Link Roundup 9/11/2013

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

News Roundup 9/5/2013

Comics

DC forbids writers from having Batwoman marry her girlfriend (after she proposes).  Writers leave. JH Williams III and W. Haden Black are out, and more details are at the link.

In general I’m thinking DC has a problem period.  New 52 has had a lot of issues, weird changes, and doesn’t seem fully accepted by the geek community.  This choice just makes the look worse, especially after the hiring of notoriously anti-gay Orson Scott Card – and his anti-gay stances are just the tip of the iceberg.

I’d put DC on your list of companies to be very cautious about when it comes to working with them – and see what other meltdowns may occur.

Publishing:

Oyster wants to be a Netflix for books.  It just appears to be limited to the iPhone and doesn’t have the latest stuff.  We’ll see where it goes.  However, it if works we writers are going to need to figure how/if we want to get in on this.

Video Games:

Irrational studio was behind the hit Bioshock:Infinite.  A shame about those layoffs.  I’ll avoid my usual game industry rant.

– Steven Savage