The 1880

Baz Rox

Auteur patty-cake?

Sometimes I feel like I’m too busy with schoolwork to learn. Might sound weird, but there are worlds of stuff that interest me over the course of a day. I would rather be investing my time in any of them rather than waxing pedantic over some who-gives-a-shit essay on the postmodern condition du jour. Luckily, as of 9:45 last night, the semester has come to a close, inspiring that dizzying sense of freedom some call summer.

Earlier this week, in a fit of procrastination, I came across Apple’s new Set to Screen series. The set of podcasts follow Baz Lurhmann and his production team as they work on Australia, his new film starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. The series is exceptionally well produced, providing tons of practical knowledge and insight into the process of creating what appears to be a seriously epic motion picture. If the podcast leaves you salivating, jump over to the curriculum, which integrates lessons and more in-depth exploration of the topics from the podcast.

If somehow, that isn’t enough, there are also contests with some really cool prizes, including a seat on the film’s promotional tour or a trip to Australia to hang out as they work on post for the film. The current contest, at the link above, is a chance to design the movie poster for the film’s Australian release. Apple provides a set of very high resolution images from on-set photographer James Fisher, featured in the photography episode of the series. If you get bored in the next couple days, fire up Photoshop and go nuts, you’ve got nothing to lose.

I hope Apple has wild success with this project, and gets to do it in the future with other productions. Anyone know of any other opportunities like this anywhere on the internet? I’d love to get some links. Post ‘em here if you have any.

Pages x 100

What an internet we have here.

As you famously tech-savvy stoodints know, every Emerson kid gets 250MB of webspace accessible anywhere on their pages folder. What’s that you say? You’re not a New Media major with unlimited web space on the newmedia.emerson server? No problem. File Dropper, a webspace service has apparently completely lost it and is giving a free lifetime account with a whopping 250GB of space to those that sign up before May 15th. Just sign up for the File Dropper special and start dumping files. Keep your giant final projects safe - you’re almost done and we don’t want you to freak out and call the help desk crying. No, we can’t get your footage off of your busted drive or suck your paper on how cool it would be to go drinking with Baudrillard and Jameson out of that damn Porsche LaCie disk. Sorry.

Hype-rdrive

Fact: "I've heard of them" adds nothing to conversation.

I love Pandora. Really. Last.fm is great too. The only beef I have with those types of services is that sometimes I just don’t know what I want to listen to. I’d rather just have someone serve me stuff they really like. I’m a sucker for the curative aspects of music sharing. Mixtapes are laborious, and iTunes playlists aren’t as accessible as I would like them to be. There has to be a better answer somewhere on this big Internet. People all over the wold run music blogs, where they offer up what they like in hopes that you will like it too. The Hype Machine is exactly the type of thing I have been looking for. It aggregates music blogs from all over and presents them in a nifty player using what I can only imagine to be some RSS voodoo.

The search functions are great too. Only want to listen to one band? Search and all of their results pop up. Like a particular blog? Every player links to the relative post on the site that accompanies each piece. The “Most Searched” sections put your finger right on the way- cool pulse of the rest of the music world, positioning your tastes precisely three years ahead of the sad blokes that wait until Pitchfork craps onsomeone’s album before claiming “I heard it wasn’t that great.” Alternately, sometimes people just post old stuff they have just found or feel in the mood to listen to, which oddly enough can be the most refreshing aspect of the whole thing

Hype Machine is a great little Internet tool that just contributes even more to the whole Internet roolz radio droolz ethos. Cept for , WERS and WFMU, ‘acourse.

PS: MGMT is pretty good. Thanks, HypeM

The E Spot

The E Spot. Em Magazine. Get it? Courtesy of espotmag.com.

Looks like we have a new magazine in town. This one’s called The E Spot, and seems to be (correct me if I’m wrong) an online magazine about sex and how it may apply to Emerson students. Why would I guess this? With categories on the main page such as “Relationshits,” “Sex Sex Sex,” and “Hot Shit,” it’s pretty much impossible to avoid. With a few risque photos and a few risque articles on sex and encounters, it’s something to check out if you’re looking for something a little… steamy.

Immediately it reminds me of Boink Magazine, Boston University’s sex-positive magazine. They’ve been pretty successful at getting some quality magazines printed out. However, they are quite a bit bigger than Emerson.

How this will coincide with Em Magazine’s nude photo shoot, I don’t know.

It seems like getting naked is all the rage for Emerson’s online material. Time to talk to the staff here? Only time will tell…

Juicycampus.com is a Slut

Janet and Kate just told John that he was gay. He didn’t know yet.

I ran across a couple articles from pretty predominant news sources today about a website being used by seven colleges called juicycampus.com. Apparently, people get angry when their sexual escapades are anonymously posted on a website. The schools want to close the website down and some students are crying “first amendment” and blah blah blah.

Well since there was such a ruckus happening about this site I decided to visit it. I sat for almost three minutes while the relatively simple and unorganized site came up. It was a long time to wait for very little pay-off. It is mostly short rants about whose sorority/frat/cult is going to whoop someone else’s similarly boastful organization. That and accusations of people being gay. Now these are the two reasons this website will never work at Emerson. The sorori-frats aren’t rivals (and who would really care if they were) and outing someone is like accusing someone of being hipster at this school. It’s usually answered with a “yeah, duh!”

But if you want to kill a few minutes and don’t mind waiting for an oddly long time for it to load, check out the website, if only to wonder at how stupid and shallow other college students can be. As for all the gay bashing, methinks the site doth protest too much…

MSNBC article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23211511

Site itself: www.juicycampus.com