Category: Actual Mileage
It was the best of decades; it was the worst of decades. But really, as far as television is concerned, it was the best of decades. Yeah, there was a glut of reality shows that made stars — or “stars” — of morons like Jon & Kate; trolls like Tila Tequila; vapid heiresses like Paris Hilton; and talentless jackoffs like Heidi & Spencer.
But you know what? You didn’t have to watch a single second of those people, because there was also a glut of utterly amazing shows, and three pieces of technology to ensure you can watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it: DVR, DVD & Streaming Video. In the past decade, Rox & I used all three to watch shows at our convenience, catch up on episodes we missed, or just to try a show we’d missed the first time around.
(more…)
It was a weird decade for the music industry. We watched the major labels implode right before our eyes, all the while protesting the future and trying to criminalize their user base. Would things have been different if the labels had put together a cheap, DRM-free solution in 2000? Maybe, maybe not, but there is no way it could have turned out worse.
It was a weird decade to be a music fan. For my entire life, the album had been the lingua franca of music: songs were the basic unit and singles were cool, but albums were a statement of purpose. But I started out the decade listening to albums from start to finish and ended it fragmenting them into my various mixes.
Now, I have a mix for the house, a mix for work, and a mix for my car: my own personalized “radio stations” that eternally combine older favorites and new songs. As someone who had been making mix tapes for himself since his early 20s, I’d only been waiting for this my entire life. But there was a consequence to the endless resequence: by 2006, most of my favorite albums revealed themselves to be collections of songs that stood out from the others.
(more…)
Save Chuck!
If you’ve been floating around the blogosphere or twittersphere or any other kind of onlineosphere in the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across a post or a tweet or a status update containing those two words.
To the cynical eye, it might seem that after Battlestar Galactica went off into the great good night — or great good morning, as the case may be — the geekosphere cast about for another TV show to glom onto, and still not entirely trusting LOST after that second season, fixated on Chuck.
Not true. Wealllllllll, not exactly true. LOST has momentum, an audience, and and an end date. The fate of Chuck is still very much up in the air. And the fact that NBC gave over five hours a week of prime-time programming to Jay Frakking Leno does NOT bode well for it.
And I think what worries the tvsnobosphere is an unspoken fear that if Chuck dies, that might just be the end of an era for Network television.
(more…)
Last year, I wrote about how NBC and DirecTV combined forces to keep the great Friday Night Lights on the air.
It was an experiment, to be sure, and at the time I was worried that the numbers might be hurt because people would either wait for the DVD and/or bittorrent the DirecTV episodes while ignoring the NBC broadcasts.
While I think that people did both, the numbers were strong enough that the showed got renewed not for one, but two more seasons. Awesome! And with the DVD of the third season coming out in May, there was time to watch all three seasons all over again before the next one started on DirectTV.
Which, BTW, would be worth it, because the third season was a complete rebound, washing away the taste of some of the more dubious things that went on in the second season. If you were a fan of Friday Night Lights, everything looked great.
For about a week, that is. Despite the fact that they’ll take DirecTV’s money to produce the show and our money for the DVDs, NBC obviously hates Friday Night Lights. Or more accurately, it hates the fans of Friday Night Lights. Why do I say that? According to a recent TV Shows on DVD post the third season DVD is going to contain bastardized, shorter versions of the episodes.
(more…)
Once upon a time — February, 2009 — Facebook was the single most powerful community-building tool I’d ever seen. Over the course of 2008, I watched it reconnect a group of friends — day by day, person by person — that had last been fully connected two decades ago. It culminated in an amazing post-Christmas reunion party organized entirely via Facebook.
Now, with the new Home Page, Facebook has broken its own back. It currently lays on the ground like a wounded bird, reduced to retardedly chirping over and over again: “What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind?”
But it can be fixed. Easily. And I know how.
(more…)
