(Thanks to Boing Boing)

- Steven

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- Steven

The post The Oxford English Dictionary Catches Up With Us! appeared first on Muse Hack.

Oh and some of us want to sell books. Hint.

But when we talk about self-publishing and its implications we usually talk quality, or technology, or market saturation. We don’t talk politics a lot because its not usually a subject that comes up.

It probably should have.

Before his son’s trial, the father of George Zimmerman has released an ebook on the case. Frankly it’s sounding like it’s filled with dog whistles about racism in the black community and kinda missing the point.  I don’t think this is going to help his son and may look exploitative.

Before I go on let me note that:
1) I consider Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin to be suspicious to say the least, but that’s what a trial is for.
2) I hate the show trial mentality.
3) Our political pundit culture hasn’t helped.

This is one of the last things I imagined coming out of the Zimmerman case. I figured after the trial there’d be the usual round of books by people capitalizing on it. I also realize I was foolish in this day and age for thinking of that.

We’re in the age of the near-instant eBook. In fact at this rate I’m surprised we don’t see more quick topical political eBooks out there.

• It’s easy to get out an eBook on your own, let alone if you have help.
• There are plenty of publishing methods available, but having Amazon’s broad focus and market makes it very easy to get work out.
• Topical subjects like the Zimmerman case make it even easier to promote books or become part of the situation.
• We’re used to a kind of “political-media” complex where politicians become commentors, popular topics find books, and more. We’re in a “mentality” of publishing based on politically charged issues, and have been ever since remainder aisles were filled with the latest quick controversial waste of paper.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised in the least to see this. In fact I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen more of political quick/topical ebooks coming out faster. My guess is we may be seeing the start of a trend.

Now, if this is a trend, and I suspect it is or will be, then I see a lot of repercussions:

1. First of all, the realm of “writing anything on politics” is big in the blogosphere. I can see that turning into political ebooks. Again, I’m surprised there’s not more of this . . . so I suspect their will be.
2. This speed of delivery in turn could well affect political situations. A blog entry is one thing, but a book gets attention and is often taken more seriously – for now.
3. For “for now” part matters. If this becomes a trend, which I suspect, and there’s an onslaught, it could well lead to political eBooks being regarded much as we regard some of the low-quality eFiction out there.
4. I suspect politicians an pundits will jump on this no matter what – a new market/method/form of attention that’s also faster.
5. This is a new vector to spread political information and misinformation, and may inform debates, elections, and of course, trials.
6. We’ve talked here about publishing indie works.  Is the realm of promoting political ePublishing any different?  Do we have any ideas at all?  Is it still evolving?

I didn’t see this coming and now I think we’re gonna see plenty of it. A good reminder we don’t always know or see what’s coming up when culture intersects technology.

- Steve

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As the resident Career Guru here (I also think of myself as the resident sex symbol, but that’s my own delusion), I’d also note something else – Hollywood exerts an irrational pull on other careers.  How many gamers base ideas on blockbusters made for balance sheets, how many writers operate under the delusion they want to write some big film, how many people want to be in the industry peripherally?  If it’s melting down, the impact will be far wider than we expect – and if it’s melting down, some people should ask where they’re getting their ideas from . . .

- Steven

The post Hollywood Is Brokener. Or something appeared first on Muse Hack.

http://gamemuse.net/talking-shop-art-of-the-deal/

- Steve

The post Jose San Mateo on Game Marketing And Deals appeared first on Muse Hack.

“Eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”

I’d have to agree.  The gamble on big pieces, spectacle, etc. has to backfire eventually – and the fallout will be fascinating.

Our own Serdar puts it simply: it’s not sustainable.

- Steven

The post Movie Meltdown? appeared first on Muse Hack.

Then I stumbled across an album by Cut Chemist with the name The Audience’s Listening. CLICK! Those three words were an encapsulation of everything I had been looking for.

Let me explain what this will all be about. —No, that would take too long. Let me sum up.

No creator works in a vacuum. Everything we do is for an audience, typically one made of our peers in the present moment. But few of us think consciously about the way we interact with that audience, or to what end. We take such interaction for granted, and we don’t delve into the mechanics of it much. As long as someone hears what we have to say, that’s enough.

This is a mistake—or maybe better to say, an oversimplification.

We have, more than at any other time in history, a staggering array of technologies, methods, and strategies for getting things out to the public at large. What we often forget is that at the other end of all this magnificent technology is another human being—someone with a limited amount of time, an attention span no more (and sometimes far less) vital than our own—whom we must make a connection with.

What’s also important is that we must, in the process of making this connection, not invalidate our very reason for doing so. We have to treat our audience as our audience, not one we hijacked away from someone else. We cannot pretend to act as if everything we make has the potential to be a blockbuster, because not everything is, and if it were it would be boring anyway.

This is the most difficult part of finding and keeping an audience: not becoming the very thing you were originally trying to compete with. Many people assume that’s the most efficient route to getting an audience: do the very thing those Big Guys Out There are doing, and everyone makes a million dollars. What this most often results in is a terrible copy of something that wasn’t worth duplicating in the first place. That’s what The Asylum does. Don’t be like that.¹

With Muse Hack now live, I’ve decided that discussion of creator-plus-audience is more important than ever. We create things because the act of creation makes us happy, but also because others can share in it. The balance—and tension—between those two drives us to do ever more interesting things, and it drives our audiences to be all the more curious about both us and the rest of what’s out there.

So hang tight. The conversation’s just begun. And the audience is listening hard.

¹ Steven would probably disagree; he finds The Asylum’s productions perversely fascinating. I just find them perverse.

The post The Audience Is Listening: Listen Up appeared first on Muse Hack.

The first adaptation came in 1964, when The Addams Family appeared on ABC as a sitcom, lasting for two seasons and sixty-five episodes. The TV show required Chas Addams to give his characters names for the first time. The series continued to show the family as being macabre, but not dysfunctional. Sure, they were bizarre and creepy, but Gomez and Morticia loved each other, in their own way. The portrayal of the family mirrored Chas Addams’ cartoons, with minor changes: Grandmama was originally Morticia’s mother, not Gomez’s; and Pugsley was more like Bart Simpson in the original one-panel cartoons.

Fast forward to 1991. By this point, most people were more familiar with the television series than the original cartoon, thanks to the magic of TV syndication. The TV series reached the magic number of sixty-five, which would allow a station to re-broadcast the series five days a week for thirteen weeks. However, adapting an adaptation can be troublesome; each iteration introduces interpretation gaps, where the portrayal of a character or even of the tone of the new work is slightly off. Part of the issue is that getting two people to agree perfectly on an interpretation is rare; everyone involved has different experiences filtering and colouring what is being seen. Yet, the original work was available.

Fortunately, the movie makers had read some of the one-panel cartoons. The cast included Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and a young Christina Ricci in her third movie role ever. Julia took John Astin’s manic portrayal of Gomez Addams and replaced the mania with intensity while still being Gomez. Ricci portrayed an older Wednesday, one that’s more devious and darker than her television counterpart. Meanwhile, Pugsley, originally played by Ken Weatherwax and portrayed by Jimmy Workman in the movie, lost his intelligence and deviousness and becamse the younger sibling. However, the sibling relationship between Wednesday and Pugsley remained intact – Wednesday would try injure Pugsley who would somehow survive and possibly enjoy what was happening.

The plot of the movie followed a scam to take advantage of Gomez and his search for his long lost brother, Fester. Hoping to cash in with a look-alike to pay off a loan shark, Gomez’s lawyer uses the loan shark’s son to pose as Fester. Through machinations, the Addamses are forced to leave their home and deal with the real world. The major problem with the movie was having the Addamses try to adjust to the mundane world, when, in the TV series and the cartoons, it was the mundane that had to make the adjustment. However, when Morticia is taken prisoner and is tortured to give up the AddamsFamily fortune, the classic macabre returns with Morticia complimenting techniques, again, coming from elements in both TV series and cartoon. The end scene, with Morticia knitting a misshapen baby’s outfit comes directly from one Chas Addams’ own cartoons. The name of the new child, Pubert, is reused from the TV series, where it was discarded because it sounded to close to “puberty” and “pubic”, words that were considered unfit for broadcast.

As an adaptation, the movie stumbled a bit by forcing the Addamses to adjust to the rest of the world, a problem corrected in the sequel Addams Family Values, where the cheerful could not stand in the way of the sardonic. However, The Addams Family movie managed to blend the style of the original cartoons with the TV series and kept the feel of both.

The movie and its sequel weren’t the only adaptations. There have been two animated series, a direct-to-video pilot, a rebooted TV series. video games, and even a stage musical. The core has always been a family who, despite their macabre ways, love each other.

Next week, heading back for a classic adaptation, The Guns of Navarone.

The post Lost in Translation 66 – The Addams Family appeared first on Muse Hack.

The-Fabulist.org is looking for volunteer slush readers … If you’d like to get involved, please email The Fabulist at readme@the-fabulist.org, and include a short note detailing your interest, experience and expectations for doing any slush reading.

Background: The Fabulist’s website relaunch has gone well. Traffic is up and we’re starting to get a goodly queue of submissions to review, of fiction and poetry. In fact, the number of submissions is starting to exceed my ability to manage them in a timely manner.

As I mentioned, we need volunteers only … The Fab is entirely volunteer run, and while we imagine a future where we pay people, writers as well as staff, that future is not yet upon us. We’ve never worked with slush readers before, so in addition to anything else, I welcome any advice on setting up slush workflow, expectations, etc.

Help him out!

- Steve

The post The Fabulist Needs Your Help! appeared first on Muse Hack.

Well that’s been over a year, Fan To Pro is now MuseHack, and I figured I’d share the repercussions now that the lack of cable has had time to become part of my life.  Or not part of my life.  Or something.

Let’s face it, cable has been part of our lives and culture, the fact we can and are leaving it is affecting our lives, our media consumption – and the technical direction of various companies.

First of all, between that last post and this I also ditched my X-Box because A) I see a value in a Home Theater PC, and B) The Microsoft’s next generation X-Box is insane.  This proved to be very easy because I never actually took time to put the Home Theater PC together, I just use my laptop plugged into my HD TV to watch Hulu and Netflix.

LESSON ONE: You can watch television perfectly fine off of a reasonably priced laptop.

This alone is kind of a game-changer if you think about it.  It now just takes one cable and rudimentary computer knowledge to ditch your cable.  It doesn’t take an HTPC or an X-Box.  It takes the laptop you got to use on vacation and you can watch television fine.

I honestly think people don’t realize how easy it is to leave cable – it takes a small amount of reading, a trip to Frys/Best Buy/Microsoft Store/Apple Store, an HD cable, and you’re done.

It would be very, very easy for leaving cable to become a kind of movement.  That’s a hint for you to do it as I’m busy.

LESSON TWO: Once you go to a Home Theater PC, or a laptop or whatever, a world of possibilities open up.

Now that I’m not only not using a console but I’m using a straight up computer, it opens a lot of possibilities.

I can browse on the system.

I have downloaded Steam and am gaming like crazy.

I can play music through it.

I can see software, novels, graphics, etc. on a big screen – my television.

Really there’s no reason not to consider computer-to-livign room TV as an option, albeit not a permanent one because of all the benefits.  Run that slideshow off your computer.  Use powerpoint to explain things to your gaming group.  Whatever, it’s easy to put a computer onto your TV.

This also makes it obvious about why Microsoft is moving towards the Living Room Media Computer.  It’s easy to do, very useful, and they want to get the hell into that space and own it.  They kind of do in my cases because it’s a Windows 8 laptop I’m using, but I’m talking in a more organized manner than Steve Has A Cable And A Plan.

LESSON THREE: The more removed you are from networks, the less you miss them.

So I don’t really miss the networks at all.  I can think of twice in the last year I’ve been frustrated by not getting ahold of certain shows, and in only one case were all my options gone.  But really I wonder why I cared in the first place.

The networks really could be in trouble in this regard.  The insane amount of content out there means that, to get attention, they either have to produce stuff that gets attention, leverage their position, or both.  Which they’re kind of doing, but still there’s a load out there – and there’s an entire WORLD out there producing video content.

LESSON FOUR: Other people care.

On the other hand having cable-using visitors, etc. gets a bit weird.  People want to watch showers, wonder if you recorded them, etc.  It takes some hunting through Netflix or Hulu or whatever, and at times people view it as a bit weird.

Our video consumption habits will change, but mass changes will be slow, need to be explained, or be understood.  Not everyone gets what I’ve done or why.

LESSON FIVE: I watch less television period.

Without habits, I’m a lot more selective viewer.  I watch less TV now simply as its not automatic.  This has been great for my time usage and time management.

LESSON SIX: My TV viewing has a purpose.

When the Cable Buffet isn’t in front of you, you start asking what you do want to watch, why, and when.  It really makes you think.

It also means I explore more as there are different boundaries and filters.

I see the ongoing change in video consumption actually bringing about similar experiences.  When you can get content via many sources and ways, what do you want to do?

IN SUMMARY:
A year later I really don’t miss cable.  I’m more selective and more focused on what I want – and it’s easy to get away from Cable thanks to computers.  We’re not in the midst of a cable-cutting revolution . . . but it would be easier than people may think, and has tangible benefits.

And if anyone’s going to push it forward?  It’ll probably be the XBox, followed by other “Boxes.” What intrigues me though is that there’s many ways to disrupt normal cable habits, so whoever disrupts it first may not be the one that finally benefits, at least directly.

- Steve

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