Category: Entertainment

I’ve been having a blast recently engaging in a unique form of multimedia… ah… edutainment that I thought I’d share with the group.

If you haven’t heard of the 33-1/3 Series of books, each of which explores a single influential album of the past forty years, you really should check ’em out. It’s an awesome concept and some of the titles are brilliant. I’ve been buying one of the books, ripping or downloading the album it covers, and then listening to the recording on my iPod at night as I read the text. Most of the books are written so that each chapter covers a track on the album. It’s fun to read about a song’s context, composition, and recording and then listen to it. It can really get you inside the music in a very deep, insightful way.

So it turns out that the new Apple ads promoting their Intel chips looks very similar to a music video by emo band The Postal Service, who are crying foul saying “We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed …” The music video and the Apple ad were apparently directed by the same person, so it’s pretty easy to figure out who to blame. Some folks think it’s copyright infringement, some think it’s not, others think it should be considered parody, and others still don’t care much one way or t’other. I happen to think that whether or not it’s technically copyright infringement, it’s a crappy thing to do. There is an irony to it though – the US Postal Service actually wasn’t all that pleased with the band using their name, but they resolved it amicably by licensing the band the use of the name in exchange for the band agreeing to ship their Internet orders via USPS. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s how most trademark disputes should be resolved.

If you want to understand the controversy, check out this handy comparison video.

via BoingBoing

Here’s a little gem I ran across (thanks to Cory) – a weekly podcast of original science fiction audio shorts called Escape Pod. They publish new stories about once or twice a week, each about half an hour long. All of their recordings are available from their website for direct download as MP3, or via any number of podcast systems.

All the stories I’ve listened to so far are quite good – and perfectly timed for my morning commute. Escape Pod apparently keeps quality up by having good editors and by actually paying the authors of the stories for the non-exclusive audio rights. What’s even more impressive is that Escape Pod then releases the stories under a CC license, which means you can share ’em with your friends as you like. And they support all this on donations alone.

Gee, look how long it took a record company to connect the dots on this one. Universal Music Group has started a project (they’ve dubbed “digital archeology”) to assemble 100,000 downloadable songs from artists whose work is currently unavailable on CD. Artists include ’60s psychedelic bands, Marianne Faithfull, Fairport Convention, and (gulp) Englebert Humperdink.

[Via The Register]

Links to the beta of the new TiVo Central Online interface have been floating through cyberspace.

The new program is Ajax-based. Clicking on a show in the schedule grid expands to reveal more info about the program and buttons for recording and creating season passes. You can also customize your schedule by color-coding different content types (movies, sports, special interests, etc.). Here’s a link to the beta. You already have to be logged in normally for it to work. Nothing too terribly exciting, but definitely an improvement over the existing interface,

Live from CES…well, we’re not actually at CES, but our younger, better-looking brother Engadget is. He says that Sony’s just announced from the show floor that a new “Sony Connect” download service will go online in March to provide “movies and new titles” for download. This isn’t completely unexpected – Sony built DRM into the latest version of the PSP firmware and has had a TV download site in Japan for awhile. But it’s good news that finally somebody is offering full-length movie downloads, even if playback is somewhat limited by Sony’s DRM. What really has me drooling is the “…new titles” that Sony mentioned. Could this be mini-games, like the new XBox Live offers? Maybe they’re still just talking about movies or maybe they’re talking about some lamo viodeothingycasts that everyone’s abuzz about these days. I suppose we’ll get the details soon enough, but tonight I will dream of PS1 titles and hope that dawn brings Sony support for indy developers…

Who guitarist Pete Townshend has an odd warning for the generation of earbuds and iPods: Keep the volume down and save your hearing. Townshend has hearing loss that he attributes to years of using studio headphones. Wait, wouldn’t years of touring with one of the loudest rock bands of his era have a little something to do with it? Anyway, he makes a point.

I’m thrilled that widespread portable music playing has gotten many of us really listening to music again (you hear things with ‘phones that you just don’t hear with over-the-air playback), but it can come at a cost if you rock too hard. So, no crankin’ it to “11,” there Nigel!

Read the short AP piece here.

I saw this game, Samorost 2, mentioned on Attack of the Show a few days ago and checked it out last night. Man is it cool. I was up until the wee hours playing it. Gee, I hope none of my editors are reading this. It was research, surely — so that I can more deftly understand the online milieu. Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, if you’re a fan of Myst-like narrative puzzle games, you’ll get a kick out of this Flash-based wonder. Beautiful look, awesomely outside soundtrack, great sense of humor, and some maddeningly hard puzzles. The first few levels are free, access to the full game is under ten bucks.

For you tightwads in the house (Craniac, is that you?), heads up on the free, online release of the original SimCity game. To play it, you need to register with Maxis, and you’ll need to run ActiveX control in Internet Deplorer, but if that doesn’t scare you off, have fun. It’s free! The link makes a great gift.

[Via TechBlog]

It seems as though every day brings some new announcement related to “post-broadcast TV,” “IPTV,” or whatever we’re going to end up calling it: the rapidly smudging margins between broadcast/cable television and Internet-delivered video content. TiVo has recently started offering TV content delivered to your TV/TiVo over broadband (i.e. to TiVo boxes connected to a LAN and the Net). Today’s offering is a free subscription to Rocketboom, a daily NY videoblog of weird and wacky happenings on the Net and off of it. Think: video BoingBoing. No, really. Like a lot of the news content on Attack of the Show, we get the stinking feeling that Rocketboom deeply datamines our BB pals for copy. Why is it that it’s common etiquette to give credit where credit is due in the text blog world, but no such transparency extends to the video blogging world?

So, is Rocketboom any good? Worth subscribing to? Um…it’s got a fetching host, does that count?

Anyway, the news here isn’t about this particular show, but the beginnings of this sort of content delivery over broadband to your TV set.

[Via Make]