Boston

Not enough time at the moment to write a lot about this, but a couple of points:

1. There’s a certain painful humor in watching racists falling all over themselves to blame the people they think of as enemies. The Onion got it spot on.

2. Rather than being a victory for “indie” reporting–Reddit, Twitter, et. al.–this incident proved that the only people who should be trusted to report critical stories like this are trained, ethical journalists. And no, TV talking heads and/or people with generic “communications” degrees don’t count. Sadly, even a lot of J school grads don’t count, either, seeing as how so many of those schools in the ’80s/’90s got stuck in the “balance = objectivity” fallacy.

Journalism is about one thing: conveying accurate information to the public. Figuring out what is accurate information and who has it is something that only comes with training and experience. It’s also something that tends to go by the wayside when a given reporter/media outlet is focused too much on getting a story out quickly and/or trying to avoid the appearance of bias to pay attention to the facts. The public doesn’t care who had a story first; only who had it right. If you screw your reputation by getting it wrong, you’ll lose a lot more audience than if you hold back until you’re sure you have all the facts.

On marriage

After reading the SCOTUS Prop-8 transcript (hilariously condensed by a friend on FB), it seems the anti-same-sex-marriage argument being offered boils down to this:

Opposite-sex couples run the risk of producing children, therefore the state has an interest in enabling these couples to be legally bound, else those children could potentially be a burden on the state. There can be no other reason whatsoever why the state might want to enable a given couple an easy way to bind themselves legally and financially to each other, ergo, there is no reason the state ought to offer such a contract to same-sex couples.

This, as you may note, is slightly different than the argument that marriage is only for producing kids, which is easily shot down by counter-arguments about opposite-sex couples who are infertile or choose not to procreate. No, they’re saying that marriage is there to cover the risk of producing kids, because gosh darnit, those straight people can’t be trusted not to make their crotch droppings a burden on the taxpayer.

But here’s the problem with that: if opposite-sex couples are so scarily at risk of producing welfare-sucking bastards at the slightest provocation, then doesn’t the state have an interest in FORCING opposite-sex couples to marry? Shouldn’t they be jailing straight people who have sex before marriage? Shouldn’t they prohibit divorce for anyone who has kids?*

Of course not. Marriage is voluntary. We understand that people are free to choose it or not as they wish. So, while we can recognize that one of the benefits of state-granted marriage would be ensuring legal and financial child support, we cannot say that that’s the purpose of state-granted marriage.

That being the case, if there are more state interests involved in marriage, then limiting it to couples at risk of procreation makes no sense.

So there.

*For the record: It’s not just potential bastard children whose legal status/expensive upkeep would be a consideration under that logic. Back when women were considered property of their husbands, a legal marriage was like having a license for your dog, proving that you had legal responsibility for it. The state’s interest, in such cases, would be the financial upkeep not only of the children born out of wedlock, but the unwed mother, too (because working mothers were more or less unheard of then.) As with feral dogs, a feral unwed mother and her pups would be considered a public nuisance. Ergo: marriage laws ensuring that men kept up their responsibilities as owners of their wives and children.

Thank goodness we no longer see marriage that way, right? Right?

 

TL;DR version of the previous post

Realized I could boil my whole point down thusly:

The way entertainment is currently funded and distributed is seriously broken. This is mostly because traditional distribution channels are controlled by a very small number of very large companies, all of which aren’t interested in bothering with anything that doesn’t stand to make them a huge amount of money. Result: creatives who want to do something other than brain candy for the masses are stymied, as are audiences who might want the different stuff they’d produce. Smaller-scale distribution channels have sprung up here and there, helping to some degree, but they’re still problematic for various reasons.

However, crowdfunding and digital distribution have now made it possible for creatives to get their stuff to audiences with a minimum of middlemen in the way, and that’s revolutionizing the field. The big guys still have their purposes–large-scale works need large-scale funding and distribution–but a whole new landscape of indie entertainment is now coming to life. Yay for that!

Unfortunately, the big guys see their chokehold loosening, and therefore want in on this and are finding ways to horn in on what should be simple, direct transactions between creative and audience. I generally hate to make slippery-slope arguments, but if we don’t want the indie landscape to turn into the same old behemoths, said behemoths need to be shown the door, and reminded that they already have their own, enormous sand box in which to play.

Again, I want to stress that I’m not anti-corporation. They have their purposes. But if they control all means of funding and distribution, niche markets simply don’t get served. That’s as true for someone wanting to sell allergen-free baked goods at a farmers market as it is for someone wanting to write books about LGBT PoCs. Underserved markets are ignored by the big guys because they’re not lucrative enough. It’s therefore critical, if we want those markets to be served, to ensure that alternate means of funding and production remain untainted by the involvement of mass-market corps.

Kickstarter, Veronica Mars and You

First, a few disclaimers: 1. I’m not a Veronica Mars fan, and therefore have no stake in the outcome of the Kickstarter campaign to fund a VM movie. 2. I’m an official part of the street team for an actor/indie filmmaker who uses merch sales and direct donations to run his production company. 3. I’m a self-published author. 4. I left journalism because there was no way to make a living in it without selling my soul, since virtually all news media is controlled by a handful of large corps.

Now that that’s out of the way …

Today’s Tweetstorm was about the aforementioned Kickstarter project, and a subsequent article in the Atlantic grousing about the idea in a ridiculous way. In among the blather about art for art’s sake (Really? How about journalism for journalism’s sake, Sparky?) he did have a point: Warner Brothers has no business at all being involved in this, even just on the distribution end, and Kickstarters involving other corps or big-name folks who have access to other kinds of funding are really missing the point of crowdfunding.

As I’ve mentioned before, just because a given creative sort has had a measure of mass-market success doesn’t guarantee that they’re rich and can bleed money for their next project. The actor/filmmaker I mention above has quite a few credits to his name, but none of it was huge blockbuster stuff; he’s not swimming in cash, and therefore asking fans to help fund his filmmaking is reasonable. Likewise, it’s reasonable for a well-known name to crowdfund small-scale projects that aren’t in line with their usual area of work: Say, a TV writer going in on a graphic-novel project, or experimenting with a web series. It’s also reasonable for big names to lend their higher profile to indie artists for a given project. A well-known actor agreeing to do some film student’s senior project for next to no pay is perfectly fine. But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is that WB is abusing a system meant to fund indie artists because they’re seeing entertainment dollars flow away from them and other large-scale middlemen, and they want it back.

Mind officially blown

On a lark last month, I submitted Thunderstone for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. I was shocked when it made the first cut, so imagine my surprise to discover it also just made the quarterfinals. Wow! Needless to say, I’m tickled, and now really have a jones to finish polishing up novel #2 (the one for which I posted an excerpt a while back) and get it off to my editor. Alas, that my kid is still taking 90% of my bandwidth at the moment, so writing will have to wait for a bit longer. Fortunately, the hubster’s official family leave starts mid-April, so I suspect I’ll spend a significant chunk of that four weeks holed up in my office, happily drowning in writerbrain.

Parental leave, sort of

As mentioned below: I have a new tiny human in the house who has taken most of my waking hours (and several of the sleeping ones, too) which is leaving me with a bad case of Diaper Brain, and thus unable to ponder the cultural imponderables I usually write about here. However, I do have a bunch of kid-related blather to get out (I can’t not write–I’d go off the deep end), so to that end, I started up another blog for such topics: The Earthling.

Parenting will undoubtedly inspire plenty of thinking about media, politics and culture, too, so I’ll be back on this side eventually. Will also be doing more novel writing, as I have one that just needs a bit of polish before I send it off to my editor. Hoping to get that one published late Spring or so. Until then, however, if you can’t stand the idea of not reading my sparkling prose, and don’t shrivel up like a raisin when thinking about kids, please join me on my other blog. :)

Welcome, Terran

Say hello to the reason I’ve not been posting lately!

Our new son was born Sunday afternoon, and just came home with us last night. Needless to say, we’re both sleep-deprived and zombiefied, but happy.

Lots I want to post about related to this: gender stuff, adoption stuff, etc., but will need to wait until I’ve caught up a bit more. :)