Midseason Replacement
Earnest Pettie, online
6 Unsung Heroes Of Videogaming
Jul 18th
Some of the most popular trends in contemporary gaming can have their roots traced back to earlier games that were definitely popular but whose impact on gaming rarely get the recognition they deserve. Here are just five games I think deserve more recognition for their impact on gaming.
Snake
The first time I played this game, it wasn’t yet Morning in America and the cast of Diff’rent Strokes all had bright futures ahead of them. It came on a cassette tape for the tape drive on my Commodore Vic-20 computer. Some of you may be thinking “tape drive?” Others of you may be thinking “cassette tape?” Yes, in the early days of personal computing, you were as likely to find games on cassette tapes and cartridges as you were to find them on floppy disks. (I’m pretty sure someone just said “floppy disk?”)
This game is probably the simplest computer game employing graphics you’ve ever come across. You are in control of a line that gets longer and longer as you play. You are competing against another ever-lengthening line, and if you touch yourself or the other line, you die. If this game had died out with the first generation of home computers, it wouldn’t be on this list. The game, however, got another lease on life as cell phones became advanced enough to show simple graphics. 
There was a time—roughly 2000-2001–when it seemed like every cell phone had this game packed into it. The inclusion of that game primed us for the inevitability of mobile gaming on cell phones. Before long, snake would be replaced with solitaire, bowling, java games, and eventually downloadable apps, but there was a brief moment when Snake defined cell phone gaming and heralded the arrival of the cell phone as a mobile gaming device.
Excitebike
For people who grew up with the NES, this game likely brings back fond memories. Excitebike was a simple motocross racing game that was recently revived for the Wii. The games simple mechanics made it easy to play but difficult to master. If it were just gameplay we were talking about, there’d be little to set Excitebike apart from its contemporaries.
Excitebike included something, though, that allowed it to stand out from other games of its era. It included a track editor. You could create your own tracks and race on them. Unfortunately, only Japanese gamers could save their tracks to disc to share with their friends; the rest of us created tracks, raced them, then created more. I reached a point where I was spending as much time creating tracks as racing on them. It wasn’t the first game to feature a level editor, but it was the first popular, mainstream game that I can recall featuring one.
This wasn’t a feature that other games rushed to copy. I think, though, that we have finally reached a point with the release of Modnation Racers and Little Big Planet where level creation has come into its own and made the leap from the DIY modding community into the mainstream. It’s taken 25 years, but this concept has finally reached fruition.
GAUNTLET
Gauntlet was a dungeon crawler that holds the distinction of holding a number of firsts. It was the first arcade game that allowed for different classes of characters. It was also the first four-player co-op arcade game. Level after level, you and three teammates rushed to kill hordes of enemies in order to make it to the level’s exit.
Gauntlet is an old arcade classic whose brilliance was never really realized on home consoles. Part of the reason for that is that the game was designed for an arcade experience. Specifically, the game was designed to eat quarters which created a sense of urgency in gamers that the home experience just could not duplicate.
Anyone who was around during the original arcade game’s heyday will probably have fond memories of this game, but the game’s luster has been dusted over as time has gone by. What this game did though can not be dismissed. This game was the first four-player co-op game, so every time you fire up a co-op game over Xbox Live or PSN, you are playing on the legacy of Gauntlet, which first taught gamers to look out for their teammates, communicate, and plan ahead as a group.
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!
The easiest thing you can do to create a high profile for a video game is attach a popular brand name to it. Sometimes, this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. A variation on that theme is the celebrity endorsement. By 1987, celebrities came no larger than the former unified champion of the world, Mike Tyson. Nintendo attached Mike Tyson to the NES port of its arcade series Punch-Out! and a star was born (not Mike Tyson, but contender Little Mac).
What makes this game unique among games with celebrity licenses is that game systems finally had reached a point of ubiquity that a meaningful celebrity endorsement could help create a blockbuster. No matter how popular Larry Bird and Dr. J were, their game was never going to have the same kind of recognition as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! is by no means an obscure game, but I think that its legacy is that it was the first game to demonstrate the strength of the celebrity endorsement. There were other boxing games that provided a more satisfying boxing experience, but, like Mike Tyson’s prodigious punches, his name on the game was something that could not be countered. It would be a full decade before another celebrity endorsement would prove as formidable. Tony Hawk took what Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! promised and delivered millions of sale over tons of sequels.
PaRappa The Rapper
As much as I loved the idea of Parappa The Rapper, the game infuriated me. PaRappa the Rapper was arguably the first rhythm game to be developed for home video gaming. The gameplay was simple, you simply tapped your keys in sync with an on-screen display, as the characters rapped on-screen. What was infuriating about this game, for me, was that I felt like the rhythm aspect was unforgiving. Despite that, I still loved the game for having rapping characters and innovative gameplay.
Other rhythm games soon followed, most famously Dance Dance Revolution. From Dance Dance Revolution, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, all of which utilize essentially the same gameplay.
You might suggest that the timing element introduced by PaRappa The Rapper had existed before. For instance, in many basketball games, your free throw accuracy was determined by timing your shot so that you pressed the button when an on-screen indicator was in a sweet spot. It was PaRappa The Rapper, however, that made that rhythm element the central focus of the game and added the music element. Without that I might never have spent hours trying to pass “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies in Guitar Hero 2. The irony is that there hasn’t yet been a great rap game to emerge from the rhythm game genre (in which I include karaoke games).
The Sierra Network
If you played computer games in the late eighties/early nineties, the name Sierra On-Line is probably very meaningful to you. Sierra On-Line created some of that era’s most popular computer games, including Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. The irony is that the company was never actually “online,” in the modern sense of the word, until it created The Sierra Network, released in 1991. The Sierra Network was an online community that allowed its users to create their own avatars and play a number of games, from casual games to arcade flight sims and RPGs together.
1991, wow. That was a time before the World Wide Web and Mosaic browser. To connect to The Sierra Network, you used a 2400 baud modem. That’s like a fifth the speed of current dial-up modems, and it was a time before unlimited access to the internet. That’s right, you paid by the hour to connect to The Sierra Network.
It was essentially a two-dimensional version of the same kind of online community for gamers provided by Second Life or Playstation @Home. It was just so ahead of its time with so few people who could actually use it that there was no way for Sierra On-Line to operate the service and keep it profitable. The idea behind The Sierra Network was sound, and people never gave up on the idea of creating online communities for people to gather and play games. Probably the most important lesson to come out of this was that there would be an audience for the online gaming communities the Internet made possible and that the key would be learning how to properly monetize them.
So there you have it: Six video games whose effect on modern gaming are indisputable and yet rarely get the recognition they deserve.
Warren G and Nate Dogg’s "Regulate" Synopsis
Jul 11th
On one of those cool, clear nights typical in Southern California, Warren G is driving around, looking around for women to have sex with. He’s chosen to engage in this pursuit all alone.
Nate Dogg, however, has just arrived in Long Beach, seeking Warren G. Ironically, Nate Dogg passes a car full of women who are excited to see him. He insists to the women that there’s no cause for the excitement.
Warren G makes a left at 21st and Lewis, where he sees a group of young men playing dice. He hops out, excited to find people to play with but discovers that they don’t want to play dice. Instead, they would rather steal his goods. Once they pull out their pistols, Warren G realizes he’s stuck.
Nate Dogg, meanwhile, is trying to avoid the women who saw him earlier. Some of them might be prostitutes, and he isn’t interested in prostitutes right now. As he evades the potential hookers, he sees Warren G being held up by some young toughs.
Warren G, unaware that Nate Dogg is nearby, can not believe he’s being robbed. In fact, he is so incredulous that he asks what else the robbers would like to steal. This is most likely a rhetorical question.
Nate Dogg sees these unfortunate proceedings and realizes that he may have to shoot people with his gun.
Despite Long Beach’s reputation for crime, Warren G can’t believe that a hold up would happen there, especially to him. As he imagines himself escaping through supernatural means, he notices that Nate Dogg is there.
Nate Dogg has seventeen bullets to expend on this group of thieves and he uses many of them. Afterward, he generously shares with Warren G the credit for neutralizing the situation, though clearly Nate Dogg did all of the hard work. In fact, Nate Dogg quickly reminds himself that he has committed multiple homicides to save Warren G before letting Warren know that there are females nearby if he’d like to have sex with any of them.
Warren recalls that it was, in fact, sex with women for which he’d ventured out into the night and is thankful that Nate knows where there are women, who may or may not be prostitutes.
Nate soon finds the women he’d left before, one of whom likes chubby men. She comes up with a flimsy excuse about her car having broken down in order to persuade Nate Dogg and Warren G to allow her to come with them. Soon, Warren G and Nate Dogg are driving with a car full of women to the Eastside Hotel for an orgy, which reinforces Nate’s earlier suspicion that the women were prostitutes.
Warren G and Nate Dogg explain their G Funk musical style before Nate Dogg issues a vague threat to “busters,” suggesting that he and Warren G will regulate the situation. This could be taken to mean that Nate Dogg will murder them while Warren G stands nearby and shares credit afterward.
Parents Just Don’t Understand: Synopsis
Jul 9th
The Fresh Prince begins by expounding on the universal inability of parents to understand their children, suggesting that neither time nor location would make a difference in parents recognizing their kids’ potential to err. He suggests, however, that it is incumbent on children to recognize the dimwittedness of adults and just accept it as a given.
To illustrate, Fresh Prince launches into the first of two vignettes, recollections from his own youth. In this first flashback, Fresh Prince’s mother takes him and the rest of the family shopping for school clothes at the Gallery Mall. At first, Fresh Prince doesn’t mind his mother’s efforts. Soon, however, she begins bugging. She begins selecting clothes for Fresh Prince that are horribly outdated, and he rebels, insisting that he does not want to look like a member of the rock band Sha Na Na. Unfortunately, she prevails, and, inevitably, the first day of school arrives. He goes to school where he is ridiculed, presumably because of his clothing. When he informs his mom, she retorts with the platitude that “if they were laughing you don’t need them ’cause they’re not good friends,” which, technically, is sound advice. Fresh Prince, understands, though, that the torment will not be a one-time occasion and attempts to convince his mother that mitigating the ridicule by purchasing more current clothing might be worth the effort. Unfortunately, she remains unconvinced. It is through illustrating his unsuccessful efforts at swaying his parent that Fresh Prince hopes he can convince other youths that the argument is not worth the effort.
Next Fresh Prince presents another scenario: In this situation, his parents have left town for a week, leaving behind their brand new Porsche (while his parents do not remain abreast of current trends in fashion, they are up-to-date on automotive trends). He experiences a moral dilemma over whether or not he should borrow the car but soon rationalizes that it would be ok if he were to take for just a little spin. While driving, he passes an attractive woman walking down the street. After getting her attention, he invites her to take a ride in the car. Understandably, she is wary of getting in a car with a stranger, but Fresh Prince soon convinces her that ownership of an expensive car should assuage any fears she’d have about his character. Convinced, she hops into the car and soon the couple find themselves at McDonald’s, which would seem to undercut the facade presented by the Porsche, but the woman is too interested in caressing Fresh Prince’s thigh to notice.
Fresh Prince is excited by having the girl’s hand on his thigh and begins speeding. Soon, they are pulled over by the police, who detain Fresh Prince but send the girl back home. It turns out she is a twelve-year-old runaway. The police inform Fresh Prince’s parents of the situation, and they return from their trip to take Fresh Prince home from the police precinct. Both parents, visibly upset, express their frustration through physical abuse. It is difficult for them to understand how easily a situation might arise in which a child would steal a car, pick up a prepubescent runaway with romantic intentions, and speed through a neighborhood. It is even more difficult for Fresh Prince to understand why they can’t understand how that might occur. So, one last time, he urges the youth of America to accept their parents’ lack of judgement.
My Remarks Upon Stealing A Loaf Of Bread
Jun 19th
What follows is a mostly accurate transcript of my heartfelt appeal to the jury at my trial. All instances of sobbing, hyperventilation, and tearful stammering have been redacted to protect the innocent:
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, is it a crime to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Certainly, the answer becomes blurry if you are considering generic brands. Whether stealing bread is legal or not, the additional pilfering of jelly, cream cheese, or other suitable toppings should never be recognized as wrong because it is naked toast which is truly the crime against nature. I admit did steal the bread. I had to steal the bread to feed my starving family– the car, I stole, because the bread was in it! They say teach a man to fish… but what if you live in a landlocked state? I never had a chance to make good. Growing up, I was deprived of my childhood by a bully– he robbed me of my youth and laughed with his friends as they passed it around.
It takes a village to raise a child, does it not? Before you can have a village, you must start with a hut. Where have all the huts gone? Robber barons with fine-pointed moustaches stole them in the middle of the night and replaced them with ranch-style homes. But no one points a finger at the robber barons. No one remarks, “What’s up with all the robber barons roaming the streets? Will our kids be safe? Wait. Where are the kids… gone with the huts?”
In fact, this world I come from was no place for a kid to grow up, which explains, in part, why it was so difficult for me to crack 5’2″. A boy becomes a man and puts away childish things, but then he has kids and needs childish things once again. He curses himself for putting away childish things but knows what he must do! If a man steals a bike to placate his whining child, I ask you, is it a crime? Bikes and loaves of bread are OK to steal, but not my new Blu-Ray player. It’s not that the quality is great, It’s just took me a long time to get used to the remote control.
In fact, I blame society for this. Each one of you is as responsible for what transpired as I am. That leads me to wonder where you were during the hard part! Everyone wants to take credit but no one wants to put forth any effort. Well, shame on you! Society has been responsible for all the major crimes of at least the last forty-two years, yet a small guy like me has to take the fall. I feel no remorse for my acts! Like industrial espionage, mine were victimless crimes! Oh, why didn’t I go into industrial espionage? I had the opportunity but lacked the follow-through.
What follows next is a mostly accurate transcript of my appeal to the parole board with the exception of the part where I tried to escape through an air vent but couldn’t find my screwdriver:
I do understand that I have the right to remain silent, but I have opted not to exercise that right because I am laughably horrible at charades. You ask me whether I feel remorse for my actions. Well, sirs and madame, I would like to tell you what Webster’s says about remorse. Unfortunately, Webster’s is uncharacteristically neutral, opting only to provide a definition. So let’s forget about remorse for now– God knows I have. I think, instead, we should look at my record inside this prison.
Specifically, I’d like you to consider my record of perfect attendance. This is something I was unable to achieve in middle school or high school, but in prison, I’ve been present every single day, even when I’ve felt under the weather! I am the first to admit, though, that my stay here has not been all positive. I’m perfectly willing to admit my yearbook club didn’t go as well as I had hoped. It turns out people are not very interested in memorializing their time in prison. Surely you wouldn’t hold it against me that the Aryan Nation managed to convince MS13 and various bloods and crips that group photos were not a good idea. Right?
I am clearly no real danger to the public at-large. I punch like and girl, and I’m afraid of my own shadow, which seems to grow very large and stand over my bunk at nighttime, telling me not to worry because it will all be over soon. And need I remind you of my ties to the community? I owe many people money, and I never made it home with that loaf of bread.
What follows next is a copy of the letter I’m mailing my lawyer tonight, the eve of my execution.
How exactly did this happen?
Anatomy of a Viral Video: Smoking Baby
May 29th
Smoking Baby Hooked on Cigarettes – Watch more Funny Videos
This was a great week for viral videos. There were at least three massive videos, including a coughing, farting cat. But the one video that trumped all others was Two-Year Old Toddler Smokes Cigarettes. It’s done over two million views on Break.com, alone, and it is most likely the the new record holder for Break’s most shared video ever on Facebook. At the time of this posting, the video has been shared 96 Thousand times. That is huge.
So what happens in this video to make it so viral? Well, almost nothing. A rotund Indonesian kid named Ardi Rizal is sitting with his family, the camera trained on him, as he smokes a cigarette. It is that almost nothing is happening that is part of what is so stunning about this video. If a toddler were smoking cigarettes at a family gathering in America, the Surgeon General would descend on the event from a black helicopter and taze the parents, stickering their foreheads with the Surgeon General’s warning for cigarettes. In this video, it is just another day. That gives the video the awe factor necessary to send it soaring into a viral orbit, but there’s another propellant the video has, and that is the WTF quotient.
The WTF quotient is the part of the viral video that makes your brain tingle. You know that what you’re looking at is strange, and you just can’t seem to wrap your brain around the image and make it make sense. In this video, the baby’s smoking is weird, but it isn’t really WTF. That’s just what we perceive to be bad parenting. No, the WTF part is the gusto with which this kid puffs on his cigarettes. Seriously, it looks like the ghosts of Joan Crawford and Humphrey Bogart must’ve materialized just long enough to teach this kid how to puff on cigarettes with the glamour of a star of the silver screen. He twirls his cigarette, looks at it, waves it around. He makes smoking look cooler than it has looked in decades! Honestly, this kid could be the new Joe Camel.
It seems this video was born to be viral in much the same way that kid was born to smoke. People who think the video is funny will pass it around, and so will people who find the video shocking. There really is no emotional response you can have that would keep you from showing it to everyone you know. Two Year Old Toddler, folks, is an instant classic.
The Lost Finale or Why I’m Right And Everyone Else Is Wrong
May 25th
The simplest lessons are often the best, and one of the simplest lessons I’ve ever received is this: Film is an audio-visual medium. It seems so obvious that it shouldn’t even be worth mentioning, but it bears repeating because it’s important to remember that what you see and what you hear are important in film. The trick of narrative film is to make all the amalgamated elements of filmmaking–the photography, the sound recording, the editing, the acting–disappear into a story. The bigger trick of narrative film is to use those elements to tell the story for you, and that is something at which the creators of Lost were adept.
Audio-visually, the clues were there all along that this season was markedly different from the previous seasons, and it all began with the negative image of the Lost bumper at the close of last season after Juliette exploded the bomb. When we returned for this season, we had a new storyline, something that appeared to be a divergent continuum, and the first time we experienced what appeared to be an alternate reality, we were transitioned between the alternate reality and the regular Lost reality without the audio cue that we’d come to expect from flashes back and flashes forward. I remind you of these things to help you understand that our storytellers understand how to use the medium to give added depth to their narrative.
I believe Lost had two endings. One ending wraps up the narrative of the survivors’ struggle for existence on the island, and the other ending is the ending to Lost, the series. For six seasons, we’ve watched as the survivors of Oceanic 815 struggled to build a community with each other in order to survive the horrors of the island as they battled polar bears, smoke monsters, Others, and even each other. The end of that story is that ultimately they did find that community and were able to enjoy it in death. The other ending is the actual conclusion to Lost. If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to flash us forward to the closing moments of the show and a sequence of very important images.
In these six images we see Jack crumbled on the Earth, bleeding to death, joined by Walt’s dog. From there we cut to the purgatory Church where all the survivors have reunited with their loves lost and friends found, where Jack and Kate finally get to be together. We cut back to the corporeal Jack, bleeding to death, happy as he sees Kate, Sawyer, and company fly away from the island. We return to the church, again, this time bringing closure to the Lost survivors’ narrative. We now can be sure that the church is their heaven and that Kate, Sawyer, Lapidus, and Miles survived the island and made it back to the real world. From here we get a transition that we have not gotten before, and that is a fade to white and a fade back to Jack. This time, however, the shot has changed. We are not looking at Jack’s body or head– instead we get his eye. This is a callback to the pilot, where we saw Jack’s eye open, which launched us into this grand adventure. Jack’s eye closes. As I mentioned, the transition that precedes this shot is significant because the previous transitions have all been cuts, which is how the show’s creators move us back and forth between the island and the alternate/purgatory stories. As we move to the eye, then, we are not returning to Jack’s body on the island. Instead we are returning to Jack’s real body on the island, the body that has survived for probably just moments, the wreckage of Oceanic 815. That eye that opened is now closing, and Jack, like everyone else, is dead. We go to the Lost bumper, and then an image of the flight’s wreckage over the show’s closing credits, which serves to underscore that everyone who crashed on that plane is dead.
Narratively, the show’s creators have had their cake and eaten it, too. Yes, while everyone on the island is dead, none of them were dead in the story we were given. Yes, the island’s survivors did end up in purgatory, but the purgatory wasn’t the island, it was one of our characters’ own making (which is fodder for an entirely separate post regarding the amalgam of religious ideas in Lost). For the purposes of our story, all of this did happen, and all of it was important, even if none of it actually happened and existed only in the desperate fantasy of a man about to die. This isn’t “it was all a dream.” It is “it was all a desperate delusion,” and it doesn’t matter that it was because we were given a meaty story with adequate closure and a fitting conclusion: Smoke monsters and Jacob don’t exist, but our struggles, before we die, to ascertain the nature of this world, why evil exists, and why we haven’t been better people do exist.
Edit 4/25 10:43 pm– In the comments and on Twitter people have pointed out that the last image of the wreckage was added by the network. I would argue that it’s the use of a a different transition to take us to Jack’s closing eye that is meaningful. Take away that last shot, and you still have the show’s creators taking us back to Jack’s eye closing after the crash.
American Idol In Decline? Yes, Of Course It Is.
May 22nd
First American Idol, Kelly Clarkson from Flickr's Vagueonthehow
Ratings are down 10% for American Idol this year, text messages are off by about half, compared to this same time last season, and the cast has been in flux for two years now. American Idol is, without a doubt, in decline. There’s almost nothing American Idol could have done to prevent this. You see, American Idol’s problem isn’t that it’s any worse a show than it was last season or even nine seasons ago. It’s that the world has changed around American Idol, and now American Idol has become increasingly irrelevant. When American Idol began its Nielsen-dominating run at the beginning of this decade, reality TV as we would come to know it was still in its infancy, Friendster was the only social network people had ever heard of, and record companies had been shoving pop groups and stars down our gullets for years. American Idol was supposed to be the remedy to the latter. The television audience would determine its own pop stars through a months-long gauntlet of singing competitions. The winner would, by definition, be a viable pop star because the audience would have already demonstrated its preference for the singer.
It’s fun to go back and look at those early episodes. All the contestants are dressed like what they think pop stars are supposed to dress like, wearing clothes that none of today’s contestants would be caught dead in. It really was a different era. Kelly Clarkson won that season and was considered a success by all measures and wouldn’t be topped until Carrie Underwood won the contest in 2005. The 2005 season represents kind of a high watermark for the show because the audience for the show was reaching its peak and Carrie Underwood was the last American Idol winner to make real waves in the music industry. It was also the last year that it was possible for Idol to be Idol.
2005 saw the explosion of Myspace and the birth of Youtube, two tools that would inevitably change the music industry and replace American Idol as the avenue Average Joes took to becoming pop stars. Need proof? The elimination episode of this year’s semifinals featured Justin Bieber, who owed his enormous popularity to Youtube videos, and the other performer on the show, Travis Garland, made his name through Myspace. Now, what seemed like a unique concept– that anyone could be a star without having to rely on the traditional route to stardom– is our everyday reality. In fact, we learned long ago that the winners of American Idol weren’t the only contestants who would receive recording contracts, so not only is the premise of the show no longer unique, the prize isn’t either. The audience, rather than choosing one contestant to make a star, has become a focus group for twelve musicians.
The music business isn’t the only thing that has changed since Idol began. Reality TV has grown by leaps and bounds, so much so that by 2005, the airwaves were quickly filling up with reality TV programs. What this infusion of reality TV programming did was make stars of regular people and make stars seem like regular people. Reality TV collapsed the allure of stardom, and aspiration to stardom was something that American Idol was built on.
So the world around American Idol has changed greatly since the show debuted a decade ago. What does American Idol have left to offer that hasn’t been usurped by reality TV and the internet? For a long time, what American Idol had to offer was a strange interplay between the bratty but professional Ryan Seacrest, the enthusiastic Randy Jackson, the ever-loopy Paula Abdul, and the schoolmaster Simon Cowell. But even that has changed. Ellen Degeneres replaced Paula Abdul, Kara DioGuardi slid in between Randy and Simon, and Simon has one foot out the door. Everything the show had to offer has dissipated, and all that we, the audience, are left with is the hope that we might tune in and see something special that reminds us of why we watched the show in the first place. In short, American Idol is the superstar that has become a nostalgia act without even knowing it. Sadly, the show that was to allow us to pick the next Britney Spears has become Britney Spears.
Anatomy of a Viral Video: Weird Russian Audition For Fish Ad
May 21st
Weird Russian Audition For Fish Ad – Watch more Funny Videos
The one thing that determines whether a video will be viral or not is whether after watching it, your jaw has dropped. It doesn’t matter why your jaw will have fallen open– it could be from laughter, shock, awe, or even anger. All that matters is that you have to see it again to be sure of whatever it is you’ve just seen. I had that experience with this screen test video. Upon watching it, I was filled with such a sense of WTF that I fell in love instantly.
The set-up is simple, right? A Russian-sounding guy is auditioning for a commercial. There is nothing out of the ordinary about that, but every other aspect of this ad is extraordinary. Let’s start with this guy’s outfit. He’s auditioning for a role as what seems like the Gorton’s fisherman, but he’s dressed more like The Undertaker. Is Paul Bearer his agent? He’s reading for this commercial, but it sounds like he’s never seen the script before– like he just happened in on the way to the bathroom and decided “What the heck? Today, I’m an actor. What a country!” The best part, though, is that there are these key phrases that he hits that would sound like regular advertising copy if it had been read by anyone but this dude. “Specialty seasonings.” I want him to sell everything.
It’s such a simple set-up, and that’s what allows it to be so amazing.
Reining In My Online Self or How I Learned To Stop Chatting And Love The Web
May 5th
Photo By Docklandsboy
One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to admit to myself was that I was spread too thin. I had too many accounts with too many different online services. For years, I wore all those accounts as a badge of honor. I felt proud that I’d forgotten usernames to more accounts than most people had ever logged into. Over the past year, though, the attention I was spending being connected to all these different services had taken its toll on my ability to be productive. This was especially problematic since my job required me to be connected to the web all day, unlike most people’s jobs, which often do their best to keep their employees from scrounging around online. I needed to cut back.
Let me illustrate the problem for you. I had seven different services hosting photos. I’d used three of them in the past two years, often duplicating my uploads to Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa. Sure I had my reasons for maintaining the separate accounts: Flickr was cool, Picasaweb had tons of free storage, and Facebook was the service everyone I knew used. Uploading photos to all those services was a waste of time and effort, and last weekend, took the bold step of deleting my Flickr accounts and vowing not to use Facebook as my photo hosting service, sticking only to Google’s Picasa.
What was going on with my photo hosting services was indicative of what had become of my whole online existence. Email addresses upon email addresses, superfluous IM accounts, and long-outdated social networking profiles had dilluted my online existence, making it too difficult to actually optimize my usage of any of them. I needed to act. My first goal was to pare my social networking profiles to the vital few I actually used: I saved Facebook, Linkedin, and Myspace (I use it for music), and I cut every other social network I’d joined in the past seven years, finally divesting myself of Friendster and scores of other services you don’t remember. That felt great, but it didn’t do much to alleviate my major problem which was that my attention was being pulled between too many things when I was online. I needed to go deeper. I needed to cut E-mail accounts and IM accounts.
Cutting IM And Email accounts was a little more difficult than I’d imagined it would be– mainly because the two are so intertwined. I wanted to delete my Netscape/Aol account, but the company I work for used AIM as their primary IM service. That left three other major Email and/or IM services that were always tugging at the edges of my field of vision: Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. I was always logged into all those accounts simultaneously (with Twitter, too) through my chat client, Digsby. As a result, I was always seeing status updates, people coming and going, and new chat boxes opening. I had no choice but to make cuts. For me, Yahoo was an easy decision. I’d long since stopped using Yahoo for anything important, and since I’d killed my Flickr account, I no longer needed the Yahoo login. It was cut. That left Google and Facebook. I couldn’t get rid of Facebook, but I could log myself out of Facebook chat and never log back in. After all, did I really need to talk to the guy who rode my bus in third grade and was interested in reconnecting? Probably not. Unless he still had those cool toys. I slammed the door on Facebook chat, leaving me access only to Google Talk and AIM with occasional Twitter updates.
Those cuts returned to me a full hour of work time. I was no longer logging into a million different sites throughout the day, chatting with a million people, or being distracted by status updates every couple of minutes.
I’m happier now that I’m not checking in on a million different accounts. I think there’s another benefit that I’ve gained from this exercise, which is that my online identity is more concrete. If someone wants to contact me, or if they are searching for me online, there are fewer options– more importanly, fewer bad options– for them to try. If someone wants to see my photos, there is one place. If someone wants to see my resume, there is one place. If they want to email me, there are still a few options because I maintain a work, private, and professional (for writing) e-mail addresses, but they should be far less likely to email me at an address that I simply never check. Another unintended consequence is that I have more time to enjoy the web. I can spend more time reading blogs and exploring new sites because I’m not keeping up with all the sites/accounts/and emails that were anchoring me down before.
Dick Cheney’s Doctor’s Note
Mar 2nd
To The brothers of the Fraternity of Evil,
Please excuse Mr. Cheney’s absence from last weekend’s monthly meeting of the fraternity of evil. As you know he had a heart attack from which he was recovering at home. Although he has been weakened by the current situation and is scarcely able to hold a remote control, let alone hold a man’s life in the palm of his hand (one of his favorite pastimes), Mr. Cheney should be back at full strength in time for the next meeting. I understand attendance at Fraternity meetings is mandatory, which he tells me is the reason you started having door prizes in the first place, but I refused to clear him for travel until his cold, unfeeling stare returned.
As you know, after Mr. Cheney’s second heart attack, we began simply replacing the heart on each successive heart attack. As per the plan developed by me, in conjunction with your Nefarious Schemes committee, each of Mr. Cheney’s new hearts has come from a virginal naif, who carries his or her innocence on their countenance like morning dew on a leaf. Rather than wait for donors to die, Mr. Cheney has found that it’s far more efficient for him to pluck the beating heart from the chest of the donor and eat it. Needless to say the donor list for these operations is very short and mostly imaginary. However, Mr. Cheney has assured me that there’s no shortage of the fresh-faced and wide-eyed to be gorged upon — whatever that means.
While I have your attention, I understand many of you have continued to question why Mr. Cheney even bothers with a heart as it tends to have a muting effect on the evil he can execute. Please remember that his body begins rejecting the heart from the moment it is placed in his near-freezing cavity, but it remains a vital part of his plan for blending in with regular humans, which you can see is almost working. Of course, his ability to express warmth remains severely limited, so every time he grimaces with pleasure, think of that as a symbolic gesture of his dedication to the fraternity.
I will also be exempting him from fundraising later this week. As his grip has grown exceptionally icy, I am worried that it will be difficult to pry the candy bars from his hands. I fully expect Mr. Cheney to be back at full strength by next month’s meeting, which he tells me should be especially fun since you’ll be remaking the map of the Middle East to suit your respective interests and will have a presentation from the local FFA club.
Respectfully and fearfully yours,
Dr. Mandlebrot
Earnest Pettie is a Los Angeles-based comedy writer from Oklahoma who spends his days mining the internet for comedy gold for Break.com
