Many a creative doesn’t want to wear the business hat. I know, that’s me too a lot of days. But it helps to be confident in wearing the hat when it’s needed and when to bring in the hired gun (e.g., a lawyer) for the right situations.
A legal eagle I use, Seth Polansky, posted this in a thread related to a particularly ridiculous film festival. I’ve seen it before, but in a sense, this about-40-minute video is evergreen and worth re-watching even if you’ve seen it before.
I was going to do a longer post about fandom gatekeeping and tie it into Banned Book Week, but I don’t have time, so here’s an article from TechRadar about NASA’s current plans for how we humans may use the moon to aid further exploration of the solar system.
Continuing Banned Book Week, Ron Charles and his editor conspired to give Ron’s essay the incendiary title “Do we really still need Banned Books Week?”
In fact, he even starts giving you umbrage fuel in the first paragraph, but then he talks to the people who and whaddya know?
Yup. People will be people and some people will always think that your dainty mind needs protection (see also, Monday’s post).
Image via EmilyQuotes.com
As friends know on social media, I’m a big fan of Banned Book Week that occurs every Fall. Given that people continue to challenge books and, really, are only looking out for you, whomever you might be, I find it a good tradition to continue. Several members of my family are or were librarians — and I well remember challenges to books growing up from parents who were worried our dainty minds would be perverted by various books.
I generally always try and read a banned or challenged book during this week. Last year, it was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, which is delightfully profane in the best possible way you want from a book. It left me thinking a lot about identity, masculinity, and race that I’m sure made many people concerned. I mean what if someone younger had asked the wrong question or came up with the wrong answer? More than that, conversations might have erupted, including two-way conversations. Very troublesome.
A lot of libraries have a display up this week to give you some ideas about a banned book to pick up, so do drop by. Ask a librarian for some recommendations. The equivalent of a Jane Austen villain will be entirely put out by you doing so, and isn’t that reward enough?
Unlike Starbucks, I’ve held off until this, the first official day of Fall, but now that’s it’s here:
Resistance is futile. Search your taste buds, you know it to be true!
But why is that anyway? And why do people hate it so much? Rebecca Jennings is glad you asked.
Look, writers are gonna write… except when they come up with voluminous excuses not to. So, periodic posts like this one to help motivate people are always handy.
In other words, enjoy this piece about how Laura Vanderkam gets her writing done while having 4 children, blogging, speaking, and presumably breathing and eating.
Okay, so I implied on Wednesday that I try and help people work smarter, not harder… because working on projects that go nowhere doesn’t help anyone.
So imagine my umbrage when I read an article by Jacopo Prisco about all the “placebo buttons” that are out there designed to give people the illusion of control. Do you people not know conspiracy theorists will run with this?!?
Of course, I have to wonder which is worse: being given buttons that don’t work and not told they don’t work OR having buttons that do work taken away.
Enter Apple, the company that’s never bashful about being forward thinking beyond a customer’s furthest vision. Apparently, they’re not so keen on the home button on their iPhones and, as of this post, may have ditched it. (Look, I write my posts in advance, all right?)
I’m not sure what’s worse, but I’m definitely keeping out of the way of the Hulk when he gets the news.
We haven’t had a wonky Wednesday in a while, have we?
All right, so let’s tackle something that affects businesses big and small. In fact, it affects families, too. How many times have there been “too many things” to do or deal with in a week?
As it happens, I deal with project selection at work — and it makes me long for the family-based stuff. Why? The number of players involved in “what to do?” for a business is, more often than not, exponentially larger for a start. And if you think trying to get a five-year-old to accept you’re not buying everything in the toy store, just wait ’til you have to let an executive know they can’t get all of their 27 initiatives funded.
As probably comes as no surprise, the folks over at Harvard Business Review have thought about this a lot — and have come up with a list of seven ways in which your organization might be holding onto too many projects.
By definition, this really should be more useful to those of you dealing with project selection (and, frankly, killing off zombie projects) at work. But if you apply bits and pieces of this to the fam, I won’t tell.
However your week has gone, you deserve to learn about the important history of cookies from the Neil Degrasse Tyson of cookie knowledge:
Happy Friday!
I touched on notions of fandom with my Crisis of Infinite Star Treks series and certainly toxic fandom has been more on people’s minds in the past year or so in any case (see, for example, these pieces on CNET and in Wired).
So it was interesting to read Ryan Britt’s piece in Den of Geek talking with the writers of So Say We All, a new book about the Battlestar Galactica remake… including the fact that it was not just a remake, but a “re-imagining.”
There’s obviously more in the book than just the subject of fandom, but that’s the focus of the article. Certainly, BSG –as it’s often abbreviated– provided ample opportunity for toxic fan uproar from its short yet expansive stint on TV. I’m sure had it been made nowadays, the uproar and venting would have been omnipresent. Much of what they pulled off was nothing less than exceptional, but let’s just say I don’t want to be in a room of BSG fans discussing how the series ended. That’s just going to get unpleasant.