GMOs

So people aren’t necessarily averse to GMOs specifically?
 
Not really. I mean, they are, but it's part of a more general aversion to biotechnology, to things people don't understand.
 
In a lot of ways, I think it’s akin to anything that appears on a label that says “may contain X,” where X is literally anything people haven’t heard of or don’t understand, and because of that, sounds somewhat strange.
 
We actually tested this with a label on apples that said “this apple is ripened using ethylene,” which is a very commonly used and safe process. But people were as averse to those apples as they were to GMOs, simply because they didn’t know what ethylene was.
 
People aren’t really differentiating a whole lot in between these things. They are just unfamiliar, scary sounding things about food.
 

Fear of GMOs holds a lot of lessons for innovation in biotechnology. I wasn't around for the introduction of milk pasteurization or microwaves, both were already widely accepted in my lifetime, so perhaps consumer fear of GMOs are just a phase, like white-washed jeans and regular fit men's dress shirts.

Elmo's arrival points to HBO's future

Sesame Street announced a new five season deal with HBO. The seasons will be available exclusively on HBO for nine months before dropping at PBS.

This is HBO pursuing the Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu strategy instead of the reverse, the latter three all offer or plan to offer original children's programming. HBO has never had kids programming, and this move is a clear acknowledgment that they view themselves as a mini-bundle in and of themselves, more so than a channel carried by the traditional cable bundle.

HBO was once content to be a brand that stood for movie titles from the Warner Bros. catalog and boxing. Then it offered some comedy, and then original series, most of it targeted towards an adult demographic. HBO has had some great original series over the years, but it's fair to characterize their house style as having a fair bit of sex and nudity along with a fair dose of profanity and violence. They told us “It's not TV. It's HBO.” but if you watched any of their series you weren't likely to confuse the two.

What they didn't offer was family or children's programming. The money was coming in by the truckload, especially during the heyday of DVD, so it wasn't as if HBO felt a great sense of urgency to diversify its subscriber base.

Then came Netflix, which doesn't have a house style. Rather, they have more of a technology companies approach to content and growth: why put artificial limits on your own growth? The limit on entertainment subscription service growth is a function of the diversity and quality of their content portfolio. To acquire a subscriber, you need enough content to entice that person to become a subscriber. Then you need enough interesting content each month to keep them from canceling (that's the main reason subscription services like HBO don't release all their series at the same time of the year).

Once you have enough content to acquire and keep one type of subscriber, the marginal return on your next dollar of content is higher if you produce content that appeals to another type of subscriber. That's the Netflix strategy. If you look at all their original series, they are all over the map in genre, style, tone. They want to offer something for everyone so their subscriber base can include anyone.

[Amazon Prime is an even more bizarre subscription because it includes not just video but free expedited shipping, Amazon music, unlimited photo storage, e-book lending libraries, Amazon-branded everyday essentials, cheaper shipping on groceries, and a personal drone for dropping your kids off at school. I made one of those up, but it might be part of Prime next year.]

And now HBO is following suit. The next step for HBO is to let its original series spill out from Sunday night. If you read the Hollywood Reporter or another industry rag, you'll no doubt have heard of HBO passing on quite a few original series recently. Some of that could be creative differences, but if any of it is HBO limiting themselves to what they can fit in their Sunday night time slots, they're imposing yet another artificial limit on themselves that makes no sense in this streaming, time-shifted age. If HBO Now is the future, at some point it shouldn't even matter if some content on HBO Now never airs on their cable channel, especially if it's something like Sesame Street which would seem out of place on a cable channel chock full of mature content. The MSO's wouldn't love that, and perhaps HBO would just tack on another channel like HBO Family, but they should be willing to consider any concessions to their linear channel to be a strategy tax.

...

Since Twitter has largely replaced late-night talk-show monologues as the joke factory on the day's news, I enjoyed this roundup of humorous tweets riffing off of the HBO and Sesame Street deal.

Like a ringtone for your car

So you’ve bought a new Ford Mustang and you want to hear a perfect deep-throated roar as you punch the gas and pull away from that Chevy Camaro. There’s an app for that.
 
Roush Performance’s Active Exhaust lets an Apple iPhone or iPad customize a Mustang’s sound and save the settings on those devices. It’s available for 2015 Mustangs with Roush’s Quad Tip exhaust system.
 
...
 
The system comes with three preloaded exhaust modes as well as the ability to create a custom sound. Touring is a quieter setting for neighborhood cruising. Sport is louder at lower speeds and less noisy in normal city driving. Track, for off-street use, bypasses the muffler for a full, unrestricted tone.
 

When I first read the headline, I thought Ford was making an all-electric Mustang, and that the engine noise would be synthetic. Electric cars are so quiet some think it's a safety problem as pedestrians, cyclists, and even other drivers often can't hear them approaching.

Everyday messenger bag

I've backed a ton of Kickstarter projects in my day, and experience tells me that projects that require electronics and hardware almost never ship on time. They are almost always manufactured somewhere in China, and somewhere along the line, some part doesn't come back the way the creators hoped, and it's back to the drawing board, and the promised release date becomes a joke, albeit not an amusing one for either party.

Physical goods that don't require electronics, however, have shipped on time more often than not. Fashion items, for example. Thus I'm hopeful to receive one of these Everyday Messenger Bags by the end of 2015, hopefully before Christmas vacation.

I've long wanted a bag that would hold both a 13" to 15" Macbook Pro and a camera body plus a few lenses. This looks like it might fit the bill, and the latest update includes a potentially clever tripod carrying solution.

Check out the video below and/or the Kickstarter page for more detail.

Truly defective

When discussing his masterful 1968 neo-noir Le Samourai, writer/director Jean-Pierre Melville said, “I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic […] A film is first and foremost a dream.” This same philosophy runs through True Detective. But showrunner Nic Pizzolatto overplayed his hand in season two, leading to characters whose emotional landscapes lacked depth, or much of a through line (unless you count daddy issues). True Detective is the clearest example of the emptiest aspects of modern noir: vengeful, self-centered white men; casual racism; violence without grace or purpose; mistaking the cliché strong female character for something meaningful; lack of levity or humor; labyrinthine plotlines without verve. Ultimately, it’s a parody lacking the sincerity needed to give its pulpy center meaning. As easy as it would be to hang this on the inflated ego of its creator, True Detective is indicative of a larger problem: Modern noir has atrophied.
 

Great essay by Angelica Jade Bastién couching the problems of True Detective in the larger context of the decline of noir in film and television.

This second season of True Detective was problematic, as many have pointed out. The plot was both convoluted and shallow all at once. I didn't think season one was as great as its widespread critical reception would have one believe.

Despite all that, I am glad a show like True Detective exists. I love the film noir genre. For all of season one's plot banality, it achieved an ominous, claustrophobic mood that is something typically found only in movies and not in television with its heavily plot-driven priorities and rhythms.

I love genre movies because they're such entertaining software for encoding deeper commentary about society, life, and the human condition. The gangster movie. The western. Film noir. Vampire movies. The heist film. They're always about something else beyond the literal plot realities, and as such they persist across the decades, commenting on each successive iteration of society, pointing out that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As long as there are people who are forced to play a losing game by the world, noir has a place in our storytelling toolbox. We are certainly far from done with the femme fatale, for example.

Noir’s shifts in part come down to one question: Whose story is being told? The dominant image of noir today is a white, male power fantasy, whether it be in positioning his brutality as badass in Drive, turning depravity into parody in Sin City, or the empty stylistic exercise of Looper. Meanwhile, the dominant female image in noir has shifted from a complex, contradictory woman comfortable with her sexuality to a hard-edged one whose strength and anti-feminine dress are implicitly linked to past sexual trauma. Shows like Top of the Lake, The Killing, and now True Detective replicate the same basic template. These female detectives are white, capable, and rough-hewn. They have immense hang-ups with their sexuality and motherhood, along with a bevy of daddy issues. Besides their genuine interest in the women they seek justice for, they aren’t all that different from their male counterparts, which means their creators don’t have to stretch themselves creatively. And what we’ve lost along the way is one of noir’s most soulful and powerful depictions of the hypocrisy of the American Dream: the femme fatale.
 
By virtue of her gender, the femme fatale’s choices are limited. Her quest for riches belies more than greed. Money is never just money in American culture. It’s the ability to define your own life story. It gives women the kind of power that society often precludes them from reaching. What’s more important to the American Dream than the means to define your own future? Films like Clash by Night, Sudden Fear, and the entire oeuvre of Gloria Grahame delve deeply into how the notion of the American Dream does not include prosperity for women or people of color. The femme fatale is often categorized simplistically, as virgin or whore. This forgets that it is the femme fatale who spurns the plot, often having the most active role in the film, and shown as having anxieties and desires all her own. Ultimately, can’t the femme fatale be viewed as much as a female power fantasy as a male nightmare?
 

True Detective hewed so closely to the outer trappings of the genre that it was too easy to see the structure, too hard to detect its dark heart.

(Rough bets: This season ends with Ray learning that, yes, his son is his own. I would put good money on that. I would be less likely to put money on the idea of Ray getting Ani pregnant, but I think it will probably happen.)
 

That's Todd VanDerWerff of Vox discussing the show in early July. These are characters trapped in a prison of the screenwriter's design. It's okay to know generally how a genre piece ends, that's why they call it genre, but to see the specifics coming from so far away does detract from the narrative pleasure.

Despite all my misgivings, I hope True Detective returns for another season. The noir genre is underrepresented on television (season one of Fargo on FX was one other example, and a superior one at that). Since the show resets its storyline and characters every season, it offers something that the noir genre rarely offers its characters: hope.