LOLcats Official History

I like that the official (that is to say, Wikipedia) history of the term LOLcats involves both the term "recapitulated" and a 1905 photo of a cat in a dress.

Kareoke Machine Contest

I was contacted by the person organizing an online karaoke contest where you video yourself singing karaoke... In her own words:

KaraokeMachine.org (my site) is hosting a contest for people to submit videos of themselves singing in order to win an all-in-one karaoke machine.

 So, click on the link if you'd like to learn the details and participate (or just view hilarious videos of people who think they're talented enough to enter any kind of singing contest ('cause we don't get enough of that on TV as is).

Netflix Lives On - In its various forms

http://www.slate.com/id/2265755

Most of the article is dead-on, with....

... two notes:

1. Their (and everybody else's) streaming service is crap. The video looks like crap, and the audio is not 5.1 or anything like that (mono, most often). I know that a lot of people don't care about that, but looking forward that is unacceptable (3D?) and that is from whence I speak. Personally, given the choice I would never ever watch a movie streamed off the network instead of off a disc (CERTAINLY if the disc in question was blu-ray), even if I had to wait for it 2-3 days for it to come in the mail.

2. Their streaming service offers no extras (alternate languages & mixes / captions / commentary / making-of's etc etc).

#1 is a matter of network throughput. Given unlimited network bandwidth you can put through the 25GB (blu-ray average) of two hours or so that an HD movie requires. But in practice that's about an order of magnitude higher than even the best home networks can provide (and TWO orders of magnitude off from what my DSL in NYC gets me.. boo-hoo to me, and go figure).

#2 is a matter of software -- creating an end-user interface that allows you to hyperlink via the player / DVR / Apple TV off on-screen choices to various bits of video segments etc. That's not hard in the great/small scheme of things, just a drive to provide an alternate user-end interface to the legacy content of 14 years of standard DVD titles (a pure software driven DVD player -- in real time over the internet -- not likely given copyright panty-bunching).

So, we will continue to see a segmentation between "let me watch the movie (crappy, streamed)" and "give me the whole experience with the extras (full, off a disc)".

Michael Jackson: This Is It

Saw the Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It a couple of days ago. Very interesting. Turns out it consists of him coming out on stage and singing the opening theme song of "One Day At a Time" over and over again for an hour and a half until somebody in the audience pulled out a gun and shot him, and that's how he died. Very revealing.