Category: media

“The kids who are coming up who often erroneously are being told that all copying is plagiarism, and our bosses and our librarians and our gatekeepers who haven’t gotten the memo yet. The fair use lobby doesn’t have the marketing muscle or the Beltway clout of Hollywood studios, but one thing they’re not is scared.”

“The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels.”

“Most explanations of game testing as a job begin with the sober admonition that is most certainly not just “sitting around and playing games all day”; that it is, you know, an actual job and entails actual work. Of course it is, but it must said that while, yes, it has certain expectations, responsibilities and so on, entry-level game testing would not be found near the top of a list of the world’s most demanding livelihoods.”

“Sales of games and consoles fell 13% during January in the U.S. to $1.2 billion from a year earlier.”

Mumbai police have detained more than 1,000 people in the hopes of heading off a potentially violent protest of a film set to hit theaters Friday.

“At first blush, the hallmarks of a terrible date movie might seem rather obvious. Such a movie might feature multiple instances of projectile vomiting, like the Sam Raimi horror flick Drag Me to Hell. It might graphically depict genital mutilation” or, perhaps, “aliens emerging from human rectums.” But these aren’t the kind of movies to watch out for.

Since mid-November, “every No. 1 film at the domestic box office not called ‘Avatar’ has been [a] chick movie. … And it’s not that there is some big new trend of more women going to the movies.” It’s that “studios are making more movies now that accurately reflect women’s experiences and interests.”

“No director in film history has made more of rubble than Roberto Rossellini. There are few buildings that aren’t collapsed, or at least structurally unsound, in the three films of his War Trilogy – Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero … Rossellini’s broken buildings come to stand for broken political theories, a broken social order, broken morality, broken people.”

An Indiana Univ. study of 400 college students found that viewers preferred versions of programs with the violence edited out to versions with violence included. What they liked was action and suspense. “Suspenseful, nonviolent content is again just as arousing, but without the aversive reaction”

“The industry’s routine use of use carbon-belching private jets to ferry stars, for example, doesn’t comport with a green mandate. Still, some producers are paying more than lip service to the hype, prompting equipment suppliers, vendors and film crews to change how they operate.”