Slacker Uprising

Michael Moores new film, Slacker Uprising, was released today into the wild. You can watch it for free online. It's about his 20-state, 60-city tour in 2004 to rally people behind Kerry. As he travels, he registers voters and gets pledges to vote.

As an experiment in releasing films online, it might prove interesting. The film itself is pretty awful, though. It's essentially a tribute to Michael Moore, and what a great job his tour did at moblizing voters in 2004. He's preaching to the choir, and it's not even a new song. Obama has already mobilized the larget get-out-the-vote campaign in history, and new voters are being registered in droves.

It seems like he could have made a great film, here. It would have been pretty easy to paint clear lines between the way Republicans attacked Kerry (or even McCain) in 2004 and what they've done in 2008. That might have made the film relevant.

Hopefully he can tell America what exactly happened in the Great Bank Collapse of 2008, because it sure seems like no one knows.

Everybody's doing it

Kottke and waxy today both link to a list of things they consider mainstream yet illegal (now that the Pirate Bay has surpassed 15 million unique peers):
1. pirating media/software
2. alcohol during Prohibition
3. speeding
4. marijuana
5. sodomy

I think the list is more informative if you put them in order of probable number of participants (at their height, for the prohibition one to be fair). I'll give them estimated percentages, even.

100%: Of them all, speeding is the only one that is completely universal. Everyone speeds.
50%+: Next would be sodomy. I would wager significantly more than half of America has committed an act of sodomy at some point.
30%: Drinkers during prohibition. Currently, about 60% of Americans drink. So we'll guess that number is a bit high for early America, and that not every drinker would break the law.
25-30%: 70 million adults over 18 have tried it. That's about 23% of the population, and doesn't include those troublesome highschoolers.
1%: Assuming that ALL of the Pirate Bay users are American, 15 million is an incredibly low number, just 0.05%. That's just Pirate Bay, though. Let's assume all other forms of piracy brings that total up a bit. It still doesn't really fit in with the rest of the group.

Listen to the podcast, no mo

This week marks the sad passing of my favorite podcast, GFW Radio. Originally the podcast for the Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows magazine editors and writers, it was far and away the best podcast available for videogames. All of the sections devoted to games involved well thought out commentary and critiques, much more than simple reviews. The non-videogame portions made it the most entertaining podcast I listened to, with meandering conversations on TV, or comics, or various fantastic/disgusting stories.

The discussions on the industry were fascinating, but at times frustrating. Since they were directly involved, they couldn't reveal full details of who they were talking about.

Sadly, it could not last forever. After GFW Magazine suspended operations, you could sense the bitterness of the editors. Ziff-Davis gave them positions in producing 1UP's online content, but it was not meant to be.

Last week, Jeff Green, former head editor of CGW/GFW, announced that he was leaving to join the Sims team at EA. This week, Shawn Elliot closed the podcast off entirely, heading for the greener pastures of Ken Levine's offices in Boston. The remaining cast members are good, but the two giants have left, and the podcast is dead. Nerds mourn everywhere. I wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors, and will keep track of them. They have earned a great deal of respect in how they handled games.

Ah, the old days

I used to have a real blog, with it's own website and semi-custom hacked-together CSS design. (Technically the CSS was put together like a Spore creature; no real work on my part, just putting the pieces in the proper places.) But Dreamhost starts charging actual money after a year of being basically free, and actual money forces one to consider if it's worth doing something that I wasn't 100% involved in. And so it died.

Perhaps it will return one day, rising from the ashes like a phoenix. In all probability, it will return and die and return and die, like Marvel's Dark Phoenix. Popularity won't bring the blog back, but perhaps the author will run out of new ideas for timewasters and resort to an old standby. For now, we stick with free.