retroCRUSH: The 100 Greatest Horror Performances

retroCRUSH: The 100 Greatest Horror Performances

I went TiVo’s listings this weekend and picked up a bunch of these.

What I Like About You.

What I Like About You.

Another list.

Comments From the Crowd Gathering Around the Body of Phidippides, Reporter of the Greek Victory Over the Persians at Marathon, Soon After He Gasped, "We Won," and Died.

Comments From the Crowd Gathering Around the Body of Phidippides, Reporter of the Greek Victory Over the Persians at Marathon, Soon After He Gasped, “We Won,” and Died.

I like lists.

X Marks the Baseball Team - Why the White Sox aren't the White Socks.

X Marks the Baseball Team - Why the White Sox aren’t the White Socks.

Interesting linguistic tidbit.

Flickr adds photo printing, with pickup in Target stores

Flickr adds photo printing, with pickup in Target stores

I’ve been pretty happy with iPhoto’s ordering integration, but this is cool.

Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat

Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat

Companion to “Creating the Innocent Killer.”

Creating the Innocent Killer

Creating the Innocent Killer

Ender’s Game essay I mentioned the other night to Kenjisan.

devoted1.com

devoted1.com

I can’t help but think this would also be useful against vampires while jogging at night.

Colbert's Rapport

Having Bill O’Reilly as a guest on The Daily Show right before the second episode of The Colbert Report gave a pretty good comparison of what Steven Colbert has to live up to mock. I think he’s doing a pretty good job, and there were a couple of really funny moments in the premiere episodes, but there’s one problem I see: Colbert knows it’s all an act, which I think is a liability in making it believable. O’Reilly is either the best actor in the world, or he’s just forgotten that it’s all for show.

Penny Arcade

I think Penny Arcade’s over-rated. They’re funny, but not consistently so, and they seem to take pride in omitting context from half of what they say. Still, they hit it out of the park sometimes, and I commend them for that.

This whole Jack Thompson thing is a good example of that. He’s the lawyer who’s suing the makers of Grand Theft Auto for inciting some nut to murder two police officers. He also made an offer that if someone made a game in which someone kills video game execs as revenge for the industry’s violence that he’d donate $10,000 to charity. Naturally, someone made said game, and he backed down on his offer, saying it was satire.

So Penny Arcade donated the $10,000 for him, in his name.

Pretty damn awesome, I’d say.

Some TV Numbers

Just thinking about some numbers here.

Say digital cable runs about $80/month. Times 12 months, that’s $960.

A TV season is usually 22 episodes long. 22 episodes times $1.99/episode equals $44.

960/44 = ~22 shows. If you only watched weekly shows, and every show you watched were available for download on iTunes, you’d save money by not having cable if you could keep your viewing below 22 shows. I watch a lot of TV, but I’m pretty sure I could swing that.

Still, I can’t see downloads entirely replacing broadcast TV. Daily shows would probably have to work differently. News shows aren’t worth much unless they’ve live. Talks shows, both daytime and late-night, get stale if you don’t watch them within about three days in my experience. Soap operas would probably do okay, because people could easily pick up the ones they missed for maybe $0.39 per episode.

Networks apparently pay between $50,000 and $1,000,000 per episode for a TV show. At $1.99/episode, a given network would only need 25,000 for (cheap reality shows) to 500,000 viewers (for hour-long dramas) to download their shows. Popular shows tend to draw audiences in the millions, and even unpopular ones scare up numbers in the hundred-thousands.

Granted, cable companies are now major providers of broadband internet, so it’s not like they’re going obselete, but I can easily see a shakeup going on here. Give me internet and five channels on which to watch the news, The Daily Show, and reruns of The Simpsons and Seinfeld (and I guess sports). I’ll download the rest.

retroCRUSH:THE 100 SCARIEST MOVIE SCENES OF ALL TIME!

retroCRUSH:THE 100 SCARIEST MOVIE SCENES OF ALL TIME!

Good list from a year or two ago. I keep meaning to watch a few of these I’ve never seen.

HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software

HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software

In case you were wondering, there’s nothing illegal about this if you own the DVD.

Towards a Lazier Dream

Apple did its thing today. I think the big news today is not what they’ve released, it’s that they’ve decided they’re going to move toward something that could be Big.

Any good science fiction knows that in the future we’ll be connected to a sleeker, speedier version of the internet where all content is available instantly. Three things are stopping that from being a reality right now. One, download speeds aren’t fast enough. You can watch a 3-minute movie trailer with only a few seconds’ delay in buffering time, but internet media isn’t ready for true channel-surfing. Two, wireless stuff. Eventually I want to be able to take any portable device (laptop, cell phone, PADD, etc.) anywhere and have the same instant fast access I would at home. City-wide wireless might be the way to do this, but all the better if it can be the same network that my cellphone uses. Three, there has to be a distribution channel.

The first two things, bandwidth and ease-of-access, will happen with time, because that’s the sort of thing that technology likes to do. The third, a good distribution channel, won’t happen until someone decides to build one. I’m pretty confident in saying that it won’t ever be a content provider, because they’re too worried about their own interests to play well with others, and no global entertainment network would be worth subscribing to if it only got one channel. With the iTunes Music Store, Apple showed that internet distribution works fine for music, and it seems like they’re extending this to video. Steve Jobs was able to use his Pixar-Disney connections to get ABC to sign on first, but there’s no real reason for other networks not to jump on board as well.

So assume that Apple succeeds and lots of networks jump onboard. Being able to grab one TV show at a time isn’t enough¹. What I picture is a super TiVo, where every episode of every show and every movie ever made is available for near-instant viewing. You’d subscribe to a show, and whenever the network aired it you’d have it downloaded to your machine, ready to watch. If you wanted to watch and episode from last season, you could buy it for two bucks. Same for movies, at maybe $15/download, and of course you’d get to keep them and burn them to DVDs. If you wanted a nicer copy with special features you could buy the retail DVD, just like you can now.

I ramble, but the point is that very little of this is unattainable right now, except that no one’s bothered to do it because they either haven’t thought of it (which I doubt), they don’t have the money to do it (which I also doubt), or they can’t secure the rights to it. The reason they can’t get the rights is, of course, that the idiots who own the rights haven’t had the sense beaten into them that it’s in their best interest. Eighty percent of the iTunes Music Store catalogue sells at leasts once every month. There’s no chance whatsoever that many of those songs would have sold in a record store. Lost last month featured a Mama Cass song that I then bought from Apple. Would I have bought that CD in a store? Not a chance. But making it instantly available and fairly affordable meant that someone got some money for it.

Of course, the consequence of my utopian wishfullness will be some major business changes. People would be less likely to buy back-episodes of TV shows that are in current syndication (but then, the Seinfeld DVDs didn’t exactly rot on the shelves). Music and video stores would take a hit. Record and DVD makers would have to lower prices or offer more to get people to buy the hard copies. Video rentals would suffer some, but there are still lots of movies that I rent but wouldn’t buy, even if I could do so with one click.

Is Apple going to usher in a grand global entertainment network where the work of every artist is available instantaneously? That’s thinking a bit big, but who else is going to do it? Otherwise we’re stuck where we are because Fox won’t talk to Sony, even while both complain that their revenues are shrinking and can’t see why.

1. Of course, the question is, who exactly wants to watch TV shows on their computers, or even on their iPods? I’ve long-argued that people only think they want to, because they look at a TV, look at a comptuer, notice that they both have screens on them, and think that they should be able to watch movies and TV on their computers. But there’s a big barrier there, and that’s furniture. When you’re typing at your computer, you want to be at a desk, sitting in a chair maybe a foot or two from your moniter (or in the case of a laptop, maybe lying in bed with it on your lap). When you’re watching TV, you want to be on a couch sitting 6-10 feet away. If you wanted a computer to do both, you’d have to set up couches opposite desks in living rooms. You’d have to force people to stop watching TV whenever you wanted to get some work done, play a game, or check your email. If you’re the only one home, you could keep working and watch TV in a window, but that doesn’t work if other people want to watch, too. So there’s a feng shui issue going on there, but if we step beyond that, I think there’s huge merit to having TV and movies available as downloadable content. Your TV could, for example, become just a moniter that has the ability to connect to your computer and display any content saved onto the hard drive, auto-detection like Bonjour doing all the configuration work for you. ↩ ↩

Marios. 64.

Marios. 64.

This has been everywhere, but it’s cute.

Microsoft Team RSS Blog : The orange icon...

Microsoft Team RSS Blog : The orange icon…

Not entirely sure why I find this so fascinating.

DCist Maps

DCist Maps

Overlay of the DC Metro onto Google Maps. Looks handy

Wallace & Gromit

Katherine and I went to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit last night, which was delightful. Roger Ebert says that Wallace and Gromit are arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation, and I think he’s got something there. Stop-motion animation has such a charm to it, and Nick Park’s creations match it so beautifully.

Tragically, almost all of them were destroyed today:

A day of celebration has turned to ashes for Aardman Animations, the English studio that created animated clay movie stars Wallace and Gromit.

Aardman said an early morning fire on Monday gutted its warehouse in this western English city, destroying a priceless archive of props, sets and models.

Aardman had just learned that The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first full-length adventure for the eccentric inventor and his indomitable dog, had topped the U.S. box office on its opening weekend.

Today was supposed to be a day of celebration, with the news that Wallace and Gromit had gone in at number one at the U.S. box office, but instead our whole history has been wiped out, said Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff. It’s turned out to be a terrible day.

The Avon Fire and Rescue service said the roof and three interior walls of the Victorian warehouse collapsed in the blaze, which broke out at about 5:30 a.m. (0430 GMT). The cause of the fire was being investigated.

Sheriff said the warehouse contained sets, props and models from all the company’s past productions, from the children’s cartoon character Morph through the Oscar-winning, anthropomorphic Creature Comforts series to the Wallace and Gromit films.

Aardman said the sets and props from Curse of the Were-Rabbit were not caught in the blaze.

Wallace and Gromit’s creator, Nick Park, said the earthquake in South Asia helped put the loss into perspective.

Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn’t a big deal, he said.

Wallace & Gromit’s previous adventures are available on DVD in the form of three short films. I highly recommend them.

First Nine Minutes of Serenity

First Nine Minutes of Serenity

Promo of the first nine minutes of Serenity.

On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers... (plasticbag.org)

On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers… (plasticbag.org)

Marketing firm latches onto a story about someone reuniting with their father. Blech.

WWdN: In Exile: little by little

WWdN: In Exile: little by little

Harvey Danger releases its album for free over BitTorrent.

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

Could be very useful.

Serenity

Even in light of all the hyperbole flying around about this movie, Serenity was as good as I had hoped, which is saying a lot. It’s certainly the best TV-to-movie movie ever (a neat feat considering it’s based on a failed TV series), and I’d say better than most sci-fi you’ll see. It has fun chases, it has a very scary set of villains, a super-cool assassin, it keeps with the original series’ knowledge that things don’t make sound in space and, most of all, it has heart. I’m disappointed it didn’t do a little bit better at the box office, but still, if you go see one space western this year, go see Serenity.