videos

Thursday various

  • Go on, ask me anything.

  • This future of publishing ad — which I’m seeing re-posted everywhere — is clever. And sure, the whole “death of publishing” thing is all in how you look at it. But, at the same time — and watch the video before you read this — I found it a little too gimmicky. Maybe it’s the length, since it is a little too long to be a truly effective advertisement, or maybe it’s that they kind of had to cheat to make the trick of it work. It is clever, though, I won’t argue with that.

  • This isn’t new, but c’mon, how can you resist a headline like Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included? [via]

  • Manahatta: same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
  • And finally, John Seavey on George Lucas’ biggest mistake:

    But all that gets lost in the sheer awesomeness of the Jedi. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high–Yoda is a cool Wise Old Master with all the good bits in Episode Five, Qui-Gon Jinn is played by Liam Neeson and Mace Windu is Samuel Freaking Jackson, and the lightsaber is the coolest weapon in the history of film. Everyone takes Yoda’s words at face value–even the authorized sequels, which show Luke trying to re-establish the Jedi in the image of the old order. Everyone assumes that Luke narrowly won his struggle with the Dark Side at the end, but in fact, he did exactly what people do every day. He got upset, he channeled his anger constructively, and then he calmed down. Only the Manichean nutbags who run the Jedi and the Sith think that this is some kind of near-impossible achievement. The Jedi aren’t the heroes of the film, Luke is, for realizing that there’s something more than the false duality that trapped and ultimately destroyed his father.

    That’s the message of the Star Wars films, and it’s a shame that Lucas made it so hard for people to notice.

Wednesday various

  • The very real problem of digital decay:

    Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

    Imagine having a record but no record player.

    Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?

    There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]

  • The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
  • Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
  • I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
  • And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]:

Tuesday various

  • So Yoko Ono only okayed the Citroën car commercial to keep Lennon in the public conciousness? That’s good, because before this, I’m sure many people were thinking, “John Lennon? Who’s that?”
  • Another from the fine line between irony and hypocrisy department: Sarah Palin Crossed Border for Canadian Health Care. Why does she hate America? [via]
  • Having just recently rented or purchased some DVDs and Blu-Ray discs where this is a particular problem, I can totally get behind John Scalzi on this:

    …if someone were to introduce legislation requiring home entertainment companies to have a “just play the damn movie” button at the start of every DVD, Blu-Ray or any other future movie-playing technology, I would call my Senators and representative every fifteen minutes until they voted “yes” on that bill.

  • Charlie Stross on how books are made. [via]
  • And finally, A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever [via]