As this and other circumstances forced me out of my career, I eventually quit my existing job. I founded a media company that is now one of the only independent platforms covering technology, culture and politics – and in doing so, have likely burned my last bridge with employment in the industry.
Now that I was my own boss, I felt free from the omnipresent threat of getting fired for my political speech, and it felt amazing. I started doing even more of that exact thing that women around here aren’t supposed to do: Get angry. Fight back. Speak my truth. Set boundaries. Take up digital space.
Be “visible.”
I am now one of the most hated people in the tech industry.
And rather than being an asset, visibility is itself a weapon against me.
I feel like to be effective with the reader you need to surprise them with the formalism. You need to give them what they’re expecting and then gently introduce something that’s different, and then you can gradually blow their mind, (laughs) instead of just tossing a bunch of mysterious lines at the reader or whatever. I’ll always give the artist the benefit of the doubt that there’s probably something smart going on, but if I don’t know what’s going on, then, for me, it’s not successful, it’s not inspiring. But I don’t think it was right to call that “empty.” I am interested in a lot of formalist work. I could easily see myself making even weirder, unreadable comics, and I guess I’ve dabbled in that, but I’m really afraid of going too far down that road. I’m sure we would both get lost. For some cartoonists that’s what they want to do and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Also, once I finally understand what they’re actually doing I’m usually like, “oh this is pretty brilliant.”
Yes, that’s right: one of the characters from Detroit is called Chevy. Another is called “Baseball,” because—well, I don’t know. It’s American? Or he’d watched The Wire and noticed that one of the characters was called Bubbles and thought maybe it was something similar? It’s not important, because Mark Millar is telling you how bad things are in the city, y’all. Like, he’s literally telling you, with characters offering laughably heavy exposition that not only doesn’t read like anything any real person would ever say, but of course makes the characters sound like every other character Mark Millar has written regardless of culture, location or any other factor that could possibly differentiate them.
Cheap Superhero Adventures In Other People’s Misery: Mark Millar’s MPH | Wait, What?
@graemem reviews Millar’s MPH. Go read the whole thing.
(via bigredrobot)
Dylan manages to link to my MPH review before I do, because I suck and he doesn’t.
Exorcists now have an extra weapon in their fight against evil – the official backing of the Catholic church. The Vatican has formally recognised the International Association of Exorcists, a group of 250 priests in 30 countries who liberate the faithful from demons.
The main way it’s different from This American Life is that instead of bringing you a different theme each week, every episode of Serial will bring you back not just to the same theme but to the same story, to bring you the next chapter. We’re starting with a crime story, that’ll run for about a dozen episodes. Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures. Like House of Cards, but you can enjoy it while you’re driving.
Today’s Distraction: Age and the Modern TV Network Drama | The World That’s Coming
Today’s Distraction: Age and the Modern TV Network Drama | The World That’s Coming
Prompted by these tweets of the redoubtable (Always Toxic) Laura Hudson’s, and the conversation that followed–really, the fact that deadlines meant that I had to drop out of said conversation–I found myself looking into whether or not TV dramas were skewed towards female leads under 30. The answer, as they say, may surprise you. Or, at least, it surprised me.
BECAUSE MY FUCKING CURIOSITY DEMANDED IT. Seriously, I really did have other things to do but this wouldn’t stop nagging.
I actually don’t remember the day I started this blog—it was June or July somethingth 2004- so I’ve arbitrarily decided today will henceforth be The Beat’s anniversary. Ten long years of late nights, sleeping five hours, web crashes, Vietnamese Instant Coffee, Amon Tobin, Luke Vibert, Vitalic, Tipsy, Mahler, Stravinsky and Amy Winehouse. Ten years of stopping whatever else I was doing at some point to say “I gotta do The Beat now.” Ten years of watching the graphic novel industry grow, 10 years of a new golden age of comics, the rise and fall of manga, the rise and rise of comic book movies and TV shows, firings, hirings, 10 days that shook the world. Ten years of the internet changing every week or minute. When I began there was no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Youtube, no smart phones. People were so starved for entertainment that they actually read websites run by one person in their pajamas.
Today’s Distraction: Age and the Modern TV Network Drama
Prompted by these tweets of the redoubtable (Always Toxic) Laura Hudson’s, and the conversation that followed–really, the fact that deadlines meant that I had to drop out of said conversation–I found myself looking into whether or not TV dramas were skewed towards female leads under 30. The answer, as they say, may surprise you. Or, at least, it surprised me.
I took all the U.S. network dramas from the fall 2014 season–purely because it was closer to hand–and looked up the ages of the female leads in each show. There’re some guesses as to who the female lead will be in some shows–I chose Jada Pinkett Smith for Gotham because her signing was the biggest news, but I’m uncertain whether she’s going to stay on the show past a year, for example–but my guide was generally “which female actor has the biggest role and/or serves as audience POV?” (Hence my choice of Jennifer Morrison for Once Upon a Time, for example). Also, shows that specifically center around the female lead (As opposed to, say, “He’s the hero, she’s the love interest” or whatever) are in bold; in cases where it’s an ensemble or two-hander where the female lead(s) have equal weight to male stars, it’s in italic.
Anyway, the results are below:
ABC
Castle (Female lead: 36)
Agents of SHIELD (Female lead: 50)
Forever (Female lead: 38)
Nashville (Female lead: 47)
Grey’s Anatomy (Female lead: 44)
Scandal (Female lead: 37)
How to Get Away with Murder (Female lead: 48)
Once Upon A Time (Female lead: 35)
Resurrection (Female lead: 62)
Revenge (Female lead: 28)
CBS
NCIS: Los Angeles (Female lead: 30)
NCIS: New Orleans (Female lead: 40)
Person of Interest (Female lead: 43)
Criminal Minds (Female lead: 35)
Stalker (Female lead: 35)
Elementary (Female lead: 45)
Hawaii Five-O (Female lead: 40)
Blue Bloods (Female lead: 44)
Madam Secretary (Female lead: 48)
The Good Wife (Female lead: 48)
CSI: Cyber (Female lead: 46)
FOX
Gotham (Female lead: 42, if it’s Jada Pinkett Smith, which–it probably)
Sleepy Hollow (Female lead: 29)
Red Band Society (Female lead: 44)
Bones (Female lead: 37)
Gracepoint (Female lead: 45)
NBC
The Blacklist (Female lead: 31)
State of Affairs (Female lead: 35)
Chicago Fire (Female lead: 32)
The Mysteries of Laura (Female lead: 45)
Law & Order: SVU (Female lead: 50)
Chicago PD (Female lead: 31)
Parenthood (Female lead: 47)
Constantine (Female lead: 27)
What surprised me about the outcome was that I genuinely thought there would be more leads 35 and under — instead, we have 19 (maybe 18, depending on Gotham) shows out of 34 where the female lead is over 40. Of course, now I have to do it for male leads and cable shows, but seriously: deadlines are calling loudly enough already.
Edited to add: I completely forgot the CW, but let’s be honest: They’re all 12 on there anyway.
Truth Goggles is by no means the only annotation tool out there. There is Scrible, MarkUp.io (which says it will be relaunching), and a plethora of tools to help web designers, educators and others markup websites with notes and feedback. There’s also efforts like Hypothes.is, which aims to create a fact-based annotation layer for the web. Earlier this month, it received a grant of just over $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to “investigate the use of annotation in humanities and social science scholarship over a two year period.”
Schultz said his project is different in that it enables content creators like journalists to embed their own annotations on their work for all to see, and because it’s oriented to creating public annotations that are “about getting people to ask better questions and be more critical.”