For the record, watched pots boil.
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I was surprised not to be disappointed
Garden State is the kind of movie that makes me want to write a movie.
Yesterday I received two things in the mail for which I’ve been waiting all summer: my first student loan residual check, so I can pay my roommate for back rent, and my new credit card. My new credit card is interest-free until May, and its credit limit is three times as high as my previous credit card.
You know what that means? After nearly six years of life with my beloved, battered P2-450, it is time. I’m going to buy a new computer. It’s going to have two monitors. It’s going to dual-boot XP and some distro of Linux (any recommendations, by the way?). It’s going to have some insane beastly muscle under the hood. And I’ve finally decided–I’m going to build the whole thing from the ground up, or processor out, or whatever. I am going to purchase thermal grease.
In case you were wondering, Napoleon Dynamite is a movie specifically and entirely about Yale Deskins. Take this as you will.
Update 1814 hrs: I should add that I liked it.
It occurs to me that all known arguments for censorship–in fact, all possible arguments for censorship–are logically rude.
| Gerda: | I wish to { purchase, view, broadcast } this material. |
| Grobian: | Upon reviewing this material, I find it to obscene. You may not { purchase, view, broadcast } it; it is harmful to the mind, inhibiting moral judgment and causing its viewers to confuse fantasy with reality. |
| Gerda: | Why is it permitted for you to review the material and judge it, and not for me to do so? |
| Grobian: | I have been tasked with reviewing such material, and would not be so tasked if I were incapable of viewing it safely. |
| Gerda: | But if the material impairs judgment to such a degree, and prevents its viewer from realizing that his or her judgment has been impaired, how do you know that your verdict is not the result of impaired judgment? |
| Grobian: | I am striking it down as obscene, instead of running out to commit vicious criminal acts, which I would clearly do if the material had affected me. |
| Gerda: | So your prediction is the opposite of the only available evidence–your own case–of the effects of reading this material. Doesn’t this empirically disprove your prediction? |
| Grobian: | No. If you, for example, were to view this material, you would commit vicious criminal acts. |
| Gerda: | How do you know that? |
| Grobian: | You’re a pervert. The fact that you want to { purchase, view, broadcast } this material proves it. |
That’s just one example–not all arguments for censorship use such flagrant circular logic (but the FCC certainly does). I’d have a more powerful argument here if logical rudeness were inherently invalid, but unfortunately, it’s not. Then again, if one’s going to be logically rude in the first place, one isn’t terribly likely to mind being invalid too, is one?
I’m going to Minnesota with Maria and her brother Michael! I’ll be back Monday! That’s four capital Ms in a row!
Actually I’ll be back Sunday, but I think you saw what I was trying to do there. Anacrusis will hopefully be updated as usual.
“So let’s say it does wreck newspaper comics. I’m on board with that. I want to punch a hole in the boat. I want to see the whole thing flush like an animal carcass down a toilet bowl, and the carcass is on fire.”
Brouhaha brews between the big and the bitter! Tycho actually has the best summary of the whole thing, so read that too, but here’s the bullets:
- Scott Kurtz has a very popular daily webcomic, PvP. Not the most popular strip in existence, but vastly more popular than most other webcomics–popular enough that he lives on its ads and his print deal with Image.
- Now, he wants to see his comic in newspapers.
- Many newspapers aren’t doing that well, because not as many people read newspapers as used to do so.
- To reduce costs, these newspapers are continuing to cut print space and funding for syndicated comic strips, something they’ve been doing aggressively for over a decade; some newspapers (like the Philadelphia Enquirer) have asked syndicates (like Universal Press) for a year of free strips, or demanded (like Knight-Ridder, which owns 31 large papers) a price reduction in strips across the board.
- Scott has siezed on this opportunity to leverage his strip’s popularity, offering PvP, free of charge, to multiple newspapers and newspaper conglomerates. It’s a smart deal for him–he gets huge exposure, and he’s already doing the strip anyway–and for them–they get a new-to-them comic with an established audience for free.
- Newspaper cartoonists who are aware of this are rabidly hating on Kurtz, while secretly urinating in their Depends.
Now, Scott’s success in this arena is hardly guaranteed. Newspapers are paranoid about comic strips, generally preferring the most sanitized, humorless pap available, as a sop to their demographic (which, I’m sorry to say, skews more and more to “old” and “boring”). This is why things like Cathy and Marmaduke and (hideously) Family Circus continue to exist. PvP has cussing and violence in it sometimes, and it might get angry letters, and it’s four inches of column space that could be used to squeeze in another ad.
Regardless, there are going to be alt-weeklies and college papers that take him up on it. They’re all going to profit from the deal. And Kurtz won’t be the first webcomic to jump to newspapers, but he will be the first one to do it for free, and bigger papers are going to look at that and start asking questions.
“Hey,” they’re going to ask, “why are we paying thousands of dollars for comics that could be generated by a monkey on lithium? Why are we getting exactly the same comics as everyone else, when we could be making exclusive deals to get a comic nobody else in the region has? Now that the Interweb allows millions of people to read any paper they want, can we use comics to leverage our success in that arena?”
The answers might be “because, because, and no,” but they will ask, and that’s a change. You remember the last time things changed in the newspaper comics industry? In a good way?
Me either.