Beastie Boys at Terminal 5

From the one time I got to see them live, at a benefit show at Terminal 5 in 2008. RIP MCA, you will be missed.

Technorati Tags: beastie boys, mca, rip

American Reunion certainly doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It’s definitely American Pie (Now with 30 year olds!). It’s still the same cast of characters, just thirteen years older. It’s predictible at times and some of the jokes seem straight out of 1999, but you know what? I’m fine with that. This isn’t a great piece of cinema, but it’s entertaining. No, it isn’t The Hangover, or Bridesmaids, or an Aptow comedy, but that would feel wrong for this. American Pie was a movie of a particular time and trying to change the characters or the universe its in to fit the newer mold of comedy would feel wrong. American Reunion doesn’t really take any risks, but that’s ok as well. Sometimes a dose of the familiar is just fine.

Overall, I’d say 3/5 stars. It was entertaining enough and fun to revisit with these characters again to see where life has taken them since high school. It may not be warm apple pie anymore, but it’s still tasty.

Technorati Tags: american reunion, mero goes to the movies

Ok, Instagram is kind of cool. I use it. Look at me being trendy with pictures from my iPhone made to look like old timey and all that. Let’s dissect this, though.

Instagram has no revenue model whatsoever. The app is free. The social aspect of it is free. There are no ads in the app or anything. I’m pretty sure that if they started changing for the app or plastered it with ads, people would just leave it for something else. How do you figure out that this is worth a billion?

Theres also the question of base. Aren’t most of the people using Instagram also on Facebook already? An awful lot of people just end up pushing their Instagram pics to their walls as soon as they take them. You’re paying for an awful lot of duplication. Plus, there are a lot of users who like the walled garden approach that Instagram offers. Hell, a lot of these people were pissed that Android users get to be a part of the community, which was iPhone only until recently. They’re not going to want to be part of the Facebook mother ship.

Also, you would have to think that eventually Facebook is going to want to make the best parts of Instagram be part of the Facebook app itself. Take a picture with the Facebook app, put a fun filter on it, post it on your wall. It’s what a lot of people using Instagram do already isn’t it? What good is an app that’s not integrated into Facebook and lets you share with a lot of other services, including twitter and foursquare, which Team Zuckerberg would love to wipe out? I know it was said that Facebook would let Instagram continue as is, but face it: talk is cheap. I think it’s only a matter of time, and it’s the move that best fits Facebook’s strategy of being the timeline of your life.

So, long story short, Facebook bought a web service with no revenue model for a billion dollars. What the fuck is the world coming to?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Instagram, one beeeeeelion dollars

Do you know why I think this ad works so goddamn well? Honestly, did you even realize it was a commercial for a video game until the last 15 seconds or so? I know I didn’t. It’s a perfect fit for their tagline (“So Real It’s Unreal”) and plays off some very real emotions. I have some great memories going to games at Wrigley Field as a kid and I’m pretty sure that if the Cubs really did win the World Series, the celebration would be something like this. I know it would dwarf MJ’s six NBA titles, the Blackhawks winning the Stanley Cup, and those dirty Southsiders winning in 2006. In any event, this ad does its job brilliantly. It’s a great buildup to the final selling point, that this video game is very realistic (and as an owner of MLB 10 The Show, I would say it is). I’m sold.

Technorati Tags: chicago cubs, commercial, mlb 12 the show

Oh, yeah, all kinds of spoilers will follow from this point. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I had the good fortune to have only read the book a few days ago so the story was fresh in my mind as I saw the movie. Overall, I thought the did a pretty good job of translating the story to the screen. Things moved along fairly well for a two and a half hour affair.

The most important thing here is that I think this movie was very well cast overall. Jennifer Lawrence is a perfect fit for Katniss. I totally bought it. The kid who played Peeta was okay enough, but I will say that they aimed a little too much in the pretty boy direction for the Gale character. Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland (who I honestly thought was mostly retired at this point) all had great supporting roles.

The biggest thing that both helped and hindered was that they didn’t really do much with the book’s first person narration. It did help some of the exposition, which could get tedious in the novel and kept things moving (honestly, I don’t need a treatise on tracker jackers. They’re genetically engineered deadly wasps. Got it). However, it dulled some of the more biting parts that made the novel interesting. First of all, it made Katniss a lot less angsty, and that isn’t a good thing. Her angst was a good fit for the dystopian life she was stuck in and the choices she made as a result of that. The loss of it softens the edges on her character a lot. More importantly, I felt like it totally changed the dynamic of the romantic relationships to set up the inevitable love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. The book made it super clear that Katniss didn’t have much use for romantic feelings for anyone. She got that she needed to play along with the star-crossed lovers bit in the Games and even felt kind of bad for leading this kid on who was truly in love with her. I feel like that all got thrown out with the bathwater in the movie. Maybe part of it is that the screenwriters (or, in my best hopes, the studio suits) demanded a clearer love triangle since this shit is marketed at teen girls. Who knows. I think that part of the story suffered for the lack of it no matter what.

Overall, I’d say 3.5/5 stars. Good, solid entertainment that solidly kept to the book’s story and did a good job making us want more.

Technorati Tags: mero goes to the movies, the hunger games

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when allof God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

– Martin Luther King, Jr. from The Great March on Washington

It’s almost 50 years later, and this rings truer than ever. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever get here.

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Easily my most favorite Sesame Street celeb video clip. It speaks to the geek in me, obviously.

The thing with it, though, is that when it comes to playing games, you have to be invested. Let me explain. Nadine bought me Gran Tourismo 5 for Christmas. It’s good stuff. I like racing games, and the GT series has always been known for its realism and fun. So great. Tonight I decide that I want to try out the game. So I turn on the PS3, pop the disc in, and fire it up to find… a screen that says “Not so fast, you can’t use it until you update it.” sigh Plus, this update is huge. So it starts to download. An error comes up. Turns out my internet connection went down. Click OK on the error (or, in reality, hit the X key on the controller). Game comes up and says “oh hey, this would work a lot better if you install a bunch of data onto your system first”. Allow that, it takes almost 30 minutes. Grow old and feeble. Data install finishes. Game starts to launch and then says “oh hey, you know that update you started? We need to finish that.” Data starts downloading again. Looks like it’s almost done. Rejoice. Going to enjoy driving a virtual car on a virtual track. Update data installs. Get excited. hair starts blowing back in anticipation. Have world crushed when a 1GB plus update starts to download after. Lose desire to play game.

This isn’t the first game this has happened to for me, as I’m sure it’s not for others. The thing is that it’s frustrating. I admit that as big of a geek as I claim to be, I’m little more than a casual gamer. I got other things to do. I don’t even know if there’s a way for Sony to make this better in PlayStation 4 or what have you. Until then, I guess I’ll just stare at this download screen and go on with my real life.

Technorati Tags: geek, gran tourismo, playstation 3

This is just the leftovers.

That, my friends, is just the leftovers, and not even all of them. Party times at our place are good times all around.

Technorati Tags: alcahol