(no subject)
Jul. 13th, 2005 05:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vicarzI think I'm just blowing off steam until I wake up at 3:30 am. Last night I just sat at home and watched TV like a normal person, thinking I needed to rest and cool off. I could have done something different, would have if I knew that I'd be no more refreshed than if I was active. Something inside of me won't let me take vacations, there is some itch that needs scratching, something more I can do. There is always some push for more, some basic dissatisfaction. Something needs fixing, but something always needs fixing, something can always be better. If you're not improving yourself, then you're trying to fix something around you, if you're not then you're just dying I guess.
I spent some time thinking about how I wound up in LJ land, what I'm doing here, and why. I think I subvert social needs on this thing - I hate having needs, and social needs strike me as unimportant. Why would I need validation? I look at my posts and see me, me, me, I and me, me and I, us as it makes me appear, all about me. When I started, I got hooked on roxy list then DCFreaks - I had friends on there and was dragged along for the ride. I made new friends through writing, found new friends through their writing, lost some friends, lost interest in others...but at the time, it was a good thing to have the internet to supplement the club interactions. Then came the trolls, a lack of moderation, and soon LJ because the venue of choice. Now I look at my friends list and while I have many friends on there, I have a bunch of strangers and acquaintances as well. Many of the stories I put up here either have no meaning, or have been discussed with friends already before they appear online. I wonder - do I just use this to fulfill my social needs without actually taking the time to interact? Is this really a form of masturbation, and if so - a healthy one?
So I watched Guns, germs, and steel part I last night. I learned something from watching it, but not from the content. It was a pretty cute show, but it was a cliff notes version of the book. They discussed briefly one of the main points of the book - how geography and native plant life either did or did not lead to agriculture, and that agriculture is why some societies flourished while others did not. In the book the plant life was described in great detail.
(One of the main reasons wheat and barley led to so much success was the fact that they were plants in which a single-gene mutation made it a great source of food for humans. Wheat is supposed to explode and scatter the seeds when ripe, but there is a recessive defective gene that prevents this survival trait and makes it worth harvesting; whereas acorns are bitter because they are somewhat poisonous but for them to be edible to us requires several unlikely recessive genes to mutate and the life cycle is so long it's not efficient to cultivate)
For a moment I was frustrated by this lack of detail, but then I thought about it. It was already difficult enough to translate this difficult and dry book through sheer detail and length alone. To turn it into a picture-show that would attract and entertain the masses, and still convey its interesting message, was one heck of a challenge. It isn't reasonable to expect the show to convey the same amount of information as the book. The audience is different; the medium is different.
So it's not easy to make a book into a movie. It frustrates the book readers when the story they liked as a book makes to to the screen - the reader knows more, and notices all the missing pieces. They feel cheated, but I think the expectations are "too high." I think that the reader should understand the process of conversion, and the inherent limitations to that process. Accept the costs along with the benefits, and understand they cannot reasonably be separated. Perhaps many watchers will take the time to read the more in-depth book later, perhaps many others who would have missed the concept entirely will be enlightened that otherwise would have been missed.
I spent some time thinking about how I wound up in LJ land, what I'm doing here, and why. I think I subvert social needs on this thing - I hate having needs, and social needs strike me as unimportant. Why would I need validation? I look at my posts and see me, me, me, I and me, me and I, us as it makes me appear, all about me. When I started, I got hooked on roxy list then DCFreaks - I had friends on there and was dragged along for the ride. I made new friends through writing, found new friends through their writing, lost some friends, lost interest in others...but at the time, it was a good thing to have the internet to supplement the club interactions. Then came the trolls, a lack of moderation, and soon LJ because the venue of choice. Now I look at my friends list and while I have many friends on there, I have a bunch of strangers and acquaintances as well. Many of the stories I put up here either have no meaning, or have been discussed with friends already before they appear online. I wonder - do I just use this to fulfill my social needs without actually taking the time to interact? Is this really a form of masturbation, and if so - a healthy one?
So I watched Guns, germs, and steel part I last night. I learned something from watching it, but not from the content. It was a pretty cute show, but it was a cliff notes version of the book. They discussed briefly one of the main points of the book - how geography and native plant life either did or did not lead to agriculture, and that agriculture is why some societies flourished while others did not. In the book the plant life was described in great detail.
(One of the main reasons wheat and barley led to so much success was the fact that they were plants in which a single-gene mutation made it a great source of food for humans. Wheat is supposed to explode and scatter the seeds when ripe, but there is a recessive defective gene that prevents this survival trait and makes it worth harvesting; whereas acorns are bitter because they are somewhat poisonous but for them to be edible to us requires several unlikely recessive genes to mutate and the life cycle is so long it's not efficient to cultivate)
For a moment I was frustrated by this lack of detail, but then I thought about it. It was already difficult enough to translate this difficult and dry book through sheer detail and length alone. To turn it into a picture-show that would attract and entertain the masses, and still convey its interesting message, was one heck of a challenge. It isn't reasonable to expect the show to convey the same amount of information as the book. The audience is different; the medium is different.
So it's not easy to make a book into a movie. It frustrates the book readers when the story they liked as a book makes to to the screen - the reader knows more, and notices all the missing pieces. They feel cheated, but I think the expectations are "too high." I think that the reader should understand the process of conversion, and the inherent limitations to that process. Accept the costs along with the benefits, and understand they cannot reasonably be separated. Perhaps many watchers will take the time to read the more in-depth book later, perhaps many others who would have missed the concept entirely will be enlightened that otherwise would have been missed.
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book --> movie
Date: 2005-07-13 11:04 am (UTC)The worst/most boring kinds of exhibition are the ones that SHOULD have been a book. Ideas too complex, too much text on the walls, that sort of thing.
The worst kind of book to read is the kind where the author really wanted to make a movie but copped out and just wrote it all down.
Adaptation is a whole 'nother can of worms, though, isn't it?
"Sin City" was a *really* interesting way to make a comic book into a movie. Uh, visually anyway.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 11:39 am (UTC)Perspective is everything I guess. I didn't find the book dry at all. Compared to traditional academic texts, it was downright whimsical--occasionally too muchso, but striking a much better balance between readability and information content than most.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 01:29 pm (UTC)*grin*
-S
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 01:38 pm (UTC)Wait. A. Minute. We're talking about a bunch of professionals, including lawyers, getting together to watch a PBS special in a Bethesda, MD home. Could we possibly BE any whiter!? Egads man...
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 01:42 pm (UTC)-S
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 02:28 pm (UTC)Shit!
Date: 2005-07-13 08:09 pm (UTC)Sorry - I was hoping that no feedback was good news.
Re: Shit!
Date: 2005-07-13 08:11 pm (UTC)-S
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 04:07 pm (UTC)