Mike Sullivan’s Magipunk concept is deeply cool and I want to play in it. GMs, take note.
Month: November 2003
I’m going to miss Monday Mashup this week (and be light on general on blogging). A family member is in the hospital with something fairly serious and I a) can’t focus on blogging and b) don’t have as much free time anyhow.
Because when it comes to terrifying home exercise marketing material, nothing beats the Gazelle Power Plus. I don’t even know where to start with that picture, other than observing that it caused me to break my self-imposed restrictions on low humor.
“You’ll believe a man can fly!”
Now, this feels good. It is my great pleasure to — well, let’s be honest, to brag — that I will be in Austin, Texas on the weekend of December 5th to attend Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5.
It’s a 24 hour movie marathon, programmed by Harry Knowles. I made it to the second one after reading the report on the first one, and I had a hell of a time. I was sad to miss number 3 and I was mournful about missing number 4.
But I made the cut for BNAT 5. Can’t even begin to express how pleased I am. 24 hours of new movies, old movies, weird movies, freaky movies, and bad movies. A chance we’ll see Return of the King.
It’ll be the second geekiest thing I do all year (hey, I went to GenCon), but it’s gonna be a great time.
Not a lot of interesting new filings in White Wolf v. Sony this week. Lots of paperwork to get all the lawyers accepted in the court. The only real scrap of interest (and it’s only tangential) is the joint certification of interested persons, which lists those people who are either a) a party to the action or b) have a financial interest or other interest which could be substantially affected by the outcome of the case.
a) White Wolf, Inc.; White Wolf Publishing, Inc.; Nancy A. Collins; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; Lakeshore Entertainment Corp.; and Screen Gems, Inc.
b) Stewart and Stephen Wieck; Mark Rein•Hagen; Sony Corporation; and Subterranean Productions, LLC.
From time to time, people ask me why I link to and read right-wing bloggers. The simple answer is “Because I want to see other viewpoints.” However, Tacitus just provided us with a clear example of the kind of integrity and honesty I find deeply valuable.
How could I not read a conservative thinker who’s that honest? That’s not an enemy, that’s a fellow human being who happens to disagree with me.
So this means that the RNC is going to be as critical of the Jessica Lynch TV movie as they were of the Reagan miniseries, right?
Fairly dull, but here’s Sony’s initial disclosures in White Wolf v. Sony. If you didn’t already know the basic argument Sony will be using, here it is:
To the extent any similarities exist between Plaintiffs’ works and Defendants’ Underworld movie, any such similarities concern material that is not original, not protectable expression, lies within the public domain, and/or constitutes unprotectable ideas or scenes a faire.
(I define scenes a faire here — “ideas that are inherent to the conventional telling of a given sort of story.”)
I should look up the cases Sony cites as precedent, but I’m lazy.
Let’s see. It looks like Sony will be using one Patricia Altner in some capacity during the trial, although apparently not as an expert witness. Maybe she was a consultant on the script? She wrote Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography, which is an annotated bibliography of vampire material.
Oh, and I don’t mind posting this PDF because Sony politely obscured the home addresses of their people by saying “contact them through their lawyers.”
Wow, those are certainly some attractive jobless numbers there. In fact, they’re so good I stole the graphic so I could stick it up here.
Damn, but that’s good. So good, I decided to reformat it a bit so I could admire it again.
Oh. And I guess employment dropped by 41,000 anyhow. So, uh… what’s unemployment look like, anyhow?
As they say, all this really means is that the rate of increase has decreased.
Edit: on rereading, I’m not sure if I was sufficiently sarcastic in my cries of mock delight, above. Shorter Popone: “The Reuters graphic was manipulated to make the drop in claims look like a big deal, but it wasn’t. Also, unemployment is still rising.”
Bush’s remarks on Middle East Democracy are quite fortuitous, since I wanted to talk some more about that war of civilizations thing. Bush is about to say, or said, that the changes we want to see in the Middle East are not “synonymous with Westernization.”
But that’s really the heart of the matter. The thing we call Western culture (and if ever there was a loose definition, there it is) is immensely viral. It spreads. It is intensely aggressive. Give us a new market, and we’ll shoulder our way into it if it all possible. McDonalds on every corner, etc., etc.
Is our civilization at war with Islam? In the sense that it’s doing its damnedest to spread into the Middle East, you bet. In the sense that we’re directing military activities which include deliberate cultural propaganda, not at all. However, it is wise to remain aware that there’s something pretty threatening about Western culture from the outside.
But this aggressiveness is not characterized as war except by extremists on that side of the fence, in the same way that nobody believes we’re at war with drugs except rhetoricians. (Parenthetically, do you think Stephen King worries about the War on Terror breaking down his door? Probably not.) It’s a conflict, but it’s not a war.
It’s also not one I feel terribly bad about. Free speech is one of my most cherished values. It’s not my job, or anyone’s job, to make people stop watching crap Hollywood movies. If a culture wants to compete, it should take a page from India and Bollywood. If you don’t like what people are reading, write more relevant books.
There’s a pretty fierce argument lurking somewhere around here about the aforementioned McDonalds and Wal*Mart. This is, of course, the monopoly problem. I am going to avoid it on the grounds that “Western culture” was spreading before either behemoth strode the global stage; I am also going to cite the trend of various nations to eschew Microsoft in their governmental software purchases. It is not as easy as it should be to compete with the big American countries… but it’s not impossible, either.