Music magazine New Musical Express has suffered another slump in its print sales, falling more than a quarter to fewer than 15,000 in the first half of this year.
The 62-year-old IPC Media title had an average weekly sale of 14,312 in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Thursday, down 28.5% on the same period in 2013. Including digital sales, its circulation rose to 15,830… In its print heyday, the magazine sold more than 300,000.
If the NME stops existing as a print entity, I’ll be more than a little sad. That was a weird influence on me in terms of writing, even if it’s not immediately obvious.
(From here.)
This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now — seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.
But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.
Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?
Would we even have a chance to see her?
This isn’t about Facebook per se—maybe it will do a good job, maybe not—but the fact that algorithmic filtering, as a layer, controls what you see on the Internet. Net neutrality (or lack thereof) will be yet another layer determining this. This will come on top of existing inequalities in attention, coverage and control.
What the HELL guys? What in the actual hell? Gamora kicks five people in THE ENTIRE MOVIE. We get four pieces of exposition about how she is a living weapon trained to be the ultimate assassin and that is almost as many people as she actually kicks. As much time is spent telling us that Gamora is dead serious as she actually spends being dead serious! What is that? Black Widow kicks more guys in Iron Man II, and that wasn’t even her movie! That scene wasn’t even a necessary scene! They added in an extra scene that was nothing but Black Widow kicking guys, just to make sure that she got to kick a lot of guys!
What does Gamora ACTUALLY do? Well, she gets taken hostage twice (both times by a couple of guys with knives, come on, are you fucking kidding me? GUYS with KNIVES are holding Thanos’ legendary invincible space assassin hostage?), she gets rescued by Star-Lord twice. She has a bunch of feelings. She fights the Evil Girl. (When there are two female characters in a movie, and one is evil, the Good Girl and the Evil Girl have to fight each other, that is the rule.) At the end of the movie she wears a sexy space mini-dress and tells Star-Lord how great he is.
She doesn’t even get a CHAIR. She has to STAND next to Star-Lord so she can tell him he’s great. Rocket Raccoon gets a chair and HE IS A RACCOON. He could sit on Drax’s head! Drax gets a chair, and what idiot even decided to let that violent space maniac into the cockpit in the first place?
I had this really rambly post in my head about how I’ve been seeing a looooooot of appreciation for Marvel’s supposedly great feminist strides but next to nothing in Guardians actually backs that up – Gamora gets some lip service, but nothing to do; Nova Prime just stands around looking concerned; girl fight! whore! – but then I came across this post, which already said it all, and better.
We’re eating this shit up with a spoon and calling it ice cream.
(via tinyampersand)
I’ve already complained about the weird way in which Marvel Studios’ movies are held up as somehow being feminist statements while not, you know, actually treating its female characters very well. I’m glad to see more people get upset about how shitty Guardians actually is when it comes to gender politics.
I don’t care if Mike Brown was going to college soon. This should not matter. We should not have to prove Mike Brown was worthy of living. We should not have to account for the ways in which he is suitably respectable. We should not have to prove that his body did not deserve to be riddled with bullets. His community should not have to silence their anger so they won’t be accused of rioting, so they won’t become targets too.
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon will announce that St. Louis County law enforcement will be relieved of duty in Ferguson, which has been roiled by protests after the shooting death by police of an unarmed teenager, according to Representative William Lacy Clay.
“The governor just called me and he’s on his way to St. Louis now to announce he’s taking away St. Louis County police out of the situation,” Clay, a Missouri Democrat, said in a telephone interview. He added that Nixon may ask the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to step in.
“There are First Amendment protections for people photographing and recording in public,” Mickey Osterreicher, an attorney with the National Press Photographers Association, told The Huffington Post. According to Osterreicher, as long as you don’t get in their way, it’s perfectly legal to take photos and videos of police officers everywhere in the United States.
This misconception is pervasive enough that the New York City Police Department circulated a memo last week reminding officers.
“Members of the public are legally allowed to record police interactions,” the memo states, according to the Daily News. “Intentional interference such as blocking or obstructing cameras or ordering the person to cease constitutes censorship and also violates the First Amendment.”
It’s Perfectly Legal To Film The Cops (via omgstopembarrassingyourself)
“misconception”
(via nickminichino)
Top 5 Marvel UK things (because I know very little about it!)
I never read much! The original stuff I mean – Deaths Head, Knights of Pendragon, etc. I had access to US imports, and I had 2000AD, and the Marvel UK stuff just seemed… obviously lame, in that instant-judgement teenage sense. They were on different paper, they LOOKED wrong, they were the Cliff to Marvel US’ Elvis. And then I was a smidgen too young for the earlier wave of Marvel UK stuff with Night Raven and Captain Britain.
So my Marvel UK was primarily a reprint house. So this top 5 is a mix of things that originated there and things that I first read through the reprints there.
1. Secret Wars: stretched out over 30 or so fortnightly issues. Introduced me to every Marvel character basically. Amazing. Terrible. Amazing.
2. “THE BLACK ZOID” early super derivative Wagnerian toy fight epic by Grant Morrison. The only original material here.
3. John Byrne FF vs Psycho Man and Hate Monger: after Secret Wars they reprinted Secret Wars II, which necessitated reprinting not only the mini but the crossovers and EVERY surrounding issue that resolved subplots raised in said crossovers. Ridiculous. But it meant we got all of John Byrne’s fevered, kinda queasy with hindsight but uh ‘resonant’ bondage epic ft dominatrix Sue Storm. (It’s the enslaved She Hulk sequences I think would read unpleasantly now tho)
4. Strikeforce: Morituri – Peter Gillis’ fantastic doomed kid super-soldiers series, no idea why they reprinted it.
5. Iceman – JM DeMatteis’ weirdo Iceman mini in which he confronts (this being JM deM) questions of death and reincarnation. Absurd but memorable clash of hero and storyline, has surely never been mentioned since.
It’s scary how much this mirrors my own Marvel UK experience.
The Iceman mini was reprinted (in a hardcover, because Marvel) a few years back, and it has to be said: half-remembered nostalgia was far kinder to that than revisiting the actual thing.