Links and Thoughts 6: 13 May 2014
Wild Cherry – Electrified Funk
Good Morning.
Music Business:
“Since incorporating sales figures from SoundScan and adding the activity of streaming services like Spotify and YouTube (also a streaming service, whether or not it brands itself as one), Billboard likely has the most accurate data it’s ever had. That doesn’t make the task of breaking out self-identifying fans and their favorite songs any easier. “
Fixing the Charts : The New Yorker
TV Business:
“Of the 47 new series introduced this past TV season by the major US broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC and The CW), only 13 have been renewed for next year”
…
“Grappling with season-to-season ratings declines (only NBC showed growth this year), the networks are trying a new tactic: approaching their lineups as if they are summer movie schedules.”
Television is taking a cue from summer movie blockbusters : Quartz
I suppose this is only fair, after Hollywood went to the trouble of turning every nostalgia-laden TV show in to a movie back in the 1990s.
see also: Peak TV?
All Up In Your Business: ‘Frontline’ Doc Explores How Sept. 11 Created Today’s NSA : Fresh Air/NPR -audio at link
What?: Kenny G has become China’s goodbye music and no one knows why
Gaming: Following up on the Nintendo news links I shared on Friday –
How we’d save Nintendo : Ars Technica
“All of this feels eerily similar to the SEGA Dreamcast. An old, honorable company tried to do something special in the gaming space and failed. That company clung to first-party titles in the hopes things would turn around until they didn’t.”
The Wii U is Dead : SlashGear
Invoking the ghost of the Dreamcast… that takes me back…
The video game console wars have a surprising ongoing life in Japanese media, with not one but two ongoing fictionalizations:
- Hyperdimension Neptunia – see also: 1 – 2 – 3
- World War Blue – see also: 1 – 2
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Today’s Book Recommendation is Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (middle initials are important) – which I obviously haven’t read yet (it just came out) but I feel fairly confident in the recommendation considering this pair’s previous two books, and after hearing them talk about it in their most recent podcast. [here’s a transcript if you don’t have your ears on] [Levitt & Dubner use the word ‘bacon’ 34 times in the podcast, you know it has to be good]
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Diary entry for 13 May:
One thing I’ve been doing recently, knowing that I have a daily ‘deadline’ to write something interesting (for whatever assumed values I have for ‘interesting’), is going back to my notes.
I haven’t dug out the dusty Moleskines (yet). But there are a lot of started-and-abandoned drafts in txt documents on my harddrive, to say nothing of the random notes — files named Scratch, Whiteboard, Topics, Found, and Notes; folders with names like Sync, Misc, Queue, Arc, Notes (again), and the overloaded Temp folder; and assorted harddrive backups which no doubt have files I’ve since merged or deleted (or in rare cases, published).
What do I do with the list of headlines that were obviously meant to remind me of (one hopes at least) a short essay topic, but without any additional material? What to make of “Two Islands”? It’s on a list between “Business as Hobby” and “Wallpaper” — I actually remember what Wallpaper was supposed to be about*, and business-as-a-hobby seems obvious as well (likely a dressing-down of owners who go into business without thinking of the money, and making a plan; I’m sure I was watching Kitchen Nightmares at the time) — but “Two Islands”?
I can’t follow that anymore. And yet, I haven’t deleted it. (Who knows? Maybe I’ll remember, or come up with a new topic to go with it.)
Some of my drafts are pretty well along, but stalled — occasionally because I haven’t yet found all the sources to illustrate my points, sometimes because I can’t be arsed to properly edit it down from a drunken ramble, in at least one case because breaking news ‘stole my thunder’, but usually because I need one or two more really good ideas to make a proper post out of it. I don’t properly format these things anyway (topic, point a, point b, point c, conclusion) and maybe some high-school-taught outlining would be good for me — but that’s not how I think, or how I write.
Actually, my process is more like “Read All The Things!” — I mean, all the things, even stuff that seems off-topic — and then let my subconscious work on it until I’ve synthesized an original thought, something really interesting, a frickin’ revolution that I then can’t quite express properly in words, and I spend too much time looking for the words, and I get frustrated, or I post my literal best attempt at changing the whole world for the better and it gets ignored, or trashed.
…So probably just like everyone else’s writing process.
The backward-rifling through my notes hasn’t produced any diary entries yet (unless you count this one) but I haven’t despaired of finding some good ideas there. —M.
[image source: Randall Monroe, xkcd]
* and who knows, maybe I’ll actually write the “wallpaper” essay
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