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Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

It’s not about the ratings. It’s not about the executives. It’s not even about who’s funnier. No one involved in the Tonight Show “Succession War” is getting screwed. Conan will be paid many millions of dollars to do nothing for the next little while. If that’s the definition of getting screwed, then we’d all bend over.

This is about the generation gap. It’s a lot like the one in the 1960′s that we never heard the end of, only this time the older generation is more vocal and demographically larger than the one coming up. Think about it. The chaplains of Team Coco are almost universally post-1960 babies. A lot of those babies are also waiting for someone to retire so they can move forward in their careers. How do I know this? I got into computers, the “career of the future”, only to find that I have to wait for the mainframe generation to retire first. Only they won’t retire, because they have adult children to support, who can’t get better jobs because they’re waiting for someone to retire.

I fear not for Conan and his late night crew. The man behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog will not be kept out of the limelight for long. However, this situation is a hard lesson for those of us trying to get established today. Jockeying for positions in institutions like the Tonight Show is not the key to job security we were led to believe. The only future we can rely on is one that we own, not the one that we inherit.

John K’s “Stuff” blog raised an interesting question about robots in anime the other day:

I wonder how many we need? What makes one any better than another?

To answer the first question, we need as many as possible. Why? Short answer, because God loves us and wants us to be happy, that’s why! Long answer has something to do with toy companies, business models and other stuff I really don’t care about right now. Robots!

To answer the second question, I believe that each era of anime robot design has its unique advantages and disadvantages:

60′s and 70′s: This represents the hey-day of “Super Robots”, machines that were usually one of a kind that derived their weapons from within their own bodies. The thick lines and clear silhouettes of these guys really look spectacular when they start to go to town the monsters they fight.

80′s: This was a period when cold war military spending was at its height. Many designs from this period borrowed heavily from vehicles like the M1 Abrams tank or the F-14 Tomcat. There are a lot more straight lines and more details put in to give the robots a increased sense of realism. This was also a period for a lot of classic “Real Robot” series, where characters took on a more central role, and the robots were mass produced machines and treated more like set pieces. Purists might criticize these designs for having too many unnecessary details, and that reducing the robots to set pieces just makes these shows into toy commercials. To this I say that details, when used properly, can make a robot look like it could come stomping through your town at any moment. Sacrificing a little bit of design for realism is not a bad thing. As for the point on mass production, I think armies of robots fighting each other is way cooler than just one or two duking it out, don’t you agree?

90′s-present: This is a period of a lot of branching out and introspection. Designs become more organic, reflecting storyline choices by series like Evangelion. A lot of remakes start happening here two. Mars Successor Nadesico is influenced by both the Super Robot and Real Robot sub-genres. There is a danger of robot designs plateauing in quality, either through repeated remakes, or because the CGI tools used to animate them allow designers to add details with reckless abandon, so as to render the mechanical designs unreadable. Fortunately, science is now catching up to science fiction. Now humanoid shaped robots are appearing in real life, perhaps mechanical designers can use them for inspiration for future designs.

The internet is a funny place to try and make your mark. Your success is not only dependent on the number of eyeballs you bring to your content, but also how many people link to your content. Think about this. The greatest entertainment force of the modern age is basically driven by banal e-mails spamming up some office’s Exchange server.

This presents a conundrum for anyone trying to increase their traffic. How does one go viral? Do you just get all of your friends to post links to your site? Does buying adspace work? You can have great content all you like, but it won’t matter if no one hears about it.

I think the big question is if there is such a thing as shameless promotion on the internet. How many links can you post to digg, twitter or reddit before it becomes annoying?  The problem with our society is that we’ve got it into our head that selling is not real work. We have all the tools of mass media at our disposal, but we shy away from using them out a sense of modesty. Unfortunately, if you are trying to start a business online, modesty might be a luxury you simply can’t afford.

Avatar is one of those movies that you just have to see. In our thousand-channel, billion-webpage universe, sometimes we need to have a collective cultural experience. The CGI is amazing. I couldn’t tell whether it was through the use of clever editing or new software tools, but the live action blended seamlessly with the animation in way I’ve never seen before. The story strikes a fine balance, incorporating enough hard science fiction ideas to inspire the visuals, but enough mythological tropes to keep the audience involved. It’s cheesy, but not too cheesy.

It is by no means a perfect movie. I would’ve liked to know why the corporation was willing to go through with genocide to get at their unobtainium (I would’ve called in macguffinite myself). This is a movie more about spectacle than nuance. But as the success of District 9 has shown us, there is room for intellectual SF movies as well as the booming blockbusters. Avatar has been an easy target for internet snark ever since the first trailers came out, but I find I part ways with the critics when they start talking about the film’s racist/mysoginist/ableist overtones.

I’m not going to go into every political grievance against this film. Even anti-smokers are getting into the game. Yes, Avatar is essentially “Dances With Wolves” in space, but that doesn’t make it white supremacist literature. People respond to this story, especially in North America because it is, in essence, their story. Most societies on the Western Hemisphere are here because of political edicts of older, more entrenched societies in Eurasia. As time went on, we adapted to our new home and eventually broke free of our autocratic masters from across the ocean. A lot of people died or were subjugated over this period of history, but it does not change the fact that it is our story. Instead of simply decrying movies like this, we should learn why they resonate with us, and in turn learn a bit more about ourselves.

How many times have you been bored to death by an anime series, only to find out later that you “just need to stick with it” for a few episodes before it “picks up”? There seems to be some prevailing theory in the anime industry that you need to make viewers work for their enjoyment. If you hook people on the first episode, well, that’s just cheap. How will you know your fans will stick with you through the inevitable recap episode?

Take my experience with A Certain Scientific Railgun as an example. The first episode is all about how this school girl Mikoto is so apparently god-like that her sidekick Kuroko has made it her mission to lure her into love hotel. The antagonists, if you could call them that, are such push-overs that it’s embarrassing. Not only do I not care what happens to these characters, this show isn’t going to let anything happen in the first place. But of course, the fourth episode is totally epic. I just have to hang in there.

I still chase the dragon of anime bliss. The next Macross or Slayers could just be one more incomprehensible title away. I’ve given a lot of my time and money to anime. I’ve got a closet full of manga and un-assembled model kits to prove it.  However, now that I’m not a university student with 11:30am classes, my time is kind of at a premium. I just don’t think it’s too much to ask to start enjoying a show as soon as the opening credits roll.

Have you’ve ever seen a movie in the theatre, enjoyed yourself, laughed, cried, ate lots of popcorn, only to log on the internet to find out you are nothing but a big fat liar? This happened to me just a little while ago.  I saw “The Invention of Lying” in the theatre and had the grave misfortune of enjoying it non-ironically. The usual excuses were useless to me. Telling the nearby film snob to “turn your brain off” wouldn’t work. I believed the thought experiment of a world without lying was brilliant. I entered the theatre of sound mind and free of chemical influence. But when I say “The Invention of Lying” was a great film, I have a metacritic score of 58, a rotten tomatoes score of 56%, and a debut at #5 at the box office proving that I am nothing but an enemy of good taste.

There is a war going on in Hollywood. The talented writers, directors, and actors are locked in fierce combat with fearsome studio executives summoned from the stygian pits of ivy-league law schools. Their prize is nothing less than the creative soul of the developed world. The resources to create the films we enjoy are tended by soulless comptrollers with no regard for the product they are trying to create. When you see a bad movie, enjoy said movie, and then recommend it to your friends, you are feeding the machine responsible for “Meet the Spartans” or “Couples Weekend”. It doesn’t matter if YOU liked the movie. There is only one objective standard of taste, and if you can’t get in line, you are siding with the demons. In fact, for every movie you like, you are crowding movies that other people like. So if you want to cover all your bases, if you want build a film landscape that is pure and free of undue influence, you have to do the honorable thing. Never like anything.

So the new GI Joe movie came out last week, making millions at the box office. To the surprise of absolutely no one, it’s not what you’d call a critical darling. Apparently the phrase “Joes before Hoes” was used. Yup, that bad.

The GI Joe movie had a lot going against it from the get-go, not the least of which was the source material. In the 80′s cartoon, the Joes had to battle such ridiculous schemes as hypnotic rock music and attempts to blow up the ocean. For me though, the biggest reason I won’t be seeing this film has nothing to do with the power suits or the fact that a Wayans brother was involved. If you ask me, the perfect GI Joe movie had already been released 11 years earlier. It was called Metal Gear Solid.

Say what you will of that game’s three sequels. They wouldn’t have all of those expectations to foil were it not for that fateful 1998 release on the Playstation 1. The names were changed, but all the elements were there. A para-military terrorist organization called FOXHOUND had seized control of a top-secret nuclear research facility in Alaska. The US government’s only hope of retaking the site was to send in a single operative in a hollowed out submarine torpedo with no weapons or political support. The operative’s code name was Solid Snake. He had the wry wit of a Connery-era Bond and the genuine pathos of Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” character. Waiting for him inside the base was a troupe of villains with the kind of comic book bravado you can only achieve by knocking off a US military facility. They had code names like Revolver Ocelot, Sniper Wolf, and Decoy Octopus.There was even a mysterious cyborg ninja with unclear motives who could give Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow a run for their money.

Beyond their superficial similarities, Metal Gear Solid had a kind of ethos GI Joe would never be able to achieve with its Reagan Era bravado. It used real world issues of nuclear arms limitation and tghe fate of the military in a post-cold war world as motivation for its characters. At the same time, the story didn’t interfere with the game’s awe-inspiring set pieces, like Solid Snake’s battles with the members of FOXHOUND, or the final confrontation with the walking nuclear tank called Metal Gear.

It may be harsh for me to write off GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra without actually seeing it. Then again, if I actually saw it theatres, I would be supporting the kind of thinking that allows Michael Bay to believe that he has the directing prowess to sell M&M’s without looking like a candy-coated purple…nut. Besides, if I really want to see Reagan-era bravado caught on celluloid, there’s Commando, Rambo, They Live, and other macho epics for me to enjoy. In fact, I think I’ll do just that.

I want to direct your attention over to this rule often quoted by social media start-ups, the 90-9-1 rule for participation. It’s basically a ratio for internet users. 90% of them are lurkers. They just read posts and articles, they never comment, never share, and never click on one of those ajax-powered “thumbs-up” links. 9% are part-time contributers, you might hear from them only once in a while. 1% is the ratio of users on any given website or online community that produces 90% of the content. You almost begin to wonder if they ever see sunlight, but you see them over and over again on all your favorite websites.

With statistics like this, you begin to wonder, how democratic is the internet, really? If such a small ratio of users is producing all the content, are we really that much better served by the internet than traditional forms of media? There are several recommendations for addressing the inequality in participation by rewarding contributing users and making it easier to contribute in the first place. I think even deeper concerns about our society will have to be addressed before we make the internet the free speech utopia that we hope it to be. No one wants to write anything they’ll regret later. The media is full of moral panic stories about public figures posting information on the internet that they would later regret, as was the case with NDP candidate Ray Lam in the last BC election. On the other hand, people might avoid contributing because they fear they’ll be ignored. By the time they’ve come up with something witty to post in the comments section, the article they were reading is buried underneath dozens of subsequent posts. I’d like everyone reading this to consider what goes through their head when they post a comment, or decide not to. Either way, if I am lucky, perhaps you will post your results in the comments below.

Determined to make the most out of our Van Art Gallery membership, Sara and I went to see the exhibition of the Dutch Masters this week. Although we were a little disappointed to see only one Vermeer painting (“The Love Letter”, pictured above), I had never been around such a large collection of Renaissance-era art. All of it came from one  century-long period of history called “The Golden Age”. It started when seven provinces of the Netherlands rebelled against their Spanish oppressors, and ended in a disastrous war against an international coalition consisting of England, France, and several other European city states. During that time they produced innovations in Art, Science, and Economics that are still in use today.

The only art history course I ever took in University was in Modern Art at SFU. Every piece we looked at seemed to be about the deconstruction, emancipation, or the questioning of history, sexuality and culture in general. The paintings and sculptures all seemed to be created in response to a particular interpretation of reality, rather than just interpreting what was out there. With the Dutch Masters, they were part of a country that had just popped into being with the signature of the Union of Utrecht. They were more concerned with committing their images to history, rather than simply trying to impress other artists. Because of the outpouring of wealth from the trade missions, men of business were now displayed in portraits alongside Kings and Queens. There were scenes of battle, daily life, and old married couples holding hands. To these people, art was synonymous with life.

Today, creating an image is a simple matter of pressing a button on a camera. It’s easy to get worried that your picture isn’t very good, especially when you have people like the Dutch Masters showing up other periods of art history. Still, when you consider all the paintings the Dutch made, and all their other accomplishments during that brief period of history, sometimes it is just enough to be alive and to have that simple wish to be counted.

People like to complain about the weather, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. When it comes to tawdry celebrity stories about addiction, Dr. Drew takes it on the way only an actual medical doctor can.

I found out about Dr. Drew through stories told by Adam Carolla on his podcast. They both hosted a radio call in show called Loveline for 11 years. He’s also been practicing addiction medicine for over twenty years, making him one of the most knowledgeable people in the media on the subject. While most drug use critics and advocates are motivated by politics, Dr. Drew talks more about the science behind drug addiction rather than the moral posturing surrounding it. A common thread among his patients, which include some celebrities, is a high level of narcissism, which he talks about in his new book, The Mirror Effect.

Narcisissm. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? That’s the reason we’re bombarded by celebrity news, featuring empty-headed young slackers in a competition to see who can go on the worst bender, isn’t it? Well, it is, but not in the way you would think. Narcissism is not the same thing as vanity. In fact, it’s the product of intense self-loathing. People who have a high level of narcissism create a persona that is outgoing and confident to make up for their lack of self-esteem. Actually, most healthy people do this. Celebrities have high narcissism because it helps them deal with the rejection that comes with trying to be an actor or a musician. It becomes a problem when it divorces people from reality. Narcissistic people turn to drugs, sexual promiscuity, and other dangerous behavior in order to cope with their lack of self esteem and any other trauma they might have. The mirror effect the book refers to is the concern that the pervasiveness of celebrity bad behavior will serve as modeling behavior to people with high narcissism, including children and young adults. Narcissism is not necessarily the cause of these problems, but it does increase the severity and scale of them.

If there is one thing that I took away from Dr. Drew’s book, it’s that addictive behavior is an extremely complex psychological problem. Each individual’s path to recovery is different, and it’s achieved through slow, incremental changes. I’ve also been listening to Dr. Drew’s new radio show as a podcast on iTunes. One of the things that he said that really stuck with me was that a patient’s prognosis for cancer is better than drug addiction. If you walk into a hospital with lymphoma, you have a better chance of walking out of there than the guy who’s hooked on Demerol. I would really like to know what he thinks of the problem of the Downtown Eastside. Vancouver may have some advantages since the addicts are crowded around such a small area, but it would be nice to actually see addiction treated as a disease from a medical science point of view.