Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
Civil war or not, a national divorce just isn't workable.
I just want politics to be normal again.
I just want politics to be normal again.
How dare you lick the boots of the sensitivity readers.
Yeah, I dunno anymore. I kinda feel like I would've gone for Trump's "Build the Wall" spiel if he'd promised to put it along the Mason-Dixon line.
I live in Pennsylvania and fairly regularly see people flying the traitor flag. The fact that they're north of the Mason-Dixon does not seem to get through their inch-thick malformed skulls.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
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Yeah, often thought about that. A the risk of sounding quite a bit "international socialism" (c'est la luuuuutteuh finaaaaaaalleuh), people seem to resemble and get along so much better based on sensitivities than on nationality or regionalism, I imagined a world of fluent mobility where people who choose places to live according to that.
There's a few problems with that, though. Firstly, it would only works on the progressive side (the conservatives would shoot the incoming foreigners on sight, them having the wrong skin color, accent and cooking habits), secondly it would make whole nations of pacifists right next to whole nations of militaristic universalists, so it would soon become one big bloody old fashionned conquista for jesus and maximized profit, and thirdly, even without that, it would make global issues (such as pollution and the deliberate frying of our planet for the sake of MONEY NOW) all the harder to tackle or even mitigate.
So, let's not. I say.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
- Jan 25, 2023
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- Switzerland
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- The boring one
(About the Dahl books. Nothing much is added by David Mitchell, but I still post this here because hey, it's a bit of David Mitchell.)
Fucking hell, I think I lost some brain cells reading that.
Alright, I'll play:
The author shows his true colours later, but it seems that his ultimate gripe is that the books exist at all.
Frankly, in a work of fiction, I find it iffy at best to change anything after publication (part of why I don't do so for anything I've written unless it's objectively at fault, such as grammar or spelling). It becomes even worse when the change is driven by ideological reasons, and where, as we've seen, the new versions read more poorly than the later ones.
And really, the last one says it all. The publishers were cowards and made "corrections" that no-one was even demanding.
This is an astoundingly flawed argument.
First, there isn't some omnipotent deity preventing Dahl's market share from diminishing. The books are published. People buy the books. The publisher sees what books are more popular than others, and prints more books accordingly. If people weren't buying the books, there'd be less books. I shouldn't have to explain this, but here we are.
Second, "pesky dead authors." Um, okay? So, I suppose you're fine with getting rid of everything from Plato, to Shakespeare, to Dickens? It couldn't possibly be that people read books by "pesky dead authors" for a reason, no, it's a gun being pointed to their head.
Third, I'll talk more on the subject of other books getting a chance later, but the idea that living authors should take precedence over dead authors is bizzare. First, history generally has a way of sorting out what works and what doesn't in art, so for instance, if an author is still being read long after their death, that's generally a mark of quality. Second, those "pesky living authors" will end up dying eventually, so do they become "pesky dead authors," or are they afforded different grace? Third, plenty of living authors obtain fame within their own lifetimes, but I'll come to that later.
All generally true, but it's beside the point. If people didn't buy the products in question, the products wouldn't be made. I'm tepid on plenty of IPs that are still going, but the reason they're still going is because people are consuming the media in question.
So, earlier in the thread, I talked about other books getting a chance. Well, on the question of Dahl supposedly crowding out other authors, I've got two words - David Walliams.
David Walliams - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
You can read that if you want, but the TL, DR is that Walliams has been called "the next Dahl," and having seen his books, it's easy to say why. If the author's thesis was correct, then Walliams should have never been able to have made it, since he should have been "crowded out." Instead, Walliams published his books, kids loved them, Dahl books are still on the shelves, and so are Walliams's for that matter.
This isn't even just a question of dead authors overshadowing new ones. Harry Potter didn't prevent Percy Jackson, Twilight didn't prevent Fifty Shades, Diary of a Wimpy Kid didn't prevent Dork Diaries, etc. The idea that there's been no new stories published since Dahl (or really, any deceased author) is insane to me. It's arguably telling that the author of the article doesn't even name any books or authors they'd like to see more attention. And again, by the author's logic, regardless of how popular someone like Walliams gets, as soon as he carks it, I'm assuming that by his logic, Walliams's books should just stop being published in order to clear the shelves?
Plato wrote philosophy - I am not aware if he wrote fiction - and ergo more or less comes under opinion. Dickens and Shakespeare have long entered public domain which means people have been interpreting, modernising, bastardising, adapting them for ages. So like it not, providing my read of the article is correct, Netflix dropped half a billion pounds to become the owners of Dahl’s work. That means they can do whatever they want with it.Fucking hell, I think I lost some brain cells reading that.
Alright, I'll play:
The author shows his true colours later, but it seems that his ultimate gripe is that the books exist at all.
Frankly, in a work of fiction, I find it iffy at best to change anything after publication (part of why I don't do so for anything I've written unless it's objectively at fault, such as grammar or spelling). It becomes even worse when the change is driven by ideological reasons, and where, as we've seen, the new versions read more poorly than the later ones.
And really, the last one says it all. The publishers were cowards and made "corrections" that no-one was even demanding.
This is an astoundingly flawed argument.
First, there isn't some omnipotent deity preventing Dahl's market share from diminishing. The books are published. People buy the books. The publisher sees what books are more popular than others, and prints more books accordingly. If people weren't buying the books, there'd be less books. I shouldn't have to explain this, but here we are.
Second, "pesky dead authors." Um, okay? So, I suppose you're fine with getting rid of everything from Plato, to Shakespeare, to Dickens? It couldn't possibly be that people read books by "pesky dead authors" for a reason, no, it's a gun being pointed to their head.
Third, I'll talk more on the subject of other books getting a chance later, but the idea that living authors should take precedence over dead authors is bizzare. First, history generally has a way of sorting out what works and what doesn't in art, so for instance, if an author is still being read long after their death, that's generally a mark of quality. Second, those "pesky living authors" will end up dying eventually, so do they become "pesky dead authors," or are they afforded different grace? Third, plenty of living authors obtain fame within their own lifetimes, but I'll come to that later.
All generally true, but it's beside the point. If people didn't buy the products in question, the products wouldn't be made. I'm tepid on plenty of IPs that are still going, but the reason they're still going is because people are consuming the media in question.
So, earlier in the thread, I talked about other books getting a chance. Well, on the question of Dahl supposedly crowding out other authors, I've got two words - David Walliams.
David Walliams - Wikipedia
You can read that if you want, but the TL, DR is that Walliams has been called "the next Dahl," and having seen his books, it's easy to say why. If the author's thesis was correct, then Walliams should have never been able to have made it, since he should have been "crowded out." Instead, Walliams published his books, kids loved them, Dahl books are still on the shelves, and so are Walliams's for that matter.
This isn't even just a question of dead authors overshadowing new ones. Harry Potter didn't prevent Percy Jackson, Twilight didn't prevent Fifty Shades, Diary of a Wimpy Kid didn't prevent Dork Diaries, etc. The idea that there's been no new stories published since Dahl (or really, any deceased author) is insane to me. It's arguably telling that the author of the article doesn't even name any books or authors they'd like to see more attention. And again, by the author's logic, regardless of how popular someone like Walliams gets, as soon as he carks it, I'm assuming that by his logic, Walliams's books should just stop being published in order to clear the shelves?
So if I were you, if that isn’t something you want to happen to your writings if you ever hit it big like Dahl, I’d suggest negotiating a copyright agreement that drops all your stuff into to the Public Domain the instant you snuff it.
Wow, you truly know nothing whatsoever about David Mitchell, and somehow came to the least accurate conclusion possible.
Are you familiar with irony? Comedic hyperbole?
That's not the point of the article though.
It's academic as to whether people are in the public domain or not in context, it's the idea that new authors should automatically take priority over old/deceased ones when it comes to stocking books and/or consuming them. It's clear that he dislikes Dahl's works (which is absolutely fine, no-one has to like/dislike anything), but it seems that the solution is to just prevent the books from being published under the premise that by their presence, it's crowding out other authors.
Well first, I'd never be published, but I'd have thought most authors would want their works under some kind of trusteeship. Not that that would prevent terrible adaptations ipso facto, but it does, in theory, allow better adaptations to be made.
And your source for this is...?
Fine. What's your conclusion?
I thought Roald Dahl was bad. Then I checked my daughter’s bookshelf
Eternal vigilance in safeguarding the minds of our children must be the responsibility of every parent.
This is an example of satire. Not very subtle satire, but satire all the same.
Again, look at the last line:
The saving grace here is that the current round of Dahl rewrites are tin-eared and dreadful. This attempted future-proofing may have ruined those books, like solar panels on a listed building. Perhaps some new stories will accidentally get a chance.
This isn't the tone of satire, this is the tone of someone wanting new stories to take precedence.
Well that’s the rub isn’t it. Dahl must have had a trusteeship of some kind. Thing is, Netflix ponied up enough filthy luchre to make themselves that trustee and so are allowed open slather to alter the work as they see fit.
...and?
I've already stated that the trust has the right to make alterations, just like people are entitled to critique those alterations and the reasoning behind them.
My source is that I've been aware of David Mitchell and his work, as well as his positions and his manner of expressing himself, for about 15 years, whereas you seem to have just learned he exists.
To clarify: David Mitchell loves history. A lot. It's one of his defining traits, and anyone who knows him would know he would never encourage people to overlook the classics. What he's doing here is pillorying the profiteering drive to endlessly repackage and rebrand the classics to make a buck-- which is exactly what he sees the rewrites as.
I didn't say it was satire. It isn't satire, and not all irony is satire.
The article very clearly uses comedic hyperbole.
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