IT WAS ACCEPTABLE IN THE 80s: THE SEQUEL

QUESTION: What is up with Hollywood making sequels to films that came out 20 years ago?

You had Rambo a couple of months ago, and you’ve got the new Indiana Jones movie coming up. I can sort of understand those, since they’re already an established series.

Then you’ve got the sequel to War Games that involves no one involved in the original film.

Then you’ve got a sequel to The Lost Boys that brings back The Two Coreys (of all the people from the 80s we hoped would never come back).

Which, by my calculations, all adds up to a big bag of 'What The Hell?'.

If the sequel trailers are anything to go by, Hollywood is in an unstoppable death spiral, because they’ve had up to 20 years to think of a good idea for a follow-up, and THAT’s the best they can come up with?

Looking forward to seeing Porky’s: The Next Generation and The Last Starfighter 2.

DISCLAIMER: I actually love War Games. And Porky's. The Last Starfighter was okay, too (though I haven't seen it since high school, mind). And The Lost Boys was all right, if a little cheesy.

Deja vu,

This is dF

BOOKS I’VE NEVER READ: THE MEME

By order of dinopollard, an interesting book meme for those of you who still read (hopefully, that’s all of you).

LibraryThing lists the top 200 books most often tagged as “unread” by LT users. For the purposes of this meme, "unread" = "It’s on my shelf but I haven’t read it, but I keep it there cos it makes me look edumacated”. For reasons I'm unclear on, the meme list cuts off at 106.

MISSION: Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

To make things a little easier, I’ve ignored the instructions and just organized my results into separate lists.

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE READ

1. Crime and Punishment
2. Catch-22
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude
4. Moby Dick
5. American Gods
6. Frankenstein
7. The Count of Monte Cristo
8. Dracula
9. A Clockwork Orange
10. Anansi Boys
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
13. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
14. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
15. Cryptonomicon
16. Neverwhere
17. A Confederacy of Dunces
18. Slaughterhouse-Five
19. The Catcher in the Rye
20. On the Road
21. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
22. Watership Down
23. The Hobbit

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE READ BECAUSE TEACHER SAID SO

1. The Odyssey
2. A Tale of Two Cities
3. The Iliad
4. Brave New World
5. 1984

PRETENTIOUS BOOKS I’VE STARTED BUT NEVER FINISHED

1. Dune
2. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES

1. Although I read BNW and 1984 in high school for lit classes, I loved both of them.

2. Of all the books on the first list, I liked all of them except Moby Dick (which didn’t do much for me) and Dracula (the first 75 pages are great, but it goes south for me after that).

3. Neither Dune nor Collapse are sitting on my shelves. I already sold them off.

4. What’s with all the Neil Gaiman books on this list?

For those of you who believe in audience participation, here’s the full meme list of "unread" books.

( Walk this way... )

Middle class intellectual,

This is dF

HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC, PART 18,457

Reports from the RIAA War On Thieving Pirates Like You®:

1. Music labels are suing Internet service providers and asking judges to force them to filter their users’ traffic and adopt a “three strikes” policy disconnecting users busted a third time for copyright infringement.

2. Music labels are suing Project Playlist for “massive infringment” because it allows users to embed music players in their MySpace page to listen to music streams from files on other computers. Note that Sony BMG is the only label not suing them.

3. Microsoft says it won’t support the DRM keys on any music sold via its now-defunct MSN Music Store after September. That means people who bought tunes or albums from the MSN Music store have to pick a computer (and OS) they want to authorize to be able to play it for the rest of their lives. Once they stop using that computer, the music they legally paid for is useless and can never be played on anything else ever again. The EFF sends Steve Ballmer an open letter demanding MS apologize to its customers. Ha ha.

4. Some of Australia's biggest musical acts are appearing in a new 10-minute documentary asking fans to please not steal their music, otherwise they’ll be too poor to make music.

"There becomes a point where you've gotta make X amount to be able to continue, you know, unless you want to be an old mate that lives in Byron Bay and sits in his hinterland shack and just plays an acoustic guitar," says Ben Gillies, drummer with Silverchair.

"The problem with downloading obviously is that it's ruining our industry in a way, because I mean you know artists just aren't making money, record companies aren't making money from it," says Lisa Origliasso of The Veronicas.

Oh, DO shut up, both of you.

FUN FACT: The Veronicas (who are kinda like Avril Lavigne, but twin sisters, and Australian) made $1.7 million last year.

Look: I fully understand wanting to make a living making music, but if yr a millionaire and STILL complaining, then seriously, fuck you. Maybe digital piracy will weed out these greedy fucks who whinge about not being able to be as rich and famous as U2, and then the only people left will be people who actually want to make music for its own sake.

Okay, that’s comic exaggeration. But I really don’t understand why, instead of pressuring their own fans not to download, artists don’t turn on the record companies who fucked up their chances of commercial success early on by trying to sue digital music out of existence instead of embracing it when they had the chance.

Rip mix burn,

This is dF