links for 2009-08-01

So, just as a friendship evolves through spending time together and sharing personal thoughts and opinions, parasocial relationships evolve by watching characters on our favorite TV shows, and becoming involved with their personal lives, idiosyncrasies, and experiences as if they were those of a friend.

The emotions we experience in being with our friends and lovers are being carried over – and sometimes even replaced – by mirrored feelings we develop for our favorite characters, toys, and objects.

I know that from our perspective in the West, where we tend to focus even more than other societies on questions of sexual morality, it's rather an immoral suggestion that I'm making – basically that men set themselves up with wives in order to have the freedom to be men, as it were – and then go ahead and design their sexual strategy from that point on.

Now, in modern Western societies, that strategy is usually to stay with one's wife – but not always, as we know! From the woman's point of view, the wife wants the security of knowing that she has her husband to protect her from the scrounging "others." It's not a notion of a love relationship. That's less common and more nakedly economic in many societies than in our own.

People always hate when their favorite site is redesigned. Lots of users were probably responding more to the suddenness of the changes than to the substance, and we'd all get over it soon enough.

Most filmmakers kicking off a long-awaited Hollywood take on a treasured Gen-X franchise spend years treating its fanboys with a mixture of reverence, fear, and worship. Lurking in the outer darkness of the blogosphere, these godlike man-children are the supposed tastemakers of today's effects-driven blockbuster — the make-or-break nerdcore audience segment whose fundamentalist devotion to dork scripture (comics, cartoons, whatever) drives the decision to give Wolverine that special hairdo of his, or to pay a team of digital artists to painstakingly adjust the heft and swing of a luminous blue penis in Watchmen.

I also had to bite my tongue, as I was given the news that there was something special about drinking French wine in France, that only the French could make proper goats' cheese, and that only in French markets was it possible to buy tomatoes with that special French taste. For two weeks I was also forced to ignore the foul manners of French drivers, the dog excrement on every pavement, the abysmal quality of French music and popular entertainment, and a degree of bureaucracy which had me queuing for a whole half hour at the local post office in order to retrieve a fax that had been sent from home.