FTA: What kind of responsibility are they ducking?
Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective action.
Ok, that's bullshit. First off it is not true: look at the rise of Netroots (in politics, in activism, in terrorism) and all of that sort of action that disproves her very own observation. People are using online communities to get involved (for good or ill). Of course if you narrow your focus down like she does to just Facebook and Myspace (two sites designed for fulltime student aged demographics) *shock* people are just using them for social networking.
Second, her statement has the implication that in the great golden times before Teh Intarnetz that people where autonomous self-actualized ubermensch that got involved all the time with important social issues and where immune to peer pressure. That's pure BS. For all the supposed young folk getting active in the 60's, a good part of them took getting active to mean as a way to pick up chicks. Joni Mitchell talked about how all the talk of free love was just a scam. That's no different than it is now. Your average college kid is thinking of two things on a Thursday night: how to get drunk and how to get laid. That hasn't changed in forty years. And the author ignores the fact that the US population was mostly positive about Vietnam and it took the draft for most Americans to finally have a stake and for the tide to turn against that war. It wasn't due to folks now caving to instant peer pressure. The term Silent Majority was coined in that very era.
This article has all the makings of Media Studies masturbation: it has no social, historical, psychological or political context. It just has posed hypothetical examples and a lot of incestuous jargon. It does not approach it's own biases with skepticism or try to study the issue from an antithetical perspective (e.g. "Maybe social networking has no effect"). Colbert would call this East Coast Ivy League crap. And this is exactly the sort of thing you could break out in a party when trying to siddle up to some young filly. "Girl, we're so alone in this darkness... here, put your head in my lap."
Ok, maybe this isn't something Joe Average does but I have kept a spreadsheet of my music purchases for the last four years. Last year was the first year I ever bought anything online. There where four purchases totalling 50:14 in running time (mostly out of print Detroit electro singles). That was just 1.44% of the 67 albums I bought last year (60:11:46 total run time). This year I'm running way behind that rate (just 29 total purchases with only 29:45:39 total run time. I'm estimated to only buy ~41 albums this year) and only four online purchases but the total runtime is up (1:42:05 for 5.72% of my purchase runtime).
I also keep track of how much money I spent the last two years. Now I calculate how much per actual physical disc I spend a year and measure it against the RIAA 2004 estimate of $12.95 per CD. My number has actually gone up. Last year it was only $11.42 while this year its $13.44. But that doesn't tell you too much. I order a lot of CDs overseas because a lot of stuff is out of print/not distributed in the US and I pay a pretty price for it.
However, if you calculate the dollar per minute I've spent per year over all purchases (electronic and physical) and that number has actually stayed about the same:.2214 $/m last year,.2258 $/m this year. If you estimate that a normal CD is 45 minutes long, then using the RIAA estimate the $/m of a physical CD in 2004 was.2877.
DRM
Now... DRM. DRM actually doesn't play much into my purchases. I buy most of my MP3s from sites that don't DRM (Warp Records massive crosslabel site Bleep.com and ClickandBuy.com which a lot of UK e-tailers seem to use). Of course it might be DRM that keeps me from buying stuff from iTunes and the like. I have an MP4 that I haven't really listened to 'cause it's got that only-just-recently cracked DRM on it... so I couldn't put it on an MP3 data disc and listen to it in my car. Also Bleep is good for just browsing. You can listen to any song as much as you want (tho they cut it into 30 second chunks).
Also I prefer physical media. Why? I dunno. I can pull it out and play it in most anyone else's car, it's not rewriteable so I can take it to work and rip it onto machines in labs and that's much more convenient then YouSendit'ing it to myself. Also I only have to pull a disc from my mail and it can go right in my car. I don't need to find a box, rip and burn, to get to it. That's great if I'm on business travel, buy a disc and want to listen to it right away (which happened last week).
I was thinking you could call a good IP movie "Once in a Lifetime" like the Talking Heads song. You know "this is not my beautiful wife", "this is not my beautiful house". Then you could say "And this is not your beautiful family photographs 'cause they're in an image format that you don't have a license too anymore... whoops!" You enlighten people to what they think they own turns out they are just "leasing" at the pleasure of some corporation. That's how we get average Janes and Joes to sit down and think on this stuff.
One thing is for sure
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
These guys aren't filmmakers. The first thing that struck me was that, no matter how OTS and easy to use the tech is, it takes a certain professional to actually make something that doesn't hurt the eyes. Long rambling interviews, close ups that where too close up (really, no one wants to be that close to that guy's beard), odd choice to shoot one guy out of focus, and no real cohesive story from beginning to end. It was a series of bad choices, like using too many Photoshop plugins because they are there. And some (like the choice to. show. only. one. word. of. text. at. the. beginning. so. you. couldn't. read. the. narration. all. at. once.) really hurt whatever they where trying to convey.
One of my coworkers said "you know, this movie's so unrestrained and poorly done that you actually respect all those big generic Hollywood movies for at least being coherent." You felt that maybe these guy's weren't right: we needed to pay for IP because the only movies that'd be left would be horrible pieces of crap like this.
Four parts was unnecessary. The whole episode was given no context (no history of IP at the beginning to set the table, no explanations of the differences in nations' IP laws or how international treaties work. Of course the creators might not know any of that themselves... which came off in a sense that they where really talking from the selfish desire to get away with whatever they want. And that's no way to sway opinion). There was no objective devil's advocacy (is there such thing as bad IP theft? Bad theft? What of Hollywood's concern about the East Asian bootleg DVD markets?), no attempt at compromise (is there some way to maintain creator's right to his work while at the same time preserving the consumer's right to fair use) or suggestion for future international law. Basically the movie just blew a big raspberry at corporations which makes the fair use camp seem childish. The only result is that fair use will get marginalized and ignored. The exact opposite effect of actually changing the landscape of intra- and international copyright.
The problem with the SOAP fan community was that it was unlike any other fan community that has ever existed and that is the inherent irreverence for the source material. Even cult movies like Rocky Horror or Plan 9 from Outer Space hinge on the fact that the source material is sacrosanct. Sure, people dress up and people show canned responses to well-known sequences... but the sequences never change, the films never change, the experience never changes. Sure, folks might come up with more elaborate costumes or better cynical jokes but the material is involatile. And you can say the same about the very film prints of SOAP except-
all of its community was built before a single frame was seen.
SOAP was an insipid idea encapsulated in a four word title. Other than that? It was an open canvas.
And the online community ran with it. It made jokes, it made photoshop, comic strips, stupid video, fake trailers, Photoshop Phridays, crap songs. And the convergence of social software just helped fuel it. Blogger, Youtube, Photobucket. In the end 99% of all original content related to Snakes on a Plane was generated outside the official film itself.
Not only that, but SOAP was something you could participate in. 15 minutes in photoshop and a couple of clicks and your picture of Mace Windu sitting on a Dune sandworm with "Yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!" written poorly in Pbrush.exe could end up on a dozen blogs. SOAP was whatever you contributed to it. Even academics and culture critics are getting into it. There are going to be papers, books, theories, conjecture. Someone is going to approach it from a Baudrillardian philosophical perspective and say SOAP was the first movie to truly capture the post-9/11 zeitgeist.
Technology and society met at a point where this was inevitable. It just took four little words and an idea that everyone could appreciate the straight-faced stupidity of.
Because of this, the actual frames of the movie are sort of irrelevant. After six months of run up, it was just another signal against the whole span of content out there. And to be honest, it wasn't even as creative or funny as a lot of that anonymous posters came up with.
The movie is what it is: a generic B horror/suspense film. And anyone looking at just the screen will see that. But those who where out there last Thursday at 10:00 in a theater full of high schoolers and college kids hearing the last ticks of summer? That was the real Snakes on a Plane. People hissing, screaming, yelling. It was a truly shared communal experience. The content on the screen was mere pretext. It was a nation-wide community that hadn't been forced down from some marketing firm that went from flash to bang in six months. MTV, Nike, Universal-Vevendi didn't tell anyone to do this. I have to agree with the guys at RuthlessReviews.com, that's pretty heartening.
And it wasn't until "Birth of a Nation" (25 years later) that anyone even BEGAN to expand that medium's horizons.
While composing most of the elements that now make modern filmmaking, it would be more accurate to say that The Great Train Robbery was one of the first films to explore film as a long form different than drama (1903, so 13 years after). It utilized "parallel editing, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting" as well as pioneering the theory that the element of a film was a shot (as compared to a scene, the unit of a play, which dominated filmmaking thinking up until then).
One could also say that in this modern communication era where the length between flash and bang is much shorter and that it should be reflected in the maturation of a medium. There are Eisners for webcomics and humanities departments are embracing blogging and hypertext. While those are just extensions of existing media, they've still matured very quickly.
Of course I'm in the camp that what makes a game a game is a competitive element (either PvP or Player v. Machine) which is absent from art (even the interactive type). A game can be profound just as art can demand something of its audience but by needing to satisfy that element it is wholly seperate from art (unless using the most liberal use of the word where we could discuss the art of the fast ball or the art of running the pick and roll). But Merchant Ivory isn't the way to think about making better games. Merchant Ivory is just yuppie porn like Architecture Digest. "Highbrow" is what folks throw out when their only measure for entertainment is if it is something that "someone like me" should do. It is completely perpendicular to the concept of quality.
Well ask a subjective question, get a subjective answer. You could say that the state of the movie is as good as its ever been and there's nothing quantitative we could say about it. I wouldn't usually consider my On Demand to be a good cross-section of movies. Most are just the biggest sellers that they can get and classics that haven't either been earmarked by networks or other cable stations (say if TNT decided to get exclusive rights to Shawshank you might not see it on your On Demand). But then it all really comes down to what you get out of movies. Pirates of the Carribean 2 was good, so was Clerks 2. There have already been some stellar movies this year (The Proposition, Wassup Rockers, A Scanner Darkly)... but then there's nothing to support that other than my own opinion. In the same way that I find Stargate Atlantis to be a second run of SG-1 which has gone on for about two or three seasons too long. But that's what floats your boat.
If anything I'd suggest getting away from your television and out into a non-megaplex theater (or at least get Netflix). Most stuff won't make it on there anyway and you won't find anything new just leafing through the few things Sci-Fi and Comcast push to you. You sound bored with the same-ol-same-old. There's only one way to fix that and it is to get out of the rut.
Of course even now the branding mindspace is getting filled. Check out "The Persuaders" episode of Frontline (PBS lets you watch it for free). The idea was that consumers got acclaimated to broad comparitive marketing and so the idea of Branding became the one true way. All products are functionally the same so you buy Nikes because they let you "Just do it" or Cheerios because it is what you ate as a child (even if that isn't true). Things are sold to you impicitly now: you see it on the street, everyone else has one, a trusted source advocates for it.
The best part about "The Persuaders" is how even that is starting to have a limited effect. The example they use is Song, Delta's regional service re-branded for the big world. The producers follow the whole branding process...
and how it doesn't work. No one knows what Song is. They remember the adverts but it doesn't link to a need (and thus no way to sell a product to satisfy it). The postscript of the episode is how Song has gone belly-up. Another dead body. Next song.
I hope that the companies realize that there are many companies that won't allow cameras with phones into their buildings because of security and espionage concerns. Truthfully I have no need for a camera on my phone. I have a camera. I can use that. I don't need keepsakes of my friends or whatever. I think a lot of these features (webbrowsing, gaming) are just gadget-candy that are of interest for only the 13-15 year old teenage girl demo. I need a reliable phone with good battery. Texting, alarms and calendars are all plusses but not necessary.
Hmmm... rates between 7.32% and 24.04%. Of course the 1% off the closing cost and 0.5% annual fee eat into that return on giving the lien. And I just how much the money is in action and being utilized... and that's why I don't trust the 7% gross return (and by gross do they mean before their fees are calculated in? And are there fees for lender as well?)
This as an investment strategy just seems to be like trying to beat the system. Big banks have all dollars share equally in gains and losses. Basically it is like a diversified portfolio of an indexed fund of all the liens they had out there. While the rates of 24.04% sounds sexy that's still probably a very rare rate and it is at the high risk threshold for max dollars.
Also wonder how the amortization schedules are set up.
Yeah, his statements are especially interesting considering that China no longer provides free primary and secondary school education. That basically means the entire 800 million sustenance-farming population lost its one way into the Chinese boom. And now all the young Chinese either work on the farm to get enough food to eat or go off to join the unskilled migrant economy. Sitting down for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to study MIT course work is comically implausible (especially for peoples who indoor plumbing would be a stunning advancement). And it isn't like China is just going to roll out internet and computers next week. Dividing any program budget by 800 million means there isn't much to spend per-rural citizen.
But I doubt there's much interest in that. I mean, why dry up your giant resevoir of hypercheap labor, the very thing keeping your economy chugging along?
What is interesting about the article is how it gets this interesting result and then does nothing with it except to speculate. That they do not share the actual poll questions forces the reader to speculate themselves what they asked. So, yes, we know that they asked if people where intellectually curious about the world around them. But what else?
Parsing into what the article reveals is a certain "would you talk about science/etc in Social Situation A" (they keep mentioning cocktail parties) or other habits (e.g. what sort of television they watch).
But the implied conclusion of this article is "more people are geeks; they are just in the closet" which I think is a big leap in logic. And I think this article is very liberal with the terms geek/nerd.
Personally a "geek" isn't just someone "intellectually curious" but also someone who exhibits Nerd Myopia: they follow their geeky passions at the expense of all others. More so they find all other topics inferior (and will demonstrate subtle vitriol to outright belligerence). The article talks about how the Science and Passion [S&P] group will bring up science topics automatically while the other groups (Money/Success/Science [M/S/S] and Style and Science [S&S]) are interested but unlikely to discuss it. All of these groups are unlike the Other People group in that they would approve of a topic of conversation switching to a geek topic.
So what about the inverse? The article mentions "Desperate Housewives" and going out and careers. What if a geek topic switched to one of those? I'd suspect the M/S/S and S&S groups would be fine with those too while the S&P would not and probably get angry or dismissive. S&P geeks like their intellectually curious topics at the expense of everything else. All those other non-geek topics are shit and should be treated as such. For geeks "Desperate Housewives" is for secretaries and HR drones. Going out is mentally numb behavior and a scam by the liquor and clothing industries. Career talk is for PHBs. All of those things are commanded by simple deterministic logic of hard sciences. They're all "soft" and defy the ability to rule lawyer and one-up in the perpetual game of nerd battle-of-wills.
And for all this talk of "in the closet", that's the real barrier keeping people out: rabid intolerance for all things outside geekdom. Geeks, nerds, whatever aren't very big tent in approach. They make their bones by being exclusory. Everyone else is "Other People" and either an enemy or some sheep who can't be trusted to do anything. And attitude like that will keep most of that 40% (and a significant proportion of that 53% of the Science and Passion who are female) at arms reach.
The moneyshot: "A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 2012 -- during this decade."
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%.
Bah. You just pulled that out of your ass.
Well no, I didn't. I just decided since that this was/. and not a moderated publication that I wasn't going to run around looking for the exact reference. Probably a little googling and you could find it.
That might have something to do with the fact that none of them are particularly good movies. We didn't have a Jurassic Park released this year, a Shawshank Redemption, or a Fight Club for that matter. The sorry state of Hollywood is the real problem.
Well that's a wonderfully subjective argument. All the critical acclaim this year's movies kind of nullifies your argument. And none of those movies you suggest won any non-technical Oscars. Heck, only Shawshank was even nominated for Best Picture.
Correction: "Audiences no longer go to see movies."
So where are all those box office dollars coming from?
I find it really surprising that you think churning out hundreds of horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies had nothing to do with the fact that people aren't going to movies nearly as much, and the public's unwillingness to take a chance on Hollywood movies anymore.
Way to read into my post something that isn't there. I never said that the "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" aren't why people are going to the movies. Yes, "people aren't going to movies nearly as much" but when they do, they go see "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" and as long as they do, Hollywood will keep putting them out.
If you spent 200 million making a good movie you would turn a profit, the problem is hollywood is spending 200 million making shit. The other issue I have is the source of this comment, everyone saw the last three Star Wars, and they were absolutely horrible movies and should stand as a monument to how disconnected and stupid George Lucas is.
Episode I, Budget $115,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $431,065,444 (USA) (30 January 2000) Episode II, Budget $120,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $310,675,583 (USA) (27 April 2003) Episode III, Budget $115,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $380,262,555 (USA) (16 October 2005)
Net from US Box Office only without Merchandising and Marketing factored in: +$772,003,582
Where they good movies from a critical view? Debateable.
Where they good movies from a strict economic sense? Three quarters of a billion reasons yes.
Number Three, all of this comes from King Kong being a flop
As another poster has said, Jackson's King Kong has made over $550 million worldwide and cost only $120 million to make.
These movies all made money, ridiculous money. If a poll was taken, probably most here would call the prequels crap. Implicitly in that all of them saw each of the movies at least once. Good or bad, they still gave George his money. And money is what makes businesses work. In Hollywood they say there is no accounting for taste but there is accounting for box office receipts.
There are a lot of standard complaints that are thrown around that don't bear out. In behavior finance this is the demonstration of revealed preferences over stated preferences.
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
First, everyone likes to point at how Hollywood likes remakes. Well this isn't a recent phenomenon. King Kong wasn't just remade in 2005 but in 1976. You could've rented the DVDs for both previous versions and watched them before seeing PJ's version. You can go all the way back to Cecile B DeMille remaking the Ten Commandments and continue on as Hollywood repeated the standard film plots, from sword and sandal standards to Dragnet to... Lord of the Rings. And that brings up the real point:
People don't mind remakes, they just don't want "bad" remakes.
The funny thing is what constitutes "bad". Consider the original King Kong. Everyone will call it a classic. Heck probably more people would call it a classic than have actually seen it. And I bet most of them have no real drive to do so even though its just a Netflix order away. It's because what most people consider "bad" are opinions on effects and film production: less believable special effects, stage-derived pre-Method acting, pre-New Wave static cinematography, etc.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
And that isn't even due to the plausability of the effects, just expectation. Compare the movies Cache and Saw: the second is clearly gorier and more violent. It is wall to wall violence and bodycount. The former has only one on-screen death (two, if you count a decapitated rooster). Now what are the reactions to the two? I've been in theaters for both and the little Hitchcockian thriller Cache shocked the audiences more than Saw did. Why? Because it's violence didn't fit into the expecations of the audience. People seeing Saw know what they're going to see; they can put on the mask of fake bravery and laugh at the misfortune of shallow unsympathetic characters. Cache engages the viewer in a completely different way: by that nefarious "character-driven plot".
Of course Saw made hundreds of millions of dollars while Cache showed to small art houses. Saw also spawned a sequel.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular. People tire of watching the same movie over again. But they wanted repeated experience. So you take a movie, conceive of a similar plot, rehire the same actors, set designers and let them go. Most sequels are really more serials with the idea of an over-arching plot pretty tenuous. Franchises like Bad Boys, Big Momma's House, American Pie. Disney has made a cottage industry of this, crapping out straight to video releases and cartoons based upon their best received product. Its a fine line of just different enough to make it stand on its own while not so different as to fall outside of expectation.
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%. And these are rarely anything special. These are the My Big Fat Greek Weddings of the world. And you can bet the masterminds have sat down and tried to figure out how to franchise those too.
Folks aren't looking for plot-driven, nonstandard movies. Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich. Their nominations were out over a month ago and only Brokeback has gone over 75 million. Crash has made 55 after a full year in theaters. Spielberg's Munich has only recouped 45 of the 75 m
I can understand if the guy was pointing to specific versions of screenplays that never made it to the screen or where horribly compromised by hack job editors (i.e. what happened to Brazil when the Exec stuck goddamn LOVERBOY on the soundtrack and turned it into a romance. Or the massacred versions of Ciminos Heaven's Gate or Leone's Once Upon a Time in America) but what he has here is an uneven list fifteen year olds would come up with after sneaking too many of mom's Bacardi Breezers. The list leads off with the failed opportunity of Alien 3 to use William Gibson's script. But then he says Garth Jennings should have directed H2G2. Huh? Like he says Jennings had nothing in the movie but a bit part: he wasn't greenlighted at some point to be the director only to drop out, he didn't have a Paul Schaffer-esque moment where he made a movie (the Exorcist prequel) that was so hated by the suits that they remade the film with the same cast but a different director.
At that point the list goes from being missed opportunities to a wishlist. Even then some of the wishes make no sense: Tim Burton doing H2H2 sounds good... but why does this guy point to Willy Wonka of all movies? That's like seeing Francis Ford Coppola and saying "Yo I LOVED The Rainmaker!! Way to bring out the flavor in that John Grisham airport fodder!!" And I bet you could throw 500 million and all the talent in the world at a video game movie and still come up with a piece of shit. Doom hasn't ever been known for its gripping story.
My personal list of Best Movies Never Made? Well what about all the butcheries of Alan Moore's work? LXG is at the top of the list for greatest sins. And V for Vendetta as a look of being a seat of the pants rollercoaster ride (and so nothing like the source). And then there's all the weak sellouts of Philip K Dick's work (the Spielbergian twist on Minority Report) or Heinlein (Verhoven might have made a great political statement with his version of Starship Troopers if it wasn't moronic, badly acted, and the Sci-Fi equivalent of the WB).
When I read, I do endow what I see with expression and inflection based on the context and punctuation I see around it.
Well yes, that's true in cases where the meaning is obvious (e.g. "I'm having fun right now!"). But many times the written word is ambiguous (e.g. "Well that was a dumb idea"). And linguistic experimentation has found two things: 1. that you are succeptable to preexisting suggestion and 2. that we default to a harsh tone when there is no evidence to work on. Tests have been done where one group of subjects were given a "prep" document followed by the test document they were told to give their impressions of. They were told that both were written by the same person A to the same person B. If the prep document was friendly, their reading of the test document was humorous. If the prep document was harsh, the test document was seen as vicious. A third group was then tested without being given the prep document and their reactions were near to the harsh view than the light-hearted one. This third group said "well I guess I could be read as a joke, but I don't think it is."
This is why you use emoticons, you dumb bastards;p
When reading we use a dry voice for internal monologue that lacks any of the subtle registers we use in conveying emotion in our conversation. So anything we read comes off very stark. The problem is that most people writing completely ignore this and use a bunch of ironic or sardonic elements that get read as harsh vitrol. This is one reason why you should wait 24 hours after writing a harsh email: when you reread it, it will lack any of the subjectivity you had when writing it and you'll read it as if for the first time (and, hopefully find the bits that would have pissed off folks something fierce). The same way, it's good to use emoticons to soften all bits in the gray area. Heck, even managers do it now.:D
This happens all the time. In professional sports coaches and personnel not bound by the collective bargaining agreement are "traded" between teams with compensation of draft picks. Just this year Herman Edwards went from the coach of the Jets to the Cheifs, who then gave the Jets a 4th round draft pick. But even in the business world, employees have a certain dollar value associated with them. All of us do. It's fantasy to assume we are unique special snowflakes and our companies cherish that. The only difference is that there is only one Al Michaels and most of us come from a pool of interchangeable workers. The market for marquee sports announcers is not liquid so instead of just letting him go, they'll arbitrate the contract they own.
And not being able to leave is simple: Al only has to yell "Fuck the fucking fuckers" on live TV, force the FCC to hit NBC with a giant fine and then threaten to continue doing so until they let him go.
Golf is standard issue for the managerial class: folks who being extroverts is a job requirement. For peons/techs/engineers there's still the time honored Afterwork Beer. Getting excited to run off into isolation and talk to people through magical cat-5 ain't the same. It implies a discomfort with being in the proximity of other meat popcicles and people notice that. Most people live out there in the Big Blue Box.
Depends on jurisduction. Yes, being laid off/fired assures unemployment otherwise you have to be determined to be eligible. Qutting for a good reason attributable to an employer is usually adequate to still receive unemployment. Being forced to work excessive hours (as the questioner posed) fits this mold. I would expect he would probably do a google search and find a page like this.
Give your two weeks, go on unemployment and go fullbore at hunting. Compromising on how you approach the hunt will produce a compromised job. If you have a nestegg or a SO to lean on, even better. Before you drop, calculate your expenses and cut off any utils or expenses you don't need (no reason to use your unemployment to pay the last month of digital cable if you don't need it). Also that two-weeks is dead man walking time; going to interviews should be easy when they aren't dropping new projects on you.
Exhaust all the avenues given above, its good advice. But don't hinder yourself by thinking you must jump from job to job without ever getting your feet wet.
Slashdot Mirror
FTA:
What kind of responsibility are they ducking?
Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective action.
Ok, that's bullshit. First off it is not true: look at the rise of Netroots (in politics, in activism, in terrorism) and all of that sort of action that disproves her very own observation. People are using online communities to get involved (for good or ill). Of course if you narrow your focus down like she does to just Facebook and Myspace (two sites designed for fulltime student aged demographics) *shock* people are just using them for social networking.
Second, her statement has the implication that in the great golden times before Teh Intarnetz that people where autonomous self-actualized ubermensch that got involved all the time with important social issues and where immune to peer pressure. That's pure BS. For all the supposed young folk getting active in the 60's, a good part of them took getting active to mean as a way to pick up chicks. Joni Mitchell talked about how all the talk of free love was just a scam. That's no different than it is now. Your average college kid is thinking of two things on a Thursday night: how to get drunk and how to get laid. That hasn't changed in forty years. And the author ignores the fact that the US population was mostly positive about Vietnam and it took the draft for most Americans to finally have a stake and for the tide to turn against that war. It wasn't due to folks now caving to instant peer pressure. The term Silent Majority was coined in that very era.
This article has all the makings of Media Studies masturbation: it has no social, historical, psychological or political context. It just has posed hypothetical examples and a lot of incestuous jargon. It does not approach it's own biases with skepticism or try to study the issue from an antithetical perspective (e.g. "Maybe social networking has no effect"). Colbert would call this East Coast Ivy League crap. And this is exactly the sort of thing you could break out in a party when trying to siddle up to some young filly. "Girl, we're so alone in this darkness... here, put your head in my lap."
Some Statistics
.2214 $/m last year, .2258 $/m this year. If you estimate that a normal CD is 45 minutes long, then using the RIAA estimate the $/m of a physical CD in 2004 was .2877.
Ok, maybe this isn't something Joe Average does but I have kept a spreadsheet of my music purchases for the last four years. Last year was the first year I ever bought anything online. There where four purchases totalling 50:14 in running time (mostly out of print Detroit electro singles). That was just 1.44% of the 67 albums I bought last year (60:11:46 total run time). This year I'm running way behind that rate (just 29 total purchases with only 29:45:39 total run time. I'm estimated to only buy ~41 albums this year) and only four online purchases but the total runtime is up (1:42:05 for 5.72% of my purchase runtime).
I also keep track of how much money I spent the last two years. Now I calculate how much per actual physical disc I spend a year and measure it against the RIAA 2004 estimate of $12.95 per CD. My number has actually gone up. Last year it was only $11.42 while this year its $13.44. But that doesn't tell you too much. I order a lot of CDs overseas because a lot of stuff is out of print/not distributed in the US and I pay a pretty price for it.
However, if you calculate the dollar per minute I've spent per year over all purchases (electronic and physical) and that number has actually stayed about the same:
DRM
Now... DRM. DRM actually doesn't play much into my purchases. I buy most of my MP3s from sites that don't DRM (Warp Records massive crosslabel site Bleep.com and ClickandBuy.com which a lot of UK e-tailers seem to use). Of course it might be DRM that keeps me from buying stuff from iTunes and the like. I have an MP4 that I haven't really listened to 'cause it's got that only-just-recently cracked DRM on it... so I couldn't put it on an MP3 data disc and listen to it in my car. Also Bleep is good for just browsing. You can listen to any song as much as you want (tho they cut it into 30 second chunks).
Also I prefer physical media. Why? I dunno. I can pull it out and play it in most anyone else's car, it's not rewriteable so I can take it to work and rip it onto machines in labs and that's much more convenient then YouSendit'ing it to myself. Also I only have to pull a disc from my mail and it can go right in my car. I don't need to find a box, rip and burn, to get to it. That's great if I'm on business travel, buy a disc and want to listen to it right away (which happened last week).
I was thinking you could call a good IP movie "Once in a Lifetime" like the Talking Heads song. You know "this is not my beautiful wife", "this is not my beautiful house". Then you could say "And this is not your beautiful family photographs 'cause they're in an image format that you don't have a license too anymore... whoops!" You enlighten people to what they think they own turns out they are just "leasing" at the pleasure of some corporation. That's how we get average Janes and Joes to sit down and think on this stuff.
These guys aren't filmmakers. The first thing that struck me was that, no matter how OTS and easy to use the tech is, it takes a certain professional to actually make something that doesn't hurt the eyes. Long rambling interviews, close ups that where too close up (really, no one wants to be that close to that guy's beard), odd choice to shoot one guy out of focus, and no real cohesive story from beginning to end. It was a series of bad choices, like using too many Photoshop plugins because they are there. And some (like the choice to. show. only. one. word. of. text. at. the. beginning. so. you. couldn't. read. the. narration. all. at. once.) really hurt whatever they where trying to convey.
One of my coworkers said "you know, this movie's so unrestrained and poorly done that you actually respect all those big generic Hollywood movies for at least being coherent." You felt that maybe these guy's weren't right: we needed to pay for IP because the only movies that'd be left would be horrible pieces of crap like this.
Four parts was unnecessary. The whole episode was given no context (no history of IP at the beginning to set the table, no explanations of the differences in nations' IP laws or how international treaties work. Of course the creators might not know any of that themselves... which came off in a sense that they where really talking from the selfish desire to get away with whatever they want. And that's no way to sway opinion). There was no objective devil's advocacy (is there such thing as bad IP theft? Bad theft? What of Hollywood's concern about the East Asian bootleg DVD markets?), no attempt at compromise (is there some way to maintain creator's right to his work while at the same time preserving the consumer's right to fair use) or suggestion for future international law. Basically the movie just blew a big raspberry at corporations which makes the fair use camp seem childish. The only result is that fair use will get marginalized and ignored. The exact opposite effect of actually changing the landscape of intra- and international copyright.
The problem with the SOAP fan community was that it was unlike any other fan community that has ever existed and that is the inherent irreverence for the source material. Even cult movies like Rocky Horror or Plan 9 from Outer Space hinge on the fact that the source material is sacrosanct. Sure, people dress up and people show canned responses to well-known sequences... but the sequences never change, the films never change, the experience never changes. Sure, folks might come up with more elaborate costumes or better cynical jokes but the material is involatile. And you can say the same about the very film prints of SOAP except-
all of its community was built before a single frame was seen.
SOAP was an insipid idea encapsulated in a four word title. Other than that? It was an open canvas.
And the online community ran with it. It made jokes, it made photoshop, comic strips, stupid video, fake trailers, Photoshop Phridays, crap songs. And the convergence of social software just helped fuel it. Blogger, Youtube, Photobucket. In the end 99% of all original content related to Snakes on a Plane was generated outside the official film itself.
Not only that, but SOAP was something you could participate in. 15 minutes in photoshop and a couple of clicks and your picture of Mace Windu sitting on a Dune sandworm with "Yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!" written poorly in Pbrush.exe could end up on a dozen blogs. SOAP was whatever you contributed to it. Even academics and culture critics are getting into it. There are going to be papers, books, theories, conjecture. Someone is going to approach it from a Baudrillardian philosophical perspective and say SOAP was the first movie to truly capture the post-9/11 zeitgeist.
Technology and society met at a point where this was inevitable. It just took four little words and an idea that everyone could appreciate the straight-faced stupidity of.
Because of this, the actual frames of the movie are sort of irrelevant. After six months of run up, it was just another signal against the whole span of content out there. And to be honest, it wasn't even as creative or funny as a lot of that anonymous posters came up with.
The movie is what it is: a generic B horror/suspense film. And anyone looking at just the screen will see that. But those who where out there last Thursday at 10:00 in a theater full of high schoolers and college kids hearing the last ticks of summer? That was the real Snakes on a Plane. People hissing, screaming, yelling. It was a truly shared communal experience. The content on the screen was mere pretext. It was a nation-wide community that hadn't been forced down from some marketing firm that went from flash to bang in six months. MTV, Nike, Universal-Vevendi didn't tell anyone to do this. I have to agree with the guys at RuthlessReviews.com, that's pretty heartening.
And it wasn't until "Birth of a Nation" (25 years later) that anyone even BEGAN to expand that medium's horizons.
While composing most of the elements that now make modern filmmaking, it would be more accurate to say that The Great Train Robbery was one of the first films to explore film as a long form different than drama (1903, so 13 years after). It utilized "parallel editing, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting" as well as pioneering the theory that the element of a film was a shot (as compared to a scene, the unit of a play, which dominated filmmaking thinking up until then).
One could also say that in this modern communication era where the length between flash and bang is much shorter and that it should be reflected in the maturation of a medium. There are Eisners for webcomics and humanities departments are embracing blogging and hypertext. While those are just extensions of existing media, they've still matured very quickly.
Of course I'm in the camp that what makes a game a game is a competitive element (either PvP or Player v. Machine) which is absent from art (even the interactive type). A game can be profound just as art can demand something of its audience but by needing to satisfy that element it is wholly seperate from art (unless using the most liberal use of the word where we could discuss the art of the fast ball or the art of running the pick and roll). But Merchant Ivory isn't the way to think about making better games. Merchant Ivory is just yuppie porn like Architecture Digest. "Highbrow" is what folks throw out when their only measure for entertainment is if it is something that "someone like me" should do. It is completely perpendicular to the concept of quality.
Well ask a subjective question, get a subjective answer. You could say that the state of the movie is as good as its ever been and there's nothing quantitative we could say about it. I wouldn't usually consider my On Demand to be a good cross-section of movies. Most are just the biggest sellers that they can get and classics that haven't either been earmarked by networks or other cable stations (say if TNT decided to get exclusive rights to Shawshank you might not see it on your On Demand). But then it all really comes down to what you get out of movies. Pirates of the Carribean 2 was good, so was Clerks 2. There have already been some stellar movies this year (The Proposition, Wassup Rockers, A Scanner Darkly)... but then there's nothing to support that other than my own opinion. In the same way that I find Stargate Atlantis to be a second run of SG-1 which has gone on for about two or three seasons too long. But that's what floats your boat.
If anything I'd suggest getting away from your television and out into a non-megaplex theater (or at least get Netflix). Most stuff won't make it on there anyway and you won't find anything new just leafing through the few things Sci-Fi and Comcast push to you. You sound bored with the same-ol-same-old. There's only one way to fix that and it is to get out of the rut.
Of course she burnt down two villages- but let's not get bogged down with nostalgia and "facts".
Of course even now the branding mindspace is getting filled. Check out "The Persuaders" episode of Frontline (PBS lets you watch it for free). The idea was that consumers got acclaimated to broad comparitive marketing and so the idea of Branding became the one true way. All products are functionally the same so you buy Nikes because they let you "Just do it" or Cheerios because it is what you ate as a child (even if that isn't true). Things are sold to you impicitly now: you see it on the street, everyone else has one, a trusted source advocates for it.
The best part about "The Persuaders" is how even that is starting to have a limited effect. The example they use is Song, Delta's regional service re-branded for the big world. The producers follow the whole branding process...
and how it doesn't work. No one knows what Song is. They remember the adverts but it doesn't link to a need (and thus no way to sell a product to satisfy it). The postscript of the episode is how Song has gone belly-up. Another dead body. Next song.
I hope that the companies realize that there are many companies that won't allow cameras with phones into their buildings because of security and espionage concerns. Truthfully I have no need for a camera on my phone. I have a camera. I can use that. I don't need keepsakes of my friends or whatever. I think a lot of these features (webbrowsing, gaming) are just gadget-candy that are of interest for only the 13-15 year old teenage girl demo. I need a reliable phone with good battery. Texting, alarms and calendars are all plusses but not necessary.
Hmmm... rates between 7.32% and 24.04%. Of course the 1% off the closing cost and 0.5% annual fee eat into that return on giving the lien. And I just how much the money is in action and being utilized... and that's why I don't trust the 7% gross return (and by gross do they mean before their fees are calculated in? And are there fees for lender as well?)
This as an investment strategy just seems to be like trying to beat the system. Big banks have all dollars share equally in gains and losses. Basically it is like a diversified portfolio of an indexed fund of all the liens they had out there. While the rates of 24.04% sounds sexy that's still probably a very rare rate and it is at the high risk threshold for max dollars.
Also wonder how the amortization schedules are set up.
Bah. I'm happy just putting my money into REITs.
Yeah, his statements are especially interesting considering that China no longer provides free primary and secondary school education. That basically means the entire 800 million sustenance-farming population lost its one way into the Chinese boom. And now all the young Chinese either work on the farm to get enough food to eat or go off to join the unskilled migrant economy. Sitting down for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week to study MIT course work is comically implausible (especially for peoples who indoor plumbing would be a stunning advancement). And it isn't like China is just going to roll out internet and computers next week. Dividing any program budget by 800 million means there isn't much to spend per-rural citizen.
But I doubt there's much interest in that. I mean, why dry up your giant resevoir of hypercheap labor, the very thing keeping your economy chugging along?
What is interesting about the article is how it gets this interesting result and then does nothing with it except to speculate. That they do not share the actual poll questions forces the reader to speculate themselves what they asked. So, yes, we know that they asked if people where intellectually curious about the world around them. But what else?
Parsing into what the article reveals is a certain "would you talk about science/etc in Social Situation A" (they keep mentioning cocktail parties) or other habits (e.g. what sort of television they watch).
But the implied conclusion of this article is "more people are geeks; they are just in the closet" which I think is a big leap in logic. And I think this article is very liberal with the terms geek/nerd.
Personally a "geek" isn't just someone "intellectually curious" but also someone who exhibits Nerd Myopia: they follow their geeky passions at the expense of all others. More so they find all other topics inferior (and will demonstrate subtle vitriol to outright belligerence). The article talks about how the Science and Passion [S&P] group will bring up science topics automatically while the other groups (Money/Success/Science [M/S/S] and Style and Science [S&S]) are interested but unlikely to discuss it. All of these groups are unlike the Other People group in that they would approve of a topic of conversation switching to a geek topic.
So what about the inverse? The article mentions "Desperate Housewives" and going out and careers. What if a geek topic switched to one of those? I'd suspect the M/S/S and S&S groups would be fine with those too while the S&P would not and probably get angry or dismissive. S&P geeks like their intellectually curious topics at the expense of everything else. All those other non-geek topics are shit and should be treated as such. For geeks "Desperate Housewives" is for secretaries and HR drones. Going out is mentally numb behavior and a scam by the liquor and clothing industries. Career talk is for PHBs. All of those things are commanded by simple deterministic logic of hard sciences. They're all "soft" and defy the ability to rule lawyer and one-up in the perpetual game of nerd battle-of-wills.
And for all this talk of "in the closet", that's the real barrier keeping people out: rabid intolerance for all things outside geekdom. Geeks, nerds, whatever aren't very big tent in approach. They make their bones by being exclusory. Everyone else is "Other People" and either an enemy or some sheep who can't be trusted to do anything. And attitude like that will keep most of that 40% (and a significant proportion of that 53% of the Science and Passion who are female) at arms reach.
Ironic considering the editorial in today's WaPo: Will Your Job Survive Globalization?
The moneyshot: "A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 2012 -- during this decade."
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%.
/. and not a moderated publication that I wasn't going to run around looking for the exact reference. Probably a little googling and you could find it.
Bah. You just pulled that out of your ass.
Well no, I didn't. I just decided since that this was
That might have something to do with the fact that none of them are particularly good movies. We didn't have a Jurassic Park released this year, a Shawshank Redemption, or a Fight Club for that matter. The sorry state of Hollywood is the real problem.
Well that's a wonderfully subjective argument. All the critical acclaim this year's movies kind of nullifies your argument. And none of those movies you suggest won any non-technical Oscars. Heck, only Shawshank was even nominated for Best Picture.
Correction: "Audiences no longer go to see movies."
So where are all those box office dollars coming from?
I find it really surprising that you think churning out hundreds of horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies had nothing to do with the fact that people aren't going to movies nearly as much, and the public's unwillingness to take a chance on Hollywood movies anymore.
Way to read into my post something that isn't there. I never said that the "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" aren't why people are going to the movies. Yes, "people aren't going to movies nearly as much" but when they do, they go see "horrible sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and comic-book movies" and as long as they do, Hollywood will keep putting them out.
If you spent 200 million making a good movie you would turn a profit, the problem is hollywood is spending 200 million making shit. The other issue I have is the source of this comment, everyone saw the last three Star Wars, and they were absolutely horrible movies and should stand as a monument to how disconnected and stupid George Lucas is.
Episode I, Budget $115,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $431,065,444 (USA) (30 January 2000)
Episode II, Budget $120,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $310,675,583 (USA) (27 April 2003)
Episode III, Budget $115,000,000 (estimated), Box Office $380,262,555 (USA) (16 October 2005)
Net from US Box Office only without Merchandising and Marketing factored in: +$772,003,582
Where they good movies from a critical view? Debateable.
Where they good movies from a strict economic sense? Three quarters of a billion reasons yes.
Number Three, all of this comes from King Kong being a flop
As another poster has said, Jackson's King Kong has made over $550 million worldwide and cost only $120 million to make.
These movies all made money, ridiculous money. If a poll was taken, probably most here would call the prequels crap. Implicitly in that all of them saw each of the movies at least once. Good or bad, they still gave George his money. And money is what makes businesses work. In Hollywood they say there is no accounting for taste but there is accounting for box office receipts.
There are a lot of standard complaints that are thrown around that don't bear out. In behavior finance this is the demonstration of revealed preferences over stated preferences.
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
First, everyone likes to point at how Hollywood likes remakes. Well this isn't a recent phenomenon. King Kong wasn't just remade in 2005 but in 1976. You could've rented the DVDs for both previous versions and watched them before seeing PJ's version. You can go all the way back to Cecile B DeMille remaking the Ten Commandments and continue on as Hollywood repeated the standard film plots, from sword and sandal standards to Dragnet to... Lord of the Rings. And that brings up the real point:
People don't mind remakes, they just don't want "bad" remakes.
The funny thing is what constitutes "bad". Consider the original King Kong. Everyone will call it a classic. Heck probably more people would call it a classic than have actually seen it. And I bet most of them have no real drive to do so even though its just a Netflix order away. It's because what most people consider "bad" are opinions on effects and film production: less believable special effects, stage-derived pre-Method acting, pre-New Wave static cinematography, etc.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
And that isn't even due to the plausability of the effects, just expectation. Compare the movies Cache and Saw: the second is clearly gorier and more violent. It is wall to wall violence and bodycount. The former has only one on-screen death (two, if you count a decapitated rooster). Now what are the reactions to the two? I've been in theaters for both and the little Hitchcockian thriller Cache shocked the audiences more than Saw did. Why? Because it's violence didn't fit into the expecations of the audience. People seeing Saw know what they're going to see; they can put on the mask of fake bravery and laugh at the misfortune of shallow unsympathetic characters. Cache engages the viewer in a completely different way: by that nefarious "character-driven plot".
Of course Saw made hundreds of millions of dollars while Cache showed to small art houses. Saw also spawned a sequel.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular. People tire of watching the same movie over again. But they wanted repeated experience. So you take a movie, conceive of a similar plot, rehire the same actors, set designers and let them go. Most sequels are really more serials with the idea of an over-arching plot pretty tenuous. Franchises like Bad Boys, Big Momma's House, American Pie. Disney has made a cottage industry of this, crapping out straight to video releases and cartoons based upon their best received product. Its a fine line of just different enough to make it stand on its own while not so different as to fall outside of expectation.
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%. And these are rarely anything special. These are the My Big Fat Greek Weddings of the world. And you can bet the masterminds have sat down and tried to figure out how to franchise those too.
Folks aren't looking for plot-driven, nonstandard movies. Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich. Their nominations were out over a month ago and only Brokeback has gone over 75 million. Crash has made 55 after a full year in theaters. Spielberg's Munich has only recouped 45 of the 75 m
I can understand if the guy was pointing to specific versions of screenplays that never made it to the screen or where horribly compromised by hack job editors (i.e. what happened to Brazil when the Exec stuck goddamn LOVERBOY on the soundtrack and turned it into a romance. Or the massacred versions of Ciminos Heaven's Gate or Leone's Once Upon a Time in America) but what he has here is an uneven list fifteen year olds would come up with after sneaking too many of mom's Bacardi Breezers. The list leads off with the failed opportunity of Alien 3 to use William Gibson's script. But then he says Garth Jennings should have directed H2G2. Huh? Like he says Jennings had nothing in the movie but a bit part: he wasn't greenlighted at some point to be the director only to drop out, he didn't have a Paul Schaffer-esque moment where he made a movie (the Exorcist prequel) that was so hated by the suits that they remade the film with the same cast but a different director.
At that point the list goes from being missed opportunities to a wishlist. Even then some of the wishes make no sense: Tim Burton doing H2H2 sounds good... but why does this guy point to Willy Wonka of all movies? That's like seeing Francis Ford Coppola and saying "Yo I LOVED The Rainmaker!! Way to bring out the flavor in that John Grisham airport fodder!!" And I bet you could throw 500 million and all the talent in the world at a video game movie and still come up with a piece of shit. Doom hasn't ever been known for its gripping story.
My personal list of Best Movies Never Made? Well what about all the butcheries of Alan Moore's work? LXG is at the top of the list for greatest sins. And V for Vendetta as a look of being a seat of the pants rollercoaster ride (and so nothing like the source). And then there's all the weak sellouts of Philip K Dick's work (the Spielbergian twist on Minority Report) or Heinlein (Verhoven might have made a great political statement with his version of Starship Troopers if it wasn't moronic, badly acted, and the Sci-Fi equivalent of the WB).
When I read, I do endow what I see with expression and inflection based on the context and punctuation I see around it.
Well yes, that's true in cases where the meaning is obvious (e.g. "I'm having fun right now!"). But many times the written word is ambiguous (e.g. "Well that was a dumb idea"). And linguistic experimentation has found two things: 1. that you are succeptable to preexisting suggestion and 2. that we default to a harsh tone when there is no evidence to work on. Tests have been done where one group of subjects were given a "prep" document followed by the test document they were told to give their impressions of. They were told that both were written by the same person A to the same person B. If the prep document was friendly, their reading of the test document was humorous. If the prep document was harsh, the test document was seen as vicious. A third group was then tested without being given the prep document and their reactions were near to the harsh view than the light-hearted one. This third group said "well I guess I could be read as a joke, but I don't think it is."
This is why you use emoticons, you dumb bastards ;p
:D
When reading we use a dry voice for internal monologue that lacks any of the subtle registers we use in conveying emotion in our conversation. So anything we read comes off very stark. The problem is that most people writing completely ignore this and use a bunch of ironic or sardonic elements that get read as harsh vitrol. This is one reason why you should wait 24 hours after writing a harsh email: when you reread it, it will lack any of the subjectivity you had when writing it and you'll read it as if for the first time (and, hopefully find the bits that would have pissed off folks something fierce). The same way, it's good to use emoticons to soften all bits in the gray area. Heck, even managers do it now.
Do they have a monthly fee? I bet these guys force you to buy a year-long membership at least. Typical New Year's Resolution scam >:(
This happens all the time. In professional sports coaches and personnel not bound by the collective bargaining agreement are "traded" between teams with compensation of draft picks. Just this year Herman Edwards went from the coach of the Jets to the Cheifs, who then gave the Jets a 4th round draft pick. But even in the business world, employees have a certain dollar value associated with them. All of us do. It's fantasy to assume we are unique special snowflakes and our companies cherish that. The only difference is that there is only one Al Michaels and most of us come from a pool of interchangeable workers. The market for marquee sports announcers is not liquid so instead of just letting him go, they'll arbitrate the contract they own.
And not being able to leave is simple: Al only has to yell "Fuck the fucking fuckers" on live TV, force the FCC to hit NBC with a giant fine and then threaten to continue doing so until they let him go.
Golf is standard issue for the managerial class: folks who being extroverts is a job requirement. For peons/techs/engineers there's still the time honored Afterwork Beer. Getting excited to run off into isolation and talk to people through magical cat-5 ain't the same. It implies a discomfort with being in the proximity of other meat popcicles and people notice that. Most people live out there in the Big Blue Box.
Depends on jurisduction. Yes, being laid off/fired assures unemployment otherwise you have to be determined to be eligible. Qutting for a good reason attributable to an employer is usually adequate to still receive unemployment. Being forced to work excessive hours (as the questioner posed) fits this mold. I would expect he would probably do a google search and find a page like this.
Give your two weeks, go on unemployment and go fullbore at hunting. Compromising on how you approach the hunt will produce a compromised job. If you have a nestegg or a SO to lean on, even better. Before you drop, calculate your expenses and cut off any utils or expenses you don't need (no reason to use your unemployment to pay the last month of digital cable if you don't need it). Also that two-weeks is dead man walking time; going to interviews should be easy when they aren't dropping new projects on you.
Exhaust all the avenues given above, its good advice. But don't hinder yourself by thinking you must jump from job to job without ever getting your feet wet.