Videos and Essays, Mostly Thought-Provoking

[l33tminion]

• I've been reading a lot of essays by bradhicks lately. A while ago, I posted an essay of his about brining back the WPA, but since then I've been directed his-journal-wards several times and decided I should pay closer attention to what this brilliant essayist has to say:
  • Here's his classic Christains in the Hands of an Angry God which answers a very interesting question: Why are American fundamentalist Christians so in bed with the Republican party when the economic values of the Republican party are antithetical to those expressed by Jesus of Nazareth, and when the biblical justifications for Republican positions regarding homosexuality, abortion, etc. are so very based on cherry picking and outright mistranslation?
  • He also gives one of the most intelligent looks at the Israel / Hamas conflict in When Will There Be Peace in Gaza: As soon as Hamas makes one crucial realization that they very much don't want to make.
  • He also has an interesting and very pessimistic take on the current economic situation, a catastrophe that could perhaps be mitigated if the FDIC decided to actually do their job... but their decision to not enforce the law was years ago.
  • His take on the church shooting committed by David Atkisson late last year is very interesting (and disturbing) in the context of current right-wing talk-media rhetoric.
• Matt Taibi talks about the contortions of current right-wing political protest, which must oppose Obama administration bailouts and progressive anti-bailout protesters.
• Linux Journal has a post about a recent investigation in Boston over a completely trivial matter that has yet again put this city at the forefront of "The War on the Unexpected". Specifically, police are suggesting (in the justification for the search warrant in question) that using a command-line interface is suspicious behavior.
• Here's an essay on how one of Disney's most famous movies ripped of an earlier Japanese work wholesale. Evidently was a "just claim we never heard of it" response to not being able to get the remake rights. Speaking of Disney, there's also an amusing take on Disney's favorite target for plagiarism, themselves.
• There's been a lot of talk on the gaming internet about OnLive, a new service business that applies the cloud computing model to gaming. The idea is to put the controller on your end and the processing all on the server, with streaming video in between. The tech community reaction has been skeptical, even if you solve all the streaming video problems, it seems like there would be some issues with latency. But maybe that's not a problem.
• A few videos:
  • A Wolf Loves Pork (a clever stop-motion-stop-motion short feature)
  • JavaScript: The Good Parts (only worthwhile if you use the language, but very worthwhile in that case)
  • The Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality

Comments

[l33tminion]

Well, whether it's technically plagiarism depends who was being copied from and whether the old animator was in the credits for the new movie (this is different from copyright violation, where it's sufficient to say the copyright was owned by Disney).

Your examples are poor, though, since it's a different situation when referring to a novel creative work: Do you start from a blank canvas when you paint a painting? Do you start from page one when you write a novel? Not that there would necessarily be anything wrong (morally or legally) with tracing old paintings or reusing old chapters, but people would still look askance at the artist or author who made that their MO.

'Course, it's not surprising to see such corner-cutting from makers of commercial art, and Disney is certainly not the only example of "self-plagiarism". And there's something funny about that (the humor is either the cheekiness of Disney trying to pass off something old as something new, or the surprise of the viewer that two seemingly unrelated movies have almost exactly the same scenes).

Still, I'd guess that there are plenty of animation studios that don't rely so heavily on tracing... although maybe you could go through, say, Studio Ghibli's oeuvre and make a similar compilation. (If that's possible, no doubt that one would also be amusing to watch.)

[peaceofpie.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think it's funny that people get so bent out of shape about "owning" creativity, but that's a whole 'nother matter.

My reaction is more like: "People have been borrowing each other's ideas for as long as there have been ideas, who cares?" I just think it's kinda ridiculous that people look at something as lesser quality if it's not "original".

The point of my examples was that there are things that make sense to do once, and then not do all over from scratch, in most activities that people do. If I were designing a website (god forbid), I would use similar design elements to those I'd seen work well for others in the past, and probably would copy and paste the code instead of typing it all out myself, and if I had any design skills of my own whatsoever I would probably copy my own work the same way, too. I doubt anyone would think that was odd. Sometimes I start entirely from scratch when I paint a painting, but a lot of times I use designs I've used before or seen others use before, and if I were painting something like a portrait or a still life the whole point of the painting would to copy what I saw as accurately as possible. But sure, I can see that depending on whether you're trying to make the point of "Ha ha let's mock Disney" or "actually Disney's not so bad", examples illustrating either point could easily be found. ;-)