(1) LE GUIN’S PROTEST. Ursula K. Le Guin’s letter to the editor in The Oregonian concisely explains the injustice of allowing Ammon Bundy and company to continue occupying a federal wildlife refuge.
Federal land: The Oregonian’s A1 headline on Sunday, Jan. 17, “Effort to free federal lands,” is inaccurate and irresponsible. The article that follows it is a mere mouthpiece for the scofflaws illegally occupying public buildings and land, repeating their lies and distortions of history and law.
Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren’t trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can’t go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That’s what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn’t belong to and who don’t belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens.
Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They’re suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders.
Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn’t The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Northwest Portland
Think Progress has a story about the letter with more comments by Le Guin.
Le Guin told ThinkProgress that the letter was printed unchanged, and she “got a pleasant note informing me it was to be published,” but nothing more from the paper or the author. A request for comment to the Oregonian’s public editor went unanswered as of publication.
The science fiction author is not alone in wanting the ranchers to return Malhuer to the public. Most Western voters, according to a recent poll, disagree with Bundy and do not want the states to take over public lands.
“We have been going out to the Steens Mountain area, on and near the Wildlife Refuge, for 45 years — first to teach summer classes at the field station, later just to be there in the grand high desert country,” she said. “We spend a week every summer on a cattle ranch very close to Refuge lands. I am proud to consider the family who own the ranch and the local hotel as friends, and I have learned a great deal from them. The Refuge Headquarters is a quiet, fragile, beautiful little oasis that is particularly dear to us.”
(2) WHAT IF BOOK FESTIVALS PAY WRITERS? Claire Armitstead’s opinion piece in the Guardian argues the burden of paying writers to attend book festivals would have unintended side-effects: “Book festivals are worth far more than fees”.
Philip Pullman became cheerleader for a growing band of refuseniks last week when he resigned as president of the Oxford literary festival because it didn’t pay speakers. Thirty more writers immediately picked up the chant, with a letter to the trade journal the Bookseller calling for all authors and publishers to boycott festivals that expected writers to appear for free.
…Edinburgh is one of the biggest festivals and an honourable exception to the no-pay rule, offering the same flat rate to all its contributors. But it’s not unusual to hear writers grumbling that this is tokenism, and no recompense for the hours (and expense) of travelling. So what is a reasonable return? Should it be calibrated to audience size, or offset against book sales? Or should it be a flat rate – only bigger than it currently is?
There are now more than 350 literary festivals in the UK, which adds up to a whole heap of calls on writers’ time and energy – and one argument is that if they can’t afford to pay contributors they should simply shut down. But small festivals do more than simply put writers on stage; they support local bookshops and create a buzz around books. They circulate flyers publicising authors and their work. They are part of the great reading group boom that has bolstered book sales by turning reading into a social activity.
…So while I have every sympathy for hard-pressed authors, I feel they need to be careful what they wish for. The logic of the marketplace – in book festivals as in every other arena – is that, were fees to become obligatory, the haves will end up having more, while the have-nots will find themselves banished to outer darkness. It would mean the end of a golden era of access to books and the people who write them. And that would be impoverishing for all of us.
(3) OXFORD MAY PAY WRITERS. Philip Pullman and other protesting writers have made the Oxford Literary Festival consider paying authors.
In a statement issued on Tuesday morning, the Oxford literary festival said that it “recognises and understands the strength of feeling in the literary community regarding the payment of speaker fees to authors and writers and we are sympathetic to this cause”.
But, adding that it is a registered charity that receives no public funding, with no full-time staff, supported by a team of 40 unpaid volunteers, the festival said that “for every £12 ticket sold, a further £20 in support has to be raised from our generous sponsors, partners and donors in subsidy”. The festival’s current supporters include FT Weekend and HSBC.
“We have of course been aware of the debate regarding author payments for some time, but given the limitations of the tight budgets we run to (the festival’s last audited accounts show a loss of £18,000 in 2014) paying each speaker would require an additional 15% in costs or £75,000 for the 500 speakers across our 250 events planned for 2016,” said the festival.
Once this year’s event in April is over, organisers have nonetheless said that they “will meet with all interested parties to discuss how to achieve payment of fees for all speakers – while safeguarding the presence of our record levels of unknown writers for 2017 and beyond”.
(4) ONE LORD A’LEAPING. Middle-Earth political science student Austin Gilkeson lectures on “The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne” at The Toast. (Traffic to the post is hyped by the GIF of a flaming Denethor hurling himself from the promontory of Minas Tirith.)
After the War of the Ring and Denethor’s death, Gondor did embrace Aragorn as its new king, partially because he’d arrived at the head of an army of the Dead. But while “commands a terrifying ghost army” is a fantastic qualification for fronting a Norwegian black metal band or a community Halloween parade, it’s less than ideal for ruling a vast and diverse country of the living.
Even worse, Aragorn’s supposed suitability to rule is directly tied to his pure Númenorean blood….
Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.
(5) EVERYMAN HIS OWN NUMENOREAN. Stephen Hawking issued another warning that humanity may wipe itself out in years to come.
Cheery physicist Professor Stephen Hawking says that mankind could be wiped out by our own creations within the next 100 years.
Answering audience questions at this year’s BBC Reith Lectures, he said that our rush to understand and improve life through science and technology could be humanity’s undoing.
He has previously suggested that colonising other planets will be the only way that the human race can survive, but he warns that we may lose Earth to some kind of major disaster before we have a chance to properly do so.
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low,” he explained, “it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.
(6) SFWA KICKS IN. Science Fiction Writers of America has begun donating to some non-members’ crowdfunded self-publishing efforts.
Beginning in January, SFWA will be making small, targeted pledges to worthy Kickstarter projects projects by non-members, designating them a “SFWA Star Project.” Projects will be selected by the Self Publishing Committee, coordinated by volunteer Rob Balder. Selections will be based on the project’s resonance with SFWA’s exempt purposes, and special preference will be given to book-publishing projects in the appropriate genres.
Funds for these pledges will come from the SFWA Givers Fund, from a $1000 pool approved by the Grants Committee in December. When a pledge results in receiving a donor reward such as a signed book, these items will be auctioned off at fundraising events, to help replenish the Givers Fund.
The first two Star Projects are:
- Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu by Jonathan Green, and
- Blacktastic: A Podcast of Black Scifi and Fantasy Stories.
SFWA President Cat Rambo also blogged about the initiative.
Over the past few years, I’ve been helping with the effort to open SFWA doors to professional writers publishing outside the traditional structure, to the point where we are the only writers organization (I believe) to accept crowdfunded publications as membership qualifying material. The Star Project effort ties in nicely with that and it’s gratifying to see SFWA continue to expand to match the changing needs of professional F&SF writers.
(7) BETTER THAN THE FILM. Rachael Acks has a completely entertaining and THOROUGHLY SPOILERY review of SyFy’s theatrical release 400 Days. You’ve been warned. And it’s safe to read the first paragraph, where nothing is given away –
400 Days is the first theatrical release film from a company (SyFy) that’s been cranking mediocre to howlingly (we hope intentionally) funny terribad movies out onto its cable station for years. Getting in to movie theaters is a big deal, a major investment, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee a movie’s actually good, right? Let me tell you, I’d rather watch a SyFy offering any day than Transformers 4. But is this Syfy going legit, so to speak?
(8) RSR INDEXES ARTISTS. Rocket Stack Rank has now added exhibit and viewing tools for a wide number of creators eligible in the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories. Gregory N. Hullender says, “The value we’ve added here is that we’ve gathered together hundreds of online images and set up a lightbox so people can riffle through them quickly.”
The drawback to the Best Fan Artist exhibit is that it features only semiprozine cover contributors at the site, and a link to eFanzines’ cover index where one can see some artwork in fanzines produced as PDFs. I will be the first to agree there are technical barriers and questions about permissions in the way of indexing art from PDFs (in contrast to semiprozine covers which are already available online) – however, RSR needs to figure out how to present fan art on a level playing field.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 19, 1990 — Natives of a small isolated town defend themselves against strange underground creatures in Tremors, seen for the first time on this day in 1990.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born January 19, 1809 – Edgar Allan Poe
(11) CONRUNNERS COULD USE MORE FANS LIKE THIS. Icelandic strongman Hafthor Bjornsson, known for his role as “The Mountain” on HBO’s Game of Thrones set a Guiness World Record for being the fastest person to carry two refrigerators 65 feet.
(12) CLEVELAND THANKS THE FANS. In response to a club’s charitable work, “Cleveland celebrates Star Trek’s roots with thank you to The Federation”.
Cleveland City Councilman Martin Keane will present a resolution of appreciation at 7 p.m. PJ McIntyre’s, on Lorain Avenue in Kamm’s Corners, is hosting a celebration from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
According to the resolution, the 60-member Cleveland chapter, named the USS Challenger — named to honor the crew of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger — has raised $15,000 for local charities, and has conducted annual drives for food for local food banks; supplies for local animal shelters; Toys for Tots campaigns and supported March for Babies, Heartwalk and Laura’s Home.
Given that the reporter pointed to another Cleveland/Star Trek connection — did you know Majel Barrett was a native of suburban Shaker Heights? — it’s a pity no one told her that Roddenberry previewed the show for fans at the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland.
(13) LOVECRAFT LETTERS. Heritage Auctions will take bids on a parcel of 10 handwritten letters by H. P. Lovecraft at its Rare Books Auction #6155 on April 6. The letters to aspiring author Frederic Jay Pabody are full of writing and publishing advice.
Lovecraft recounts recent visits with his “literary friends” R.H. Barlow and Adolphe de Castro, the suicide of Robert E. Howard, other “weird” fiction authors, the nature of good marriages and bad marriages, religion (or the lack thereof), Atlantis, some splendid passages about the nature of “seriously artistic” weird fiction, and his repeated inveterate hatred of typewriters.
One highlight from the letters includes a hand drawn map or, as Lovecraft calls it, a “rough Mercator’s Projection chart” of Kusha, a land associated with the myth of Atlantis.
Another letter, displaying Lovecraft’s somewhat morbid sense of humor, describes his short story “The Haunter in the Dark”, in which he kills off a character based on his friend and fellow writer Robert Bloch, as “a kind of revenge.”
“In both ‘The Dark Demon’ and ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ Bloch has a figure modelled more or less after me come to a hideous end. Well- I’ve survived other fictional deaths – Long having left me as a charred cinder on the floor of my apartment over a decade ago in “The Space-Eaters.” In a recent unpublished mss. Kuttner kills off Bloch, himself, + myself under thin disguises… slaughter de-luxe! I am decapitated – but my head is later found with its teeth buried in his carotid artery. Nice, wholesome ideas the boys have!” (December 20, 1936).
(14) BUGS. Kudos to Black Gate’s John ONeill for turning today’s entomological headline into a beautiful genre blog post – “I Don’t Mean to Alarm Anyone, But We’ve Discovered Giant Insects on Monster Island”.
(15) PEOPLE OF EARTH. TBS has given a series order to People of Earth, a comedy starring Daily Show alum Wyatt Cenac as a skeptical journalist investigating a support group for alleged alien abductees.
In the series, from Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels (The Office) and formerly known as The Group, Cenac’s Ozzie Graham slowly becomes sympathetic to the survivors’ stories and eventually comes to suspect that maybe he is an abductee, as well.
The cast includes Ana Gasteyer (Suburgatory), Oscar Nuñez (The Office), Michael Cassidy (Men at Work), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Selfie), Brian Huskey (Veep) and Tracee Chimo (Orange Is the New Black).
[Thanks to Will R., Brian Z, Cat Rambo, Jim Reynolds, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kurt Busiek.]
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It turns out the reason that Rey is missing from so much The Force Awakens merchandise might be that Hasbro messed up on its market predictions. This wouldn’t cover the Disney meet-and-greet issue, as that would be a different marketing department making the decisions. (Though it’s possible they made the same wrong guess.)
at 1)
L’immortal.
@k_choll
Ahhh, now that makes me feel good. One of our big goals is to empower fans by giving them enough information that they feel good about making more nominations.
@JJ Thanks for the corrections. We’ll make them ASAP. As for removing information, that’s just a place where we disagree. We trust the fans to be fair and to make wise use of any information we can give them. The fans beat the slates at Sasquan, and we believe the fans can beat them at nominations if we can just make it easy enough for them to get the information they need. For us, more information will always be better, as long as we’re honest about the limitations of it.
I find the insects somewhat viscerally unsettling, I confess, but I’d choke it down and give them my backyard if I could. I’m so glad there’s so many now! Go, tree lobsters!
(Sometimes I think if I was ever richer than God, the best thing to buy would be a very small island. I’d wipe out the rats, hire a rat patrol, and set up a very small biological reserve for anything that would thrive there. Alas, that’s a lot of copies to sell…)
Eric has made @JJ’s updates, and he has a request: for anyone who owns any of the books in the Unknown section of the professional artists page, could you look on the back of the dust cover (or the inside flaps) and see if there’s a credit for the artist? We’d love to support these artists by giving them credit for their work.
Thanks!
So, from the Hasbro marketing article, it seems that the PTB thought that Kylo Ren would be the breakout character.
Really? That emo-driven WATB? No one with an ounce of pride would want to be that idiot. ESPECIALLY since Rey bjarq uvf nff.
@Ha Nguyen:
“They really liked the Kylo Ren showreel. Did we remember to include any post-unmasking scenes?” “Nah.”
If I remember rightly, ‘including at conventions’ was added quite recently: I have an idea that it came about by a rather haphazard process in which a motion changed a lot, though I can’t remember the details. So I don’t think it can be definitive of the meaning of the rule. If it means anything, it means that conventions aren’t excluded (since you might think they aren’t public enough).
‘other public display’ has been part of the rule since time immemorial. I would suppose that when the rules for some other categories were changed to include online publication, this wasn’t done for BFA because it was assumed that ‘other public display’ covered it.
Terrible news about David Hartwell. ‘Ascent of Wonder’ was a hugely important collection to me as a young sci-fi fan and introduced me to several works and writers which remain influential to me today.
I am astounded anyone who paid any attention at all to The Force Awakens, even someone who doesn’t care about Star Wars and was only paying attention to come up with marketing ideas, could imagine Kylo Ren would have more appeal than Rey. I am unable to suspend my disbelief.
@Kathodus
Not all that surprised myself. Daisy Ridley’s performance is great, but all the early shots of her in a mouse coloured costume with a quaterstaff don’t bring that over. Kylo Ren has a funky mask, a cool cape and a weird lightsabre with crossguards.
One is distinctive, one looks distinctive. And the look of the character, nine months before the finished film can be viewed, is what the marketing guy has to base his decisions on.
Could we stop killing people off before they are dead? My heart goes out to David G. Hartwell’s family and friends as they go through this difficult time. Sitting by the bedside of someone you love knowing they are dying is devastating.
Bruce Arthurs: I’m sad, but not grieving… which rather makes me feel like I’m a crappy son.
Your not. It’s much more common than you’d expect. Things were complicated with my father and I when he died and and grieving has never been high on my list. May you come to peace with your situation over time.
What marketing person doesn’t know that heroes outsell villains?
@NickPheas – Ah, I’d assumed they’d be given an exclusive look at the film, or at least several scenes.
Thanks! I never would have figured that out. It is good to ask.
I’ve been doing this the hand-cranked way, bookmarking the last comment (which oddly doesn’t always bring me back to the same place) and checking. Less efficient, but also fewer messages in my inbox.
@Kip W
On not returning to the same place you bookmarked: I’m pretty sure that’s down to comments not always posting in real-time. Spam filters triggered by keywords cause comments to hit moderation, new posters need their first comment approved, etc. Once cleared the delayed comments pop in place back at their original timestamp which shifts stuff around a little.
From the article on Hasbro and the unnamed source:
Maybe your boys don’t. But other boys might who have parents who aren’t as unconsciously biased. Girls make up ~50% of the population they might want to play with the girl dolls. And women do most of the shopping for kids toys.
I think marketers need to be doing more market research and less relying on their gut instincts or what they know.
I’m sure he was involved in many, many, many other books that I dearly loved, but the three that spring most to mind (because they actually had his name on the spine) were horror anthology The Dark Descent and SFBC fantasy anthologies Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, all three of which broadened my reading horizons immensely.
Iphinome asked:
Are you certain that they always do?
Disney blew their projections for the popularity of ‘Frozen’ merch and it took them a full year to figure it out. They also didn’t anticipate Elsa being more popular than Anna, given who had the most screen time. And that was for a pretty standard princess flick. Who would believe a room full of Marines screaming love at Elsa singing ‘Let It Go”? Yet it happened.
I’m beginning to think that data-driven marketing has a ways to go.
Also, I bet if they had Rey and BB-8 at a meet and greet, the lines would approach the length of the ones for Anna and Elsa.
Tasha Turner on January 20, 2016 at 9:24 am said:
From the article on Hasbro and the unnamed source:
“We know what sells,” the industry insider was told. “No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it.”
Maybe your boys don’t. But other boys might who have parents who aren’t as unconsciously biased. Girls make up ~50% of the population they might want to play with the girl dolls. And women do most of the shopping for kids toys.
I think marketers need to be doing more market research and less relying on their gut instincts or what they know.
Beyond that, the idea that boys won’t watch shows with female lead characters (or play with toys of female characters) is entirely based on conventional wisdom, not evidence. (When there is evidence, it’s based on confirmation bias. A movie with a male lead that fails is just a random flop; a movie with a female lead that fails is proof that movies with female leads don’t sell.)
Here are a few articles based on actual research about what boys and girls like in media characters:
http://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/english/publication/televizion/21_2008_E/winter_neubauer_engl.pdf
http://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/english/publication/televizion/21_2008_E/goetz_lieblingsfiguren_engl.pdf
http://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/english/publication/televizion/21_2008_E/goetz_fantasy.pdf
I suspect in this case they were also expecting another Darth Vader. Darth Vader was madly popular compared to Luke Skywalker (and no wonder) and there’s Vader merch out the wazoo. So hey, put your nickel on the guy in the black cape and cool mask! Worked before! Plus girl cooties! Can’t fail!
I suspect a couple people in marketing watched the movie when it came out and went “ohhhhhh crap….”
The Disney Elsa thing can probably be tracked to a fundamental misunderstanding of why princesses grab little girl brains. They don’t want the prince, they want to be INTERESTING. They want to be at the center of the story. They’ll take superpowers and a power ballad every time.
And instead got another Darth Maul…
Gah. I am hating marketing’s gender bias more and more. There have been NUMEROUS outcries against gender-labeling toys lately, from Lego’s Friends set to asking Toys r’ Us to stop actively splitting the store in two to the “Where’s Black Widow?” campaigns. I’ve seen compare and contrast studies of older catalogues, sociological commentary on the effect it has. Oh, and all the stuff about video games.
Have these people not heard word ONE about any of these? They are directly related to not only the marketers’ industry but their field. It seems like a huge pile of data is building, but all outside their bubble somehow. We’d (verbally) flagellate people in most fields for ignoring trends this blatant in their supposed area of expertise.
I’ve even noticed in the freaking Cars merchandise, where apparently being a high end blue Porsche or a spy car with freaking secret wings isn’t enough to get a female character onto merchandise ahead of cars with fewer — or NO — lines. (Yes, no lines. They keep featuring racecars that we only see in the background instead.) And it’s not because Cars 2 flopped; this is about the merchandise that is out there despite that flop.
There’s one comment on the Hartwell piece that really strikes a chord with me, from Terri Windling:
Respect despite strong disagreement. That seems to be in pretty short supply lately, and that lack is exactly why I don’t want to see fandom become just another battlefield in the culture wars. More than anything else – the slating, the nominees, the accusations – this is what I find most repellent about the way the Puppies have carried on. I get the impression that if something this bad happened to any of the figures they regularly line up to revile, the Puppies would not react by grieving “a good person with whom I disagreed,” but with crass celebration that an Enemy has been banished from the battlefield. Worse, they’ve begun to inspire that feeling in me – and that’s awful. I hate feeling that I could celebrate the passing of someone whose major crime was that their taste in books differed from mine.
In short, the standards I am most concerned about seeing lowered are not literary ones. There have always been good books and bad books, on either side of any line you care to draw, and that’s never going to change. I’m more worried about basic human decency falling by the wayside.
Confirmation bias is dangerous. In marketing it will kill your company’s sales and reputation.
Preaching to the choir but 101 classes in college should include practical exercises on things like confirmation bias and sexist/racist unconscious biases. Little things like the Blindspot Harvard.edu testing done in small conversation groups can open people’s minds if done sensitively.
Also how to do laundry, cook basic meals, change diapers, clean floors, grocery shop, understand car repair bills, put together IKEA style furniture. Stuff that are frequently taught to either girls or boys at home but not both. Basic living skills. Oh and how to use search engines and do research online and critically review the results.
RedWombat: Yes to Elsa being more marketable because INTERESTING. (I think Anna is interesting as a personality, and I’m a little sad she got so outstaged by personality AND magic powers the character actually gets to keep using AND a killer song, because at least one friend of mine finds her the first Disney Princess she ever got to identify personally with).
I suspect that they assume, too, that Rapunzel is interesting because long blonde hair and cute purple dresses and perky outlook, where I find her interesting because underneath extreme naivete from isolation and overdone perkiness and painful mother-issues is a rapid-dire mind and amazing healing powers. That they market her as she looks in the movie instead of as she looks at the end not only means they can sell the princess “look” they think appeals, but, if I were the little girl marketed to, means that anyone fooled into believing the implication that Rapunzel loses her power at the end can keep playing their stories with someone who has magic powers.
(In my opinion, which is supported by the movie’s text even as the movie’s subtext suggests otherwise, she doesn’t lose her actual power when she becomes a pixie-cut brunette, the power just needs to be expressed through a different outlet.)
@Tasha, as it happens, my dayjob work is all about teaching kids how to avoid confirmation bias, how to find and authenticate online information, and related topics: http://www.mediasmarts.ca
@Rev Bob
Yes. There have never been enough people capable of this. How do we teach people this skill?
@Lenora Rose:
I’ve wondered if the former was actually a direct response and workaround to the latter. As in, from Lego’s standpoint, they saw that places like Toys ‘R’ Us were actively splitting the store and only putting Lego on the ‘boys’ side, thus costing them half their potential market. So they created a line that stores would be forced by their own logic to put on the ‘girls’ side. And then at least made sure that the ‘girls’ line was still physically compatible with other Lego sets so that they weren’t actually locking anybody out.
It’s still not good, of course, but it’s not good in the ‘working around a bad situation without actually doing anything to help anybody else’ way rather than an ‘actively trying to make things worse’ way.
Petréa Mitchell: A corollary to your question to Iphinome (are you certain heroes always outsell villains) was the surprising-to-me news item I read yesterday where a fan group in Darth Vader and Stormtrooper regalia presented a child with an artificial arm.
Never mind the internal consistency of having prosthetic-assisted Vader as a presenter — he’s the archvillain of the original trilogy of films. How strange to see him welcomed as a leader of charity work…
Making one of my few trips to a real bookstore this weekend. What should I check out? My list so far is:
Word Puppets
I Am Princess X
Ms Marvel Vol 4
The Lego situation came about because they were suffering huge losses against the licensed toys that became big after the rules against mixing programming and advertising were removed in the early 1980s. (The removal of those rules was itself the biggest contributor to the gendering of toy sales, since it was now doubly important to make sure that the ads, I mean shows, reached the right target audience.) Lego able to win back market share by both buying and granting licenses but most of the available licenses were for “boy” brands (Batman, Star Wars, etc) and so got put in the blue section. Lego Friends was a later attempt to create a new pink section brand.
I’ve seen trailers for an Angry Birds movie. All the voice actors I noticed were male. Now, quite aside from “why an Angry Birds movie?” – why an all (or mostly)-male Angry Birds movie?
Jamoche: And what about the ethnicity and gender of the Angry Birds?
Question to self: How many birds would be required to have one representing every subdivision in a movie that I know I’m never paying to see no matter what actors do the voices?
… An Angry Birds movie?
And I thought that seeing Angry Birds Star Wars posters was bad enough on the ‘Why is this a Thing?’ scale…
(Though I will admit seeing a drawing someone did of Wreck-It Ralph about to be launched by the Angry Birds slingshot was a good one… hey, Ralph gets to wreck things and be the hero at the same time!)
We have one of them a mere 75 minute ferry ride from downtown, sanctuary to lots of birds. The Department of Conservation also looks after a bunch of other offshore islands that are/have been made predator-free* as refuges for endangered species.
@Rev. Bob,
Yes, it’s one of the things many of us** try to do, holding ourselves to basic human decency, not descending to name-calling, abuse & insults. It’s hard because the name-calling, abuse, and insults gets the attention, and it is tempting (so very tempting) to reply in kind.
*It requires constant vigilance to prevent rat reinvasion: Norway rats can cross 2 km of open water and stowaways on visiting boats are a frequent risk too.
**It’s a big part of why File770 has become a regular hangout for me. That and books.
@Tasha Turner —
I think marketers need to be doing more market research and less relying on their gut instincts or what they know.
Marketing has the enviable characteristic of being understood not to work reliably. It gives a lot of leeway for policies that act to reinforce the marketer’s rates. If you allow significant marketing to girls, diverse marketing to girls, or admit that there’s non-gendered appeal as a thing, you do a bunch of things to a marketer’s job, all of them bad if you’re male and established in that job. So incumbents don’t do those things, employing whatever explanation is required at the time as justification.
That the justifications don’t hold factual water isn’t really a problem unless the boss starts caring about facts over consistency of outcomes. (That’s a rare boss.)
…if the Bird who lays the explosive eggs is voiced male, I shall be greatly puzzled. And if there is not an explanation about how roosters do sometimes lay sterile eggs, greatly wroth.
In the movie Home, the cat is a male calico. Calicoes are rarely male. In the book Home was adapted from, the cat was female. That was a 2015 release, so I’m going to go ahead and check the cast list for Angry Birds, just to see. According to IMDB, Matilda (the egg laying bird) is voiced by a woman. I also see Dinklage is voicing a character. I have now set my bar for this movie to “hopefully less painful than Destiny voice acting from Dinklage.”
Marketing has the enviable characteristic of being understood not to work reliably.
I’ve spent some time in the trenches of Marketing and this is depressingly true. It allows presenting personal opinion as a factual basis for decisions that otherwise make no sense whatsoever. Calling someone on this and suggesting they provide better proof than “we know this works” is futile, unless you’re surrounded by people who value logic over emotions.
If I had unlimited funds, I would buy Hawaii and eradicate the myriad introduced species that have caused what is probably irreversible damage and I’d start with the rats and mongoose (the latter introduced to deal with the former by people who didn’t understand that diurnal predators weren’t much good against nocturnal prey) who have pretty much eliminated native birds.
Ah neat altered carbon will become a 10-episode Netflix series Follow the link for the article !
This could be really fun. I recall liking the first few novels when I read them when they first came out.
@Cheryl S. —
It’s hard to bring back extinct native birds. The ones that aren’t extinct yet are being killed by bird malaria as it gets above the 4000 foot line as global warming moves the mosquito habitat up the mountains.
(I mean, it could be tried; there are study skins for a lot of them, there’s DNA. But you’d have to do something about the habitat while you were at it; the botany’s mostly invasive species now too. Seriously big project.)
@Graydon, I don’t think it’s possible to revive extinct species, but there are tiny pockets of native birds left in Hawaii. They are under constant pressure from habitat eradication, rats, mongoose, feral cats and people. Even if predators were eliminated today, they might still not survive.
My dream is about removing non-native species. I think it’s gone too far in Hawaii for native species to come back, unless humanity vanishes along with non-native plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. There might need to be some improvement in soil organisms as well.
And none of that is at all realistic. I was just engaged in my own dream for a moment.
@Shambles – That’s great news! Man, lately I feel like I’m really being catered to, TV-wise.
@ Kyra
Glad you’re liking Hidden Warrior. I liked it and the sequel, too, very much. A much more nuanced and realistic take on the hidden princess and rightful heir reclaiming kingdom tropes. These make me want to look into others of Flewelling’s books.
@Cheryl S. —
Empathize greatly with the dream.
Greg Hullender: anyone who owns any of the books in the Unknown section of the professional artists page, could you look on the back of the dust cover (or the inside flaps) and see if there’s a credit for the artist?
Trigger Warning is Adam Johnson
I was just at the grocery store. I passed an endcap with Star Wars Force Awakens themed boxes of Fruit Roll-Ups. Fruit Roll-Ups are apparently ineluctably masculine, as there was a box with Emo MaskBoy and some stormtroopers on it, and a box with droids on it, but no box with, oh, the main character of the movie. Because who’d want that?
Sad that Pluto isn’t officially a planet any more? There may be a new actual official ninth planet out there, and they even think they know approximately where it is: http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/20/us/possible-ninth-planet/index.html