Archive for the ‘commentary’ Category

Review and Commentary: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

So I am not a geek, or expert, or anything in the world of Anime. I don’t even claim to be one on television, or on the internet. But every so often, I decide to throw one into my Netflix queue. I have had “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” sitting on top of my TV for a few weeks now, along with a few other DVDs that I’ve been meaning to watch. So I decided to pop it into the MythDora box (which also happens to be my DVD player) and watch it. Well, I can now see why Netflix recommended this movie.

It is a tale of struggle, of conflict, and of a fight. A fight between factions and a fight for the planet itself. This is a movie that I would highly recommend anyone out there seeing. It’s a movie that I think that everyone out there could learn a thing or two from.

Even though this anime was produced in 1984 it has a lot of parallels as to what is going on in the world today. The endless warring that our current president has dragged us into in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fight for the survival of the earth. The plight of the people who are being driven from their homes, both from war abroad and trouble at home.

I think we all need to sit down and watch this. Learn from Nausicaa and calm down the rage in the world.

If I were a movie critic, and I don’t even pretend to play one of those, I would definitely give this 5 stars. Now go forth and add it to your queue.

-Adam

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RIP: George Carlin

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Sad news out of LA tonight… Comedian George Carlin has died. (Cut for language)
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I don’t get it…

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Why do people write blogs and then don’t allow commenting? There are a couple of blogs I have in my RSS reader that are like this. It’s annoying, especially if I have an opinion on a subject. Blogs are not meant to be a one-way media. TV, newspapers, radio… Those are all inherently designed to be one-way, the internet, however, is not. It’s bi-directional. Look at all the success that social media has because of this! Of course, some people at least give you the ability to do a track-back. I mean, that’s at least a start, but in reality, it just means I have to write a blog post just to respond to that blog post, and honestly, if I have a short reply, it seems to me that it’s a waste of my bytes to respond on my blog.

A good example, today, is on Seth Godin’s blog. He posted about ignoring the “no user serviceable parts” sticker on things. I’d love to comment over there that ignoring that sticker is pretty much how I learned the ins and outs of my computer, but since there’s no “post comment” button, I have to write this reply to say that.

Honestly, I’m not picking on Seth here… He just happened to have the first example I stumbled upon.

p.s. Feel free to comment… I leave them on, though, I think WP auto turns off commenting after a certain period of time to deter spam. I could change that, however, I was getting LOTS of spam on old posts. It’s a manual switch because I don’t have the plugin.

Cap. Times moves to online publishing, Madison freaks

Friday, February 8th, 2008

Holy crap. I’ve never seen so many people flip out because a newspaper was stopping daily printing and re-focusing as an online publication (with a twice-a-week print run, partially distributed with the other paper published in the joint-venture).

Yes, I understand the Capital Times was one of the last remaining afternoon newspapers in the country (and the better of the 2 papers in Madison) but times change. More people are reading news online versus in print anyway, so why doesn’t it makes sense that Madison’s progressive paper move to an online publication???

I’m seriously, by the way, asking that question. Why shouldn’t they go online? From my perspective, it makes perfect sense. You go where your readers are. If more people are reading online than in print, by all means, go online. Print media is going the way of the dinosaur. Besides, this is Madison, we’re all “down to earth” here and this will save countless numbers of trees and reduce the amount of paper that’s wasted publishing something people aren’t picking up anyway.

Local Reaction:
Dane 101
Caffinated Politics
The Isthmus
The Hippie Perspective
Madison.com/Cap. Times — Comments section of article

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Who says Pownce is dead?

Friday, December 21st, 2007

So TechCrunch has decided that Pownce is headed for the dead pool. They’re so damn sure that Twitter has won in the micro-bloggin/status-posting/whatever-category-they-are field that no one else can touch them. I’m not so sure about that. The biggest problem with TechCrunch’s statement is they forget to take into account that Pownce is still in closed, invite only beta and has not even made their public launch yet. Honestly, I think Mike Arrington is just really hoping to see Pownce fail because he doesn’t like it. Well, Mr. Arrington, I’m here to respectfully disagree with you on this. Click “read more” for the for the rest.
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