Hookers and Marx!

Did you know that I work for an actual fanatical Marxist school board that teaches kids horrible things like class warfare, anti-racism, and not beating up hookers?

Oh, SUN News, you are precious.

TDSB day of significance : Prime time : SunNews Video Gallery

The answer, as always, is "scrap public education and give the money back to the parents."

Meanwhile, Crackgate continues, with the Honourable Wife-Beater still refusing to comment (I watched almost the entire City Hall proceedings yesterday, where he appeared hungover but not inebriated and did not answer any questions about crack). Jon Stewart's take is, of course, great.

Let's give moody, hyperactive kittens chainsaws and catnip.

[fengi is hitting the comedy goldmine this week. Ah. This is going to be great, you guys. So great.

Because it's not funny enough that Yahoo bought Tumblr, now Amazon has plans to monetize fan fiction.



Discuss. Bonus points for digging up hilarious wank. — Sabs]

Originally posted by fengi at Let's give moody, hyperactive kittens chainsaws and catnip.

Amazon has decided to monetize fan fiction. Not fucking kidding:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

I read about this in a post by author Jim Hines who offers soem intitial observations. Chuck Wendig does as well including a very interesting possibility:

The weird thing is what happens to that comfortable space that separated canonical from non-canonical. Like, one assumes that the fan-fic remains officially non-canonical — and yet, people are paying for it...it still grants it a kind of territory in the canonical space. Someone might read Book 3...and say, “But this doesn’t refer to that time when she time-traveled back to the Old West in that novella, Booby Nuthatch.” And you’re like, “That wasn’t real, though, someone else wrote that.” But then they say: “I PAID FOR IT SO IT FELT REAL TO ME”...That’s a pretty serious shift in authorship and authenticity.

For me, the interesting part is an aspiring oligarchy is injecting some "creative disruption" (i.e. greed and exploitation) into a scene which, to be polite, is slightly prone to hyperbolic reactions which at times involve distorted perceptions.



Is trying to cash in on the emo side of the net the new thing? I wonder what's next: Google purchases Encyclopedia Dramatica?

ETA: I made this point on fengi's post but I'll repeat it here:

I almost see this as a form of outsourcing. Authors have these pesky agents, after all, and wouldn't it be nicer if we could just get naïve amateurs to write our tie-in material? We don't even need to pay editors. People will do it for loooove. Toss the fanfic writers less than a pro would get paid, but more than they'd get paid if they were posting on ff.net; toss the authors a bone because copyright, and still more profits for Amazon.

It's an interesting model. I think publishing definitely does need a new model, and I'm vaguely in favour of anything that recognizes the inherently collective nature of creation, but I think this is going to fail miserably and hilariously. — Sabs

Star Trek: Into Darkness

A quick review, 'cause I have a long day tomorrow.

I...didn't hate it? I kind of thought I would. I didn't think it was actually a good Star Trek movie, but as a summer blockbuster with exploding spaceships, it was highly entertaining. I don't think a good Star Trek movie is actually commercially viable, and it also requires a good series, which we don't have at the moment. (What I wouldn't do for a DS9 movie, but that's never gonna happen.)

The puzzling thing about JJ Abrams' reboot is how fundamentally embarrassed it seems to be about the source material. Sure, there are winks and callbacks to TOS, but if you want an indication of what I'm talking about, calculate the actual on-screen time any of the characters are in the iconic uniforms. (Well, except for Uhura and that mini-dress. Not that she doesn't have the legs for it.) Kirk in particular seems to get into a leather jacket at the earliest opportunity. ("This can't be an official Starfleet mission!" Right.) And everything has to be constantly moving, lest the summer blockbuster audience get bored. At least he's limited most of the lens flare to the bridge scenes.

More central, however, is how the space exploration and meeting exciting alien thing—the core purpose of the original series and those that followed—is also faintly embarrassing to a modern director and a modern audience. There has to be a terrorism allegory, because sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi isn't relevant. The movie itself takes a fairly progressive stance in terms of the War On Turr, but whatever message it's trying to send is buried under the cool explosions.

(I like explosions, and so I enjoy this. But. This is why it's not a Star Trek movie.)

( More spoilery type things under here )

Since a Star Trek movie about, you know, boldly going where no man has gone before, is not ever going to happen, and since studios won't take a risk on a big budget sci-fi movie that isn't part of some known franchise, I'm going to shrug off whatever nerd rage and just enjoy big dumb movies for what they are. Be honest, it's still more fun than Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And most of the others. I admit that I have terrible taste and my favourite is actually the one with the whales, but I have a feeling they won't try to remake that one.