Media: February 2004 Archive Page

Let's assume that you have a brilliant Idea. Let's say a sitcom about a group of different people living under the same roof. Or a story about a police unit who dedicate their lives to solving crimes. Or maybe some other equally original idea that demonstrates how creative and innovative sort of a person you are.

Now, let's continue by assuming that you'd want to make it as a virtual series with a staff of writers and producers and you want to release scripts in regular intervals.

This is all very nice and all, but you might not have an idea as to how to do it. Well, this is where I tell you one way of doing it. --T. Henrik Anttonen
--A Beginners Guide to Starting Virtual Series (Voice Over)

An interesting article about organizing a team of writers to produce scripts for a non-existent TV series. Writing is hard work; some of those who wanted to do it for fun gave up when they looked at the schedule. But whether you are hoping to hone your skills for a shot at a professional job, or you simply have a passion for using words to create, an exercise like this would be a tremendous experience.

I used to participate in a collaborative epistolatory science fiction epic, at the suggestion of my high school friend Gilbert Stack. We started off writing letters to each other in-character, but I started supplying one- or two-page fictional treatments to contextualize the letters (sometimes showing what the character chose NOT to put in the letter), and soon some of us were writing mock newspapers and scripts. Steve Spishak (a Medievalist and the drummer for the cheesy 80s cover band "Gonzo's Nose") wrote an entry in blank verse... I still remember one of the lines... "This churlish syntax burns my English tongue" (spoken as a blank verse aside, but referring to an unpleasant prose interaction with a minor character). Another friend, Christine Heath, and my brother, John Jerz, were also regular contributors. I also remember contributions from Chris Park, Carol Johnson, Sarah McLeod... This was in the late 80s, and we did it all through snail mail. I still have several thick 3-ring binders, and I keep telling myself that some day I'll turn my corner of that universe into an interactive fiction game.

While our interactive literary work doesn't quite have the style of existing as tattoos or stickers, it really helped focus my writing energies in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do if I were merely writing for myself, without any sense of an audience or people who were sometimes writing against what I wanted to happen in our shared fictional universe. I kept an encyclopedia of technology and culture and a timeline; I think someone else created a map showing travel routes and distances. God, was I a geek... but I really loved it. My old files simply called this "MAIL Game."

The point of my nostalgic trip: I am so glad that, when I was young and frequently bored, I spent enough time away from the TV and the joystick to create something that meant something to me and my friends. I wouldn't have the time to start something like that today. Of course, I write all the time, in my blog, in e-mail, in the margins of student papers... but I've been feeling the draw of creative writing again. I'm kicking around an idea for a somewhat quirky academic paper, but I'm also hoping that I'll get back into writing interactive fiction.

Part of Maloney's job is to evaluate books on the sleeper list and decide whether they go to the bargain basement sale or get a second chance.

"It's a really hard thing to get rid of a book," Maloney said. "A big, big consideration for us is just space. Our juvenile fiction shelves are packed right now. There comes a time when you have to say 'goodbye."'.... For the 800 hardcover juvenile fiction books on Maloney's list, the odds aren't good. Maloney estimates about 80 percent will wind up downstairs for bargain hunters. --Librarians struggle to let go of lonely books (AP/Mankatopa Free Press)

Ahh! I always thought libraries were like museums. Quick, run to the library you remember from your childhood... somebody, look in Patrick Henry library in Vienna, Va., or the Fairfax County Public Library... are those dog-eared copies of Lester Del Rey's classic science fiction still there? What about Encyclopedia Brown, or the Henry Reed Detective Agency? Or the wonderful books about astronomy, that paint Jupiter with no rings and about 12 moons? Is there still a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which I checked out on one of my first forays from the Juvenile section to the Adult stacks, and is the page still folded down in the section that describes "Typical Dreams"?

According to the article, "Sometimes, all it takes to save a book from being discarded is a single person's desire to read it."

Via Waterloo Library Blog.

Two different things seem to have happened at the same place and time, according to the "spin" placed on two different reports from competing local papers.

Post-Gazette to seek wage concessions (Tribune-Review, reporting on its competition)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is gushing red ink, prompting workers to vote today on wage and benefits concessions designed to save the newspaper from insolvency, union officials said Sunday during a special meeting.

Vote on contract adjustments by PG unions (Post-Gazette, reporting on itself)
Leaders of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's 1,100 unionized employees urged the workers yesterday to approve contract adjustments that would help the company avoid a projected loss of $6.5 million in 2004.A Tale of Two LeadsTrib-Review/Post-Gazette)

Thanks for the links, Jess T.

Interesting comparison of stories... the Post-Gazette competes with the Trib-Review, so according to the Trib it is "gushing red ink". The Post-Gazette, reporting on itself, emphasizes the sacrifices its union employees are willing to make.

Competition is good for the public, because it keeps journalists on their toes and makes them accountable for their little mistakes (I presume that the Post-Gazette, which calls its owners "Block Communications Inc" is probably right, and the Trib, which calls the company "Blade Communications Co." is probably wrong) and biases (such as the Post-Gazette's privileging of the union leaders' plea to the rank-and-file union members).

When I was an undergrad at U.Va., there were two competing daily student papers, the Cavalier Daily (or rather the "Cavalier Five-Day-A-Week-And-Weekly-During-The-Summer) and the University Journal (which was three days a week during my freshman year and gradually worked up to five). A few years after I graduated, I learned the UJ went under, which was really too bad. Reading someone else's version of the story you covered, or seeing the photo someone else took at the same event, is really a great learning experience, even if it is sometimes humbling.

I remember when I used to cover city council meetings and other dry stuff for a local radio station, if three things happened that night and I write radio stories on two of them, no matter what, the next day at noon, the local paper would be out on the stands, and the third thing -- the thing that I didn't cover -- would be in the headlines. Being a very green intern, I was convinced that my news sense was completely wrong -- until the wiser, saner folks at the radio station pointed out that the newspaper was trying to reach the very same audience that listened to our radio station on the way to work in the morning.

Oh, I should note that the city desk editor of the local paper was married to the news director of my radio station; they were extremely professional about their work, and would try to scoop each other all the time. Once I worked hard on a 20-year anniversary story (on the destruction caused by Hurricane Camille), and had produced a half dozen stories, one or two minutes long; they were scheduled to run, one per day, in the week leading up to the actual anniversary. The local paper published a beautiful, in-depth report the weekend before the anniversary, which pretty much exhausted everyone's interest in the subject. Each of my little jobbies looked pathetic and lame, limping along five or six days after everyone had already clipped out the paper's big spread and saved it in their scrapbooks.

The L.A. Times ('free' registration required--thus my extensive quoting) has story about how:

the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations, the agency has ruled.

This raises all sorts of questions like does tagging and indexing a blog post count as editing, does reformating an article to fit a house or blog style count as editing? And is a 'service' really a 'service' if no money changes hands? It seems some publishers, including the American Chemical Society, have decided to risk "fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years" by editing scholarly articles they publish. --U.S. Embargos Extended to Editing ArticlesKairosNews/LA Times)

Since the LA Times requires an obnoxious registration, I'm linking to Scott's post on KairosNews instead.

Leadholder can be broadly defined as any durable instrument that is designed to hold and be refillable with consumable pieces of graphite so that the graphite can be conveniently used for drawing or writing. Within this definition there are subsets such as porte-crayons, mechanical pencils, and drafting leadholders. This website is primarily concerned with drafting leadholders, which are commonly called by draftsmen in the US as simply leadholders. (From "What is a Leadholder?") --The Drafting Pencil Museum (Leadholder.com)

Okay, maybe I'm not quite that geeky, but I still enjoyed the site.

A 40-plus-year-old A-list actor pondering whether or not to appear in a game? Heck, even Roger Moore would have been loathe to actively participate in what was once the perceived domain of momma's boys.

"Traditionally, Hollywood signed away rights without any expertise or any idea of the plot lines," said industry analyst P.J. McNealy.

Several factors helped change Hollywood's mind. Technology advanced exponentially, making it possible to accurately recreate the voice, looks and movements of real people. Another factor was the Sony PlayStation 2. Or to be more exact, 60 million PS2s, GameCubes and Xboxes sold in the United States alone.

As games became synonymous with mass entertainment, Hollywood got it. The movie executives who chanted "cross-branding" and "synergy" at power lunches got it. Game developers got it. Even the actors got it. Soon Electronic Arts was convincing not only Brosnan, but Bond regulars John Cleese ('Q') and Judi Dench ('M') as well as William Dafoe, Heidi Klum and Mya to join "Everything or Nothing." --Tom Loftus

--Stars seek more control over video games (M$ NBC)

Via Terra Nova, which features some thoughtful musings about digital rights and the creative freedom of game designers.

Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often ignore or delete newsletters that have insufficient usability. --Jakob Nielsen --Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength (Alertbox)

In these movies, priests are suicidal, corrupt and/or lascivious. Nuns are heartless and sadistic.

Before you run to your keyboard: yes, I'm aware of scandals, past and present, involving the church. And yes, some of the films listed above are powerful, important works based on true stories.

But a lot of this stuff is just exploitative garbage. And no other religious group gets bashed with such frequency. Can you imagine a similar number of films with Jewish leaders playing villains and moral weaklings? --Richard Roeper --Join the clubbed: Catholics know pain of being bashed  (Sun Times)

As a young boy, I found it very easy to spot when an actor was not Catholic. When a Catholic makes the sign of the cross (touching the forehead, chest, and then each shoulder), inside your head you are saying "In the name of the (touch head) Father, and of the Son (touch breast), and of the Holy Spirit." Well, in truth probably most of them shorten it to "'Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." But there's a little pause when you hold your hand on your chest, before you make the horizontal stroke. When non-Catholics do the sign of the cross, unless they have been coached by someone who knows better, they rush that horizontal motion -- it looks like slashing. So it was always clear to me when an actor was only pretending to be Catholic.

[I]t seems the media (TV and newspapers) are just now picking up on the "Beyonce Knowles as Lois Lane" rumor from earlier this week, and even though the rumor has been shot down as being false, various TV news programs and newspapers are running with the story.

It also appears that Johnny Depp is not connected with the role of Lex Luthor as previously rumored, but that he is supposedly trying out for the role of Jor-El.

As always, take these as purely rumors. Nothing is official until Warner Bros. announces it... actually, believe nothing until you actually sit in the cinema and see it for yourself. :)

Media Rumors (www.supermanhomepage.com)

My former student Bobby Kuchenmeister sent me this item. The underground fan network has already deflated this as a rumor, but the mainstream media haven't noticed.

It's not unheard of for a PR campaign to "leak" something that is still under negotiation; when politicians do it, it's called a trial balloon. If the public response is too negative, the informal report can be disowned as premature.

It has been said that reality is all about perspective -- a camera is a pinhole view of the world that frequently filters out much of the story. With that in mind, check out this video of the familiar "I have a scream" speech by Dean. I'm no Dean supporter, but from down in the trenches it doesn't look nearly as bad as it played on TV. Obviously the video you've seen on the news has the best part and the audience noise turned down, but from this vantage point, the speech almost seems appropriate for the crowd and the moment (but was still a lapse in judgement to forget cameras were rolling). --Mathowie --MeFi's take on 'I Have a Scream' (Metafilter)

I'm at home and haven't bothered to check the video over my slow telephone connection, but since I've blogged about Dean's speech before, I thought this alternate view was worthwhile.

Unless we get an influx of suggestions within the next three hours, I'll have no choice but to watch this year's Super Bowl. I write this post from the living room of Vidiot Emeritus Peter Ko, and if the prospect of sparing me from the tedium of this year's game isn't enough to spur your creative suggestions, the least you can do is spare Pete from the tedium of my company. --Super Bowl Weblog XXXVIII (Tee Vee)

An interesting site... the Tee Vee bloggers are commenting on the commericals. (How far did you get in Colossal Cave Adventure, Monty?)

My kids are sick, so Leigh and I planned to go to church separately today. I tried to go to an early mass at a different church, but couldn't find the church... my wife had given me directions that she later admitted weren't very good. So I decided to go to the latest mass in the area -- the 7:00pm service at the cathedral. But apparently the bishop is a football fan -- mass was cancelled.

--wood s lot

A few good finds from this Canadian blog:

• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
  E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil
  Third Edition, 2002

• The Day of the Condour
  or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
  Ronald de Sousa
  repost

  I scarcely dare fourmulate this question, lest it be censoured, and--Horrour of horrours!--deter our Honourary Donours. Yet suffour me to exhourt you: four though some may harbour the thought that this minour question is not wourth the furour, or think--in errour--that I speak humourously, this issue is especially impourtant for our langourous juniours to considour -- provided, of course, they have not been savouring liquour priour to pouring over this text, endeavouring to gauge its tenour.

• The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media
  The Black Commentator

  If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.

  The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of media’s role in the American power structure.