“Ominously… happiness studies have been diverted into an applied science. The happiness measurers very much want to direct us and are itching to engineer a happy society. They do not know what they are talking about, but are very willing to put “policies” about it into practice anyway.”
Tag: 06.08.12
What American Book Publishing Was Like Only 80 Years Ago
“In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels. In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores … [and] most were refined, old-fashioned ‘carriage trade’ stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities.”
Copyright Case Against South Park Parody Video Thrown Out Of Court
“A federal appeals court affirmed Thursday that a 2008 South Park parody of a real-world video – ‘What What (In the Butt)’ – did not infringe on the YouTube video of the same name … [The] the outcome affirms the right that you can get an infringement case thrown out of court – via a fair-use defense – without having to go through an expensive trial.”
James Corden Of One Man, Two Guv’nors On His Aptitude For Pratfalls
“I don’t think it’s about aptitude, it’s about wanting to get the biggest laugh. You get that if you go as big as you can. At one point in the show, I slap myself in the face. The harder I slap myself, the bigger the laugh I get. So it’s not an ability, it’s a desire for the reaction.”
Walk-in Movies Down At The Caves On Friday Nights In Prehistoric Times
The caves in Lascaux aren’t just great art – they’re great film, as seen by paleolithic stone disks and flickering torchlight.
When Publishers Know Everything About You
“Imagine a scenario where a publisher is able to cross-reference a reader’s profile on their news site with information gathered through social media profiles and other online behaviors. The product, still in private beta, triangulates all the signals we leave around the Internet to try to create a unified picture. You can see how this would be useful to a news outlet that wants to better tailor its content for readers or simply needs better ammunition to raise their CPMs. (And you can see how it might raise the hackles of privacy advocates.)”
What Kind Of Muppet Are You? (It Matters)
The Muppet Theory is “a little-known, poorly understood philosophy that holds that every living human can be classified according to one simple metric: Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet.”
Big Video Streamers Maneuver For Position In Online Wars
“The internet is now in its very own age of video, and there’s simply so much traffic moving on the network that websites are striking deals with the ISPs themselves and installing their own gear in nondescript buildings all over the world.”
Movies As Comfort Food (Are Fans Becoming Less Open To The Unfamiliar?)
“It’s impossible to ignore the indications that, more than anything else, moviegoers build their viewing not around a sense of discovery, but the comfort of seeing what they’ve already decided they’re going to enjoy.”
Margaret Atwood Remembers Ray Bradbury
The term “science fiction” made him nervous: he did not want to be shut up in a box. And he, in his turn, made “science fiction” purists nervous, as well he might.