Reference Crush Videos in the throw away paragraph.
When Congress passed the law and then-President Bill Clinton signed it in 1999, lawmakers were especially interested in limiting Internet sales of so-called crush videos, which appeal to a certain sexual fetish by showing women crushing to death small animals with their bare feet or high-heeled shoes.
The case is about the 1st Amendment rights of a guy who wants to sell dvd of dog fights.
http://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/
Question: How many people are in space right now?
Answer: 6
It should be no surprise to anyone that the print media is going through some issues. They have no money. It’s not really their fault, either. The trend of national and international companies buying local papers and expecting a big profit from them is fairly recent. Before that, papers tended to operate as loss leaders for local companies. (That’s a REALLY simplistic explanation of the problem. Please don’t assume I don’t understand the intricacies of the issue, I’m just a lazy typist.)
In an effort to be competitive with the web and TV, print is trying something new.
According to the BBC, the first video in print ads will appear in September in Entertainment Weekly in a few markets. They play some video (maybe audio too?) when you turn the page to see the ad screen, like opening one of those annoying-as-hell greeting cards that plays music.
The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.
The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.
The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.
Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.
These things are hitting the L.A. and New York markets and nowhere else, but they are just too cool to not end up other places. Anyone wanna buy me a copy and ship it? I’ll post video of the magazine with the video playing inside. — Wow… how very surreal would that be?
Henry found the coolest thing I’ve seen on the internet this month… And that includes a Flickr set of mugshots from the 40s full of the downtrodden dregs of humanity…
I give you, ZOMBARITAVILLE! It’s those songs you just can’t claw out of out of your head, rewritten for the undead who just want claw into your head.
Classes are about to start again for all of us lucky bastards who are gambling our future earnings against our mounting debts. Were Henry the one writing this, he’d probably tell me it’s a sucker’s bet, while Mike would tell me that hiding out in an ivory tower is a wonderful way to pass a recession.
I like to view college as a few years of constant anal rape with the hope of a reach around at some point in the future.
That sounds bad, doesn’t it? That’s because I’m pretty burned out on college. And you know what? It wasn’t the classes that burned me out; it wasn’t the idiot students that are a decade younger than me; it wasn’t the professors who manage to go through an entire semester without learning the name of a single person in their class of 16 students; it’s the god damn price.
Up until this point, I’ve been taking out student loans to cover my course, and help a little with bills. I paid rent, bought groceries, and blew fun money from the part time job I had. It wasn’t much, but I was comfortable. My first semester back in school was a breeze. So was my second. By the end of the summer classes, I was beginning to worry. I’m now three years in, a Junior, and all I do is worry. Tuition has skyrocketed under Texas’s orgy of deregulation, and there’s no end in sight. I’m going to be in school for at least another year and a half unless something derails me, and more and more, that’s looking like it’s going to be the money situation. I had to take out a massive loan this year to make sure I can pay my rent while in class, because the jobs I’m finding in town are really damn hard on full time students
I am paying almost 400 dollars more for 12 hours of class this semester than I did last Spring. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying close to 175% of what I did three years ago.
When/if I graduate, will I even be able to pay off this massive debt in the following decade? Will I be paying off my student loans into my 40s? I think so.
Am I alone in this almost crippling worry? I’d like to hear what you internet heathens and social networking savages have to say about it.
I’ve been gone for about a month and a half. What you didn’t notice the decline in the site’s level of profanity? Well, fuck you!
I got laid off a month and a half ago and suddenly I had nothing to say. It was depressing, really. I got laid off from a shitty, low paying, part time job in a filthy building that was giving me health problems like the first 20 minutes of Joe Vs. The Volcano.
I was working for a form printing company called Gulf here in town, and while it was by no means an ideal job, it allowed me to do stuff like Pay The Fucking Rent and to occasionally Pay My Goddamn Bills On Time. I took the job with them because I’m in college and needed to work at a place with semi-flexible hours from semester to semester.
I’ve spent the month doing odd jobs and freelance to pa my bills, but with the fall semester about to start, it’s going to get very hard to scrape by. I’ve been looking for freelance work on oDesk.com as a writer/editor/proofreader, but I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to compete with people in the Philippines who are willing to badly do what I do well for a dollar an hour.
I’ve also been applying for anything I could find that would allow me to make enough money to live off of and go to college at the same time. So far, no luck.
This is going to be an interesting couple of months for me, I think.
So I’m sitting here at work with nothing to do and probably nothing to do for the rest of the day. It’s got me wondering. What do all of you do to waste time in those down periods at the office? I want to hear about stuff you do at work that sort of looks like you’re working if your boss wanders by and glances at your monitor with no real interest.
Currently, I’m in an IRC channel, checking three forums for activities, surfing CNN.com, reading Twitter, skimming through the DailyKos, and compulsively updating my Recommended Products list on Amazon, and thinking up backstory for the Bounty Hunter character I’m gonna play in an upcoming Star Wars Saga game.
Please, reply to this with your list. Give me one more thing to read so I’m distracted from this almost overpowering urge to set my office on fire and run out the door smelling of gasoline and cackling madly.
Saturday I was talked into seeing the new Star Trek movie by my girlfriend and two of our friends who had already seen it. I saw a trailer a while back and thought, “That looks sorta cool,” but that’s as far as my thoughts on the movie went. I’m not a Trekkie. I was too young to enjoy the original series, and not interested enough to enjoy TNG. DS9 and Voyager didn’t do much for me and I quickly lost interest in both for different reasons. I tried the pilot of Enterprise and did not enjoy it. The movies were either mind-blowingly bad (I’m looking at you, Time Traveling To The 80s Whale Movie) or extended episodes that tried too hard.
But that’s ok, there’s nothing to say that by being a geek I *must* like Star Trek.
A bunch of my friends watched the reboot of the Trek franchise on Thursday and Friday and they gushed so much I was afraid they might start leaking. It currently enjoys the insane Rotten Tomatoes freshness rating of 95%. So I figured that the reboot must be doing something right. I was willing to give the movie a chance, my girlfriend didn’t exactly need to twist my arm to get me to agree to watch it.
So let me start with the good: Lots of in-jokes and fan service for the Trekkies. Lots of references for enthusiasts of the various series. Lots of explosions. Lots of fights where Kirk gets the shit kicked out of him. (Seriously… He doesn’t win a single damn fight and I bet his ribs were broken by the end of the movie.) And Simon Pegg is excellent in everything he does. Even when he was an extra on Land of the Dead.
The bad: The majority of the drama was built using an uber-dramatic score, a hand held camera to give everything that “realistic” look, and blurred out pans to other actors for reaction shots instead of cuts. The bad guy was a plot device that was forgettable other than using him as a method for getting the crew together. New Spock – total douche. New Bones had some great moments but his “Damn it, I’m a doctor not an X,” lines were pretty ham-handed. (The ham-handed scene was pretty fucking funny, though.) The opening scene with a pregnant woman being wheeled past explosions as she was going into labor was funny and lame – I kept imagining studio execs scribbling all over the script and saying, “We need to raise the stakes!”
I did like the movie. It was entertaining. The action was fun, if over the top. I just don’t think it was the second coming of Star Wars like people are saying. The reboot will end up making enough cash that a sequel is guaranteed, and I’ll watch it. But this wasn’t a movie I feel a desperate need to own or watch again.
I want to see how many readers we have, what sort of posts you’d like to see more of and what flavor of geekdom you more identify with. I realize these options may not best suit you, but pick the answers you like the most.
(This is really just to test the polling plugin I installed on the Basement.)
[poll id=”2″] [poll id=”3″]
Update: I altered the polls slightly because I got tired of the complaints about how limited the choices were.
There’s some great stuff out there… Most of it is profane. All of it is funny to someone, somewhere.
