Millions of Web-Orphans.

-  Why do people start blogs if they are going to so quickly abandon them?  Is it an impulse thing?  I was directed recently (via message board sig) to a blog specializing in beer and rap music reviews; I was interested because I thought it was a really neat idea.  Arriving, I realized the damn thing hadn’t been touched in going on 3 years now.  And prior to that it had been updated far from regularly, like twice a month.  And here I am, feeling like a waste of space for not writing anything for three or four days.  A Google search led me to THIS page, an examination of statistical information from various sources tackling such things.  One report claimed that over 1 million blogs are abandoned after one day.  One day.  The same report said that nearly 70% of blogs had not been updated in 2 months.  It’s an interesting conflation of statistics.  The blog is alive and well… for those who blog.  Ha.  Which reminds me of advice I saw somewhere for being any sort of writer: “To be a writer — or, a good writer — one has to write.”

Relatedly: “On This Whole ‘The Web Is Dead’ Meme”

-  Drummers really like Soul Coughing a lot.  It makes sense I guess.

-  A site called Something Awful regularly hosts “Photoshop Friday” contests that can be a lot of fun.  Last Friday’s was titled “Supervillains In Politics”.  It featured some wonderful entries referencing everything from GI JOE to Austin Powers and Captain America.  Here’s Red Skull making his rounds, presumably in Iowa:

(Thanks for the heads-up, SuperPunch)

-  Apparently Tarentino is using the old Deadwood sets (they’re not really sets, it’s fully fleshed-out town) for his Western Django Unchained.  Fuck all that hype over the Avengers Superbowl spot, this is MY geek-out news.  One of my favorite TV shows ever (and probably the best Western TV show ever; definitely top 3) doubling as the environment for Tarentino’s next film, HIS first Western??  Good God.

- Another file sharing site has shut down, following Megaupload.  BTJunkie voluntarily closed it’s doors today, likely brought on by fear of federal jail time stemming from its creators.

“BTJunkie provided a search engine for Bit Torrent files and was one of the top five torrent sites with “dozens of millions of users a month,” according to TorrentFreak, a website which covers file-sharing news.

TorrentFreak quoted the unidentified founder of BTJunkie as saying that BTJunkie’s decision to close down stemmed partly from recent legal actions against Megaupload and The Pirate Bay, which faces legal action in Europe.

Megaupload was shut down by the US authorities on January 19 and seven people were charged in connection with what the Justice Department and FBI described as “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.”

-Sonny

Lazers & Gold Mining R’ Us.

-  “Hey, Drake, you own any Bruce Lee movies?”; “I got ‘em all on lazerdisc“… has got to be the most out dated line of any ex-SNL member’s comedy classic of all time.  Okay, that’s pretty specific I guess.  Know what this is from?  The 1996 Farley/Spade classic Black Sheep.  That’s Farley asking Gary Busey‘s retired-POW-now-living-in-school-bus character about the martial arts classics.  Looking back, watching it now, sure maybe it seems dated (hell, I was still probably playing NHL ’95 for the Genesis at the time) but it really isn’t that old.  Less than 15, more than 10.  But still, at the time lazerdiscs were the premium non-VHS/tape/reeled movie viewing device on the planet.  There’s no nostalgia for them, don’t get me wrong, and I’m sure as shit happy the DVD edged them out of the market (who needs a gigantic floppy disc looking movie the size of a vinyl record anyways?).  It is a shame what happens to one-side of a medium though.  We saw it again with HD-DVD‘s vs. Blu-Ray in what Wikipedia is calling the “high definition optical disc format war”.  Am inside the TRON universe right now?  What it comes down to is money.  Sony, the pushers of Blu-Ray just had more money to market the damn thing, and the inclusion of a player in it’s much-hyped PS3 was enough to make HD-DVD obsolete forever.  I wonder if Sgt. Drake collects HD-DVD’s now of classic martial arts films??

-  The long-dead Deadwood HBO series was about a lot of things.  Politics and corruption, law/chaos, architecture, gender, civil rights, even the rich history of American theater.  More than anything else though, to me the show was about American capitalism.  Looking back, one cannot say it’s a total indictment of capitalism nor does it hold the monetary system in a saintly light. 

A Whole Lotta “Speaking Of”.

Well – less than a year after she destroyed the chances Sen. John McCain and the GOP had to keep the White House, Sarah Palin has finally accepted an offer from a publisher for her memoirs, which are due in 2010.  HarperCollins is the publisher, which is owned by the over-reaching NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch.  That guy’s like a really wrinkled and Austrailian version of Lex Luthor.  Murdoch is also campaining to end free news on the Internet starting with newspaper websites under the NewsCorp umbrella.  Isn’t the whole point attracting views, which ups the hits per day, which ups the advertising fees, which makes NewsCorp money??  Then again, he does have a point in that sites like GoogleNews take the articles directly from the source sites, and display them WITHOUT linking to the source sites.  William Hearst is rolling in his grave with all this “Death of the Newspaper” talk.  Though he probably was already rolling once Citizen Kane asserted itself as the greatest movie ever made years after its release, and initial backlash.  Speaking of William Hearst: I was incredibly disappointed in finally reaching the “end” (though it’s not much of an END) of Deadwood which of course heavily features William Hearst’s father, self-made tycoon George Hearst.  And (as if the “speaking of” sequiter EVER got old… I’m such an idiot) SPEAKING OF Deadwood, here’s a pretty cool site about the real Deadwood over on Blogspot.  Holy linkies.  Adjourned.

-SonnyW.