Capability

The Next Potterdammerung: Harry Potter’s World is Back

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And apparently J.K. Rowling is writing a script for the film.  It’s going to be based on the textbook “Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them,” which isn’t a half-bad idea, though I do sense a bit of dead-horse kinetic application here.  I also sense that the title is very appealing in the wake of “How To Train Your Dragon.”

So I guess Harry Potter’s world is back . . .

Interesting to see where this goes – because it may also give ideas to other franchises or push them out of the way.

– Steven Savage

Link Roundup 9/11/2013

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Career:

Job seekers recruited via Social Media more likely to be hired. Not surprising really, but worth thinking about.

Culture:

Steve found this about Meritocracy – this blog post notes it came from a satire, before going on to eviscerate sexism/classism/racism in text.  Remember that next time someone says they’re in a Meritocracy.

Publishing:

Lulu is adding new features – They include new templates and, according to their press release, “four new solutions for publishing e-books, each allowing authors to make their books available quickly and easily on tablets and e-readers through the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Bookstore and the Lulu Marketplace.” Notice that Amazon is conspicuous by its absence.

Try and follow this.  Tumblr’s book club picks a novel about a fangirl as it’s first book club pick.  First, congrats to the author on promoting such a subject and I’ve heard some good things on it, secondly Tumblr has a book club.  Wow.

Technology:

Tivo moves to the cloud.  Sure it’s experimental, but they’ve got some foundation, lead, and alliances – and a need to save themselves from market changes.  Probably worth watching and there might be some good opportunities – though since everyone else is doing the streaming/TV/cloud thing who knows . . .

Video Games:

Ouya’s “Free The Games” is a bit of a debacle.  More here.  I’ll say again I treated the Ouya as more a milestone or experiment.  But this is kind of sad.

– Steven Savage

Sympathy For The Intoxicated: Drunk On The Power of Technology

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Monday, we got to meet Nathan Shumate of the accurately named LousyBookCovers. It’s a fascinating insight into the man, the project, and the . . . less than ideal covers that occasionally appear in self-publishing.

He mentioned one thing that struck a truth with me; that some people get drunk on the power that modern technology, print on demand, distribution, etc. presents. I wanted to explore that a bit because it’s rather personal, and very telling for us MuseHackers.

There’s plenty of power modern technology gives us. In many ways modern technology is all about empowering because power sells and people want to do their own thing. People want to make videos and books and music and games; many of them can now live the dreams that years ago would have stayed dreams except for a few. We have sheer ability now.

However, as we’ve seen power may not be misused but . . . well it can result in products of questionable value. Oh we’ve all done it. We all have that fanfic we don’t want to mention, that bad book cover we’re not proud of, that AMV that was kind of awful, or the company brochure that proved there’s a reason we’re shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near desktop publishing. We wonder how we missed how . . . not that great we were.

We miss it because we get drunk on the power.

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