As those in the want-to-be-filmmaking community may have noticed, Amazon.com recently announced the formation of Amazon Studios, where they believe “21st-century technology creates opportunities to make and share movies and scripts more easily than ever.”

Sounds great, right?

Well, probably not.  For reasons that clearly demonstrate a total lack of understanding of how movies get made, Amazon has decided to use a crowd-sourcing model of artistic creation.  In Amazon’s words:

Any participant at Amazon Studios can revise a script or test movie.  But, as explained above, revisions do not replace each other, they are simply alternate versions.

This, in a nutshell, is exactly why there are so many terrible movies hitting theaters near you.  Studios hire a writer to write a draft of a script.  They producers don’t like it, so they bring in another writer.  This version is also not up to par, so a third writer is brought in for more revisions, etc.  This process goes on until studios literally have to start shooting or they’ll miss their pre-set release date.

Good movies, on the other hand, often go like this: a writer writes a fantastic script.  A talented director shoots it.  No one else is brought in.

This is (obviously) remarkably simplistic, and there are hundreds counter-examples for both those scenarios.  But this idea is not novel or new.  The biggest difference in Amazon’s model is they’re not actually paying anyone to do any of the writing.

No writer worth a damn should bother.  Amazon is treating the creative process like an ant colony.  Individually, ants are practically useless.  They get lost, confused, stuck, or squashed.  But when you pool the collective trial-and-error of hundreds of thousands of individual ants, they often come up with great solutions to problems.

Writing should not be this way.  Could it be?  Maybe.  If you sit thousands of monkeys down at typewriters (as the saying goes), eventually something good might come out.  But you’ll get something good with much greater efficiency if you hire someone good to write it.

Emphasis on hire.

Shame on you, Amazon.  I expected better.

The pay’s not much, but the benefits are great.

When Amy and I finished college, her mother and sister graciously decided to purchase an extremely nice television as a graduation present.

I’ve never had a really nice television.  And since I’m picky about picture quality and intended to keep this TV for a good long while, I wanted to have some say in what we got.  So the four of us went down to Costco to pick one out.

Now, I don’t want to get too technical, but there are a shocking number of television options these days.  LED, LCD, plasma — all work differently and all have pros and cons.

After about an hour of watching Spider Man 2 play on a hundred different televisions, we finally settled on one that was perfect in every way.

Except one.

One of the problems with LCD televisions is their handling of motion.  Specifically: they stutter, because the refresh rate of the pixels isn’t sufficient to handle really fast things flying across the screen.

To compensate for this, all new LCD TVs operate at 120 Hz, which means the screen refreshes 120 times per second.  This isn’t inherently a problem (the more the better, right?), but an issue develops when you take what you’re watching into account.

Film is shot at 24 frames per second (which effectively translates to 24 Hz — not exactly the same thing, but the comparison will do for our purposes).  Video is shot mostly at 30 frames per second.  Televisions are interlaced, which means the even and odd fields refresh alternately, creating effectively a 60 Hz cycle on a TV.  Broadcast TV works on this cycle.

Now, when you change up the frames per second, you have to do a conversion.  If you’re watching a DVD that’s meant to be seen at 60 Hz and you’re watching it at 120 Hz (as we were on this TV we were about to purchase), the technology inside the television effectively creates a frame in between every frame.  It blends two frames to create a new frame in between them.

And this looks like bullshit.  There’s no other way to say it — it makes anything you watch look like a video game.  Everything looks too smooth, too sharp, and decidedly digital.

So I had a very simple question for the Costco employee that was helping us:

“Can you turn it off?”

“Why would you want to do that?” he replied.

“It looks bad.  Everything looks too clean, it’s too digital.”

“I mean, you can,” he said, “but come here, let me show you what happens when you turn it off.”  He lead me to another TV, fiddled with the settings for a minute, and then took a step back.

Spider Man 2 now looked amazing.  Just like a film print.

“See?” he spat, disgust in his voice unmistakeable, “now it looks like a movie theater.”

And suddenly I felt very, very old.

On Monday, Dr. Frank Ryan drove his car off a cliff in Malibu in a tragic accident that claimed his life.

More tragic, I feel, is that his death is being reported as follows:

“Dr. Frank Ryan Dead: Heidi Montag’s Plastic Surgeon Dies in a Car Crash at Age 50”

Despite everything this man has done for his entire life — despite the adventures he’s had, the people he’s touched, the good he’s done — he will forever be remembered as “Heidi Montag’s plastic surgeon”.

That’s the real tragedy.

America!

I feel pretty safe in saying that most mid-20s middle class Americans do the VAST majority of their reading on the internet.  Physical newspapers and magazines have long been giving way to the immediacy and intimacy of digital things.

And this is changing reading a bit — long blocks of text are no longer the standard.  We now expect our articles and information to be accompanied by images, infographics, and even video media that helps enrich our experience.  Take this article about the most recent Mad Men episode, for example.  (Spoiler alert if you haven’t watched it).

Curmudgeons would probably say something about this generation’s declining appreciation for the written word, but this new style actually reminds me of something else entirely:

A lecture.

Like, the kind we had in college.

Good lecturers (and you know which ones I’m talking about) were able to combine two skills to great effect: a clever, engaging speaking style AND the ability to find and utilize intriguing, memorable visual examples to drive the point home.

Written information now has to follow the same pattern.  And I think this is a good thing, for no other reason than we are now being expected to think like educators, instead of just writers.  Goes back to this whole, “everyone’s now having a perpetual conversation” idea I talk about a lot.

The bar is raised, people.  Reach accordingly.

I would like to share a quote I just found, pulled from People.com.

“In response to Hansen’s Tweet, Stephanie Tweeted, ‘No josh Hansen u were dumped stop acting like a child.  Keep star [expletive] ur (sic) way into Hollywood.  Now pls GO AWAY!!!!!!’”

Now let’s break down all the things I find interesting about the grammar.  (Oh balls, you say.  Now he’s going to spend the rest of the time talking about grammar.)

First of all, the word “tweet” is capitalized, which is something I’ve never seen before.  ”Stephanie Tweeted.”  This is odd.  We don’t capitalize “said” or “wrote,” which are the comparable words for an activity like tweeting before two years ago.  Why did People decide it should be capitalized?  It’s not a proper noun.  We don’t even capitalize “googled,” as in, “I googled a recipe for artichoke dip, but it came out all lumpy.”  

And let’s not forget that the New York Times, the longstanding gold standard of journalism (according to me), decided that “tweet” isn’t a word at all and shouldn’t be used in the paper (outside of ornithological contexts, of course).  People Online apparently disagrees — not only is “Tweet” acceptable English, it’s important enough to be CAPITALIZED!

Second: Twitter is rife with “internet speak,” which is that annoying thing that happened when kids decided AOL Instant Messenger was a casual-enough medium to relax the spelling of most words.  This isn’t new — it was happening when I was 12.  It’s as old as the internet.  But text messages (and now Twitter) actually gave it some practicality — when you’re limited to 140 characters, it occasionally makes sense to type things like “u” instead of “you” or “ur” instead of “your,” or “you’re.”  (Still a pet peeve, but I understand why.  Sometimes).

The interesting thing about this quote was the use of (sic), which is reporter shorthand for “I know this is wrong — it’s not my fault, it’s a direct quote.”  (It’s actually supposed to be [sic] — in brackets, not quotes.  But hey, that’s not their only mistake.)

As you’ll notice in the above quote, (sic) is used precisely once: after “ur,” as in, “keep star fucking ur way into Hollywood.”  I find this incredibly amusing, because having it in there once (and only once) invites a lot of questions.  If I wrote the Stephanie Pratt Twitter Incident article, I would probably have enough faith in my readership that I wouldn’t include the [sic] at all — everyone can identify internet-speak at this point, and the fact we know she’s “Tweeting” it adds to the context.  However, if my editor insisted I include the [sic], the quote should really read:

“No josh [sic] Hansen u [sic] were dumped stop acting like a child.  Keep star [expletive] ur [sic] way into Hollywood.  Now pls [sic] GO AWAY!!!!!!”

I bolded them to make it a little clearer.

However, this article’s author, the venerable Dahvi Shira (according to the byline), only felt the need to include the third of four.  What does that mean?  Does that mean she (he?) doesn’t understand that first names need to be capitalized, that “u” is not actually a word, and that pls is not how you spell please?  

Because that’s the impression I’m getting.  By including one without the others, you are tacitly admitting that the rest are okay.  And that it’s okay to use six exclamation points at the end of a sentence, which is absolutely not true.

What the fuck is going on here?  Do PUBLISHED REPORTERS not know English anymore?  Or do they not know what [sic] means?  

Or does it really just mean that People can no longer officially count as news?  Because I personally find that last one very upsetting.