Daily Archives: October 13, 2010

A Few Comments That Need To Be Said

Economics, Memoirs, Politics, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I thought I would take a moment and just make a few comments that need to be said. Unfortunately, only my stuffed animals read my blog. Well, my stuffed animals and my imaginary girlfriend…from Canada…and maybe that mysterious group of government assassins who have been trying to replace my nonfat milk with soy products, but you probably get the point.

1. If a news article is ever written about me that includes the phrase, “and police searched the wood chipper for signs of the body” then let’s just say that I’ve probably reached a saturation point of relevance and should immediately be put to sleep. Or if police were searching the wood chipper for signs of ME, then let’s just say that I’ve probably got worse problems than anything I might complain about on my blog.

2. I’m convinced Craigslist has no further relevance or importance now that they have removed the adult ads. I’m sorry, but it has no purpose any more. I attempted to put up a personal ad the other day, and it never showed up. The system said I did everything right, but it just never made it to the production side of the house. This has convinced me that all the site was ever really good for was advertising fake personal ads that were really a cover for underage girls selling sex to dirty old men and local law enforcement. Or it was local law enforcement trying to pretend to sell potential sex to dirty old men to put them in jail for wanting sex with underage girls. Or it was NBC trying to snare dirty old men trying to find sex with underage law enforcement officers, or something like that. Either way, underage girls were involved and so were dirty old men, so do the math, and you can probably figure it out. Let’s just shut down Craigslist for good. It doesn’t make sense any more.

3. No politicians are honest. At all. Oh, they talk a good game, but they’re really only interested in pretending to be something they’re not so they can get a job they probably don’t deserve. We should force them to create Craigslist ads instead, and then we can hire the underage girls to run our government. I’m just saying….

4. The “check engine soon” light on your car is a boldface liar. It doesn’t want you to check your engine. It wants you to bring your car back to the dealer so they can charge you $99 to tell you that they need to charge you $299 to replace a sensor that tells you to check your engine soon. What they’re really doing is replacing the light in the sensor so that it will go off two days after you leave the dealer’s shop. Mine did. And now it goes off for a week, goes on for a week, and then repeats the cycle. There’s nothing wrong with the engine, other than it has a faulty sensor that keeps telling me to check the engine soon. Or perhaps my engine is just lonely and wants friends. Maybe I should get a sensor that goes off whenever I’m in public that says “check duane soon…he needs friends”. And then people can pay me $99 for me to tell them they need to pay me $299 so that I’ll tell them to pay me $99 very soon.” I’m just saying….

5. The lives of celebrities aren’t important to the rest of us. It’s one thing to follow the news and be interested in celebrities. It’s another to have it thrown in our faces nonstop as if it’s important. I was tuning into the news the other day, and the point-counterpoint was all about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I’m sorry, but there’s the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election around the corner, and all sorts of actual news stories that are really news. We really don’t need too political partisans going back and forth about what kind of role model Lindsay Lohan is presenting for young girls who don’t even know who she is because she hasn’t been relevant in about a decade now. Same with Paris Hilton. Since her last actual television reality show, she hasn’t been relevant, significant or even interesting in a very long time now. The people who remember her are no longer capable of being influenced. The ones who are capable of being influenced really have never heard of her and probably think she’s some old woman who their parents might have found interesting. It’s amazing how socially irrelevant celebrities become in a few years.

6. The publishing industry sucks. No two ways about it. I get so discouraged trying to make it as a published novelist, only to find out that Snooki or Tyra Banks is being given a huge publishing contract to churn out drivel that my pack of monkeys (who write Shakespearean sonnets…remember them? The ones who if they write enough gibberish will eventually duplicate a Shakespearean sonnet) could have written just as well. Bah, I get so upset at this sort of thing.

Smallville–Supergirl episode misses mark on its target demographic

Television, , , , , , ,

First off, the latest episode of Smallville was interesting. The emphasis of the episode was that Clark needs to prove himself, or something like that, and that only Kara, his cousin is capable of doing so, so she reveals herself as Supergirl (not the name she uses) and pretty much has herself targeted instead of the future Superman.

Some immediate comments: It was great seeing the actress who plays Kara back again. It’s also kind of cool that they touched on the fact that Clark still can’t fly, and for a second he did…right before crashing down and burning. Oh well. Baby steps.

The problem with the episode is more in what they were trying to do than it what they did. There’s always been a freakish element to the show that I think is inherent in the people who develop the show. A couple of times they’ve gone with the whole leather aspect of the superhero costumed characters just cause it was kind of hot and innovative. Not to mention that all of the actors/actresses are hot as well, so it makes sense that they take advantage of their best attributes.

Last season, they went the fetish route with an attempt to create a false superhero identity for Lois Lane, in that her character was named Stilleto, and she dressed in black leather, in a sort of catwomanish costume with black stilletos. It was pretty obvious that they were going the full nines in attempting to make her fetishy hot. And they succeeded. They even threw in a few S&M jokes as well to even out the look.

This episode they went the full monty, so to speak. The main villain for the episode was followed to an S&M bar by Lois, who then dresses up as a dominatrix so she can get into a scene with the guy and then blackmail him into giving up his vendetta for the Blur (Superman/Clark). There was the obligatory scene where Lois walks through the dungeon atmosphere and people are doing all sorts of freakish things while pounding music is playing in the background. Then she puts the guy in handcuffs, pours hot wax on his chest and then elicits two hot women who help her take photos of the guy in bondage. Then she uses the photos to ruin the guy’s credibility.

Okay, here’s the complaint I have. First off, if they’re interested in appealing to the fetish crowd, which is the only reason you do in your face bondage sorts of scenes in a network television show, well, you’re going to get that crowd interested in your show. You’re not going to get the Bible thumping crowd, so you have already decided on your audience appeal. Well, then your next move should not be to try to discredit that same crowd by showing that once you reveal the photos, you’ve discredited your character. In other words, you can’t show the scenes, expect to excite your audience and then turn around and tell your audience that it’s not acceptable behavior. If you do, you’ve basically pissed off every potential audience member you could ever hope to attract. The Bible thumpers are going to hate you for going all fetishy, and the fetish crowd is going to hate you for going all moralistic and anti-fetish. Basically, you lose on all counts.

The whole CW thing lately has been to be as innovative, fetishy and sexually-aware as possible, and that’s great. But if you’re going to do it, go all the way. I don’t mean show nudity or go nuts with the sexual content, but at least show that if your emphasis is to show it, don’t ridicule it as well.

Having hung with that crowd for some time now, I find the ridicule from mainstream television to be really counter-productive because it’s been no secret that a lot of creative types are into all sorts of interesting persuasions (or lifestyles). As such, they find themselves having to sneak it into mainstream material and then pretending that it’s just innovative but vanilla at the same time. Well, it’s not. And unfortunately, they’re never going to convince the mainstream people who hate them that they should embrace them, so either go all the way with it and be proud, or don’t do it. Save it for people and innovators who are willing to take a risk and a chance with the idea. Otherwise, you force it right back into the closet again, because if the people who really believe in it aren’t willing to back it up, then who will?

One of the interesting things about Buffy when it was on the air was that it was never scared to just “go there”. It never apologized for it, and it went on with life like everything was normal when they did go there, and they did go there enough times to cause people in those communities to really appreciate it. I think that’s what the CW wants to do, but they’re too frightened to do so. Instead, they keep sniping from the shadows, hidden in closets and hoping that people will think they’re innovative so that they can sneak out and wave their pistachio banners for everyone to see. But that’s never going to happen as long as they keep hiding in shadows.

Not the greatest episode, but there’s a lot of promise there for the future. Here’s hoping they continue to try to innovate without hiding behind their intentions.

I’m Suspecting Amazon Doesn’t Actually Understand Writing

Economics, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

For a bit of time now, Amazon has been trying to herald the move towards electronic books, essentially ushering in a new medium for which books will eventually become the primary method of production. The Kindle, which is not a new story, was supposed to be their attempt to usher in this new era, and so far, it is doing a pretty damn good job of leading the industry. Sure, the iPad is an attempt to steal back some of that thunder, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that right now Amazon is in the driving seat with the capability of calling a lot of future shots.

Which is why I found it shocking that Amazon released the following statement:

Generally speaking, writers have two options when they sit down to create a new piece that can be distributed through conventional channels. They can author a short, attention-grabbing magazine-length feature that doesn’t require the reader to invest more than a few minutes of their time, or they can craft a long, 50,000-plus word novel that is meant to be absorbed over multiple sittings.

Now, if you’ve never been a professional writer before, this may sound quite innocent, and maybe even informative, but if you have any knowledge of the publishing business, and I mean ANY, you know that there are far more than two options an author has when sitting down to write a new piece. Basically, Amazon is stating a writer can choose from a short story or a novel, and now they have somehow managed to invent something in between that.

Writers have been writing all sorts of variations of those two models for centuries. Publishers have been publishing variations of far beyond those two models for centuries as well. Just recently, the whole unmentionable (by me, mainly) epic of Twilight released a novella, which just so happens to be a book that is too small to be a 50,000 normal novel and too big to be a short story. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? Yes, writers have been tackling this genre long before Amazon came onto the scene.

To me, it appears that Amazon is attempting to somehow create a new category to invent a brand new revenue stream, even though that category has existed long before Amazon became a web site, back in the days when an Amazon was often referred to women I dated who used to beat me up when I didn’t comform to their expectations (but that’s a completely different article, of course). We don’t need this new category, especially when Amazon already charges different prices for different books based on the expectations and demands of the specific publishers.

To indicate they are somehow inventing a brand new length of writing after 4000 years since the first human scribbled some carvings on a cave is somewhat insulting to the rest of us. It’s not like they need special programming to release an e-book that has fewer pages than a “normal” e-book. The whole announcement sounds like a non-announcement to me, but more of an attempt to remain in the news now that everyone and his brother is releasing an e-reader and selling it at Best Buy.

(sources: TMC Net, Amazon’s web site)