{"id":3750,"date":"2010-02-09T18:30:02","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T23:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3750"},"modified":"2010-02-08T16:39:15","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T21:39:15","slug":"tuesday-various-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3750","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday various"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\"><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The headline reads, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/health\/8497148.stm\">Vegetative state patients can respond to questions<\/a>. This seems significantly more scientific than some <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rom_Houben\">other recent stories<\/a> in this area. [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.warrenellis.com\/\" title=\"Warren Ellis\">via<\/a>]<\/li>\n<li>All I can really say to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;view=blog&#038;id=58712\">this argument<\/a> &#8212; and to <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20100203\/en_nm\/us_oscars_snub_1\">James Cameron&#8217;s own insistence<\/a> that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations &#8212; is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. <i>Avatar<\/i> an important movie (and so are <i>Up<\/i> and <i>District 9<\/i> to some extent), but <i>Avatar<\/i> is not a particularly <i>good<\/i> movie. That&#8217;s just my opinion, but I think it&#8217;s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren&#8217;t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they&#8217;re just genuinely not as good.\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\"><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s <i>maybe<\/i> some bias against computer-assisted performances like you&#8217;ll find in <i>Avatar<\/i>, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsfromme.com\/archives\/2010_02_03.html#018463\">as Mark Evanier writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">There may be a solid argument that in <i>Avatar<\/i>, Sigourney Weaver is &#8220;acting&#8221; her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can&#8217;t argue that when we see her performance, we&#8217;re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that&#8230;enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I&#8217;m not saying that&#8217;s right or wrong. But I think that&#8217;s how it is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\"><\/p>\n<li>Word to the wise: don&#8217;t look at porn while at work. And definitely don&#8217;t look at porn <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSTRE6124J020100203?feedType=RSS&#038;feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&#038;rpc=22&#038;sp=true\">while your office computer is on live television<\/a>. [<a href=\"http:\/\/josephmallozzi.wordpress.com\/\" title=\"Joseph Mallozzi\">via<\/a>]<\/li>\n<li>I have to say, I really loved this <a href=\"\">Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes<\/a> video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years &#8212; though also huge spoilers if you&#8217;ve never seen the show. [<a href=\"http:\/\/maximumverbosit.blogspot.com\/\" title=\"Maximum Verbosity\">via<\/a>]<\/li>\n<li>And finally, speaking of <i>Lost<\/i>, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it&#8217;s okay for a show to have a plan, it&#8217;s usually better <a hef=\"http:\/\/www.avclub.com\/articles\/and-they-have-a-plan-what-good-is-knowing-what-com,37707\/?utm_medium=RSS&#038;utm_campaign=feeds&#038;utm_source=channel_tv\">for them to work around it<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p><font face=\"Verdana\" size=\"2\">Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some <i>Lost<\/i> fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC&#8217;s big <i>Lost<\/i> replacement hopeful <i>FlashForward<\/i>, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers&#8217; hearts grow fonder. The series&#8217; creators\u00e2\u20ac\u201dDavid S. Goyer and Brannon Braga\u00e2\u20ac\u201dentered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who&#8217;d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it&#8217;s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it&#8217;s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can&#8217;t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone&#8217;s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted &#8217;90s sci-fi series <i>Babylon 5<\/i>, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via] All I can really say to this argument &#8212; and to James Cameron&#8217;s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations &#8212; is that hey, if you want &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3750\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14,37,38,101,17,52],"class_list":["post-3750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-movies","tag-news","tag-science","tag-sex","tag-tv","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}