Archive for 2010

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »

I M-M-M-M-Miss Max Headroom

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

But that’s okay. He’ll be back August 10th on DVD. Max Headroom rarely gets the credit he deserves for predicting soundbyte-driven talking heads like Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann. Or for pretty much creating Jim Carey’s shtick.

As a countercultural, club-dwelling, art movie snob in the 80′s, the most likely use of a television in my house was as a piece of furniture or a light source, i.e., in one of those typically 80′s “paint everything matte black and use old snowy-screen TVs as decor” apartments. I mean, I really, really hated television. That is, except for Max Headroom. In an era when the top-ranked shows on television included middle-America lifestyle propaganda horrors like Charles in Charge, Silver Spoons, Full House and Webster, here we had this stroke of utter genius in the form of a snarky, highbrow, digitally manipulated talking head. And in spite of this being cutting-edge technology at the time, the creators did the brilliant thing and made the special effects secondary to the writing and character, letting the quirky, fidgety persona of actor Matt Frewer shine through. You may have never noticed, but about two-thirds of Jim Carey’s shtick is lifted straight from Frewer’s characterizations for Max Headroom (see this Letterman appearance, for instance). I was more partial to the earlier British Channel 4 Music video program – I think the character worked best in short snippets – but there was also a Cinemax talk show and a British-produced ABC TV sci-fi series that lasted two seasons, in 1987-88. And guess what. The latter is coming out on DVD August 10. The other productions may never see the light of day because of the labyrinthine copyright issues due to song and cable rights, but you can find many of them as bittorrents or with a YouTube search. We’ve included a few YouTube Clips below. Read the rest of this entry »

You Biatch! You Stoleded My Link!*

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Ever get a weird possessive feeling about the links you share? Me too. That’s because they’re ALL MINE. I just haven’t been sharing them. Help me name our new weekly “link dump” column.

I get depressed sometimes when I realize that my life is just a bunch of web links strung together with occasional real-life discussion, but mostly just connected by written commentary and link sharing on Facebook. It gets REALLY depressing when I find myself having an emotional response to someone sharing a link on their Facebook “wall” without crediting me, as if somehow it was MY link. Or if they get more comments in spite of posting it when it’s already a week old. “Stupid link sharing friend! I shared that link LAST WEEK!” This is one of the unfortunate side effects of maintaining a site like Dissociated Press. As I said to a friend once: “The Internet. I have seen it“. Out of the literally dozens of sources I comb regularly to bring you interesting stuff, I OMIT infinitely more than I share, because, well, they’re JUST LINKS. So I’ve finally decided to put this wasted pile of weekly links to use, with a regular “link dump” section. I just need a name for this new section on the site. “Linkdump” somehow doesn’t sound like something that would generate enthusiastic user engagement. So if you have an idea for a name, feel free to share. But enough delaying. On with delinking! Read the rest of this entry »

Lady Sovereign May Be Short, But Not On Sass & Raw Talent

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 2, 2010 by admin in Music

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Never mind all the “British teenage lesbian rapper picked up by Def Jam” spin, and ignore her non-existent PR skills. Just have some fun with her tightly-produced Garage Grime.

Even though she’s been releasing material since 2004, you may have overlooked UK MC Lady Sovereign. That would be easy, she’s only 5’1″, a fact that she apparently has no discomfort with; her label is an EMI subsidiary called Midget Records. And while we’re at it, let’s get all the white British teenage lesbian rapper crap out of the way first thing. And don’t worry about her opinions on life either. Lady Sov probably needs a publicist or should let herself remain mysterious. She doesn’t work so well in an interview setting, so do yourself a favor and don’t bother watching or reading any interviews. Just listen to the music. She sort of proved her chops in 2005 anyway, when Jay-Z asked her for one on-the-spot freestyle before offering her a contract with Def Jam. Her 2006 release Public Warning was mostly synth and Eminem-style speed rap driven, but was punctuated with the occasional treated guitar or MIA-like whoops. 2009′s Jigsaw showed some maturing in her presentation; she almost kind of sings here and there, and comes across a little less like some punk out to prove herself. There’s still plenty of naivete, but that’s part of what makes it work. Lady Sovereign fills in a strange space between Die Antwoord, Robyn, MIA, Lily Allen, and Eminem, and if she manages to keep it together – she’s apparently a bit of a party monster – could turn out to be someone to keep an eye on. Vids below. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Horror Films By Independent Film Studio Fewdio

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 1, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Fewdio cashes in on the often overlooked fact that horror films are typically 90% setup to bring you studio-quality, witty horror film shorts. And they’re FREE.

The fact that so many films can be summarized in about 90 seconds is probably one of the reasons I enjoy short film so much. Why spend 120 minutes of your life doing something that can be accomplished in five? What is fairly easy to do, and is done a lot in this genre, is comedy. Which is why it was refreshing to run across Fewdio , an extremely talented and polished group of professionals who had been working in the studio system and decided they wanted to do something where they had complete control, and without a huge budget and production cycle. They cashed in on two facts that are largely overlooked regarding horror: first of all, that the best segments of horror films often stand up on their own and are strung together with setups, and secondly, that no-one was really doing quality horror shorts. As Fewdio’s Drew Daywalt points out in this Shock Till You Drop interview, it’s a very viable and largely unexplored format. As he puts it: “You end on a scare and bang, you’re out…it’s a good model to aspire to. Twilight Zone is formulated that way. Set up, continued set up, expected left turn, roll credits“. All of Fewdio’s films (and there are around 50) have fairly high production values, a clever concept, and exceptional attention to details that are often overlooked in independent productions, especially their attention to sound, probably one of the most powerful tools at a horror filmmaker’s disposal. You can watch most of their films on their YouTube channel, or buy the Nightmare House – Volume 1 DVD on their site. Watch a few below. Read the rest of this entry »

Google And The CIA Invest In “Temporal Analytics Engine”

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 31, 2010 by admin in Technology

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Google and the CIA may sound like strange bedfellows, but not in an era in which the ad industry is building “databases of intentions” based on your surfing habits. Learn how “harmless” sites like Dictionary.com are tracking where you surf, and what you type while you’re there. And how to prevent it.

Love it or hate it (and in spite of occasionally hilarious results) the Google auto-complete feature can be uncannily accurate when guessing the rest of what you’ll type. So wouldn’t it be great if in the future, Google would know what you’re searching before you even search for it? If this sounds more like the movie Minority Report to you than reality, you should take a look into the kind of marketing and data mining methods that are in common usage on the web. For those of you who miss the “Big Brother” vibe of the Bush era and the Patriot Act, ponder this: Google and the CIA are both investing in a company called Recorded Future that “goes beyond search” to “visualize the future, past or present” using what Recorded Future calls a “Temporal Analytics Engine”. Although a disturbing alignment of interests, this isn’t so far from what other companies are already doing. Dig deep into the links in the recent WSJ feature What They Know to learn about who’s poking and prodding your browser, and which tracking technologies are at work. The days of simple cookies are over; these services use Bugs, Beacons and Flash Cookies (more on these insidious Adobe doodads below) not only to store information about which sites you visit, but even what you type while you’re there, or in the case of Flash Cookies, to re-insert the conventional cookies you’ve deleted without telling you! And we’re talking about “harmless” sites that you visit all the time, like Dictionary.com and CNN. While one might argue that you’d be happy to be served up ads based on the things you actively look at – which is a big part of what the intention is with these technologies – there are a few problems with that line of thinking. First of all, for people like me, this is an utterly useless approach; I do a lot of research looking at things that really don’t interest me. So when I write a piece about the billions being made by Farmville, for instance, I then get fed a constant stream of REALLY dumb ads targeting people who play web-based games and shop at Walmart. Another problem is that these third party services are often based on predictive marketing, and attach your data in ways that really DO very nearly identify you specifically with IP addresses and other information. BlueKai, for instance, is “aggregating valuable shopping and research behaviors across the Internet” to build “the world’s largest database of intentions”. Yes. You read that right. A “database of intentions”. If this stuff doesn’t trouble you, try putting what these companies are doing in a real-world scenario. Imagine going to the mall, buying something at The Gap, and then having a little attendant walk up and say “I’m just going to follow you around and watch what you buy, so we can improve your experience here at the mall today”. That would of course be annoying and unsettling, but wouldn’t it be even creepier if you knew a team of attendants were doing it with remote surveillance techniques? Below are some basic tips for easily blocking these rather invasive marketing tools. Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »