Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather continue to celebrate the podcast’s fifth anniversary with a consideration of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and the @Horse_ebooks revelations.
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Your Panel
Further Reading
- Spy vs. Spy on YouTube
- David Mamet’s memo to the writers of The Unit
- Horse_ebooks on Twitter
I had no idea the @Horse_ebooks scandal had caused such controversy. Personally I never followed any potential link-bait, I just thought it was odd and funny but left it at that.
I have no idea where I got this idea from, but when I signed up to follow them I thought it was one of the hosts of Awesomed By Comics. I forget why.
My question is, what would the better endgame of Horse_ebooks be? That level of insight couldn’t have been randomly created, so would the art project be more valid if it was some student in a basement somewhere? Or am I growing too cynical to wonder if a machine could tweet insights, like a zen Person of Interest? Did my extremely false assumption that it was a person all along immunise me from this disappointment?
Oh, and happy birthday from 50.844121, -0.147484! Keep up the good work, Agents of Overthink!
I liked the idea of “Agents of Agents of Shield.” You could go two ways with it. One would be just having it be about the office staff back at Shield headquarters. (I’m not going to much with all the periods – just image they’re there.) It could be an office sitcom where the various secretaries, mailroom clerks, and their supervisors yuk it up while coping with the serious semi-comicbook shenanigans that their bosses are getting into.
The other way would be more in line with the discussion of the true meaning of “agency” as discussed in the podcast. Have the show be about *sub*contractors for Shield. In other words, to save money, the unspecified government funding agency that funds Shield starts outsourcing many of the agencies functions to private contractors, who are poorly trained and less able to cope with the situation than the actual agents themselves.
Not going to MESS with the periods. Not MUCH with the periods.
I love how you refer to clicks as if they are some sort of endangered species, and that the authors of the horse_ebooks scheme might be engaging in Roosevelt-style conservation of the clicks, as if there are a limited number of clicks still in the wild and capturing them is important for their preservation.
I think the idea that Coulson is representing the big overarching organization is problematized when you consider the scene where Ron Glass’s character (or maybe the person he’s talking to?) says something about how he (meaning Coulson) can never know the truth about his “death.” You talked about it a little, but in a different context- his lack of knowledge about what actually happened to him shows how he, too, has superiors and ultimately must report to someone (or multiple someones) when executing his plans.
Ming Na Wen was the voice of Mulan, Wrather!
Lee, you went where I was going to go about the actual content made on Buzzfeed: I do actually think there are some pretty great, long articles on there. I started a thread in the forums, for example (only a bot has commented on it, though, alas), using a really long Buzzfeed article about the making of the movie Clue, complete with interviews from the director and most of the living cast members. There was also a really good one about the appropriation of indigenous iconography for team mascots. I actually think Buzzfeed is very similar to Twitter in the sense that both are thought of as very brief snippets for our instant-satisfaction/ short-attention-span culture we’ve created. But both can work outside that paradigm- by sending multiple tweets, you can still post pages of text on Twitter; and there are those pretty long, well-written articles on Buzzfeed. And yeah, I thought a similar thing to you, Lee, in that the quick-click stuff helps support the deep investigative articles.
Which makes me think about ends justifying means and all that kinda jazz- if their goal is to make real, in-depth articles, and the stuff that’s most popular is the insta-list stuff, have they lost sight of the mission? Is it justifiable for them to produce such high volumes of shallow content?
There was totally a Portal joke in there, but I guess you gentlemen are prolly more sophisticated in your sense of humor than I am. Alas…