Take a Gander at:

• puberty
• tax incentives
• bad ads
• fake bots
• A Real Party Animal!

Also save a glance for sbc0212, CM Crockford, and Simon DelMonte for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, posts articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The Ringer‘s Brian Phillips drills down on the theory that “chosen one” fantasies are allegories of male sexual maturity:

I mean, who are the chosen ones in traditional fantasy and speculative fiction? Almost all straight, cis boys on the cusp of sexual maturity, right? And how does their chosenness reveal itself? Generally through the acquisition of an object that is both transparently phallic and imbued with profound mystic significance. A wand. A lightsaber. A magic sword. […] But there’s not really a magic sword in Dune, is there? Huh. Well, maybe when Frank Herbert sat down to write the novel, he decided to skip the overt penis symbolism and go for something more subtle, less obviou—OH MY GOD, THE GIANT FUCKING WORMS. It’s the giant worms. Of course it’s the worms. The first way Herbert blows up the traditional chosen-one narrative is just by making it bigger than anyone else’s. Paul Atreides doesn’t just get a cute li’l wand buddy; he gets AN ENTIRE WORLD whose underground depths, like a 14-year-old’s sketchbook, are teeming with dick imagery.

Beloved Soluter C.M. Crockford reports on the benefits and problems of Pennsylvania’s tax incentive program for film productions at cinéSPEAK:

Dan Lantz is a Philadelphia filmmaker who has shot several low-budget genre films on location in Delaware and Montgomery Counties, including Alpha Rift and Hayride to Hell. Lantz has received the state’s tax credits before and emphasized that he doesn’t feel entitled to the money, but calls the application process “very opaque” and “not filmmaker friendly.” For one, he’s still unsure why Hayride to Hell was turned down by the program. “The executive producers did everything we were supposed to, but [the office] still said ‘no’ without telling us why.” The DCED did set aside $5 million in credits for smaller, independent productions in 2022, but according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, that money went to M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin instead of multiple low-budget films. Most of the recent FTCP recipients, in fact, have been bigger budget movies and shows. Independent director Lantz certainly doesn’t plan on applying for tax credits again. “I shoot in other states because at the end of the day, I can count on New Mexico. I can count on New York. I can’t count on shooting in Pennsylvania.”

At RogerEbert[dot]com, Matt Zoller Seitz has had it with illogical ad breaks in streaming services:

It’s been explained to me that the random cruddy ad-breaks problem might be traced back to coding issues. The software for the presentation platform is looking for the correct spots where ads can be placed but—because of somebody’s technical failure—failing to accurately detect them. But this is more an explanation than an excuse. It’s like being told that the reason so many night scenes shot during the era of digital cinematography are illegible coffee-colored smears is because your TV is improperly calibrated, or not expensive enough. Incomprehensible night photography didn’t used to be a common problem. Ads in the middle of a scene, sometimes cutting off a sentence or an important piece of action, didn’t used to be a common problem, either. Both are symptoms of a culture that has stopped even pretending to care about presentation. We are now at the point in the history of show business where a bad experience is free and a decent one costs extra.

The Verge‘s Emma Roth reports on the time recently departed Gizmodo writer Tom McKay created a fake bot handle and remained on the company’s Slack:

The move camouflaged McKay’s active Slack account for months, letting his account evade deletion. It also allowed him to send bot-like messages to his colleagues such as, “Slackbot fact of the day: Hi, I’m Slackbot! That’s a fact. Have a Slack-ly day!” My colleague Victoria Song, who previously worked at Gizmodo, isn’t all that surprised that this situation unfolded, and says, “As Tom’s former coworker and a G/O Media survivor, this tracks.”

Megahn Boilard’s Off-Topic offers a mixed-media presentation reminding us of the time Senator Strom Thurmond went mano-a-doggo with Spuds MacKenzie:

Equipped with colorful posters and paraphernalia to prove his point, the senator set to work convincing his compatriots to put an end to Spuds once and for all. Grabbing a stuffed Spuds by the neck, the politician stated the following: “We think to put these toys advertising beer on them, for little children, to sell in the stores, is absolutely unnecessary, inadvisable, and against the public interest.” And all the the while, he stared intently into the doll’s lifeless eyes.