Broken.

I just watched “Unbreakable,” thus completing the course requirements for my M. Night Shabbalabbadingdong film class. At least the films with the requisite twist-endings. If I had wanted extra credit, I could check out 1992’s “Wide Awake” which looks hilarious.

Anyway, “Unbreakable” was okay, probably my least favorite of his films, but definitely watchable. And certainly listenable. It had a bangin’ soundtrack. Samuel L. Jackson is kinda hard to take seriously, and Bruce Willis is a little too Willisy, but I guess that kinda goes with the territory.

I’m never sure what to make of M. Night’s flicks. I don’t think he’s the genius people thought he was after he made “The Sixth Sense,” and I don’t think he’s the hack people think he is after everything made since “The Sixth Sense.” I thought “The Sixth Sense” was good, I really liked “Signs” (I saw it at the drive in, made it creepier), and “The Village” was solid. If anything, I think he’s probably getting better as he goes along. I’m a retard when it comes to twist-endings, I never see them coming, so seeing his movies is usually a fairly enjoyable experience.

I guess the reason I like his flicks is because they remind me of good Twilight Zone episodes. Both M. Night and Rod Serling usually have a lesson or a morale to teach, and they go about teaching them in an interesting way. Still, M. Night is no Rod Serling. He’s only four movies into his career and he’s already recycling themes and ideas (lots of water), but he’ll do for now.

Anyway, I’m all caught up now for “Lady In The Water” this summer. We’ll see what happens. (My guess? More water.)

Digi-mán.

So I was playing Tiger Woods on Xbox at my landlord’s house. Now on a regular day, that would be strange enough all by itself. But that’s only the start of the strangeness. Let me back up.

It all started with TiVo. But what doesn’t start with TiVo? Honestly. You see, out here in BuFu, New York we’re on the cutting edge. DB Sweeney and me? We tight. Out here no one has a landline anymore. It’s all cell phones, and digital PBX and VoIP and ching chang walla walla bing bang. That is, except my landlord. He’s still kickin’ it POTS style. Perfect for TiVo. So when I finally got my Series1 TiVo up and running, it needed to phone home to clear a few things up. You know, reaclimate itself to the real world, Neo-style. Its eyes hurt because it had never used them. You get the idea. So I hit up my landlord’s place next door, and hooked TiVo up in his basement.

Now when a TiVo hasn’t phoned home before, that first call can take a while. Hours, even. And while my landlord was nice enough to let me join his family for dinner, that still left a good hour of sitting around in the basement with nothing to do. Thus, Xbox.

Despite my Apple-love and Microsoft-loathe, I don’t think that Xbox is actually that bad of a system. It’s the most powerful of the current generation consoles, and Xbox Live is pretty awesome. The games for the most part aren’t my cup of tea, and I’m not about to go out and buy one, but still, I see its virtues. And when given the choice of playing Xbox or watching TiVo crunch program data, Xbox is the victor.

Point is, after playing Tetris Worlds (blasphemy) and Ms. Pac-Man (which is a bitch with an analog stick), I finally settled in on Tiger Woods Golf. Thing is, I never actually got to play golf. Never really got past the menus, actually. Wanna know why? I’m not sure you do, but okay.

I don’t know when this happened, but it did, and it’s not cool. NOT COOL. Actually, it’s kinda awesome, but one of the scarier things that I’ve seen as of late. What is it, exactly? Well, consider yourself warned…

Spooked out yet? Yeah, well, you shouldn’t be. It’s just a video game. I probably could have done better if I had a mirror in front of me. Probably would look less caveman like. Fire bad. Regardless, I’m spooked. Are you?
I’ll take your silence as a you’re dead.

Dead from fear.

In West Philadelphia, Born and Raised.

I’m in Philly at a conference for work. West Philly, specificially. Awesome Philly, more precisely. Virtually every other visit to Philly up until now has been spent in South Philadelphia since that’s where Tom and Brian used to live. Their part of Philly? Kinda scary. West Philadelphia is awesome though. Tomorrow morning I plan on going to Cereality for breakfast. Because that’s just how West Philly rolls. But again, that’s not why you called.

So I just used PayPass for the second time. Kinda cool.

Over winter break I got a new card from KeyBank since the old one was about to expire. I was happy because I never liked my signature on the old card… probably because I thought it would be a good idea to use a Sharpie to sign it, so it looked like I was a four year-old with a credit card. Anyway, this new card had a PayPass chip in it. PayPass?

“MasterCard PayPass is a new ‘contactless’ payment feature that provides cardholders with a simpler way to pay by tapping your payment card on a point-of-sale terminal reader rather than swiping or inserting your card. It also gives you cancer.”

I made up that last part.

Anyway, when I got the card in December I was psyched/spooked about it. Psyched, because it had a PayPass chip in it. Spooked, because it had a PayPass chip in it. I love me some new technology, but at the same time, RFID is still in its (relative) infancy, and it’s only a matter of time before some industrious hacker figures out some l33t spl0itz that take advantage of its fairly insecure nature. Ultimately though, dweebness prevailed, I activated the card, and started hunting for PayPass logos. The first time I used it was a few weeks ago on spring break to pay for tickets to “Ultraviolet.” (Awful movie, by the way.) And now, about and hour ago I waved my card in front of a reader and bought a BLT and some Yoohoo from Wawa.

Yoohoo from Wawa.

Anyway, like EZPass before it, I think I’ll come to enjoy PayPass as more and more places start accepting it. Right now I use it for novelty’s sake, but I can imagine in the future it’s actually going to live up to the hype and make purchases more convienent. Right now it’s more cool than actually useful because it’s not any easier than paying with a credit card since it’s kind of been shoehorned on top of places that already take credit.

I think the PayPass killer app is going to be coin op machines. Soda, laundry, arcade machines… that sort of thing. If they start embedding PayPass readers into those, that’ll be huge. I’d love to be able to wave my credit card in front of a Coke machine and have soda fall out. It’d make me feel like Jesus. And arcade machines? Sweet christ, I hope that doesn’t happen, actually. I’m imagining a future where I just leave my credit card on top of a little PayPass tray on a Mario Kart GP machine and rack up a $50 bill on my credit card in a matter of minutes. Scary.

Point is, PayPass? Kinda cool. The chip is teeny tiny, and right next to the signature strip if you have a card and want to find it. I’ve literally “tapped” both of my purchases so far, but in the future I’m going to try and see how far away from the reader I can it to pick up my card. I also want to see if it can use it without taking the card out of my wallet. (I imagine I can.) I’d also be interested to find out what’s going on behind the scenes cost-wise. I wonder if MasterCard is taking a different cut from vendors if I pay via a regular credit card swipe versus a PayPass tap. And if they are, what are the percentage differences? Likewise, I wonder if PayPass is going to increase customer spending, or if it’s just going to change the way people pay.

So many questions. So little Yoohoo.

A Little Older, A Little Wiser. Waaaaay Conjunctivier.

I usually fill this space with inane chatter regarding films I’ve seen, games I’ve played, and yes, occasionally even books I’ve read. Once a year though, I like to give a little bit back to the little people. And what do I get in return? The dreaded gum disease… GINGIVITIS!

Oh, no, wait. Wrong itis. Conjunctivitis that is. Pink eye. Texas tea. But hey, that’s not why you called.
So yes. I’ve been 26 three weeks now. I’m in my 27th year, and it’s already been a hoot. I was home in Albany for a week or so, and then visited Boston and NYC for a second week. And now I’m back in Clinton with the plague. But at least I had some more presents waiting for me upon my return.

Anyway, like last year, a quick rundown.

• I had a lovely party thrown for me at work, complete with a signed card from George and Laura. And of course, sparkling Welch’s grape juice.
• Then another rather large get-together at the Rafferty Compound with lots of people coming out of the woodwork. The infamous Justin Mueller and Brian Kohn among others were in attendance.
• Took the now-annual excursion into the depths of Vermont to play miniature golf. And also lost once again at miniature golf, again due to sabotage.
• Got to live the high life on 68th street in Manhattan for three days.
• Partied like it was freshman year in Wilmarth all over again in Dorchester in Boston.
• Saw Olympic-level badminton at MIT. Ridiculous.
• Got a bunch of birthday presents. Including a sweet Asteroids watch which I feel guilty wearing. The next part of my Kuri-kurin collection in the form of my first imported GameCube game. A bunch of DVDs, including, but not limited to: R Kelly’s masterpiece, Trapped in the Closet, the tricked out Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and your favorite only-ran-for-one-season-back-in-1995-on-UPN series, Nowhere Man. And of course, last but not least, Deb once again pulls out the big guns:

Ridiculous.

Let Me See That Kong Ka Kong Kong Kong.

So I kind of went off on a little bit of a King Kong bender there for a while. It started a little before Peter Jackson’s version came out and ended, well, it still hasn’t really ended.

Back in December, Turner Classic Movies had a showing of the original, which was awesome. I had never seen it, and although I already knew the ending and it was the old unrestored version, it was still pretty sweet. (If you haven’t seen it either, I’ll just tell you one thing… it doesn’t end well for the monkey.)

A few days later, American Movie Classics (aka “AMC” aka “The Poor Man’s TCM”) was airing the 1976 remake of Kong with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange (and Odo). Hard call between Fay Wray and Jessica Lange for hotter hottie, but pretty easy call for which was the better Kong. Somehow despite being given over forty years to improve the special effects, the 1933 Kong is more believable.

Anyway, so then Peter Jackson’s Kong came out in theaters. You’d think I’d complete the trilogy right then and there, but no. Instead, a couple days after Christmas I bought the tricked-out two disc DVD set of the original 1933 version. Complete with the infamous spider pit sequence recreated by Peter Jackson’s team over at WETA. Pretty awesome.

I held out until 2006 for New Kong (kinda like New Coke) because I told Hancock I’d see it with him. And we did. In Chicago. At 10:00 at night. Pretty bad idea, because that meant we got out around 1:00 in the morn. But hey. King Kong. Good times. As for Naomi Watts vs. Fay Wray vs. Jessica Lange? Don’t make me choose.
So then, upon my return back to Albany, I watched all four hours of production (and post-production diaries) from the Kong is King website. Oh, and of course, King Kong Versus Godzilla. Can’t forget that.

You’d think it would have ended there, but sadly, it didn’t. About a week after the Chicago viewing I saw it again in Crossgates. Phew.

Which brings us to today, DVD Tuesday, also know as “King Kong Special Edition” day. But, per usual, it’s only the first of what I’m sure will be many “Special Editions” of the film. Today’s special edition is the one for chumps (or chimps, as it were). No cut scenes, no commentary, just some featurettes and The Volkswagen Toureg vs. King Kong. Super gay. I’m holding out for the third or fourth release. The one that’s like four hours long. You know it’s coming. There were scenes in the early teaser trailers that never made it into the flick and sequences in the production diaries that were cut. It’s out there, but this is how the film industry milks us. Bastards.

Anyway, Kong is indeed King. Minus the 1976 version.

Gardening. Constantly.

There a few certainties in life, but I can tell you this: Rachel Weisz is hot. That much is certain. Despite being preggers.

She won the Academy Award for best supporting actress, fyi. I just saw her on a Letterman rerun the other night, and I watched “The Constant Gardener” auf das Powerbook a few days prior. The flick is a bit of a downer, but it was good. It’s all about this big pharmaceutical company taking advantage of Africa(ns), and Ralph Fiennes trying to get to the bottom of this big conspiracy involving Rachel Weisz, who puts the whole story into motion. Who, incidentally, is pretty much only seen in flashbacks. Maybe only seen in flashbacks, depending on how you look at the film. You also see her backside, but she’s pregnant, so it’s kinda gross.

Huh, pregnant in the movie, then pregnant for reals. Weird.

Anyway, I think I’m gonna check out “City of God” now which is also directed by the same dude. Next time I’m feeling good about myself, perhaps. Constant Gardener though, thumbs up. Kinda like “Traffic” plus a little Enron documentary thrown in, and, hmm… some “Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy” for good measure.

Speaking of documentaries, and also in keeping with the impoverished third world countries theme, I also just saw Darwin’s Nightmare last weekend. It was playing on campus, so I thought I’d check it out since it was nominated for best documentary. Didn’t stand a chance against the penguins, obviously, but then again, what does.

So yeah, I went in not knowing anything about it. I had assumed it was something about the current problems going on in our public schools about teaching evolution to our nation’s children. (I originally wrote that sentence “regarding the debate over evolution” but decided that was giving the creationists too much credit.) As it turns out though, the movie was all about this fish that gets introduced into Lake Victoria and screws up the lake’s ecology by eating all the other fish. So that’s bad. But it’s also good, because now the lake perch has become a huge economic windfall for the region. Blahbitty blahbitty bloo. I would have rather seen something about the Scopes Trial meets the Dover school district.

Oh, and fewer amputees.

Planking. Constantly.

So everything’s coming up Milhouse for the DS in 2006, man. (I had never heard this phrase either.)

First off, as promised back in December, I picked up Animal Crossing. But not before I picked up Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. And since then, Electroplankton and Advance Wars. I haven’t really played enough Crossing yet to nail it down, and I’ve hardly touched Castlevania and Advance Wars, but I have played Electroplankton, and I’ll tell you it’s pretty cool. Trippy, even. It’s definitely Nintendo pandering to stoners. If you don’t know, Electroplankton is more or less a glorified techdemo— a “sandbox” game if you will— by Toshio Iwai, who is apparently a big deal back in his home country of Japan. In the “game” you play with these little creatures (plankton, actually) that make music depending on how you manipulate them. This is all accompanied by visual stimuli of the creatures floating around. It’s all very bizarre. Very Japanese.

If nothing else though, Electroplankton has at illuminated one of the more elusive aspects of the DS: the microphone. Turns out, the microphone on the DS is pretty decent. We had some idea of its capabilities from the short voice clip you could record on Nintendogs, but the consensus there was that the recording quality wasn’t so good. We’ll also find out how well voice chat works over teh internets when Metroid Prime Hunters comes out next month, but if Electroplankton is any indication, it would seem that voice chat will be pretty awesome. Anyway, we shall see.

What’s perhaps more interesting about Electroplankton though (and actually the only reason I picked it up in the first place), is Nintendo’s distribution method for it. Offically, there’s only one one place in the United States that carries Electroplankton in retail: The Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Plaza in New York (which is where I got it). Otherwise, if you want to pick it up you’ve gotta buy it online. Nintendo’s rationale being that if you’re interested in Electroplankton, you’re probably also the type of person who is gonna go to the trouble of seeking it on your own. Judging from the fact that the Nintendo World Store apparently was sold out for some time soon after its release, I’m guessing they might be on to something.

Anyway, enough about Electroplankton. We must look towards the future. Yes, the future, all the way to… uh, March?

March is a big month for the DS, but that could be said for just about any month for the DS at this point. March though, several things happen. Two of them on March 20th. Firstly, Metroid Prime Hunters is unleashed on the world, and the world gets its first taste of glorious handheld FPS deathmatches over tha interweb. Damn. Secondly, Tetris DS is unleashed on the unsuspecting populous and communist Russia strikes another blow to American productivity despite having lost the Cold War nearly seventeen years prior.

So yeah, March 20th is gonna be a problem. Fortunately it’s during spring break, so I won’t have to call into work, but it’s gonna be rough nonetheless. I think I’m gonna try and get my wisdom teeth pulled the day before, so hopefully the pain of that will somehow counteract the euphoria of the Metroid/Tetris double team.

And as if that wasn’t enough the redesigned DS is not a myth, much like dry land. No sir, the DS lite hits Japanese shores March 2nd. (Actually, it’s probably already within the borders of Japan, so it won’t so much be hitting the shores as it will be hitting the stores… you get the point.) It’s a really nice looking handheld, if I do say so myself. Quite a bit smaller, with brighter screens, a nicer stylus, and some sweet add-ons. Most notably Opera for some web browsing goodness. Cue heavenly choir music:

A release date hasn’t been announced for the U.S. yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it coincides with the April 17th release of the English version of Brain Training, or “Brain Age” as it’s known here in the states. That’s just how Nintendo rolls.

Also, for those of you playing at home, Nintendo also likes rolling with crippled handhelds. It’s a long sordid history they have dating back to the original brick-sized Game Boy with it’s four shades of green LCD. Then when they finally went color, they didn’t go backlit. Then when they finally went backlit (err, frontlit), they lost the headphone port. Then when they finally got a backlit, color, headphone-enabled handheld, the thing was back to original brick-size (the DS). Now don’t get me wrong, the DS lite is gonna be badass, but Nintendo, being Nintendo, has to screw up an otherwise perfect handheld. Their screwing method du jour is having GBA games stick out about a centimeter from the casing. Awesome Nintendo. There goes my extra clip.

Still, you can’t deny that the DS is basically the system to own at this point. And I don’t me handheld system, I mean system system. And I don’t mean for hardcore gamers, I mean for everyone… gamers, gamer parents, kids, pets, grandparents, political prisoners, illegal aliens, alien aliens, everyone. GameCube, XBox, Playstation 2, GBA, PSP, even the much-lauded $400 XBox 360 all pale in comparison to the DS. And I think it’s gonna stay that way well into the new year.

Milhouse indeed.

The crying on the inside kind, I guess.

One of my favorite Bill Murray movies is coming to DVD. Finally. Maybe. It might already be on DVD. I have no idea.

So on Saturday I took a trip out to ye olde Berry Hill Book Shop with Kelly and Buena (mostly Kelly) since they were in town for the weekend. The store is incredible, so I knew Kelly would appreciate it. And there’s a bunch of chickens running around the property, so I knew Buena would like it too. If you didn’t click on the link above, you should, it’s to a Google Local page of the store with the purty satellite imagery. The place is huge. They don’t have a proper website though, probably because it’s run by this elderly little republican couple who is supplementing their Social Security checks with this absolutely ridiculous bookstore that’s in their backyard. My best guess is that they had a lot of books laying around and an empty barn so they decided to fill the barn with books and turn it into a bookstore. It’s crazy. And they love Dubya. Anyway, back to Bill Murray.

So while Kelly was looking at poetry books from the 1800’s, I was looking at movie posters from the early 1990’s. And while there were many classics in there (I’m going back for “The Wizard” poster), the highlight was definitely the $3.00 poster for “Quick Change.” Awesome.

For those of you who don’t know (which is everyone) (despite the fact that anyone who reads this has no doubt heard me talk about Quick Change before), Quick Change is an overlooked Bill Murray classic. Yes, even moreso than “Scrooged.” Probably less so than “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” though. The movie is about Bill Murray’s character, “Grimm” planning a bank robbery in New York that goes off without a hitch, but in the ensuing trip to the airport everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Geena Davis plays his girlfriend and Randy Quaid plays “Loomis” (such great character names), Grimm’s childhood friend. It’s genius I assure you, and it’s one of the few remaining Bill Murray movies not on DVD. (”Garfield” and “Osmosis Jones” though, you can get those no problem.)

Point is, after I bought the poster, I decided to hit up Amazon and check to see if there was a revised release date for the DVD. The last time I checked on it was probably back in June when I was writing about making images of SCSI hard drives via my old PowerMac 7100. (The PowerMac’s name? Grimm.) Anyway, when Amazon doesn’t know the release date of something but still want your money, they’ll come up with a phoney release date just to rope you in on a preorder. That release date is usually January 1, 2010. So when I hit up Amazon last night I was surprised to find that it got bumped up four years to February 14, 2006. Not bad. Knowing Amazon’s deceptive ways though, I tried a couple other sources just to double check. Barnes & Noble backed Amazon up, good sign. Walmart.com had no record of it anywhere though, bad sign. Most curious of all though, is numerous eBay sellers had the release date listed as August 30, 2005. Huh?

So yeah, I don’t really know when it’s coming out. Maybe next week, maybe it came out back in August, or maybe it’ll be out in 2010. I will say this though, if you don’t hear from me next Tuesday, it’s because I’m watching Bill Murray dressed up as a clown robbing a bank.

Who is eating human flesh? Bear is eating human flesh!

Caught “Grizzly Man” this weekend.

Let’s get one thing out there up front. Timothy Treadwell? Nutjob. Total nutjob. For those of you who don’t know, there was this dude, Timothy Treadwell (real name: Timothy Drexler) who hung out with bears and foxes and other woodland creatures every summer on the Alaskan peninsula for thirteen years. Then, in 2003, on lucky year thirteen, him and his girlfriend got eaten by a big grumpy bear. The end. Sort of.

Turns out for the last few summers Timothy was bringing some video cameras with him out to Alaska to video tape his tomfoolery out in the wilderness. Postmortem this German dude Werner Herzog gets a hold of the tapes and edits them into a documentary called “Grizzly Man” which came out this past summer. Apparently I missed out, because everyone thought it was awesome. It was on a bunch of critics top ten lists and it garnered a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was okay, I thought there was a little too much camera time of people from Timothy’s life saying “Yup, can’t say I’m surprised that he got eaten by bears,” and not enough of Timothy himself. Then again, had there been any more Timothy I might have started gnawing on my own arm. Why? Because Timothy = nutjob.

(That being said, pretty much everyone else in the film was certifiable as well. Friends, his mom, his fellow bear lovers, even the coroner who autopsied what was left of his body. The closest thing to a sane person in the movie was the pilot who dropped him off and picked him up every summer. And in any other movie he would have been the crazy person.)

(I will say that Werner Herzog is awesome though, just because he’s not just a little German, he’s super German. And, yes, also super crazy.)

Point is, I didn’t think the flick was all that great. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had saw it up on the big screen with bears growling at me twenty feet tall, but probably not. Maybe I would have liked it more on DVD, but then I probably would have had to pay for it. So that leaves… the Discovery Channel?

The most interesting thing about “Grizzly Man” is that I saw it on the Discovery Channel. The movie came out August 12th in limited release in theaters, then on DVD on December 26th (no being mauled by bears for Christmas for little Timmy!), and it debuted on Discovery Channel bearly a month later on February 3rd. (I’m sorry.)

The catch of course is that Discovery took a 108 minute movie and turned it into a three hour marathon. So in the end it was approaching one half commercials. Dang. Fortunately there’s TiVo, but sweet christ, if I was watching it with commercials it’d be infuriating. As it was it was a chore going through fast forwarding every seven or eight minutes.

Now for “Grizzly Man,” yeah it was annoying, but I’m happy I didn’t pay for it, and the structure of the film lent it self well to the frequent interruptions (if that’s even possible). Basically it was: interview crazy person, commercial, interview crazy coroner, commercial, show Timothy talking to bears, commercial, interview crazy person, etc…

In the end though, hey, I watched it, and it was… how you say… bearable. (Last time, really.) I’d be all for more of these quasi simultaneous releases in the future. DVD comes out Tuesday, movie debuts on cable on Friday anyone? Would I watch the eight hour version of Peter Jackson’s King Kong? Not so much. But I’d be down for Murderball on MTV or March of the Penguins on Animal Planet in a second.

Probably not “Country Bears” on CMT, though.

Wait, that’s a real movie.

Rigoddamndiculous.

You ever get the feeling that content providers don’t really want you to see/hear/enjoy their content? Don’t confuse that with buying their content, they definitely want you to do that, but once they have your money, they don’t give a fuck what happens.

In a feeble attempt to hold onto their dying business models, the music, film and television industries are doing all sorts of stupid shit to try and protect their content and their stacks of cash.

(I feel like I’m muck-raking right now or something. Next I’ll be referring to all the big media companies as “corporate fat-cats.”)

Within the past month, I’ve personally run into road blocks on all three fronts: music, movies, and television. It’s ridiculous. I had a little tet-a-tet with the Sony root-kit debacle, I danced with “M cubed” over a Garden State DVD, and I had a minor annoyance with Viacom and their so-called “Video Hits One.” I’ll actually start with VH1 since it’s my weakest (or “weekest?”) argument, but it at least includes a pretty picture to keep you guys interested.

So I’m watching Best Week Ever on VH1 a few weeks ago. Great show. That Paul F. Tompkins sure is funny. I was nary three minutes into the show when I saw this:

What the ƒuck is that? (Yeah, I said “ƒuck.” It was an accident at the time, but I’m sticking with it.) I wish I knew what the ƒuck that was, but I can’t tell because there is an enormous ad covering 50% of the screen. Not to mention the VH1 and Best Week Ever “bugs” in the lower corners… you know, just in case I forgot what channel I was on and what show I was watching. In any event, the in-show advertising has officially crossed the line.

I remember back in the day when channels didn’t even have the company bug in the corner. Ah. Those were the days. Then CNN came along, then over the years everyone else said “yeah, that’s a great idea.” Which brings us to today where you miss half of the show you’re trying to watch because it’s obfuscated by advertising for other shows. It’s as if television executives are saying “Well, we’re losing advertising dollars to the Internet, let’s make TV more like the internet… with pop-up advertising!”

My favorite thing though has to be the TBS tactic of starting a second episode of Family Guy while the credits for the previous episode are still running in the lower third of the screen. (Their reason no doubt being that by sandwiching those of credits in with the actual show they can squeeze one more commercial in during a half hour.)

I can’t wait until 2008 when an hour long show is 32 minutes long without commercials and the show is running in a window in the upper right hand corner of the screen while ads run in the remaining space. And if you’re watching on a widescreen TV that extra space is used for more advertising. That’s gonna be totally sweet.

Anyway. Onto music.

Remember a few months ago when everyone was up in arms about the whole Sony XCP DRM debacle? At the time, I didn’t give a damn about it. I figured I have a Mac, I rarely buy CDs, and when I do I make damn sure there’s no DRM on them (even though more often than not the DRM is completely ignored by OSX). However, once a week whether I like it or not, I’m stuck in front of a Windows machine for two hours doing my radio show. Anyway, on my second-to-last show of the semester I noticed they had the new Trey Anastasio CD in the hotbox. Damn hippies. For some reason I remembered that Trey’s album was one of the 52 CDs released with XCP on it. Probably because I smoked a big bag of pot the night before and spent about three hours at jambands.com.

Just for kicks, I figured, hey it wasn’t my computer, why not. So I popped the CD in hoping to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out though, I couldn’t even install the software to put the rootkit on for Sony to track my every move. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is debatable, but the point is, even if I wanted to I couldn’t listen to the CD. I couldn’t play the CD. At a radio station.

This is a bad thing. Well, it’s good that they’re theoretically less hippie music on the airwaves, but if I were Trey Anastasio, I would be really fucking angry. Well, actually I’d probably just be kinda “bummed,” really. It’s kinda hard to be “really fucking angry” when your Blood Pot Level (BPL) is at a constant .8 percent.

Point is, Sony is hurting themselves in a virtually infinite number of ways with this rootkit debacle. Fortunately they seem to have learned from their mistakes (for the time being anyway), and live to die another day.

Now if only people got up in arms about DVD copy-protection.

The DVD front is probably the most infuriating of my trifecta of media annoyances. This is because: 1] it makes virtually no sense in context, 2] it wasted about an hour of my time, and 3] it’s a multi-pronged attack of stupidity (from the MPAA, Microsoft, and Macrovision… the aforementioned “M Cubed”).

So as is virtually always the case when I go home to Guilderland, I wind up sleeping on Kevin’s couch. And hand in hand with that I’m always the last person awake in Kevin’s apartment because everyone else are a bunch of pussies. So last time I was there it was like 3am, and I was finally gonna go to bed, but I figured why not pop in a DVD and fall asleep watching it on his lovely HDTV. I had already watched an episode of Lost on it and man was it was awesome. So I busted out Garden State since I figured it would be nice to dream of Natalie Portman that night. So I pop in the DVD and… wait for it… wait for it…

“Media Center cannot play this DVD. The DVD may be in use by another application or it is copy-protected.”

Nice.

So I type that into Google. Dah. Macrovision. Apparently (and I still have no idea how this even works), if you’re using component video cables to hook your computer up to your high definition television and are running at a resolution higher than 640×480 that’s a not gonna fly in Macrovision land. Microsoft’s “resolution” is to lower the resolution on your display to 640×480. So basically you want me to lower the resolution on my high-definition television to a resolution lower than DVD-quality (which is already lower than the resolution of the television) so I can watch the DVD that I rightfully own? Okay, awesome.

I understand why they’re doing this, they want to prevent so-called “casual piracy” from cutting into their bottom line. (”They” being the MPAA via Macrovision, the copy-protection people.) They assume that you’re gonna buy their DVD and make copies for all your friends via the old DVD-to-DVD burner/VCR tactic. They assume this because, you know, you went to the trouble of going out to the store and buying the DVD with your hard-earned cash. Of course you’re a pirate. You’re a filthy filthy pirate. And you’re are going to hell.

Here’s the thing, though. Here’s the “rub” as it were. I was trying to watch Garden State on a Media Center PC with a dual layer DVD burner in it. If I’m going to copy the DVD, I’m just going to straight up copy the DVD, copy protection and everything. That capacity has been here all along predating even the days of DeCSS. I’m not going to use the “analog hole” to dub the thing. I’m not a redneck. And neither is anyone else with a $1600 Media Center.

(That reminds me of my favorite Jeff Foxworthy joke, stop me if you’ve heard it before: “You might be a redneck if you bootleg your DVDs by sending the signal from your Windows Media Center to your Apex DVD recorder using a composite video cable and stereo RCA wires to two 4.7GB single layer Imation DVD-Rs, circumventing the Macrovision copy protection via an RF modulator hooked up to your 19 inch television.” See, it’s funny because it’s an Apex DVD recorder. Oh that Foxworthy.)

Now under normal circumstances I would just install VLC and be done with it, but in this situation I wanted to be able to use the pretty Windows Media Center remote to control the volume and turn everything off when I finally fell asleep. So, not wanting to go to bed (err… couch) defeated, I spent an hour figuring all this out and finally downloading some software to get around this copy protection (and as it turns out, the FBI warnings and all that other crap, too). And you know what? Now I’m better equipped to inform my friends and would-be Google searchers how to get around it in the future. Great job MPAA. Way to stick it to pirates and encourage people to go out and buy the genuine item.

(By the way, Kevin, if you’re reading this, that software is going to expire in a few days. FYI.)

Bill Gates says that Blu-ray and HD DVD will be the last physical format. Meaning after the next format jump, everything from that point on is going to be distributed digitally. Mr. Gates is pwobably wight, but I’d argue there’s absolutely no good reason why you shouldn’t be able to buy a full length feature today. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to buy a copy of Aeon Flux digitally right now. The movie sucked, it bombed, it lost all sorts of money, it was out of theaters two weeks after its release, and I didn’t get to see it. And while I’m certainly not going to wait until March 21st and drop $14.99 to buy it, I’d totally drop a couple bucks if I could have a nice H.264 file at DVD resolution with no DRM on it. It’s two dollars more than you’d see out of me normally, and I anticipate a ton of other people like me.

The point of all this is to say that until content providers wise up, I’m going to continue stealing music, downloading movies and skipping ads (and probably stop watching shows entirely if they continue covering them up as I watch them). Whoever figures this out first (and selling us low bitrate music and low resolution video doesn’t count as “figuring it out”) is gonna make a pantload of money.

Or, as Lewis (or maybe it was Catone) said, “Whoever gets on base first wins.”