Christmas Links #5

Scary Claus: Exploring Krampus and the Christmas Season's Serious Horror Creed:
"This year's holiday season officially kicks off with the release of the super-fun horror-comedy KRAMPUS, which may seem like a weird Yuletide viewing choice—that is, to those who aren't hip to Christmas' longstanding connections to all things macabre."

Access Denied: The media, after access:
"Earlier this year a young employee at a celebrity magazine explained to me a problem. The magazine was doing reasonably well, as was its website. But both were publishing photos taken from Instagram with increasing frequency. This was fine: the photos were good and people liked them. The problem, this person said, was that it was unclear when, or how, the further publication of Instagram photos would stop."

A Price Of Games Journalism:
"For the past two years, Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda, the publisher of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series. For the past year, we have also been, to a lesser degree, ostracized by Ubisoft, publisher of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and more."

Fake War on Christmas Comes to Rome:
"How one school in Italy tried in vain to choose integration over segregation, sparking a national debate and exposing profound problems for the future."

Film of the Week: Film Firsts (1959-60):
"Produced for television audiences (ABC) but also screened for school groups and other non-theatrical audiences, the two-part, hour-long documentary does not exactly amount to a thorough and unbiased history but it is very representative of this reflexive sub-genre that dealt with the evolution of the motion picture. Often such films catered to the audience’s nostalgia in an era where memories of the nickelodeon and the picture palace were very much alive. They also provided a venue for studios to repurpose their library of films for the era of television. Finally, in a more implicit manner, they partook in an evolutionary rhetoric that cast the turn-of-the-century flickers as a primitive manifestation of an art and industry that by the 1950s and 60s had blossomed into a global entertainment empire."

Getting Personal With The Stars and Creator of 'Marvel's Jessica Jones' (And What They Know About Season 2):
"To celebrate the show's critically lauded premiere, this week showrunner Melissa Rosenberg ("Dexter") hosted a reception at her house (which was really, really nice, in case you were wondering), attended by cast and crew, including stars Krysten Ritter and Carrie-Anne Moss, as well as contributing writer Jane Espenson (whose nerd cred includes writing for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Battlestar Galactica")."