(1) THESE GUYS ARE SHAMELESS. Disney tried to shut down a YouTuber’s remix of Steamboat Willie even though it was in public domain: “Disney pulls ‘Steamboat Willie’ YouTube copyright claim amid Mickey Mouse entry into public domain”.
Mashable reported that YouTuber and voice actor Brock Baker had uploaded a video to his channel with over 1 million subscribers which was almost immediately hit with a copyright claim from Disney.
Baker’s video featured the entirety of the 1928 Disney animated short Steamboat Willie. He had remixed the film, which stars Mickey Mouse, with his own comedic audio track playing over the nearly 8-minute cartoon, and released it under the title “Steamboat Willie (Brock’s Dub).”
After being hit with the claim, Baker’s upload became demonetized, meaning the YouTuber could not make any money off of it. The claim also blocked the ability to embed the video on third-party websites. In addition, the YouTube video was given limited visibility, including being blocked from view entirely in certain countries.
Baker disputed the copyright claim shortly after receiving it. His case appeared strong, as Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on January 1, 2024, allowing a broad range of creative usage of the film and its contents without Disney’s permission — including for profit.
He was successful.
“Disney released their claim and it’s now embeddable and shareable worldwide,” Baker told Mashable on Friday along with a screenshot of the email alert he received from YouTube letting him know the copyright claim was released.
“Good news! After reviewing your dispute, Disney has decided to release their copyright claim on your YouTube video,” reads the YouTube email message….
Watch “Steamboat Willie (Brock’s Dub)” at the link.
(2) THE SUBSTACK DILEMMA. Cass Morris and Brian Keene recently shared their takes on “Substack’s Nazi Problem”.
“So… Substack…” by Cass Morris.
A few weeks ago, I co-signed an open letter to Substack’s founders asking them to not platform Nazis. Their response was… not great. The Paradox of Tolerance in action, really. And I could go into a big thing about the dangers of free speech absolutism and how it’s really just permission for terrible people to be more terrible more openly, but, y’know, that’s all been said a billion times. “Don’t welcome Nazis” really should not be a controversial viewpoint, yet here we are.
As a result of the founders’ statement, a fair number of both creators and supporters are leaving Substack. Even more, I think, are trying to decide whether to do so. A.R. Moxon and Catherynne Valente have said, more eloquently and thoroughly, the things I’m thinking and wrangling with, but I did want my readers to hear from me directly on this….
…Moving somewhere else is also no guarantee that a new platform won’t also face the same problems someday, forcing yet another move. I’m a child of the LiveJournal age; I remember how it started, and I remember what happened when it got sold. Very few sites seem to have long-term viability without corporate backing, and the increased corporatization of the internet is most of the reason I think the internet peaked in 2007. Every site is potentially in danger. Just because Buttondown or other platforms are promising good behavior now doesn’t mean anything if leadership or ownership changes (citation: Twitter). As Moxon and Valente both pointed out in their essays, abandoning every site that fails a virtue test means giving all our playgrounds over to the Nazis, and I’m not sure I’m okay with continuing to do that….
“Letters From the Labyrinth 364” by Brian Keene.
…These days I am so far removed from the drama and the backbiting and the petty squabbles that encompass our industry that I no longer know who is mad at who, or who’s been cancelled and for what, or which publisher isn’t paying, or what this person did. For example, I only found out recently that Substack has an apparent Nazi problem — something I was blissfully unaware of until several newsletters I subscribe to migrated away from the platform. And I respect folks decisions to do that. I’m going to stick it out because I’m tired of leaving platforms when the Nazis show up. We did that with Facebook and Twitter and Reddit. If we keep doing that, soon every bar will be a Nazi bar. Sooner or later, you’ve got to plant your feet and fight. So here is where I’ll make my stand — a counter-voice to their voices. If you can dig that, cool. If not, I don’t care….
(3) THE AMERICAN MULE? Ross Douthat’s New York Times opinion piece “Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?” kicks off with a big reference to Asimov.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a “psychohistorian” in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the future so exactly that he can anticipate both the empire’s fall and the way that civilization can be painstakingly rebuilt. This enables him to plan a project — the “foundation” of the title — that will long outlast his death, complete with periodic messages to his heirs that always show foreknowledge of their challenges and crises.
Until one day the foreknowledge fails, because an inherently unpredictable figure has come upon the scene — the Mule, a Napoleon of galactic politics, whose advent was hard for even a psychohistorian to see coming because he’s literally a mutant, graced by some genetic twist with the power of telepathy.
Donald Trump is not a mutant telepath. (Or so I assume — fact checkers are still at work.) But the debates about how to deal with his challenge to the American political system turn, in part, on how much you think that he resembles Asimov’s Mule.
Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?
Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world, precisely the sort of figure a “psychohistory” of our era would have anticipated? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?…
(4) DOUG BERRY: THE GUY IN THE GIANTS HAT. [Item by Chris Garcia.] Last October, the world lost a wonderful human being — Douglas Berry. A Bay Area fan who was one of the original denizens of the 2000s Fanzine Lounges, Doug was also a phenomenal writer, best-known for his game writing in the Traveler game system universe, he was also a regularly blogger and Facebooker, and contributed to Journey Planet and The Drink Tank, co-editing two issues of the latter.
Doug’s widow Kirsten, Chuck Serface, and Chris Garcia gathered some of Doug’s best writing from 2023, along with a few pieces from the last few years. The resulting collection, The Guy in the Giants Hat, can be downloaded from the link.
(5) PARAMOUNT+ SHEDS ORIGINAL STAR TREK MOVIES. Rachel Leishman gloats “Now That Only the Kelvin-Verse ‘Star Trek’ Movies Are Available on Paramount+, Maybe You’ll See Things My Way” at The Mary Sue.
Finally my time has come. You will all be forced to appreciate the Kelvin-verse. My plan is working, and you will all soon love my favorite Star Trek movies. That’s what you get for being mean.
To be fair, you can still stream the original Star Trek movies. They’re just no longer on Paramount+, the home of the franchise. Hilarious to think about it like that, but it is weird that the home of Trek does not have the original Star Trek movies on its platform. What it does have are the movies starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Karl Urban. Yes, you can still watch the magic that is Star Trek Beyond to your heart’s content.
The Kelvin-verse movies (aptly named because they exist in an alternate timeline) started with the 2009 Star Trek from director J.J. Abrams and gave us a new crew of the Enterprise. They are beautiful and getting to see their adventures is extremely necessary in the world of Trek. Also, who doesn’t want to see more of Leonard Nimoy as Spock? Point is: These movies rule and we have been stuck in limbo about whether this franchise will continue for years.
(6) SCHRÖDINGER’S TV SERIES. Meanwhile, The Orville’s fate has not been sealed: “Seth MacFarlane Says The Orville Isn’t Canceled Yet” in The Wrap.
Seth MacFarlane, the creator, writer and star of “The Orville,” has offered a cryptic update on the sci-fi series’ fate.
“All I can tell you is that there is no official death certificate for ‘The Orville’,” MacFarlane told TheWrap in an interview when asked about an update on a possible Season 4. “It is still with us. I can’t go any further than that at the moment. There are too many factors.”
MacFarlane’s co-star Scott Grimes added that conversations about “The Orville” Season 4 began before the SAG-AFTRA and Writers’ Guild of America strikes.
“I do know that we are still talking about it. It’s not dead in any sort of way whatsoever. It’s just about when, where and how and building the stuff again,” Grimes told TheWrap. “I’m excited because it’s one of the greatest things to work on. So I just have my fingers crossed. And I know Seth wants to do it and that usually holds a lot of power. And I hope he gets to because it’s one of his babies that he just loves and it’s a blast to work on.”…
(7) FREE SFF READ. The Sunday Morning Transport offers “Agni” by Nibedita Sen as a free read to encourage people to subscribe.
Nibedita Sen brings us a brilliant, dangerous world, complex power dynamics, and characters we can’t stop thinking about…
(8) DR. EMANUEL LOTTEM (1944-2024.) Israeli translator and editor Dr. Emanuel Lotem has died. The Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy Association mourned his loss on Facebook. (Note: Translations of his name are spelled several different ways; I have followed the spelling used by his Zion’s Fiction co-editor Sheldon Teitelbaum.)
Emanuel was one of the founding fathers of the Israeli community. As one of the association’s founders and chairman, he saw the approach of science fiction and fantasy as a supreme goal. The founders of the community and the association concentrated around him, and in light of his vision, conferences, and lectures began in them. Even after retiring from his official position, Emanuel was always present to give a listening ear, a push in the right direction or a prickly and precise word, always out of love for the content world and the community created around him. Emanuel made sure to lecture at conferences, meet the young and old fans that always surrounded him, and always returned the love that the community allowed him.
Emanuel was the translator of the science fiction and fantasy types into Hebrew, his translations brought to the Israeli audience the greatness of writers and books in Israel for more than 45 years. For many his translations were the first encounter with science fiction. His translations to “Dune” and “Lord of the Rings” well illustrated that Emanuel saw in the role of a translator a purpose, and a way to enrich the literary world through careful dialogue with the work. His vast breadth of knowledge and proficiency in every possible subject made his translations into art, and not just technical art. Emanuel pushed for the translation and publication of science fiction at a time when its translation was an insidious act, and was a significant factor in the field’s bloom.
Many people owe him their entry into this world, and many more will miss him.
Lottem recalled his start as an sff translator in an interview, “Dr. Emanuel Lottem, Intrigue and Conspiracies”, by the ISFFA.
…I fell in love with the English language and it helped me a lot to develop my third career as a translator from English to Hebrew. I started it basically as a gig. In my first career, as a university lecturer, salaries there weren’t anything, I needed a gig, I said, I can translate, why not, that’s how I came to Am Oved Publishing House, I had personal connections there, and I translated several books for them in my professional field, which is international economics. Then the White Series was born. And I was turned on. I said I want to translate. Tell me what a serious person is, what you have with this nonsense, science fiction. What are you, floating in the clouds? Translate serious things. I insisted, and then one day I called, it was already in my second career in the Foreign Ministry, the editorial secretary of Am Oved, called me, said I have a book called Dune, want to translate it? Luckily I was sitting on a good chair, so I didn’t fall out of it… And that’s how it started. That’s how my journey as a science fiction translator began. If the question was how my love for science fiction began, it was years before….
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 7, 1912 — Charles Addams. (Died 1988.) Ahhh Charles Addams. No doubt you’re now thinking of the Addams Family and you’ve certainly reason to do so, but let’s first note some other artistic endeavors of his.
His first published book work in the early Forties was the cover for But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter DeVries, a silly slice of life novel. He previously sold some sketches to the New Yorker.
Random House soon thereafter contracted him for anthologies of drawings, Drawn and Quartered and Addams and Evil. (Lest you ask, the term “anthology” is from his website.) Four more anthologies, now on Simon & Schuster will follow.
And there was The Chas Addams Mother Goose, really there was. Here’s his cover for it.
Based on his the characters that had appeared in his New Yorker cartoons, 1964 saw The Addams Family television series premiere on ABC. It would star, and I’m just singling them out, John Astin as Gomez and Carolyn Jones as Morticia.
It lasted just two seasons of thirty-minute episodes. Mind you there were sixty-four episodes. Yes, I loved every minute of it. I have watched it at least three times, as recently as several years ago and it as great now as was when I first watched it decades ago.
Halloween with the New Addams Family is a follow-up film with the primary cast back. No idea why the New is in there. We also had The Addams Family, an animated with a voice cast with some of the original performers, yet another Addams Family series (each with these largely had just Sean Astin from the original series).
Think we’re done? Of course there is The Addams Family with Raúl Julia as a most macabre Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams with Carol Struycken playing Lurch for the first of several times. I really, really adore this film.
It was followed by the Addams Family Values which for some reason that I can’t quite figure out I just don’t adore.
Are we finished? No. The New Addams Family which aired for one nearly a quarter of a century after the original series went off the air after but a single season but lasted an extraordinary sixty-five episodes. I need to see at least the pilot for this.
And then there’s the Addams Family Reunion which had the distinction of Tim Curry as Gomez. I’ve not seen it, so who has? It sounds like an intriguing role for him…
There will be two animated films as well, The Addams Family and The Addams Family 2, neither of which I’ve seen.
Finally let’s talk about licensing. After his death, his wife, Tee Addams, was responsible for getting his works licensed. To quote the website, “The Addams Family, both its individual characters and the Family in its entirety, have a long history of selling products, in print ad campaigns and television commercials alike – from typewriters to Japanese scotch, from designer showcases to perfume, from paper towels to chocolate candies, and all that lies in between.”
So I went looking for use of the characters. I think the best one I found is the claymation one for M&Ms Dark Chocolate which you can see here. (And please don’t ask me about the Wizard of Oz M&Ms commercial. That one is still giving me nightmares.though the FedEx Wizard of Oz commercial is just silly. I mean dropping a FedEx truck on that witch…)
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- Thatababy plays “match the snowman”. How many do you recognize?
- The Far Side shows the dogs’ take on nuclear war.
- Peanuts from March 28, 1955 is the start of five more Martian jokes.
- Sally Forth has a complaint about that other Jetpack…
(11) I’LL BE BACK. [Item by Steven French.] Physics World picks “The 10 quirkiest stories from the world of physics in 2023”. This one is kinda scary:
Shape-shifting robot
In the classic 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot assassin, the T-800, comes up against the T-1000 Advanced Prototype, which is made from a liquid metal called “mimetic polyalloy” that can reform into any shape it touches. Researchers in China and the US this year came close to recreating in the lab some of the T-1000’s special abilities. They did this by designing miniature robots that can rapidly and reversibly shift between liquid and solid. First, they embedded magnetic particles in gallium, a soft metal with a low melting point. Then they applied an alternating magnetic field, which not only heats the magnetic particles, making the body become a liquid, but also allows it to become mobile. In one video released by the team, a 10mm-tall LEGO-like minifigure liquifies to ooze before passing through bars in a mocked-up cell. It then cools inside a mould before the figure reforms back into its original shape.”
(12) CLIENTS PROPPING THEM UP. CBS Los Angeles reports how the “Entertainment industry bands together to save struggling Hollywood prop house”.
From the outside, Faux Library Studio Props may seem like an unassuming warehouse nestled in North Hollywood. Inside, however, are a whole host of set pieces that tell the recent history of the entertainment industry.
Unfortunately, like many businesses trying to bounce back in the past couple of years, all of the priceless mementos may be lost unless the owner can come up with $100,000 by February.
Marc Meyer started Faux Library Studio Props over two decades ago in 2000.
“When I retired from decorating I said I got to keep buying and enjoying myself. So, this was my business,” Meyer said.
His retirement project turned into the home for vintage furniture and décor worth millions of dollars, including a desk from “Top Gun Maverick” and a boardroom table in “Grey’s Anatomy.”
However, Meyer is famous for the prop books he holds, all 16,000 of them, including the ones from “Angels and Demons.”
While the covers are real, the insides are not.
“That’s the wallpaper on the inside, just to make it look like pages,” Meyer said. “The actor really has to act to show the weight.”…
(13) STAR HOOEY. “Fox News Host Unexpectedly Wins for Most Baffling ‘Star Trek’ vs. ‘Star Wars’ Take” according to The Mary Sue.
….On Thursday’s episode of the Fox News roundtable show Outnumbered, the hosts discussed a new Star Wars announcement. These high-profile, successful women on Fox News were outraged that a woman, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, will direct the next Star Wars film. Like much of the right-wing media, they found it upsetting that Obaid-Chinoy said it was about time a woman directed a Star Wars movie.
The show also highlighted a statement Obaid-Chinoy made years ago, unrelated to Star Wars, about enjoying making men uncomfortable with her movies. After showing the Obaid-Chinoy quote, Fox News host Emily Compagno said, “Pretty great attitude for a director of a franchise that is geared towards men!”
Kayleigh McEnany, another host on the show, predicted Obaid-Chinoy’s film would “flop.” McEnany tried to bolster her argument by reading a list of recent conservative “successes” in pop culture. These included the terrible song “Try That in a Small Town” and the Bud Light boycott. McEnany made an argument that “woke” things failed in 2023. (I guess she missed how Barbie dominated the box office, among other successful feminist works in the past year.) She wrapped up her rant by sarcastically wishing Obaid-Chinoy the “best of luck” with her Star Wars movie.
That’s when Compagno flashed a backward Vulcan salute and said, “And that’s why I’m a Trekkie and not Star Wars!”…
And then The Mary Sue pointed out many examples of when Star Trek was attacked as too “woke”.
(14) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Ryan George takes you inside the “Rebel Moon: Part One Pitch Meeting”.
[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Kathy Sullivan, Chris Garcia, Lise Andreasen, Daniel Dern, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark Roth-Whitworth.]
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Number one proves that the Mouse is and will be always be a greedy rat bastard. No one needs to try to squeeze a penny out of a now copyright free product almost a century old. But they’ll try anyways.
1) I saw another news item about this and one of the people interviewed speculated that Disney hadn’t updated the database on the software that searches for copyright violations.
It seems that they have updated their database now.
5) PARAMOUNT+ SHEDS ORIGINAL STAR TREK MOVIES.
Wait a minute. I have Paramount +. Those films weren’t there before. So how could they be shedding them? Trust me, I’d have noticed if all of those had been there. Hell, I’d have been watching Wrath of Khan!
(2) I still say Nazi speech, and fascist speech in general, is not protected as free speech, as it threatens everyone else.
(3) It would have been foreseen. Let’s see, https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/ is from 1971, and I’ve been reading about it for years. Then the millionaire-funded “Jesus Freak” movement, https://www.historydefined.net/the-jesus-freaks/. Then, far more public, was Ronnie Raygun’s leading the outright war against unions, and the “War on (some) Drugs” that was against people who might not vote GOP. It’s been building up since. The only weirdness was some this incompetent and incoherent as the voice.
(10) But I didn’t see any that were obviously made by Calvin….
(11) “I created the Torment Nexus as a warning, DON’T MAKE IT!”
The title – I was doing a takeoff of one of my favorite scenes in all sf: as Alvin leaves Earth, in Against the Fall of Night/City and the Stars.
(2) I don’t blame people for staying. But I also don’t blame people for deciding to leave Substack. I like the Nazi bar analogy, however.
(9) I was always an Addams Family kid rather than a Munsters kid. I also watched the Saturday morning cartoon — which was closer to the Charles Addams style IIRC. I have some of his reprints around here somewhere.
I saw the recent animated movie (the first one), and it had its moments. But as one review mentioned, it also tried to deal withtwo different plots, and that didn’t really work out. Neither plot got enough attention.
(13) One of my favorite reactions was, “Has anyone told her?”
I didn’t realize she’d said Star Wars is a franchise geared toward men. Meh? While there is a view of the typical SW fan being a guy, the fans aren’t just guys. At least one-third of the hardcore SW fans are women.
Come gather ’round pixels
Wherever you scroll
And admit that the files
Around you have rolled
And accept it that soon
You’ll be terribly droll
If your box to you is worth ticking
Then you better start filking or you’ll be thought a troll
For the pixels they are a-scrollin’
Oh, Star Wars being for guys? Um, er, may I point out that at the Women’s March, in 2019, there were a zillion people carrying posters of the leader of the Rebellion: Leia.
Forgive me if it’s already been mentioned, but we lost Cindy Morgan a few days back (I just saw an article on the Minneapolis Star Tribune website today). Relevant to us because she was Laura/Yuri in TRON, which I just rewatched tonight, and which remains a favorite for its visuals and its soundtrack.
https://www.startribune.com/cindy-morgan-star-of-tron-and-caddyshack-dies-at-69/600332938/
(13) I read one of the threads from this, and a lot of people were pointing and laughing. (I remember going to see the first movie, during Memorial Day weekend, and I was in an all-female group. We enjoyed it greatly. There were a lot of women there.
(11) Okay, yes, that is scary.
(1) Disney will ever be Disney. But yes, the idea that the database hadn’t been updated yet seems quite likely
(13) General Leia Organa forever!
LisC – she died literally a day or two before the March. I hope she saw those posters.
And, oh, don’t you know, girls don’t want spaceships, and girls don’t want lightsabers…
Let me note that one of my twins was president of the fencing club in college, and the other had fun fencing with me (and given it had been years, I still didn’t disgrace myself). They’d use a lightsaber better than 90% of the idiot incels.
Randall M is Dylanizing, I think.
9) Chas Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life is an excellent biography of Charles Addams that I highly recommend.
Randall M I am hearing in my head Mr Zimmerman’s wonderful Budokan performance of that song as I read your filk.
2) Quick reminder that in addition to being a Nazi bar, from very early on Substack was handing out money to transphobes. Bigotry has been baked into the platform from the beginning.
(1) Well, it’s one thing that something is in the public domain, you could at least show some respect for the creators instead of mucking about and doing your own “version”, showing your lack of initiative and creativity. It is about art’s integrity in the long run, (Even though the focus in this case is more on Disney’s coffers than anything else…)
@Randall M: Applause!
Mark:
If the Lewis Powell memo is a blueprint, then “Project 2024” is a declaration of war, detailing how the Republicans will take down democracy, give themselves power with no checks on power, and pass even more restrictions on US society.
If you think that banning abortion (and with it, critical care for women with pregnancy complications), and denying healthcare to children, and replacing the current school curricula with right wing propaganda (sanitized of any mention of the holocaust, slavery, or anything having to do with critical thinking is bad, then you ‘aint seen nothin’ yet!’ It will ramp up to limit free speech (except for theirs), and initiate surveillance of all non-right wingers. Welcome to 1984! (Orwell was a bit premature, but otherwise correct!)
They intend, among many other things, to remove, by executive order, funding for pubic television (NPR and PBS), censor and prevent publishing of books that are not right wing, and, as De Santis proposed, “eliminate” transgender people, immigrants (unless they’re white, and European), and eliminate birthright citizenship (it may start with children of immigrants, but it can then be applied to anyone who doesn’t follow the party line).
The only defense we have at this time is to vote as though our lives depend on it.
Carl Andor: they’ve been cutting funding for PBS and NPR since the Grinch shut down the government in ’95. Right now, they get next to nothing; I think the numbers are under 10% of their funding. I mean, unless you don’t listen, you haven’t heard the endless begathons. But no, I’m far too aware of Project 2025.
And one other note: the original quote: “He never saw it going, but presently there echoed down from the heavens the most awe-inspiring of all the sounds Man has ever made – the long-drawn thunder of air falling, mile after mile, into a tunnel of vacuum suddenly drilled across the sky.”
I wanted to be in that ship when I was in my teens, and that desire has never left, nor will, till I die.
@Jan-Erik Zandersson–No, this wasn’t about artist inegrity and respect for the creators. And while Disney keeps a close eye on the dollars and doesn’t pass up what they can get, the speed with which they withdrew their complaint says this wasn’t about money, either. It’s about the fact that Disney’s database didn’t get updated quickly enough.
I wouldn’t excuse Disney’s behavior like it was a mere clerical error. How many years have all of us known the exact date Steamboat Willie would enter the public domain? They deserve the criticism.
@ Jan-Erik Zandersson
One point of the public domain is that people can now access the original for free — so that those works are no longer lost. When I wanted a copy of “The Phantom of the Opera” novel in the 1970s, it was very hard to find as it was out of print. Now, it’s in the public domain and everywhere.
But another point of having a public domain is that people can now do their own versions based on the original. Yes, this leads to things like cheap horror movie versions (Blood and Honey, for example). But it’s also the reason why we have had new adaptions of “The Great Gatsby” since 2021 (when it ended up in the public domain). Not to mention the Phantom of the Opera musical, so many Dickens and Dracula adaptations, etc.
5) MAX has the original Star Trek movies. I watched Wrath of Khan the other night and it still holds up as the best Star Trek movie, although Undiscovered Country is also up there.
6) Speaking of Star Trek, I’ll be glad to see ‘The Orville’ come back. Until ‘Strange New Worlds’ premiered, it was the best Star Trek series since DS9.
9) Love me some Addams Family. The two most recent animated features are well worth your time, if for no other reason than they use the original drawings.
13) ‘Woke’ is the right-wing equivalent of ‘fascist’, ‘racist’ and ‘bigot’ (or ‘nazi’, for that matter) in that it has been largely stripped of it’s original/actual meaning and now largely means ‘this person is a sociocultural or political opponent and/or disagrees with me.’ When I hear it, that’s generally my cue to stop listening and just nod during the pauses until the noise stops.
That being said…”It’s my intention to make a large part of the intended demographic for my luxury good/entertainment product reticent to spend money on my product” is an odd thing for someone who wants to make money off that demographic to say. I’d maybe take the Michael Jordan route instead.
3) Mr. Douthat has the sequence of events wrong. Mr. Trump is not an anomaly, agent, or accident. He is a response. He is the equivalent of your body developing a fever in response to an infection.
Of course, too great of a fever can kill a person just as much as the original infection can kill them.
[FTR, I’m not voting for or supporting Mr. Trump in 2024. I’m not voting for Mr. Biden, either, but that won’t be the question.]
2) I disagree with Ms. Morris. The response from Substack was great. Free speech is never clean and easy. It is always dirty and rough.
Censorship always impacts marginalized groups first and hardest.
That being said, the Substack AUP does include prohibitions on certain types of content. Perhaps folks should report these Nazi accounts when they post violent content that violates the AUP. Being insulting is not the same as being violent.
Regards,
Dann
M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: “Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity.” I answered him: “The second half of your program will destroy the first half.” And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word “fraternity” from the word “voluntary.” It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot.” – Frederic Bastiat
@mark
The Supreme Court disagrees. And to be honest, even if the result makes us cringe, this is the only possible result in a free society.
1) Old habits die hard. Give them time, they’ll figure it out.
I’m currently reading Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses and finding it slow going, mostly due to his sentence structure which is architecturally impressive but requires a great deal of unravelling before I can make sense of it. Still, one occasionally comes across things like
And there’s a whole chapter of Fiorinda admiring herself naked in a mirror, something you don’t find in Tolkien.
Not sure about the best place to ask this, but — is the 2023 recommended novel thread already closed to comments on purpose? It’s usually open for a few months into the following year, but I just tried to post something there and couldn’t.
Kyra: Comments are open again. I had set a limit that closed comments 360 days after a post went up. I see that’s not going to work for this post. It will be possible to add reviews for another couple months now.
And tomorrow I will put up the 2024 review post.
According to a Platformer newsletter by Casey Newton, Substack reports that they will remove some Nazi publications from their platform.
They said this isn’t a reversal — instead, it’s “rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.” Also, they said they will remove materials that include “credible threats of physical harm.”
They will keep their existing content policy. And they won’t retroactively remove neo-Nazi and far-right extremist content. But they are “terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology” (after Platformer flagged some of those accounts).
Note: Platformer has more than 172,000 subscribers and was one of the publications threatened to leave if more was not done.
Mike Glyer: Thanks!
(1) I think didn’t-update-the-database is almost certainly the reason for those events, but I agree with our good host that it is not a valid excuse! Unfortunately, the legal remedies for false copyright claims are few and feeble, even in relatively egregious cases. So there is little motivation for Disney (or others) to do better in the future.
Side note: the box for notifications of followup posts seems to be missing. Yet more Jetpack nonsense, I assume.
@Anne: and Disney has gotten a lot of money out of proving their own versions of out of copyright works.
Xtifr: The comment notifications are back now. I guess the completely unrelated change I made to allow a longer comment period must have made Jetpack burp and lose the setting.
Thanks, Mike! Is indeed working again!
Mark:
“Carl Andor: they’ve been cutting funding for PBS and NPR since the Grinch shut down the government in ’95:
I’m aware of this, and have been every election cycle, but the right wing is intending to bypass Congress on a LOT of things, by way of executive orders this time. They’ll strip the funding from not only National Endowment for the Arts, but many other entities with which they have “issues,” like Social Security, Social Services of all kinds, OSHA (who wants public safety? Employees are expendable, after all!), while using punitive executive orders to attack certain groups.
One of the worst things I see coming, if they win, is the stripping of birthright citizenship, ostensibly for children of illegal aliens, but also to punish targeted groups, whole classes of people, and ultimately, to disenfranchise American Citizens, while giving the executive branch unprecedented powers while removing checks and balances.
@Carl Andor “the right wing is intending to bypass Congress on a LOT of things, by way of executive orders this time. ”
It’s not just the right wing; remember Obama and his pen. Biden is doing the same. And the fault is as much or more Congress’s as it is the President’s — they have abdicated their role in making the law and delegated power to Executive branch agencies to set policy by regulation. Congressmen don’t want to get pinned down by taking a stance on an issue.
Bill: Obama issued far fewer executive orders than W or TFG. As of January 7, 2024, President Joe Biden (D) had signed 128 executive orders. TFG, 220.
And he’s doing it because the Trump Crime Family (formerly the Grand Oligarchic Party) refuse to acknowledge that the Democrats hold the Senate and the White House, and define the word “compromise” as “do what I want, or I’ll hold my breath (and shut down the government) until I turn blue”.
@mark — It’s not a contest where the president who issues the fewest Executive Orders wins. Judging only by totals puts every EO at the same level — surely you don’t think that EO 14047 (“Adding Measles to the List of Quarantinable Communicable Diseases”) is of equal importance to EO 9066 (“Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas” – resulting in the internment of Japanese citizens in WW2).
The point is that all modern presidents, of both parties, use EOs to accomplish policy goals that should be implemented by Congress passing laws. Congress has abdicated power, and the executive branch has assumed the it.
A prime example is DACA. Despite his constitutional obligation to “faithfully execute” the laws of the United States, Obama decided to waive them with respect to certain illegal aliens. No matter whether or not you agree with this policy, it is for all practical purposes a change in immigration law, and as such should have been passed by Congress and signed by the President before being implemented. The fact that people like it doesn’t make it proper.