Once a week now, huh?

So it seems I've gone from posting multiple times daily, to posting about once a week.

Also, I've become highly addicted to Amazon Black Friday Deals Week.

Where else can I get iCarly DS for $17!?! Also, Dead Space extraction sold out instantaneously

So everyone that matters, this is where I shall be buying your Non-denominational Winter Gift Giving Holiday.

To other techie things:

A lot of talk has been debating the latest Google phone (Droid) vs. the iPhone. The insight from me is that THERE IS NO VS. I don't know why people choose to pit devices against each other and then claim brand loyalty. It makes no sense because each company is faulty and there will be a time when you will be embarrassed by the company you solidly stick behind. They owe nothing to you and they get free advertising from you just talking about it.

On that note, APPLE ROCKS! iPHONE FOR TEH WINZ!

Seriously though, its in the network. There's no use of having a cool app or feature that doesn't work because the coverage isn't strong enough and no wifi hotspot to hijack, isn't a good phone. If AT&T is strong in your area great. If Verizon is stronger, cool, whatevs. They're options; consider them well.

In other Techie news:

THIS

In other Youtube Findings:

I really need to start watching The Wire

Now please excuse me while I try and bid on this Hannah Montana Disney DS game.

Other things

Instead of annoying you with small-ish updates, I decided to lump everything into one large octomom birthing (see, I'm using topical humor to stay relevant. Ocotomom is still relevant, right? Oh God, what happened to my life?) update.

3rd Party Company creates touchscreen capability with iMacs/monitors/Macbooks

Troll Touch Touchscreen created a bunch o slip screens that cover the glass and connect via USB ports. The only problem is that they range from $699 - $1699. This could overall, double the cost of your mac. But it does run quite smooth.

My biggest problem with anything touch screen though, is that it creates more problems than alleviates. Touch screen really only works on something small like on cell phones or portable media devices. When it's applied to a computer like this, it becomes a little daunting to do a simple task, like typing.

Whoever stood at a digital ATM and thought, I'd like to work off of this thing? That's basically what you'd be making your computer. A kiosk. I apologize if that is what you are trying to make, but for the average household, it's not going to fly.

This is really just something cool to show off to your friends, before you remove it and quickly surf the intarwebs faster on your mouse and keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts are also a thing of beauty. Sure, you can replace those with gesture controls and what have you, but it's just not as effective. You'd be straining your arms and it's not exactly the most ergonomic thing you could do for 8 hours, let alone 15 minutes at a time.

My last complaint with touch screen computers is that you can't see what you're doing. Your hands will constantly get in the way of scrolling around or when you are trying to type (in one of the videos, the guy who's demoing the system has to pull up a virtual keyboard, which would take up screen real estate). But meh, whatever, I can still show it off the ladies. Right? Wait till they see my ram board. Hur hur! Nerd jokes.

Bored Programmers use Roombas to Play Pac-Man

The culmination of Man has reached its apex.

PS3 turns 3

Yup.

Sorry for Lack of Updates

I've been busy at work. I've finally had the time to slow down and kind of relax... and waste copious amounts of time with this little thing.

BBAM: Epilogue

I found this nifty bit of internet video and thought that after the strange rant I had yesterday, this would clear things up.

Big Budget American Movies

So, last week, when I said "tomorrow", apparently, I had meant next week. Which is today. Let me not procrastinate any further and provide you with my insight on big budget American movies.

Now to differentiate, I don't consider most comedies and dramas so big budget as they tend to focus on acting/story. What I consider big budget American movies (from here on out BBAM) are mostly action movies, or something so heavily funded that it's ludicrous to think that they spent more money on this piece of crap rather than paying for your college tuition (DAMN YOU, STUDENT LOANS).

Because I'm trying to be timely, the latest BBAMs coming out for this holiday season are 2012 (coming out this weekend) and Avatar (Dec. 18).

These movies offer so much in special effects and visuals that will make your head spin 360 degrees; you'll want to vomit, but you can't because you've twisted your neck and nothing comes out, so you end up having really bad heart burn and being stuck in an uncomfortable situation. There is such focus on the visuals in these movies, that the acting and plot is put on a back seat. Now, some people will say that they just watch movies for fun, to turn their brain off and see some 'splosions.

It's funny how often people come out of theatres wondering what the hell they just saw. When Terminator came out, it had some of the best special effects, but because of its completely shitty story and dialogue, it flopped harder than a drunk sorority girl at Denny's... well... maybe not that hard. Anyways, it was no wonder that Christian Bale was pissed. I would be too if I was on that movie.

My biggest gripe about BBAMs is their complete lack of intelligence and their weak attempts to prove that they are. A BBAM that I can watch is something that has a simple enough story line that it doesn't create clutter and the actors are free to actually perform. Prime examples are Saving Private Ryan (Save a dude. Get out.), Jurassic Park (Dinosaurs go apeshit. Dude from Seinfield gets his face ripped off), J.J Abrams' Star Trek (College in space. Some shit about time travel), Crank 2 (Dude's a motherfucking timebomb of shitscapedes).

Well... Crank 2 is more out of fun because I feel it's self aware and knows what it's audiences want to see. It's not caught up in trying to explain the Iraq war through over glorified Smurfs or trying to have a spiritual reference in 2012. Crank 2 knows it's target audience wants to see stuff go boom and maybe see a tittie or two. By the way, let me take this time to discuss that I have no idea what the correct spelling of tittie is. It could be titty. Anyways, Crank 2 doesn't try to overcomplicate things with great overall meaning. It's just some bad ass paving the streets with blood.

A lot of great BBAMs are never too complicated, or if they want to have great overarching meaning, they give the actors some room to actually act and convey it (not just to pad time either). Michael Bay is a director who wants to do this, but does it very sloppy. He crams in plot elements and tries to make actors love each other after a fart joke or two. Didn't you see the deleted scenes in Pearl Harbor? Dude totally lets a long gut buster out before he proposes to his dead best friend's girlfriend, to which the dead best friend ends up being alive! What the hell am I talking about? Exactly. Don't watch Pearl Harbor. You'll only take the side of the Japanese... and wonder where the hell Cuba Gooding Jr. is nowadays.

Video Art

In the Beginning

I graduated with a BFA (Bachelors of Fine Arts, Cum Laude) in Digital Film Making and Video Production at the Art Institute of Washington DC. Yes, I know, that's quite a mouthful of words, but I present them to you to make myself sound like I know what I'm talking about. I recently had this discussion with a good friend of mine about video art and the differences between that and actual production work.

Picture a color spectrum (you know good ol' ROYGBIV). On one end, you have high end, epic blockbuster movies like Transformers and Avatar. Moving further along, you get into romantic comedies and dramas. Foreign, Indie, and horror movies are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and then it dips into music videos and finally video art. Keeping in mind that it is a color spectrum, a lot of times, things mix and you get interesting bold new colors or ugly colors of slop that no one would paint their porn barn with. Oh, by the way, porn is ultraviolet. Invisible to most, but all around us.

Assmaster Cycle

After laying down those ground rules, I'd like to say that I really don't like a large portion of video artists. A lot of them, in my opinion, are really photographers who think that they're larger than life (even more so). Video artists are the pinnacle of that goofy artist that no one understands and wears all black to prove it. They hang out in over-stylized coffee bars that sell $25 drinks of pure decadence. Sure I'm over generalizing a group of people, but they deserve it. Matthew Barney is a perfect example of this.

He has a particular visual style and design that is absolutely stunning. It would just work better if it was photography. There's very little narrative that's going on here that video would be the required medium for it. The pacing is so slow, it might be better for it to be a set of photographs. People would be able to muse over it and gain a better understanding for themselves or zoom through the whole process faster.

Video artists tend to want to take photography concepts and make them into videos that no one really wants to sit down and watch for 8+ hours. People pay a huge amount time and patience for nothing that's nearly as entertaining or causes as much debate as a Michael Bay movie, which is really sad actually.

RESPECT

Now the video artists I do respect are Jeremy Blake and Nam June Paik. Jeremy Blake was like a video version of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, though later he turned into a goofy, almost Tim and Eric kinda guy. I've talked about him before though. Nam June Paik, I like because of his actual intervention in the viewing of video within itself.

He mixes ideologies and symbolism in almost real time with when you are viewing it. A lot of it is a head trip, not because you're sitting down watching it, but because sometimes it interacts with you and requires you to be there to view it. It's a form of performance art with TV being the annoying guys dressed up, dry humping you in a rape tunnel. Only it's much nicer and doesn't leave physical stains (the mental ones are always the hardest to remove).

Slowly moving up from video art is the music video or video artists who need money. Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze both started out doing music videos and both have Charlie Kauffman to thank for launching their indie film careers. This is really where things should get started. Even though MTV (all its entities) rarely play videos at times when people are actually watching, people now have access to youtube and such to actually watch these things and have them take off to mild success.

Video art is one of those mediums where I feel it's a cop out to society. It isn't really doing anything that innovative. There's a loss where the artist focuses too heavily on the content that the technical ability of the video itself is just lost. Sometimes they'll focus so much on the technical ability, that there's nothing to see.

When you get into higher budget films, cinematographers are the artists that really drive the look and visual style. The best will compose each shot so that there is nothing that has to be cut away while helping to move the story line further. Conrad Hall was a perfect example of this.

Both images above taken from Road to Perdition

Taken from American Beauty

He focused so much on how lighting was portrayed and how it would add to the scene. You can see how it helps build the drama without having to get in the way of the story telling. It's the perfect meshing of a brilliant artist and an apt screenwriter with a director at the helm to even everything out. Great movies have great teams. It's never really one person that makes the movie great. Video artists need to learn this and work together instead of just being at the helm of every project and proclaiming it their own.

The Future of Video Art

New forms of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality can really make or break video artists. It can really pull off ideas and concepts that were not achievable before. Or, it can really cause headache inducing acid trips that each new video artist will be known for creating and ripping off each other. Either way, something must be done to compel video artists to reach out and try something different by challenging themselves to be normal and see if they are as good as they really are. After all, getting a concept across a large audience is already a hard enough job to do.

If you think I was too hard on video artists, please join me tomorrow where I'll be attack big budget American movies.

Recession Cases for the iPhone

This neat little recession case (only .99 cents for one 14.99 for a 30 pack!) for the iPhone is not new, it was actually released about a month or two ago, but is now announcing a contest where you decorate them. The prize? A 1982 Suzuki FA50 scooter!

Here are a few of my favorite ones posted so far:

Enter now and hopefully you can win! Also, I highly suggest you visit the original site where you can buy one. The specs are quite humorous.

What Happened to Weezer?

So out comes this week another album from a band I used to cherish. In high school, I would drive around in my old 1986 Toyota Corolla listening to Weezer, Catch 22, Sleater-Kinney, and a bunch of other random messes. But Weezer was one of the top bands to come up on my seemingly unending MP3 disk player that I bought with my hard earned cash.

The memories flood of hanging out with friends after a nerdy theatre sports (like who's line is it anyways) and singing along to Weezer. It was a great band that didn't pander to anyone; it just so happened that a lot of nerds liked them. They were lyrically complex when they wanted to and fun when they needed to be.

Raditude in many ways is like the Be Sharps. It's a name that seems funny and witty at first and then gets less so every time you say it. The songs are mediocre for current Weezer standards, but it's still terrible from my standpoint.

It's embarrassing, that now, they feel like they have to suck up to their core audience by almost making fun of their intelligence. Their newer albums tend to smack their old fans in the face. It's just strange because the fans who grew up listening to them, are now much older and don't care for this immature embrace of internet memes and things that were old as the day they started. Don't get me wrong, I like some internet memes every once in a while, but I want those guys to play good music and grow up and stop chasing whatever the flavor of the month is.

Weezer used to be the forerunner when it came to "being Weezer" and now it seems like they try to play catch up with themselves and try to stay relevant by pulling dumb stunts like this:

That is no lie, what you see in front of you. That is indeed an official Weezer Snuggie. This is much worse than "selling out". This is a complete abomination to what you consider your fans.

It's time I step up to memory road and try to forget about what's currently happening.

New Layout

We'll see how this works out, I wanted to give you guys the ability to stretch out the page to fully watch videos, see pictures, and whatnot. I know a few out there read this on iPhones and other mobile media devices, so let me know how it works out. I'm testing it on my BlackBerry Curve it seems to work out alright. Obviously the flash videos don't work though.

American McGee's Alice II

American McGee's Alice is getting a sequel

I really hope that they keep with the stop motion puppetry throughout the game. Or at least keep them for cut sequences. It adds to the creepy element, especially if you've seen Coraline. On the other hand, the models don't look all that great and look like something out of Celebrity Deathmatch.

This is one of those old nostalgia games where I thought it was cool and am now wondering if it really was cool. I'll get back to you on that. Anyways, gothy as it is, I look forward to it with lofty optimism.