“So as we try to make sense of Mandatory Fun, Al’s fourteenth studio album – and as we round into the fourth decade of his career – it’s becoming clear that his old-school/new-school media business playbook is a little genius. In many corners of the English-language Internet, this week has been Al-saturated, his new music videos and songs unavoidable. How does he do it? Where will it lead? And will this be his media strategy forever?”

“The BBC spent £6 million less on talent in 2013/14, the Corporation’s latest annual report claims, with a £194 million bill for its star presenters and performers representing a 15% fall in wages over the past five years.”

“Sitting on my sofa, push-button dialing system by my side, I can’t help but feel that I’m filing a dispatch from a future entertainment universe. We should embrace and celebrate the fact that we can now watch great movies on TV the same day they’re in theaters. And yet this development feels like it’s brought on more consternation than joy.”

“All of this leaves me wanting more, specifically more context: such as what greater societal forces are shaping the types of games we play and why? And what do different games reveal about us as a culture?”

As Microsoft lays off 18,000 people, one of the departments slashed is the Xbox Entertainment Studio, launched in 2012 and with nearly 20 series in some phase of development.

” ‘It’s a pleasure to talk about him, but there will come a time very soon where I say, “I’ve done that, I am closing the door and moving on,” ‘ explained Mr. Suchet, 68, clad in a very un-Poirot-like blue dress shirt and jeans.”

“The easy tropes and practiced banter, the reliable fulfilling of a sitcom’s tasks, contributed to a sense of permanence. … Here was a world void of dread, danger, and anxiety, a place in which work and play were indistinguishable, in which jobs just meant different aesthetics attached to the same basic glee.” Exhibit A: Just Shoot Me.

“It’s only common sense that the devaluation creative industries face is having a sustained negative effect on the investment available for sustainable artistic careers. Through new groups like the Content Creators Coalition, artists have begun to advocate for themselves. But forging an internet that takes individual rights (including privacy), cultural diversity and sustainable progress seriously also requires that consumers get on board.”

“A Montreal filmmaker fears that she could lose the centrepiece of a federally subsidized art installation after Canadian customs officers intercepted her material and deemed that it contravened the country’s trade sanctions against Iran.”

The mega-conglomerate would certainly have been Hollywood’s heaviest hitter, but the risks of meshing the two studios would have been risky for everyone involved, including the entire Los Angeles area.

Nathan Rabin: “So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to pop culture: I’m sorry for creating this unstoppable monster. Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, … I would welcome its erasure from public discourse.”

“It’s as if, through sales figures, profits and other assorted fiscal headlines video games will be able to buy their way to legitimacy. How fitting that a medium which typically encourages its players to exert dominance over the competition would frame its worth as a battle, usually with cinema, as if this were a fight to be won, as if the winner would somehow usurp the loser, as if each venue for human expression didn’t have unique capacity for joy, wonder and meaning.”

“SAG-AFTRA reported a year-end surplus of $8 million “due to expense management efforts and increased revenue from dues and initiation fees.”

“The only thing standing between the show keeping the audience on its side and outright mutiny is often the warm-up (and his reliable sidekick, the DJ), who aims to keep those long gaps between scenes light-hearted and funny, then drop the audience right back into the action when taping resumes.”

“We need to be responsive to the way the industry is evolving and reflective of the kind of shows being produced … So much production is being done around town, and they don’t all fit into nicely, cleanly defined boxes.”

“The future of photography is the past, both as subject and technique. Time-lapse photography is coming to your smartphone, and when it does, expect to see the passage of time take over all your albums, feeds, and streams.”

“Thus far the majority of Internet Culture has yet to stray from its medium of birth. And why would it? Not all mediums are equipped to handle all forms of expression.”

“Familiarity also breeds contempt. Contempt breeds indifference. And when audiences feel like they’ve seen something, or someone, once too often, they start consulting their iPhones to check the weather and put off the movies for another week.”

“BBC director general Tony Hall has unveiled plans to allow the Corporation’s in-house production teams to make content for rival broadcasters, as part of a shake-up he has described as a ‘competition revolution’.”

Here’s the complete list of Emmy nominees for 2014.

“Tablets have become as mundane as the PCs whose decline they hastened. Instead of radical hardware innovations, the maxed-out market is racing toward as many screen sizes as shoe sizes.”

On the last day of 2020, Anders Weberg will release Ambiancé, which is, he says, “an abstract nonlinear narrative summary of the artist’s time spent with the moving image.” The film will “be shown in its full length on a single occasion syncronised in all the continents of the world and then destroyed.” (includes trailer)

“The romantic comedy has created, on top of everything else, a new genre: the obituary for the romantic comedy. … Because the truth is that [today's] romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unseemly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic.”

“What actually gets people moving? Do grant-supported media projects incite change, or are they simply an expensive way of preaching to the choir? Ultimately, the answers may help determine which projects get financed, which formats are favored and how stories are structured.”

It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.

“A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster. … This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals – the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.”

On the Media‘s Bob Garfield talks with Daniel Alarcón (whom you might as well think of, for now, as the Latino Ira Glass) about his Spanish-language series, Radio Ambulante. (audio)

“Their crude variables and simplistic results reflect a larger problem video game research continues to face as it grows, one that makes rigorous experiments hard to recognize: Scientists don’t even know how video games’ real-world effects should be measured.”