Anyone who’ve watched the original British teen drama would know it does not lend itself well to an American adaptation. There are just too many cultural and sociological differences between British and American teens to accurately capture the essence of the original show.
The biggest difference, of course, is the FCC. What’s so attractive about Skins is that its teenage characters behave and think in very realistic and genuine ways. The dialogue in the original British series is raw and uncensored, with explicit drug and sex references casually peppered throughout. From what I can gather of the MTV remake, all of the snappy chatter is replaced with pseudo-explicit innuendo to sidestep FCC regulation. The original Skins also features sex heavily, as an authentic slice of teenage life ought. American censors, however, blanch at even slight nudity—even when it’s on a bedsheet!—let alone on-screen sex. This sheepish submission to censorship destroys the integrity of the show and removes any impact it may have had.
Unfortunately, this is the best we can currently do in this country unless we somehow shed our uptight Puritan attitude towards sex, drugs, and strong language. Needless to say, I now have a newfound respect for NBC’s adaptation of The Office, which successfully translated its quirky, awkward British humor to American tastes without losing its effectiveness.
(Source: thelandbaronandrewbanks)
18th January 2011
Reblogged From ragdoll
Notes: 25
Why are you wasting your time responding to idiots? Ryan Tate, Gawker’s resident dickbag, is clearly just trolling you.
I closely follow the whole App Store rejections debacle—which has increasingly become so popular that even the mainstream press has gotten wind of it—and now this Adobe vs. Apple, freedom vs. Apple thing, and while I don’t agree with some of the rejections (Google Voice? C’mon, man) and how ridiculously arbitrary some of your App Store approval rules are, I do believe you’re entitled to do what you want on a platform you created. Out of nothing. There wouldn’t even be anything for anyone to whine about if you hadn’t created the iPhone/iPad platform.
If the haters don’t like it, there are plenty of other platforms and vendors willing to pick up the slack. I for one absolutely adore my iPad and will definitely be getting the upcoming iPhone, and I’m perfectly content with not having Flash on my devices if that’s the decision you’re sticking with.
So why are you wasting your time responding to these inane criticisms? Let’s get back to work on the iPhone and the iPad 2, please. The future of our technological lifestyle dearly needs you.
Best,
Hotin
So I just started watching this little show called Lost… It’s really good! I wonder why I hear so little about this show—as always I’m two steps ahead of the mainstream…
Okay, fine. I have been meaning to watch Lost for the longest time but I just never got around to it. This changed when I got my iPad several weeks ago and downloaded the ABC Player app which let me stream all six seasons for free. I’m only a handful of episodes into the second season but already I’m hopelessly addicted.
To be honest, I’m quite surprised by how good Lost is. I’ve been conditioned by moronic network producers that the popularity of shows has a direct inverse relationship with how great they are. Out of my favorite shows—Pushing Daisies, Arrested Development, Mad Men, Flight of the Conchords, My So-Called Life, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, to name a few—none had much luck attracting mainstream viewership, and all but a few were unceremoniously yanked off the air because of it. So for Lost to be as awesome as it is and stay on ABC for six seasons is just mind-blowing to me. They are, after all, the network that canceled Pushing Daisies.
But I digress. This whole Dharma Initiative storyline is just incredible. I especially love the stark black and white iconography that makes up the highly distinctive Dharma brand. Check out these fantastic food labels.
Dressed in tennis gear and carrying racquets and balls, the guests who wandered through the lobby of Dubai’s al-Bustan Rotana hotel on Jan 19 couldn’t have looked less threatening.
But within hours they and nine accomplices had carried out the ruthlessly efficient assassination of the Hamas military Commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had just a few seconds’ warning of his fate as the killers overpowered him in his room.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in room 230 at the Al-Bustan Rotana hotel with the door latched and chained from the inside. An initial report indicated that he died from sudden high blood pressure in the brain. Subsequent reports have suggested he was electrocuted or strangled. Traces of poison was also found in his blood.
The assassination apparently bears the hallmarks of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, who are known for carrying out quiet but highly professional assassinations around the world.
Dubai authorities released extensive CCTV footage pieced together from hotel surveillance cameras that allegedly shows the movements of the 11-person assassination team in the hours before and after the murder. The 27-minute video plays like a real-life version of The Bourne film series. Suspects were seen changing in and out of disguises, using sophisticated personal communication devices to avoid surveillance, and even attempting to reprogram the al-Mabhouh’s hotel room door.
Check out the Wikipedia article on this fascinating assassination.
(via 3quarksdaily)
Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, and let go of what you can’t change.
Kiss slowly, play hard, forgive quickly, take chances, give everything, and have no regrets.
Life is too short to be anything but happy.
Wow. I just got Rickroll’d through Twitter. Win points awarded to all parties involved.
The wilderness must be explored! Caw, caw! RAWR!
Russell is beyond adorable. Pixar can do no wrong.
My So-Called Life – ‘In Dreams Begins Responsibilities’
This heartbreaking final scene of My So-Called Life is probably one of the best teen drama moments ever. Devon Gummersall plays Brian Krakow to perfection as a geeky and socially awkward teen secretly in love with a girl who’s too infatuated with another boy to notice. Angela Chase—played by the wonderful Claire Danes—never looks at her neighbor and long-time family friend the way she looked at Jordan Catalano, a handsome, popular, and rebellious slacker who is failing high school—played by the excellent Jared Leto—until she realizes the beautifully profound and thoughtful love letter Jordan had given her was actually written by Brian.
My So-Called Life is one of the rare network television shows that tackled difficult real-life issues in its episodes without pandering to viewers’ likes and dislikes, but unfortunately at the expense of mass appeal and marketability. It is the best and most realistic teen drama I have ever seen, and its short televised run only serves to highlight how moronic and hopelessly stupid most American television viewers are. If you haven’t yet watched this incredible show, I highly recommend checking it out on Hulu.
Not to toot my horn—not too much, anyway—but there’s an awful lot of good stuff I ‘liked’ on Tumblr: 245 at the last count. It’s mostly stuff that for one reason or another I didn’t reblog directly but still wanted to bookmark for myself. It’s sort of like Delicious or Instapaper for Tumblr posts.
There are several long essays on a multitude of topics that I felt warranted much more than a mere reblog with a short block quote, and I didn’t—don’t—have the chops to provide a thought-out and well elucidated response or commentary that would do it justice. And, you know, other stuff like sexy photos or funny videos or memes that didn’t seem to fit in with this humble tumblelog (hey, that almost rhymed!).
Sharing is caring, so go to Account › Preferences and enable ‘Share posts I like’ so you can be cool like me.
- Me: did you take some tv shows?
- Me: i know you were at my desk bc there's a folder named hoyin on my desktop
- Me: and my chips ahoy bag was empty
- Hoyin: AHAHAHHA
- Hoyin: HAHAHAHAHA
- Me: i was like..
- Me: HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM I WONDER WHO
- Hoyin: DANG I'M NOT SNEAKY ENOUGH
- Me: BITCH
- Hoyin: this convo is going on tumblr
- Me: hahaha
The most magical love/lust song ever written. Peep the amazing lyrics. Absolutely fantastic.
Put on the dress that I like
It makes me so crazy, though I can’t say why
Keep on your stockings for a while
Some kind of magic in the way you’re lying there
I didn’t ‘get’ Animal Collective when I first listened to Merriweather Post Pavilion—which is my first AC album—and I even complained about it on Twitter, but after several more listens I fell in love with “My Girls”. Soon after that I found “Bluish” to be even more amazing and that’s when I pretty much ignored my initial impression and gave MPP another well-deserved listen.
Now I’m in love with Animal Collective.
The rest of the album is also splendid, especially “Brother Sport”. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go catch up on all the Animal Collective that’s been missing from my life.
Played 1 times.- Ned: You’re the only one for me.
- Charlotte “Chuck” Charles: I know you feel that now, but… there are things you want. There are things we both want.
- Ned: So? Everyone wants stuff. We wake up everyday with a list of wishes a mile long, and maybe we spend our lives trying to make those wishes come true but just because we want them doesn’t mean we need them to be happy.
- Charlotte “Chuck” Charles: What do you need to be happy?
- Ned: [smiling slightly] You.
Story by Justin Morgan (Awkward Things I Say to Girls)
The charming, beautiful, and—of course—awkward 19-chapter story on Awkward Things I Say to Girls titled “It’s Not a Date” is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time.
The heart-on-sleeve writing is disarmingly frank, painfully honest, and completely endearing. I eagerly refreshed his blog in search of new chapters two years ago, when I discovered the blog. So it was to my great dismay when Justin suddenly stopped posting new chapters in June of 2008—and the blog has been quiet ever since.
The blog was never too aesthetically pleasing to me; the stark black Lucida Grande on white left much to be desired in terms of layout and contrast, and the WordPress navigation controls were clunky and not at all suited for book-like reading. It was, after all, merely one of several categories of stories on his blog. So in May of 2009 I decided to code and host a copy of the entire unfinished story on my Syracuse University MySite web-space. It would also serve to hone my HTML and CSS skills, and as an exercise in advanced web typography.
I worked intermittently on the CSS in my spare time for the past two weeks, and it’s finally done. I’ve tested it on Firefox 3.0.11, 3.5rc4, 3.6a1pre, Chrome 2, and Safari 4 on Windows XP, and Firefox 3.0.11 and Safari 4 on Mac OS X, and it looks pretty sweet if I must toot my own horn.
“My date sat to my left. She was very sweet, the sort of girl who went on mission trips but always refused to play truth or dare. Which, by the way, isn’t unattractive at all to me. In fact, quite the opposite. If you curse like Elizabeth Bennet and Winnie the Pooh, I’ll probably think it’s the cutest thing ever. Although frankly, if you curse like a drunken sailor, that’s an entirely different yet equal kind of cute. I don’t care about the direction of your hotness vector, just its magnitude along the awesome axis.”
I certainly learned a lot of CSS from this personal exercise—and ran into several Gecko and WebKit (I’m not even going to mention Internet Explorer lest I provoke a bloody aneurysm in my brain) bugs along the way, including the much-hated :first-line bug, much to my noobish frustration—but it also performed admirably as a beautifully laid-out and typeset story, which was what I intended of the exercise at the end of the day.
Ultimately, this whole mini-project was coded and hosted for my personal enjoyment, but if you’ve never read this heart-warming story before, take half an hour out of your otherwise mundane life and read, read, read!
“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled for more than two months but I’m still not ready to forgive FOX for their mindbogglingly stupid decision. I have watched the entire series twice already and although the beginning was a bit rocky, TSCC really matures into a fantastic science-fiction television series whose storylines definitely do James Cameron’s films proud.
The intricate, multi-layered plots, the deep, philosophical discussions on the consequences of altering the future, and even John and Cameron’s extremely complicated relationship made for unnaturally difficult storytelling that requires a lot of faith and dedication to keep together. But I loved every minute of it. Anyone who’s even marginally interested in the Terminator franchise or science-fiction storytelling should really give TSCC a wholehearted try.
It is a terrible shame for FOX to pull the plug on a show with an incredible season two finale that left massive cliffhangers for season three. I went from extremely excited, to sad, then to infuriated when I realized that’s forever how the series will be ended—on the cusp of an epic third season but canceled before the story was ever told. My hatred for FOX hasn’t subsided in these past months and I’m still fuming over their idiotic decision.
A last glimmer of hope hinges on the sales of the season two DVD/Blu-Ray—high enough sales might convince FOX there’s still a market for excellent science-fiction storytelling. But I won’t be holding my breath.
R.I.P., TSCC.
