various

Thursday various

Monday various

  • I’d like to see some corroboration for this, but, if true, it does explain a lot about Hollywood’s way of thinking: MPAA to teachers: don’t rip DVDs, just record your television with a camcorder. What this does is effectively recommend piracy as a means of enforcing the DMCA. I suspect commenter TJ S is right: “They’re making it hard to do, because if it’s hard to do, then nobody will bother.” [via]

  • Here’s a few things I’ve found strangely compelling recently:

  • Wow, David E. Kelley’s new show must be really bad if NBC would rather pay a seven-figure penalty than air it.

  • Keith Phipps raises an interesting question in his review of Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human:

    Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Chuck Berry (and others, of course) started making rock ’n’ roll, and suddenly everyone had a guitar, some blues riffs, a pounding rhythm, and a song to sing. Why should it be any different with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells?

  • And finally, Neil Gaiman on why, among other things, George R.R. Martin “is not your bitch.”

Tuesday various

  • Do you think John Ridley’s caveman ancestors went around saying things like, “Everybody’s always cave-painting nowadays! I don’t want to know about the mammoth you killed last night! You annoying kids and your fire and your wheel!” His anti-Twitter screed on NPR — which he’ll probably hate to hear I heard about first on Twitter — gives Maureen Dowd’s recent piece on Twitter a run for its money on Just Not Getting It. Twitter isn’t anything more sinister or complicated than a microblogging platform with a built-in open chat feature. It’s not an insidious invasion of privacy, and it’s not an unavoidable annoyance. If you don’t care what people are posting to it, then don’t read those posts.
  • Here’s another one I found via Twitter — this time via Rainn Wilson — apparently IMAX isn’t always IMAX:

    Let me make one thing clear: I am not opposed to digital projection in principle, or to the IMAX digital system in particular. I think the change to digital projection in the giant-screen world is inevitable. And I fully admit that the IMAX digital system is superior, in certain respects, to some other digital systems.

    But I object when anyone claims that two patently different things are the same. Where I come from that’s known as “lying.” And call me naïve, but I don’t believe that any company whose business plan is based on deceiving its customers can succeed with that strategy for very long.

    My local IMAX theater is one of the genuinely big-screen theaters, and I think the truly immersive experience you get with that is worth the extra money. Personally, the experience isn’t exactly my favorite, which is the main reason I haven’t been back since I saw Beowulf two years ago. Still, if that’s the experience you’re after — and if that’s what is being marketed — you have a right to be upset when you’re charged the same price for the small-screen IMAX.

  • And another story I first heard about on Twitter — it’s been that kind of day — this time via Jonathan Carroll — Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote:

    DUBLIN (AP) — When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

    His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

    Don’t these journalists read xkcd?

  • I kind of actively disliked the Charlie’s Angels movies, but maybe it’s a little unfair for me to keep judging their director, McG, on their excessive and annoying gloss alone. Certainly, he’s no worse a choice to follow in James Cameron’s footsteps than Terminator 3‘s director Jonathan “Who?” Mostow. And I can kind of respect McG’s recent defense of giving Terminator Salvation a PG-13 rating:

    “It just became clear that the things that would take it to an R or an NC-17 would be: There goes the arm, and now the blood is squirting on my face,” McG said in a group interview last Friday in Beverly Hills, Calif. “That wasn’t in service of the character or the story. The elements that would have taken it to R just ended up feeling gratuitous in the editing room. There’s a topless scene with Moon Bloodgood. I was trying to echo that scene in Witness where Kelly McGillis turns and says, ‘I’m not ashamed’ to Harrison Ford. But it just felt like, ‘Oh, there’s the genre stunt of the good-looking girl taking her top off.’ And it felt counterproductive in the spirit of what we were looking to achieve on a storytelling level, so way to go.”

    Assuming it’s not just BS, of course.

    The PG-13 rating is sometimes lambasted for being an easy cop-out for directors and studios, afraid of losing the lucrative teen audience with a more mature R rating. But McG is not wrong: forcing a movie to be an R just to appease fans isn’t the way to go. It would compromise the film just as much as making cuts to appease the ratings board. I’m willing to accept that this is exactly the film McG set out to make.

    Whether that film will be any good… That, I don’t know.

  • And finally, Telescopic Text. I also really liked Joe Davis’ These Are the Boring Bits. [via]

Monday various

Thursday various

  • So here’s a tip for first-time writers: when submitting a story, don’t include a rejection letter from the last place that had a look at it. I’ve received submissions addressed to the wrong publication — mostly by e-mail, and probably because they were sending it to many places simultaneously, even though most of us specifically say not to — but nothing like this has happened to me.
  • Joshua Schachter suggests that URL shorteners are maybe not such a good thing. They’re all over Twitter — by necessity, given the 140-character limit — where I suspect they’ve been a huge boon to spammers. [via]
  • Here are a couple of neat tools: Chow.com’s Know Your Pasta guide (PDF) [via] and Flipping Typical, a little web app that displays text in whichever fonts — of those it can detect — installed on your computer. [via]
  • Do you get the sense that the Senate Democrats are just toying with Arlen Specter at this point? Sure, we’ll let you re-join our party — heck, even Joe the Plumber is leaving the Republicans these days — but we’re gonna make you sit at the kids’ table for awhile. [via]
  • And finally, one less mystery for Doctor Who to solve: we may have found a cure for the recently widespread honey bee colony collapse. [via]