Unmissable – CollegeHumor churns out quite a bit of funny videos, and here’s a real gem:
It’s a brilliant, hilarious take on how Minesweeper (yes, the Windows game) would look like if it was in real life – wait a minute, more like reel life – in a typical Hollywood blockbuster.
This summer, Minesweeper the Movie comes to a theater near you!
I stumbled upon this very cool project that’s a mash-up between a song file and pictures from Flickr. The idea is simple and captivating: as the song is played, pictures from Flickr are flashed according to the words/lyrics based on their tags. So you get a nice music in the background, while enjoying (somewhat?) relevant but random images. The interface is pretty cool too ~ you can drag them around just like a pile of real photos.
Try it out – it’s a little heavy though (~3MB).
This really smells like greenwashing to me, but for what it’s worth here’s the story: the movements of the clubbers and dancers on the floor are harnessed as electricity by the floor (loaded with springs and such?) – the electricity garnered are used to power itself (the music, the lights, etc).
I am deeply skeptical about this – given the exorbitant amounts of energy that these hundred-decibel, bass-thumping, strobe-flicking, juice-guzzling contraptions uses in any typical day, versus the actual amount of electricity that can be harnessed: it just doesn’t seem logical at all.
And yet it seems that these are some of the most visible or publicized ways to achieve the green agenda – massive undertakings (think of the installations and how much extra energy/resources are required to produce them) with questionable actual effect: my take is, everyone just want to feel good that they’re doing something. Whether it’s really green, well – that may not be so important after all.
I know the title doesn’t make sense, but really, someone should implement this in ALL cinemas – how often do you see people so excited about this usually-boring time? That’s probably an even more engaging experience than the movie itself!
Haha, amusing, and actually pretty cool watching these hardcore fans making themselves Transformers! (I sense I’m pretty obsessed with Transformers these few days … )
The last thing I thought I’d ever be interested in on the planet is opera (the art, not the browser). But Paul Potts, the winner of the talent show Britain’s Got Talent enchanted me – somewhere between his earnest delivery and incredibly emotional singing voice, I think he captured the dreams and imagination of the millions who voted for him, and many more (like myself).
He’s a mobile phone salesman – looking nerdy, with the missing front tooth – these definitely doesn’t make the best first impressions for a talent contest. When he starts singing, you might go “oh well at least he’s not bad”. But when the tune turns into some of the most expressive parts of the song, my hair stood – and it’s just a great feeling looking at how he has remained humble and deeply appreciative of his talents and the support he’s got, and if you look through some of the clips, seeing him grow in confidence in himself.
This is definitely a great, welcome break from the typical talent shows whose sole ethos seem to be superficial glamor – this competition truly brought out a winner who’s talented, and definitely inspiring. Bravo!
This video charts and describes some of the past events that we’ve seen – traditional media (whether content or advertisements) being displaced by new technologies and new perspectives of how information is passed on: from a hierarchical, top-down style to one in which the masses themselves are both the producers and consumers of information – hence the term “prosumers” (a different definition from the market segment of expert/professional consumer users).
There are some claims to what the future holds too – these are pretty bold, but it does give some sense of the revolutionary, paradigm-changing nature of the world that we live in – the transient nature of what we may have considered to be immovable and anchored firmly within the very fabric of society – things like television and radio.
On another note, I think the accent of the narrator is somewhat addictive too!
Depending on your interest and sophistication in Western portrait art appreciation, this video may be artistically heavenly and awe-inspiring or downright creepy. Unfortunately for me (with my non-existent understanding of western art) it’s more of the latter – it’s interesting though how the paintings seem to come to life in three dimension as they transform from one piece to another.
The media landscape today’s definitely a vastly different one than just twenty years ago. Effective advertisements of yore were mass-blasted through the conventional channels: TV, Mass Print, radio, etc. Most of the time, the effectiveness of the campaign scaled rather proportionally with your pockets.
With recent developments in technology, we’re seeing the emergence of a whole new ballgame. We can now skip past the ads in TV program segments. We probably don’t even watch TV all that much – preferring to get our stuff through the Internet, sans advertisements, at our own time and pace. We’re freed from the confines of having to sit through commercials, infomercials – we can effectively filter them now.
What, then, happens to the conversation between the advertiser and the consumer? This video explores.
Here’s an amazing effort by a professor in a university to illustrate what copyright means. The entire movie was narrated by a continuous montage of narrative derived from snippets of Disney’s movie (which perfectly illustrates the principle of fair use as satire). It’s quite refreshing to see this rehash as a retort to the sometimes absurd legal measures taken by copyright owners like Disney! It also shows how money and power corrupts since by using money gained from copyrighted work, a portion of that money was (and still is) used to pay (bribe) our politicians (congress and senate) to continually extend the copyright time limits. The whole intent of limiting this was to spur new ideas and work, however, as with may things, we the people let this happen by re-electing the bribed politicians.
