Uncategorized

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A Word of Thanks

Just wanted to give a shout out to my online buddy, Scott Neumyer. In addition to his day job, Scott is an author as well as a photographer. Coincidentally, these are two fields that I’ve recently made some inroads into, with the new Kindle Single Stephen and I just published, as well as my increasingly serious photographic pursuits.

Occasionally in my online travels, I’ve had the privilege to encounter super nice people who are willing to help me out, just out of the kind goodness of their hearts. Scott has certainly been one of those people, guiding me through some very uncertain processes and doing so with lots of patience, generosity, and graciousness. Thanks, Scott. Any success in my future endeavors in these fields will be partially due to you.

Check out Scott’s book on Amazon’s e-book store!

The Atrocious Sexual Assault Reporting of the NYTimes

The New York Times recently published a piece by James C. McKinley about the brutal gang rape of an 11-year old girl. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates. The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said…

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said. “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

Even on its face, the implication that the victim might have somehow been responsible for her own assault seems abhorrent in such a story (conveniently, the people explaining her proclivities are relegated to the anonymous “some”).

Emily Long explains why she thinks this article is a pretty poor piece of reporting:

And here we have another variation on blaming the victim, which is blaming the victim’s parents. For one thing, the girl’s mother did not grant permission for a child to be viciously assaulted. We have no background on what was going on in the victim’s private life (which is as it should be; she and her family deserve anonymity). For all we know, the girl was no more supervised at home than she was in the Quarters, and the reasons for that could be any number of possibilities. Within the article, that makes for two quotes working against the victim, and none against the accused beyond statements about how devastated the community is by the attack as a whole.

Mary Elizabeth Williams chimes in with a thoughtful, well-written analysis (as usual):

The question, however, is not what that girl or her mother did to bring this on. And it’s sloppy journalism for a reporter to run a story that casts a victim and her mother as somehow responsible for an attack, especially without including a single quote from anyone in town with a more sympathetic view of the family. That’s far from the balanced journalism the Times aspires to. The girl’s mother, identified only as Maria, told the New York Daily news this week that the family has received several angry phone calls, and that the child has been moved to foster care for her protection. “These guys knew she was in middle school,” she said. “You could tell whenever you talked to her. She still loves stuffed teddy bears.” Where’s that quote in the Times story?

It’s a painful thing to contemplate that a girl’s circumstances may have made her more vulnerable to attack. But being vulnerable does not put the burden of what happens on the victim. No 11-year-old deserves a word of questioning or doubt on that front. No one who has ever been sexually assaulted, and certainly none who has ever been sexually assaulted in such a sustained and inhumane way, deserves to have her makeup or clothing brought into the conversation, regardless of her age. And how demoralizing, how outrageous, how sickening that once again, when a female is brutally and inhumanely attacked, the issue of what her multiple assailants apparently did somehow pales next to the curiosity over what she must have done to provoke it.

Reject Radio Revamps

I’m usually keenly aware about most of our “competitors” in the film podcasting world (and that word is in quotes only because podcasting is not a zero sum game; people can obviously listen to more than one in any given week). That being said, there are few movie podcasts that I feel truly elevate the genre and offer a good mix of entertainment and information. The ones that come to mind immediately are probably obvious to anyone with even a cursory interest in this field: The Treatment, Filmspotting, Creative Screenwriting Magazine, not to mention the podcasts I’ve mentioned I can’t live without. Aside from these, most of the podcasts that I hear about represent some minor variation of the “Random Guys Talking About Movies” genre, which I have no real interest in, primarily because I produce one of those shows myself (Of course, there are exceptions to this).

For a time, I felt like Reject Radio fell into the latter, less favorable camp. In my opinion, that show (under the umbrella of Filmschoolrejects) had a rough start but really started to find its voice towards its more recent episodes. However, its host, Cole Abaius, has recently “rebooted” the show with some pretty impressive results. The new format involves interviews with a variety of interesting people (a format I’m attempting myself), as well as an awesome game-show segment towards the front end that will delight anyone who reads these movie blogs on a regular basis.

My only concern is: Man, this must take a helluva lot of work! Hopefully Cole can keep it up. But regardless of whether you’re a fan of Reject Radio you gotta give them props for trying something new and different.

You can check out the first revamped episode here.

In Mississippi, Half of the People with HIV Aren’t Receiving Treatment

An upsetting report from Human Rights Watch via @jimmurphysf:

The 59-page report, “Rights at Risk: State Response to HIV in Mississippi,” documents the harmful impact of Mississippi’s policies on state residents, including people living with HIV and those at high risk of contracting it. Mississippi refuses to provide complete, accurate information about HIV prevention to students and threatens criminal penalties for failing to disclose one’s HIV status to sexual partners. At the same time, Mississippi provides little or no funding for HIV prevention, housing, transportation, or prescription drug programs for people living with HIV, and the state fails to take full advantage of federal subsidies to bolster these programs. In Mississippi, half of people testing positive for the virus are not receiving treatment, a rate comparable to that in Botswana, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.


Pornography Will Ruin Your Teaching Career

The sad story of Tera Myers, who was unable to escape her past involvement in pornography:

A Parkway North High School science teacher has been placed on administrative leave and will not return to her job after disclosing she had worked in pornographic films before becoming a teacher, according to school district officials. The teacher, Tera Myers, requested the leave Friday after a student approached her about her past, according to the district. Previously, Myers had been suspended from a Kentucky school district for similar reasons.

Why Movies Succeed And Fail

Drew McWeeny on why you shouldn’t give Universal crap for deciding not to finance Guillermo Del Toro’s newest film:

There are so many reasons good movies fail to find an audience, and it is myopic to claim marketing is the only key. I’ve seen good movies that were marketed well die. Just plain die. And you can sift through the ashes of a disaster and proclaim this and assert that, but all you really know for sure is that people did not want to see the movie in the theater. Maybe the movie was misrepresented to them, and they would have loved it, and they will kick themselves years later, a la “The Shawshank Redemption” or “The Iron Giant.” Maybe so. Or maybe the general audience just plain didn’t want something. And no matter how good it is, no matter how sure you are it deserved an audience, it just wasn’t meant to be. It happens. Sometimes it’s about timing. Harry kept telling me how “The Thing” was mismarketed back in 1982 today, and I’m afraid I don’t agree at all. That was the same summer “E.T.” came out, and if you look at what did well that year, there was an optimism that was embraced, and it simply looks to me like audiences wanted their aliens sweet and cuddly that year, instead of shape-shifty and nightmarish. It happens. You can’t control that. You can’t make the audience go see something. There was 100% nothing anyone in 1982 could have done differently to make “Blade Runner” into a $300 million grossing hit movie. Nothing. Absolutely no trailer or poster would have changed that movie’s fate. You take Han Solo and Indiana Jones and you put him in a movie where he’s an emotionally vacant “hero” who murders one woman in cold blood, gets his ass beat by another, and who has one of the most ineffective final showdowns possible with a bad guy who wins and who chooses to spare his life. I love that film, but I can understand why it failed.

Universal’s been on a pretty spectacular run lately, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. They’ve made some pretty ballsy moves and when I read about the box office returns in the news, I see more misses than hits. Nonetheless, I agree with McWeeny’s overall point: at least they’re trying. Movies like State of Play, Land of the Lost, Paul, Duplicity and Your Highness might not all be your cup of tea, but they are all, to a significant degree, different than the big studio pap that they are shoving into our faces. Universal deserves our support.

The Case Against Anonymity

Facebook has recently rolled out Facebook Comments, an exciting new commenting system for blogs and websites. Why is it so exciting? Because it forces people to comment using their real names (or at least, makes it more difficult to continue creating fake ones). TechCrunch has tried implementing the system, and it’s had some pretty interesting results so far.

Steve Cheney, for one, claimed that the new comments were killing authenticity:

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

In the beginning, Facebook catered to this instinct we all have. But FB in its current form, a big graph of people who may or may not know anything about one another, does not. And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

The argument is basically: you’re only free to be yourself when you’re not being yourself.

Robert Scoble responded thusly:

Where did my authenticity come from? I knew that REAL change comes from people putting their necks on the line. I couldn’t remember a time when an anonymous person really enacted change in, well, anything. It’s why I sign my name to everything, even stuff that could get me fired. Hell, I live in an “at will” state. THIS post could get me fired! My boss could wake up tomorrow and decide he doesn’t like the shirt I’m wearing and fire me. People have been fired in Silicon Valley for less you know. Look at all the images from Egypt (and I hope you don’t think I’m comparing myself to those heroes who sacrificed their lives there) but they put their necks on the line and they signed their name to the ultimate sacrifice. They were NOT cowards. THEY LOVE FACEBOOK AND THE VOICE IT GIVES THEM!

As usual, I think the true answer lies somewhere in between. We can’t all be like Robert Scoble. Not everyone has his outsized personality, his willingness to put himself out there, his defiance of any potential consequences that could arise from the things he says. That being said, Facebook Comments seem like they’d be a boon to any website that finds itself in a never-ending battle with trolls. As Scoble points out, for a site such as Techcrunch, “the flow has gone down,” but “the quality has gone way up.” Facebook Comments still have a long way to go to compete with more flexible commenting systems like Disqus, but you can’t really argue with a system that makes your website a more pleasant place to be.

Update: Laura June at Engadget has weighed on this debate with a thoughtful piece on the costs of forcing identity disclosure.

[I]f I have to be the Laura June that my step-mother (who was friends with me on Facebook, back when I had an account) knows when I’m commenting on Gawker, well, my behavior will be much different. In fact, I might not comment at all. The problem isn’t that idea: it is of course, absolutely true. The problem is that very few people seem to be questioning whether or not that is, in fact, a good thing. Because… is it? Am I no longer entitled to some separation between who I am when I’m talking about technology rather than when I’m talking about my political beliefs, should I choose to separate those things? Is a teenager no longer entitled to explore and even comment on blogs about, say, homosexuality, without logging in to Facebook to do so? Does everybody need to know everything that I like? Do they even want to?

If I was that exploring teenager, of course, and the whole world had flipped the Facebook switch, I could always just make a fake Facebook account, for sure. But it seems to me that this is a false necessity, where we force people to lie about who they are, rather than merely enabling them to choose not to disclose who they are to begin with.