This is my blogchalk:
United States, Georgia, Atlanta, English, Chuck, Male, 31-35, film, literature.

A law passed in 2001 eliminates the tax in 2010, only to resurrect it a year later, a quirk forced by Senate rules designed to prevent lawmakers from deepening budget deficits.

Virilio went on to suggest that, wheras space was the main category of the nineteenth century, the main category of the twentieth was time.

I often think about the future of these games - what happens when they cease to be profitable? What will we make of the ruins of these worlds, if at some point we recover them? Or will gamers simply continue their quests on their own, running hacked code on pieced-together hardware? Will people figure out a way to save their character, frozen in an odd stasis, world-less?

Godard nailed it once and for all: at the cinema, you raise your eyes to the screen; in front of the television, you lower them. Then there is the role of the shutter. Out of the two hours you spend in a movie theater, you spend one of them in the dark. It's this nocturnal portion that stays with us, that fixes our memory of a film in a different way than the same film seen on television or on a monitor.

Large media corporations are far more profit-focused and risk-averse. They sometimes confuse short-term profits and long-term value. They kill local programming because it's expensive, and they push national programming because it's cheap -- even if it runs counter to local interests and community values. For a corporation to launch a new idea, you have to get the backing of executives who are obsessed with quarterly earnings and afraid of being fired for an idea that fails. They often prefer to sit on the sidelines waiting to buy the businesses or imitate the models of the risk-takers who succeed. (Two large media corporations turned down my invitation to invest in the launch of CNN.)

That's an understandable approach for a corporation -- but for a society, it's like overfishing the oceans. When the smaller businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? Nor does this trend bode well for new ideas in our democracy -- ideas that come only from diverse news and vigorous reporting. Under the new rules, there will be more consolidation and more news sharing. That means laying off reporters or, in other words, downsizing the workforce that helps us see our problems and makes us think about solutions. Even more troubling are the warning signs that large media corporations -- with massive market power -- could abuse that power by slanting news coverage in ways that serve their political or financial interests. There is always the danger that news organizations can push positive stories to gain friends in government, or unleash negative stories on artists, activists or politicians who cross them, or tell their audiences only the news that confirms entrenched views. But the danger is greater when there are no competitors to air the side of the story the corporation wants to ignore.

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

• L sent me a link to this interesting satire recently discussed in the Washington Post. Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that the author of the site has had dozens of serious inquiries. The FAQ page and the "prices" page are especially entertaining.


• From Invisible Adjunct, the Time Travel Fantasy Game, in which she asks the great question, "If you could travel back to any time and place of your choosing, where would you go and with whom would you like to have dinner?" Given the subject of my dissertation, my temptation is to suggest a high level of "theoretical sophistication" already exists within this question. Implied within are all kinds of political and ideological considerations as well as an interesting consideration of the "frames" with which we "read" the past. By the way, I chose Orson Welles during the making of Citizen Kane for my dinner with the past, but now I'm thinking that the dinner party when Mary Shelley began telling the story that would become Frankenstein might be pretty cool.


• Update: For dinner tonight I had the best New York style pizza I've had in the five years since I ate at Mama Teresa's in Ithaca, NY. Johnny's in Decatur makes a great cheese slice.


• Update II: Tonight's student film screenings at the Eyedrum were a lot of fun. Lots of talented, young filmmakers here in town. Student film screenings take place on the last Wednesday of every month. One film by a group of Clark Atlanta students, Sydney and Shelley, was beautifully done, especially the editing between the two main characters who were talking on the telephone during the majority of the film. Really terrific sense of narrative progression and pacing, and my feeling is that the film could possibly be expanded into a feature length project.

"I don't see a need for 35-mm film based on what I've seen over the last few years," he said. "Long term, it's all going to go digital."

A blogosphere story that gets branded with a keyword, like "googlewashed" or "second superpower" is observable in total through searching in Google on that word.

The easy coexistence of the amateurs and professionals will, soon enough, seem natural. Publications like OhmyNews will pop up everywhere, because they make sense, combining the best of old and new journalistic forms.

OhmyNews is an experiment in tomorrow. So far, it's looking like a brilliant one.

• Local ownership limits within media: The original rule prevented owning more than one radio station in a city. Currently there is a tiered approach allowing comapnies to own anywhere from 4-8 radio stations depending on the size of the city and up to two TV stations (if there are 8 or more TV stations in that city).


• Local ownership limits across media: The original rule "limited owners to one AM, FM, or television station." Currently companies may own 1 TV + 7 radio stations if there are more than 20 "voices" in the market. The current rule also bars ownership of a newspaper and radio station or television station in the same city (Atlanta's Cox Communications is one the 54 "grandfathered" exceptions).


• Restrictions focused on national markets: Rule originally prohibited ownership of more than three stations nationwide. Now companies may own any numebr of stations, up to 35% of the national audience. Two companies, Fox and Viacom currently own more than 35%. Viacom also owns two major networks, CBS and UPN. One of the major changes would allow comapnies to own stations totalling up to 45% of the national audience.

In the rush to publish, many bloggers are running headlong into some of the problems conventionally published memoirists know too well: hurt feelings, newly wary friends and relatives, and the occasional inflamed employer.