Tuesday, November 18, 2008
After the post-election burnout, the need to avoid legitimate news sources and/or any statistically-based predictive modeling, I need a dose of funny shit. Lucky me as Vanity Fair lucked into a copy of Thomas Kinkade’s memo for making his pastel hued, projector launched nightmare of cozy old lady sentimentality and drunken Sigfried and Roy heckling Christmas Cottage as cloying to the eye as his, um, prints. Big score for VF because the memo is fucking hilarious as is the commentary from people who can delineate between asses and holes in the ground and the cinematographer among the bunch compares his “vision” to that of a 1960’s era pornographer.
Apparently Kinkade got his start by pooping out how-to guides for artists that were presumably successful and popular. I wonder if his mentorship will extend to the silver screen as he lays down some heavyweight goop like item 16:
16) Most important concept of all — THE CONCEPT OF LOVE. Perhaps we could make large posters that simply say “Love this movie” and post them about. I pour a lot of love into each painting, and sense that our crew has a genuine affection for this project. This starts with Michael Campus as a Director who feels great love towards this project, and should filter down through the ranks. Remember: “Every scene is the best scene.”
You can almost hear cast and crew member heads exploding with the frustration of accommodating the douchebag of light. Each and every head explodes with love, warmth, and an unbending belief that after the rapture comes crashing down around us that we will all inhabit hazy, psychedelic Hobbit villages far, far away from the tiresome repenting and gnashing of teeth.
Update
Damn it. Kottke already mentioned this in a very similar post. I need to stop reading primary sources I guess.
Filed in Movies
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303 words in this post
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
The LA Times ran a story today about web only digital song releases for 10 cents a shot. This doesn’t sound like the worst idea ever until they throw the rest of the carrot away in exchange for the less clean end of the stick:
They hope customers will also buy, for an extra 79 or 89 cents, a version of the song they can download and transfer to portable devices or burn to CDs.
What I fail to understand is why services don’t offer the ‘only playable through a web browser content’ as a promotion tool instead of nickel and diming potential customers with the not so compelling offer to hear some ultra compressed music through shitty computer speakers. What reason do you have to pay twice if you like something enough to listen to it on a medium that isn’t streaming and is apt to give out ‘buffering…’ messages instead of trickling out the dime worth of promotional material you just surrendered a micropayment for?
This seems little more than an attempt to charge the potential listener for some half assed marketing towards them. I will say that this is slightly smarter than charging bands to churn out massive numbers of promo product to the employees of chain record stores but only slightly. I would guess that most companies have some sort of marketing and promotional budget built into their business plan and this smells of an attempt to scrape some revenue out of what might otherwise be a demographic interested in hearing a full version of a song before plunking down the full price of an album or use-specific rights for that song.
Filed in Music
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273 words in this post
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Although this has surely been ravaged with more humor than I’ve got in reserve by numerous lefty sites McCain Space is something that I hadn’t heard about until tonight when I wandered over to see what new talking points they were recommending to spew to weblogs in the ‘Action’ section. I’m guessing from the introductory video by McCain where he mentions that there a scant hundred days until the election (and soon after recommends that you check back daily) that Oscar’s birth was the prime matter on my mind at the time. If McCain’s name wasn’t present in the domain name I would think this was parody cooked up The Onion or something.
If you haven’t already snickered about it months ago, go take a look at the video of mouth breathing supporters with glassy eyes reciting the bullet points while staring directly into the lens. My favorites are the Jersey Girl (”I am also a maverick”) and the serial killer kid in the 10 Things video who is really excited that McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts since they’ve done sooo much for the economy. Were they all bribed with huffs of ether before recording these things?
Filed in Politics
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199 words in this post
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
I spent too much time last night setting this up and trying to get the design elements (the stuff that drives me absolutely crazy but is invisible to the rest of the world) established. At some point during all of that I microwaved a frozen dinner and quickly ate it. A couple of hours later I was purging all of the current and previous eats from my system in a fit of what I guess was food poisoning. I’m blaming the frozen food because once the last little bit of dangerous turkey was finally out of my system (something like twelve hours later) then I suddenly felt a whole lot better albeit completely exhausted. That seems like an appropriate rite of passage for placing Team Murder on hiatus and doing something else. It’s amazing how great being only a little nauseous feels and how great it is to take more than a couple sips of coffee before my stomach does flips. I look forward to a night of sleep that isn’t interrupted by continual and twitchy nightmares between spells of vomiting. That sounds, well, nice.
I feel like I have a huge archive of crap that I need to address in some way so that will slowly appear on these pages in the weeks to come. Until then, go read this article about working for one of the term paper mills and the sad state of American students and literacy.
Filed in Life
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240 words in this post
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Making sure that at least some of the plugins are working. I hate this part of setting up new sites.