Fun links of interest for Friday

[franceslievens]

I've got heaps of these bookmarked for further reading and exploring, which hardly ever happens. Or I want to use them to write an LJ-entry on it, but that doesn't happen either, so let me entertain you and provide some links.

Research

• Research on Social Network Sites (e.g. LiveJournal and MySpace), compiled by danah boyd.

Literature

• Frostbite, a serial novel by David Wellington. I haven't started reading it yet, but it was recommended by onepotmeal.
• The Veronicas of Literature: Mark Bernstein on why Veronica Mars is a great character, and also what kind of characters people identify with. (I'm not doing his blog-post much justice with this statement. Just go and read it.)

Visual art

• Flight: Great comicsblog from equaly great comic books. (Or does this fall under the name graphic novel?)
• abandonedplaces and deadmachinery: Two rather strange, but interesting photo-communities. Both ask for posts of pictures representing abandones places and decayed machinery respectively. It gives off a rather eery atmosphere.
• Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work: When stuck with a boring story to tell in your comic, use one of these panels to get the suspense going. I think it also works when film-making.
  

Downloads

• The Best Media in Life is Free: Music, audio-books, e-books, all for free to download. No illegal stuff going on here, because this blogger links to downloads licenced with Creative Commons, or that have fallen into the public domain.

Life

• The Saddest Thing I Own: Stories and pictures from people about the saddest thing they own. Don't forget your hankerchief.
• How To Do Video: Don't know how to do stuff? Here are some handy videos that explain all from changing your car's oil to doing a backflip.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Agggg I wrote a long reply to this and hit the wrong button!!!!

I have to strat again now...

Well, I was commenting on the Bernstein's entries. There are some good points but I am not sure that a tv character is necessarily great because we identify with it, or that a book character can be great if we can hardly identify with it. They all serve a goal.

Having say that, tv and books are more than the characters. Alice is terrific but I barely identify to the main character's features.

Veronica has witty come-back and is too smart to be real, she is definitely a idealized teenager just like Alice was Carroll's idealized girl, but we don't necessarily relate to idealized versions of people. I think we relate to the experiences fictional characters encounter, the stuff they go through. It's something Whedon understood very well with Buffy.

IMO Veronica wouldn't work without Keith Mars (figuratively and literally!)and all the family stuff around her. Family was the key of the show, it's what made the characters good ones. It wasn't the detective action or the Highschool romances.

But they have worked on the family bonds for 2 seasons and I wonder if the series can extend to other fields now. If not, it is condemned to repeat itself.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Like I said: I didn't do the entry much justice by talking about identification. Bernstein's entry is already a comment on a quote from Marie-Laure Ryan, where she states that when it comes to identification we prefer the action and not the contemplation. I think that statement is a bit one-sided, and Bernstein is correct in stating that we need both the actions and the contemplation. I haven't watched VM, which is probably why I never refered to this blog-post before today, because it wasn't enough about VM for me to not understand it, but it was also too much about VM for me to say something meaningful about it.

One of the points Bernstein makes though, is that you can put whatever character you want in specific situations. The two will connect to make something new and special. This is also something Joss Whedon understood when placing the high school cheerleader in mortal peril every week. (Note that Mark Bernstein has high regards for BtVS. To see: go to his homepage (http://www.markbernstein.org/), scroll down to the "movies" section in the sidebar, and read he lists Buffy (season 7) as Really Good. Scroll over the other years to read how he lists the other 6 seasons.)

What was faulty with the quote, is that it says that action ultimately gives us flat characters, which is a stupid presumption of course. And then it goes on saying things about identification when confronted with first-person point of view. It's too simplified. The distinction between what we identify with and what we consider good isn't that clearcut I think. Alice is great, but I don't identify with her. Alice doesn't have many features to identify with! She just goes from one adventure to the next, and that's about it. She does so following rules that don't apply on our society anymore, so it isn't so strange we can't identify with her. But we can still identify with Elizabeth Bennet. Hmm...

What was the point I was making again?

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I can't find the sidebar !

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Hit the link in my comment. Scroll down. (The side bar isn't something that's separate on the page, just the thing on the left of the screen.) Somewhere in that part of the page is listed MOVIES, and under it is a list of movies and series in different colours (very small print!) with different colours to state if Bernstein liked them or not.

I must say that this portion of his homepage has become very cluttered over the time I've been reading him, since he lists everything, also the things he doesn't like.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

But there's nothing on the left of the screen! It's all red, but no list, no side bar.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Strange, maybe his site doesn't work very well inthe browser you're using? I'm using Firefox...

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Oh I figured it out! I had to change the style and switch to "blue" or "nouveau" and the side bar showed up!

But the links in the movie category don't work...

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Oh they aren't links...Not sure I agree with him movie-wise btw.

Sorry for spamming you lj!

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

No, I don't agree with him movie-wise either. He also writes a lot of book reviews, and in those I don't always agree either! So when I discovered his love for Buffy, I was kinda thrilled.

But I must say that most academic bloggers I read have at least seen Buffy and mostly also love it. And I don't read them because of that fact!

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

BTW do you know this blog ?

http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/