Love Fraud

Tracy Clark-Flory wrote a piece reporting on “love fraud,” where scammers convince marks to fall in love and send them money. It’s a fine piece, but I was really hit by this last paragraph:

It’s easy to hear these stories and think, “What dupes.” But who isn’t looking for some form of connection and understanding online, whether it’s on Facebook or OKCupid? We broadcast so much of ourselves — sometimes unwittingly revealing our greatest hopes and fears — and romance scammers use those personal details to target a collective craving. That’s the real enabler in these cons, and its one most of us are vulnerable to: The desire for love. As one user wrote to a troubled poster who expressed still finding enjoyment in talking to her scammer despite having found out the truth about them, “Stay strong – someone will eventually come that will be honest and not wanting to play with your feelings.”

Psychoanalyzing Conan O’Brien

Scott Tobias has a great summary of some recent Conan O’Brien-related pop culture paraphernalia, including the recent War for Late Night book by Bill Carter and Rodman Flender’s disappointing documentary, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop:

All the attributes on display in Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop—the ceaseless drive to perform, the ability to connect broadly with audiences and improvise on the fly, and, yes, the need for constant gratification—underlines a point made in Carter’s The War For Late Night: Very few people can do what Conan does. Greater and lesser lights have tried and failed, from Magic Johnson to Pat Sajak to Chevy Chase to Dana Carvey, but only a handful can capably manage the various moving parts that go into the show—the monologue, the interviews, the remote segments and bits of sketch-comedy business—and get it done every night, in a marathon run with a finish line that keeps receding into the horizon. It takes a special kind of versatility and brilliance to pull it off (and I wouldn’t exclude Leno from that, however determinedly mediocre his show), and Conan, after a famously rough start, has logged the thousands upon thousands of hours to prove it. He’s a comic entertainer with very specific qualities: He’s not a stand-up, but he can get through monologues. He’s not an actor, but he can goof his way around desk and sketch bits. He’s a talk show host, a rare fusion of diverse attributes.

Massachusetts Implements Strict Health Rules for Public School Food

Sometimes, it feels good to be a Massachusetts resident:

The state Public Health Council this morning unanimously approved new rules aimed to improve the nutrition of food served in Massachusetts public schools. The nutrition standards, which take effect in the 2012-13 school year and are believed to be the strictest in the country, prohibit fried foods, sugary and artificially sweetened beverages, and foods high in sodium. The rules apply to food sold in vending machines, snack bars, and a la carte offerings in cafeterias.

Traffic

Interest in the unreleased teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises is at a fevered pitch. Yesterday, /Film took the unorthodox step of posting a description of the trailer. Sure, people might think such a posting goes too far in the world of fandom, but the interest has gotten so insane that every time we post ANYTHING related to The Dark Knight Rises, our servers stutter as thousands of film fans simultaneously click through the front page to see us eat of the scraps from Christopher Nolan’s table.

You could cluck your tongue and furrow your brow at this behavior. But above all others, Dustin Rowles from Pajiba totally gets it:

A movie like The Dark Knight Rises generates a ton of web traffic. For instance, that description of The Dark Knight Rises trailer on Slashfilm was retweeted over 100 times and Liked on Facebook nearly 300 times. It probably generated thousands of page views. So, while we were all making fun of Peter over at Slashfilm for posting it, he was probably laughing his ass off as his wallet grew three sizes because that one post generated more traffic than a lot of movie blogs put up in a week, a notion that makes some of the more high-minded assholes weep in their Ramen noodles. The economy is in the tank, but he just paid a writer for a week. He’s got an audience; he caters to it, and honestly — as TK so eloquently put it — the rest of us can go f*ck ourselves. After all, in the 100 or so comments underneath the description, what I didn’t see from his readers was, “You asshole. I can’t believe you posted this.” It’s taken for what it’s worth, and the world moves on. It’s not like we’re dealing with the debt crisis, like Emily Miller — a political reporter for the Washington Times — who actually tweeted in the midst of debt negotiations: “Forget debt ceiling … hello tan Clooney. RT @popsugar: Wow! Newly single #GeorgeClooney is lookin’ good in Cancun!”

World Lessons Learned

Benny Lewis shares life lessons he learned while travelling around the world for almost a decade (via Kevin). Here’s my favorite one:

Too many people presume that when they have that one thing they can work towards for years then “everything will be alright”. This is delusional. When you get it, there’ll be something else missing in your life. I fundamentally believe that long-term pure happiness from one particular situation or achievement is a pipe-dream, but we can learn to be content with what we have, live in the now, all while enjoying the progress and changes we are making. If your whole life is working up towards one really big major goal that you hold on to for years, then you will have a major anticlimax after the dust settles. Work towards it, but stop deferring your happiness.

Get there slower and enjoy the ride.

You Can’t Just Break Bad

Fascinating piece on Breaking Bad (via Donald), and how it compares favorably to The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men (I agree on at least two of those counts):

It’s not just that watching [Walter] White’s transformation is interesting; what’s interesting is that this transformation involves the fundamental core of who he supposedly is, and that this (wholly constructed) core is an extension of his own free will. The difference between White in the middle of Season 1 and White in the debut of Season 4 is not the product of his era or his upbringing or his social environment. It’s a product of his own consciousness. He changed himself. At some point, he decided to become bad, and that’s what matters.

The Legality of Pixelation

I’m fascinated by the legal intricacies of Fair Use, and I love me my photography, so when I first heard about the battle over Andy Baio’s pixelated rendition of Jay Maisel’s iconic Miles Davis photograph (seen above), I was intrigued. The short version is that Maisel took a great photo, Baio repurposed it –creating a pixelated version that he believed was covered under Fair Use — and Maisel sued his ass off. People on the internets got pretty upset because they thought that Maisel was stifling art and generally being a dick. This internet mob had real-life consequences for Maisel, who found himself as the unfortunate target of harassment and online character assassination.

Was it justified? Jeremy Nicholl has weighed in with an in-depth assessment, and he’s not kind to Baio, nor one of his defenders, Thomas Hawk:

Andy Baio, a man with a history of breaking and encouraging others to break intellectual property laws, made a considerable amount of money selling his intellectual property to Yahoo […] His account of his dispute with Jay Maisel provided an ammunition dump for those who wished to attack the photographer for defending his work under the same laws that allowed Baio to profit. And Andrew Peterson / Thomas Hawk has gleefully raided that dump to conduct a campaign of defamation and vilification against Maisel, neglecting to disclose his own recent history of being caught out for copyright infringement and libel.

See Andy Baio’s response to Nicholl by clicking here. For further reading, check out Baio’s original post on the topic, as well as Copyhype’s deconstruction of Baio’s Fair Use argument.