#Bill (Television Executive)

[elleven-news]

Trump and Paramount Seek Mediator for CBS News Lawsuit

Lawyers for Paramount and President Trump have agreed to appoint a mediator in his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. The move to bring in a mediator is another indicator that the two sides are trying to resolve the case, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, out of court. A mediator could help them…

[oristian]

In the United States, there is a very big, “Well, what about me?” complex that dictates much of how people go about their day, make their decisions, and vote for the next president. The thought process has always been formatted around placing the needs of yourself above those of everyone else. Which, inherently, is not a bad thing; everyone is allowed to be selfish.

It becomes a “bad thing” when the needs of others are being actively suppressed and threatened by the current administration. It becomes a “bad thing” when the candidate in which you endorsed, voted for, and actively support has an agenda written on the basis of hate. It becomes a “bad thing” when the rights of all citizens—including those that had been selfish—are placed in a state of jeopardy.

In the last forty-eight hours, Donald Trump has signed executive orders that pardoned t*rrorists (anyone who engaged and/or actively supported the insurrection on January 6th, you are a t*rrorist), removed the United States from climate treaties and health organizations, removed access to a government-ran website structured around female healthcare and reproductive resources, removed access to an app that helps prospective migrants come into this country legally, removed a bill that lowered the cost of life-saving medication, actively discriminated against the LGBTQ+ community on the inaugural podium, removed a law that prohibited employment discrimination based on race/sex/age/etc., is attempting to remove birthright citizenship, et cetera. The list is as endless as it is terrifying.

All of this for lower gas and grocery prices? Oh, well, actually, that will not be possible given the implementation of the External Revenue Service that seeks to use tariffs for exports/imports. Where do people believe that money will come from to pay those tariffs? Hint: It is not the country being charged the tariff.

When the whole first row at the inauguration seats the billionaires of this country—and the ones running our social media platforms—that is a red flag. When the president of the United States is chummy with some of the most deplorable world leaders known to man, that is a red flag. When the current president has multiple charges against him (and lost in court) which legally classifies him as a r*pist, that is a red flag. When the president willing admits to election fraud at the hands of the man who willingly performed, two times, a N*zi salute on live television during the inauguration, that is a red flag.

A flag red enough to match the hats of those who have the blood of America on their hands.

Is it great again yet?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Podcasting "Microincentives and Enshittification"

Tomorrow (Oct 25) at 10hPT/18hUK, I'm livestreaming an event called "Seizing the Means of Computation" for the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "Microincentives and Enshittification," about the way that monopoly drives mediocrity, with Google's declining quality as Exhibit A:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

It's not your imagination: Google used to be better – in every way. Search used to be better, sure, but Google used to be better as a company. It treated its workers better (for example, not laying off 12,000 workers months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years). It had its users' backs in policy fights – standing up for Net Neutrality and the right to use encryption to keep your private data private. Even when the company made ghastly mistakes, it repented of them and reversed them, like the time it pulled out of China after it learned that Chinese state hackers had broken into Gmail in order to discover which dissidents to round up and imprison.

None of this is to say that Google used to be perfect, or even, most of the time, good. Just that things got worse. To understand why, we have to think about how decisions get made in large organizations, or, more to the point, how arguments get resolved in these organizations.

We give Google a lot of shit for its "Don't Be Evil" motto, but it's worth thinking through what that meant for the organization's outcomes over the years. Through most of Google's history, the tech labor market was incredibly tight, and skilled engineers and other technical people had a lot of choice as to where they worked. "Don't Be Evil" motivated some – many – of those workers to take a job at Google, rather than one of its rivals.

Within Google, that meant that decisions that could colorably be accused of being "evil" would face some internal pushback. Imagine a product design meeting where one faction proposes something that is bad for users, but good for the company's bottom line. Think of another faction that says, "But if we do that, we'll be 'evil.'"

I think it's safe to assume that in any high-stakes version of this argument, the profit side will prevail over the don't be evil side. Money talks and bullshit walks. But what if there were also monetary costs to being evil? Like, what if Google has to worry about users or business customers defecting to a rival? Or what if there's a credible reason to worry that a regulator will fine Google, or Congress will slap around some executives at a televised hearing?

That lets the no-evil side field a more robust counterargument: "Doing that would be evil, and we'll lose money, or face a whopping fine, or suffer reputational harms." Even if these downsides are potentially smaller than the upsides, they still help the no-evil side win the argument. That's doubly true if the downsides could depress the company's share-price, because Googlers themselves are disproportionately likely to hold Google stock, since tech companies are able to get a discount on their wage-bills by paying employees in abundant stock they print for free, rather than the scarce dollars that only come through hard graft.

When the share-price is on the line, the counterargument goes, "That would be evil, we will lose money, and you will personally be much poorer as a result." Again, this isn't dispositive – it won't win every argument – but it is influential. A counterargument that braids together ideology, institutional imperatives, and personal material consequences is pretty robust.

Which is where monopoly comes in. When companies grow to dominate their industries, they are less subject to all forms of discipline. Monopolists don't have to worry about losing disgusted employees, because they exert so much gravity on the labor market that they find it easy to replace them.

They don't have to worry about losing customers, because they have eliminated credible alternatives. They don't have to worry about losing users, because rivals steer clear of their core business out of fear of being bigfooted through exclusive distribution deals, predatory pricing, etc. Investors have a name for the parts of the industry dominated by Big Tech: they call it "the kill zone" and they won't back companies seeking to enter it.

When companies dominate their industries, they find it easier to capture their regulators and outspend public prosecutors who hope to hold them to account. When they lose regulatory fights, they can fund endless appeals. If they lose those appeals, they can still afford the fines, especially if they can use an army of lawyers to make sure that the fine is less than the profit realized through the bad conduct. A fine is a price.

In other words, the more dominant a company is, the harder it is for the good people within the company to win arguments about unethical and harmful proposals, and the worse the company gets. The internal culture of the company changes, and its products and services decline, but meaningful alternatives remain scarce or nonexistent.

Back to Google. Google owns more than 90% of the search market. Google can't grow by adding more Search users. The 10% of non-Google searchers are extremely familiar with Google's actions. To switch to a rival search engine, they have had to take many affirmative, technically complex steps to override the defaults in their devices and tools. It's not like an ad extolling the virtues of Google Search will bring in new customers.

Having saturated the search market, Google can only increase its Search revenues by shifting value from searchers or web publishers to itself – that is, the only path to Search growth is enshittification. They have to make things worse for end users or business customers in order to make things better for themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

This means that each executive in the Search division is forever seeking out ways to shift value to Google and away from searchers and/or publishers. When they propose a enshittificatory tactic, Google's market dominance makes it easy for them to win arguments with their teammates: "this may make you feel ashamed for making our product worse, but it will not make me poorer, it will not make the company poorer, and it won't chase off business customers or end users, therefore, we're gonna do it. Fuck your feelings."

After all, each microenshittification represents only a single Jenga block removed from the gigantic tower that is Google Search. No big deal. Some Google exec made the call to make it easier for merchants to buy space overtop searches for their rivals. That's not necessarily a bad thing: "Thinking of taking a vacation in Florida? Why not try Puerto Rico – it's a US-based Caribbean vacation without the transphobia and racism!"

But this kind of advertising also opens up lots of avenues for fraud. Scammers clone local restaurants' websites, jack up their prices by 15%, take your order, and transmit it to the real restaurant, pocketing the 15%. They get clicks by using some of that rake to buy an ad based on searches for the restaurant's name, so they show up overtop of it and rip off inattentive users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

This is something Google could head off; they already verify local merchants by mailing them postcards with unique passwords that they key into a web-form. They could ban ads for websites that clone existing known merchants, but that would incur costs (engineer time) and reduce profits, both from scammers and from legit websites that trip a false positive.

The decision to sell this kind of ad, configured this way, is a direct shift of value from business customers (restaurants) and end-users (searchers) to Google. Not only that, but it's negative sum. The money Google gets from this tradeoff is less than the cost to both the restaurant (loss of goodwill from regulars who are affronted because of a sudden price rise) and searchers (who lose 15% on their dinner orders). This trade-off makes everyone except Google worse off, and it's only possible when Google is the only game in town.

It's also small potatoes. Last summer, scammers figured out how to switch out the toll-free numbers that Google displayed for every airline, redirecting people to boiler-rooms where con-artists collected their credit-card numbers and sensitive personal information (passports, etc):

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

Here again, we see a series of small compromises that lead to a massive harm. Google decided to show users 800 numbers rather than links to the airlines' websites, but failed to fortify the process for assigning phone numbers to prevent this absolutely foreseeable type of fraud. It's not that Google wanted to enable fraud – it's that they created the conditions for the fraud to occur and failed to devote the resources necessary to defend against it.

Each of these compromises indicates a belief among Google decision-makers that the consequences for making their product worse will be outweighed by the value the company will generate by exposing us to harm. One reason for this belief is on display in the DOJ's antitrust case against Google:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1328941/download

The case accuses Google of spending tens of billions of dollars to buy out the default search position on every platform where an internet user might conceivably perform a search. The company is lighting multiple Twitters worth of dollars on fire to keep you from ever trying another search engine.

Spraying all those dollars around doesn't just keep you from discovering a better search engine – it also prevents investors from funding that search engine in the first place. Why fund a startup in the kill-zone if no one will ever discover that it exists?

https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android

Of course, Google doesn't have to grow Search to grow its revenue. Hypothetically, Google could pursue new lines of business and grow that way. This is a tried-and-true strategy for tech giants: Apple figured out how to outsource its manufacturing to the Pacific Rim; Amazon created a cloud service, Microsoft figured out how to transform itself into a cloud business.

Look hard at these success stories and you discover another reason that Google – and other large companies – struggle to grow by moving into adjacent lines of business. In each case – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon – the exec who led the charge into the new line of business became the company's next CEO.

In other words: if you are an exec at a large firm and one of your rivals successfully expands the business into a new line, they become the CEO – and you don't. That ripples out within the whole org-chart: every VP who becomes an SVP, every SVP who becomes an EVP, and every EVP who becomes a president occupies a scarce spot that it worth millions of dollars to the people who lost it.

The one thing that execs reliably collaborate on is knifing their ambitious rivals in the back. They may not agree on much, but they all agree that that guy shouldn't be in charge of this lucrative new line of business.

This "curse of bigness" is why major shifts in big companies are often attended by the return of the founder – think of Gates going back to Microsoft or Brin returning to Google to oversee their AI projects. They are the only execs that other execs can't knife in the back.

This is the real "innovator's dilemma." The internal politics of large companies make Machiavelli look like an optimist.

When your company attains a certain scale, any exec's most important rival isn't the company's competitor – it's other execs at the same company. Their success is your failure, and vice-versa.

This makes the business of removing Jenga blocks from products like Search even more fraught. These quality-degrading, profit-goosing tactics aren't coordinated among the business's princelings. When you're eating your seed-corn, you do so in private. This secrecy means that it's hard for different product-degradation strategists to realize that they are removing safeguards that someone else is relying on, or that they're adding stress to a safety measure that someone else just doubled the load on.

It's not just Google, either. All of tech is undergoing a Great Enshittening, and that's due to how intertwined all these tech companies. Think of how Google shifts value from app makers to itself, with a 30% rake on every dollar spent in an app. Google is half of the mobile duopoly, with the other half owned by Apple. But they're not competitors – they're co-managers of a cartel. The single largest deal that Google or Apple does every year is the bribe Google pays Apple to be the default search for iOS and Safari – $15-20b, every year.

If Apple and Google were mobile competitors, you'd expect them to differentiate their products, but instead, they've converged – both Apple and Google charge sky-high 30% payment processing fees to app makers.

Same goes for Google/Facebook, the adtech duopoly: not only do both companies charge advertisers and publishers sky-high commissions, clawing 51 cents out of every ad dollar, but they also illegally colluded to rig the market and pay themselves more, at advertisers' and publishers' expense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

It's not just tech, either – every sector from athletic shoes to international sea-freight is concentrated into anti-competitive, value-annihilating cartels and monopolies:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

As our friends on the right are forever reminding us: "incentives matter." When a company runs out of lands to conquer, the incentives all run one direction: downhill, into a pit of enshittification. Google got worse, not because the people in it are worse (or better) than they were before – but because the constraints that discipline the company and contain its worst impulses got weaker as the company got bigger.

Here's the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/23/microincentives-and-enshittification/

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_452/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_452_-_Microincentives_and_Enshittification.mp3

And here's my podcast's RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

[disneydarlin]

Gravity Falls: Grunkle Stan—Aesthetic

Stanley "Stan" Pines' Character & Personality

Stan is a man in his sixties who's fifteen minutes younger than his twin brother. He's the great uncle and summer guardian of the Pines' twins as the paternal uncle to Mr. Pines. Stan exploits Gravity Falls' local lore and the tourists' gullibility to finance himself by running the dubious Mystery Shack. He represents the oyster symbol in the Bill Cipher Zodiac, as it presents his fez. Stan is a wise, charismatic and highly manipulative salesman. He conducts his business with surprising flair and wit. When not planning or executing money-making schemes, legal and illegal, Stan is usually at home watching television. His preferred shows include Cash Wheel, Duck-tective and period dramas. In addition, Stan enjoys fishing. His most noticeable traits are his greed and selfishness. Stan's greatest desire is to be rich. He sees tourists as easy cash and nothing more. However, this obsession stems from the harsh, poverty-stricken life Stan led after being disowned by his father. While his trickery might appear unremarkable to some, his cunning transcends his Mr. Mystery persona: he's able to figure out plots on numerous occasions and can outwit others. Although Stan was written off as unintelligent, he's capable of restoring a universe portal and operating its computer. Beyond this, he has a deep sense of family loyalty. Stan will do anything a family member asks and dedicate himself to the task no matter how long it takes to accomplish. He's also quite protective of his niece and nefew, despite the morally ambiguous situations he occasionally puts them in. Stan will even defend them against other relatives who might harm them. Overall, he'll do anything to keep his loved ones safe. Despite his lengthy history as a con artist, Stan has a compulsion to state his honest opinions on the subject at hand.

[fans4wga]

August 4 - Hollywood Food Insecurity Spikes Amid Strikes

The entertainment industry’s most vulnerable workers are increasingly unable to feed themselves amid a historic double strike with no clear end in sight, according to non-profits tasked with addressing the food insecurity crisis. They describe Hollywood’s ongoing work stoppage — prompted by the contractual impasse between the writing and acting guilds on one side and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on the other — as a humanitarian emergency broadly affecting the community, not just striking union members.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which runs pantries for those in need throughout the county, attributes a meaningful portion of its nine percent uptick in year-over-year distribution to the strikes’ impact. “When income stops immediately, the demand rises very rapidly,” explains chief development officer Roger Castle.

“This is happening right after the pandemic, which drained a lot of people’s savings,” observes Keith McNutt, executive director at the Entertainment Community Fund, which has distributed $3 million to more than 1,500 workers as of Aug. 1. “So, you have the financial burden on people who’ve already been depleted.” As a result, his organization — whose donors include Seth McFarlane, Steven Spielberg, and Greg Berlanti — has seen an unprecedented wave of immediate requests for basic living expenses, including groceries. “Before this started, we would do about 50 grants out of the L.A. office a week. Now we’re getting 50 applications a day.”

On July 28, below-the-line unions IATSE and the Teamsters Local 399 held a drive-through food drive for industry members affected by the strikes at IATSE’s West Coast headquarters in Burbank. It drew about a thousand vehicles throughout the day.

According to the relief nonprofit Labor Community Services, which helped to organize the event and is planning another in August, the organization distributed 1,740 food boxes, feeding an estimated 8,700 people, that day.

In California, striking workers are ineligible to receive unemployment assistance, while nationally, they cannot receive SNAP food benefits unless they qualified pre-strike — something Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is aiming to change with a new bill, introduced July 27. One place that striking actors in particular can turn to for help during the work stoppage is the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, which offers emergency financial assistance and other resources, including grocery store gift cards, to union members. SAG-AFTRA made a seven-figure donation to the Foundation early in its strike to assist these efforts. (The WGA West does provide its own members with emergency financial loans from its strike fund and Good and Welfare fund.)

Cyd Wilson, its executive director, has seen an explosion in demand for the organization’s help. “People are making these decisions: Should pay my rent, or should I put food on the table? Should I put food on the table, or should I pay my utilities?” she explains. “There’s a great deal of suffering that’s happening.” By Wilson’s estimate, the foundation is now handling 40 times its typical number of applications per week, and it has already distributed as much in grants since the beginning of the WGA’s strike three months ago as it typically would in the span of a given year.

Meanwhile, Groceries for Writers, a direct aid project administered by Humanitas, a non-profit focused on film and television writers, has distributed more than 1,100 gift cards to WGA members since the onset of its work stoppage in early May. Humanitas executive director Michelle Franke says that “many of these writers have left notes indicating they’re in very urgent financial situations. Writers describe struggling with student debt, falling into eligibility gaps with CalFresh and EDD [state unemployment assistance], eviction notices, writing teams splitting low pay, having only just moved to Los Angeles and not having a large local support network as a consequence, dwindling savings.”

Groceries for Writers is hardly alone in addressing the growing need. In July, L.A.’s World Harvest Food Bank founder and CEO Glen Curado estimated to The Hollywood Reporter that his organization, which is offering free food to striking writers and actors, was serving an average of 150-200 members of this group per day. That effort was inspired by The Price Is Right host Drew Carey’s gesture of paying for all striking writers dining at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank and L.A.’s Swingers Diner for the duration of the work stoppage.

THR asked both the AMPTP and the talent unions whether they bear any responsibility for the worsening situation. In a statement, a spokesperson for the AMPTP said: “Like those negotiating on behalf of the guilds, representatives from the AMPTP and its member companies came to the table in good faith, wanting to reach an agreement that would keep the industry working and prevent the hardships caused by labor strikes.” SAG-AFTRA didn’t respond to a request for comment, while a WGA spokesperson said in a statement: “The public knows that working people are putting everything on the line in order to negotiate a fair deal with the studios who have caused this strike and the resultant suffering by refusing to address the reasonable proposals that writers brought to the table over 90 days ago.” Neither the AMPTP itself nor any of its major studio and streamer members responded when THR asked if the companies or their philanthropic arms had made any contributions specifically to address the industry’s food insecurity crisis since May.

Support staffers — early-career workers who fill roles such as assistants and coordinators and tend to be low-paid — are especially at risk at this time. “So much of the compensation that they receive is, no one’s going to say it, but it’s implied to be food-based,” notes Liz Hsiao Lan Alper, the co-founder of advocacy group Pay Up Hollywood and a WGA West board member. Alper says that support staffers are often paid the “bare minimum” but access complimentary food through writers’ rooms, craft services on sets or in agency kitchens and conference rooms. And so, when the strikes occurred, the need was “overwhelming,” she explains: “It’s invisible compensation that just went away when the work stoppages happened.”

For that reason, on June 7 Pay Up Hollywood relaunched its COVID-19-era Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund. So far, the fund has distributed around $45,000 in one-time financial need grants up to $1,000 apiece, according to organizer and support staffer Alex Rubin, who says she’s encouraged support staffers to obtain free food distributed on picket lines. “I think that there is a little bit of embarrassment and insecurity about not being able to feed yourself,” she says. “It is the reason why we give our grants as just like, ‘Here’s a one-time grant. You don’t have to tell us how you want to use this.’”

Helping people in entertainment with food during work stoppages is a “tangible message,” says James Costello, a Teamsters Local 399 driver and an IATSE Local 44 prop master, who was volunteering at IATSE’s July 28 food drive. A second-generation Teamster, Costello still remembers a union strike in the 1980s that prompted his parents to warn their children that their Christmas holiday would be affected that year, and the Teamsters emergency relief that arrived in the fall, offering groceries and a Christmas tree.

As the strikes drag on and both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have yet to formally reprise negotiations with the AMPTP (although the Writers Guild is set to have a preliminary meeting with the studios’ organization on Aug. 4), the non-profits on the front lines of the industry’s food-insecurity crisis are girding themselves for a long period of need. SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Wilson says it’s pursuing a “very aggressive fundraising strategy” to meet the demand. (Already, it’s netted over $15 million in emergency assistance from stars like George Clooney, Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon and Dwayne Johnson, who are donating $1 million or more apiece.)

The Entertainment Community Fund’s McNutt notes that pocketbook pain will outlast the current conflict. “Just because the strike ends, it doesn’t mean the need will end. Everyone doesn’t go back to work the next week. We’re going to be looking at this [elevated] level of need for months afterward.”

Give to the Entertainment Community Fund

Give to Humanitas' Groceries for Writers

Give to the Green Envelope Grocery Aid mutual aid fund

[eregyrn-falls]

Gravity Falls Revival Prospects Teased by Disney TV Boss (Exclusive)

By Russ Milheim Posted: June 05, 2024

(From "The Direct", original article linked above.) While Gravity Falls may have ended in 2014 on the Disney Channel, fans are still hoping for a revival—thankfully, that doesn't look too far out of reach, at least according to an update from a top Disney executive. The series may have ended in 2014, but since then, creator Alex Hirsch has published several books in the universe. This included Gravity Falls: Tales of the Strange and Unexplained, Lost Legends, and Journal 3. In fact, another book is even coming out later this year, called The Book of Bill, which tells the story of the show from the perspective of the big bad. However, while books are great and all, a continuation of the show would absolutely thrill the franchise’s fanbase. In an exclusive interview with The Direct’s Russ Milheim while promoting the release of Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation, Executive Vice President of Television Animation and Disney Branded Television Meredith Roberts gave a hopeful update on a possible Gravity Falls revival. She confirmed that they’re “in conversations with [creator] Alex [Hirsch]” before ending with an encouraging “never say never:” “You know, we're in conversations with Alex. He's about to publish a book with Disney on his project. And we also do some shorts. So never say never.”

What Could Be Next for Gravity Falls? While the update is a small one, plenty of fans will be thrilled to see even a slight glimmer of home. Sure, the new book releases are exciting, but not nearly as much as having the show back. If the show were to return, creator Alex Hirsch would likely want to introduce a new threat other than Bill. Admittedly, that's a high bar to clear. Perhaps a continuation would also age its leading characters, Dipper and Mabel. However, having older leads could transform Gravity Falls into a much different, more adult-based narrative. Either way, there's plenty of demand from fans to see the world of Gravity Falls again. Hopefully, that's something Disney can capitalize on sooner rather than later.

Since this is going around, and I haven't seen it posted here... well, here you go. What does it mean? Nobody knows! It may not mean anything. It's hard to tell whether this is just a Disney exec making noises for promotional purposes or what. I honestly would take this with a grain of salt until or unless Alex himself posts or tweets about it.

(My own thoughts: to be worthwhile, I strongly feel that any new Gravity Falls content would need to have the involvement of Alex Hirsch AND a good chunk of the other folks who worked on the show. People like Rob Renzetti, and others like Matt Braly, Alonso Ramirez Ramos, Emmy Ciceriega, Dana Terrace, Matt Chapman, Jeff Rowe, etc. etc. It would probably be difficult to impossible to get everyone back, unless it was for a very limited project, like a TV-movie or something.

I'm not saying they would ALL need to be back, and I do also think you could find some new folks to work on the project who would be very good replacements for some of the original crew who might not be able to come back. But, I've said many, many times: Gravity Falls was not the work of only one man. I respect the hell out of Alex Hirsch, but, the show that we love had contributions from a lot of other people that went into creating the final product. If what we want is something as good as the original show, then I think it would need input from those people.

And even then, we still have to keep in mind that it can be difficult to recapture lightning in a bottle. Even if they got back a majority of the original team, it's 10 years later (ish), and all of those folks have been through a lot, and most haven't been working with each other. There's a groove that the crew of the show got into at the time, and they'd have to recapture that groove. It would be different in at least SOME ways. Maybe a GOOD different! A lot would depend on the enthusiasm they had for doing it.)

So, we'll see! Keep an eye out, though, for more news.

[roxannepolice]

Rant 3/phantom pains of Schrödinger's lore in ChibnallWho/"the history between" doesn't mean much to the author. that is, it does. but it doesn't. but it does. but not really. but./can someone in the group chat please read my time sensitive questions I posted 25 hours ago?

Between bracing myself to finally open the advisors reviewed thesis, waiting for anyone at work to give a newbie a hint, and reading a fairly good criticism of the political stance in ChibnallWho, I guess it's a good time to let go off some steam about this era. Now, an important clarification for tumblr: when I criticize the show, I am not in any way bashing on people who enjoy it! Good for you, and that's why I try to tag these appropriately.

But yeah, this is going to go deep into what I mean when I say the writing in this era is just bad, something even its defenders sometimes concede. This often turns into dicussions of political/social messaging in seasons 11-13, which is as fair criticism as any. Yes, it often veered into confusing to downright appalling. But for me, that's not what "bad writing" means. You can make an excellent story about a likeable rapist and murderer. You can make compelling propaganda of pretty much any economic stance (well, maybe except for "the solution to problems with Amazon is to blow up their trucks so now everything has to be delivered on foot I guess", that's something straight from Monty Python). And of course, the "too woke" "criticisms" aren't anything valid like at all.

No, for me the bad writing in ChibnallWho lies in the general sense of confusion as to who exactly is the target audience here: someone who's very well acquaintanced with the lore(s), or someone who's completely new to the show. Now, this is also inspired by some criticisms of RTD2 is that it is too expository, leading into the show-within-a-show theorizing. And of course, exposition can be done well or not-so-well, and there's good argument some parts of exposition in s14 were on the nose. But the thing about a television series, especially one as long as Doctor Who, is that any episode can be someone's first - and the writer's job is to make it so it won't be their last. What this means is that the audience needs to be provided the information necessary to grasp at least the emotional level of the story, if not every bit of earlier lore logic. In the case of Doctor Who there's also a part of establishing which part of the lore is valid to the story at hand, considering that both within the show itself, but also the huge multimedia lore, there are bound to be contradictions. And that's ok! You have a good story idea that will require a retcon for a better pay off, go for it! Like, if you really think the Doctor should get to save Gallifrey for their 50th birthday, then go ahead, just reduce the Time War to a local conflict between Time Lords and Daleks instead of underlining just how widespread across time and space it was, and logistically impossible to contain by removing one party (this is one of the many cases of "I don't like what Moffat did, but I agree the execution is functional").

Basically, Lancelot having an affair with Guinevre isn't relevant to him storming a wedding and killing mortally wounding giving a fleshwound to the bride's father.

So, essentially my issue with ChibnallWho writing is simultaneously trying to cut itself off from lore/earlier seasons, while relying on it for any emotional pay off. To give a counterexample from this very era's one of best written episodes: when the Doctor goes on about what being turned into a Cyberman means and that she won't lose anyone else to that, that's bloody powerful! And it's powerful regardless of whether you know it's specifically about Bill, or just go on the information provided within the episode - that the Doctor lost someone to this. Unfortunately, The Haunting of Villa Diodati is an honourable exception in this and many other aspects.

So, to start from the beginning. There's a frequent criticism that team TARDIS was overcrowded in seasons 11 and 12 with three companions, to which an immediate defense is that it's not the first time there were three companions at once. Fine. But combine this with the following: it's not just three companions introduced at once, it's three companions introduced at once, plus a brand new Doctor, plus a brand new sonic, plus a brand new TARDIS interior (that's absent for nearly full two first episodes). So you're basically left with four strangers and no point of reference in your getting to know them. And by no point of reference, I mean something that I haven't noticed anyone else pointing out: Thirteen is literally the first Doctor since One to have no established elements in their first season, at all (barring the TARDIS and sonic, again, completely redesigned).

It's a bit hard to discuss One to Two regeneration relying only on stills and audio, but Polly and Ben are there to act as audience proxies for this Beatle-hairstyled guy with a recorder being the old man he was a moment ago. Three's first season all revolves around UNIT, established in Two's era. Four inherits UNIT and Sarah Jane. Five inherits Adric, Nyssa, Tegan and the Master for his welcome. Six has Peri. Seven has Mel, the Master and the Rani. Eight's movie is all about the Master. Even the reboot for Nine has the Nastene consciousness as a hello and the whole season revolving around the Daleks. Ten gets Rose and Tylers, and Cybermen, and Daleks, and Sarah Jane, and K-9. Eleven gets the previously established River Song and a Classic Who villain reunion in the season finale. Twelve gets Clara. Thirteen gets.... Twelve's suit that she should have stayed in and Daleks, nearly three months from her first episode.

And the thing is, I understand how this would have appeared to be a good idea on paper! Complaints about the show getting lost up it's own self-referential ass have been around for years by this point, and even Moffat tried to go for a soft reboot in s10. Chibs literally asking him to set the TARDIS on fire is as symbolic a new beginning as they get. A bold, intriguing idea. As is trying to explore Titanic with nothing but a snorkel.

Because in practice it had two fundamental flaws, one more general and one specific to the story as it unfolded. The general one has been hinted at: this is basically why there's the sense of overcrowding on the TARDIS, while also leaving the audience feeling they don't really know anyone on board. Are we getting to know the new Doctor from the companions' perspective? The companions from the Doctor's? The new villain (and a really unfamiliar one, Toothboy isn't a familiar threat like plastic pollution metaphor or pshysically inevitable end of the world) from an alien's or humans' perspective? The new worlds from all of theirs? We sort of end up relating most to Grace, except she dies in the first episode. The thing is, it is in confrontation with the established that we learn most about the characters. Nothing characterizes Nine more than his interactions with the Daleks, going from torturing one to deciding he can't commit another planetary destruction to stop them. Basically, between a kind straight Black navy officer and a White lesbian strangling her wife in a jealous rage, you're likelier to recognize Othello in the latter. Something tells me this is why RTD had Fifteen interact with another Doctor, Donna, Mel, Kate, UNIT, the Toymaker and even toothied Master before sending him on his own merry way.

The second problem has more to do with the direction the story actually went in. Because just from the above, and indeed after s11 it was a frequent praise of the era, it would look like Chibs is going for something easily accessible to new audiences. Great. But then comes s12 and basically all of the emotional pay off comes from the audience's attitude to the the lore! Or, maybe I'll put it this way: all charitable interpretations of it are rooted in not only lore literacy, but specific readings of established lore. And not only is the lore hardly established for the newcomers, but it's also not established which parts are to be cherry picked for the returning audience. Nowhere is it better visible than in Fugitive!Doctor's TARDIS being a police box. This was clearly meant to tell the audience yes, this is indeed the Doctor's TARDIS, but if you know how much of a deal pre-Hartnell Doctors would be, you'd also know the TARDIS doesn't just look like a police box, it was stuck looking like one in 1963. And so we end up with secret third Doctor theories between classic series 6 and 7.

And this is the fundamental problem with the timeless child. It shakes the lore to the core, but without establishing what this lore is, and how the audience is supposed to feel about it. Oh, you can go for post-colonial criticisms, but that relies on you reading the Time Lords as the british empire, a reading not clear to all of the audience, as exhibited by an actual academic article (because yes, I spent my hard earned money on a collection of academic articles about ChibnallWho and no I absolutely won't share a pdf should anyone dm me) written by an author more rooted in feminist than post-colonial critical theories seeing the new origin of Time Lords as replacing a masculine creatio ex nihilo ethos by that of a feminine explorer-scientist [appreciative]. You're basically supposed to get a phantom pain of a lore that's both alive and dead until observed, the presumed intention being that you will have a positive or negative feelings about the cat, without considering most people will be either abstractly impressed by the metaphor, or equally abstractly disturbed by animal abuse. It's criticising the roman empire by debunking it being founded by Mars's children raised by a she-wolf.

And this is also visible in the Doctor's own reaction to the revelation, which I guess you might argue is complex, but I would say it's more shifting from establishing moment to establishing moment. She goes from being shocked by it (again, no part of the text informed me I shouldn't cherry pick her characterization as including calling Time Lords the most rotten civilization in the universe, also is it even established that's the second time Gallifrey was destroyed?), to describing it as empowering, to apparently not thinking about it for 100 years, to having an identity crisis, to stating her identity is about what she does, to bemoaning the could-have-beens, to deciding she doesn't want to know, to her deepest desire being wanting to know it after all (the vision of ttc in potd). Like, come on, not finding your glasses means your room is messy, not complex. The effect is infantilizing more than anything else, I mean it's been what, three months since the last time a villain informed a heroine she has an epic origin that's also very horrible in The rise of Skywalker? Which impression is amplified by the only clue as to the Doctor's personal, not performed, attitude being that she apparently finds the cliche chosen one story of a boy abused by his adoptive family turning out to be a wizard, and a special wizard at that, comforting. Probably not the intended reading that wouldn't even be available if Rowling got cancelled earlier, but there as things are.

And of course, this has a lot of bearing on how thoschei dynamic is executed. On the one hand we have the entire emotional pay off rooted in the "history between them", on the other vague references to Classic Who and expanded universe, on the third characterization of the Master that is rooted more in fanon Freud-for-dummies woobification than anything this character's motivations have ever been established as. Like, between the charitable reading "Thirteen is hostile to the Master because of the events of s10" and the anti-charitable reading of "Missy's development was retconned in the Master's hostility", the answer is, it doesn't bloody matter to the story at hand, or else it's the writer's job to point to it as meaningful (again, as Maxine Alderton did with cybermenification in THOVD). Another case of "I don't agree with Moffat, but I agree the execution was functional", but you can juxtapose this with the way Simm!Master was presented in s10 - yeah, he got cured and kicked out of Gallifrey; that's really all you need to know, because his role in this story is being an unrepentant asshole and no amount of gifs slowing down John Simm turning his eyes down before saying "Eh, you wouldn't understand" will change that. The same goes for "see, the Master didn't destroy Gallifrey over everything that's been done to them, but over Theta being hurt uwu" interpretation - neither the reading this was the motivation, nor anything relating to the Master suffering from the Time Lords have been established in the text, neither as it unfolded nor as a pay off reveal! This basically relies on the attitude that the most charitable reading is by default the intended one, which is how you end up with "op means that Taylor Swift being gay shouldn't make you ignore all other gay women musicians".

A little bit of an aside, but people remember O was an actual person the Doctor met in unknown circumstances, not just a creation of the Master from the beginning, right? Like, this is taken into account in all "he's so desperate to be friends again uwu" readings, right?

So this is why "if the history between means anything" quote falls flat to me. The meaning is rooted in lore that's brushed aside in the same breath. The author relies on it being meaningful for the audience, while providing only the bare bones of "we were friends, but took completely different paths" background, and that by the end of the first act. Just as he relies on the audience having an emotional attachment to the lore without doing anything to create that attachment.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 09, 2024

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat. 

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers. 

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files. 

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote. 

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[saxandviolins77]

What do the Constructicons like to watch in their free time.

Veeery self-indulgent, but if you follow me you aren't a stranger to that.

A little fan continuity fun fact: Cybertron does not have the types of audiovisual, written, and artistic media Earth has. The forms of entertainment that existed before the war were: theatre(telling histories of Cybertronian myths), traditional Quintessonian Orchestras, and Gladiatorial matches. As such, when coming in contact with Earth media, the Constructicons took a bit of time to learn about the concept of "fiction", because why would humans waste resources and time to tell untrue stories that have nothing to do with their practiced religion and cults? Nowadays they can more or less distinguish it, but they still find the concept silly, especially with sci-fi movies, which they avoid watching like the plague.

Scrapper: Discovered old human movies and never looked back. He enjoys movies from the 20th century, his favorite types of movies being screwball comedies and he's beginning to enjoy musicals too. His favorite movies at the moment are Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Grease (1978). The rest of the Constructicons do not see the appeal of watching humans execute their mating rituals in convoluted and unrealistic ways.

Scavenger: Doesn't like movies. Fortunately, he discovered documentaries. He's absolutely entranced by the concept of well-explained videos lecturing the audience about something, he'll watch just about anything, but his absolute favorite ones are nature-focused ones and the "How Is It Made" one. The Constructicons don't mind his tastes, but they do not care about biographical documentaries.

Long Haul: He doesn't like human media at all, like, why would he be interested in what the organics that inhabit the planet they're trying to conquer like to watch? It's probably not even worth his time... That's what he thought before he fell into the reality television pipeline; he's definitely embarrassed about this and considers it his worst guilty pleasure (he doesn't even like using the word "pleasure".) It's completely stupid media and a waste of time, but he can't help but keep watching to see his favorite contestant (urgh) push through. His favorite Reality Show is Big Brother (girl, your taste... Is awful.) The other Constructicons know he's embarrassed so they don't comment on it, though Scrapper likes to indulge him a bit and ask about his opinion at any given moment (he'll say it doesn't matter, but will start to defend a controversial contestant as if his life depends on it.)

Hook: You think Hook would waste his precious time watching HUMAN-MADE MEDIA?! That would be completely idiotic, his genius brain is too advanced to be entertained by such nonsense! Don't even make such baseless assumptions about him again!

...

He likes dramas... Medical dramas. I guess the fact that he doesn't know about human anatomy manages to grip him, but he pretends he isn't invested in the personal lives of the characters.

Bonecrusher: He's a very simple guy, a good action movie is enough to keep him interested. I do think he doesn't show outward emotions about what he's watching, preferring to shrug and say it's fine instead of saying he truly enjoys something. One of the ways you can know if Bonecrusher enjoyed a movie is that he'll want to watch it time and time again. His favorite movies are Kill Bill (2003) and Pulp Fiction (1994) (no, he doesn't know anything about this "Tarantino" guy.)

Mixmaster: Worst. Taste. Ever. (according to the other Constructicons.) This guy likes spoof movies from the 2000s and slapstick movies from the 1960s, you never know what you're getting with him, but he has a frightening ability to accurately choose the worst, unfunniest, and cheapest comedies ever. Looking at the bright side, the Constructicons can spend an hour pointing out how stupid and badly made the movie is, Mixmaster does, in fact, join in and honestly, he doesn't even care about movies that much.

Honourable mention:

Devastator: One day, the Constructicons tried to give live sports a try. They watched plenty of different American games that were airing at the moment but didn't get the appeal. However, SOMEHOW, the practices must've stuck hard into their subconscious, as Devastator developed the worst habit ever: adopting incorrect sports lexicon in his vocabulary and using his gun as a bat and/or golf club as a joke. It never stops being embarrassing when someone asks them about this.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Brian Stelter at CNN:

CNN, one of the most popular news websites in the world, is starting to ask some of its visitors to pay $3.99 a month for access. On Tuesday, the news organization is laying the first bricks in a so-called paywall that should, over time, help foot the bill for CNN’s journalism around the world. “Starting today, we are asking users in the United States to pay a small recurring fee for unlimited access to CNN.com’s world-class articles,” Alex MacCallum, CNN’s executive vice president of digital products and services, wrote in an internal memo outlining the plan. The average visitor to CNN’s website, who may only read a few articles a month, will not be prompted to pay at this time. “Only after users consume a certain number of free articles will they be prompted to subscribe,” MacCallum explained. “In addition to unlimited access to CNN.com’s articles, subscribers will receive benefits like exclusive election features, original documentaries, a curated daily selection of our most distinctive journalism, and fewer digital ads.”

[...] That paid offering is what’s launching on Tuesday – in a preliminary form that will expand in the months ahead. “Over time, we will invest in ways to better meet our users’ needs and expand our aperture to engage and serve new audiences,” MacCallum wrote Tuesday, hinting at “new products and businesses” in the future. For brands like CNN that make most of their money from cable television, the challenge is clear: to develop new digital revenue streams that can offset declines in legacy TV. Under previous management, CNN developed a streaming video product called CNN+ in 2022 to create direct-to-consumer relationships with fans of the network. That product, launching just days before a new corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, took control and looked for cost savings, was doomed, however. CNN+ was cancelled within a matter of weeks. CNN now intends to generate subscriptions with its core offerings. Some content, though, will remain fully accessible without a subscription, including the CNN homepage; breaking news live stories; standalone video pages; and sponsored articles.

CNN has begun its paywall launch, another disastrous trend of walling off high-quality reporting.

[vital-information]

"But, for at least part of the 1999-2000 TV season, Freaks And Geeks was a beacon to anyone whose high school experience was awkward, boring, humbling, or painful—basically, anything other than the sexy and stylish depictions that had dominated teen-centered movies and shows. It begins with a feint in the pilot episode, one of best series introductions ever. Director Jake Kasdan scans the high school track, seeking out a very blond football player (Gabriel Carpenter, in a role not unlike his appearance in 1999’s Drive Me Crazy) who’s confessing his affection to a very blond cheerleader in the bleachers. This early encounter is the extent to which Freaks And Geeks would engage with the kind of prepossessing teens who were frequently the subjects of these shows. This decision, Feig tells The A.V. Club, was based on having “grown up on such a diet of teen stuff being about beautiful people who were so cool with everything, including sex. It didn’t reflect anything I grew up around. You would see those kids; they were around. But they weren’t my group. They weren’t the majority of the kids that I knew.”

The camera ventures under the bleachers, where Daniel Desario (James Franco) is holding court among the other “freaks,” before panning over to our protagonist, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), who’s lurking nearby, ever between groups. The camera keeps moving, settling on an altercation between the “geeks”—Lindsay’s brother, Sam (John Francis Daley), and his friends Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) and Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine)—and a bully named Alan (The Sandlot’s Chauncey Leopardi). Lindsay comes to their rescue, but inadvertently offends Sam by referencing his diminutive stature. Lindsay is insulted by Alan’s buddies for her trouble, and Sam stalks off. This opening scene is a prime example of the brand of subversion found in Feig’s good-hearted show. A lesser series would have dedicated at least five minutes to Lindsay making up her mind, either in approaching the freaks or standing up for her brother. In Feig’s pilot, Lindsay acts decisively and still gets it wrong, which is not how this is supposed to go—that is, not on network television, and certainly not on the powerhouse network that was NBC in the late ’90s.

That was far from the last time Freaks And Geeks would defy expectations. In the same episode, we learn Lindsay is in the midst of an existential crisis brought on by her grandmother’s death. Hearing from her grandmother, the kindest and best person Lindsay had ever known, that there was nothing waiting on the “other side” leaves her questioning everything. So the former mathlete goes looking for answers in unlikely places, including under the bleachers and on the “smoking patio” with the freaks. Lindsay bonds with the freaks, especially Kim Kelly (Busy Philipps), whose depths were just as filled with teen-girl fury as insecurity. She even manages to win over the caustic Ken Miller (Seth Rogen). But her behavior flummoxes her parents, Harold (Joe Flaherty) and Jean (Becky Ann Baker), and to a lesser extent, her brother. Lindsay’s quest, which unfolded over the course of the season, was probably just as baffling for NBC executives (and possibly viewers). She wasn’t mollified by a new relationship with sweet stoner Nick Andopolis (Jason Segel), nor did she quickly learn her lesson and return to her high-achieving best friend Millie’s (Sarah Hagan) side. The absence of easy answers became a defining element of Lindsay’s life, as well as of the show.

But Freaks And Geeks was always just as optimistic as it was realistic, which is a key part of its enduring appeal. It’s a show about survival, about how a found community can help you muddle through anything. Despite the labels, Feig’s characters are all basically good people—failing that, they’re people who are capable of doing better."

Danette Chavez, "Why Freaks and Geeks Is the Teen Show that Endures"

[blogger360ncislarules]

Gweat news for woyaw Big Bang fans: another popular character from the hit CBS sitcom is poised to return for the upcoming spinoff on Max. John Ross Bowie, who played plasma physicist Barry Kripke on The Big Bang Theory, is joining fellow alums Kevin Sussman (Stuart Bloom), Brian Posehn (Bert Kibbler) and Lauren Lapkus (Denise) on the offshoot from franchise boss Chuck Lorre and Warner Bros. Television.

Since the project is still in development and has not been officially greenlighted, Bowie — just like Sussman, Posehn and Lapkus — has signed a WBTV talent holding deal with the purpose of starring in the proposed offshoot.

As Deadline reported exclusively in December, Big Bang co-creator Lorre has recruited feature writer Zak Penn and fellow Big Bang co-creator Bill Prady for the spinoff, with the trio co-writing the script and set to executive produce the single-camera series.

Bowie was a mainstay on the original series. His character Barry Kripke quickly became a fan favorite when it was introduced in Season 2 and continued to recur for the rest of the series’ 12-season run. A Caltech plasma physicist and string theorist, Kripke was known for relentlessly teasing his colleagues — with most of his barbs directed at his string theorist rival Sheldon (Jim Parsosn) — and for his distinct speech pattern. He has rhotacism, pronouncing “r” and “l” as “w”, making him sound a bit like a cartoon character.

The addition of his recurring role on Big Bang, Bowie starred on the ABC comedy series Speechless. He also recurred on another Chuck Lorre CBS comedy, United States of Al. His feature credits include Jumanji: The Next Level. Bowie, who is a regular performer at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles and New York, is repped by Innovative Artists.

[scotianostra]

Happy Birthday Bill Forsyth the Scottish film director and screenwriter.

Born in Glasgow July 29th 1946 and educated at Knightswood School. On leaving aged 17, he answered an advertisement for a “Lad required for film company” and spent the next eight years helping make short documentary films.

Leaving documentary production in 1977, Forsyth wrote the scripts for Gregory’s Girl and That Sinking Feeling in the hope of breaking into feature films.

Obtaining finance, however, proved frustrating and problematic. The BFI Production Board rejected Gregory’s Girl three times. Forsyth later said, “I remember one torment of a meeting when I tried to explain that Gregory’s Girl was really a structuralist comedy… I suspect my script was too conventional although nobody actually told me as much.”.

That Sinking Feeling was eventually made in 1979 with amateur actors from the Glasgow Youth Theatre, including John Gordon Sinclair (who later took the lead in Gregory’s Girl , its tiny £5,000 budget was raised from a variety of sources.

Forsyth’s distinctive voice as writer-director is already apparent in this tale of a robbery of stainless steel sinks by a gang of unemployed Glasgow teenagers - intensely humanistic and humorous yet with an underlying seriousness of purpose. This ability to create a self-contained yet believable world with a keen sense of the absurd and bizarre in the everyday is perhaps only rivalled by the work of British television writer Alan Plater. The film opened to great popular and critical success at the Edinburgh and London Film Festivals but was unable to secure more widespread distribution.

Gregory’s Girl was Forsyth’s breakthrough film. This acutely observed story of adolescence and first love set in a Scottish new town was rapturously received by both critics and public alike. Forsyth’s reputation seemed to be secured by the success of his next venture, Local Hero, a first collaboration with producer David Puttnam.

In 1999 he made Gregory’s Two Girls as a sequel to Gregory’s Girl, with John Gordon Sinclair playing the same character, but it received mixed reviews.

Gregory's Girl, to me, is still a very funny film, but it feels dated, that's not to say that it hasn't stood the test of time with some folk, indeed The Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) showed a 4k version of the 1980 cult classic last August 1which was followed by a Q&A session with some of the cast including Gordon Sinclair(Gregory), Clare Grogan.

In 2022 the popular Scottish actor Peter Capaldi spoke of how Bill Forsyth saved him from living off pakora and lager after featuring him in Local Hero. The Doctor Who and The Thick Of It star praised the Scots film director in an acceptance speech after receiving a Bafta Scotland Award for Outstanding Contribution to Film & Television.

I love Capaldi's affection for our country, speaking to the audience while holding his Bafta, Capaldi said the award was “for getting lucky, and for being lucky enough to be born in Scotland”.

He said: “Forty years ago I was just up here (in Glasgow) as an art student, living off pakora and lager for breakfast.

“Bill Forsyth scooped me up and put me in Local Hero.

“It was an act of kindness and confidence that baffled me and much of the industry to this day, but I wouldn’t be here without him and nor would a lot of others.”

Capaldi landed this breakthrough film role aged 24 playing Danny Oldsen, a naive young oil industry executive, in the film.

A number of actors, including Dee Hepburn, will be a part of a celebration of the films of Bill Forsyth at the Outwith Festival of music and arts which takes place in Dunfermline from September 3-8. It will also screen That Sinking Feeling and Local Hero at the city’s Carnegie Theatre.

[disneytva]

Big City Greens Plants Season 4 Premiere For September 23 on Disney Channel + Guest Cast List

Bingo Bango! Disney Branded Television has set primetime premieres for Big City Greens Season 4 slated to debut Saturday September 23 at 8:00PM EST only on Disney Channel and streaming October 25 only on Disney+.

The episodes airing on September 23 – 'Truck Stopped / Jingled' – have "Tilly and Cricket wrestle with indecision at a truck stop between Big City and the country" in the former, while the latter sees Tilly becoming a Big City jingle writer and rising through the ranks. In addition to premiering on Disney Channel, episodes will also be added to Disney Plus on October 25, 2023.

Guest Stars on Season 4 include musican Michael Bolton as Rick Razzle on Jingled where Tilly wants to become a Big City jingle writer and rising through the ranks. Other guest stars for Season Four include June Diane Raphael (Marvel "Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur"), Tom Green ("The Tom Green Show"),NHL player Brad Marchand,Margo Martindale (Sony Pictures "Cocaine Bear"),podcaster Justin McElroy, Tim Meadows (ABC Network "The Goldbergs"), Dean Norris (AMC "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul"), Comedian Ms. Pat, Amy Seradis (Netflix "Bojack Horseman", Lucasfilm "The Mandalorian") and comedian Trevor Wallace.

Since it's debut on 2018, Big City Greens has been one of Disney Television Animation recent hits with multiple shorts, a NHL game -themed broadcast special in collaboration with ESPN and a animated feature film based on the series is on production slated for a 2024 release, the series spawned a new legacy of Disney TVA creators like Natasha Kline with chicano lead-driven animated comedy series "Primos" slated for 2024 and more animated shows on development for Disney Channel by Big City Greens Alumnis. (Cheyenne Curtis,Monica Ray, Amy Hudkins,Raj Bruggemann and Houghton Brothers mentor C.H Greenblatt) who will be getting series orders in the coming months.

The new season will include the show's 100th episode, which is a major landmark for any animated series, but especially for a Disney Channel series with few ever making it quite that far. "Season four is pure insanity," says Chris Houghton, Big City Greens co-creator and executive producer. "Tilly becomes a commercial jingle-writer, Cricket tries stand-up comedy, Bill loses his mind like six times, and Gramma dabbles in minimalism. The fact that we have such a fun arena to play in when it comes to these characters is not lost on us or our crew. Even though we’ve told so many stories with these characters, this season feels fresher than ever." "There are some very funny and silly episodes in this season," adds Shane, "like 'Handshaken' where country folks act like western gunslingers, but assert their power through firm handshakes. There are also a few emotional episodes that reach out and give your heart a good squeeze – 'Family Tree' is one that makes me tear up every time I watch a cut of it. And biggest of all, Chip Whistler is back! This season may have more action, adventure, and thrills than any previous season! And here's a couple rapid-fire teases you’ll see in season four: Gloria hires a new café employee, Vasquez goes to therapy, and the kids meet a long lost family member."

Additionaly Big City Greens will continue with new shorts trought the Disney TVA multi-platform division trought Chibi Tiny Tales, Broken Karaoke,Theme Song Takeover, How NOT To Draw & Random Rings.

Big City Greens characters will continue to host on the Disney Television Animation's crossover compilation series "Chibiverse" as it's second season is slated to debut Saturday September 23.

[justforbooks]

Dr Michael Mosley

Popular celebrity medic who offered health advice to millions through his TV and radio roles, most notably on fasting

Dr Michael Mosley, who has died aged 67 on the Greek island of Symi, explored health and fitness issues of interest to big audiences. He was a versatile communicator, whether as a television diet guru, newspaper columnist or podcaster.

He became a household name for diet books promoting calorie reduction and fasting, including The Fast Diet (2013), written with the journalist Mimi Spencer. His work gained in popularity from his self-experimentation, which included swallowing tapeworms, magic mushrooms, internal cameras and – most famously – fasting to cure his own type 2 diabetes, diagnosed in 2012. He became a well known TV and radio celebrity medic, regularly appearing on The One Show for the BBC and This Morning for ITV. On BBC Radio 4’s Just One Thing podcast he offered health tips to the nation, from the benefits of daily spoonfuls of olive oil to the usefulness of the plank position.

Yet his own medical career was brief. Mosley, who studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at New College, Oxford, trained in medicine at the Royal Free hospital, north London, after two years of working as a banker. He wanted to become a psychiatrist, saying that he found people more interesting than finance, but was disappointed to find that “there were severe limitations to what you could do”, he told the British Medical Journal in 2004.

He opted instead to exert influence through the medium of television, joining the BBC training scheme as an assistant producer in 1985, and going on to produce documentaries based mostly in science, mathematics and history.

His most glorious moment arguably came with the Horizon programme Ulcer Wars, which he made in 1994 about the work of Barry Marshall of the University of Western Australia, who was convinced that the bacteria he had identified called Helicobacter pylori was responsible for most gastric cancers and ulcers.

The story appealed to Mosley and inspired his own self-experimentation: Marshall had drunk a solution of H pylori from a beaker in the 1980s and his stomach had been colonised by the bacteria, which disappeared when he took antibiotics.

Marshall was right and later, with his colleague Robin Warren, won a Nobel prize. Mosley received more than 20,000 letters from people cured of their ulcer pain by antibiotics. The film brought him awards. “I probably did, in a funny way, more good with that one programme than if I had stayed in medicine for 30 years,” said Mosley in the BMJ.

In 2002, Mosley was nominated for an Emmy as executive producer on the documentary featuring John Cleese, The Human Face. In 2013, he began to host the series Trust Me, I’m a Doctor for the BBC. His most recent TV series were for Channel 4: Who Made Britain Fat? (2022) and Secrets of Your Big Shop (2024).

The Fast Diet book, which launched the 5:2 diet, also came out of a Horizon documentary. Eat, Fast and Live Longer (2012) was inspired by Mosley’s own diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to excess weight. The disease ran in the family. His father, Bill, had died of the complications at the age of 74. Mosley came across the American neuroscientist Mark Mattson’s work on intermittent fasting, and adopted the pattern he advocated of normal eating for five days and consumption of just 500-600 calories on the other two.

He claimed to have lost 20lbs and reversed his own type 2 diabetes. Mattson appeared in the documentary, which is credited with popularising the 5:2 diet. In 2021, Mosley published The Fast 800 Keto, which combines fasting with a ketogenic diet, high in fat and low in carbohydrates, but in its later stages allows carbohydrates back in.

Mosley’s diet work was controversial because of its focus on calorie reduction to lose weight. In 2021, the eating disorder charity Beat said of his Channel 4 series Lose a Stone in 21 Days that “the programme caused enough stress and anxiety to our beneficiaries that we extended our helpline hours to support anyone affected and received 51% more contact during that time”.

He said he had suffered from chronic insomnia from his late 30s. That became the subject of another BBC documentary and also a book published in 2019, called Fast Asleep.

Born in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, Michael was the son of a banker, Bill Mosley, and his wife, Joan. At the age of seven he was sent to boarding school in Britain. Mosley said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald that his mother was heartbroken to send him away to school, but that his father worked in Hong Kong and the Philippines, wanted Michael and his other son, John, to become bankers as he had, and that sending children to boarding school back in Britain was part of the culture of that time.

His maternal grandfather was an Anglican bishop. Mosley said he came from a long line of missionaries, but “the closest I get to religion is incorporating fasting in my diet”.

Mosley met Clare Bailey at the Royal Free hospital medical school, now part of UCL medical school, and they married in 1987. Bailey, who became a GP, was an active partner in Mosley’s dietary work and wrote recipe books for people embarking on the Fast 800 diet as well as newspaper columns in her own right. She told interviewers that she did not fast, because she had never needed to lose weight, and that she would hide chocolate from Mosley, who had a sweet tooth.

She survives him, along with their three sons, Alex, Jack and Daniel, and a daughter, Kate.

🔔 Michael Mosley, doctor, writer and broadcaster, born 22 March 1957; found dead 9 June 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[gilligould]

what's barry about/what's the premise? everyone says it's really good and i believe it but i know pretty much nothing about what it is

on the surface, barry is a dark (and i mean dark) comedy about a disillusioned hitman who travels to los angeles for a job and finds himself drawn into the community theater scene. the potential to leave his violent past behind is appealing, but doing so is easier said than done. the show’s got it all—comedy, tragedy, absurdism… astounding action set pieces, to ill-fated romances, to simply stunning cinematography. it’s like if david lynch and the coen brothers came together to examine humanity’s capacity for change.

but it’s also a show about:

• living with the consequences of your actions.

• the effects of trauma.

• self-delusion and what it means to live a lie.

• abuse and abusive cycles.

• grief’s capacity to hollow out and compress.

• toxic codependency.

• our desensitization to violence.

• the sensationalization of tragedy.

• and perhaps most importantly,

how violence inevitably corrupts everything that it touches. even the innocents. even children.

it’s wonderfully executed and a rare example of auteurist television—this is bill hader’s vision and oh, what a vision it is. i absolutely recommend it, feel free to drop back in with your thoughts if you do decide to give it a go!