Woah. Not sure quite what this is, or who these guys are, but this is pretty incredible — if nothing else just for the scale of the whole thing:
Apparently it’s a collaboration between Blu and David Ellis who are… well I’m not actually sure who they are. But they’re pretty amazing.
Thanks FormFiftyFive.
Apparently this is a big thing. This is the first time I’d seen it. Forest Gump in a minute:
Pretty hilarious. And kind of sums up the way I feel about the movie (and Tom Hanks two (!!!!) academy awards).
These guys have other ones too: 28 Days Later and Kill Bill. I like this one best.
And apparently there’s an ‘In 5 Seconds’ genre as well, although the only ones I’ve found of those are not so funny (which is sad. ’Titanic in 5 Seconds’ seems like a pretty easy layup).
Thanks BuzzFeed
Just saw this on Stereogum and I really like it. It’s just a beautifully shot, fun music video. Some of it feels a lot like Spike Jonze at his best:
I don’t know much about Fool’s Gold, but they sound like an interesting project…
Yikes. Don’t these guys ever learn? Not even after this and this?
Microsoft is now encouraging people to host “launch parties” to honor the release of Windows 7. No. I’m not kidding.
Now you too can help usher in a whole new era of mediocrity. Forget all those parties you threw to help Obama get elected. This is bigger. Much, much bigger. And space is limited so you have to act now. Hurry. Your multicultural friends of all ages are waiting.
Only Microsoft could make technology look even less appealing than late-night infomercial products.
I swear. Microsoft, next time you need an idea for an ad campaign or a promotion, just give me a call. Me and my friends in your target demographic have lost cocktail napkins with better ideas of appearing “hip” and “with it.”
I know Facebook has done some tweaking of their UI lately (most notably to get rid of those spiffy, but apparently very difficult to maintain, rounded corners on the pictures), but they seem to be getting a little careless in terms of what gets out to production. Working for a large company myself, I know sometimes things can accidentally come out of the oven a little before they’re cooked. I’m just surprised to see this from Facebook.
Check this out:
1. The logo is blurry. Maybe they’re trying to reduce the file size? But man. I think that’s a no-no. Maybe it’s worth the extra K or two to have the logo be sharp?
2. The borders on all of their photos in the (freaking annoying) Highlights section are totally out of whack:
Come on Facebook! Pull yourself together! It’s not the weekend yet! Put down the margarita, re-save your logo, tweak your CSS and THEN you can leave for your rafting trip. K?
This is a Cohen Brothers short that was made for Chacun son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema) — a short film festival featuring 3 minute shorts to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival.
World Cinema, the Cohen Brothers contribution featuring the amazingly talented Josh Brolin, is great (and apparently until recently, very hard to find). Have a look see:
Apparently a lot of filmmakers contributed to Chacun son Cinema including Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Roman Plolanski and David Lynch — and all of their films are included in the DVD. But somehow World Cinema was omitted.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, it’s now been released in Technicolor!
Thanks interwebs! And thanks VSL!
I know I’m not the first one to say it, but I really wish people were a little bit nicer online. Or more considerate. This “story” on Mashable kind of got my goat today:
Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad
So, yeah. If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday. There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade. These things happen. It was not a big deal. It was not the end of the world. The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days. Stop whining, internet.)
So fine. It happened. And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back. And Google explained the whole thing.  And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?
So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?
That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.
Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started. And they’re nice. And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).
There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging. That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media. At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.
I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s beef with George Hunka).
But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it? Try Facebook. Or Twitter.
Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say? In which case, maybe keep quiet?
UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day? The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them? That’s some great journalism. Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop! We have a replacement for you!
Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time. Or Twitter! Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error? Or a suggestion of how to improve it?