A Trip to "Blahs" and a Thorough Scraping
So I've apparently been "scraped". This, which I'd never even heard of before, is what happens when a site steals your content and then directs all keyword searches for your post to their site. In this case it's something called "broken controllers". Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend a visit. They charge you to join and fill you up with spyware. Not pleasant, I'm told.
I was able to get them to remove my post, but so far any keyword searches are still leading people to the non-existent post. Ugh. I'm not through, though. I'm currently accepting submissions for possible new titles to the blog, and am sending notices to the big search engines that I was thieved from. Unfortunately, I dealt with that rather than compose a new and post, but I'm back on the horse today. They won't keep me down.
In other news, last night a friend of mine and I went to a preview of "Oz: The Great and Powerful". I went in with low expectations, but still hoped for a good story. I didn't get it.
The film's creators didn't go deep enough into their characters, didn't fully flesh out the characters and elements they added, and because of restrictions in dealing with a film that's still under copyright, could not use the fully fleshed out characters that someone else created, as much as they would have liked. As director Sam Raimi said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, "...finally we came up with designs that were not too close, but not too far either". So what you get is a cutesy, cloying, cut and paste job, with a lot of the same plot devices and visual references as the original film (there's a rainbow reflection in almost every splash of water) but none of the depth, or heart.
Like the wizard's tricks, this film directs your eyes toward the flash of special effects, hoping you won't realize there's very little behind their technical achievement. Believe me, if you can tear eyes away from the green skinned wicked witches drag queen eye brows long enough, you will notice.
I was able to get them to remove my post, but so far any keyword searches are still leading people to the non-existent post. Ugh. I'm not through, though. I'm currently accepting submissions for possible new titles to the blog, and am sending notices to the big search engines that I was thieved from. Unfortunately, I dealt with that rather than compose a new and post, but I'm back on the horse today. They won't keep me down.
In other news, last night a friend of mine and I went to a preview of "Oz: The Great and Powerful". I went in with low expectations, but still hoped for a good story. I didn't get it.
The film's creators didn't go deep enough into their characters, didn't fully flesh out the characters and elements they added, and because of restrictions in dealing with a film that's still under copyright, could not use the fully fleshed out characters that someone else created, as much as they would have liked. As director Sam Raimi said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, "...finally we came up with designs that were not too close, but not too far either". So what you get is a cutesy, cloying, cut and paste job, with a lot of the same plot devices and visual references as the original film (there's a rainbow reflection in almost every splash of water) but none of the depth, or heart.
Like the wizard's tricks, this film directs your eyes toward the flash of special effects, hoping you won't realize there's very little behind their technical achievement. Believe me, if you can tear eyes away from the green skinned wicked witches drag queen eye brows long enough, you will notice.
A fun diversion on the way to "Blahs"