The zen master speaks
Is there anything that could possibly be better than being taught how to blow cigarette smoke rings by a british drag queen right after she rolls out of bed at the crack of noon?
I didn’t think so.
I love the internet, I love the internet, I love the internet, amen.
Dear Blogo-Podo-NewMediosphere,
Ok, look. I understand that it can be fun to get some drinks or a couple of joints, sit down in your basement around a microphone and shoot the shit. I also understand that the “basement” may be metaphorical because your friends live all over the fuckin’ place and you can only shoot the shit on Skype. I’ll even forgive the fact that you upload these inane conversations to the internet and call it a “podcast”.
But for the love of god, just own the fact that your audio is going to sound a little shitty. Layering bad CC dark ambient music under the talking is one perfectly acceptable way to forgive a myriad of sins. Sending 45 minutes of conversation through an echo filter to make everyone sound like you were talking in a cave made entire of pixels is just a dick move.
Stop doing that now, please.
Sincerely,
Mer
What do you get when you cross-reference archive.org with the cannonical guide to culty b-grade midnight movies? You get the most excellent collection of public domain schlocky cult films available, that’s what.
Got a little free time to kill? Go play with this collection of 18 interactive musical flash toy… thingies.
Free classical music. Just go.
Hey, man, you’re going to a website that plays a recording of an old vinyl record to learn how to speak hip? That is the squarest thing ever, man.
You did know that viral videos are big business now, right? They’ve got some pretty nifty shit, too.
You are a robot, and you must escape the house. Play a kickass puzzle-solving game. Get to the Gateway.
Two compound words: Stickman swordfights.
Distraction. It’s a game.
And finally, I declare this psychopath to be the spiritual heir of Bob Ross. Public access FTW!
That there is a collection of more than 20,000 educational and industrial films available for free on the internet is perhaps not shocking. That some dude collected virtually all of these by himself in their original celluloid goodness might be. And thank god for him and his website, AVGeeks.com. It’s fun, and I love it. To get you started, here’s one of my favorites, a little propaganda piece for the protestant work ethic.
An Andrews Sisters hip-hop remix of the song “Give Me Some Skin”. It’s a little bit dirty and a little bit genius.
Yeah, yeah, I know, internet predators and child abuse and kiddie porn are serious like a heart attack. Even in Duckburg. This should be enough warning that you need to watch this at your own fucking discretion.
Gawd save me from the search engine traffic I’m about to receive.
source: Unique Vids
Hi! Miss me?
Ok, so, history class. Lame, right? Usually. But sometimes, the teacher posts questions that are just asking for it. I just finished an assignment for my Ancient History class, and I had to share. For any of this to make sense, you really need to watch the YouTube clip linked in the second paragraph. That I forgot to mention this to my classmates? A calculated attempt to see if they’re actually paying any fucking attention.
How is Rome treated in movies? How does this compare to the reality? If you answer this question you must refer to specific films.
In the history of film, Rome has a rather spotty reputation. From Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar to that modern classic Ben-Hur, Rome is cast as a great, creeping infection, bearers of conformity, brutality and injustice. To help appeal to any remaining anti-colonialist sentiments in the American population left over from the Revolutionary war, the Romans are always cast with either British actors or New Zealander actors with plausible British accents. This helps to set the tone of malevolence and danger, both traits that Rome should posses in the eyes of directors and Elizabethan playwrites.
In the modern classic film The Glory of Rome, available here if you would like to watch it in full, we are presented with an excellent opportunity to critique most of the common errors of epic Roman film making.
The first, most glaring error we see is the odd insertion of Latin into the conversation between Decimus and Quintius. It does not seem particularly unusual for the Roman elite to have been multi-lingual, but it’s rather unlikely that English was among them.
This film is unusual, in that the hero is also a Roman, obviously Americanized to appeal to the target audience. Traditionally, films about Rome tend to star heroes that are either slaves or persecuted Israelites.
Another note, on sets and settings. Hollywood traditionally spends lavishly on it’s epic projects, and most of that money tends to go towards sets because, for economic or artistic reasons, the studio would build all setting locations on their lot. An unfortunate side effect of this policy is that outdoor settings were often assembled on sound stages, giving ancient Rome a decidedly airless, claustrophobic feel. While this may be a good quality to evoke when filming one of the most overcrowded cities in history, it’s rarely put to good effect, and The Glory of Rome is no different.
The historical accuracy of Roman epic films can generally go in one of two directions. Either the writers will draft scripts wholesale from the period historians, which generally results in rather stilted dialog on screen, or the writers will sacrifice historical accuracy for narrative engagement. The Glory of Rome obviously falls in the latter category. We’re presented with an exciting tale of political intrigue and family loyalty, but the historical veracity suffers greatly. For instance, the footwear on the characters obviously comes from a later period than the one being documented, and the writers seem to have combined the stories of the Julio-Claudian emperor Tiberius with an entirely fictional Wikipedia entry drafted by a serial griefer known to the wiki-editor community to be unreasonably silly.
Most unfortunate of all, however, has to be the characterization of the Roman emperors as cruel, despotic and power-hungry madmen. Tiberius was, in reality, a fairly competent emperor who endeavored to work in cooperation in the senate, but due to traditions of this genre, he is recast as a character more reminiscent of inbred, unstable French royalty than anything genuinely Roman. It is simply patently untrue that Rome suffered from chronically insane emperors. Not only is it well documented that some were infact very well liked, but it’s highly unlikely that Rome would have reached the heights of civilization and culture that it did if that were actually the case.
On the whole, Rome does not get a fair shake in Hollywood’s reels. Mostly, it exists as a convenient backdrop that will lend an air of aristocratic menace to any character story and it’s personalities and images serve as little more than convenient villains from central casting.
Only a journalist, reporting on the Aussie public radio, would have the balls to suggest that Journalism is one of the great cognative achievements of human evolution, right next to Science and Democracy.
The hell, institutional journalism? You are repeatedly the only one who thinks so highly of yourself.
