People can be annoying
Feb. 3rd, 2020 10:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Links. Make of this what you will:
* Death Threats Against The Author of American Dirt Threaten Us All
This is what we’ve come to.
The publisher of a novel titled “American Dirt,” by Jeanine Cummins, has canceled the remainder of a national book tour because Cummins and the bookstores set to host her have received threats of physical violence.
This is what we’ve come to. In the United States of America.
More than 30 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa demanding the assassination of Salman Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses,” here we are terrorizing one of our own novelists.
If you’ve been distracted lately by the presidential impeachment trial, you may have missed this tertiary symptom of the collapse of our democracy.
“American Dirt” was published last week in a paroxysm of rage and praise that racked the literati and generated almost 50,000 hardcover sales in its first five days.
Cummins’s novel tells the story of a Mexican bookstore owner named Lydia and her 8-year-old son trying to escape a poem-writing drug lord. The novel opens with his men killing 16 members of Lydia’s family during a quinceañera, and now they want to finish the job. With gunshots ringing in their ears, Lydia and her boy flee. They sneak onto buses, they jump onto moving trains, they trudge across deadly deserts, hoping against hope to reach the promised land: America.
It’s just a melodramatic thriller tarted up with flowery ornaments and freighted with earnest political relevance. The book might have fallen unremarked into the great vat of sentimental suspense fiction that New York pumps out every year, except for an unprecedented collision of promotion and denunciation.
* Milan talks about the RWA mess, and mainly how it is or isn't effecting her The question? What do you do about racism?
We don't know. It's not that interesting, a lot of apologizing and begging to left alone. I get the feeling Milan regrets getting involved in any of this to begin with.
* A Well Choreographed Protest at the Half-Time Show -- which fell on death ears. None of the media outlets picked up on it. They said there were no political messages in the half-time show. And focused on the sexy/risque dancing instead -- as if they've never had that before.
2. Having issues with my Iphone's storage capacity. I've tried everything. Nothing works. I don't want a new phone, but may have no other options. Ugh.
3. So, in case you missed it, I've saved all my meta to Archive of Our Own Shadowkat67. I think that will take you there. There's 122 works, 121 are meta, one is a drabble. Most of it is Buffy, but I've got other stuff in there as well.
4. Better links, or one's that might not make you want to hang your head in abject despair for the human race. (shrugs)
* Ridley Scott Explains Why You Don't Show the Monster Too Many Times - Because it looks fake?
Scott also followed the rule that the best horror and sci-fi films adhere to: Never reveal too much.
“You don’t show the monster too many times because you’ll get used to him and you never want to get used to him — ever. That’s always been my thesis. The best screening room in the world is the space between your ears, which is your brain. So, it’s learning to tap into the human brain to show just so much. Let the brain do a lot of the work. That’s where you start to tap into people’s anxieties.”
Michael Seymour’s Oscar-nominated production design added to the anxiety. “The Nostromo was one giant set on a stage at [Shepperton], all built together so that they could do those kinds of shots,” said screenwriter Scott Essman. “Where you’re going from room to room and you’re going down hallways and it’s underlit. It’s very suspenseful and you don’t know where the creature is from one moment to the next.”
* 1917 and the Trouble with WAR Movies
In an interview in 1973, the great French director Francois Truffaut told Gene Siskel that he “didn’t think [he’d] really seen an anti-war film … every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Before becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut had shaped his perceptions—and those of an extremely influential generation of readers—as a film critic; his comments, while obviously provocative, get at something troubling about the genre. Obviously, Truffaut had, at that point, seen a great many ostensible “anti-war films,” starting with Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning, paradigm-shifting World War I parable All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)—a film that 1917 pays homage to—and also including his countryman Jean Renoir’s powerful POW drama La Grande Illusion (1937). He’d have understood those movies’ scripts and sentiments as being angled against war, either in retrospect or contextualized as a preventive gesture (Renoir’s plangent plea for pan-European decency was released on the eve of World War II). But Truffaut’s awareness of the movies’ effective power led him to believe that simply showing war onscreen was tantamount to a kind of glorification. You can have characters give speeches about the horror and futility of combat, or tug at audiences’ heartstrings by killing off beloved actors, or deliberately emphasize pain and brutality, but you can never truly drain such material of its basic fascination, so that even the most skillful and poetic attempts to use the medium as a form of protest become weaponized against themselves.
(In other words - why I don't like WAR movies and have no interest in seeing 1917 in a nutshell.)
400 Years Later - The Fork Still Remains at the Center of the American Dining Controversy
How Flying Seriously Messes with Your Mind?
Doing Western Students Homework is Big Business in Kenya -- okay this may not help you much in how you view the human race..although it looked intriguing.
* Death Threats Against The Author of American Dirt Threaten Us All
This is what we’ve come to.
The publisher of a novel titled “American Dirt,” by Jeanine Cummins, has canceled the remainder of a national book tour because Cummins and the bookstores set to host her have received threats of physical violence.
This is what we’ve come to. In the United States of America.
More than 30 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa demanding the assassination of Salman Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses,” here we are terrorizing one of our own novelists.
If you’ve been distracted lately by the presidential impeachment trial, you may have missed this tertiary symptom of the collapse of our democracy.
“American Dirt” was published last week in a paroxysm of rage and praise that racked the literati and generated almost 50,000 hardcover sales in its first five days.
Cummins’s novel tells the story of a Mexican bookstore owner named Lydia and her 8-year-old son trying to escape a poem-writing drug lord. The novel opens with his men killing 16 members of Lydia’s family during a quinceañera, and now they want to finish the job. With gunshots ringing in their ears, Lydia and her boy flee. They sneak onto buses, they jump onto moving trains, they trudge across deadly deserts, hoping against hope to reach the promised land: America.
It’s just a melodramatic thriller tarted up with flowery ornaments and freighted with earnest political relevance. The book might have fallen unremarked into the great vat of sentimental suspense fiction that New York pumps out every year, except for an unprecedented collision of promotion and denunciation.
* Milan talks about the RWA mess, and mainly how it is or isn't effecting her The question? What do you do about racism?
We don't know. It's not that interesting, a lot of apologizing and begging to left alone. I get the feeling Milan regrets getting involved in any of this to begin with.
* A Well Choreographed Protest at the Half-Time Show -- which fell on death ears. None of the media outlets picked up on it. They said there were no political messages in the half-time show. And focused on the sexy/risque dancing instead -- as if they've never had that before.
2. Having issues with my Iphone's storage capacity. I've tried everything. Nothing works. I don't want a new phone, but may have no other options. Ugh.
3. So, in case you missed it, I've saved all my meta to Archive of Our Own Shadowkat67. I think that will take you there. There's 122 works, 121 are meta, one is a drabble. Most of it is Buffy, but I've got other stuff in there as well.
4. Better links, or one's that might not make you want to hang your head in abject despair for the human race. (shrugs)
* Ridley Scott Explains Why You Don't Show the Monster Too Many Times - Because it looks fake?
Scott also followed the rule that the best horror and sci-fi films adhere to: Never reveal too much.
“You don’t show the monster too many times because you’ll get used to him and you never want to get used to him — ever. That’s always been my thesis. The best screening room in the world is the space between your ears, which is your brain. So, it’s learning to tap into the human brain to show just so much. Let the brain do a lot of the work. That’s where you start to tap into people’s anxieties.”
Michael Seymour’s Oscar-nominated production design added to the anxiety. “The Nostromo was one giant set on a stage at [Shepperton], all built together so that they could do those kinds of shots,” said screenwriter Scott Essman. “Where you’re going from room to room and you’re going down hallways and it’s underlit. It’s very suspenseful and you don’t know where the creature is from one moment to the next.”
* 1917 and the Trouble with WAR Movies
In an interview in 1973, the great French director Francois Truffaut told Gene Siskel that he “didn’t think [he’d] really seen an anti-war film … every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Before becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut had shaped his perceptions—and those of an extremely influential generation of readers—as a film critic; his comments, while obviously provocative, get at something troubling about the genre. Obviously, Truffaut had, at that point, seen a great many ostensible “anti-war films,” starting with Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning, paradigm-shifting World War I parable All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)—a film that 1917 pays homage to—and also including his countryman Jean Renoir’s powerful POW drama La Grande Illusion (1937). He’d have understood those movies’ scripts and sentiments as being angled against war, either in retrospect or contextualized as a preventive gesture (Renoir’s plangent plea for pan-European decency was released on the eve of World War II). But Truffaut’s awareness of the movies’ effective power led him to believe that simply showing war onscreen was tantamount to a kind of glorification. You can have characters give speeches about the horror and futility of combat, or tug at audiences’ heartstrings by killing off beloved actors, or deliberately emphasize pain and brutality, but you can never truly drain such material of its basic fascination, so that even the most skillful and poetic attempts to use the medium as a form of protest become weaponized against themselves.
(In other words - why I don't like WAR movies and have no interest in seeing 1917 in a nutshell.)
400 Years Later - The Fork Still Remains at the Center of the American Dining Controversy
How Flying Seriously Messes with Your Mind?
Doing Western Students Homework is Big Business in Kenya -- okay this may not help you much in how you view the human race..although it looked intriguing.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-04 05:14 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmIxcmVievs&t=145s
no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-04 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 02:09 am (UTC)I've seen some Japanese Anime that did a good job with it. The Japanese and the German filmmakers are great at anti-war movies interestingly enough. I'm wondering if you have to lose a war to get it? Platoon and Apcoalypse Now were sort of anti-war movies. Vietnam War created a lot of anti-war films and series.
WWII and WWI unfortunately did the opposite in the US. The US tends to glamorize or romanticize WWII and its own role in it. And WWII was a very nasty War with nasty consequences.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-04 11:04 pm (UTC)Now that would explain a lot. My friends and I have often commented on how little sense it makes that plane travel is so tiring when so much of it consists of sitting around. (Although the frequent anxiety of scheduling probably adds to it).
The Kenyan writers article presents a fascinating view of what's clearly become an industry. I wonder how much money these middlemen platforms make now compared to pre-Internet. $40 a page is quite a lot for a 10-15 page paper.
What I could see from her is that no one really taught her how to study. No one really taught her how to take notes
Students being unprepared for college work (or even high school work) is incredibly common and has been for decades now. However disadavantaged students would seem to be the least likely to be able to pay for this kind of work. So who are these students?
And the irony of it being an ethics course...
no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 01:58 am (UTC)The person who cheats doesn't care about learning the subject matter, just getting the good grade. They don't seem to understand that grades are irrelevant and just an indicator if you learned anything. They probably are narcissistic -- and see winning at any cost the goal.
I've run into a lot of people who cheated in high school and college and in the work place. They do it there too. Take short-cuts. And are unethical. Lie on resumes. They do get caught eventually. I am currently dealing with several contractors who like to cheat and pull a fast one. I spend a lot of time catching them in the act and kicking them for it, by making them redo their proposals, and follow the contract requirements.
Who are these people? They are from upper-middle class families. Privileged. Often bullied by their parents, so bullies themselves. With a lot of pressure to succeed. Usually their parents are successful and narcissistic. They tend to be white. Social. Party goers. Athletes. And they have to get into a good school and can't afford to get anything lower than an A.