Speak for yourself, buster.

This was something I found interesting when listening to the new audio commentaries on the Spaced DVDs. The American guests were praising British Television while putting down American Television…but the Spaced crew did the opposite-often sggesting Spaced is pretty much an ode to American television and movies that they love.

Today’s XKCD jumps off from the Voynich manuscript, which I’d never heard of before. I checked Wikipedia and found a fairly good primer on the controversy, speculation as to its purpose, and so forth. It’s not going to make me into an expert, but it’s immensely easier than, say, Googling to find an alternate source.

(Not least because the top ten entries would be XKCD, Wikipedia and Wikipedia mirrors.)

The same people who slavishly follow characters created before they were born and who are constantly (and I mean constantly) calling for another go at some beloved (and frequently canceled) book.

And I mean the exact same people, not the “same people” in that vague message board way that means “these people over here say thing and those people over there say that, so I’ll pretend it’s the same people saying these two contradictory things”. You’ll watch some poor loon go red in the face complaining about them remaking such-and-such film and how this demonstrates the complete lack of creativity in Hollywood, then his very next post two minutes later is in “WHAT CHARACTER SHOULD PETER DAVID WORK ON NEXT”, where he rattles off a laundry list of 78 beloved characters that he thinks Peter David would be a perfect fit for.

As for Wikipedia, I think the more truthful statement would be: it may be a great source of information, but you only use it for entertainment trivia.

Mind you, the more important the subject, the more you should be compelled to follow their links to the sourced material, where you don’t have to worry about vandalized information.

Remaking older movies pretty much goes back to the very beginning of film making-along with adapting books/plays/comics. People complain like this is new…but it has always been the bread and butter, and even when it fails, it tends to be a safer bet than “new ideas”. And even if every person who complains about remakes stopped going? It would still be more profitable. The internet has made it seem as if lots of people hate remakes. But the fact is, the complainers are a very small subset of the movie going public-and just like “Normal people don’t care what internet nerds think about anything” the general public just doesn’t care.

(Personally, I think a large chunk of the “Remakes Suck” community thrives on remakes, because it is so easy to complain about)