Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi. Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously [...] [...more]
Living next to a prop house, every once in a while you glance over and do a spit-take. They had just chucked what looked like a limp woman’s body out of the back of a semi.
Wondering if the frustrated Evil Elves in the fabrication shop had finally snapped and gone Jeffrey Dahmer, I cautiously wandered over to see what the hell was going on.
This thing is a lot heavier than you would think. It's pretty much the same weight as a real human. Which is more than a little creepy.
Turns out that some of the more enthusiastic sword-swinging extras on the set of “Thor” accidentally connected with some of the helpless “peasants” they were wading through. The prop guys said that they had already charged the production company $1900 for damaging this dummy. The damn things are meant to stand up to being thrown off buildings, overpasses, crashed in cars, etc.
I don’t know what kind of maniac was swinging the aircraft-grade aluminum “Hero Swords” the Evil Elves have come up with (and no, I can’t show them to you – the designs are super-cool, but the Marvel guys would impale me for leaking them to the Chinese toymakers, who are trying to gear up to flood the market with knock-offs of the Christmas tie-in toys), but they apparently work quite well.
We briefly considered taking the dummy into our house and giving it the poor woman (it is a woman – note the wasp waist) a decent home. But it was soaking wet. And it stunk.
Still, she had served her purpose well.
Ashes to ashes, dummy to dumpster.
She was hurled into the dumpster will full military honors.
(In Forrest Gump voice: “We are not related.”) I guess I shouldn’t squeak too much about this: it has the words “Lust” and “LaFontaine” in it, so it’s gotta be good, right? [...more]
(In Forrest Gump voice: “We are not related.”)
A LaFontaine makes the magazine covers in Frankfurt. He's even gesturing wildly, as I do. Damn charlatan stole my act....
I guess I shouldn’t squeak too much about this: it has the words “Lust” and “LaFontaine” in it, so it’s gotta be good, right?
The swine flu pandemic – er, ahem H1N1 virus (now the officially gov’t sanctioned name for the Aporkalypse) – has generated hysteria in the news that rivals the Deadly Y2K Bug That Was Gonna Kill Us All (if you don’t remember – a sample headline from Wired at the time was “Head for the Hills!”). [...] [...more]
The swine flu pandemic – er, ahem H1N1 virus (now the officially gov’t sanctioned name for the Aporkalypse) – has generated hysteria in the news that rivals the Deadly Y2K Bug That Was Gonna Kill Us All (if you don’t remember – a sample headline from Wired at the time was “Head for the Hills!”).
So I’ve kinda amended the “Friday Noon Videos” format a bit to include some of the best snark available on the web, in the hopes on contributing to a general relaxation from the End of Days-level media converage this illness has been getting.
So first, this LOLCat-esque picture is making the rounds:
Next has to be the parody of Twitter’s “Failwhale,” which is a pretty decent homage to the way that the “pandemic” has been dominating online conversations this past week:
…and now for the videos.
First, got this gem from Gentleman Jim Breiner, who particularly liked the way it mimics the breathless reportage of some TV commentators. I particularly like the set for this “underground newscast” — it looks like someplace that only a member of the “Trailer Park Boys” would find appropriate for a TV studio.
Next, I gotta go with this bit from an “Actual victim” of the swine flu, revealing how it was that the virus made the porcine-to-human jump (hint: he was a little drunk at the time, she was dressed provocatively, hormones were running high).
Last, I’d love to show off this series of unintentionally funny 1975 ad for swine flu shots. Pay attention to the cheesy 70s synth score in the background. Whoever that composer was, he obviously moonlighted on porno movies up in Northridge. Straight outta Boogie Nights. I think some of the moustaches on these guys could thatch the roofs of an entire Amazon jungle village.
The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There's a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular - they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It's the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It's a human voice. The voice that says, "Well, y'know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he's a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away..."
It's the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn't feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said "objectivity." The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit - because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary. [...more]
Last week at the International Symposium of Online Journalists in Austin, I presented a series of viral videos to make the point that the national discourse is no longer “owned” by what we think of as professional media. It may seem like a trivial point, when compared to the other nuclear meltdown-level emergencies of declining advertising, lack of a sustainable business model for the future, declining audience share, sky-high debt loads, etc. – but I believe that adapting ourselves to this new environment is the first step towards resolving these other problems.
I asked the audience how many of them "got" the central image here, and could put it into its viral meme context.
Over at the Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles makes a compelling and far more comprehensive argument about why the whole concept of ownership of the news & the national conversation has been toxic to the mainstream media’s efforts at retaining its audience share.
Another point that I tried to make was that it is OK to use humor in your reportage, now and again. The relentless barrage of bad news these days is making us all a little crazy (see this excellent Newsweek article on this topic). There’s a reason that John Stewart & Stephen Colbert are so popular – they report on the news, they give it the kind of context that is so often missing on these stories, and they do it in a way that makes us crack a smile. It’s the voice that I remember from my early b.s. sessions at seedy bars with grizzled news veterans. It’s a human voice. The voice that says, “Well, y’know, I hadda write the story about [local businessman X] getting the Nice Guy award for the paper. But the funny thing is that everyone knows that he’s a screaming tyrant whose wife tried to run away…”
It’s the kind of voice that can re-establish the trust that our audience has lost in us. The one that doesn’t feel the need to kneel and genuflect at the altar of he-said she-said “objectivity.” The one that can make us feel informed, energized, and in control a bit – because things that we can laugh at are no longer quite so scary.
[And yeah, I know, my much-promised blog post about the effects of fear in the media on all of us is still in the works. Forgive me.]
So for all of you trapped in office cubicles, or just in need of a bit of diversion at the end of the week, here are the top viral videos:
We all make judgments about each other based on surface impressions - it's what the book "Blink" was about. A couple of bearded guys in an aging VW Microbus is such a cliche that I'll bet you immediately thought "hippie." The cops do things like this with bumper stickers, such as when they revealed that 90% of the time they pull over a car in LA with a KROQ bumper sticker, they routinely search it for drugs (when this was reported, two things happened - KROQ screamed bloody murder and thousands of stoners went outside with razor blades and started scraping furiously). Gang members do it with shoelaces, and screeners at airports do it with twitchy body language. [...more]
I find data mash-ups like this absolutely fascinating. Totally anecdotal, useless for anything other than starting an argument or feeling smug/outraged, but impossible to look away from. It was made by comparing the reported list of favorite bands from Facebook with the average SAT scores of the university that those students were attending.
So yeah, it’s a completely made-up signifier, one that purports to reveal some hidden correlations, but which is maddeningly vague. I mean, are Billy Joel fans really smarter than Foo Fighters fans? Or is it just some combination of Jersey-boy favoritism and Ivy League colleges skewing things?And AC/DC fans smarter than Doors fans? I mean, who really believes that the shop class dirtheads out-IQ the pretentious poets?
A larger point to ponder is the amount of data we all have voluntarily contributed to public places, and the ways that data is available to even casual researchers to aggregate, thin-slice and draw conclusions from. Imagine someone with a slightly more robust databank figuring out how to correlate the playlists on Last.fm and Pandora with the incidence of buying Crocs sandals and voting Democratic in local school board elections.
We all make judgments about each other based on surface impressions – it’s what the book “Blink” was about. A couple of bearded guys in an aging VW Microbus is such a cliche that I’ll bet you immediately thought “hippie.” The cops do things like this with bumper stickers, such as when they revealed that 90% of the time they pull over a car in LA with a KROQ bumper sticker, they routinely search it for drugs (when this was reported, two things happened – KROQ screamed bloody murder and thousands of stoners went outside with razor blades and started scraping furiously). Gang members do it with shoelaces, and screeners at airports do it with twitchy body language.
Graph showing the relationship between favorite band and SAT score.
Apparently, there is no government agency doing a complex & demanding job that a bunch of yo-hos don’t think could be replaced by private industry. Even when said private industry has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with the job that the government agency was doing. With this in mind, please either put down the soft drink, [...] [...more]
Apparently, there is no government agency doing a complex & demanding job that a bunch of yo-hos don’t think could be replaced by private industry. Even when said private industry has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO with the job that the government agency was doing.
With this in mind, please either put down the soft drink, or erect a plastic shield between your Diet Coke-filled mouth and the screen.
The latest meme to start making the rounds of the nuttier regions of the intertubes holds that mankind would be so much better off if the Gates Foundation (and Microsoft) took over the job of space exploration.
“An operation is attempting to emergency abort the launch. Do you want to allow this?”
“Microsoft Interplanetary Explorer has encountered an error and needs to close. Do you want to notify Microsoft?”
The iStarShip would be overpriced, underpowered, and made of really shitty shny white plastic.
but it would look amazing and all the cool hip starship captains would have one
“Clearly, the solution is to have a Linux-based Starship.”
No thanks. I don’t want to have to recompile the kernel every time I open the airlock.
Aw hell, go on over there and check out the pie-fight. They’re saying it much more effectively that I could – and the sad thing is, the error messages are pretty much what I’d expect to see from an MS-Vista controlled spaceship.
I always wondered why Sarah and John Connor didn’t just upload Vista to Skynet to stop the Terminator…
I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev. My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers. It’s designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the [...] [...more]
I was serenaded by this group last night on a riverboat restaurant here in Kiev.
My friends here took us out for a big traditional Ukrainian dinner, and started plying me with this deadly local concoction made of vodka, honey and hot peppers. It’s designed to hit your stomach, and warm you up in the winter. It had just started snowing when we got here, and looking out the window, I saw huge heavy flakes floating down to disappear into the dark, slow Dnieper River. Chunks of ice, broken free from the mass far upriver, kept floating by on their way to the Black Sea. With this music in the background, it felt somehow timeless…
So yeah, it’s campy and melodramatic. But as the song goes on, you start to see the changes come over the faces of my dinner companions. I don’t know what they were singing about, but it must’ve been heavy.
Eugen, the dean here at the Digital Future of Journalism school, explained to me that traditional Ukrainian songs are all tragedies, drawn from their long and heartbreaking history.
“The potato harvest fails, so to support his family, the man goes off to fight in the Tsar’s wars,” he said. “He knows that there is small chance of him ever coming back alive, and his wife knows this is probably the last time she sees him in this world. So they sing of their love for each other, and he embraces his children goodbye. It’s like Ukrainian bluegrass, or country and western. Where the man has no money, no job, his pickup truck is broke, his wife left him and his dog just died. That kind of thing.”
This cries out for the LOLCat treatment, but I am far too slammed with “New Media” work to come up with something clever. Suggestions, anyone? [...more]
Ravenous cat lunges for the prize.
This cries out for the LOLCat treatment, but I am far too slammed with “New Media” work to come up with something clever. Suggestions, anyone?
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across. It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week: Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on [...] [...more]
As part of my ongoing experiment in coming up with a coherent content strategy, I offer up a week’s worth of fun and/or interesting videos that I’ve come across.
It’s been a real rollercoaster of a week:
Started out with the fear that Bush would figure out some last, triumphal way of screwing up on his last day in office
Felt pride, relief, hope and a growing sense of “what the hell just happened to us all?” during the Inauguration
Felt sick in the aftermath as it turned out the economic meltdown wasn’t going to give us a break, no matter what
Even sicker when Xeni Jardin championed a documentary about how the U.S. tortured innocent people through depraved intermediaries
Anyway. Here’s a couple of things to lighten things up -
OK, this is childish, and an advertisement to boot, but the only other thing I saw like this was Jim Carrey’s dancing eyebrows in “Me, Myself & Irene”:
This gem from the Vancouver Film School that shows off 1) the 3D animation-fu of the creator, and 2) a deep-seated psychological fear of uncontrolled facial hair
Next, this is a movie trailer for a film being distributed by Ted Perkins, a friend of mine. It’s not a chucklefest, but the photography is beautiful, and I gotta give Ted a shout-out:
This is kind of a rip-off of the famous scene from “Fisher King,” but I love it anyway. The thing to pay attention to is how many people are using their cellphone cams to take pix or video of the flashmob. In the future, we’re all going to be self-contained news gatherers – in much the way that Twitter has turned us all into terse Telegram-style news alert generators, the coming 4G phones will make us all part of a constant info-web.
Next, this somewhat creepy talking baby shows us all the outtakes from the Super Bowl adstravaganzas that we AREN’T going to see this year … and more in future blog posts about the coming ad meltdown that is coming into focus…
aaaand finally, the winner of the week, with almost 700,000 views since Tuesday:
Just another experiment with the Lightbox software. The plug-in is working, but only fitfully. I think I need to do some surgery on the “rel=” tagging functionality. Apparently, the healthy vegan cuisine does not appeal to Yuki. [...more]
This is not what I ordered.
Just another experiment with the Lightbox software. The plug-in is working, but only fitfully. I think I need to do some surgery on the “rel=” tagging functionality.
Apparently, the healthy vegan cuisine does not appeal to Yuki.
Because surfing the Internet is like drinking from a firehose, David LaFontaine braves the torrent to tell you what trends and technologies to gulp down, swirl in your mouth, or spit out.
