Media

Inbreeding, Horror, and The Other

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So I got my latest issue of Fortean Times (If you don’t know what it is, just trust me and get it), and among their media section was a blurb review of a film called “Inbred,” which sounds like your standard people get butchered by inbred clan of psychos.  It’s really been a standard trope in Western horror for awhile – the terror of some separate, inbred group of maniacs out to kill you.  The most prominent example of it is likely “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and it’s legions of illegitimate children, but you can easily find the roots in Lovecraft and the various swamp denizens, tribal cultists, and wizardly families who were both possessed of terrible knowledge and a lack of genetic diversity.

It’s not hard to determine why this is terrifying to people, and tells us a lot about humans:

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Status On My Next Book

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Well my next book – which is really more of a booklet  – is out of editing.

My plan is to take some of my past Fan To Pro columns on job searching and improve and enhance them to form a tight guide to oddities on the job search.  It’s gone pretty well, and I expect to be publishing sometime in November.

I’ve had great feedback from my pre-readers and I think it’ll be very useful for folks on the job search, especially those who want to try and get out of a rut or take their job search skills a bit farther.  I’ll probably be pricing it pretty cheaply as an e-book.  Not sure I want to do a physical book, but more on that later.

It’s a bit under 40 pages, and doing it’s been interesting:

First, I really feel the idea of using blog content as the seed for a book actually works.  I wasn’t initially sure about the idea (I mean, why not just do a reprint?), but instead it’s like the original posts are the basis for another useful form.  What works as a blog post in my ranty-coach didactic style doesn’t work as a book, and what you can do in a book and a blog differs.

Secondly, after you get feedback on a series of blog posts and/or look over your work, you can incorporate that into the based-on work, and this ads a lot of value.

Third, it’s a way to make your content accessible in a  different manner.  People don’t want to have to go back to your blog all the time, or have to find printouts, or whatever.  You can give things to people in a different useful format.

Fourth, and something I hope to explore later, if you’re producing a physical object (a book or magazine), there’s something new to leave for posterity.  Something that can be passed on, put on a shelf, gifted easily.  There’s something satisfying about that.  This may not happen with this book – but we’ll see.

So hang in there, it’ coming . . . and starting to wonder how I present these books on my sites, so suggestions welcome . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

The Debate Died Early

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The Obama/Romney debate was unimpressive (big looser?  Jim Lehrer).  From what I hear about the Stewart/O’Reilly debate it was livlier but uninsipriing.  Everyone’s already talking Twitter, Facebook, and how that impacts the debates.  Big Bird is a meme, the Stewart/O’Reilly debate’s technical glitches are being discussed, and the debates kind of fade away.

I miss the idea of good, substantial debate.  Catchphrases, bumper stickers, and blatant lies aren’t exactly the substance of great historical import.  Neither is statistics diddling or mathematical games.

So I began speculating that perhaps the internet is replacing debates.  There you can post length discussions and link to numbers.  There the dialog is ongoing.  There things happen.

My answer to this is, possibly, yes.  But I don’t think the internet killed the debate.

I think that it died a lot earlier in our media.

Everything is turned into media sound bites, spectacle, and sensationalism, and our supposed politics and policies aren’t much different.  It’s an age of sensationalism and catchphrases, of what makes audiences angry over any kind of discussion, of what sells ad time.  Politics is entertainment – it’s always been, but it’s pretty much merged as far as I’m concerned, accelerated by television, media empires, and 24-hour news cycles people have to fill.

Worse, it’s a mix of advertising and reality television.

To put the final capper on it, it’s been entertainment long enough for people to imitate it.  You’ve heard the catchphrases bubble up in people’s political discussions.  You know the people who ape their favorite media-news pundits.  This reality-TV politics has infected us.

So debates are dead.  We just started killing them early – and I think the internet is replacing the gap.

Even if that gap sometime is using LOLCats as template for political discussions.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.