I want to blame 50 Shades of Grey for tarnishing the memory of Pride and Prejudice, but I think all the unauthorized sequels to Austen’s most famous novel already did that.

langer:

Steve Almond! Where were you ten years ago when I tried making this argument and just got told I was being an over-serious unfunny buzzkill!!

In a sense, Rice owed Stewart an even larger debt. His criticism of the Iraq war—a series of reports under the banner Mess O’Potamia—might have done more…

Sure, let’s not talk about how the reboot of the Spiderman movies was just a blatant attempt by the baby-boomers that own Sony to maintain franchise rights, let’s just blame it on ‘young people,’ because saying that the latest generation sucks and that the previous generation was way cooler/more authentic/less narcissistic is a new and fresh argument that no one has made before and hey you damn kids get off my lawn!

femfreq:

It’s important that individuals who engage in hateful behavior and threats of violence don’t go unchallenged and do face some measure of accountability - that said its also critical to remember that the domestic violence ‘game’ targeting me is a symptom of our deeply misogynist culture (both…

fek:

So, yesterday, Cody Chestnutt puts his first album in a decade on Kickstarter. Today, Dan Harmon and Charlie Kaufman announce a project. Which is great. This is the kind of democratization against studio systems and record labels that people have been waiting for forever to come along wanted, right? But is it naive to ask if these guys are going to crowd out the smaller users of Kickstarter without IMDB pages or rabid fan followings?

I have such a problem with well-established groups or individuals using Kickstarter to help fund what at best sound like vanity projects and at worst are a blatant exploitation of fan loyalty (Penny Arcade).