Category: media

“The recent outcry online over the low wages, high stress and professional instability that assistants face — given a voice through the hashtag #PayUpHollywood ­— has served to highlight the significance of writers’ assistants and script coordinators’ successful unionization efforts.” – Variety

“The Academy’s response to any criticism no matter how facile or valid—including accusations of radical leftism, elitism, racism, sexism, and general mustiness—has been to make vague, grand mission statements while frantically ushering some younger, less white, and less male Academy members into the ranks. The result has been generally non-transformative.” – The Daily Beast

Way back in the ’90s, Michele Loud applied to be a researcher for the show just a few weeks after she flunked the test to be a contestant; a year later, out of the blue, they called her in. Twenty-six years on, she’s now one of two staffers running the writers’ room. Here she explains how categories get chosen and clues get written as well as the extra jobs each staffer has during taping. – Vulture

The basic problem? A dashed line (one that violates international law as decided by a court at The Hague in 2016). “Malaysia’s censorship board initially agreed to permit Abominable to premiere on November 7, if the image of the map was removed from the version screening in their country. However, Universal Studios, which is distributing the film everywhere but China (Pearl Studio is Abominable’s Chinese distributor) has refused to make the cut.” – Vulture

The narration begins, “You were too young to lose your mum, and we were too young to organize a funeral. So because we were in Yorkshire, with nowhere else we wanted to be and nothing else we wanted to be doing, we decided to go and look for David Hockney.” – Aeon

This is a bit of a problem for the massive company: “The big question now is whether some of Netflix’s existing subscribers will decide to cancel its service and defect to cheaper alternatives that Apple and Disney will launch within the next month.” Or will the other two just be add-ons for people who get most of what they want through Netflix? The company is counting on it. – The New York Times (AP)

Untitled Goose Game “sees you play as a single-minded goose making her terrible way through a village. Your palette of interactions is limited yet sufficient: you can grasp at objects, flap your wings, or honk. Through this trinity, you terrorize the villagers, partly in pursuit of a goal that is revealed only in the game’s final moments, and partly just for the sheer hell of it.” Simon Parkin makes the case that this game is just the thing for a time of moral crisis. – The New Yorker

According to the domain brokerage GoDaddy, the five most expensive publicly-reported domain names are CarInsurance.com – $49.7m; Insurance.com – $35.6m; VacationRentals.com – $35m; PrivateJet.com – $30.18m; and Voice.com – $30m. Sex.com sold for $14m and Porno.com – $8.8m. – The Guardian