Posts Tagged ‘internet’
A lot of Hollywood types have been chewing on their fingernails this summer. Once reliable suckers, the young guys under 25 have been notably absent from the theaters. Since I have a vested interest in a producer eventually discovering Super Acadia and the Amazing Evangeline Sweet, I thought I’d conduct an informal poll in the mall parking lot behind Friendlies. This is where the local bored youth of America hang out in beat-up old pickups with fancy rims. “Internet Porn,” says one acne scarred dude with a Coors. “Video Games,” says the owner of a Bondo-colored Ford. He’s got a level 85 warrior on the Cho’gall server. “What about you? Are you getting one of these guys to take you to Captain America? ” I ask the owner of a pair of alarmingly short floral daisy dukes. “Yeah, that Chris Evans is kinda cute!” She says with a flashing smile and I’m wishing I was eighteen again and wearing my letter jacket in the summer heat just because it impressed girls.
The suckers are back. Captain America bopped Harry Potter on the nose with an estimated $65.8 million box office on its opening weekend. Audiences are still going out of their way to avoid seeing movies in 3-D especially the re-purposed ones like Captain America but that’s okay with me. Vange just might poke an eye out in 3-D with her superhero costume. Most of the reviewers are saying it’s wonderful nostalgia just like a pulpy piece of Mom’s apple pie, but you gotta love the Village Voice for calling it a “hokey, hackey, two-hour-plus exercise in franchise transition/price gouging, complete with utterly unnecessary post-converted 3-D.” I think I fall in the middle there agreeing with Karina Longworth of the Voice while at the same time loving American hokey and hackey.
So I didn’t write the story in time for it to matter. See, the govt. decided to crack down on the million sites on the Internet that show pirated stuff. And my fave tvshack.net was one of them. But by the time I was finished looking for the banner pic (thanks Vange) tvshack.net was already back up as tvshack.cc. LOL Internet.
Here’s the story. The quote is even funnier now.
“That’s why we took the actions that we did,” Bharara said in a statement. “If your business model is movie piracy, your story will not have a happy ending.”
Except if you forget that the Internet is Whack A Mole. Go catch a real crook!
Go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up your vocab. Don't be surprised if your hoe steps out wit' me And you see us coming down on yo' slab. Livin' ghetto fabulous, so mad, you just can't take it. But nigga if you hate now, then you wait while I get your bitch butt naked.
No, not the good kind of Internet Whore. Like Caramel up there. I mean the bad kind. The kind that writes posts about how they just ‘happened’ to get turned on to ‘zazz!’ mouthwash and OMG how awesome is that! I hate to say it, but not everything you read on the Internet is self-indulgent crap. Some of it is for money! And the FTC has decided that it needs to be clamped down on. The Snooty NY Times Says:
Beginning today, bloggers, Twitterers and others who write online reviews or endorse products using new media must disclose it when they receive free merchandise or payment for writing about an item.
I have two questions on this. The first is how come nobody ever offered me money to talk about Zazz!? I would have poured that crap into my eyes for a C-Note. But I guess it’s too late now, which leads me to my second question: Does this mean the Internet will be different? Like, how are they gonna catch EVERYONE? Will we have to declare war on the Phillipines?
Will the relative popularity of the site doing the whoring matter? I would love to see Perez Hilton get sent to Oz so Adebisi could draw funny cum drools on Perez’s face. Except not fake. And then staple his lips to a trash can or something. But I digress.
The number one thing about all this is that I am volunteering to be the guinea pig for the whole thing. You all send me a bunch of free shit and money to write about things and then I will see if the FTC catches me. If they do, I will go on a hunger strike and become a hero to 10′s of people. Fight the Power! And if you really make money off of that sort of thing – screw you for not getting me turned onto it and watch out for the heat!
It’s the end of the summer and the Gallery staff is busy doing things other than writing posts. Because we are more of a hippie commune than a business, I fully support and respect their sabbaticals. Also, since I don’t pay them, there isn’t anything I can do about it. I don’t even pay myself. So before I get into the rest of my topic, make sure you contact me here or in the Bat Cave if you want to jump in and also do stuff for the personal fulfillment of maybe getting a comment from someone or the extra special prize of being sexually harassed by me (*drops pencil*).
But on a more serious topic, I want to know what is stealing regarding the Internet. I am not talking about posting up a column from Entertainment Weekly and saying I wrote it. Nor am I saying that I want to post the ENTIRE article from Entertainment Weekly and talk about it and link to it. But I am saying that I will take an excerpt from the article, then link the article then write some stupid joke about it. Is that stealing?
If that is stealing – then what the hell is the point of having in Internet? Is the guy who took the picture of the girl up above there that I messed with and put new words on looking to get paid cause I put it there? I mean, no way in Hell would I ever actually PAY him. But pretend for a minute that I wanted to. I got the pic from some other site. Who got it from some other site. And so on.
The reason I am even talking about this is that it is really a hell of a lot EASIER to ‘present’ content than create it when people are busy with their real lives, etc. Like, we get a million email forwards a day. If I wanted, we could have 50 posts a day from nothing but email forwards. Snopes be damned – I am gonna tell you that Tiger Woods wife posed nude. She didn’t, really, but the email I got said she did. And I didn’t post it. Cause I checked. I also didn’t post the thing about the heartwarming teacher who loves veterans so much. To see what I am talking about – Google for: “Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a social studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock”.
So – what is stealing and what isn’t? If we show you something you haven’t seen before, is it still entertaining even though all we did was show it to you? I am planning on ripping off a bunch of ‘aggregator’ sites this week. I am not even gonna link them. Rather, I am gonna present the content they took from somewhere else (making sure that I remove their watermark first). BUT! I am also going to NOT watermark it myself and pretend that I made it. I am not the fuck from ebaums world. Anyway – post your thoughts about Internet stealing etc. etc.
Sometimes the stuff that people DO talk about gets in the way of things that people SHOULD be talking about. Now, all my energy saving ideas keep getting crapped on by ‘the man’ (why don’t they put windmills next to the interstate so the cars going by can make them spin and and least provide power for the streetlights?) but maybe since this one came from a regular source people will pay more attention.
Then again, the source is Popular Mechanics, so it is only being read by me and people who found a box of them when they had to clean out their grandfather’s house 
Anyway – here is the deal (emphasis added by me):
…Researchers at the University of Texas recently unveiled a design for a hybrid fission–fusion reactor, a best-of-both-worlds device that would dispose of the deadliest waste from traditional nuclear power plants while generating power along the way. Most nuclear waste can be reprocessed for use as fuel in standard fission reactors, although that’s not currently the practice in the United States. The hybrid reactor would be a next step. It would employ fusion reactions to flood the remaining, highly dangerous transuranic waste with neutrons, allowing it to be burned in a fission process. One-third of the resulting energy would be fed back into the fusion process and the remaining 700 megawatts would be fed into the grid. According to senior research scientist Swadesh Mahajan, at the end of the process, about 99 percent of all nuclear waste could be eliminated. “What we really want to do is to tell the world, Please allow the expansion of nuclear energy, through standard light-water reactors,” Mahajan says. “It’s the only thing that can be ramped up quickly enough to replace coal. Do not worry about the waste. Because we’re going to give you the solution in 20 years. We will make it in time.”
Now, this may all be a bunch of hooey. And if they figure the soonest they can do it is in 20 years then they have plenty of room to adjust their estimates. Pretty much the only things I can predict for 20 years from now are my age and the ages of people whose ages I currently know. But that doesn’t mean that all this money that’s being spent for this and that shouldn’t be spent on nuclear power plants. Stop crying about all the ‘danger’ and ‘radioactive waste’. You can put that shit in my backyard. Think how many fewer solicitors you would get if your yard was full of nuclear waste!
Anyway – what do you think about nuclear power? I say, if it’s good enough for Springfield, it’s good enough for us!