The OMG of the week is this French YouTube video of people throwing cans in the trash. The "it's fake!" response doesn't diminish the OMG effect very much for me. So what? See also Guy catches glasses with face.

Big Love will air three flashback shorts in anticipation of its new season, first on On Demand and later on the web and on the regular HBO. My question for all such things is, if they are inessential for understanding the narrative of a series itself--and they have to be inessential because HBO is not going to risk the vast majority of viewers' incomprehension--why should I watch? I watched the BSG miniature New Caprica episodes and didn't know what to do with them. This kind of storytelling seems to be so much more driven by the desire to try out new distribution systems and media platforms than by a need to tell certain kinds of stories.

A review and appreciation of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at PopMatters makes clear just how impressive this work is, a shot-by-shot fanvid remaking Raiders done by kids in the early 80s without the aid of a VCR. They relied on memory and research and found many creative solutions to problems of recreating a blockbuster using the resources available to amateurs.

And two blog threads I meant to link to earlier in the week...better late than never:

1. I haven't read all the comments, but a number of posts at Kristina Busse's blog about fandom, fanfic, gender, and related topics make clear how passionate media scholars are about their objects of study (see especially the one that got it started about a gender divide in fandom studies and a subsequent one about the validity of fanfic that gets pretty bitchy at the end of the comments).

2. Chuck has been tracking a discussion about whether film blogs are a threat to critics/professional writers or even whether they are just changing things for the worse (1, 2). Similar discussions have been going on for several years in various quarters. Foodbloggers have changed the way the public gets info about restaurants, especially in big cities. Litbloggers are killing book review sections. Lawprof bloggers jump on Supreme Court opinions the moment they are issued, bettering the analysis offered by journalists and rendering law reviews, which have slower publication schedules, irrelevant. If this is a fight, my money is on the bloggers. They write for free and with great passion, are networked to each other, engage directly with their readers, and have few of the limits on their creative output that constrain mainstream media. Indeed, the mainstream media may succeed by co-opting many of the bloggers' forms and functions.