Month: January 2013

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The Vision That Was Planted in My Brain Still Remains Within The Sound of

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Alannah Weston, Creative Director of Selfridges, officially opens the ‘Silence Room’ as part of ‘No Noise’. The Silence Room was first created by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of the store in 1909 at Selfridges on January 10, 2013 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images for Selfridges)

The idea of a “Silence Room” in the center of a massive store is kind of wonderful, and kind of ridiculous at the same time. I love it for that very dichotomy.

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Do You…

It’s the kind of week that’s just full of stuff – entirely work-related – which leaves me forgetting things like, Hey! It’s Wednesday, and I should link to my Time Entertainment essay! It’s all aboutChoose Your Own Adventure making a comeback in pop culture, because that’s the kind of thing that I think about. Go read.

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The conversating/The price is what?

So, I spent part of this weekend trying to catch up with Misfits, inspired and shamed in equal parts by Jeff Lester during a Wait, What recording last week; I made it through five episodes of season three in one sitting, and the opening of season four, before I realized that I’d stopped caring about the show. It’s not that the series had dipped in quality so much between seasons three and four as much as it was that season three had, to all intents and purposes, finished the show altogether. Characters died, arcs were completed, and the thread started in the first episode was pretty much cut quite cleanly.

I started watching the first episode of the fourth season with the strange feeling of “How are they even going to try and convince people that this is viable as a continuing property?” only to discover that – seemingly, they were just going to ignore that altogether and continue as if nothing was any different. It’s odd, when you realize that the only reason you’re going to continue to watch something is through skeptical eyes, waiting to see it wake up and wonder what has gone wrong.

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“There’ s A Powerful Downside to This Level of Output”

This is a lot of work, point blank.  It’s too much work and there’s a powerful downside to this level of output, most importantly being less time with the family and impact on my health.  2013 will likely be just as busy as none of these projects are ending anytime soon.  Most likely as Mara ends I’ll replace that with Anthem.  I have 6 issues left on my contracted Star Wars run but that was always open to be extended and depending on how things go I may re-up that.  I have 7 issues left to go on Conan The Barbarian.  The Massive will continue through 2013, and I’m assuming I’ll keep writing Ult X-Men for the foreseeable future.  ”Not Yet Announced” will be announced soonish.

The goal of this heavy workload was to build a “secondary backlist”, a somewhat panicked but justifiable reaction to my sudden departure from DC and the steady and substantial income I make off the trades of my Vertigo work.  Not knowing what my future was – I was literally ejected from DC with no warning – I overcompensated and needed to get as much work in print and earning money for my babies ASAP.  My next goal is to start to scale that back and settle into a roughly 880-page yearly output, giving me some breathing room and space to do more personal projects.

From here.

I saw this last week and sympathized completely, both from the “I am working too much and that is bad for me” viewpoint but also the “I ended up without this job suddenly and I got scared and said yes to too many things” one. I promised myself that 2013 would be the year I’d work on that, but judging on my workload from this first week, I appear to be doing a really bad job at it.

Onwards, ever onwards.

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The End of A Cycle

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

From here.

This is at least a month old by now, and I’m still unsure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it has a ring of truth, but I also suspect that social media in general will prove to adapt and reinvent itself faster than being given credit for here; if nothing else, someone else will come up with a hacked/revised version of something that already exists to jumpstart the next generation, surely…?

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Pack Up, Don’t Stray

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A boy looks at waves of the Mediterranean sea in Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, Jan. 7, 2013. Wind gusts reached up to 40mph, as waves reached 9 meters high (30 feet). (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

At first glance, I didn’t recognize the waves as waves, if that makes sense; I wondered if the man on the bike was looking at damage on a wall as a result of the winds or something. That instant of confusion immediately won me over to this image.

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Two Days Late, But Also Four Days Early

But what makes Downton Abbey such a guilty pleasure? What is it about watching Lady Mary and Matthew flirt and fight in secret with the sexual tension thick enough that everyone else can barely breathe that we can’t say no to, that makes the sight of Bates sitting there, glowering with moral superiority as the world falls to pieces around him so bizarrely appealing? Since Downton premiered in 2010, there have been attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to try and duplicate the show’s success – The BBC’s dour, Nazi-filled revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, which aired in the US alongside Downton as part of PBS’ Masterpiece series, and the international miniseries Titanic that aired on ABC last April, to name just a couple – but none have quite managed to get it exactly right. What is it about Downton Abbey‘s DNA that makes it quite so hard to clone?

A mostly-removed paragraph from today’s Time Entertainment piece, which proved to be a beast to write, and in a compressed time frame compared to the usual schedule due to the holidays (Traditionally, there’s a full week between pitching and the piece going live, allowing for multiple days writing/researching, then a day of edits and re-writes; this time, there were three days between pitch and the piece going live). You’re welcome, Internet.

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Night Breezes Seem To Whisper

From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Clouds from a nearby bushfire are seen over Mount Wellington during day one of the Hobart International at Domain Tennis Centre on January 4, 2013 in Hobart, Australia. Bushfires are burning across Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria as temperatures soar into the mid to high 40s celsius (110 degrees F) across South Eastern Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)

So beautiful and so dramatic.