Skip to main content

A YouTube kind of evening

At work, I don't watch video. It's one of the policies I have to so I can stay focused on work. Tonight, I find myself with free time late at night for the first time in a while. There is nothing else to watch, so I'll review various items on YouTube that I pinned during my daily search routine.

They are making a film version of Watchmen, one of the best comics of all time. A lot of people are a bit concerned about how they'll be able to make a movie out of the 12-part series. Yet, the producers created an interesting contest. They invited filmmakers to make commercials for the various products that you see being advertised in the fictional 1980's in which the story takes place - a world in which Richard Nixon is still president in 1985. Some of the winning entries include this one, which I thought was the best of the four shown on this post at i09:



I almost never watch anything on YouTube, but I ended up on the homepage for some reason the other night and watched this amazing little piece of entertainment. I want one of these things. This is the kind of thing that reminds me the world can be a good place if we let engineers apply their vision to things like this. Maybe our future Cylon overlords won't be so bad if they can get a groove on:



Finally, I just watched this odd thing from either Sesame Street or the Muppets. I don't care to look up which. The site where I got this, io9, has a whole bunch of them in this post. I don't know quite know what to make of it, but I think I'll stick to having just watched the one:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Sean, the robot is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time. I want to make one but the website says it is 750 dollars worth of parts. Boo
Sean Tubbs said…
Yeah, pretty steep indeed, but it would be a fun hobby to get into. I wonder if any one is doing anything like this around here. Robots are fairly spooky, imho.

Popular posts from this blog

Running as sense-making

It's going to be a stressful day. I got up at 7:00 AM to start work and I could sit here in front of my computer for the next 10 days and still not get it all done. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but I'm prone to that awful habit when I'm under stress. I'm under stress at the moment as I try to balance work, my other work, and my need to run six miles or so every other day. In 14 minutes my feet will hit the street and I'll be off. No phone. No e-mail. Just me and my feet. I'm even going to skip the iPod today so I can hear the birds, and so I can concentrate on my surroundings. I don't know where I'm going to go. I know I'll leave the condo and will turn left up Commonwealth Drive. From there? I don't know for sure, but I can guarantee you the day will become a lot less stressful.

What happens next after Facebook?

I just completed a long day at work in my new job. I worked on the Downtown Mall to get ready, and felt charged by the snow falling. It's winter now,  my favorite season, and I wanted to just watch it happening while I prepared two public comments I made at the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors meeting. I didn't want to put the above on Facebook, but that's the kind of status update I used to feel comfortable rattling off without any thought. When I joined the site, I was a reporter for Charlottesville Tomorrow. I think. I think that was back in 2008 or so? At the time, I had gotten so used to posting on this blog, which I consider public record. What I have written on this site since 2005 or so is a document of my life during that time.  I stopped posting here on a regular basis a long time ago. I would post items to Facebook, in part because I wanted a larger audience. I wanted to communicate to more people than I could reach here, and I wanted interaction.

Video builds the radio guy

I'm watching the tail end of the debut of Max Headroom, one of those shows from the late 80's that seemed so amazingly different, refreshing. The premiere revolves around an advertising conspiracy that's killing people. When I was a kid, this seemed so futuristic and somehow important. A television show was critiquing television practices. Now, the irony comes in because I'm watching this show on Joost , which is a new service created by the makers of Skype and KaZaa. There's advertising, of course, but it seems so seamless, you hardly notice it. A friend of mine sent me an invite today, and there's a ton of content here that I can watch legally, as often as I want. And, the picture is pretty darned good, full-screen. Everything is changing, and changing fast. Steve Safran of Lost Remote was recently a guest on Coy Barefoot's show and continued preaching the gospel of convergence, and Joost is so far the best (legal) implementation I've seen. It lacks