Posts by Craig Ranapia
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There is just no way you could put Card in front of a Comic-Con audience. They’d eat him alive.
Would be nice if it was true, I have my doubts given the unpleasant spectacle of c inomics and OSC-fans deploying the global supply of handwavium to make OSC’s explicit and long-standing homophobia __go away__… Of course, it’s all a beat up by the politically correct, over-sensitive gay mafia who are suppressing Card’s constitutional freedoms by… well exercising their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. (Also delightful watching some of Card's more *cough* Randian fans getting outraged by folks acting like consumers in a free market by declining to purchase anything with Card's name on the cover. I'm sure Hayeck, Friedman and Saint Ayn are spinning in their graves.)
Sometimes, I’m just ashamed to call myself a geek.
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I was talking to a university class the other day (among other things) about photo adjustment with computers, and how you need to be very careful about what is an acceptable level of manipulation to your audience.
An audience that’s a lot more sophisticated (and cynical, both for better and worse) that it used to be. in another thread, Russell mentioned David Byrne’s How Music Works and it makes a fascinating bookend to Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography). They’re two men who, in their own vastly entertaining and insightful ways, have thought a lot about our ambiguous and complex relationships to technology, art and how it can all obscure as much as it reveals.
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Hard News: Photoshocks, in reply to David Cormack,
I think this talks to a really interesting piece of psychology. I remember during the ‘teapot’ scandal with Banks and Key how the media started publishing stories about the Government – and Key – with really unflattering images of our Prime Minister. Shadowy, looking tired etc.
During the PAS thread on the British general election and it’s aftermath, it was interesting to compare and contrast the photo selections. The right-wing tabloids went for photos of Gordon Brown looking like the dour Scouse dwarf who got kicked off The Hobbit hikoi for being a buzz-kill. (Not exactly a hard get, to be fair.) And when the coalition was signed, the photo editor of The Guardian excelled with a spectacularly icky "candid" shot of David Cameron louring behind a half-open door. (IIRC, it was half the front page of the print edition that day.) I’m sure the whole ‘creepy clown playing hide and seek at a kid’s birthday party’ vibe was totally unintentional.
There’s a fine art to photo editing, and you can do a hell of a lot of editorializing without saying a word.
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Hard News: Photoshocks, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s interesting to speculate how much of the killer-cyborg vibe is context.
A hell of a lot, I'd say. If they'd cropped the bottom of that O.J. Simpson mug-shot, it would have been pretty much indistinguishable from a million pretty anodyne 'candid' photos of Simpson taken over the years. IIRC (and I don't have a key to the paywall to check), the picture of Pistorious was part of a portfolio of Olympians in the glossy New York Times Sunday magazine where he was "inspirational high-tech paralympian sex bomb" not "dude facing murder charges - as well as a lot of rumours that he's a paranoid, abusive control freak."
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Hard News: Media3: Where is Broadcasting?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
FFS, Red, could we acknowledge that some really shitty television slithered into the light of the cathode ray before the 2008 election? Honestly, if I can bring myself to admit the Fifth Labour Government did get things right now and then :), this shouldn't cause undue trauma.
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Blade runner and murder accused Oscar Pistorius made the cover of Time magazine last week, if for all the wrong reasons
And like so such of the Pistorious porn, the most interesting thing is what’s not there: Reeva Steenkamp – not “Pistorious’ girlfriend.” You know, the woman that “superman gunman” shot to death.
This isn't the fucking cover of L’Uomo Vogue and Oscar Pistorious isn't a sociological data point. He’s been charged with murder. Please strike a visual tone that remembers that.
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Hard News: A good soldier dies, in reply to Craig Young,
According to a recent article on Gay Star News, LGBT military suicide appears to be a serious problem in the United States:
Military suicides and service-related mental illness are a serious problem, full stop and period. I throw down some links, but tracking them down would not only be depressing but prone to trigger rage at the next politician who cants about "supporting the troops" while voting to gut already pathetic levels of funding for veteran support.
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Hard News: A good soldier dies, in reply to George Darroch,
… armed forces around the world are set up in ways that deliberately intensify certain social dynamics.
Sure – and they also build in an awful lot of culture shock because this isn’t Sparta, and we’ve had an volunteer military for a long time. I have an American acquaintance who, shall we say politely, had a limited experience of Hispanics and African-Americans until he volunteered to enter a strictly hierarchical community where an awful lot of them were not only his peers but (along with a handful of women) in positions of unquestionable authority? When you’ve been socialized with a great deal of unexamined white male privilege (and homophobia), you don’t just flick it off like a light switch and somebody up the chain of command better be thinking about that. Diversity is wonderful, in theory; it's the practice that's hard.
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Hard News: Media3: Where is Broadcasting?, in reply to Rob Stowell,
The key will be to insist that it’s public service television, it’s allowed to sometimes be boring
No no no… public service television more has to be “boring” than the commercial stuff had to be tasteless-yet-lethal as a slab of raw tofu marinated in anthrax culture. One of the smartest yet most “commercial” television dramas I’ve seen in years was a co-production of not one but two publicly owned state telvision companies working under various local content quotas and fiddly production funding mandates.
Now, if by “boring” you mean “not strenuously trying to be all things to all people until you end up meaning nothing to nobody”, I couldn’t agree more -- and it's a tension all producers struggle with to some degree. But I’m one of those pointy headed elitist types who doesn’t have to go to a board and justify what I’ve commissioned. Please tell me how to square that circle, because bigger brains than mine have been failing for years.
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Hard News: Media3: Where is Broadcasting?, in reply to Myles Thomas,
In response to Craig, it’s unfair to slap down Labour.
Myles: If that's unfair, then it's just as unfair to criticize National for gleefully pressing the kill-switch that was handed to them? N'est–ce pas? I'd also note the establishment of Maori didn't exactly have the "powerful Sky/TVNZ lobby" peeing its pants with glee, but it still happened without MTS being (arguably) hobbled from the start. And it doesn't please me to say that, make no mistake.
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