I find that metal and chiptunes and other really energetic music keeps me going when I'm doing tedious stuff, but it's hard to find energetic music that isn't overly ... invasive?...

Lately it's been bands like Outrun the Sunlight and Porcupine Tree. Porcupine Tree is fucking amazing. I recommend their In Absentia album. They'll do some heavier riffs and then segue into the smoothest prog/rock you'll ever hear.

Sequelitis is the best show about video games I've seen in a long time. I fucking love that guy, and I wish he was faster. Waiting months between videos is hard when the resulting videos are that good.

They try to hide that behind the more modern argument of 'states rights', if they're actually displaying the flag for that reason. I live in 'Bama, so I see them a lot, and for the most part I think people just associate it with 'The South' in general, rather than all the politics and negative implications of that time.

People also call it the Stars & Bars, but it's actually the confederate naval flag. The Stars & Bars was the first official flag of the confederacy, and looked nothing like the southern cross at all. The army's battle flag was very similar, but was square. You can tell the different versions of the flag here. If you live in or have traveled through the south, you may have seen several variations of the flag and wondered what the differences were. http://www.usflag.org/history/confedera … dbars.html

It should be noted that toward the bottom of that page, the author makes the State's Rights argument I was talking about. I think state's rights are great, but if that's what you're all about, it would almost make more sense to fly the old Gadsden flag.

It makes me wonder, as we get more and more films like this that are either entirely CG or use performance capture to get a couple of CG characters into a live action movie, what the likelihood of that sort of performance getting it's own category is. And what they'd call it. "Best Digital Performance"? Also, would you nominate the actor or the animation supervisor or both or ...?

I voted for a few of the topics, but not all of them, as I've not yet seen the artist, the descendents or dragon tattoo. Dragon tattoo is one that I have no excuse for. The others - and many of the movies nominated for stuff this year - didn't play near me because I live in redneckville alabama where the three (!) 16-or-more-screens (!) theaters here all played the exact same ten movies at any given time, most of them being either the latest crappy horror movie or the latest crappy action movie or the latest crappy comedy about people having sex and throwing up.

But they did play The Help - which is pretty damn good - and Dragon Tattoo. So, for instance, "Actress in a leading role"...  all of those movies are playing right now, and only those two I mentioned have played here. If it's not out on DVD and it's listed on this chart somewhere, then odds are I haven't seen it due to it not playing here.

I really need to look into the logistics, costs and availability of funding for running my own theater. This is one of the most populated areas in Alabama, and the closest thing to an arthouse theater here is over two hours away.

wait, they're making ads for ads now?

Was there a link button somewhere that said "Click here to see a sneak preview of the new Ferris Bueller Superbowl ad!" somewhere? 'Cause that would be an ad for an ad for an ad...

Trey, is there something you're not telling us?

Do you secretly run The Pirate Bay?

http://geeks.thedailywh.at/2012/01/24/p … f-the-day/

Best Animated Film is gonna be interesting (not really).
Odds that Chico & Rita will win based on merit: 2:1
Odds that Chico & Rita will win based on the number of voters who saw it: 10,000:1

I haven't seen A Cat In Paris or Puss In Boots. Is Puss In Boots any good, or is it basically Shreck without Shreck? I still think it's laughable that they bother to nominate stuff like that for best animated film. That would be like nominating Home Alone for best picture. The US industry was doing pretty good up until a few years ago. Now it's back on it's downward spiral.

I haven't seen any of the foreign films this year, which kinda bothers me on a personal level.

If there were a theater here that was playing that line-up I'd be in heaven. The nearest theater to me that would consider playing any of that stuff is about 100 miles away. I've got one screen playing The Artist right now and one screen playing The Iron Lady and that's as arthouse as it usually gets around here. I'm kinda surprised they're playing The Artist. I'll have to go see it, as I didn't think it would play...

Also, I think in the case of The King's Speech, a lot of the perceived 'smallness' of that movie here has probably more to do with the weird way they rolled it out. It started on a couple dozen screens, then rolled into a hundred or so, then rolled onto a few hundred, etc. There was an article here about how they were thinking about cutting it down to a PG-13 because they were disappointed at the returns they were seeing on it.

The problem with that was that it was, at that time, being played on about 800 screens and was currently in 3rd on the weekend charts. It was making more than the #1 and #2 movies per theater combined, and they thought people weren't going to see it because of the rating. If they had opened it on a couple thousand screens in the beginning, they probably would have made a hell of a lot more money than they did. I don't think they ever had it playing on more than 1500 screens at once, tho, and by that time it had been out for almost two months.

It was, for the first month of release, the only film on the charts that was consistently going up at least a couple spots every weekend. It started out at #14 or something and after a month was sitting at #2 or 3. You don't often see that, and it was particularly weird in this case due to the fairly large amount of buzz surrounding it prior to it's release.

Wow. If you scroll through some of the tech/news sites out there you'll notice that since Megaupload went down, several other sites have suddenly blocked US users or limited their services to remove sharing functionality.

The comments on every one of those stories is 95% in favor of piracy and these websites. It doesn't surprise me at all, but I find it kinda funny that these kids today are just so god damn adamant that taking whatever they want for free should be their right and privilege as internet users, and anyone who tries to stop them is clearly wrong.

It's like the entire internet is made up of spoiled 10 year old kids.

That website is fascinating. I've often thought about make a website that would read way too far into movies like this, but this guy's definitely better at it than I'd ever be. You just know all of this was due to the sweater. Some dude saw the sweater and was all "OMG! He's trying to tell us something!" and just reverse engineered the rest from there.

I'll have to look through the rest of that site. I love that there are people out there who are so dedicated to this sort of crazy shit.