The Rumpus has published Charlie Kaufman’s introduction to the shooting script of his film, Synecdoche, New York. It’s everything you’d expect a piece of Kaufman writing to be: amusing, neurotic, brilliant, and thought-provoking:

Maybe it’s easier to see people as peripheral. Maybe that’s why we do it. It’s a weird and daunting experience to let other people in their fullness into our minds. It is so much easier to see them as serving a purpose in our own lives. In any event, this somehow seems to lead me to some of the things explored in the screenplay that you, imaginary person, are holding in your hands right now. And the relentlessly experienced life of yours that has brought you to this book at this time will now perhaps interact with the relentlessly experienced life of mine as it is represented by this script. I hope we recognize each other.

Alright, so I spoke too soon.

The other week, I posted my favorite longreads of 2010. Since then, however, I’ve been introduced to variety of websites that have had even more awesome long reads (not to mention I’ve also had time to go through my own archive of Instapaper articles). With the year winding up, I’ve been able to blast through a bunch of them and present to you seven more reads that I think are worth your time:

7) The real-life Swedish murder that inspired Stieg Larsson – A gripping tale of a murdered, mutilated body, and an investigation that ripped apart reputations and captivated the Swedish media. A real-life murder mystery.

6) Sledgehammer and Whore – A hilarious story about an unexpected hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold from the twisted mind of a TV writer.

5) Letting Go – Up there on the list of “articles that changed my life and the way I think about things,” this piece by Atul Gawande delves into some systematic problems with the way end-of-life care is discussed in our country from the perspectives of both patients and doctors. See if the following blows your mind:

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.

This is a must-read for anyone that thinks end-of-life decisions may one day be relevant to them. Which is basically all of us. Be sure to check out the accompanying Fresh Air interview as well.

4) Tie: Art of the Steal and The Ballad of Colton-Harris Moore – These pieces have a great deal in common: they are both about misunderstood individuals who happen to be geniuses at stealing and eluding the authorities. They’re also thrilling to read, and interesting character studies. I recommend checking them both out before the inevitable film adaptations are announced.

3) Who Killed Ayana Stanley-Jones? – An earnest examination of the tragic circumstances that led to the death of young Aiyana Stanley-Jones. Written by Detroit native Charlie LeDuff, this piece delves into the abject poverty of Detroit with brutal honesty.

2) The Theory of Relatability and Rethinking Justin Long’s Face – An excellent meditation on online film criticism by Michelle Orange. Orange writes about the pursuit of excellent in film and film criticism, and thoughtfully deconstructs what we are to think and feel in an age when our written words can echo all the way across the internet and reach the very ears we are insulting. On the film Going the Distance, and its “relatability,” Orange writes:

Blame Oprah if you want to, but relatability has been fermenting as both a cultural phenomenon and evaluative rubric since the 1970s, when a combination of factors moved the social concept of the self to the front of the culture. The mainstreaming of therapy and therapized language, the platonic “we’re all the same” rhetoric of the civil rights and equality movements, the merging of high and low culture, and rampant individualism conspired to form a kind of cultural currency, a new dialect that had the ear of the country…The most dangerous thing about relatability is the way it is often presented (and accepted) as a reasonable facsimile of or substitute for truth. This, I worry, may handicap our culture so violently that recovery, if it comes at all, will be generations in the reckoning; if in the meantime we lose our appetite for the real thing we are pretty much doomed. The pursuit of truth is a basic human instinct, and guides our engagement with ourselves, with art, and with other human beings; the scourge of relatability—and its sweetheart deal with another basic instinct, adaptation—puts all three relationships at risk.

1) Unauthorized, But Not Untrue – Kitty Kelly explains why “unauthorized” is not a dirty word when it comes to biographies. A breathtaking look back at a prolific career (although a touch on the self-congratulatory side).

So Gawker media was hacked this weekend, and the result is a pretty huge clusterf*ck for the site and many of its users, whose passwords and account info has been splayed out for all the internet to see.

The WSJ has an entertaining article about the top 50 Gawker media passwords. Check out their article for some fun analysis, but in the meantime, here are the top 50 most popular passwords for Gawker media commenters (in descending order of popularity):

1. 123456
2. password
3. 12345678
4. lifehack
5. qwerty
6. abc123
7. 111111
8. monkey
9. consumer
10. 12345
11. 0
12. letmein
13. trustno1
14. dragon
15. 1234567
16. baseball
17. superman
18. iloveyou
19. gizmodo
20. sunshine
21. 1234
22. princess
23. starwars
24. whatever
25. shadow
26. cheese
27. 123123
28. nintendo
29. football
30. computer
31. fuckyou
32. 654321
33. blahblah
34. passw0rd
35. master
36. soccer
37. michael
38. 666666
39. jennifer
40. gawker
41. Password
42. jordan
43. pokemon
44. michelle
45. killer
46. pepper
47. welcome
48. batman
49. kotaku
50. internet

Note that of the 180,000+ passwords exposed, over 3,000 of them used “123456” as their password, almost 2,000 used “password,” and over 1,000 used “12345678.” The lesson here, of course, is choose stronger passwords. And it goes without saying, but if your password for ANYTHING is the same as one of the words/phrases listed above, change it now!

Or, to quote Jeff Green, a “fucking disgrace”:

You can bet your ass that most of the behind-the scenes “editorial” work that goes into the making of this show is the wheeling-and-dealing with the EAs and Ubisofts and Bethesdas and the like to get those exclusive trailers on the show. And the game publishers, still dazzled like the little children they are in the bigger universe of the entertainment industry, get seduced by the idea of being on TV, of the “glamor” and “prestige” of it all…And by running announcements like Bethesda’s new Elder Scrolls game (and, yep, I’m as excited as you guys are for it), they give themselves the veneer of importance simply be serving as the vehicle for a commercial. The publishers get their free ads, the awards show gets its exclusives: Everybody wins! Everybody, that is, except for the poor gamer, who may have naively turned on the show expecting to see something with a modicum of respect and sincerity for the industry it was supposedly saluting. I watched this show by myself and was still embarrassed, and was monitoring the remote control in case my wife or kid came down and saw me watching. And, yeah, I know exactly what that sounds like.

My screening for TRON Legacy is tonight, but a bunch of reviews have already hit the internet. The consensus is that it’s visually thrilling and emotionally empty. Very few reviews enjoyed it on a level deeper than that. Here are a few reviews that I enjoyed reading.

Katey Rich at Cinemablend says the movie is a sad metaphor for the phenomenon it’s describing:

In making his visually spectacular but emotionally bereft film about people trying to escape the digitized world they’ve created, first-time director Joseph Kosinski has somehow made a movie that’s a metaphor for itself, and full of handy advice for audience members who may be anxious to get out this glitzy, oppressive universe after just two hours inside. Cribbing its plot liberally, and incoherently, from sci-fi adventures of the past and treating its actors more like computer programs than human beings with independent thought, Tron: Legacy creates a computerized and dark world that’s intended to be terrifying, but falls so in love with its own digital trickery that it becomes the machine it supposedly rails against. It’s a good-looking machine, sure, but one that’s all clicking parts and no beating heart.

Jonathan Crocker from Total Film calls it a mixed bag, saying it’s “a film that awes and bores in frustratingly equal measure. Visually and musically, it’s a triumph. Dramatically, it needs some re-wiring.”

Anne Thompson is doubtful of the film’s long-term prospects, saying:

Even with late-inning tweaks from Pixar writers, the story is silly. And while Bridges, Garret Hedlund as his son, Olivia Wilde as his surrogate daughter, and Grid key players James Frain and Michael Sheen do their best to keep things lively, this movie is almost as inert as the first one (it looks so primitive now). But like the first Tron, which had a huge impact on Hollywood, this sequel (which is rumored to have cost more than $200 million) also pushes the frontiers of what’s possible. The movie delivers enough of a wow factor to pull in viewers. But I doubt that Disney has a super franchise on its hands.

Eric Kohn calls the film a “Spectacle of Nothingness” and has some good videos and accompanying links for his review. A highly recommended read:

I suppose “Tron: Legacy” contains enough of a cream filling to justify the hype, but there’s nothing surrounding the cream. The accusatory tone is a byproduct of its overall flimsiness. It works decently as entertainment for at least an hour or so because it distances viewers from the nonsensical plot. The sci-fi component mostly exists on an abstract level; forget about real science. The characters are enjoyably familiar archetypes and thoroughly acceptable on that purely superficial level. (Pixar’s writers supposedly doctored the screenplay, although it seems as though they gave up after the first act, which features the best scenes and fewest effects.) The quest isn’t nearly as problematic as the increasingly diminishing sense of humor that ultimately gives way to self-importance. “Perfection,” Flynn says at one point, “is unknowable.” Such pop philosophy worked in “The Matrix” precisely because the Wachowskis always lingered on the edge of parody, but in “Legacy,” Flynn unleashes his knowledge with a straight face. It’s impossible to take the movie seriously when everything flashy on the screen functions as a spectacle of nothingness.

 Look for my thought later, either here, at /Film, or on the /Filmcast.

The other day, the Wall Street Journal posted a leak of Verizon’s device sales. This leak was fairly unprecedented, in that it allowed for a very fine-grained analysis of how well Verizon is doing in the mobile space, especially compared to their very similar competitor (in size and reach), AT&T.

Mobile guru Horace Dediu has an interesting portrait of Verizon based on these figures. It’s of a company that’s flailing. Verizon has bet big on Android, hoping that it could be a beachfront in the war against Apple and the iOS. But it hasn’t worked out that way; based on the chart, most Android customers have been former Blackberry users. And while overall growth has occurred, it’s been eclipsed by the growth of the iPhone:

By 2009, Verizon was probably optimistic that they could head off AT&T (and Apple) at the pass. With the vast array of vendor Android roadmaps laid out in front of them they saw a way to stem the flood of defections. I think that optimism dissipated sometime this year and was replaced by a more dreadful prospect than what iPhone presented in 2007. It is perhaps coincidental that the rumors of a Verizon deal with Apple seem to have started in earnest right after August. It’s thin, circumstantial evidence, but the only evidence we have to corroborate the data above is that Verizon has been signaling more desperation. Reading further into the data, I would say Verizon faced these problems and decided that they had to throw in the towel. Apple may be the devil, but so could be Google. Apple was predictably evil. But Google? The devil you know is perhaps better than the one you can’t predict.

[For further Verizon-related reading check out Michael Mace’s post on what’s really wrong with Blackberry (via Daring Fireball)]