I get that you had to prioritize.  Start with your newer titles and your big grossers.  Then move on to the sci-fi and action movies with the great sound, and then the cult classics that you can package with extra features and sell to rabid fans for $40.  (By the way, what made you think you could sell a special edition version of The Rock for $40?  It’s not like it’s Evil Dead II.)

But eventually, you know you have to do every title, right?  It’s kind of your responsibility.  How much could it possibly cost to put a movie on a DVD and manufacture a couple thousand copies?  Can’t be that much because the technology is readily available for me to do this myself.  Rule no. 1 in technology is that if a person can do it himself, it’s really cheap for a company to do it in scale.  Are you worried it won’t sell well?  Call it a limited edition and double the price.  The eight people on the planet that want that movie will gladly fork it over.  Are you worried the movie is a piece of crap?  Guess what, they’ve been putting pieces of crap on DVD for years.

My issue is not your negligence or sense of self importance, it’s that you are robbing history of these movies.  VHS players are no longer being manufactured, and copies of these movies on tape are becoming scarcer and scarcer.  Soon, there won’t be any way to watch Speed Zone! That’s a crime.  That’s cinemacide.  You’re erradicating a piece of culture that seven, maybe six people hold near and dear to their hearts.  What gives you the right to say that Speed Zone! cannot live on in the digital age?  Do you realize what you’ve done?  You’ve cut every John Candy Movie Marathon short by ninety minutes.  You’ve robbed the world of one of Eugene Levy’s great performances.  How could you actively, consciously abridge the lifespan of a contribution to annals of culture?  Do you think Plautus intentionally destroyed the ending of Aulularia?  The five people who love Speed Zone deserve to have their needs addressed.  Hell, you made three other movies based on the same idea, starring mostly the same people, and those are on DVD!

This is bullshit.  You’re bullshit.  Put Speed Zone! on DVD so that I can rent it from Netflix and rip it for free.

“He’s really been in a downward spiral since those Wall-E posters started showing up around town,” said Short Circuit co-star Fisher Stevens. “I mean, you have to admit, the little robot does look a lot like Johnny…just a reminder that he hasn’t worked since the first Gulf War.”

Disney/Pixar executive Deborah Majors, was on hand to observe Johnny 5′s drunken tirade: “He just kept shouting, ‘Need input, laser lips? Wall-E’s mother is a f—ing snow blower!’ He was not the lovable robot I remembered from those movies. Wait…wasn’t he coated in gold at the end of Short Circuit 2 ?”

“If he didn’t look coated in gold last night, it’s because he wasn’t,” said Stevens. “Johnny sold all his gold plating in the summer of 1997 and blew it on cocaine and hookers within a month.” Add to that a whopping seventeen DWI charges and the picture becomes much clearer. “Well, it’s kind of hard to not get DWI’s when your legs are tank treads.”

As with many stars from the ’80s, Johnny 5′s lows have lasted much longer than his highs. Once the toast of Hollywood, Johnny Five is now another out of work robot actor sharing an apartment with the tiny flying saucers from Batteries Not Included . (from funnyordie.com)

So, I want to tell all those kids out there–the ones born after 2005–that they’ll never know how hard we Gen Y’ers had it.  I hope this website is still up when these kids are old enough to read.  I think I need to do this FJM style.

When I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

Children of tomorrow, you don’t know how bad it was.  We used to have to LEAVE THE HOUSE, go to the library, search the digitized catalog, and then go find the book on the shelf!  We couldn’t use Google’s vast eBook database to search the text of every single publication on earth.  We had to FIND THE RIGHT PAGE.

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter … with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

First, I should admit that I thought people stopped writing letters shortly after the First American Civil War.  Second, children of tomorrow, do you realize that we used to have to set down at our computers to write emails?  We couldn’t type them on our smartphones as we rode our hoverboards to the spacepark.

There were no MP3′s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

Back in my day, we used to have to search by the individual song that we wanted and hope that someone else on the peer-to-peer network had it.  We couldn’t search the vast landscape of the entire Internet for full albums and TV seasons, and we couldn’t use torrents to download from multiple people at once.  Downloads sometimes took HOURS.  And we could only fit 2,000 songs on our iPods, which couldn’t always remote control your house.

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it!

Get a load of this: Some phones only had 2 lines when I was growing up.  And they showed just the phone number and name of the person calling.  Not a customized holographic photo like your phones do now.

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Play station video gameswith high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like “Space Invaders” and “asteroids” and the graphics were horrible!

The video games we had when I was growing up were like Neanderthal tools compared to the shit you kids have today.  3D images had to be SIMULATED on a two-dimensional flat-panel HDTV, and you had to hold a controller full of buttons in your hands and different buttons corresponded to the various actions you could perform.  And only 4 people could play at a time, instead of 32 like you’re used to.

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating!

I have to take a moment to fill you in here, because this must sound very foreign to you.  Before the advent of 4320p ultra HD and petabyte Internet streaming, people used to have to go to a place called a “theater” where new movies were shown for a fee.  You didn’t pick them from the on demand list, you had to show up for a scheduled showing of the movie, and the floors were very, very sticky.

You never would have lasted 5 minutes in 2000, kiddo.  And you’d only be able to download half a song in that amount of time.

The Black MacBook
Benefits:
- Bigger processor
- Will run faster
- Costs approximately 3/5 the price of an equivalent white MacBook
Issues:
- Trouble “getting into” certain websites
- Most of the software on it will be stolen

The Yellow MacBook
Benefits:
- Incredible mass production
- Capable of incredible efficiency, especially when networked with other Yellow MacBooks
- Widescreen resolution is much better
- Smaller and lighter
Issues:
- Kinks in marketing scheme: “Made by children…for children”
- Runs on coal

The Brown MacBook (Eastern Edition)
Benefits:
- Oldest MacBook, long dated history
- Comes with a polishing cloth
Issues:
- No logic board
- Blows Up

The Brown MacBook (Western Edition)
Benefits:
- Incredibly low cost
- Works well in hotter, outdoor conditions
- Clever new packaging allows for many more units to ship via pickup truck
Issues:
- Difficult to keep clean
- Nothing happens when you press “h” key

The White MacBook
Benefits:
- Excellent for financial institutions and government
- Easily upgradeable
Issues:
- White MacBook does not network as well with Yellow, Black, or Brown MacBooks, despite prominent advertising to the contrary
- Will only perform at 40%
- Higher production cost than Yellow, Black, and both Brown MacBooks – while technically not capable of anything different
- No help-desk, the White MacBook doesn’t make mistakes

The Red MacBook
Benefits:
- Entirely organic
- Uses little to no energy
- Sales Promotion: First 1000 users to be taught alternative computing techniques (e.g. introduction to kernel)
Issues:
- Production floorspace previously devoted to Red MacBook, now almost entirely overrun by White MacBooks
- Roughly 6 exist in the marketplace, not easy to find
- Frequent guilt-inducing reminders telling users to empty trash
- Highly susceptible to Western viruses

More on this as it develops…
(Collaborative DB Team)

Ok… the truth of course is that Indie Rock has come to mean something entirely different. You can go ahead and google the sh*t out of the term looking for some semblance of a definition but it is simply a genre of music with distorted and blurred boundaries which work out quite nicely for the “real fans” who are free to subjectively judge which artists have or haven’t sold out according to their unfounded, elitist point of view.

How do you know if you’ve run into an indie rock elitist?
1. You’ve just been informed that your favorite bands are all sell-outs and so fake.

2. It has come to your attention that you’re just a part of the corporate machine**

3. You’re enduring an argument about the legitimacy of Neitzschean nihilism from a guy in his late 20s who runs the soundboard for Mercury Lounge and supplements his income as a barista at a coffee shop in Williamsburg because Starbucks is just so fake.

4. “Dude, you’re so fake”

**This may also be a hippie, the differentiating factor would be whether or not they have showered.

Meanwhile, enjoy the link below as Zach Galifianakis interviews the “most indie rocker” of our time… in the form of Michael Showalter.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/05/galifianakis_showalter_strive.html

Yes.

So I was somewhat surprised when I read that the show actually has a very un-predictable, un-formulaic aspect to it. And it’s the last second of every episode, literally. The show’s writer, Chuck Lorre, chooses to use the vanity cards (You know when a show ends and they remind you who produced it? That’s a vanity card.) as little personal diaries. The thing is, vanity cards usually only air for a second or two after a show ends, so you’d have to use some sort of magical time-shifting machine to actually read the entire thing. Luckily, that technology is readily available for about $9.99 a month from your local cable provider.

Shown at about 8:29 p.m. and 9:29 p.m. Eastern time, his Chuck Lorre Productions vanity cards feature an essay — usually about 100 to 200 words — on subjects such as meddling network executives, Hollywood culture and his own family drama. The messages can’t be read in full as they air, because they’re shown so briefly, but they can be read by viewers who have DVR technology with a pause button on their remote control. The cards have attracted a cult following, as well as the attention of network executives.

I have precisely zero statistics (Hey! That’s a statistic!) to support me, but I feel like DVR technology has been around for long enough and has made its way into enough households that TV types and advertising whatsits would start to alter their gameplan a bit. I’m waiting to see an ad on TV that is shown in split screen. The left side of the screen would be for regular type TV viewers stuck in the present tense, and the right side would be for time-shifting future watchers such as myself. For example, let’s say you want to advertise auto insurance. (They do some TV ads right? ) The left side of the ad would be your standard ad, and show some sort of car crash, in real time, and with sound, while the right side would show the same thing silently in slow-motion (which would appear as real-time while being fast forwarded through). Left siders get the added benefit of seeing a dramatic slow-motion car crash (a definite audience pleaser which also hammers the whole “seriously, get insurance” point home), and right-siders get to see a high-speed car crash Benny Hill style. It would be different, and people would talk about it. And that’s kind of the idea, right?

Oh, the WSJ article has a few samples of the vanity cards available, including an audio only vanity card in which Mr. Lorre plays a jazz guitar version of the Knight Rider theme he learned during the writers’ strike.