Archive for December, 2009
« Older Entries |Auld Lang Syne, Two-Thousand-Nine
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 31, 2009 by admin in Holidays
Thursday, December 31st, 2009There are so many things we could say about 2009 and the last decade, but let’s not. Let’s just look forward to another year and decade of exciting new possibilities.
 Um, maybe not. |
All in all, 2009 wasn’t so bad. It was better than 2008 anyway, which was – according to many sources – the worst year ever. And it has the perk of being the end of a pretty scary, if un-nameable, decade. So tonight, we might as well party like we only do once in a blue moon, because, well… it is one. Personally, I’ll be observing a moment of silence for the folks that had built an industry around those New Year’s Eve party glasses with the zeroes as the eyes; they’re screwed. I’ll also be wishing I wasn’t so strapped for cash, because I’d go buy the domain howdoyousay2010.com and set up a single serving site. For now, you can just visit TwentyNot2000.com for similar results. So how DO you say 2010, anyway? Everybody was so anxious for the “oughts” to be over so they could start saying “teen”, but no-one seemed to remember the fact that the first three years of the teens aren’t. Aren’t teens, that is. 10, 11, 12 —fully one-third of the decade doesn’t end in “teen”. Oh well, we have a couple of years to figure that out, and then it won’t matter anyway, right? So have a blast tonight whatever you do, just don’t overdo it. We’re looking forward to an ever better time in 2010, how about you?
Trent Reznor Drives More Nine Inch Nails In The Coffin Of Old-School Music Business
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 30, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009What comes in 1080p high definition video with 5.1 surround sound, spans 3 continents, 4 languages, and takes a team of dozens – including 5 specialist teams and a network of thousands – a total of 12 months to complete? That would be The Gift, which is 3 DVD’s worth of NIN concert video assembled [...]
What comes in 1080p high definition video with 5.1 surround sound, spans 3 continents, 4 languages, and takes a team of dozens – including 5 specialist teams and a network of thousands – a total of 12 months to complete? That would be The Gift, which is 3 DVD’s worth of NIN concert video assembled from source material released by NIN, professionally edited, and color corrected and authored. To be clear about this, the amazing thing about the project is that it’s not an official NIN release; this was assembled primarily by rabid and obsessive fans. Back in January of this year, Trent Reznor joked (see original text here) that a “mysterious, shadowy group of subversives” had somehow gotten their hands on 400 GB’s of raw HD concert footage and that it may be out there on the internet somewhere. Well, the fans took the cue and worked with NIN crew to create what appears to be some mind-blowingly high-quality concert material. And the cost? Unbelievably, it’s free. They’re even soliciting people to provide free physical DVD’s to technophobes that are incapable of figuring out the download options! We mentioned last year how Trent Reznor had ingeniously brought us back into the fan fold with his gift of “Ghosts”, but this video material may really take the concept of “free” as a marketing tool to new heights. You be the judge. The YouTube clip below is promising; we’re downloading the torrent as this article is being posted, so will probably do a follow up next week. Read the rest of this entry »
Help Pick The Dissociated Press Best Of 2009
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on December 29, 2009 by admin in Best Of 2009
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009Your input will have a direct impact on whether we keep going in 2010.
We shared some thoughts on the whole idea of “Best of 2009″ lists recently, but you know what I think the best thing about 2009 was? You. You may not realize it, but you’re pretty special. You’re one of about 20,000 people that visit this site each month. With some rough math, assuming a global population of 6 billion people, that means you’re about 1 in 300,000. Okay, so you’re not a one-in-a-million kind of person, but you’re pretty special to me. Because without visitors, a web site is pretty useless. So thanks for visiting. If you happen to be one of those who visits regularly, you may have noticed I’ve offered up something interesting for you to look at or read every day since June 11, 2008. And only one of those somethings was a lame, self-referential “blog post”, and even then I feel like we kept things amusing. So. Since you’re so special, I’m going to ask a little favor, one that may benefit both of us. I generate all the content for this site alone, and although I get a fair amount of feedback via e-mail, thankfully there’s little in the way of user comments. I say “thankfully”, because if there were, then I’d have to spend time moderating them. However, I now NEED your comments; I’m about to make a decision to either invest considerable energy in developing the site further, or let it languish tragically in the linkrot wastelands of the web as I pursue other projects I’m working on. So here’s the favor: browse back through the year’s posts (an easy way to do that would be to view the 2009 posts) and help us pick a best of 2009. Then post a comment referencing Read the rest of this entry »
Drinking & Driving Is All Fun & Games…
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 28, 2009 by admin in Holidays
Monday, December 28th, 2009…until somebody loses a license. Or gets their DUI ticket Twittered all over Texas.
 Don’t be a drinking and driving dummy |
…until somebody loses a license or something. For all you poor cusses who have to hold down the office between the holidays, we have a special New Year edition of our Monday Demotivators. With New Year’s Eve just a few days away, many of you are probably thinking more about drinking than working: how much to do, how much to buy, how well you can drive when you’ve done a little. So let’s start with that last bit. You’d think that with the way most game developers drink, there’d be more Flash games devoted to the topic. All we could find were a couple that were devoted to staying vertical, like Sittin’ at a Bar (which was really just a promo for country band Rehab’s Bartender Song), or Mind Me Bloody Beer (which was a promo for British comic Johnny Vegas) and Haleed the Drunk, which was a plug for…I dunno. Haleed the Drunk? Games specifically devoted to drinking AND driving have run into marketing problems in the past, in spite of getting funding from the US Army. But we found a couple anyway. If you happen to be drunk right now, you’re probably in the right frame of mind to enjoy Drunk Driving Championship; hitting the space bar to avoid crashing gets dull pretty quickly on just coffee. Likewise with Drunk Driving Dummy, which gives you odd instructions for a drug run starting at a bar, and then sends you off. Unfortunately it sends you off in a car with a broken Read the rest of this entry »
The Burros of Northern Colombia & The Men Who Love Them
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on December 27, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, December 27th, 2009It’s rare that a short film on man and donkey love is informative rather than gratuitous. No butts about it though, these fellows aren’t horsing around. They love their donkeys. Probably too much.
 Well, she IS kind of cute. |
I have a friend who’s getting on in years and occasionally uses the charming expression “I’m so hungry I could eat the north end of a southbound mule“. After learning about the unusual traditions involving donkeys that are practiced in Northern Colombia, I’m wondering if there’s a variation of this expression in Spanish. If you’re easily offended – scratch that – if you don’t like hearing about cultural traditions that involve sex with donkeys, or more importantly seeing such things occurring, stop reading. NOW. But if you can stomach it, VBS.TV – an online network headed up by Spike Jonze – has a feature called Asses of the Caribbean. Which – while it features sex with donkeys – is oddly not exploitive or gratuitous. It just happens to be about locals in Cartegena, Colombia who have a tradition of having sex with donkeys. It’s worth watching, if only to see and hear things like a local cab driver matter-of-factly saying “on Sundays we went into the hills to have sex with donkeys“, and to hear other locals – including the women – explain how it’s just a part of growing up around Cartegena. I would’ve thought that this was a gag of some sort, but in the clip they consult an actual sex expert (Hani Miletski, author of Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia