machine that was built around them churned on, making money and doing what it was designed to do, and their stupidity was never revealed. Not until the market changed, that is. Then, suddenly, actual skill and insight is needed.
Skill and insight?! Gasp! No! We never needed that before! We just needed to look good behind our desks and sign papers! When times are good, the executives and business leaders with actual skill are hidden. Only when things go sour are they revealed. And every time things go sour, it's always so sad to see how few of them there actually are.
The Recording Industry, on the Ropes (New York Times)
"Is this a good thing? I have had numerous conversations with musicians — both famous and obscure, but all of them doing important work — who lament that they are making much less money now that the major labels are on the ropes."
I don't know to what musicians he's talking, but if you talk to any of the musicians on TheSixtyOne, who are only making any money because of the internet. In the era of the major labels, they wouldn't have been musicians.
Money is always made with t-shirts, and touring, and posters, and other crap. Most musicians never made money from albums. This article is confusing the music industry with the CD industry, which are entirely different.
Even Mick Jagger argues that musicians never really made money through album sales. The album companies made money through album sales. Want more evidence? How about Metallica earning less than 5% of their money from album sales, and they're a major band. Want to bet that smaller bands, who are still indebted to the record companies, earn ANY money from album sales? I'll take that bet and have you buy me dinner.
"Sure, they have released mountains of Top 40 schlock. But it paid the bills and enabled them to put out less-profitable music with real cultural value, like jazz, opera and all sorts of esoteric rock ’n’ roll.
They can’t afford to do that anymore. Now it’s pretty much all Lady Gaga all the time. No offense to her ladyship, but is that really progress?"
YES! It's lots of progress! For one thing, Lady Gaga is great, just wanted to throw that out there. For another thing, none of these guys have ever partaken in Pitchfork.com, the army of indie labels releasing bleeding edge music, or the services like Uvumi.com or TheSixtyOne.com that let you hear all of the future Radioheads that the labels can only give a chance after they've selflessly covered their costs. Fuck this argument.
These guys, the author of the article, the author of the book, and sure-as-hell the executives at the companies don't know shit about shit. They've proven it. The world is changing around them and they continue to tilt against windmills. They are classic executives. Men (primarily) who got to where they were and did nothing. The machine that was built around them churned on, making money and doing what it was designed to do, and their stupidity was never revealed. Not until the market changed, that is. Then, suddenly, actual skill and insight is needed.
Skill and insight?! Gasp! No! We never needed that before! We just needed to look good behind our desks and sign papers! When times are good, the executives and business leaders with actual skill are hidden. Only when things go sour are they revealed. And every time things go sour, it's always so sad to see how few of them there actually are.
The Recording Industry, on the Ropes (New York Times)
Friday, May 07, 2010
What The Hell Happened in 1972?
I was perusing Wikipedia, as I often do, and came across the list of top-grossing films. I take solace in the fact that Avatar is still very far down the inflation-adjusted and ticket-sales lists... Unobtanium... fuckin' hell.
But regardless! You can view this list, which lists the top grossing films for each year. You have outliers, like Gone With The Wind (and I bet Disney is really embarrassed that Song of the South was a bonafied mega-hit), but what about 1972?
It's frequently mentioned that Jaws was the first summer blockbuster, but the phenomenon seems to have started three years earlier. Previously, the top-grossing films had been measured in double-digit millions for over three decades. Thirty million here, fifty million there. But 1972 brought The Godfather and a box office of $245 million. $245 million! Alright, fine. Gone With The Wind did $338 million in the 30's. But the next year, The Exorcist, $402 million. Then $193m for Godfather II. Jaws, $470m. Rocky, $225m. Star Wars, $782m.
Over NIGHT, Hollywood started producing mega-million-dollar blockbusters. What the hell happened?
But regardless! You can view this list, which lists the top grossing films for each year. You have outliers, like Gone With The Wind (and I bet Disney is really embarrassed that Song of the South was a bonafied mega-hit), but what about 1972?
It's frequently mentioned that Jaws was the first summer blockbuster, but the phenomenon seems to have started three years earlier. Previously, the top-grossing films had been measured in double-digit millions for over three decades. Thirty million here, fifty million there. But 1972 brought The Godfather and a box office of $245 million. $245 million! Alright, fine. Gone With The Wind did $338 million in the 30's. But the next year, The Exorcist, $402 million. Then $193m for Godfather II. Jaws, $470m. Rocky, $225m. Star Wars, $782m.
Over NIGHT, Hollywood started producing mega-million-dollar blockbusters. What the hell happened?
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Purpose of Movies.
Movies are meant to entertain. That is it. They are not paintings. They are not meant to challenge or be though-provoking. They are meant to entertain. The best movies do that and challenge you, but things that are so avant garde and artsy fartsy that they become moving paintings stop even being movies. They do not entertain.
Juxtapose the experimentation of the French New Wave with Italian Neorealism. The French understood that a movie should entertain. It should be about being a movie. Italian neorealists were depressed because the war had just ended, so they started making films that were depressing and pointless.
Go watch The Bicycle Thief. It's boring as fucking hell. Yes, yes, it was groundbreaking and has had a generations-long effect on cinema all around the world. That doesn't change that it is tearfully boring. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to sound intelligent. I respect it. I comprehend it. I appreciate it. I still say it's barely a movie.
I mean for Christ's sake, the films were so pointless and depressing (and that was the point) the government told them to stop making them. Compare this to Schindler's List. It's depressing, moving, heart-wrenching, but also entertaining. It fills us with emotion and tells us a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Juxtapose the experimentation of the French New Wave with Italian Neorealism. The French understood that a movie should entertain. It should be about being a movie. Italian neorealists were depressed because the war had just ended, so they started making films that were depressing and pointless.
Go watch The Bicycle Thief. It's boring as fucking hell. Yes, yes, it was groundbreaking and has had a generations-long effect on cinema all around the world. That doesn't change that it is tearfully boring. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to sound intelligent. I respect it. I comprehend it. I appreciate it. I still say it's barely a movie.
I mean for Christ's sake, the films were so pointless and depressing (and that was the point) the government told them to stop making them. Compare this to Schindler's List. It's depressing, moving, heart-wrenching, but also entertaining. It fills us with emotion and tells us a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Jon Stewart vs. M. Bison
The Daily Show lives on finding contradictions by people in the public eye. Fox News is a ripe cornucopia of contradictions. Generally, Fox News doesn't respond because they can't. Whatever was said by the DS writers is rather accurate.
For some reason, Bill O'Reilly decided to respond after the Daily Show's recent piece joking about how Fox News has become liberal.
Now here's O'Reilly's response.
1: I like how O'Reilley opens with a condescending, yet back-handed compliment about how the daily show is usually not mean-spirited and is pretty funny, thus relegating it to mere entertainment.
2: After his first clip, he says "To be fair? Ha!" I want you to listen to the way he speaks here very carefully. Do any of you remember the geeky or nerdy kid back in middle school, as he tries to feign confidence in the face of bullies or mocking. He would talk slowly, acting in a grossly confident manner, trying to mimic confident behavior that they see in other people. They might put their hands behind their back, chuckle arrogantly, or pace around shaking their heads like some kind of James Bond bad guy. I see the same behavior here.
Moreover, unlike Stewart, who makes fun of real contradiction, O'Reilly makes fun of Stewart's joke. Attacking his "to be fair" comment. It was a joke. It would have been like Stewart making an anti-Semitic comment and then attacking him for hating Jews.
3: O'Reilly finally arrives at the pay day, where he will reveal the Daily Show's gross misappropriation of the comment. He says "once again," as though Jon Stewart is constantly taking things out of context and, to my knowledge, he's almost never done that. Importantly, he never contradicts Stewart. If the comment had been something like "survey says: most protesters are simply loons, but we disagree," or something like that, it would have been a legitimate complaint.
But it wasn't. If anything, it made O'Reilly's position worse. He said most have been peaceful, but more than a thousand have been arrested. He argues he was talking about the ones who were arrested, but that doesn't matter. We've had extreme protesters at both the RNC and at the most recent protests, where, oh right, people were armed. It doesn't matter if the protesters were actually loons or not. He said he'd never call protesters loons, but called protesters loons. And then he expanded the description to include people arguing for the "destruction of the American system; for retreat in the face of terrorism." That gross exaggeration includes almost everyone who would have hated Bush enough to stand around outside with signs. So, effectively, he was calling all of the protesters loons.
I also must admit surprise that only 45% of the Daily Show audience is liberal. Why would any conservative watch it when most of the conservative figureheads in the country are constant fodder for the show? Oh, and in another study, Fox News viewers were the second-most clueless when it came to current events, where Daily Show watchers were second-best informed. To be fair, O'Reilly Factor viewers were only a few ticks behind Daily Show viewers.
4: Alright, about playing to your audience, O'Reilly lives in the world's biggest glass house.
5: "Media attacks during Holy week." Why does whether it's during Holy week matter? Regardless, again, this isn't a contradiction. She was still bitching about Christians being attacked. She said no one should be attacked, but that position was immaterial to her complaining that Christians were being singled out. If she had said "Christians are an easy target, but Muslims and Jews get the worst of it." That would have been material to Stewart's comment.
6: Stewart isn't worried? Did he just miss this episode?
7: "Some people believe he's presenting an accurate portrayal of the country on his program, and that is frightening." Again, I reference the study above. O'Reilly has a little more room to speak, since his viewers are decently well-informed, but the network he's on has an audience comprised primarily of idiots.
For some reason, Bill O'Reilly decided to respond after the Daily Show's recent piece joking about how Fox News has become liberal.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Fox News: The New Liberals | ||||
| ||||
Now here's O'Reilly's response.
1: I like how O'Reilley opens with a condescending, yet back-handed compliment about how the daily show is usually not mean-spirited and is pretty funny, thus relegating it to mere entertainment.
2: After his first clip, he says "To be fair? Ha!" I want you to listen to the way he speaks here very carefully. Do any of you remember the geeky or nerdy kid back in middle school, as he tries to feign confidence in the face of bullies or mocking. He would talk slowly, acting in a grossly confident manner, trying to mimic confident behavior that they see in other people. They might put their hands behind their back, chuckle arrogantly, or pace around shaking their heads like some kind of James Bond bad guy. I see the same behavior here.
Moreover, unlike Stewart, who makes fun of real contradiction, O'Reilly makes fun of Stewart's joke. Attacking his "to be fair" comment. It was a joke. It would have been like Stewart making an anti-Semitic comment and then attacking him for hating Jews.
3: O'Reilly finally arrives at the pay day, where he will reveal the Daily Show's gross misappropriation of the comment. He says "once again," as though Jon Stewart is constantly taking things out of context and, to my knowledge, he's almost never done that. Importantly, he never contradicts Stewart. If the comment had been something like "survey says: most protesters are simply loons, but we disagree," or something like that, it would have been a legitimate complaint.
But it wasn't. If anything, it made O'Reilly's position worse. He said most have been peaceful, but more than a thousand have been arrested. He argues he was talking about the ones who were arrested, but that doesn't matter. We've had extreme protesters at both the RNC and at the most recent protests, where, oh right, people were armed. It doesn't matter if the protesters were actually loons or not. He said he'd never call protesters loons, but called protesters loons. And then he expanded the description to include people arguing for the "destruction of the American system; for retreat in the face of terrorism." That gross exaggeration includes almost everyone who would have hated Bush enough to stand around outside with signs. So, effectively, he was calling all of the protesters loons.
I also must admit surprise that only 45% of the Daily Show audience is liberal. Why would any conservative watch it when most of the conservative figureheads in the country are constant fodder for the show? Oh, and in another study, Fox News viewers were the second-most clueless when it came to current events, where Daily Show watchers were second-best informed. To be fair, O'Reilly Factor viewers were only a few ticks behind Daily Show viewers.
4: Alright, about playing to your audience, O'Reilly lives in the world's biggest glass house.
5: "Media attacks during Holy week." Why does whether it's during Holy week matter? Regardless, again, this isn't a contradiction. She was still bitching about Christians being attacked. She said no one should be attacked, but that position was immaterial to her complaining that Christians were being singled out. If she had said "Christians are an easy target, but Muslims and Jews get the worst of it." That would have been material to Stewart's comment.
6: Stewart isn't worried? Did he just miss this episode?
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Home Crisis Investigation | ||||
| ||||
7: "Some people believe he's presenting an accurate portrayal of the country on his program, and that is frightening." Again, I reference the study above. O'Reilly has a little more room to speak, since his viewers are decently well-informed, but the network he's on has an audience comprised primarily of idiots.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The New Epidemic.
Every generation changes things. Frankly, I think that change only comes with each generation and the passage of power. It seems pretty simple as to why this is. Humans are remarkably intransigent creatures. Combined with a healthy dose of stupidity and fear, we sort of determine what the world is and should be at a pretty young age. Changes beyond that norm are to be either feared or hated.I look to a recent survey done in Rhode Island, my home state, where the gay marriage debate is heating up because our governor is a little bit slow in the brain case. If this survey is to be believed, that's not surprising.
In it, 60% of Rhode Islanders supported gay marriage, with 31% opposed. Further cementing the Republican party as the party of intolerance and outright idiocy, those numbers went strongly along party lines, with Elephants against and Donkeys for.
But it was the generational divide that was interesting, with a scant 32% of those over the age of 70 supporting gay marriage, but 18-29 year-olds supported strongly with 87%. 70% of 30-39 year-olds gave their support, as well.
This all leads to video games. How so? Well, the generation of people who are currently, apparently, Repbulican and against gay people, think they're ruining our children. Because, seriously, what isn't ruining our children?
Every generation has a boogeyman. Whatever the parents don't understand, they hate. And yet, with every generation crying how they'll never become like their parents, they do the same thing. Over and over again. The children don't dislike the particulars, be it comic books or video games, but they never seem to catch on to the underlying principle, they thus make the same mistakes.
I have long been against any politician who says things about video games. Joe Lieberman is a modern-day Anthony Comstock. He's a grand-standing blowhard who uses hot-button topics to further his own career. He is total scum.
I'm aware of the fact that Hillary Clinton has discussed similar topics about video games, and yet I supported her during the elections. Basically, Hillary never turned video games and other possible first-amendment issues into a personal crusade as Lieberman did with Mortal Kombat all those years ago. Moreover, my primary desire out of the presidential elections was a good manager to basically fix what Bush broke.
The irrepressible march of society continues, and despite the cries of untold fear-mongers throughout history, we're still here. We haven't devolved into bestiality and cannibalism. Out children are not all rabid serial killers. They were wrong. They were wrong then. They're wrong now. Just shut the fuck up.
Is it the only lesson of history that man is unteachable?
-- Sir Winston Churchill
The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956
Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises--not this sort of mental gladiatorship.
- Scientific American, July 1859
The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.
- The Times of London, 1816
The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
-- Sir Winston Churchill
The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it's making the difficult job of being a parent even harder ... I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control.
- US senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2005
The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness; impair nervous stability and destroy the sanctity of marriage. It is an evil influence on the youth of our country.
- Minister Albert Carter, 1956
Many adults think that the crimes described in comic books are so far removed from the child's life that for children they are merely something imaginative or fantastic. But we have found this to be a great error. Comic books and life are connected. A bank robbery is easily translated into the rifling of a candy store. Delinquencies formerly restricted to adults are increasingly committed by young people and children ... All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!
- Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, 1954
This new form of entertainment has gone far to blast maidenhood ... Depraved adults with candies and pennies beguile children with the inevitable result. The Society has prosecuted many for leading girls astray through these picture shows, but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.'
- The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1909
A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises--not this sort of mental gladiatorship.
- Scientific American, July 1859
The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced ... at the English Court on Friday last ... It is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies ... to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is ... forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.
- The Times of London, 1816
The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison?
- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 1790
Some Quotes Of Note: Politicians Damning New Technologies/Cultural Artifacts (TechDirt.com)
Forget Video Games, Why Aren't Politicians Complaining About Chess? (TechDirt.com)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
New Musical Order
A few posts ago, I talked about how the internet is opening amazing new possibilities in media distribution. Old walls are disintegrating and a new era of almost-democracy in entertainment is being, painfully, born.
That birth is painful because the old companies who made all their money controlling the previous business model don't want things to change. And why should they? They were emperors in their time. No movies or music was made without their say-so, and the valuable transmission channels for that media made them filthy rich.
I was perusing YouTube for my Angry Suburban Music, specifically Nu Metal (helping white people feel badass since 1994), and I came across the video for Korn's Y'all Want a Single, and it just about says what artists, even hit artists like Korn, were feeling. I'd embed, but it's disabled. I guess Korn doesn't fully understand, either.
I can't blame them, even Sir Paul McCartney is pretty clueless.
UPDATE like, three minutes later: The blocked embed wasn't Korn, it was Sony/BMG. Regardless, I found an upload that isn't blocked.
Enjoy! And remember my fellow privileged white people, stay angry!
That birth is painful because the old companies who made all their money controlling the previous business model don't want things to change. And why should they? They were emperors in their time. No movies or music was made without their say-so, and the valuable transmission channels for that media made them filthy rich.
I was perusing YouTube for my Angry Suburban Music, specifically Nu Metal (helping white people feel badass since 1994), and I came across the video for Korn's Y'all Want a Single, and it just about says what artists, even hit artists like Korn, were feeling. I'd embed, but it's disabled. I guess Korn doesn't fully understand, either.
I can't blame them, even Sir Paul McCartney is pretty clueless.
UPDATE like, three minutes later: The blocked embed wasn't Korn, it was Sony/BMG. Regardless, I found an upload that isn't blocked.
Enjoy! And remember my fellow privileged white people, stay angry!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)