Tuesday various

  • Netflix is pretty sure it has no future in DVDs. You know, I like streaming and on-demand, but the selection is still not that great, relatively speaking. If Netflix could ensure the same level of selection and quality with streaming as with the physical DVDs…well, I’d still occasionally be annoyed they were most often DVDs without special features of any kind, but I’d be more willing to switch over to streaming-only. (If the high cost of having both doesn’t force the issue for me at some near-future point.) But Netflix can’t promise that. Some of it is out of their hands — studios are covetous of their movies and shows, and some (like HBO) see Netflix, maybe rightly, as a direct competitor. So I really do hope Netflix doesn’t continue their push towards streaming-and-only-streaming, that they realize it wasn’t just the Qwiskter name that upset customers. I want a wide and varied selection of movies and shows. I don’t want more of “You can’t watch that, but have you ever tried this…?”)
  • Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost [via]
  • Want to smell like a superhero? [via]
  • “Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.”
  • And finally, Basil Fawlty Impersonator Chat:

    As Mark Evanier notes, “There are literally more professional impersonators of Basil Fawlty around than there were episodes of Fawlty Towers.”

Tuesday various

Wednesday various

Tuesday various

  • “The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over…” Creating a new language for A Game of Thrones
  • Along the same lines, 20 awesomely untranslatable words from around the world. I particularly like

    Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” [via]

  • Are we truly living in the age of fanfiction?

    What’s been truly bizarre, though, is the way the mainstream has slowly headed in the same direction, and without anyone noticing it, we seem to have handed over our entire industry to the creation of fanfiction on a corporate level, and at this point, I’m not sure how we’re expecting the pendulum to ever swing back. I know people love to blame Spielberg and Lucas for creating the modern blockbuster age, but at least when they decided to pay tribute to their inspirations, they did so in interesting ways. Spielberg has talked about how his frustrations at hearing that only English filmmakers could direct James Bond movies led to the creation of Indiana Jones, and Lucas was working out his love of Flash Gordon when he created “Star Wars.” Those are healthy ways to work through your love of something, and absolutely make sense as important pieces in the creative process. What’s scary is how these days, filmmakers wouldn’t bother with that last step, the part where you take your inspirations and run them through your own filter. Now, instead, we live in an age where we are simply doing the source material again and again and again, and where original creation seems to be almost frowned upon as a “risk.” [via]

  • See also: they’re re-making Starship Troopers. And The Munsters. As a “dramatic re-imagining.”
  • It’s so sad to see Monty Python members fight among themselves.
  • Blackwater is changing its name. This is like if the Devil started asking us to call him Gus.[via]
  • David Milch to adapt William Faulkner? I am so there.
  • They’re coming to crowd-fund you, Barbara… ‘Living Dead’ Fans Digging Up Funds to Keep Chapel from Going Under
  • Bruce Wayne’s medical records [via]
  • And finally, I haven’t seen the new Tintin movie, but this fan-made opening sequence is really quite wonderful. [via]

    The Adventures of Tintin from James Curran on Vimeo.