Month: July 2024

“Seeing with an Artist’s Eye” – Counter Craft

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“The fan brain thinks about what is. It worries about “canon” and wants to preserve the work like a sacred object from critics, vandals, and barbarians. The artist brain thinks in what could be. It looks at the object not to vandalize it, but to come up with a new object. Actually, let me shift my metaphor to the “artist’s eye.” The artist’s eye is always looking for openings, cracks, and canyons to explore. And yes, fans can have an “artist’s eye” too. Isn’t the main impulse of fanfiction “What if this thing I love had been done differently?”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/seeing-with-an-artists-eye

“I can’t binge games like I used to – but here’s how I finally got stuck into Elden Ring” – Keza MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)

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“Elden Ring is a horrible game if you’re trying to complete it as fast as possible with extremely limited time – most games are. It’s a wonderful game if you’re focused on the adventure you’re having in the moment. I spent about 40 minutes in a small smouldering church, trying to beat a red phantom warrior with a gigantic cleaver who could kill me in two hits, just to see if I could. When I got her – after two successful parries and a flurry of desperate sword swipes – I was beside myself. That was a moment I would have missed entirely if I’d been fixated on getting through the game”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/jul/02/pushing-buttons-elden-ring-making-time

“Jeff Zucker’s Fleet Street Misadventure” – Michael Wolff (Intelligencer)

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“As media becomes more of a constrained business — a troubled asset class — it becomes more of a technical one. You are managing decline. You’re fighting at the bottom rather than living at the top — but that can be a business opportunity as well as any other. Zucker is a good operator. Possibly a great one. In a world of limited media opportunities, he is able to discern the small successes. And, if you have to go low — and it is media, after all — he knows how low to go. He is shameless, certainly, and yet proud”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jeff-zucker-telegraph-bid.html

“The Shareholder Supremacy” – Ed Zitron

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“The Michigan Supreme Court found that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders [and that] the powers of the directors are to be employed for that end,” and intimated that cash surpluses should not be saved to invest in upcoming projects, but distributed to shareholders, because Ford had shown that it was good at making money. Ford was directly forbidden from lowering prices and raising employee salaries, and forced to issue a dividend.

To be clear, the statement around corporations’ duty toward shareholders was made “obiter dicta.” This means it was not actually legally binding, despite over a hundred years of people acting as if it was”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/tss/