Let's put on a show...
If I've learned anything from 80's movies, it's that when something goes awry you can just put on a show and everything will turn out all right. Is an evil developer threatening to put a strip mall over your rec center? Then break dance your way out of debt and into our hearts. Is the orphanage closing? Then let's drive on a cross country trip to put on a big rythm and blues review.
What do you do when it's not just one place that's failing, but a whole institution?
Fake it until you make it...
I have some 25,000 images sitting on an external hard drive whirring away next to my computer. There's a soft blue light flowing forth from the front panel of the drive that lets me know that everything is all right, at least mechanically because aesthetically it's a nightmarish morass.
Not having to pay for film, or pay for development is both a blessing and a curse. It's certainly informed the way I approach photography, which bears more relationship to a strategic bombing campaign than an actual photoshoot.
The weekend gross: Observe and Report (spoilers)
It ended as awkwardly as it began, perhaps even more so with an explosion of full frontal male nudity and gore.
I went in to Observe and Report, Seth Rogen's latest vehicle, forewarned that some of the subject matter was going to be offensive. That the film would try to take comedy to a dark place, not usually trod upon in films that reach wide release.
We only like it because it's free
Part of the decline of newspapers, what part wasn't decimated by the excesses of private capital, came from Craigslist offering up a free marketplace for classified ads selling everything from socks to sex. In the past few weeks, in a cute bit of irony, I've been turning to the site looking for media jobs gradually being undermined by the service.
Fees, like captchas, are barriers to entry. When you charge for a service it discourages people from signing up and abusing (or even just using) the service as it changes the math of a break-even point for your scam. Newspapers offered that kind of barrier, though it was penetrated on occassion by the more ambituous, but Craigslist only attempts it for some real estate listings and ads from sex workers who, but for a wink and a nod, are pimping themselves to anyone that will look.
It is up to the community to point out the scams by flagging them and hectoring them with response posts warning their fellow users. For Craigslist the system makes sense, since there are thousands of listings posted every minute all across the world and it would be impossible to review them without grinding things to a halt, but in that darkness scams and shams proliferate.