Posts Tagged ‘Veronica Mars’
Thursday Links!
* In case you missed it from the weekend: a CFP for a Science Fiction Film and Television special issue on “Star Trek at 50.”
* Call for submissions: Accessing the Future.
* Today’s twenty-first-century political weirdness is the Scotland referendum on independence. The Guardian. MetaFilter. The economic case. Schroedinger’s Kingdom. John Oliver. Why Scotland thinks it can survive as an independent country. I’m Guardian editor Matt Wells. Got questions on Scottish independence? Ask away!
* Alison Bechdel, certified genius. Some professors won too.
* Postdoc of the year: “The Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University invites applications for its 2015-2016 Postdoctoral Fellowship program. The successful candidates will couple their own research and publishing agenda with their contributions to the Center’s Collective Memory Project, a wide ranging oral history of the George W. Bush Presidency.” Friend, do I have a story for you.
* Chris Ware is serializing a novella in the Guardian: “The Last Saturday.”
* Unpopular opinions watch: Carceral progressivism.
* More Weird Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Original Star Trek.
Roddenberry believed there was no chest hair in the future.
The dream never dies.
* A day in the life of a data mined kid.
* This Is What Happens To Transgender Kids Who Delay Puberty.
* The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World.
* World War II and the creation of the paperback industry.
* Cruel optimism watch: Are More MLA Faculty Jobs on the Way?
* The madness of crowds: Wealthy L.A. Schools’ Vaccination Rates Are as Low as South Sudan’s.
* Hamburg wants to be the best city in the world in 20 years.
* Burlington nipping on its heels.
* Calvinball in Wisconsin: the rules on voting just changed again.
* Study: 30 percent of former NFL players will get dementia or Alzheimer’s.
* Don’t look now, but the US prison population is growing again.
* The University of California is just literally a hedge fund now.
* What Are the Real Odds That Your Birth Control Will Fail? Pretty frightening.
* A King Kong prequel, because we haven’t even come close to hitting bottom yet.
* BREAKING: Naomi Klein Is Right, Unchecked Capitalism Will Destroy Civilization.
* In decades of public debate about global warming, one assumption has been accepted by virtually all factions: that tackling it would necessarily be costly. But a new report casts doubt on that idea, declaring that the necessary fixes could wind up being effectively free. The price is too high!
* BREAKING: Immigrants aren’t stealing your jobs.
* A feminist history of Wonder Woman.
* Every panel of Watchmen, sorted by average lightness, ascending.
* Understanding the Tortoise and the Hare.
* Because you demanded it: “Play It Again, Dick,” the weird quasi-Veronica-Mars nega-sequel, is finally here.
* Necrocapitalism in the Anthropocene: Govt may do away with tribal consent for cutting forests.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Thievery marring Little Free Libraries.
* Anti-monuments in Milwaukee and beyond.
* May 2015 can’t come fast enough.
* And no one could have predicted: Apple releases U2 album removal tool.
It’s Always Mischief Night Somewhere Links
* You can now order the special Paradoxa issue on “Africa SF.” The testimonials indicate that Samuel Delany has at least heard of something I’ve written, so there’s that…
* Those who do not study history will have their wise decision ratified by bean-counting administrators: One of the 17 University of North Carolina campuses could stop offering degrees in physics, history and political science. If you read that sentence and thought to yourself, “gee, I bet that’s a historically black college,” give yourself a prize!
* MLA Reports Modest Decline in Job Ads Posted in 2012-13. The State of the Academic Job Market, by Discipline.
* ‘I Wish I Were Black,’ and Other Tales of Privilege.
* The Logic of Stupid Poor People.
* What The U.S. Would Look Like If It Mirrored The Main Characters On Prime-Time Network Television.
-Half the population would be white men.
-Five percent of the population would be black men.
-Just 1.9 percent of the world would be Asian or Latino men.
-Overall, 57 percent of the population would be men.
-34 percent of the world would be white women
-3.8 percent would be African-American women
-And 3.8 percent would be Latino or Asian women
-31.8 percent of the population would work for the police or some sort of federal law enforcement agency.
-9.7 percent of us would be doctors.
-2.6 percent of us would be criminals.
-1.9 percent would be supernatural creatures or robots.
* What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.
Students whose parents pay tens of thousands for SAT tutors to help their child take the test over and over compete against students who struggle to pay the fee to take the test once. Students who spend afternoons on “enrichment” activities compete against students working service jobs to pay bills – jobs which don’t “count” in the admissions process. Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C Z Nnaemeka termed “the un-exotic underclass” – the poor who have “the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting”, the poor who make up most of the US today.
* …a recent Twitter thread started by a popular feminist blogger examines a dark side of that cliché in real-life academe, one in which professors’ advances – intellectual and otherwise – feed a need for validation and flattery, and at times cross the line into sexual harassment.
* By the numbers: Sex crimes on campus.
* The New York Times spends 36 hours in Milwaukee.
* Colorado Counties Ban Sale of Marijuana, Want Share of Proposed State Sales Tax Anyway.
* Obama’s going to be super-mad when he finds out about the nonsensical security state procedures his administration has been using in lieu of actual oversight. And breaking into Yahoo! and Google? Why didn’t anyone tell him!
* Ripped from the pages of Philip K. Dick! Pentagon weighs future of its inscrutable nonagenarian futurist.
* Pennsylvania law protects pregnant women from unwanted belly rubbing.
* The Chronicle follows up on last year’s PhD-on-food-stamps, who is now in a TT position at Martin Methodist College.
* How Not To Take The GRE With a Non-Standard-English Name.
* The richest country in history: The Number Of Homeless Students In The United States Hits A Record.
* “Riots always begin typically the same way”: Food stamp shutdown looms Friday.
* Perry Anderson accidentally writes a whole issue of New Left Review.
* 20th Century Headlines, Rewritten to Get More Clicks.
* How the Koch Brothers laundered illegal campaign contributions.
* They’re marketing the Veronica Mars movie as a love triangle. This is my skeptical face.
* Sesame Street parodies Homeland.
* The chart that explains the world.
* What’s W.R.O.N.G. with ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’? A.L.M.O.S.T. E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
* No accidents, comrade: The New Inquiry considers Cold War nostalgia and Twilight Struggle.
* People Who Live Downwind Of Alberta’s Oil And Tar Sands Operations Are Getting Blood Cancer.
* BREAKING: Student Debt Is Making All Your Life Choices Worse.
* Matt Zoller Seitz completes his series on video essays on Wes Anderson films. Bring on The Grand Budapest Hotel!
* PRINCETON, N.J., Nov. 27: Princeton’s freshmen again have chosen Adolf Hitler as “the greatest living person” in the annual poll of their class conducted by The Daily Princetonian.
* The coming Terry McAuliffe landslide as proof the GOP brand is in serious disrepair.
* And it looks like they’ve finally (almost) proved that Darth Vader wasn’t always going to be Luke Skywalker’s father. Gotcha Lucas! You can run but you can’t hide.
Friday!
* 15 Geeky College Courses You Won’t Believe Actually Exist. The Tolkien class I’m inheriting is #8. Fall 2014!
* “The rich get education and the poor get training,” Carnevale said. “It’s a way of reproducing class. The higher education system is now in cahoots with the economy to reproduce class.” Already, he added, “there are a lot of kids who are not getting a real education any more. They’re getting training.”
* Double Majors Produce Dynamic Thinkers, Study Finds. That’s why I majored in both English and Philosophy.
* When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened 30 years ago this month, something unexpected happened: People started leaving things at the wall. One veteran has spent decades cataloging the letters, mementos, and other artifacts of loss—all 400,000 of them.
* The NYPD will arrest you for carrying condoms, but that depends entirely on who you are.
* More in NYPD-related travesties: Women who report domestic violence are exposing themselves to arrest under a new NYPD directive that orders cops to run criminal checks on the accused and the accuser, The Post has learned.
* The Washington Post is shocked, shocked to find money driving decisions in the NCAA.
* Now fourteen adults have been “functionally cured” of HIV.
* Well, there you have it: The Vatican lashed out at what it called a “defamatory” and “anti-clerical left-wing” campaign to discredit Pope Francis over his actions during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military junta, saying no credible accusation had ever stuck against the new pope.
* Rob Thomas: I did get an email from Bryan Fuller earlier today saying, ‘Hey, can you jump on the phone with me at some point? I know you’re busy, but I would love to talk to you about how this thing works.’ And I know it was specifically for “Pushing Daisies.”
* “Jesus, Grampa, what did you read me this thing for?”
* And in local news: A Wisconsin court has banned a local man from all the libraries on the planet after he was caught openly masturbating inside the Racine Public Library.
T-Shirts Alone Are 4% of the Budget
Looking at the figures and the estimated deadlines for delivery (most are concentrated around Thomas’ projected release date of February/March 2014, an astoundingly tight production schedule even for a film with whole-hearted studio backing), the obvious question is, “How can this be accomplished?”
If this was your project, then Kickstarter would expect you to have priced all this out beforehand with surplus backers in mind. I look at things like the t-shirts and extrapolate from there. This morning, I visited two online shirt manufacturers — CustomInk and BlueCotton — to seek quotes for a basic, one-color print tee. At the time, the number of backers entitled to Thomas’ limited-edition shirts was 34,000 and change. CustomInk gave me a rough quote for the exact number of shirts I sought: $3.90 each, for a total of $132,600. (“You saved $579,360.00 [81%] with Volume Discount,” the site reassured me.) BlueCotton was cheaper at $3.44 apiece, but it maxed out at 9,999 shirts, meaning some rough multiplication and rougher estimate of $116,960. That’s more than 4% of the total amount raised so far — ostensibly Thomas’ production budget, which also has to cover such actual necessities as crew, equipment, transportation and craft service — just to produce t-shirts.
DVD, Blu-ray and poster manufacturing are anybody’s guess with a studio’s facilities at the ready. If you were pooling estimates on the market, you could expect to pay around $1.50 apiece for manufacturing and packaging 18,000 DVDs. Blu-ray duplication isn’t much more, but packing along with the DVD — as promised to the 7,200 backers who have pledged $100 or more — requires totally different packaging. The total manufacturing cost then rises. Posters should cost around 50 to 60 cents each, not including design. It’s a minor if not negligible expense, particularly when factoring in shipping along with movie DVDs and/or organizing the epic signing binge that Thomas expects to comprise himself and eight cast members led by Bell. It’s worth noting the complete series sets as well, of which it’s worth asking if nearly 1,000 even remain available sealed and ready to ship. If those three-disc sets and their corresponding trays require a new round of manufacturing, then the cost rises still.
Veronica Mars Movie in the Works
Veronica Mars is apparently the latest canceled series to jump from TV to film.
Tuesday Bits
Tuesday bits.
* Is it Tim Kaine? Staffers called in from all across Virginia for emergency meeting to discuss line of succession if Kaine steps down as governor.
* Ten weird medical conditions, including the woman who can’t stop orgasming, the girl allergic to water, and the boy who can’t sleep.
* McCain goes after the Dungeons and Dragons lobby.
* Remember that whole Solzhenitsyn plagiarism thing? Turns out the original story was falsely attributed to Solzhenitsyn and actually came from a right-winger named Chuck Colson.
* And everyone is happy Rachel Maddow’s been given her own show.
On Spoiler Whores
Jason Mittell has a good post up explaining the differences between watching (Viewer A), watching-when-you-already-know-what-will-happen (Viewer B, the spoiler whore), and rewatching (Viewer C), using Lost and Veronica Mars as models. It’s good stuff:
…if the pleasures of suspense are in the telling more than the story, then viewers B and C use their story knowledge to focus attention on the discourse, absorbing and enjoying how the story is told and the subsequent emotions that the telling stimulates. Again, our survey bears this out – many spoiler fans claimed that by knowing what was going to happen, they could actually appreciate episodes of Lost more fully! Fans wrote that they used their foreknowledge of story events to focus on textual details, subtleties of performance, foreshadowing and clues, and stylistic flourishes. Thus by knowing the story ahead of time, spoiler fans approach a “new” episode more like academic critics, simultaneously experiencing and analyzing a text. I’ve discussed this practice in the context of the broader trend of narratively complex television, arguing that such programs stimulate an “operational aesthetic” that combines the act of reading and rereading simultaneously. As Jonathan and I write in our essay, “If typical fan consumption practices for programs like Lost straddle the experiences of first and subsequent viewings, then spoiler fans are taking this process one step further, increasing their expertise to more fully embrace the logic of rereading, and, as one respondent noted, ‘allow[ing] for a deeper analysis while you are viewing it.’”
Trend alert: Following the success of Buffy: Season 8 and the planned comic adaptations of Angel: Season Six and Star Trek: Season 4, Newsarama reports that DC Comics is in talks with Rob Thomas to make Veronica Mars: Season 4, based off the planned plotlines for the now-cancelled show. (Via Monitor Duty.) Given how bad the last season of Veronica Mars got, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly good idea—though at least it may make those people who bought all that candy for nothing happy.