Links for August 15th through August 16th

17 August 2010 | Media | Comments

Things I’m tracking for August 15th through August 16th:

• Did ‘Star Wars’ become a toy story? Producer Gary Kurtz looks back [Updated] | Hero Complex | Los Angeles Times –
• Boredom Is Extinct – Magazine – The Atlantic – "People used to talk about boredom as though it were a thing, not a mood—a sort of physical object. It “descended” on you. You “escaped” from it, you “fled” it. Or you “dispelled” it, as though it were a fog. This wasn’t always easy to do; sometimes the boredom was just too thick, too “heavy.” Trapped in the back of a car on a long road trip, stuck on a flight without a book or magazine, or seated beside a dull stranger at a formal social gathering, the best you could do to “lift” the boredom, to muster a bit of leverage against its mass, was to imagine that you were somewhere else (or perhaps even someone else), doing something else."
• On Disliking Mad Men « Just TV – Long scholarly article about the show– a show about which I have mixed feelings. "As a scholar and fan of contemporary narratively complex television serials, one of my blindspots has been Mad Men, a show about which I’ve mentioned on this blog has little appeal to me. Thus it was a bit surprising months ago when I was invited to contribute to a forthcoming book of collected essays on the show – the editors knew that I didn’t like the show, and wanted me to write about why. I accepted the invitation as a kind of challenge, and the results are posted below."
• Hulu Is Seen as Readying to Go Public – NYTimes.com – "Led by Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com executive, Hulu has grown to become one of the biggest sources of online video on the Web. It features content from most major TV networks — CBS and CW are two exceptions — and several movie studios like MGM and Lions Gate.<br />
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  But Hulu is still confronting big questions about its future prospects. The company has long been believed to be second only to YouTube in terms of online viewers. But a revision to comScore’s methodology sent Hulu’s viewership numbers plummeting, to 24 million in June from 43.5 million in May."
• Technology Review: How HTML5 Will Shake Up the Web – Nice primer on why HTML5 is important: "Experts say that what HTML5 does behind the scenes–such as its network communications and browser storage features–could make pages load faster (particularly on sluggish mobile devices), make Web applications work more smoothly, and even enable browsers to read older Web pages more easily."