Feb 26
Kickstarter raising millions for creative projects, prospective donors lining up with their wallets out, does the age of “Crowd Financing” shepard in an exciting new era of film financing? Actually I think there’s some potential troubles there worth talking about. To the shiny new videoblog thing! Read more
Feb 24
I’ve been talking a lot on Twitter about trying to find a new format to talk about issues in film and television and it’s finally time to share this “very-much-still-a-work-in-progress” experiment called Video BlogFox!
Episode Fun Fact ™: Yes, I absolutely shaved and put that shirt on specifically to resemble my cartoon avatar as much as possible.
“Google Fail” posts usually have absolutely nothing to do with what I normally blog about, but are attempts to fill gaps in the mighty collective internet knowledgebase. They are triggered by rare cases where Google has failed me in my search to find some piece of information, or easy instruction on how to do something, and I’ve had to solve the problem myself like in “the olden days” (with hardtack, and liberal application of cholera).
I’ve been using the excellent “Disqus” WordPress plugin for a number of websites, but have been increasingly frustrated that there didn’t appear to be an easy way to modify the shorthand comment count links that appeared in the themes (usually “0 Comments”, “1 Comment”, or “# Comments”). Traditionally in WordPress this would be done through simply modifying the comments_popup_link function in the theme. However because Disqus overwrites this link any customization to this function (like not displaying “0 Comments” at all) were ignored. Read more
I thought this was a big hit?
Hey all – I’ve been working on a bold Blogfox experiment for this month, which I was hoping to roll out this week – but that’s been back-burnered for a few days… so I’ve given myself ten minutes to jot down a couple of things I *have* to get down regarding “ye olde funnybooks” before they become too dated: One is about the value of a “hit” in any media, and the other is how to really look at “profit margins” when comics publishers move into digital distribtuion. Napkin calculations ahoy! Read more
Now that I’ve, hopefully, made a passable argument that dynamic and varied story engines were not a strength of 1980s kids television – let’s look at a different, but related, aspect of those shows (and kind of the underlying point of this whole series of posts) – The Universes they were set in. Read more
I re-read this post on digital comics yesterday (based on Brian Hibb’s post on Digital Comics sales), and I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. For starters how many frustrations I actually had with comics buying compared to pretty much every other recreational aspect of my life. But more importantly, I realized that I have fallen into buying comics in ways that are actively harmful to how I’d like to see the industry as a whole develop. Read more
I got an e-mail from a friend (on his way to a Useage Based Billing consultation) yesterday curious as to what my thoughts were on the whole thing. I haven’t written anything about it at length (other than the odd tweet, mostly because my position generally falls outside both of the established “camps”, and when I have talked about it I generally found the discussion quickly deteriorated to me being asked to defend “the other side” and tenants I didn’t actually agree with.
Actually my biggest problem with the “debate” so far is that the two sides usually distill down to the arguments that “UBB is necessary” vs. “UBB is bad” and given that those aren’t actually mutually exclusive positions it’s frustrating to try and even define what the core issues are.
But in yesterdays exchange, I realized that I do have some thoughts which are a different viewpoint from most of what I’ve been seeing written – so if nothing else it might provide a different angle for people to contextualize their own positions – whatever they may be. Read more
Thankfully I pretty much gave up on any notion of being “cool” a lifetime ago… but this is a big leap even by my standards. Against all odds, there are people out there who want me to write about “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic” (presumably because they want to laugh at me). Before I do however, I need to start somewhere else, and work around to it, because what’s really been turning my crank since Christmas is thinking about Universe Building and (ultimately) how I think a lot of ongoing fantasy series have really messed up the concept of Universe Building in both audience expectation, and also creator intent. But since Universe Building is such a meta concept, I need to craft a bit of a “grand unified kitchen sink” theory requiring all sorts of odd bits and pieces, so there’ll be a lot of ranting about seemingly non-related things for a bit, capice? I actually considered doing this as a video blog as I’m stronger at lecturing on this type of material rather than trying to write it, but I’m not sure I’m man enough to be confident I can pull off a YouTube video extolling the virtues of “Twilight Sparkle” and “Rainbow Dash”. So – bear with me for the next few days as we see where this crazy rabbit hole leads. First stop: The 80s!
Cartoons targeted at girls in the 80s were, for the most part, terrible. I can say this as an authority. I was the only boy on my street until grade school, so I’ve played more than my fair share of Barbie, My Little Pony, and – most of all – Strawberry Shortcake. Suffice it to say if I was going to be eternally stuck playing the Peculiar Purple Pieman (and I was, invariably, always The Peculiar Purple Pieman(1) ) I had to understand “the canon”, as it were. Read more
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