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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Amazon foolishness, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. It Was A Dark And Silly Night and stuff

posted by Neil
Over at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2009/04/wilson-and-gaiman-at-work-and-play.html You can learn about this cartoon, which I have embedded here because, well, it said I could on the New Yorker site and I thought I'd see what would happen...



As the New Yorker says,

This Friday night at 7, the Morgan Library & Museum will hold a special screening of “Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird,” a documentary, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe, about the life and work of the New Yorker cartoonist of the gleefully macabre bent. Wilson and the director will be on hand for a Q. & A. after the screening (which is being presented in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “On The Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker”). Meanwhile, we have some new work by Wilson: he illustrated this short animated adaptation (also directed by Jaffe) of “It Was a Dark and Silly Night,” a story by Neil Gaiman, the author of (among many, many other works) “Coraline,” a movie which was recently celebrated in these pages by David Denby.


It should probably say that the story was actually written for the Mouly/Spiegelman edited book "It Was A Dark And Silly Night" and was the second of my five-finger exercises before I started The Graveyard Book (the first was the short story "October in the Chair"). And that I loved working with Gahan, and talking about him in the documentary.

(You can hear Art Spiegelman talking about the book here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1435446)

...

Beautiful Graveyard Book-inspired photos at
http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2009/04/jazjaz-40-hauntingly-beautiful.html

Vanessa at Fidra Books writes about Blueberry Girl, as does Mama's Cup.

Jon Scieszka made the Battle of the Books more interesting by knocking The Graveyard Book out in the first round. Which I thought was a wonderful thing to do, and it makes things much more fun.
...

An explanation for what actually happened at Amazon is at http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp?source=mypi
(As The English all probably suspected, it was the fault of The French.)

Cheryl Morgan does a good summing up of the upshot of AmazonFail at http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=4528

(I would add, the best, and also the most dangerous thing about Twitter is the speed with which things happen. If you're a big company and something like this explodes, just having someone who can simply say "Yeah, we know. Thanks for alerting us. It's not malicious, we're trying to fix it by working through our Easter Sunday" on Twitter would probably have been enough to pour oil on twitter-troubled waters.)

(And the thing that is best, and thus most problematic about Amazon, is that we do use it as a resource. I'll normally link to Amazon for a book rather than to, say Indiebound, only because there's more raw information at Amazon than at Indiebound, and it's normally easier to access than Barnes and Noble. (Each of the links are to The Graveyard Book, on Amazon, Indiebound and B&N respectively.) And in twelve years, no-one has replaced that thing.)

...

Moby has a new CD coming out. He gave an instrumental track "Shot in the Back of the Head" to David Lynch, with instructions to do whatever he wanted. David Lynch made a haunting little mostly hand-drawn animation. I made a shrunken URL for it at Http://bit.ly/lynchmob, because it made me smile. (It's actually at http://pitchfork.com/tv/#/musicvideo/966-moby-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head-mute).

...

And finally congratulations to the Wieden+Kennedy folk, whose awesomelytriffical Coraline website has been nominated for two Webby Awards, at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=13

(Also, you can nominate and vote for the websites you think are the best of the web at http://pv.webbyawards.com/)

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2. Amazonfail Sunday

posted by Neil
Argh. My trainer just came over and I worked out for the first time since January. It kind of sort of feels good, but mostly it feels like I was on the road for three months and I need to get back into some kind of shape.

I shall break out the Wiii fit tonight I think. And trampoline a lot.

...

Yesterday morning someone called @Zanzando twittered me, saying,
@neilhimself Neil, if you could tweet re: Amazon removing GLBTQ titles from searches & rankings (# amazonfail), that'd be great. Thanks!
I asked for links, expecting it not to be a real problem, and found myself discovering that, yes, Amazon were indeed doing this -- deleting books from the Amazon Rank database. And to books like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It was a very real problem. (A list of affected books is up at http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html) (The removal of a book's Amazon rank is, among other things, going to make it much harder to find on an Amazon search.) So I twittered about it, using the #amazonfail tag, and people read it and retweeted it and spread it around. And it rapidly became the top topic on Twitter. (Er, I'm not saying this was because of me. I probably speeded things up by a few minutes.)

Soon wonderful things like this were appearing, and I was retweeting them.  People within and without the GLBT communities saw the utter stupidity of this (along with the dangers of a more or less monopolistic retailer that was used as much for information as it was for sales deciding that only information it approved of could go out there).

Several hours later people were asking me about why I wasn't boycotting Amazon because Amazon hadn't fixed it yet, and I found myself pointing out that it was Easter Sunday, and honestly, you were going to have to give them a chance to fix it... 

(I mean, a week ago, a search for "Girl Scout Cookie" on Amazon.com produced sexy costumes, speculums, wolf urine and a Morgan Freeman biography as a result. Now the speculums and Morgan Freeman biography have vanished (although the wolf urine is still there). Obviously, Amazon listings are always in flux...)

Having said that, Amazon describing it to the AP as "a glitch" isn't as reassuring as they might perhaps have hoped. Something's obviously wrong, and it's something that Amazon should not ever have touched with a ten-foot bargepole. But who made it happen, and whether it was stupid or evil, and how long it's going to take to fix, and whether they're going to apologise, all remain to be seen. (NB. If you're an Amazon spokesentity and you're reading this, trust me, the whole apology thing would be a really smart idea.)

Here's a piece on why it may not be fixed overnight http://sbisson.livejournal.com/927640.html

...

Meanwhile, Cat Mihos is about to launch the redesign of the Neverwear Site, and she's holding a contest to celebrate:

0 Comments on Amazonfail Sunday as of 4/13/2009 12:23:00 PM
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