Announcement: The Histories “I Need a New Computer” Write-a-Thon
Starting now, I’m campaigning to get at least 100 people to buy an entry in The Histories so I can buy a new computer. That’s 100 people sending $10 or more to my Ko-Fi or PayPal OR joining my Patreon at the same level. The Histories is my quirky encyclopedia project (now a wiki) wherein I write absolutely true short histories about real people. Lots of folks have already been included in the wiki, including my good friends Paul Weimer, Brandon O’Brien, Stina Leicht, and more, plus really awesome writerly folks like Premee Mohamed, T.J. Berry, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Diana Rowland, and more. These folks are wizards, space pirates, immortals, mad scientists, and so on! Anyone can get an entry for themselves or for a friend or family member OR expand an existing entry (your own or someone else’s). If that interests you, read the Buy an Entry page for how to get one and some of the basic rules (what you can request, etc.).
A Definitive Absolutely Accurate Ranking of James Bond Theme Songs
The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off for years, both as a kind of weird comfort watching and because the culture critic in me wants to understand them. The other real reason: cause I want to. In preparing for this, I had to consider two factors: first, what criteria to use to judge these songs, because no ranked list would be valid if we didn’t pretend to some kind of objective measure; and second, how to use such a list to incorporate my brother’s feedback, as he was coaxed into participating in this fiasco for our mutual amusement. The second of these, I simply decided that we’d use the ranking average of our two scores for the final score in one of the criteria categories. The more difficult task was coming up with the criteria in the first place. And so with much deliberation with myself, a little with my brother, and a little more with other folks who also have opinions about things, I came up with this list of five:
Fan Fiction vs. Tie-In Fiction: A Framework
Every once in a while, fandom is beset upon by a series of somewhat aggressive arguments about the function of accuracy in film/tv adaptations. The best of these follow my own path, which involves assessing the work on its own terms before going back to look at how it functions as an adaptation. The worst of these, however, fall into a familiar trap of damnation by comparison — typically by comparing an adaptation to fan fiction. Essentially, the argument goes, substantial deviations from the source material make a work more fan fiction than adaptation; by doing so, these works become worse off. Fan fiction, in other words, is, by implication, a lesser form of art. None of this, of course, is particularly surprising. While many fan fiction writers and the community which surrounds them find great value in fan fiction and its various related works (fan art, etc.), there has always been a side of the broader fan community which views such works as a lesser fan pursuit, artistically weak, or, in the most brutal rejection, contemptable garbage (sometimes verging on a kind of moral decay).
4 Things Twitter Could Do to Make Blue Worth Paying For (But Probably Won’t)
Over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about why Twitter Blue has not been the success its new owner had hoped for. While subscription numbers are hard to assess, Endgadget reported that as late as mid-January, Blue had only 290,000 subscribers worldwide, which doesn’t come close to Musk’s demand that the company get half of its revenue from subscriptions. Using absurdly basic math, you’d need 15.6mil subscribers at an $8/mo average to meet half of Musk’s revenue expectation of $3bil. If you’re in podcast circles, you’ll sometimes hear that anywhere from 1 to 10% of your listeners will subscribe to a Patreon (in my case, it’s about 3.7%). For Twitter, the target is around 3.4% (depending on the number you use for active users), which should be achievable in a short time frame. And yet, all data suggests that this isn’t remotely the case. But why? What is keeping Twitter from reaching a subscription milestone? There are probably dozens of reasons, from violations of the trust thermocline, Doctorow’s enshittification theory, distrust in the ownership of the platform, the consumer conception of value as free things become paid things, and so on. Twitter, in other words, is a mess.
Chicon 8 / Worldcon 2022 Schedule!
For folks who follow me here on this blog object, below is my current schedule of events at this year’s Worldcon! You can find the program guide online here. There is a lot of great stuff on the program, including stuff I worked on as academic head! 😀 Do with this knowledge what you will :):
Pete’s Dragon and the Most Alarming World of Child Abduction…with Music!
When you’re a kid, you don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the historical basis for the narratives in the fantasy films you grew to love. It’s all about the anthropomorphic Robin Hood figures, talking parrots and genies, flying beds and walking suits of armor, an astronomically large collection of Dalmatians, or a magical cartoon dragon who roasts apples for his child companion. That describes much of my early experiences with Pete’s Dragon (1977), which saw Disney attempting to recreate the live-action-and-cartoon musical magic some thirteen years after Mary Poppins. It’s a film about a little boy and his magical dragon, about a small New England seaside town, about larger-than-life hillbilly villains, and about familiar Disney things like the power of family (even found family) and even the “value” of children. Value would normally have an obvious meaning here. Something like “hey, we should listen to kids because what they have to say matters,” for example. And Disney certainly has that here. Pete (Sean Marshall), the lively redheaded boy who is taken in by lighthouse keepers Nora (Helen Reddy) and Lampie (Mickey Rooney) gets his fair share of moments to remind the adults around him that what he thinks does matter – though other adults, such as the strict and draconian schoolteacher, Miss Taylor (Jane Kean), find little of value in the words of children. Yet, it’s the other value that I found particularly shocking upon rewatching the film for this feature.