So with Zemanta generating related links, photos + MrTweet recommending who to follow, and Twitter being the happy enabler of no longer than 140 character communication, it won’t be long till our communication is automated; Friends are automatically matched, posts automagically generated + the semantic web takes over. So given it’s not worth fighting The Intersect in all of us, I’m just grabbing some hyperlinks mashed up with my fave viewing of the last 48 hours. So many gigs, so little bandwith.
Red Riding : 9/10 Yorkshire Noir Fo Real.
Final out Next Thurs Eve UK Time/Friday Rest of World.
Red Riding, a 3 parts British series of investigations into abducted girls/killed women is so fn good I cant praise it enough. It’s not family viewing tho. Being a British equivalent of David Fincher’s Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman masterpiece Se7en. The 3 parter is subtitled the year it’s set : 1974, 1980 + 1988. The aesthetics on this are amazing, I can only imagine what it’s like at BluRay or even x264 quality using a decent monitor. The set of books now I’m hoping are like a British James Ellroy, and on my list of must haves when I have da$.
They are getting Rats to Trade Stocks, as they would obviously be better than most fund managers via Kortina : “Every day the rats were confronted with 100 different ticker tracks; the goal was to make them find out sound-patterns that humans are not able to recognize, and to predict the next market move after the last sound heard. ( I am currently working on a website to train humans too). Each time after listening to a sound, the rat had to choose between pressing either a green or a red button, green for “long” (if the prices were expected to move up), red for “short” (if they predicted a decline in prices). When they were right they received a small amount of food (the good rats became fat very fast) when they had taken the wrong button, they received a minor electric shock. Very soon it showed that some rats were doing outstandingly well: they developed a good ability to remember the patterns they were listening to; we needed them to react to real time data though.”
Kramer vs Jon Stewart : I’m still trying to get around to watching this 8 minute video that the blogosphere is awarding to Stewart. Or read about the womyn they should have listeened to not Greenspan and his pals : “In 1997, Brooksley Born warned in congressional testimony that unregulated trading in derivatives could “threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it.” Born called for greater transparency — disclosure of trades and reserves as a buffer against losses. Instead of heeding this oracle’s warnings, Greenspan, Rubin & Summers rushed to silence her. As the Times story reveals, Born’s wise warnings “incited fierce opposition” from Greenspan and Rubin who “concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market.” Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn’t know what she doing and she’d cause a financial crisis. (A senior Commission director who worked with Born suggests that Greenspan and the guys didn’t like her independence. ” Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.”"
Unfinished Fiction by David Foster Wallace : I was holding my breath when reading about DFW’s unfinished, drove him crazy latest fiction. We await with reverence via Mercury News : “Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, said that he had a tentative agreement with Wallace’s agent to publish “The Pale King” in the spring of 2010. The unfinished novel, Max writes, was in part Wallace’s attempt to move beyond the “self-consciously maximalist style” of “Infinite Jest.” “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Max quotes Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, as saying. “It was different from what he had written before,” said New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, though it’s also clear that some of it recalls the expansive, trick-filled Wallace many readers came to love. The characters in “The Pale King” are Internal Revenue Service agents in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of “mindfulness” — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should be “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
Pete Doherty on the other hand is in a happy non dead place : ‘“I get very paranoid. There was the time I thought terrorists were on my roof, trying to break in. You can laugh, but it was scary. In my mind they were outside trying to get me. “When you have the crack shakes, you think everyone you know is going to kill you.”‘ BTW as I type this I’m watching my fave Saturday morning 23 minutes show another Brit #FreeAgents S1E5, which starts with the recently separated homeless talent agent Alex, meeting with coworker supporting lead’s accountant to which when asked what The Plan is for his life :
Free Agents S1E5 : “The Plan, well um, The Plan, Step 1 of The Plan obviously, was to walk out on my family, and have a semi-nervous breakdown. Big Tick, nailed that. Two - I’m thinking; Just See - What Happens. That’s about as far as I’ve got with The Plan.”
Skins - 9.2/10 : Love Love Love It!
Cant think of a fault… across 3 series.. when u start with a new cast so u can focus on same age bracket - genius. I wish they’d make a film of it or by same people. As they r fn brilliant. And so few people watch this show… preferring to Buzz about how conflicted they are about Dollhouse or breasts on Underbelly (the latter being vgood the former not) Anyway, Skins and SidnNancy below Effy roolz so bad. Soon I’m going to sit down and watch Season 1-3 back2back.
Skins own Nancy.… it is a bit of a fascist regime being part of GenY.
So is Effy bulimic, drug addicted or up the duff. Probably all three but the bonus will be having Cooks child. So there will be a termination.. and what will happen from there ? Do they replace cast again ? In which case she may die from termination complications. But that story would be too conventional for Skins. They do it harder.
So we’re off on a camping trip…. this can only end badly!
Smaller Orange Vantage or Bigger Black DBS Aston ?
Effy - the one remaining cast member from Series 2 (well one of two if u count Panda) never gets more than a few hours of the life she wants, then she hits self destruct mode.
BTW totally unrelated but Postrank really helped me out this week.. their product of blog algorithm popularity filtering really works.. I am non programmer hear me code thx to Postrank or Aiderss as i prefer to call em:)
It always ends with tears or bruises… I’ll drop in some links ere after a cawfee. Dave Winer’s twitter piece is worth a read, there does need to be something other than Twitter 
“Bottom-line: This isn’t the way the Internet works. The guys at Twitter should know this. I think they’re living in a bubble, and creating one at the same time. No one likes someone who pops the bubble while it’s still building. So be it. We need to get that power out of their hands, or they need to disclaim it. They’re such a small guy, it’s really puzzling why they would do something that alienates so many. Most people won’t say it, for the obvious reason that their business interests prevent them from. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said.“
Damages - 9/10 S2 Roolz. Every1 Has an Angle.
They stepped up the cast so they could deliver same continuous flash forward/back state of double/tripple/quad angle playing. The Wire Lester Freamon is pretty much architect of S2, I wonder if he will be killed. If u assume Ellen and Glenn Close need to live.. but Lester and William Hurt are likely guest stars for S2 and therefore may die.. what will happen to the rest ? One FBI is dead, Pete - Pattys Crim Dirty Deeds Uncle is dead.. and what about Wes an ex police who is doing Ellen but has a contract to kill her to get out of something corrupt he did. I hope he kills the guy who was editor/sub at The Wire S5, the hitman who is the father of the Fangrrl on Flight of the Conchords. Oh and what will happen to Walt Kendricks - the closeted Police Commissioner on The Wire.. who in #Damages the evil yet dumb East Coast establishment owner, who is always a step behind but has brutal power and protection. Anyway just watch it already.. but u have to watch Season 1 first.. I wish I could watch it all again…
Just as every1 has an angle on Damages, the Australian online industry has 2 angles says Mark Jones in his very good Marketing Love in Piece on Filtered Media : Digital Agency who sell display, sponsorship, websites, search engine optimisation or Social Media Consultant. The former supposedly I guess via search want performance marketing (in reality not so much unless pure SEO/M) while the latter talk ‘brand conversations’ - Altho they havent usually worked in brand management for a major or startup company. In yesteryear they would have worked in a traditional agency hehe. Anyway all these people were at Ad:Tech + Aimia awards and wrecking the fk up of twitter. Ooh look ma I can use a hashtag. How kewl is this backchannel not, whatevs. There really better be something after twitter. It’s gr8 the mainstreamisation, but there is goin to need to be some fracturing to keep group sizes a good fit.
David Lee’s Ad:Tech preso on Transparency : It all sounds good till u have to implement it.. or walk away from money/work/clients that dont want it. Easier to talk than walk. But nice pictures/preso that said. Really wish presos from conferences had audio attached.
Wes in Damages is vkewl, and he’s the sheriff in the amazing Deadwood : Now the lead of Deadwood Shane McGowan has a new show coming out Sunday in America called Kings, which I’m interested in checking out. Via Sepinwall on NJ.com : “In “Kings,” NBC’s contemporary re-imagining of the Old Testament story of David, Goliath and King Saul, Goliath is an enemy tank, the slingshot is a grenade duct-taped to a wrench and the king’s son is party-boy magnet for the paparazzi. The concept of translating classic tales into a modern context is by now so familiar that it’s almost a surprise when a new Shakespeare adaptation isn’t set in the 21st century. But where a project like Fox’s short-lived “Skin” (”Romeo and Juliet” in the LA porn industry, complete with Ron Silver barking, “His father is the district attorney!”), borrows the traditional framework and little more, what sets “Kings” apart — for good and maybe for ill — is how faithful it tries to stay to both the content and the spirit of the original. ”
Kerpoof! A Lesson in Focus : Own a specific demographic with the right featureset and Disney may acquire you, in this case the 3-8 yr old set. Looks obvious in retrospect. Alot harder when in it with the doubters. Kudos. Focus + Features yo’all. Via Colorado Startups : “Krista and her team did a fantastic job bootstrapping Kerpoof. They flirted with raising money a few times, but never really needed to. They funded the company by doing some lucrative consulting on the side, signing up early customers and landing a grant or two. All the while, they were building some fantastic technology that really appealed to youngsters. If you have some kids in the 3-8 year old range and you haven’t checked out Kerpoof, have them give it a try.”
Life on Mars US version - 6.2/10
Started off really strong, love the casting, and the aesthetics… but the overall story line its a bit blah.. but having watched UK Life on Mars + Ashes to Ashes upon whic its based, plus the US series.. they all suffer from an overall bigger picture at the end of each series or the show itself. It’s one of those time travel issues.. which makes u realise how amazingly they are navigating it via Daniel in #Lost ! Although is Space Travel different to Time Travel ?
I agree with Clique Clack on the show + latest episode with Showgirls/Bound Gina Gershon : “With only three episodes left, things continue to run at a snail’s pace with this show to bring us to the finale. There’s little that could have been done, though, since these episodes were likely shot before the word came down from on-high that the show was not getting a renewal. I just today realized that the finale episode will air on April 1st. Hopefully that’s just a coincidence and we’re not going to be in for a big joke when this all comes down … that is, unless the joke is: “haha, we’re not canceled and this isn’t the end!” Actually, that would kinda suck too. It’s tough to come up with a theory that sticks, based on all of the “evidence” thrown at us these past 14 episodes. The latest clue seems to point toward this all having to do with space travel.”
Chuck - Solid 7.2+/10 for Season 2
Now get the girl and the Intersect out of yer Head
If you are into Chuck : The map of the Intersect below that Chuck has (Life Charlie Crews style) behind his Tron poster (that his dad gave him and may of invented the intersect the forums say?) Anyway the flashy map is up at NBC, vkewl.
As usual gr8 review of last ep (S2E16 ere) which roold, over at Sepinwall :
“Just so you know, I am going to get this thing out of my head one day. I will. And when I do, I’m going to live the life that I want with the girl that I love. Because I’m not going to let this thing rob me of that. I won’t.” -Chuck Bartowski
