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Updated on June 14, 2022
Here’s some interesting articles from the past week, and my thoughts about them.
Media
iHeartMedia loves podcasts?
iHeartMedia (the radio conglomerate formerly known as Clear Channel) is planning on getting into podcasts by airing them on their radio stations. One good thing about podcasts is that we don’t need radio to listen to them, especially given the current state of most American commercial radio.
Viacom buys “Garfield”
Viacom is buying the rights to “Garfield” (via buying creator Jim Davis’ Paws, Inc.), with plans to create a new animated series for Nickelodeon. The newspaper comic, meanwhile, will continue as usual. There’s no word on whether “U.S. Acres” will be part of any future plans, or if this new animated series will be 2D or CGI.
This was pretty surprising news, as “Garfield” has been a successful comic franchise that’s independently owned. That said, Nickelodeon’s had success with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which Viacom bought in 2009), so maybe things will look good for Garfield, Jon, and Odie.
Disney’s earnings depressed
Between Disney’s big Fox assets purchase and upcoming Disney+ launch, Disney saw their earnings drop short of expectations for the last quarter. The blame seems to be on Fox’s movies underperforming, especially that “Dark Phoenix” X-Men film. Which pretty much confirms the mutants are going to fall more firmly under Disney’s control going forward.
Netflix debuts “Rocko’s Modern Life” movie
Netflix debuts the reunion/revival film of “Rocko’s Modern Life”, “Static Cling,” on Friday. Rocko and his friends return to Earth (and O-Town) after wandering through space since the series finale, only to find a lot’s changed since the 90s. Of particular interest (and not a spoiler at this point, per press coverage) is the news one character from the original series is a trans woman.
I did like the original cartoon, so I’ll be watching this film. The original trailer is below. There’s also a shorter Netflix-specific one; the film was originally meant for Nick, but delays and a change of plans caused Nick to offer it (and a similar revival “Invader Zim” film) to Netflix instead.
Technology
Hate speech sites get the boot
After last week’s shootings in El Paso and Dayton, the far-right website 8chan (a site for those who don’t find 4chan racist enough) spent most of the past week kicked offline, starting with losing Cloudflare support. A Seattle area company named Epik briefly hosted the site. However, the company Epik rents servers from, Voxility, realized what was happening and booted Epik. As of this writing, Amazon is trying to figure out if 8chan (or anyone with ties to them) has anything to do with its cloud services.
(Also, I’ll note it took repeated horrific events to overcome these tech companies’ “free speech!” excuses.)
Elsewhere in racism online, Gab (a social network/site for those who don’t find 4chan racist enough) has started up a Mastodon instance. The rest of Mastodon’s dealing with this by mass-blocking any access to or from Gab’s users.
