Yes, yes, yes.

texturism:

when the web started, i used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. they put my stories up. they put my stuff up on the web. i had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. and i also got very grumpy because i felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. and then i started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. one of which was… places where i was being pirated, particularly russia where people were translating my stuff into russian and spreading around into the world, i was selling more and more books. people were discovering me through being pirated. then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in russia, it would sell more and more copies. i thought this was fascinating, and i tried a few experiments. some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. we took “american gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. you could read it and you could download it. what happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent i started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. you’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. when i give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “well, what about the sales that i’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” i started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. which is, i’d say, “okay, do you have a favorite author?” they’d say, “yes.” and i’d say, “good. what i want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” and then, “anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” and it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. they buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. very few of them bought the book. they were lent it. they were given it. they did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. and i thought, “you know, that’s really all this is. it’s people lending books. and you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. it’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” what you’re actually doing is advertising. you’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. allowing people to read things. allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. and i think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.” - neil gaiman on copyright, piracy, and the commercial value of the web via garychou: roominthecastle

The last three months’ Amazon Studios semifinalists. Givin’ lots of money to writers and filmmakers since 2010, and now actors, editors, and artists too.

Yes please.

needthisnow: palomino blackwing 602

Ray Bradbury’s advice to a young reader. My favorite part:

Fall in love with the future! […] Be your own self. Love what YOU love!

Isaac Asimov pretty much sums up how I feel about libraries. My favorite part:

[…it is] a friend that will amuse you and console you - - - and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.

Courtesy of Kevin, a must-read, hilarious, and thought-provoking essay on female characters in A Song of Ice and Fire (obviously, SPOILERS.) Excerpt:

George R. R. Martin is creepy. He is creepy because he writes racist shit. He is creepy because he writes sexist shit. He is creepy, primarily, because of his TWENTY THOUSAND MILLION GRATUITOUS RAPE AND/OR MOLESTATION AND/OR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SCENES. And I could write a post about those, to be sure. But you know what would be easier? I could just count them. One by one by one.

by Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown.

I don’t usually do politics/news/etc. on loveallthis, but this man is a fantastic writer, and there’s lots of things to love in this piece, such as:

JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can’t afford what’s in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

Get the rest after the jump:

Great stuff in here. Click through for more.

amazonstudios:

On career development: “I don’t think there’s necessarily a thing as career development. You write what you’re passionate about. Anytime you try to write what’s popular you’re going to be two years off anyway. It’s important to do the one thing that never goes out of style: solid, bold, compelling stories.”

— Shane Black

(Source: amazonstudios)

amazonstudios:

Writer/director Shane Black, an action hero to screenwriters everywhere, served as a guest judge for the Amazon Studios April awards – and took some time to answer a few questions (and dodge a few about Iron Man 3).
Shane Black’s voice, so deliberate and enunciated, takes on a conspiratorial tone. I hold my breath. “Here’s what people don’t know,” he says. “Here’s the big secret.” It’s not about Iron Man 3, the blockbuster sequel he’ll be directing for release in 2013 (he can’t say much about that). This secret is about screenwriting. “I don’t just say this for me, I’ve heard this from many people,” he said. “You write a script. It’s very difficult, but then you finish it. You think if you write, say, seven more, you’re cruising, everything’s great.”
Yeah, that sounds about right. Especially when you’ve written scripts like Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Last Boy Scout, as Black has. “But each one is more difficult. If you’ve written nine scripts, the tenth is going to be even harder,” he says. Wait, what? “Maybe it’s just that you know more about writing and you’re not satisfied with less. But it never gets easier, only more grueling with every script. I’ve never had an easy one.”
Can’t help it; heavy sigh. Some secret! “That’s not to say it was all misery,” he continues quickly. “Difficulty doesn’t mean it was a miserable process. Difficult means you had to burn brightly and pace around 1,000 times and go through 10 reams of paper, but you get it. … I think it’s important to feel like you’ve really smashed at the envelope, flailed away at all the corners until you’ve exhausted the pool of ideas that exist for a project you’ve chosen, even if you don’t use most of them.”
He seems to still be in envelope-smashing mode for Iron Man 3, which he will be writing (with Drew Pearce) as well as directing. The movie is a reunion of sorts with Robert Downey Jr., who starred in Black’s directorial debut, the snappy neo-noir Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Black can’t get all plot-specific, but he can talk about what excites him about Iron Man, which he describes as a “distinctly entrepreneurial story” about someone who’s a genius, who makes wonderful machines, “a guy who can kick your ass, but also has a reason for doing it that he thinks is justified.” The story is a “coming of age for a rich guy, a pampered guy, who has to get back to his grassroots.”
As much as that though, or more than that, it’s a story about science, and how it can unite humanity. Lately, particularly post-Fukushima nuclear meltdown, science and its seeming gifts have been more divisive and painful. Black is excited by the space-age vibe of scientific discovery: “Iron Man is something for the 16-year-old boy with a copy of Popular Science under his arm and a dream. … Optimism combined with real-world kickass sentiment.”
And then there’s the chance to work with Downey again, to “encounter someone who is a brilliant talent, decent guy, a friend, see where he’s at and get reacquainted creatively,” he said. “I have utmost respect for this guy. I have never worked with anyone who is just so effortlessly good.” It’s odd to think that in the mid-2000s, when Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out, Downey was considered less than a sure thing as a leading man. But a superhero franchise and Sherlock Holmes reboot later, and perceptions have changed for Downey. And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang certainly changed perceptions of Black. “The most rewarding thing was that I don’t think people realized that I had weird taste,” he said. “Everyone just assumed that I was trying to make big-budget movies, but I really wanted to try some new things.”
One of the biggest new things was directing, though Black acknowledges that he’d been accused of directing on the page long before he stepped behind the camera.
“I think it’s wonderful to write screenplays,” he said. And there was this sense, at first, that just having written a movie was “such a huge deal.” But after writing 6 or 7 of them, and seeing directors make choices he wouldn’t have made, things shifted, Black said. “It’s now so much about trying to make the most incredible movie with the most incredible people and have me not have to step out” and let a someone else take over.
Black came to realize that “the barrier that I imagined there was between the writer and director, there really isn’t. The writer, especially someone with a visual imagination, can have just as good of ideas as the director.”
And to him, that visual imagination “seemed always a necessity, it’s actually the joy of it, to be able to open up your imagination from the sort of proscenium arch that I was trained to work with in college in theater playwriting, then say oh, no – there’s no limits to that. You can be in the middle of the sky, now how do you want to look at the middle of the sky?”
Of course, fueling that imagination isn’t easy. “I’ve never been much of an artist, but what I would do is advance frame by frame through a lot of movies for a lot of hours and see just how they achieved the fluidity of movement,” Black said. “Having made the leap, I know it’s not an impossibility. It’s just hard work to become a good director.”

– Studios Steph

(Source: amazonstudios)