Month: November 2007

I had some Post-it Flags stuck to the top of my desk last night. These were leftovers I’d scavenged from old projects yesterday, when the supply cabinet downstairs turned out not to have new ones. I’d planned on re-using the flags to mark up a new set of proofs — and boy, howdy, did they need marking up — but this morning, they were gone.

Who steals used Post-its stuck to somebody else’s desk?

And a little over a week ago, I posted about the variety, or lack thereof, in the soda machine in my office. I know you’ve all been on the edges of your seats waiting for a follow-up. Well, there’s another machine for the rest of our employees downstairs. That one has:

• Coke
• Diet Coke
• Pepsi
• Diet Pepsi
• Snapple Iced Tea
• Snapple Peach Iced Tea
• Fruit Punch
• Grape Juice
• Apple Juice
• Orange Juice

“The strike,” she writes, “[is] over whether producers and studios can profit from the writers’ work on the Web without paying them specifically for it to appear there…”

There’s also the increased residuals on DVD sales, but I think the Internet is the real heart of it. Going forward, I think it’s definitely the more important of the two issues on the table. You can probably make a decent argument for or against residuals — I think Mark Evanier makes a pretty convincing argument for the set-up here — but it’s ridiculous to claim that they shouldn’t apply to the internet. It’s disengenous to say that the shows and movies are just “promotions” when they’re downloaded or watched online. And it’s insulting to profit from somebody else’s work and then refuse to share even the tiniest percentage of the profits with them.

“As Aimee Mann could tell you, it’s rare that you ever know what to expect from a guy made of corpses with bolts in his neck.” – Nathan Rabin (on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)

“It sounds like a formula for bad science. And yet the formula for bad science turns out to be the formula for good writing.” – Paul Elle (on Musicophilia)

“Knowing the sources of Schulz’s inspiration does not explain the imaginative power of the work.” – Bill Watterson (on Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography)

“By way of contrasting example, an iPhone is a blank, shiny, flat box that fits in your palm; and the longer you talk about its capacity for complicated work or time-wasting, the more alien and intimidating it becomes.” – Cherie Priest (on steampunk)

Change always provokes fear, but I’d once believed that the death of our beloved television would unify all those affected, talent and studios, creators and suits. We’re all afraid and we’d all be afraid together. Instead we find ourselves so deeply divided.

Read the whole thing. Then head over to Mark Evanier’s website (where I found this) for more on the WGA strike.