MorrisonFilm

"My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies. They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did."

- Steve Jobs, Good Management is Like The Beatles, Fast Company

Silly Girls and Zombies

I want to like the Walking Dead more than I actually do. I keep watching it in hopes it will eventually pay off. The final few episode were actually decent and I’m by no means giving up on the show. But one of my biggest gripes are the female characters and how much I hate them. There isn’t a single female character on the show I like and I finally realized it wasn’t my fault. They aren’t likable.

The problem is that all of the women characters can’t help but constantly screw things up and the macho men have to come and fix everything. What happens when Lori tries to go help her husband Rick? She flips the car over for no good reason. Silly girl should have just stayed home where she belonged with all the other women.

The entire first half of season 2 revolved around finding Sophia because the stupid girl got lost. She couldn’t just listen to what the man told her to do. Silly girl.

Then there’s the woman from the abusive relationship. She is the least interesting character in the history of drama. What did she do when her daughter was missing? Absolutely jack nothing. She just let all the men risk their lives while she practiced being boring back home.

After the season two first half finale, the big zombie slaughter was just too much for one female character so she just went into shock. Because she’s an hysterical silly girl. I don’t even remember her name because she hasn’t done a single thing of consequence otherwise. To be fair, Rick also went into shock for 3 episodes— oh wait, no he didn’t because that would have been totally absurd for a man.

The strongest female character is Andrea because she wants to learn how to shoot a gun. But this is the same character who was angry that Dale saved her life. She’d rather just check out of this world than deal with it. At least she actually did learn to shoot a gun and hasn’t yet accidentally shot herself. (Though she did accidentally shoot a man, because, you know, she’s just a silly girl with a gun).

Of course there’s also Maggie, the farmer’s daughter who is pretty strong except she’s also confusing and contradictory because she’s a silly girl. And she immediately wants to sleep with the nerdiest character because you know, that’s realistic.

I’m going to keep watching it because zombies, apocalypse, survival, guns. But I really am just waiting to finally root for one of these female characters and not just because she doesn’t totally screw something up and ruin it for all the men who are trying to save the world¹.

Don’t even get me started on the lone black guy and how the only thing of consequence he’s ever done was get his hand cut really bad. That’s an entire post on its own. ↩

I’m not going to blog about that

I’m not going to look it up, but it’s probably been about five years since I wrote a post about blogging. That’s because at some point I decided “I’m not going to blog about that.” Who wants to read about blogging? Just blog. I think it was a good choice. The problem is, over the last five years or so, I stopped writing anything online because I decided, for one reason or another “I’m not going to blog about that.” Oh, I took this cool photo, maybe I should share it. Eh, no one wants to see my Instagram retreads. Oh I know, I really have something to say about the Red Sox. Really? Who reads my blog and also cares about the Red Sox? I’m not going to blog about that. I’ve got about 10,000 words to share about— fuck it, that’s way too long for the Tumblr Dashboard¹. I’m not going to blog about that.

And what I was left with was nothing.

So I’m rebooting this bitch. And I only have one rule: Write whatever makes me happy². Also, at the suggestion of Garrett I purchased a Tumblr premium theme as a guilt device. This way when I stop blogging for a few weeks I can think, “Shit, I just dropped $50 on that damn theme, I better make it worth it.”

Actually, I think the Tumblr Dashboard, with it’s insistence on short, digestible content, likes and reblogs has a lot to do with killing my enthusiasm for writing online. At this point instead of leaving Tumblr I’m just going to try to ignore all those things and see what happens. ↩
Ideally this will not result in my blogging only about the Red Sox and my cats. ↩

"So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU."

- Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out — Daily Intel

Someone got a pasta maker for Christmas! (Me) (Taken with instagram)

Prometheus Trailer

God I hope this movie is great. Not just good. I want great. And I don’t think it’s asking too much. It can’t be overstated how Alien and Blade Runner are two of the best sci-fi movies of all time. No one has really ever come close.

Most exciting for me is that Scott’s two sci-fi movies were hard science fiction, not fluffy action sci-fi. No one makes hard sci-fi, not anymore. So if Prometheus is true to his previous genre efforts we’ll be very lucky.

The big question about Prometheus has been, how connected to the Alien universe will it be? And it seems that we’ve got an answer from the trailer: quite a lot. I see the “Pilot” and the U-shaped ship from Alien, which is a hell of a lot more than I expected to see in the trailer.

Also I really love how the letters of the title for “Prometheus” build on screen just like the title in Alien. Nice touch. Actually, the whole trailer is a callback to the the original Alien teaser trailer, including the music.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about this movie?

Panning for Gold

I got to thinking recently. Why pay $10 or whatever a month for Spotify or Rdio¹ when I’ve got 30GB of music on my hard drive that I never listen to? The problem is I open up iTunes, scan through the list of artists and think “I hate all this crap.” But here’s the trick: I don’t hate it all. I just forgot about all the good stuff.

So I started an insane project. I am rating every single song in my iTunes library. The short version of this story is that I’m having a blast and finding a ton of great music I had lost touch with.

There are a few things I’ve done to make this easier.