The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.
Our writers are all active on services like Twitter and Facebook, and our official Re/code accounts on social media post our stories all day long. Readers aren’t shy about offering their opinions to us on these and other social media services, and you are likelier to be able to interact with us there.
In effect, we believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years.
Competing on The Voice is notoriously dehumanizing and exploitative experience. A copy of a contract leaked last year that revealed the show tells its contestants they must agree to be portrayed in ways that are “disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing (and) may expose [them] to public ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.”
They also have to agree to allow producers to portray them in a “false light.”
Are some people really so desperate to be “discovered” that they’d sign a contract that demands that of them? Really? (Looks around, realizes the answer is definitely “yes.”)
(Quote above from here.)
Several years ago I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.
There’s no point in us asking for and then celebrating the release of female ongoings if we’re going to sit silently as sales fall and we don’t buy them. I mean, if we can’t make Storm succeed, then why should Marvel announce more?
I’m torn about this (It’s from the CBR message boards), because I get the point the poster is trying to make, but at the same time, I find myself wanting to dismiss the argument and thinking that the answer to “Why should Marvel announce more?” is as simple as “Why shouldn’t they?” Even just the question implies that white male leads are a default setting, which shows a limited/limiting idea of the potential audience out there.
