One of our very own Stocktonoids, Brian Sullivan, has come up with a great web project called “treefingers” which is really interesting and fun, and very unpredictable.

When you go to the site, you are greeted with several index-card size phrases that were contributed by previous visitors. You get to ”water” or “weed” the phrases – kind of a voting process, in which watering makes the phrase greener and weeding makes it browner (and less readable).

You can, of course, contribute your own phrase. The process of watering/weeding tends to, quite literally, weed out the spammy or obscene phrases (though, as you can tell by my screencap, some do get to linger a while). This is a communal pruning process that makes this feel like a Wikipedia in miniature — multiple editors clashing over the relative merits of these haiku-sized phrases — and a series of Facebook comments in isolation, with contributors challenging each other to be funnier, more risqué, more confessional, more… more, in a very tiny space, or risk deletion.

Sorry… it doesn’t work on Internet Explorer. Sullivan and his co-horts (Mathew Preziotte, Bilal Shaikh, and Brian Shlosberg) explain in a press release that they decided to favor the underdog browsers since, alas, the coding worked on them, and the time it would take to debug for the corporate dinosaur IE just wasn’t worth it — i.e. (no pun intended), no coding for The Man.

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Yeah, that’s right, I saw it, you didn’t.

For some reason, the new flick by Michel Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, which he also wrote) reached the Ritz Bourse here in Philadelphia before making it to the more mainstream places. I guess that makes me lucky — especially so, since I can be the first to tell you that… it… no, doesn’t suck, but was a bit of a letdown.

Ok, New Jerseyans, it takes place in Passaic (where I was born). My standard line is that they could have invited Kevin Smith in for dialogue help and maybe speech coaching — but realism was hardly the point (though slacker-style comedy might have been).

You probably know the story: the Jack Black character somehow becomes magnetized and accidentally erases the entire stock of VHS tapes that is the bread and butter of Mos Def’s store (owned by Danny Glover). (No, they don’t use their real names in this — I just have no memory.) So Jack and Mos, while the owner is away, are forced to remake nearly every film in the store to satisfy customers who might just let Danny know that Mos is incompetent. (Danny’s a bit slow himself… he had to take a walk across town to discover something called the DVD.) 

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Ok, maybe this is old news to many of you… but here is a game that, for a brief moment of my life, I became quite addicted to. It soothed my turbulent soul like strains of Sibelius would have King Kong (had he been able to hear it over the biplanes).

Maybe it was the awkward, yet haunting, Japanese accents on the soundtrack that says things like “Get ready…” (tripping slightly on the “r” as many Asians do) and “Quicken”; maybe it was the pulsing soundtrack that brought me back to gin-soaked nights in a Williamsburg bar when techno still seemed new; maybe it’s that the game is actually quite short — about three minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing, five if you kick ass and get to meet the major bosses — good for my “I really shouldn’t be playing video games” attitude. (But of course, I played — sometimes for a couple of hours, getting better and worse by turns.)

Maybe it’s the weird “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”-meets-Kurt Schwitters style poetry of the text – ”HONTO are,” anyone? — or maybe I just like blowing shit up? The mysteries of the human heart.

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A few weeks ago, Sara Silverman released a scandalous video on her boyfriend’s late night show, Jimmy Kimmel Live. The video made Silverman’s graphic relationship with Matt Damon public. She’s fucking Matt Damon. Jimmy was stunned and, I’m sure, crushed by the news.

I’m guessing that after weeks of crying and drinking, Jimmy pulled himself together enough to get even. (Read more…)

The Showtime series Dexter has made the clumsy descent to CBS and public television. I think it’s good and bad: It’s good because now everyone in America can see how great of a show Dexter is. It’s bad because now everyone in America won’t feel pressed to pick up Dexter on dvd to see it in all of its unedited glory.

The acting by Michael C. Hall as Dexter is really great and the rest of the characters hold their own, especially Jennifer Carpenter as his sister, Deb. The writing is good, the idea behind the show is awesome. I think it’s one of the best shows on television at the moment. I’m hoping this remains the case after CBS gets done pleasing all the censors and sponsors.

I watched the premiere last night, and it wasn’t that bad; I don’t think much was lost in translation. I did notice a couple of rough profanity substitutes. I’m not saying that “mother lover” is never used in anger, but I don’t hear it that much on the street. I’m concerned about further editing as the show progresses. Does CBS have a good track record with shows featuring serial killers, heavy gore, tasteful nudity, and realistic profanity?

Dexter airs Sunday nights at 10:00pm eastern on CBS.

(image flickred by twenty_questions)

Kosovo delcared it’s independence today, stating that from now it is is going to be it’s own self-governing nation and has asked for official UN recognition. Go, underdog, go.

Some people may remember Kosovo from the Clinton years. It was the tiny, backwater country in which NATO and the US led bombing campaigns against. Ironically, a particular salvo of bombs which would go down in history as the single most numerous amount of bombs dropped by US planes occured on April 20th, 1999.

You figure it out.

While the intent of the bombings was to clear Milosevic out of the country, it turned the Kosovar landscape into a veritable wasteland. It didn’t help that we used depleted uranium on our bombs. Some favor we did them. Luckily, NATO officially apologized for the bombings and the damage it did to the Kosovars and their home.

The country is offically seeking recognition from the United Nations. Serbia is not so happy.

I’ve been approached a few times now with people asking me, “Just how does this primary thing work?” In light of that, I figured I’d stave off the analysis slash angry ranting and give a quick explanation as to just how Democracy goes down.

The purpose of the primary is for each party to pick its nominee. Think of it like a quarter-final or a qualifying round. Each candidate campaigns in each state, trying to win delegates. This is where most people end up confused, and don’t feel bad; it took me a few tries to fully grasp this process.

A delegate is anyone who is selected to pledge their support for a given candidate, and there are a certain number for each state, depending on population. Hence, states like California and New York have huge numbers of delegates, and a state like New Jersey has a moderate number. In simple terms, when a given state has its primary, each candidate wins a percentage of the vote and gets a proportion of the delegates, and whoever gets the most delegates in said primary goes on to the general election.

But like everything in this whacky life, it is not that simple.

Delegates can pledge their support to a candidate. This means that they agree to support Candidate A no matter what. A given voting district can have all of their delegates support one candidate, so voting for Candidate B in that area would not matter anyway. Another way the votes get skewed is jerrymandering. This is when a concentration of one ethnic group or voters who always vote to one side is jammed into one voting district. For example, Obama can claim he won 80% of the black vote in Alabama, but that otherwise crushing lead amounts to only two or three districts, meaning he only gets a few delegates for a massive portion of the vote.

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Barely keeping afloat with that gambling addiction? This’ll sink the raft.

Intrade.com allows users to bet on a variety of topics they would usually only bet on with friends for like twenty dollars. With Intrade, the entire Internet is your friend and the bet can be your life savings.

I know I’ve been dying to bet on who’ll receive the democratic nomination and, by extension, what the voters of Pennsylvania will do at the polls. See, I know what they’re thinking up there. That’s what I plan to tell the bank manager when I try to get a loan.

Intrade isn’t perfect yet. Users still can’t bet on things like “how many fingers am I holding up?” and “I just picked something up. What is it?” But I’m sure they’ve got people working on that problem right now. How many people? Five? I think it’s five. I bet you it’s five.

(image flickred by Dominic)

I was sent this NY Times article with my stringent anti-social networking site psychosis in mind. Admittedly, it is a little weird being one of the few human beings, particularly when living on a college campus, who does not have any kind of online profile. I’ve had several complaints lodged against me that I am difficult to get in contact with because I lack said profile. As if dialing a number or sending a text message is hard.

But I digress: that really doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m sitting down to write about.

What I mean when I say Facebook steals your soul is that they retain information about you after you delete your page, indefinately. One Nipon Das (where the hell do these people, and their names, come from?) campaigned for two months to get his info taken off the site. Even after threatening legal action and being told his info was removed, he was still able to be contacted through Facebook. Is it wrong to be worried by this? With people killing themselves over MySpace and alleged talk of employers and cops looking through online data with the intent of passing judgement on people, do you really want that info out there?

For instance, do you really want all of those photos of you drunk off your ass at some dorm room party, or maybe that video you don’t know exists of you clumsily grabbing your crotch, cat-calling to your roommates hot girlfriend, complete with a little nametag that identifies you instantly to any random schmuck who cares to look, out there on the net forever?

The larger issue here is, of course, who owns the rights to your personal information. Personal info on the net is going the way of radio stations under Bill Clinton, television under the cable tv regime, and more recently XM radio. We the people no longer own the corporate-ized public radio waves, and because big business can hide behind, “Free speech is for everyone who can pay for it,” we silently let our rights get flushed down the toilet. The same is happening here when we sign our name over to indefinate display before the entire world.And as Mr. Das knows, even lawyers can’t help.

I watch The Biggest Loser on Tuesday nights whenever there isn’t a new episode of House on. Actually, that’s a lie; I watch the second half of The Biggest Loser on Monday nights; House is only an hour long and an episode of House that I’ve already seen is almost always better than watching people run on treadmills and chew Extra gum for two hours.

But The Biggest Loser does have its charms. Being a show about overweight people exercising, there’s always some crazy twist or ….plot? ..development to keep the audience interested. The other week they stuck chocolates in front of the contestants’ faces to see if they would eat any. I’m waiting for the episode where the producers drop the contestants in the desert and make them choose between dying from exposure and indulging their craving for banana splits.

Ridiculous entertainment aside, the best part about The Biggest Loser is the fat community that exists at the workout/torture/mind game camp. When else has anyone on that show been in a group entirely comprised of obese to morbidly obese people? Before, if one of the contestants was sitting at the public library and screamed “I WANT A CHEESE STEAK,” all the other people at the library would shake their heads, maybe even suggest the person find a treadmill and a bowl of lettuce, stat. But at Biggest Loser Penitentiary if someone screams, “I WANT A KEG OF BEEFARONI”, someone else jumps up and screams, “I WANT TWO KEGS OF BEEFARONI.”

I think this fat fellowship, even in the fucked up fat person eat fat person world of The Biggest Loser, is one of the best ways to lose weight. It must be nice to be accepted for who you are instead of having people slide a protective arm around their food when you walk into the room.

(image flickred by jslander)