Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
The book panel started before I could even start typing – these gentlemen had so much to say about launching books, building community, and “creating” versus “marketing”!
On the whole they were very incisive, and their recommendations extend far beyond just the realm of paperback bestsellers. Great points all around, but especially from Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week.
[Read more…] about Books (and effective product launches) on Twitter @ #140conf: Day 2, pt. 7
by krisis
Two great panels – one from journalists, and another from the comic book industry – talking about how their two newsprint industries can move seamlessly into the social web.
This is the quote of the entire conference, because at least half of it has been about this:
“The role of journalists and editors now is to form [news] into a piece of narrative and inform. Real time web becomes right time web,” getting the information people want to them in a digestible format at the right time.
Also, my paraphrase from the comic panel:
It’s not a surprise that creators are celebrities – they are the artist and the auteur. It’s different than film or television stars.
[Read more…] about Paper on Twitter @ #140conf: Day 2, pt. 5
by krisis
I love and hate media awards ceremonies like The Grammys and the Emmys.
What are they measuring, really? Whatever is “Best”? Best how? Most commercial? Strongest technically? Most likable?
Voters of the various academies aren’t any more interested in thinking hard about the merits of “Best” than the guy that sat next to you on the bus. They nominate and vote for what they like, and they like what they know.
Does that occasionally highlight the best work in a year or coincide with the zeitgeist? Sure. But one look at the Golden Globes and the Grammys tells us that’s not necessarily the case.
The Oscars are the one set of awards that can still excite me. The one that at least nominates the most worthwhile performances and works, even if some genre fare slips through.
However, equal to that excitement, the Academy Awards also introduce skepticism to my film diet. I love a great many event movies, serious movies, and indie movies, but I have a contentious history with Best Picture nominees. It’s a good year if I like 2/5 of them.
Maybe it’s because I already pre-judge movies pretty harshly – before they get heaped with incongruous praise. If I haven’t seen a movie before it gains steam as an Oscar front-runner I become commensurately more skeptical that it’s actually any good. I enjoy being proven wrong (The Queen, Juno), but more often my prophecy is fulfilled and I’m either ambivalent (Michael Clayton) or I hate the movie (The Wrestler).
In this year’s field of ten (of which I’ve only seen the pair of sci-fi flicks) that movie is The Hurt Locker. It may be great; I haven’t seen it. However, my sneaking suspicion is that it will be a tedious movie about THE REAL WAR (TM).
I guess I’ll see. Eventually.
(Seeing only the sci-fi flicks in cinemas is characteristic, as I hardly ever pay theatre prices to watch talking heads. I can safely say neither were best.)
(Okay, maybe Avatar, but not the heavy-handed, lazy bullshit of District 9. )
What should win? I’ll tell you next year, when I’ve seen most of them.
What might win? If Avatar doesn’t neatly sweep it will be splitting heavily with Hurt Locker, leaving an outside shot for one of the smaller films which isn’t too similar (i.e., District 9 and Up are both splintering Avatar votes just on genre/style).
What am I rooting for? I already know I universally despise Coen Brothers movies, and I could care less about Push, so of the remaining films I suppose I’m pulling for Tarantino, even though I suspect I won’t like his movie very much. I suspect I’ll like An Education the best of them all.
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For what it’s worth, this was my take on 2008:
– Benjamin Button, my favorite director and lead actors, but it was shitty, pointless, and overlong.
– Frost/Nixon, a decent documentary that was really a movie.
– Milk, stunning, beautiful.
– The Reader, still avoiding, sounds soul-crushing.
– Winner, Slumdog Millionaire, a middling crowd-pleaser.
by krisis
Here’s the techier side of the links I re-remaindered out of last night’s remainders post.
Why did Duke Nukem’ Forever take forever? I’ve read some great articles on this vaporware legend (my fav example of which I cannot seem to track down), but none with a line so succinct and close-to-home as this one:
t’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again.
Substitute “pop music” for “video games” and you have the story of Chinese Democracy, or my long-promised LP. (Via Daring Fireball).
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Indie acousta-rocker Scott Andrew got tired of trying to sync his blog to MySpace, so he wrote an app for that.
I’ve been seeing little boxes from LaLa on just about every blog albums-of-the-year/decade list, proffering handy audio samples. Apparently Apple just bought the La^2, and in the process scuttled a longstanding CD swap service. This is notable because they backed out of it in (what I considered to be) an apologetic, helpful fashion. Take note, MySpace/iMeem.
Via Contentious: An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy charts what personal info different eBook services can track. This chart should be combined with “An E-Book Buyer’s Rights” guide that talks about what privileges can be rescinded by each service. For example, if you replace your Kindle it will not reload your purchased periodicals.
(For the record, I am anti-eBook – if I wanted to read something I don’t own from a screen I’d just keep sitting in front of my laptop.)
Also via the same Contenious post: Backupify to back up your Twitter, FaceBook, and Gmail … for free. That is, sign up for it now, get a grandfathered freebie account even when the service switches over to a paid model. Quote from Backupify president: “[S]torage is cheap while customer acquisition is very expensive.”
Smart guy.
In a similar vein: Download videos from YouTube with Gazzump I come and go on the usefulness of this service. I used to want to sit on my own personal archive of everything. While I still feel that way about my audio collection, I think I’ve sacrificed video to the cloud. Still, handy.
Finally, not strictly a tech link, but: The Flag of Earth.
by krisis
A few weeks ago Gina and I convened to brush up on our originals for the impending annual Shubin Theatre Holiday Revue, and in the process caught one of our newer covers on virtual tape.
The song is “Falling Slowly,” the Academy Award winning tune from Once.
Gina saw Once early in its theatrical run – before I had even heard of it. The next day she came to rehearsal and said, “I have to play you this song.” She proceeded to unfurl a beautiful, played-by-ear version of “Falling Slowly.” She narrated her way through: “Here the woman starts singing a higher harmony part.” “And, you see, in the chorus he goes up for falsetto -the lines cross.”
I was enamored with the song immediately, though less so when I heard the warbling official version from the soundtrack. I filed it in the back of my head as something to try as Arcati Crisis at a later date.
That later date came this summer, as we were casting about for some new covers to learn. “What about,” I queried with caution, “playing ‘Falling Slowly’?”
Gina was all over the opportunity, with the caveat that this was to be my chance to sing a song without playing guitar. Which sounds like a nice vacation, but it is actually TERRIFYING – partially because the song is tricky and I sing better harmony while I am playing guitar, but also because I’m simply not used to singing without an instrument (aside from karaoke, which is a different beast).
This live @ rehearsal demo of the song finds us at a late stage of the rehearsal process – we’ve worked out the road-map and harmonies, but we’re still fine-tuning the blend between our voices. We’ll debut our performance of it this Saturday at the Shubin Theatre.