Ben Eaton conjures up images of driving a rusty pickup down some county back road separating Iowa grazing pasture from late August corn. A greasy quality permeates music comfortably seated in vintage blues musicians of some bygone era. Two tracks are available on Eaton's own site, (you can listen to parts of the entire album on CD Baby where the album is for sale) provide a solid introduction to this Iowa local who is bringing his brand of swamp-juice infused lyrically textured sounds to smoky saloons. If you long for the days of AM radio featuring the sounds of both country and western, Ben Eaton's songwriting will satisfy your nostalgia.
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http://members.dslextreme.com/users/davidroel/
You can't love sci-fi without knowing the name Philip K. Dick. The author's exploration of the mind as a significant part of future technological evolution is a theme repeated throughout his writing. That I'm aware of, very few audio interviews with PKD exist. David Roel of Enormous Vibrating Eye discovered an informal collection of thoughts from PKD in a stack of tapes loaned to him by a friend. The interview, complete with background television and children playing, is available in its entirety as downloadable MP3 files or in a Bit Torrent.
http://jakeludington.com/comicbookthemovie
Released in 2003, this is possibly one of the best underground films ever released on the Miramax label. Mark Hamill directs and stars as a high school teacher and world's foremost expert on the Commander Courage comic book. Hamill's character, Donald Swan is hired by a movie production house to consult on their upcoming Commander Courage movie, joining the film producers on an adventure to the largest comic book convention in the U.S. Hamill is absolutely hilarious, he's obviously studied many of the fans from Star Wars conventions past, as he blends in as Donald Swan almost too perfectly. Swan comes off as both naive and genuine, at times making you forget Comic Book is staged and not a true documentary. The movie stars many movie and comic book heroes (of the writer/artist variety), which makes viewing a treat on many levels. Tons of bonus material, including interviews with Stan Lee and Hugh Hefner, make this a must have addition to any geeks collection of DVDs.
When a new scientific discovery is made, we rarely remember the people who made it happen. The faces in front of a movie camera are remembered far longer than any of the visionaries who put movies together. And craftsmen almost never see recognition outside the trade groups they participate in. To ignore the stories of these visionary thinkers is to ignore an important piece of world history. PeoplesArchive attempts to capture these stories, through a series of video interviews ranging from childhood reminiscences, to military duty, to the life's work that put them in the history books for all time. Learn about many of the world's great treasures told in their own words. Registration is required, but the content is free. All video is in QuickTime format.
http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0405/22606/Teched_Realworld
It's a little known fact that the Microsoft execs have a great sense of humor (no I'm not talking about any of the bugs in Windows). Anyone attending the bigger conference events, like PDC, TechEd, or WinHec, gets treated to a well-produced humorous video generally featuring Steve Balmer and Bill Gates humiliating themselves on camera. This particular video is exec free, but certainly funny enough to warrant a few minutes from your schedule.
The boys of summer are launched into what might be the most interesting season in years. Roger Clemens and the Astros are going to give the Cubs a run for their post-season money, with the Rocket already becoming the oldest player in history to win 5 games in April. Barry Bonds is hitting home runs at a pace that requires more talent than an injection regimen could possibly provide. If you happen to have a premium subscription to MSN, you can catch all the action at home, work, or the local Starbucks. This site deals with baseball games past, specifically hitting and pitching stats from 1871 thru the end of last season. Download the entire database, to help make trade decisions in your Rotisserie league or fuel arguments over who the best all-around third baseman was. There's also a selection of entertaining opinion pieces on topical subjects relating to America's Pastime.
Take a break from work or forwarding the latest in a long line of bad jokes to catch up on some of the most entertaining countdown lists on the Internet. These sometimes irreverent, generally sophomoric lists put imitators to shame, delivering hours of productivity lowering entertainment. You'll laugh, you'll groan, and you just might find something better to forward to your friends on those lonely evenings in front of your CRT.
http://kill-bill.cz/game/index.php
I'm still dragging my feet about seeing Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2. My movie going days are severely limited thanks to an insane publishing schedule, so several hours of revenge just haven't made it into an open time slot yet. I did find this cartoon-violent flash game from a Czech game developer. The object of the game is to defeat sharp-dressed attackers in sword play before they get you. Things get confusing as some of the previously defeated baddies come back and distract from the new and more dangerous villians. The entire site is in a language other than English, but the rules are reasonably self-explanitory. Click the left button to start the game and use the arrow keys to defend your character.
Link love to Boing Boing
The Electric Company was the show I most looked forward to as a kid. The funk beats and catchy songs fooled my generation into believing we were being entertained, while teaching us grammar, phonetics, reading basics, and even manners. The show is long since off the air, the 780 episodes living on as nothing more than a memory. Fortunately, a small fraction of the show's best material is available via The Electric Company MP3 archive; featuring both MP3 recordings of some of the musical numbers and postage stamp size QuickTime videos of some of the better animated sketches. I'm guessing the site does not have permission to distribute this material, but a lack of reruns or DVD boxed sets means fan sites are the only alternative.
Cool Blue mixes the best of songwriters new and old to streaming radio. With a playlist including Frank Sinatra, Norah Jones, Richie Havens, Duke Ellington, and BB King, mixed with a host of names I either never knew or have long since forgotten; this station is musically diverse enough to keep most listeners entertained for hours. Cool Blue may not rev up the after work Friday party, but the mix of jazz, blues, Motown, and more contemporary light melodies is the perfect backdrop for just about anything else you might choose to do while listening to music. The only way you can tune this in on a traditional FM dial is to move to Auckland, which isn't feasible for me just yet, so I'll listen via the available Windows Media stream.
http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?id=5269
While the debate rages on over what is acceptable to do with content still under copyright, plenty of good content finds itself in the public domain on a regular basis. One of the greatest horror movies of all time, Night of the Living Dead is one such public domain offering. Archive.org, a non-profit dedicated to disseminating content, makes the 1968 classic horror flick available for download in MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 formats, in addition to providing a QuickTime stream. This is exactly the sort of content Bit Torrent users should be sharing.
The only place I listen to traditional radio is my car. At home, I listen to streaming audio from the Internet or from my own personal collection of music. My personal music collection is severely lacking in the classical department, which is where Internet radio really picks up the slack. WPCE broadcasts can be found on the FM dial in the Raleigh-Durham area, via C-band satellite, or on the Internet from anywhere in the world. Delivering 24/7 classical music, with features like the Back to Baroque weekend coming up in April. Available formats include MP3, OGG, WMA, QT, and RealAudio.
I'm an animated short film junkie. To feed my addiction and keep abreast of the latest developments in ground breaking animated shorts, I regularly check in with AnimWatch. This is the site to read if you want to stay current on all the truly cool short films popping up at site across the Internet. Interviews with the animators provide a unique insight behind the process of creating animations. Many of the shorts are side projects created by pros with work you would recognize in bigger budget products.
http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/spotlight/collections/hidef/
720p Hi-Definition content delivered to your PC. This latest Atom Films project brings some of the best short film material available to your desktop in streamed HD format. While not every film in the Atom Films Hi-Def library is truly HD content, the quality of encoding and presentation far outperforms anything currently available elsewhere online. The content displayed in true HD 720p uses Windows Media HD. Playing movies requires Maven, a software client for managing the delivery of digital video content, which is available free.
http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54
Switching to a different operating system has tradeoffs no matter how you slice it. Program incompatibilities and interface inconsistencies can result in hours of re-learning familiar functions. For super villains, switching is the difference between world domination and utter humiliation. This Apple switch parody examines the finer points of Linux and what makes it the easiest solution for aspiring ego maniacs.
Thanks Brandon
http://www.nugs.net
http://www.livedownloads.com
Concert downloads via file sharing services with an emphasis on doing it all legally. What a concept! The recording industry would be wise to look at how nugs.net and livedownloads.com are giving artists (or labels) control over music released to the Internet and how it is distributed. Most of the artists currently available from these two sites have jam band status of the Grateful Dead kind, including The String Cheese Incident, Dave Matthews, and Rat Dog. Singer/songwriter Jack Johnson offers downloads, while Robert Randolph allows listening only. Audio quality is as good as live concert recordings ever get. Marketing question for the industry: How many kids could talk their parents out of ten bucks for a download of the concert they just attended? I know several concerts I've attended are worth having in *any* recorded format.
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Remember the Office Linebacker from a Super Bowl past? You know, Reebok's clever attempt at keeping office slackers in check? He's back with a new 3-minute short film. This one isn't quite as funny as previous episodes (which are available for viewing with registration). Bleeped swearing was apparently necessary by someone's standards, so I suppose this merits an office warning. Thanks to Sean Alexander for the tip.
It looks like Reebok is currently making the Terry Tate page on their site unavailable at the moment, which is too bad because the videos are awesome. Fortunately, the video links are still live - I've got links to several of the videos over at PMCMovies.com and iPod-ready Terry Tate videos are available via Sync2play.
When fan films have a budget, good things happen. Originally planned as a one-off Star Trek adventure, overwhelming popularity warrants a continuation of the series. Two new episodes are currently in production. The original episode, "The Savage Empire," with Captain John Garrovick leading a mission to save a ship infected with a deadly plague, is available for viewing in QuickTime format. Production details and special effects are better than anything Kirk faced back in the day.
What a tangled Web musicians weave. This site links musicians, showing the crossover between various bands throughout time, relationships between artists, stylistic similarities, and general popularity. If you are looking to expand your listening horizons, think of musicplasma as a visual roadmap to get you from Bo Didley to Queens of the Stone Age in just a few easy steps. Type in a band name to see the connected universe surrounding the artist.
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net
Windows Movie Maker is a great place to get started creating movies on your PC. Microsoft makes it easy to take content from digital video cameras and produce professional looking output. Despite the overall ease of use, there are many tricks that make creating movies. Windows Movie Makers is a great place to learn tricks, read tutorials, and generally improve movie editing skills. In addition to educational resources, an active community forum provides an excellent source for answers to questions ranging from newbie stuff to complex editing tasks.
http://www.CustomFlix.com/Index.jsp
While I frequently talk about creating DVDs from family movies, there are certainly plenty of potentially commercial projects that need to go beyond the home computer and into a distribution pipeline. While burning DVDs from your PC is an option, this also means taking responsibility for fulfillment and all the headaches associated with shipping physical goods. Mastering houses can produce large print runs of your DVD content, but then a risk of being stuck with hundreds of extra copies is introduced. For a small fee, someone else can take on the fulfillment headache for you and keep the inventory levels down to a minimum. CustomFlix is that someone else. For a $49 setup fee, plus a per sale fee, CustomFlix manages distribution, provides online trailers of your DVD, prints artwork on the packaging and allows you to focus on all the details of content creation.
