We have the technology!
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| Octopus Hat We have the technology! |
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Tuesday, February 22, 2005 Avert Your Eyes For any fans of the food network, I must share. I don’t know what to say other than those photos are highly disturbing (don’t forget to click on the thumbnails below for more.) posted by JMV | 2/22/2005 03:09:00 PM | Monday, February 21, 2005 Parade Through the City of Dis  Hunter S Thompson is, by all accounts, dead; a victim of his own hands and his own gun he ended the crazed and often out of control arc of his life on Sunday echoing Hemingway in his methods. posted by JMV | 2/21/2005 02:21:00 PM | Friday, February 18, 2005 Last weekend we were hanging out trying to get some LAN gaming action up and running. During the manditory 7-11 run I saw the newly introduced "Budwieser Extra" (or B-to-the-E, no really that is what it is called.) It is billed as beer + caffine + "energizing herbs," and is served in 10oz cans (halfway between a redbull can and a standard beer can.) The results are very similar to beer and redbull that has been mixed... In your stomach and then vomited into said 10oz can. Really, REALLY foul. | Tuesday, February 15, 2005 Pig, Wrapped in Pig What the hell? I would have bet cash-money that I had a Valentine’s Day post from last year, but I can’t find it in my archives. Since I can’t link to it I’ll quickly sum it up, Jules and I don’t celebrate VDay in any traditional sense. So last night I cooked a slightly more complicated meal than our standard weekday fare, and I thought I would share it As I’m sure many of you know, one of my favorite meats is pork, and one of my favorite cuts is the tenderloin. It is so versatile easy to work with! For this meal I chopped 3 cloves of garlic and a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and then, using the flat of the knife-blade, crushed the garlic and rosemary (along with a bit of salt) into a fragrant paste (I snuck a half-tbs on olive oil in to help the texture.) This paste (about 2 TBS once all was said and done) is then rubbed onto the cleaned-and-trimmed loin. And then I wrapped the lion in bacon, securing any loose-ends w. a tooth-pick. Toss it on a med-heat grill for about 6 minutes per side and serve w/ garlic mashed potatoes and crusty, grilled, bread. Simple and unbelievably tasty. posted by JMV | 2/15/2005 03:35:00 PM | Monday, February 14, 2005 When John's Chins Attack The long-lost results of "the mustache sessions" taken WAY back in September '02 during the wrap party for Trannies!. The idea was all the guys who worked on the film should come to the wrap party sporting their best mustache, and let me tell you the results were frightening. I'm tempted to use this picture as my headshot on IMDb. | The Way of the Future Finally saw The Aviator over the weekend, and I must say it was better than I had expected, and I found the film to easily be the best Scorsese picture since Casino. The performances were outstanding (especially the chameleonic Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn who blatantly stole the show from DiCaprio.) The pacing of the film was excellent (which I find Scorsese sometimes has problems with.) I would highly recommend the film, especially since I think it is going to win a bunch of awards come February 27th. Frustratingly, during the inevitable break-up sequence between Hughes and Hepburn a lady sitting a few seats down from us decided to un-wrap and eat the loudest snack-food you could imagine, nearly destroying the emotion of the scene. And then two eastern European ladies sitting directly behind us just started having a conversation during the CLIMACTIC SCENE. The very last shots of the film, a very dark and introspective moment and they just start yammering away in their full-on normal voice. We were appalled… posted by JMV | 2/14/2005 03:07:00 PM | Wednesday, February 09, 2005 Apathy So my goals of blogging more frequently have died on the vine, and here I am once again facing a week since the last update. Work has been rough lately and I’ve been in a bit of an emotional rut. I blame the waning days of winter. But I keep getting the feeling that things are looking up; leaving the office after a long day last night I glimpsed a faint glow to the west that promised longer-days ahead. Winter was once my favorite season, but as I get older I’m more infatuated with that elusive feeling of emerging Spring and the promises it brings. But as it stands right now, I don’t much feel like writing and It has taken me nearly 3 hours to type this post out. I also realized that in my lethargy I never finished awarding this year’s Octys! I got bogged down on the movie category because I didn’t want to award it w/o seeing some of the stand-out films that I missed. Well, here we are in the 2nd week of February and I still haven’t seen any of the films on my list. So I’m just going to give-up and give the Octy for Film to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Though “I :heart: Huckabees” and “A Very Long Engagement” certainly gave it a run for the money. And lets not forget “Garden State” and “Sideways” as other notable films. I think its interesting that after 2003 was dominated by HUGE films (Return of the King et all) 2004 saw a return to smaller, more independent-spirited films. But Eternal Sunshine stands out as another stellar script penned by Kaufman that was carried by next-level performances from the whole cast and shot with a crazy/brilliance by one of the most visually inventive talents since the French New Wave.
As for the final Octy in tech/gadgetry, it can only go to flickr. The site is taking the ‘net by storm and is really changing the way people interact w/ digital photos. If you haven’t signed up for an account, and you have a digicam, you should really go and check it out!
| Wednesday, February 02, 2005 Toon-Me As requested Matt Hals on his newly discovered weblog. You can make your own here. I don't really like the ears, but beyond that I think it is pretty good... | Tuesday, February 01, 2005 Media, Media, Media Back in the day the TV in my childhood home had a remote control with 6 buttons (power, mute, ch-up/down, and vol-up/down.) I could either watch the same channel all night, or “surf” around the dial hoping something caught my eye. Today, I have an unwatchable amount of recorded broadcasts on my TiVo. Back then, I would ride my bike to the Wherehouse and flip-though racks of CDs until something caught my eye. Now: I think of a song I want and I buy it off iTunes while sitting naked on my couch. Old: endlessly wandering Blockbuster, frustrated because all the new releases were rented, until something caught my eye. New: Netflix, and a queue of dozens of carefully selected and ordered DVDs sent directly to my house as quickly as I can watch them. Do you see where I am going with this? Browsing is dead, long live on-demand consumption.
I’m not sure if this is a positive chance in consumer-culture or not, but I don’t think there is any denying that the paradigm is shifting. Where does this leave the consumer? How does this effect “taste?” Take a look at this article about the (probable) emergence of a niche-driven model of media-consumption to get an idea of where technology can take the market. It supposes that distribution channels are becoming increasingly “virtual” which will lead to the dissolution of the “mainstream.” But my question is how does Joe Sixpack climb out of the rut of top-40, summer blockbuster, primetime network crap? Which isn’t to say it is ALL crap, but just look at the top album, movie, and TV show right now (The Game, Hide and Seek, and American Idol.) Most content-delivery businesses based on the net are beginning to change the way products are marketed; for example Amazon.com’s increasingly-accurate recommendation engine is sometimes scary-good (but other times just scary) and Netflix’s new social networking approach to recommendations shows a lot of promise. And as advertising becomes a less and less viable was to sell content, the marketing minds of the world are going to have to come up with some new ways to satiate the newly empowered consumer’s increasing appetite for media.
Did any of that make sense? It took me forever to type that in-between putting out fires at work…
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