{"id":9401,"date":"2012-09-19T18:30:01","date_gmt":"2012-09-19T22:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9401"},"modified":"2012-09-18T20:31:56","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T00:31:56","slug":"wednesday-various-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9401","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday various"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>A <i>lot<\/i> has been written recently about the &#8220;film,&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Innocence_of_Muslims\">Innocence of Muslims<\/a>, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that&#8217;s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman <a href=\"http:\/\/journal.neilgaiman.com\/2012\/09\/a-letter-from-scared-actress.html\">one of the actresses speaks out<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not quite sure I buy into the idea of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/09\/12\/breaking_bad_white_supremacist_fable\/\"><i>Breaking Bad<\/i> as a &#8220;White supremacist fable&#8221;<\/a> entirely &#8212; it&#8217;s probably true the show doesn&#8217;t get the drug trade right, but, then, it&#8217;s not really <i>about<\/i> the drug trade, is it? &#8212; but there&#8217;s some interesting food for thought here:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth  \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and for the people who sell him stuff \u00e2\u20ac\u201d White is right.<\/blokcquote>If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch <i>The Wire<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com\/post\/31026577075\/on-self-publishing-and-amazon\">John Green on self-publishing and Amazon<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my concern: What will happen to the next generation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Toni Morrison? How will she\u00e2\u20ac\u201da brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a huge built-in audience\u00e2\u20ac\u201dget the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll note that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <i>no<\/i> self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to. Over time, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually <i>read<\/i>, even if literature remains broadly <i>available<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>This isn&#8217;t new, but: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonathancoulton.com\/2012\/06\/20\/emily-and-david\/\">Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity<\/a>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we&#8217;re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it&#8217;s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It&#8217;s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we&#8217;re getting out of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>And finally, PBS asks, &#8220;Can fandom change society?&#8221; [<a href=\"http:\/\/jessethorn.tumblr.com\/\" title=\"Jesse Thorn\">via<\/a>]\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/B9Zum7azNIQ\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot has been written recently about the &#8220;film,&#8221; Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that&#8217;s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out: It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painful to see how our faces were used &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=9401\">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":[219,16,123,220,126,27,83,41,14,15,37,55,9,11,151,106,63,17,10,142,12],"class_list":["post-9401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-amazon","tag-books","tag-drugs","tag-fandom","tag-geeky","tag-internet","tag-legal","tag-media","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-news","tag-pbs","tag-pop-culture","tag-publishing","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-tv","tag-various","tag-video","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9401"}],"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=9401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}