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It’s a line lamenting the impossibility of an incestuous relationship, but it applies here, too, to the long-delayed Ender’s Game film adaptation: it’s never happening. It no longer has a director, a script, or a studio, leaving it little more than the fevered dreams of hundreds of thousands of fans.
Author Orson Card writes:
This complex weave of emotions has made Ender especially difficult to film and has resulted in two decades of fizzled studio meetings, dead-end scripts and a marathon director search. The author said he was not interested in a “tough-hero action film” and refuses to condescend to green-screen Hollywood. Card imagines a “film where the human relationships are absolutely essential — an honest presentation of the story.”
This freaks me out:
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This graph, if the type is too small, shows the price of oil from January 2003, roughly $30, up through to December 2008, roughly $40. Inbetween was a terrifying ride presaging the end of the Western Civilization. What I want to know is this: What is going on? I know the price slide, rapid as it is, has a lot to do with the recent economic collapse as much as it does the reduced demand the high oil prices engendered, but I have to ask if a price slide this quick and this pronounced is really a good thing. It worries me because I don’t understand it. A year ago, the talk was that this was the new norm, that gas prices would never go below $2 a gallon again. Today the average gas price in the US is $1.838, $1.830 in my area, even lower elsewhere. And I’m confused.
I suppose I should be relieved that the prices haven’t stayed high, compounding the economic crisis even further. Imagine if the news we get every day of massive layoffs and failing businesses was coupled by oil that cost $200 a barrel. And yet, maybe it’s because 2008 was a year of terror and chaos, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, that this drop is simply a temporary thing, or that it causes some other problem. I don’t trust that it’s a good thing. I suppose I’m simply being paranoid, but here I am.
I have no excuse for letting yesterday go by blogless; I was in class a good chunk of the day, but I also spent a lot of time playing The Sims 2, longer than I should have, being honest. That said, yesterday was a pretty slow day. What was I gonna talk about? Rod Blagojevich? Pshaw. That’s no fun, and it’s not why you’re here. It’s funny, though; most of the blogs I read are pretty dead right now, too. Maybe something’s going around.
Mark Shea has it easy. People send him topics.
So I’m gonna go ahead and do another Total Request post. Tell me what you wanna read, and I’ll write it. I mean it this time!
And while we’re here…
As much as I like blogging, it doesn’t pay me a cent. I’m not sure how to make this mild success of mine some sort of money-making machine, but truth be told. that’s not why I do this. Unfortunately, I’m four short months from being thrust out into the cold, uncaring world where the government won’t cover my Cheese Nabs and Pop Tarts, let alone my rent, so I’ve got to line up a job for June, and fast. There are unfortunately very few guarantees that I’ll be able to work anything out, so I’d certainly appreciate some prayer, now that I’ve started to send out resumes.
Kevin and I are continuing to try and break into the comic world, and to that end, we’re throwing together at the last minute a short little X-Men comic to shove in the faces of Marvel reps at the upcoming New York Comicon, which I’ll be missing. Anyway, it will mean that Marvel will have samples of both mine and Kevin’s work. I was supposed to have this written weeks ago, but I kept forgetting, and school got in the way, and I honestly didn’t really have any ideas. So I called up my friend Ian, who oft-comments on this little blog of mine, and grilled him for stories. I eventually used something he devised, building up its scale a little bit, detailing and snarking it up, and I hope to be able to script over some finished art in the next couple days. As usual per my work, it has a light frosting of Judaism, but this derives wholly from the characters, and was Ian’s idea anyway. Blame him.
I wish I’d been able to recall a classic Excalibur short, “A Demon Went to Church on Tuesday,” from #75, which was probably my first encounter with Catholicism in my entire life, a loving little tale where Nightcrawler wrestles with how his status as a mutant intersects with his Catholicism, and goes to confession, asking forgiveness simply for being who he is. It’s wonderful. If I’d remembered that, I’d probably have tried a much more internal tale than the one I wrote.
I’ve also, in the past week, sent out resumes to Simon and Shuster, The Politico, and a celebrity magazine in New York that was advertising on Craigslist. I was also pointed by Kevin to a fellowship at First Things magazine for which I’m preparing an application, and I’m still putting together my employment pitch to Ubisoft Milan, for a job that’s almost certainly been filled.
Anyway, keep me and Kevin in your prayers.
In celebration of nearly doubling my post count since last time I had a little party here, I give you KT Tunstall doing “I Want You Back.”
Youtube is a wonderful thing. Once upon a time, and by this I mean the distant year of 2004, I used to have to scour Google for videos of commercials I liked that had long passed. I kept a folder in my bookmarks designated “videos,” and kept it proudly bursting. Full of whims, it was, but hard-fought and battle-ravaged whims, proud of the flights of fancy which were so well-earned. What a collection it was, in the best sense of to collect, the search and struggle to acquire, not only for the thing itself, but for the very triumph of acquisition. And I have always been a collector, from the 1993 Fleer X-Men cards to the whole first generation of Monster in my Pocket.
Then Youtube came around, and now it has everything anyone has ever filmed or animated or recorded. It has Renato Carasone’s “Tu vo’ fa’ l’americano.” It has every Simpsons couch gag in one big, long, reel. It has that Pizza Hut commercial that ran in front of the first Ninja Turtles picture. It has the original opening theme to The Electric Company right alongside the Apollo 8 Christmas broadcast and the Betty Boop adaptation of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher.” It has Nancy Sinatra and the intro to Disney’s Gummi Bears. It has Bruno Bozetto’s Italians vs. Europeans. It has everything. It’s all right there, in a big burlap sack for you to dig through. Collaborative collecting, if you will, makes it easier to get what you want, but it steals all the thrill away.
Now, that stuff ain’t stuck online anymore.
I’ve always wanted to be able to swipe those videos offline for my own personal use, to stick them on my new iPod classic and watch them between classes or when I got bored with the lecture, to share them at lunch with friends, to simply be able to be moved or amused with a simple button push wherever I went, without even needing an iPhone that can get to all that stuff where it is. Unfortunately, every Youtube downloader I’ve ever used didn’t work.
This one does.
It’s called Kickyoutube, and it’s the easier thing in the world. Just go to youtube, watch a video, and type the word “kick” in front of “youtube.” Then select your format, click “Go” and download. There it is, an MP4 or FLV or whatever else you want, ready to be stuck on your portable device, and all of it for free.
So when does this become illegal?
A bit over a month ago, in those heady days before seventy-one thousand jobs could be lost in one day, I wrote a little post with a deceptively whimsical title, “Cake and Video Games.” In it, I sit around and wonder how I, as a Christian and a thinker, should respond to this economic collapse we’re presently in the midst of, especially if it decides to go ahead and get a whole lot freakin’ worse, which it might. Among the dithering about the role of poverty and prosperity in the Christian life, amid the wondering whether or not I should just go get a job and struggle along or embrace poverty to better serve the poor, I threw in a little biographical detail.
I have some personal experience with how the Credit Crunch can affect small business, though: at my last job, I did Accounts Payable/Receivable for a small Christian bookstore. I wasn’t very good at it, and you’ll notice I don’t work there anymore. Anyway, this store positively depended on small, short-term lines of credit both to and from businesses it dealt with. We’d receive $3000 worth of books and wouldn’t pay it for eight months, or we’d sell $3000 in choir robes and wouldn’t see that money for a year. We could do that because much of our operating budget came from small, short-plan loans. We depended on the ability of banks to keep small businesses afloat with these loans. Banks stop doing that, and we go out of business.
Well, guess what? It’s going out of business. I swung by there last week to pick up my W-2 to account for the $760.32 I earned between the beginning of 2008 and mid-February, when I got canned, and struck up a conversation with my old boss, wondering why he was still in Virginia when I thought he was moving to Denver for school three months ago. Sitting at the old, worn desk, the man who looked so much like Daniel Faraday from Lost told me he was “seeing it to the shore.” Upon further questioning, he told me the store was folding. Perhaps, he said, it might become an online retailer, but a local fixture for thirty-seven years was shuttering up. A lot of this was a loss of business over the past decade due to the rise of, well, online retailing, the nail in the coffin was exactly the process I described above. They couldn’t get the short-plan loans needed to stay in business. Book distributors are more reluctant to extend lines of credit to small stores. Churches to whom they’d sold things on payment plans didn’t have the money to pay anymore.
It all just fell apart in four months.
This place, seriously, was the major supplier of pretty much every independent Evangelical and Baptist church in the city, providing an important service to the Body of Christ. This is a big blow.
I am consistently struck at how often other religions feel the need to talk about what the Catholic Church is up to. Hell, not just other religions, but everybody, hyperbollically speaking. There is no public institution under such intense and critical scrutiny as the Catholic Church. The Church cannot issue a document, cannot make a public pronouncement, without the world media explaining what everyone thinks is wrong with that decision. It’s not the Catholic Church is the only worldwide Christian body. We don’t see this much attention devoted to the action of the World Council of Churches, which represents most mainline protestants, to the Anglican Communion (unless the discussion is about how Bad Conservatives are disrupting it), or even of other protestant heavyweights like Rick Warren unless he’s somehow involved in the political process.
No, such opprobrium is reserved for the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Nobody cares what the Methodists say or how the SBC resolves its internal dislocations and disputes, but when the Pope rescinds the excommunications of four wayward bishops, we find out that this undoes decades of ecumenical work, is some sort of violence against Jews and Judaism, instead of the Church trying to stop a bad situation from simply getting further out of hand. People seem to think that this reconciliation is an endorsement of Holocaust denial — how soon they forget the actions both John Paul and/or Benedict took toward memorializing the dead and condemning the crime.
By “welcoming an open holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II’s moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism,” he said.
This is the same sort of person who frets that, in the 1962 Easter prayers, there’s one that the Jews might be converted, and thinks that this violates some imaginary decision to stop sharing the Gospel with Jews. It’s amazing.
Let’s look at some of the comments to this CNN story, shall we?
- What next, returning to the burning of witches and heretics? That church is so out of touch and out of date it is becoming a laughing stalk and it just keeps sliding backwards.
- Once more this re-enforces my decision to leave the Catholic Church.
This also explains why there are so many catholic churches closing throughout Canada and the rest of the world.What value is there to a prayer recited in a language that is not understood by the person praying?
Denying the Holocaust never happened confirms the shameful role Pope Pius X played during WW II.
It is just a question of time when all the citizens of this planet will question the relevancy of religion.
- Please understand that it is not only JEWS who are offended by the Pope’s actions! Anyone who denies the well-evidenced factual truth of the holocaust
is either mentally deficient or willfully ignorant, and it offends me, a Christian, very deeply that such a person has been found worthy to occupy an important position within the church.
For the life of me, I simply do not understand. Why, I must wonder, do people who place so little stock in Catholicism get so up in arms about everything we say? Why do the same people who say “Why do we care what the little man in the white beanie has to say?” spend so much time condemning what he has to say? Could it be they recognize the Church to be the enemy of their actions, and reflexively recoil?
One of the things I love about the modern world is the way in which people have responded to the Second Vatican Council. There’s been some weird stuff, ya know, like the legendary “clown masses,” but I think it’s been largely positive, and WaPo has an article about a Catholic lay mission house in Washington, DC. I’ve been wanting to be involved in something like this for years.
This is a great little combox skirmish between Big Bad Catholic, Mark Shea, and a pleasantly open-minded atheist called Toastisyummy that has been going on over at Catholic and Enjoying It.
It isn’t often you come across arguments on the internet that are conducted in good faith, and this is the reason I am linking to the exchange. Toast disagreed with Mark, but was curteous in voicing his point of view, and it seems like he and Mark both got something out of the discussion. I certainly did (thanks guys). Also, check out Toast’s blog entry ‘Atheist, Not Enjoying It‘ – seems he feels he got more than he bargained for when he tussled with the Shea!
