Media

Media / Personal — 2 Comments
21
Nov 05

McRib Challenge Video

McRib ChallengeJeff posted his video from the McRib challenge to Google video. He did a great job with it: added a soundtrack, edited it up real nice, and added a McRib progress bar as well as cool opening and closing animations. Be sure to watch it. I’m even in it for a few short seconds clowning around.

Coincidentally, my friend (who apparently doesn’t read this site) emailed me this weekend to tell me the McRib was back for a limited time and looked to be talking about another shot at eating ten McRibs. He is obviously non compos mentis since when he last polished off eight of them he suffered big time.

Related: The McRib has claimed another victim November 11, 2005

Literature / Media — 1 Comment
15
Nov 05

“Women are still a closed book to men”

I found this article interesting, although not surprising. Any guesses at the reasons why men don’t read novels by females?

But a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: ‘Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men.

Out of the recent eighteen or so books I have mentioned here on my site (not even including audiobooks), only three have been by women, and two of the books were by the same woman, Margaret Atwood.

Business / Media — 2 Comments
15
Nov 05

Weird McRib Promotion

On the way home from work yesterday I heard a bizarre McRib promotion on the local hip hop radio station. It was a man with a stereotypically black accent who went on about how even though the McRib is always only available for a limited time, this time it was going on a farewell tour because McDonald’s was thinking about shelving it forever, and if you wanted to save the McRib be sure to sign the petition at McRib.com. There are a couple things wrong with this:

  1. It’s obviously a McDonald’s advertisement. Why would McDonald’s ask people to sign a petition to fight their own decision to 86 the McRib? They don’t expect their customers to be very sophisticated.
  2. The idea of a farewell tour for the McRib is retarded. If you go to the website, you’ll see young people with tattoos and McRib t-shirts partying up at the McD’s with boneless pork sandwiches, showing off their saucy fingers and edgy tattoos.
  3. Oh, wait, the petition is on behalf of the Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America. McRib is not made of mechanically separated pork like other pork products. No way. McRib comes from “Grade A” Sus Domesticus Nobonius, otherwise known as the boneless pig.

Totally weird. On the other hand, I noticed so maybe it was effective, although I am attuned to all things McRib. They also provide several t-shirt designs for the prospective McRib supporter: no bones logo (a bone with a line through it), McRib farewell tour, and a diagram of how a McRib is composed.

Boneless Pigs
Media — Comments Off on Get board monkeys to write your book
11
Sep 05

Get board monkeys to write your book

I was at Border’s today and investigated this book, “The Real Meaning of Life”, and I was surprised to discover that the content of the book was entirely created by respondents to a post on a message board inquiring into the meaning of life. Since everyone has their own view on this the book wrote itself. Could this be a cheap way to produce a light read?

Media — 6 Comments
31
May 05

Funny World of Warcraft video: Leeeeeroy!

There’s a funny video that’s been going around that shows a group of World of Warcraft players about to go on a guild-organized dungeon crawl. Check it out here.

Edit: See the comments for more information. The original file was removed from the server for bandwidth reasons, but there is now a bittorrent available here.

Media — Comments Off on The Military Changes Their Sales Pitch
12
May 05

The Military Changes Their Sales Pitch

As has been widely reported, the military is having trouble meeting its recruitment and retention goals since launching offensive action in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is to be expected in our media-savvy and highly educated society. As people gain access to more information and a resistance to marketing-speak it becomes tougher to sell what amounts to, in the simplest of terms, an opportunity to get yourself killed. The message is that joining the military is an act of service to your country and that it’s the most patriotic thing you could do, but if you look around you realize it is much more complicated than that. When the most influential people in this country (even the past two presidents) avoid military service the impression is formed that it is far from desirable or wise.

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Media / Software / Internet — 2 Comments
07
May 05

Shhhh… The Blogging Business Model

Blogging is becoming a business for a select few, but how long can it last before the business world catches a whiff and susses out the simple mechanism for generating ad-driven revenues? Many for-profit blogs like, Boing Boing, simply repackage actual content allowing them to make money off the teeming masses of individuals that publish original material to the web. As a business model, it’s rather uninspired: grab a bunch of junk from RSS feeds, technorati pings, and credit-link-whoring tipsters tied to their computers and post it before the plebes see it anywhere else first. Anyone can do this, and they will.

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Cool Tools / Media — Comments Off on Trendy
21
Mar 05

Trendy

If you’re attuned to what people wear and do you’ll notice fads. Why do people follow the lead of other people? What are you thinking when you wear certain clothes or buy certain products? How do you decide what has value? Here are a few things I’ve noticed:

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Film and motion pictures / Literature / Media / Religion/philosophy — Comments Off on Consumption Junction
20
Feb 05

Consumption Junction

Friday night I went to see Keanu’s new movie, Constantine, which is based on a comic book by Alan Moore, the creator of The Watchmen and From Hell. It was enjoyable, although you shouldn’t expect to leave feeling overwhelmed by it. The religious dimension to the film was interesting. I liked the idea that heaven and hell exist as parallel realities behind our everyday reality, and that some people are part angel or demon.

Afterwards, we walked over to Borders and I purchased the Baltazar Gracian (pronounced gray-thian) book of aphorisms, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. As a compilation of experience and advice it will make a nice companion to other similar books in my library like the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, and Nietzsche.

Media / Software / Internet — 1 Comment
20
Jan 05

Unabashed praise

I work for a company that publishes video games. It’s just expected that you spend some amount of time playing games and staying current, otherwise when everyone is talking about the latest thing they’re playing you won’t know what they’re talking about. You have to stay in context.

The biggest thing to happen in a long time is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (wikipedia entry). Everyone I know is playing it and new people get sucked in all the time. It is that good. I don’t even play subscription games and I’m playing it. Even people who have never played an online game before have caught the WoW bug. It’s a phenomenon.

They have sold somewhere around 500,000 copies of the game and their current active subscribers are estimated at 350,000. That’s in just two months. Each one of those 350,000 people pays $14.95 a month to play. It’s no wonder traditional media giants like Fox and Viacom are itching to get a piece of online gaming action. When you compare it to the time you spend watching cable television it is not difficult to justify the expense. It is bigger than Everquest 2 and it is scaring the crap out of anyone who is expecting to compete with it in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online games, as they say in the biz). The game is just that good. It is not revolutionary, but it takes ideas from everywhere and does everything well. Quality speaks for itself. WoW removes any arguments for producing a bad game. A game can be done of the highest calibre.

If you’re looking for a new experience, World of Warcraft is a game that’s fun, accessible, flexible and deep. Check out their website and let me know what you think. I’m the warlock “Sivori” on Sargeras server. Send me a message and we’ll go fishing.

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