But instead of sitting down at the table of the Internet and discussing these issues like calm, collected folk, the Internet responded as only the Internet knows how: with pile-ons and death threats.
The people who criticized Whedon publicly — which may or may not have spurred Whedon leaving the Internet — are, themselves, getting death threats. It’s a snake eating its own tail.
People have been writing about the many ways that the treatment of Black Widow has sucked, but that’s all going to get lost now. Instead, everyone’s going to talk about the abuse. And about Whedon, personally, instead of the work. But that’s just playing into the Internet’s many ongoing culture wars, and it’s going to ruin everything.
Marvel Entertainment are not nice people. They like having an avuncular mascot to trot out and reassure people that these entertainment products are made by the same kind of people who hand-crafted the original comics, but that’s a lie. It’s not about people at all. It’s about a company with a seventy-five year track record of scorched-earth business tactics doing everything they can to maximize their leverage on largest scale possible, the kind of scale not even Lee himself could ever have imagined.
You can’t root for Marvel anymore. It’s like rooting for McDonalds. Once upon a time Stan Lee believed himself to be Ray Kroc, but for a while now he’s been Ronald McDonald.
From The Back of My Head
So, I tossed out a half-formed thought about this on Twitter yesterday, but the cancellation of The Mindy Project and subsequent reports that it’ll be picked up by Hulu for two years feel like it’s the third latest installment in some kind of movement for sitcoms based at a particular demographic to be quietly pushed from television to the Internet. (See also Community and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt).
What’s interesting to me is how much of this is self-fulfilling prophecy – are the shows being cancelled (or not even making it to air, in Kimmy Schmidt’s case) because ratings are low as a result of the core audience already watching the episodes online? And if so, does this mean that we’ll see more broadcast TV follow suit outside of sitcoms? Will TV – or, at least, broadcast TV – become the refuge of programming aimed at older audiences, while the Internet becomes the default home for younger-skewing programming?
You discover, later, that you’re not good enough, or not lucky enough, or not present enough, and you made too many important decisions on the fly because you were too busy or too scattered or too tired, and that you’re never going to be that person who writes one of those inspirational blog posts about success. You’re in your 40s and you’re still standing on the shore, keeping a wary eye on the riptide, because you know that all the small things you’ve built could be swept away overnight.
They are credited with reviving rock’n’roll, setting the template for modern pop songwriting, and inviting a generation to turn on, tune in and drop out by embracing psychedelia. But a study questions quite how influential the Beatles were – claiming they were merely following musical trends already set in motion.
Research by a group of London academics focuses on musical patterns in the US pop charts from 1960 to 2010, using data analysis to pinpoint the year in which trends appeared in the charts and measure their duration.
The study’s findings may come as a shock to fans of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, as its authors believe there is no musical evidence to suggest that the “British invasion” of the early 60s caused a revolution in the US charts at all. Rather, the music style those bands displayed – measured by properties such as chord changes and tone – was already established in the US charts before they arrived.
Farage is the new one who looks like Fozzie Bear trying to sneak into Parliament by putting Kermit on his shoulders, poking out the top of a stolen suit.
Clegg – I’ve got a trick for remembering which one he is: I think of which one I can’t remember and that’s him.
Cameron is the one who was born to rule, but they keep having elections instead, which you can see gets right on his wick.
Sturgeon is the one who looks like an auntie who’s come to pick one of the others up.
Miliband reminds me of when I was in Aldi and found this squashy CBeebies thing on the floor that a baby had dropped. Everyone had trod its face to bits, but it still had this big smile, maybe because it knew somebody loved it.