…when I can hear them all over the building.
- I'm a Grinch. No, really; without the Hallmarkish episode of hypercardia, followed by the carefully hushed-up coronary infarction that was kept off-camera and partly explains the lack of a publicity tour in support of the 1966 masterpiece. But if you've actually read this blawg more than once, you already knew that.
And if you're one of the many publicists and "critics" who misunderstand the nature, use, and value of "reviews" whom I've eviscerated over the years, you definitely knew that. Today, though, I'll make it a little bit less personal, a little bit more "the entire system is corrupt," and demand that y'all just stop running "best of the year" lists before the end of the year. It's bad enough that all too often, the publicists are doing their very best — sadly, it's a very effective indeed "best" — to coopt, to corrupt, the entire system, ranging from "goody bags" for loyal reviewers on up. (Merely because you've succeeded in putting the cart 100m in front of the horse doesn't actually move the bloody cart, you maroons.) But "best of the year" lists based on prerelease private viewings, and unedited ARCs, and unlawfully-marked-"Not-for-Resale"1 records/CDs, also run the risk of including (or missing) substantial changes between the version reviewed and the version actually put in circulation. Not to mention little things like proper crediting (right, J____s C_____n)?
- None of which is really going to kill lazy-ass remakes in the foreseeable future. "Yeah, it sucks; but the IP recognition is rock-hard" has been H'wood's guiding principle since Beau Geste; how else to explain the middle of the Bond franchise, or indeed the concept of "franchise"?
Inquiring minds who've ever pondered The Anxiety of Influence — the good and the bad, and there's a lot of both, and even more not-invented-here problems, but it's still an essential set of memes with which to at least engage — will ponder the connection between this sausage and the preceding one. I recommend leaving the eggnog for later, though; it's vertigo-inducing enough without ethanol.
- Or maybe we could just learn something else from New Zealand, other than Mr Waititi's brilliant improvised line (as I understand it) in the preceding sausage. Like, say, civility in representative democracies actually being of value… and being, in the end, one of the distinguishing characteristics from authoritarianism and theocracy, but context obviously doesn't matter when you've got graft, corruption, and nepotism to get on with.
- I've started one anticipated New Year resolution early. On a couple of sites I visit frequently, there are some ideological trolls who refuse to accept when specific portions of their ideology have been responded to — repeatedly. I've tried to be patient and not hijack someone else's site; I'm now just no longer going to engage.
Until there's an appropriate virtual dark alley. And plausible deniability. My first career taught me that much.
Die Hard is a holiday movie, dammit. And Yo-yo Ma rulez.
- You make copies available to the public — any public — and you've just exhausted your first-sale-doctrine rights. That's been true since the 1976 Act was passed, even under prior versions of § 109. I snickered at what ended up in used record stores with those goofy stickers on them even as an undergrad…
As one of my math professors remarked repeatedly, applying this to related circumstances in the real world is left as an exercise for the student. The final exam in that course consisted almost entirely of such applications to related circumstances. You have been warned, especially when you try to claim that noninteractive fixed material is being offered only as a "license."