If you want to get lost down an Internet blackhole, you should take a look at the Periodic Table of Storytelling. It doesn’t help that it links to TV tropes.
You should hop over to their Leet World section if you ever get the chance. Weird to see so much work put into something you’ve written.
I’ve been watching this way too much over the last couple of weeks. Poor Superman. Always getting a bad, boring rap.
Fantastic quote on writing from Ira Glass, and one that proves to be a great comfort every now and then.
I really wish someone would have told me this a few years back, when I was less a writer and more like a gasping fish, lost on an unfathomable shore. I remember desperately wanting my words to catch up to my ambition, and the more I’ve output over the last couple of years, the more I feel like there’s actually some water under my fins, instead of endless grains of sand.
Keep closing the gap.
This TurboTax ad caught my eye the other day. Pretty impressed that they took something as boring as doing taxes and managed to create a super personal and charming ad out of it. As a marketing writer by trade, it’s cool to see when a company does a great job of finding a story to tell like this.
Also, Wreck it Ralph voices it. So that’s cool, too.
There are some things that are so Internet that you can’t even begin to describe them. I’m sorry not to have a better word for the bizarre organic phenomena that occur across this vast network of tubes, but I’m sure someone smarter than me will come up with one and make a billion dollars while I cry into my Voltron blanket.
In case you aren’t a Netflix subscriber, or you didn’t read that weird personalized e-mail from CEO Reed Hastings, you might have missed out on the news that Netflix is splitting DVD and Streaming not only into two plans — but separate businesses. Continue reading →
It’s very rare that I see something that stirs that special spot in my heart reserved for fond childhood memories, but it has been known to happen on occasion. As much as looking back on being a kid offers a mixed bag of whatever, there really is something magical about that place where imagination ran wild with unfettered gusto. To be a kid was to attempt the impossible on a daily basis, and much of that fire is missing as a guy in my late twenties that sits in a cubicle writing Web copy.
In the last week or so, I’ve hit two media examples that poked at those halcyon days of youth. Continue reading →
Long time since I’ve posted, but I’ve got a perfectly justifiable and no good reason for that named Halo: Reach. It has taken over my life, my sleeping schedule and my thoughts. Also, Seven Sons is hitting the home stretch so I’ve been focused on that.
Anyway, when I’m not doing those things I am laughing hysterically at this killer panda. Continue reading →
Lately I’ve been doing some ranting about derivative videos on the tubes, but here is a special one that manages to rise above even my disdain for them and the majority of their brethren. It’s a music video that tells the complete history of the Soviet Union to the theme of Tetris, and I think it’s something special that seems to have been largely overlooked.
This is probably because it didn’t have a cute nerdy chick in it, or because it is well done and clever. Who knows? Continue reading →
I apologize in advance about the rant-y nature of this post.
I’ll go ahead and say it: I’m tired of viral videos. I really am. Not viral videos in general, though. I’m tired of the weekly recycled “awesome fan made x trailer/short film” (x being some property like Doom, Batman, AntMan or what have you). This is a conclusion I’ve reached recently, and it’s caused me to look at online video in an entirely new light, like getting a bucket of cold Fortress of Solitude ice water thrown on my face: for the most part, viral videos have turned into a derivative pile of predictable drivel.
For years now, the Web has been heralded as some kind of wide open landscape ripe with potential for creative types to find a home for their exciting and original content. At times, we’ve seen just that: people that become a unique force in a way they might not have outside the tubes, whether they are comic artists, Web show creators or video game reviewers. But is the Web actually living up to this promise, or are we making backwards progress? Continue reading →
OK, I know I’m going to get called for a serious latepass on this, but I thought I might as well post the glorious Double Rainbow meme that’s been circling the Web like a satellite recently. This particular set of videos falls under the category of stuff that gets increasingly funnier every single time I watch it.
It really must be experienced in both respective parts: the original, in which a hiker freaks out about a double rainbow. Then, the remix, in which the audio from the first clip is auto-tuned. They produce in me a feeling that can only be called pure and unadulterated joy. Continue reading →