Posts Tagged ‘trademarks’
Sunday Morning Links!
* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!
* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.
* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.
The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.
* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?
* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.
* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”
* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.
* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.
* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.
* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.
* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.
* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.
* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.
* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?
* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.
* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.
* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.
* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.
* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”
* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.
* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.
* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.
* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
* And on the pedestal these words appear.
Saturday Morning Links, Just Like When We Were Kids
* The Department of English invites applications for an entry-level, tenure-track Assistant Professor position in medieval literature, language, and culture, primarily British, before 1500. Marquette English is hiring!
* Maybe my new favorite page on the Internet: r/DaystromInstitute’s list of long-running Star Trek what-ifs and what-abouts.
* I think I’ve linked this thread before, at least a different version of it: “I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.”
* Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture.
* Creative Destruction: Tech and the evolution of the desk, 1985-2014.
* Bousquet breathes some fire: This change in appointment types is not accidental or caused by outside forces. The adjunctification of faculty appointment has been an intentional shock treatment by campus administrations. Of course, there may be some claims regarding saving money; however, most critical observers note that “saving” on $70,000 faculty salaries generates a vast, expensive need for $80,000- to $120,000-per-year accountants, IT staff members, and HR specialists, plus a few $270,000 associate provosts. Not to mention the $500,000 bonus awarded to the president for meeting the board’s permatemping target and successfully hiding the consequences from students, parents, and the public. It should be obvious to most of us that any money left over from bloating the administration is generally directed to consultants, construction, and business partnerships.
* The National Association of Colleges and Employers conducted a recent survey that questioned the correlation between internships and full employment upon graduation.The findings were astonishing. Hiring rates for those who had chosen to complete an unpaid internship (37%) were almost the same for those who had not completed any internship at all (35%). Students who had any history of a paid internship, on the other hand, were far more likely (63%) to secure employment.
* What’s wrong with college? Plenty. What’s wrong with journalism about college? Everything.
* Casinos are the autoimmune disease of city planning. They destroy everything else in the area, then die when the host is dead.
* From nuclear bombs to killer robots: how amoral technologies become immoral weapons.
* Preliminary Studies Show Potential Health Risk For Babies Born Near Fracking Sites.
* AAUP writes Chancellor Phyllis Wise over the Salaita firing.
* BREAKING: Elizabeth Warren won’t save us.
* Will Zephyr Teachout save us?
* Unskew the polls! Democratic Senate edition.
* Today in climate change neologisms: “Megadroughts.”
* California, before and after drought.
* The arc of history is long, but: “Doctor Who ‘lesbian-lizard’ kiss will not face investigation.”
* A unique experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has started collecting data that will answer some mind-bending questions about our universe—including whether we live in a hologram.
* Asst. Principal Fined for Changing His Son’s Failing Grades 11 Times. This story has everything:
According to the New York Daily News, Ali has been reassigned away from Bread and Roses, but has not been placed at a new school. He remains on the Department of Education’s payroll with a $104,437 annual salary.
…
The school, the Daily News reports, is expected to close by 2016 for poor performance.
* Study suggests autism rates have plateaued since 1990.
* ALS Foundation floats trademarking the concept of an “ice bucket challenge,” but immediately gets talked out of it.
* Thoughtcrime watch: Dorchester County discovers one of its teachers is a novelist, completely flips its wig.
* Fox developing a drama about a world without sleep.
* The inexorable march of progress: This Cheap Exoskeleton Lets You Sit Wherever You Want Without a Chair.
* Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: What’s the point of studying history?
* The Politics Of Every Major U.S. Religion, In One Chart. Way to claim the vital center, Catholics!
* The 12 Most Obnoxious Dungeons & Dragons Monsters.
* Suddenly I’m up on top of the world: They’re rebooting Greatest American Hero.
* An Annotated Reading Of Multiversity #1.
* How the growing generation gap is changing the face of fandom.
* A eulogy for Twitter. Twitter as misery factory.
* Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine Mitt Romney running for president, forever.
* Why Aren’t Women Advancing At Work? Ask a Transgender Person.
* And just this once, everybody lives: Family Cleans House, Finds Pet Tortoise Missing Since 1982.
Thursday Links!
* Marquette makes Slate’s vaunted “ridiculous phrases universities have trademarked” list. Meanwhile, Danny Pudi’s Marquette-flavored entry in the 30 for 30 series is up at Grantland. Jesuit author featured on ‘The Colbert Report’ to speak at Marquette University commencement.
* The academic outrage of the year is Nazareth College rescinding an offer following a request for more salary, research accommodation, and “official” maternity leave. I’ve been ranting about this on Twitter (1, 2, etc) (and now MetaFilter) all day but I can’t see how people can see this as anything but naked gender discrimination. I hope she sues.
* I know there’s a whole secondary argument on Twitter about the propriety of Buzzfeed’s appropriation here, but I found @steenfox‘s thread incredibly powerful last night. What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?
* This is one of my favorite endlessly recurring Internet images: “Do colleges have to hire RED professors?” asks The American Legion Magazine in Nov. 1951.
* The Humanities Crisis Industry.
* Workers Sue McDonald’s For Wage Theft Violations In Three States.
* Chicago Police Cannot Keep Complaints Of Brutality Secret Anymore, Court Rules. Why could they ever?
* Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner walks free after 30 years.
* My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Poor.
* Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don’t Get Hired.
* “Is it time to rethink the 40 hour week?” Yes, it’s time to think about bringing it back.
* University of California Credit Is Downgraded by Moody’s.
* I’ll give it to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this regard. I had, up until last night, found Ward to be one of the blandest characters on the show. But now he has my sympathies. Because that character is stuck in a world where terrible things happen and, when they happen to him, no one cares.
* Free markets! Disruption! Innovation!
* Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men. How To Make A Pundit. And I can’t wait to see how they voxplain this.
* I want to return to a thread I introduced in that earlier piece with much greater force: That those who write for free or very little simply because they can afford to are scabs. I don’t endorse this piece, honestly, because I think it significantly misunderstands the terms under which TT academics are employed — but I found it an interesting provocation nonetheless.
* WI school officials seize control over student paper after ‘rape culture’ article appears.
* I have never seen anything as utterly nihilistic as the position Andrew Napolitano proudly puts his name on here. It’s unreal.
* The Sheep Look Up: Radioactive ‘Oil Socks’ Found Illegally Stockpiled In Abandoned North Dakota Gas Station. North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links From Website. Panasonic First Multinational Company To Pay Air Pollution Hardship For Overseas Workers In China. NASA Study: Climate Sensitivity Is High So ‘Long-Term Warming Likely To Be Significant.’
* The economics of prostitution.
* The best TV show you may not be watching: Review from Andy Daly. Also starring another Comedy Bang Bang stalwart, Jessica “Marissa Wompler” St. Clair.
* Reuters auctioning off unpaid internships. My god.
* The only thing Americans care about less than climate change is race relations.
* “They cry because they are not allowed to be children at all.”
* Scott Aukerman explains BetweenTwoFernsGhazi.
* Teju Cole: @apieceofthewall.
More Monday Links!
* Martin Luther King’s Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income. Restoring King. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” “Beyond Vietnam.”
* Jebediah Purdy: No One’s Job: West Virginia’s Forbidden Waters.
* Well, here’s something interesting from the entrance survey to the “It’s Not a MOOC, It’s a Movement” “History and Future of Higher Education” Coursera course: You are invited to take part in a research study conducted by your instructor, Professor Cathy N. Davidson, and a graduate student from North Carolina State University, Barry W. Peddycord III. The purpose of this study is to assess a tool developed to automatically assess the quality of peer reviews on writing. The tool, called “Automated Metareviewing,” reads the essay and a review of it, and then measures how relevant, helpful, and specific the review was.
* Adam Kotsko has a provocative post today on higher ed and masculinity, reframing the crisis of rape culture on campuses as a byproduct of the hypermasculine spaces of fraternity and athletics colleges nurture for development purposes. In the comments I felt the need to try to extend this observation a little bit to the toxic masculinity that sometimes dominates academic departments themselves.
* State Higher-Education Spending Continues Slow Recovery.
* The future, folks: Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It. Microsoft’s ‘smart elevator’ knows where you’re going.
* It turns out you can get fired as a cop.
* Science has figured out why cold air smells different.
* On Thursday, Seay received a $10 off coupon from OfficeMax that was address to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash, Or Current Business.”
* The Air Force has roughly 500 officers in charge of protecting and maybe someday launching America’s arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles. Nearly all of them cheat on every exam they take, at every chance they get, according to three veterans of the force.
* Candy Crush Saga studio claims to own the word “candy” the same way it owns your every waking moment.
* And Tom Tomorrow has your typical day in the governor’s office.
Gerry-Built Monday Links
* Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” It’s hard not to take this personally.
* In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, Gilligan documents a striking statistical connection between changing rates of violent death in the United States over the past century and the party of the president. He concludes that Republican administrations are “risk factors for lethal violence,” and that the only reason they have not produced “disastrously high epidemic levels” of suicides and homicides is that Democrats have repeatedly undone their damage.
* Gingrich, true to form, takes right-wing attacks on the very idea of journalism itself all the way to the next level.
* Grover Norquist promises impeachment if Obama doesn’t extend the Bush tax cuts.
* Political religion: May you find the Ronald Reagan living inside each and everyone of you.
* I think I’ve linked this one before, but it’s a classic: Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter “To My Old Master.”
* A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever.
* Say goodbye to Captain Marvel.
* And today in fandom: #BelieveInSherlock. Big spoilers for the end of the second season, if you’re not current yet.
Three for Wednesday
* And every freshman composition essay ever: Since The Beginning Of Time, Mankind Has Discussed What It Did On Summer Vacation.
Superman and the Courts
io9 has a nice look at the history of comic-book intellectual-property law through the lens of Superman-related lawsuits. The most interesting, for me, remains the legal tussling over Superboy:
Superman creator Jerry Siegel submitted a proposal to DC Comics for a series of adventures about Clark Kent’s youth. DC rejected the proposal, but later printed Superboy while Siegel was serving in the US Army. When Siegel’s heirs attempted to terminate Superboy’s copyright, DC and Time Warner claimed that Superboy was merely Superman as a young man, and not a distinct character (and thus not copyrightable as distinct from Superman), giving DC the legal right to publish books featuring Superboy with or without Siegel’s permission.
Superboy’s Story: The original Superboy follows the adventures of the young Superman growing up in Smallville. He wears glasses as his alter ego Clark Kent and the iconic suit as Superman. Like his grownup self, he has superpowers and battles Lex Luthor, and he eventually travels to the 30th century to join the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Outcome: In 1948, a referee in a dispute between Siegel and DC found that Superboy was a distinct entity from Superman, and that DC had published the comic illegally. The findings were vacated in a settlement between DC and Siegel, but in 2006, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the referee, granting termination rights to Siegel’s heirs. However, the court later vacated that ruling, granting Warner and DC’s motion for reconsideration. Although Siegel’s family has recaptured some rights to Superman, the Superboy question remains undecided.
It must be the narrativist in me who just can’t understand how Superboy can be a distinct entity from Superman: the whole premise for Superboy is that he’s Superman as a boy.
Gerry Canavan 