Learn how to process your own JWST photos at home, "no technical experience required to start"
Deadline's Robert Lang compiled a bunch of short films (that you can watch for free online) that were later developed into feature-length films like Reservoir Dogs, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Boogie Nights, Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dynamite, and District 9.
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BookTube more important than BookTok ?
'BookTok' has been getting lots of attention -- ‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers David Barnett reported in The Observerjust on Sunday -- but now Ella Creamer writes in The Guardian that a Nielsen Report finds YouTube more popular than TikTok for young book buyers.
Yes: "34% of people aged between 14 and 25 find new reads using the video platform YouTube" -- while: "TikTok and Instagram were used by 32% and 27% of participants respectively". This seems like a margin-of-error kind of difference (and it's based on a "survey", i.e. self-reported and hence of dubious reliability), but, hey, whatever gets 'em reading, right ?
Twenty-one years of the Literary Saloon
I can finally raise a glass not just to but with the Literary Saloon, which today has reached the legal drinking age in the US -- yes, the first post went up at this weblog-annex to the complete review (itself a twentieth-century relic) exactly twenty-one years ago today !
Glad to see that there are quite a few regulars who still drop by -- and that many others at least take the occasional look.
Cheers !
And Other Stories' redesign
At the venerable publisher, And Other Stories' Series Design Revealed: Putting Words First -- and I have to say, I like it ! (And I am always for putting words first !)
KulturPass
Germany recently followed in the footsteps of several other European countries in offering a 'Culture-Pass' to youths once they hit a certain age: the German KulturPass allows anyone who turns 18 this year to get €200 which they can use for any kind of cultural expenditure they like. Unsurprisingly, as elsewhere, it's proven to be quite a hit.
At Börsenblatt they sum up the early results, with 130,000 youths having taken up the offer (about a third of those eligible), leading to a turnover of €2.9 million. (There's apparently a more detailed report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, but it's paywalled.)
The top items the youths went for: books and comics (alas, not broken down how many of each ...), 83,000; movie tickets, 57,000; and theater and concert tickets 25,000. Nice to see that 25 bought sheet music -- and interesting to see that twice as many spent the money on musical instruments (ca. 700) as did on CDs/records/etc. (ca. 350). A bit disappointing to see that museums and parks weren't that popular: only a thousand takers/goers.
Graphomania
At The Guardian Politics-author Adam Thirlwell finds ‘We’re gripped by graphomania’: why writing became an online contagion and how we can contain it.
Writing and disseminating several hundred thousand words a year in reviews and Literary Saloon weblog posts I'm afraid I definitely count/contribute to this graphomanic excess; I suppose one could call what I do "manic reading, which leads to even more graphomania" ..... But maybe what I do is also part of the: "proliferation of small-scale writing