Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

NPR is talking about the Ubi thing right now. Very weird.

 

MY EYES HAVE BEEN OPENED!

 

I love you people.

 

Very wary about a Sandman film - the series is brilliant, but it's subtle - everything a Hollywood superhero movie is not and it certainly isn't a superhero tale either!

 

In case anyone is following the Slenderman stabbing, one of the girls is to undergo a competency hearing.

It's a step in the right direction, but I think she needs a comprehensive psych eval even more. Just because one is deemed competent to stand trial doesn't mean that there's not something going on in their head.

 

I don't think Broseph Gordon Levitt will go over the top with it. I don't know if I trust him with true subtlety, per se, but only because the dialogue might be overstated and hamfisted; hopefully Gaiman will do enough hands-on stuff with the script and David S. Goyer will keep his mitts off it. But overall, Levitt's sensibility seems to be on the stylistic side, so at the very least I trust that it won't be a big Hollywood blowout.

 

Oh Lord, if Goyer gets into the Sandman script.... that's nightmare level stuff. It'd be if they gave Kurtzman and Orci scripting duties on one of the Star Wars movies.

 

I was interested in what Aisha Tyler had to say about it:

 

Oh, I'd agree the casting's good PC, as you say the script is critical.

 

I got here thanks to Coop's Twitter account and now I know what I've been missing all my life.

 

Speaking of the villain's point of view in Disney stories, Twisted: The Untold Story of A Royal Vizier did extremely well. The idea was that this magic kingdom is full of poor and starving people, the princess keeps disrupting the neighbor princes by siccing tigers on them (how can she get away with that?) and we are supposed to cheer for the sultan? Who keeps playing with animal toys instead of working? And we are supposed to hate the guy who wants to change things?

 

Brilliant performance!

 

This is great. In pointing out that things are changing, there's a very good underlying point to be found here: To handle social issues like this responsibly, people have to stop approaching the second or third phase of the diversification process as if it's still the first. When lots of people are talking about this issue and are on the right side of it, it's time to stop acting as if the entire world is against it and using that to justify having a loudmouthed entitlement complex or continually moving the goalposts. That's not to say it becomes less important or that moving forward will somehow be automatic now---it won't---but simply that a clear perspective of the situation at hand is necessary for keeping things on track. Roughly, phase one is about making people aware, and phase two is about leveraging that awareness to make very simple, practical changes. Once you're into phase two, you're actually doing a disservice to the cause by continuing to indulge the oversensational alarmism of phase one; demanding all these changes RIGHT NOW AND IN EVERY GAME! was never an honest expectation, but simply an overcompensatory rallying cry which projects urgency in the beginning, but becomes friggin' annoying as hell after a few years and starts driving more people away than it rallies. In terms of mass psychology, that humorless loudmouthed refrain is essentially an expression of "All your activism are belong to us!" and a competition to see who can care the most. I mean, it's like how Family Guy is actually funny, but ruined by some of its dumb fans.

That's half the problem with Anita Sarkeesian; she writes in a way that discredits the entire culture, like a sensationalized exposé of some long-dormant issue which she was the first person to ever discover. When part of your platform is that gamer culture is insensitive, it's just downright stupid to come at the issue as an outsider and still expect those insensitive people to care more about your feelz than about the fact that you're an outsider trying to expose their culture; right or wrong, you knew they were insensitive, so what did you expect? Frog, meet scorpion.

Social evangelists could learn a thing or two from religious evangelists: To the gamers, you must become as a gamer. Now the activism has to come from a place of love, and Aisha Tyler has perfectly captured that.

 

I saw this today and felt the need to share it:

 

Do not speak of such things.

 

While the new Battlefield: Hardline game isn't technically the next main Battlefield game (as in BF5), I did notice the campaign story follows a Miami cop named Nick Mendoza. Thought that was kinda cool.

Also, it's a cops and robbers game. Do want.

 

Happy Father's Day, peeps. If you're a father or are still living with your father (haha you loser geek), you should read this book today.

 

Aw no.....