XKCD: How Geeks Prevent Buyer's Remorse

Comics for Technophiles

Posted to Blog on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 @ 11:40 AM
There are some great web comics out there. My favourite is xkcd, which is strongly targeted at the geekier demographic. But I particularly loved this one, which hit close to home, and explains why my technophobic friends always ask me to come to FutureShop with them.

The Downside of Piracy: Watching Crapping Movies

Oh God, Help me to Press Stop

Posted to Blog on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 @ 11:14 PM
I admit my hypocrisy: I am adamantly against pirating music, but I routinely download movies off the intertubes. I have a very weak defense of my behaviour that I can outline at another time. The good news is that everything balances out in the end, and I am getting my just desserts.

The problem with movie piracy is that it is so easy. Too easy, in fact. It is so easy to pirate movies from the web that once you get the hang of it, you have your computer running like a digital oil derrick, sucking movies from the binary high speed pipe day and night. Anything familiar. Anything you read about in the paper or saw mentioned on TV. Anything in the spam you get from Rogers.com or Blockbusters.com gets into your movie piracy queue. The problem? The vast majority of those movies are complete garbage, but having invested your time and bandwidth, you feel obliged to watch them.

I've spent the last few nights getting caught up with some of the films in my booty chest.

Bobby: possibly the most boring assassination movie ever made. I'll even say that Ishtar is an assassination movie just so that I can include it in this comparison. Think this is a movie about Bobby Kennedy? Nuh-uh.

Hollywoodland: after seeing this movie, I am actually less interested in the death of George Reeves than I was before I knew this movie was about his death. And that was before I knew who George Reeves was.

Revolver: I was hoping for something Usual Suspects-esque, and I had heard this was intriguing, challenging, a riddle-inside-an-enigma sort of thing. Yeah... I'm no Hitchcock, but I have no idea what the hell was going on here. Whoever storyboarded this was seriously high, and then they lost the storyboards, and had to do it from memory, while no longer high. It's that confusing. Good guns and naked chicks though.

I actually had to queue up the first 30 minutes of Gladiator just to restore my faith in movies. It worked.

Now I only have 24 more pieces of crap to go. Pray for me.
Ed's Note: He just watched Pan's Labyrinth. His faith in pirating movies is restored.

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This site is the brainfart of Joshua Sarkis Prowse. (Yo.) I am a teacher, writer, geek, music and sports enthusiast, and zealot for clear communication in all forms.
You can contact me by emailing jsp at yoursinwriting dot com. I like mail and respond within a day or two.

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