Category: Entertainment Industry

👓 Werner Herzog on ‘The Mandlorian’ and Why He Hasn’t Seen ‘Star Wars’ | Variety

Read Werner Herzog on Why He Didn’t Need to See ‘Star Wars’ Films for ‘The Mandalorian’ Role (Variety)
At first sight, playing a vital character in Jon Favreau’s “The Mandalorian,” Disney’s live-action “Star Wars” series, which the studio is using to launch its ambitious streaming venture, might appear to be an odd move for Werner Herzog.

Do you watch any television?
I do, I watch the news from different sources. Sometimes I see things that are completely against my cultural nature. I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity, but sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch “WrestleMania.”

WrestleMania! This has to be the quote of the year from Werner Hertzog.
November 12, 2019 at 10:35AM

Podcast discovery, Huffduffer, and listen feeds

As I was reading through some of the subscriptions in Aaron Davis’ well-curated blogroll which I’m subscribed to via OPML Subscription in Inoreader, I was reminded that I should be following my own Huffduffer Collective. This is a feed of audio that comes from all of the accounts I’m following on Jeremy Keith’s awesome Huffduffer audio service. For those looking for a great method for discovering new and interesting audio content and podcasts, this is by far the best discovery service I know.

While finding content which others have bookmarked is an excellent discovery mechanism, I think that finding it by means of things they’ve actually listened to would be even more powerful. By saying you’ve listened to something, it means you’ve put some skin in the game and spent some of your own valuable time actually consuming the content and then separately posting about it. I wonder how Huffduffer might incorporate this sort of “listen” functionality in addition to their bookmarking functionality? I can’t help but thinking that more audio applications should have Micropub functionality for posting listens.

Here I’ll remind people that my website provides just such a feed of my own listens, so if you want to hear exactly what I’ve been listening to, you can have your own feed of it, which I call my faux-cast and you should be able to subscribe to it in most podcatchers. I do roughly the same thing for all the things I read online and off as well. I may bookmark something as interesting, but you know it was even more valuable to me when I’ve spent the time to actually listen to or read it from start to finish.

Do you have a listen feed I could subscribe to?  Perhaps a Huffduffer account I should follow? How do you discover audio content online? How could this be used in the education technology space?

👓 Keanu Reeves, 55, goes public with his first girlfriend in DECADES | Daily Mail

Read Keanu Reeves, 55, goes public with his first girlfriend in DECADES (Daily Mail Online)
He has not had a serious girlfriend in decades. But that changed this weekend when Keanu Reeves held hands with his business collaborator Alexandra Grant when at the LACMA event.
Why do I click on these things…

👓 Iron Man and me | Adactio: Journal

Read Iron Man and me by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith (adactio.com)
All of my Flickr pictures are published under a Creative Commons attribution licence. One of the reasons I switched over to using this licence was so that people didn’t have to write and ask me whenever they want to republish one of my photos. But I still get plenty of emails from people asking me...
An awesome little story and an interesting tidbit about movie clearance offices.

👓 Craft beautiful equations in Word with LaTeX | Nature

Read Craft beautiful equations in Word with LaTeX (Nature)
Manufacturers are ditching equation editors in word-processing software in favour of the LaTeX typesetting language. Here’s how to get started.
Replied to Misnomer on Twitter (Twitter)
So here are some of my choices:
Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Ben Kingsley, Joe Pesci, Malcolm McDowell, Bill Duke, J.T. Walsh, Sam Shepard, Wallace Shawn, Chevy Chase, Creed Bratton, Hervé Villechaize, Gary Burghoff, Paul Michael Glaser, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards

If death is on the line, I’ll take the Sicilian!

🎧 Sheila Nevins on Age, Sex, Love, Life, and Everything Else | Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Listened to Sheila Nevins on Age, Sex, Love, Life, and Everything Else by Alan Alda from Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

Sheila Nevins has explored the human condition in the thousand or so documentaries she produced for HBO. From more than 30 years of telling us stories about ourselves, to her experience as a woman in the workplace, Sheila has plenty to say about communicating. And she never holds back. In this delightful episode, Alan Alda talks with Sheila about her life, how she feels about aging, the #MeToo movement, sex, divorce, documentaries, storytelling, and just about everything else! This episode is sponsored by Calm. Check out www.calm.com/alda for more details.

I always forget that Sheila is as old as she is. She does have a great sense of humor.

She makes an interesting point about humility that people with power (and especially within the entertainment industry) should be aware of and work to improve.

Most shocking was the story she tells about her me too moment and how she viewed it. Definitely a perspective I wouldn’t have expected.

Her perspective about looking at individuals as a way into human problems and making documentaries is similar to a philosophy I remember hearing from Masha Gessen in an interview that Jeffrey Goldberg did with her. The upshot is that, especially for righting wrongs and general atrocities, focusing a story on a particular individual has a lot more power than focusing on the nameless and faceless masses. Sheila’s example of the Holocaust survivor is a particular apt one. (As I think about it Masha would be a great interview for this podcast.)

In fact, I recently watched an immigration related documentary on Frontline and while I didn’t personally find the lead woman very relate-able or sympathetic, I was still pissed off at the process because her individual story was still so powerful.

This general ideal also reminds me of the gut-punch scene at the end of the film A Time To Kill (1996) [spoiler alert] which ends with the command to the jury “Now imagine she’s white.”

Bookmarked Pubnet (pubnet.org)

Pubnet® organizes the order processes between publishers and book retailers with the standard global Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Orders are sent to Pubnet® by ERP systems on a completely automated basis and forwarded to the appropriate publishers. The key benefit of the system is its increase in efficiency: Book retailers connect to a single system and can access all of the relevant publishers, while publishers no longer need to maintain separate links with thousands of book retailers. This is particularly relevant for communications between major book retailers and smaller publishers, and smaller book retailers and publishers.

For retailers, the service is free of charge with the exception of a setup fee, while publishers pay a fixed annual fee based on their use during the previous year. Saving energy and time EDI messages supported on Pubnet® include:

Orders
Order acknowledgments
Shipping notices
Invoices

Automating the sending and receiving of these documents can dramatically reduce the cost and time spent re-keying information, sending emails, dealing with faxes or sending information via the traditional post.

Our members include Internet bookstores, college stores, wholesalers, library jobbers, trade stores, international subsidiaries of publishers, exporters, elementary and high schools, book clubs and more. Pubnet® has been serving the book industry since July 1987.

👓 ‘Lion King’ director Jon Favreau explains why he’s remaking an animated classic | TechCrunch

Read ‘Lion King’ director Jon Favreau explains why he’s remaking an animated classic (TechCrunch)
Disney has been cranking out live-action remakes of its animated library for the past few years — in fact, Tim Burton’s “Dumbo” just left theaters, and Guy Ritchie’s take on “Aladdin” is currently at the top of the box office. But these distinctions get tricky wi…
I was reading some other Tech Crunch stories and recognized Caleb Deschanel in the photo for this article, so I clicked to see what he’s been up to lately. I actually recognized him before Favreau…

👓 Lean Publishing by Peter Armstrong [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle]

Read Leanpub (Leanpub)
This book explains the philosophy behind Leanpub, from its origin in "a book is a startup" to the present form. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.
Great example here of eating what one cooks for one’s self (aka self-dogfooding.)

👓 Book Promotion Visuals Ideas for Social Platforms and Blogs | Paolo Amoroso

Read Book Promotion Visuals Ideas for Social Platforms and Blogs by Paolo Amoroso (blog.paoloamoroso.com)
Leanpub is the self-publishing platform I use for my book Space Apps for Android. It provides a toolchain and workflow for publishing works in-progress, something similar to releasing new versions of a software package. Publishing a new version of a book in-progress is a good opportunity for posting...

👓 The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper | The Atlantic | Dan Cohen

Read The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper by Dan Cohen (The Atlantic)
University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.