Google Ebooks won’t make people read more. Shut up. You know it’s true
Trust me, Google won't make you hate it any less.
Actually, I do read a lot. I’m making myself finish The Prestige this week (It is really good), and I finished The Winter of Our Discontent two weeks ago (It is really, really good). I also teach a lit class part time (My students hate the deep insides of my guts). So, when I hear about technology making reading “fun again”, I don’t have the super, happy reaction you would think. I’ll explain in a minute. First, Google is dipping its toes into the eBook market, because Google has many toes, and it is also a pervert. From the New York Times:
Google’s move is likely to be welcomed by publishers who have expressed concerns about Amazon’s aggressive pricing strategy for e-books. Amazon offers Kindle editions of most new best sellers for $9.99, far less than the typical $26 at which publishers sell new hardcovers. In early discussions, Google has said it will allow publishers to set consumer prices. “Clearly, any major company coming into the e-book space, providing that we are happy with the pricing structure, the selling price and the security of the technology, will be a welcome addition,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, which publishes blockbuster authors like James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks.
I’ve discussed this before, but making books electronic isn’t going to make people read more. It just won’t. There are millions of books in the world. All you have to do is go to a library or a book store and go get them. You can even get books mailed to you online. You can get these books for less then five books, and that includes shipping. Having books put into a PDF file and pumped into a handheld won’t make you smarter. It won’t make you any more inclined to read Atlas Shrugged. Technology won’t save us, no matter how many times we say the contrary. A Google e-Reader thingy won’t make you any more literate. You’ll download a few books, get three pages deep, realize that you hate reading, and then you’ll toss the e-Reader thingy on the coach and flip until you get to House re-runs. Shut up. You know I’m right.
The Walking Monster of Climate Change kills 300,000 each year.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," will be all over our tombstones.
Uh Oh. From CNN:
More than 300 million people are already seriously affected by the gradual warming of the earth and that number is set to double by 2030, the report from the Global Humanitarian Forum warns. “Climate change is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time, causing suffering to hundreds of millions of people worldwide,” said the forum’s president, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Of the 300,000 lives being lost each year due to climate change, the report finds nine out of 10 are related to “gradual environmental degradation,” and that deaths caused by climate-related malnutrition, diarrhea and malaria outnumber direct fatalaties from weather-related disasters.
There is much, much more, but it is early and I don’t want to scare you too much. This is how it works. We won’t see the immediate effects of climate change. It won’t be like we’ll have a “Climate Change” monster walking around, toppling buildings and spitting out acid rain. It will be slow, gradual increases in the number of people dying each year in third world countries. That’s the major problem. Americans won’t have to feel the effects until it is too late, until it is unfixable and unavoidable. Its not too late yet! Stop using plastic bags! Recycle that orange juice carton! Vitamins! Take your damn vitamins!
The All New 10 PM Podcast: An Afternoon with DJ Datz
Where Dreams are made...
Welcome to the all new, somewhat but not really improved 10 PM Podcast. No, I have no reason at all to call it the 10 PM podcast besides the fact that this is the internet, and you can do whatever the hell you want to. This week, I got the chance to skype up with DJ Datz of 360Sync fame. What do two guys who play a lot of video games talk about? Yep, you guessed it. Gay rights. But we talk about video games too. We also discuss our predictions for E3, which DJ Datz is very lucky to be going to. And we do it all for you, dear listener. It is our way of giving back to the people that give us so much. It is also our way of wasting time instead of doing real work. But whatever. Listen and enjoy.
Intro and Outro music by Pempi
Put that junk on your iTunes, son!
Check out the podcast page, kid!
Hey, this is DJ Datz’s Twitter page and this is the 360Sync page!
Saying Goodbye to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
It was a good show.
And the worst part about it is that there is a whole population of people that will never, ever see it. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled. It is gone, and won’t be coming back. Just like Firefly, a great television show has been taken off the air because not enough people watched it. Good television doesn’t have the luxuries that movies and books have. A book or a movie can find an audience years later. A television show rarely is allowed to become fleshed out, to breath, before executives with dollar signs begin to touch and pull on it or just destroy it completely. The sci-fi site i09 has done a wonderful job covering the lose of a brilliant television series. Here is a piece from a rant by Charlie Jane Anders.
These were real, complicated, messed up people, making mistakes but also being brave and generous, in the face of the probably inevitable end of the world. You couldn’t help but root for them.
And here are some last words from producer Josh Friedman.
I prefer to watch characters try and fail and try again and sort of succeed a little and maybe fuck up again. That’s what I want to see. Flawed people trying to figure their shit out. Because that’s me. We’re not perfect parents or lovers or friends. We’re not heroes. But we can do heroic things once in a while, sometimes even on purpose. So TSCC is a sloppy mix of hope and despair and that suits some people just fine and others don’t have a taste for it. I’ve made peace with that…But my show got canceled. So what do I know.
Godspeed, TSCC.
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The Missing Link is Found and, yes, no one cares.
"What? Can't a guy walk to the store? Damn!"
Some of you don’t believe in Evolution. It’s OK. I totally respect that. I actually prefer the idea of creation due to absolute Will as opposed to growing like a tumor and relaying on mutations to get us on our way. But wait! Look! They’ve found it! They’ve found it! What? You haven’t heard? They found the missing link! THE MISSING LINK!
An incredible 95 percent complete fossil of a 47-million-year-old human ancestor dubbed Ida has been discovered and, after two years of secret study, an international team of scientists has revealed it to the world. The fossil’s remarkable state of preservation allows an unprecedented glimpse into early human evolution. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, it represents the moment before anthropoid primates–the group that would later evolve into humans, apes and monkeys–began to split from lemurs and other prosimian primates. This groundbreaking discovery fills in a critical gap in human and primate evolution.
It looks a lot like a damn cat to me. Is that what the fuss is about? I’ve seen possums I’ve ran over that were more impressive. Other things that you won’t care about when they happen: UFO Landings, Politicians telling the truth and Twilight fans admitting that the movie was horrible and the book wasn’t much better. Oh snap!
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News Rodeo: Obama vs. Some Old Fart, Epic Fail for Terminator, and Remembering Memorial Day
Dick Cheney WISHES he was this cool!
Welcome to another week of News Rodeo. Yes, thank you. Please, sit down. No applause, please. First up, the stupid and retarded fabricated duel between Former Vice-President and current Ass-hat Dick Cheney and current leader of the free planet President Obama. The reason this is going on is because we didn’t toss Dick Cheney’s butt in jail when we should have. The idea that we can’t shut this guy up proves that Americans have jelly spines and marshmallow balls. But Jack Cafferty says it much better.
It doesn’t go away by itself. Watergate “went away” when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace and left town never to be heard from in an official capacity again. The Bush presidency is thankfully over…but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won’t go away.
The question that keeps coming up: Do terrorists have rights? If you are an enemy of America, do you have the right to have rights? Or can we just toss you in a hole and put water up your nose when we want to know something? Terrorists aren’t cool. I’m not saying they are. But when you start acting like your enemies, it is hard to remember where you were before. It is easy to say things until you experience them. Just ask Mancow Muller, who allowed himself to be waterboarded to see what the fuss was about:
He would undergo the procedure himself, and then he would be able to confidently convince others that it is not, in fact, torture. Or so he thought. Instead, Muller came out convinced. “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow said. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back… It was instantaneous… and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”
On a lighter note, it looks like Terminator Salvation sucks:
I went into Terminator Salvation with high hopes: I’d bought into McG’s grand statements about his film’s ambitious themes of what it meant to be human. I was pumped for a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, and a gritty war movie. I liked the ashen deathscape he’d managed to create out of a stretch of New Mexico, and the fact that he was using practical effects and real killer machines as much as possible. I actually thought it might give Star Trek a run for its money. And because I went into it with high hopes, I wound up being more disappointed than I was, say, by Wolverine or Dragonball.
How can this movie be bad? How? First the series gets canceled. Then the movie is bad? It is beyond embarrassing, and it sort of makes me want to go to bed early and hide.
Finally, Monday is Memorial Day. My Grandfather served in the Navy. I was too young to ask him what he did, or how he did it. But I know he received a Purple Heart. And I know he was the greatest man that I ever knew. Yes, the military is misused sometimes and we don’t treat them like we should when they come home. But these men give their lives for us, regularly. It is too simple to say that we owe them. We can’t give enough back to them. When you BBQ your hotdogs and sleep in tomorrow, let us all remember that. Have a good week.
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Life After the MFA: Why Your Students Should Care
I teach English part-time at a community college. You guys know that. It is an amazing learning experience, figuring out ways to teach people something that I enjoy. Do I enjoy grammar? Literary theory? All that? Yeah, sometimes I do. What I really enjoy is reading a story, figuring out what we can learn from it, and explaining that to people and showing them how to understand what they read. I also like explaining to people how to write something clearly, so that other people understand what they are trying to say. Your opinion matters. How you convey your opinion to other people will make it matter to them. So it is interesting to me when I teach students that do not care, at all, about any of that.
It happened twice. I was reading a student’s essay when I noticed that the essay was…good. I don’t mean, “good” as in sticking with the Five Paragraph essay style or “good” as in smart paragraph organization. I mean it was using words that I didn’t know. That isn’t a giant feat. My vocabulary is thin, I’ll admit. But if I have to grab the dictionary four times in three minutes, something isn’t right. So, yeah, I googled the first sentence of the second paragraph. Hey, kids. Did you know we could do that? Ten seconds later, I was looking at the exact essay that the student had turned into me. A few words had been changed, but it was almost identical. (more…)
Will “Inglorious Bastards” be any good?
I am not the biggest fan of Mr. Tarantino. I actually was using the bathroom the other day and I thought, “You know, Pulp Fiction was a pretty bad movie.” I know, you probably choked on your Latte when you read that. But, think about it. In the movie, you had an emotional reaction about things that give you emotional reactions. Drug Overdoses, violence, anal rape. All those things will cause you to react, and they are hard to forget. Is that talented directing, or just talented awareness of what makes humans uncomfortable? Is there a difference? Does it matter? Anyway, there is some positive, early buzz for Tarantino’s newest flick, Inglourous Bastards.
I saw it today and loved it. The movie contains the kind of spectacularly creative and entertaining dialogue Tarantino is known for. In fact, it begins with a very long dialogue scene which may make some viewers restless because of its length. But if you’re someone who savors Tarantino’s writing, it’s great. The film is less violent than many of Tarantino’s efforts, or maybe it’s that the violence doesn’t seem as gratuitous in the context of a war movie.
I think about what makesa good narrative. I think that it is the learning of human nature, and not in an obvious way. Tarantino has always given us lots of “Stuff”, swords, motocycles, guns and the like. Will this be different? Can Tarantino grow up? We’ll see.
Netflixing: Battlestar Galactica Season 1
Battlestar Galactica is one of those television shows that you hear about and avoid. At least I did. Huh? An epic sci-fi series with tons of characters, ties to an older series and with high themes and over-reaching explanations about human nature? Nah, I’ll pass. Thankfully, I’ve reviewed how stupid I have been and have begun the long, long effort of watching the entire series from beginning to end. Last night, I finished the first season, and I’m beyond impressed. But, of course, not everything is perfect, and I’m very curious about how the story lines play out. Warning, there are a few spoilers. Don’t read if you don’t want stuff ruined.
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New Auto-Tune the News for your viewing pleasure…
Not as funny as the last one, but still way funnier than watching the real news, which isn’t funny at all.
Jarvis Slacks
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