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WTF happened to Smashing Telly?

July 14th, 2010 · 17 comments or link to (permalink)

Two things: it was taking up too much of my time for something which I felt was half-assed since the niche for picking the good full length stuff out of google seemed to disappear after Hulu, Netflix on Demand and my ability to watch things like the BBC via a proxy; secondly I could never seem to build it into a community site with people contributing.

Here’s what I plan to do. I’m currently obsessed with lists and in order to try and take the most banal form of content that happens to work on the Internet and make it into something seemingly superficial but actually thorough, I’ve put most of my extra-curricular effort into Oobject which is a kind of online Wunderkammer comprising visual lists of man-made objects. A mainstream version of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Typologies, if you like. Oobject may look like yet another, crappy, weird things site, but delve into it, I’ve put an unhealthy amount of effort into it.

In the spirit of the global takeover of content by the headline and listicle I also plan to do one last post on Smashing Telly with a big list of my favorite factual TV programs and clips (since Smashing Telly focused on these).

Stay Tuned.

David

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Every Tarkovsky Movie Online for Free

July 14th, 2010 · 11 comments or link to (permalink)

Kottke writes: “If Smashing Telly were still going, this would be perfect for it: every feature-length Andrei Tarkovsky film is available for viewing online for free.”

Voice of mysterons: “In…deed”. See them all here.

For the record, Mirror is my favorite.

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TV is moving to the Web in the Wrong Way.

June 8th, 2009 · 15 comments or link to (permalink)

UK’s Channel 4 is to put its entire back catalog online for free

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this will presumably only apply within the UK.

Increasingly the dream of on-demand, online TV of the type that I tried to make available here from scraps that required sifting through endless search results is becoming a reality.

But there is one thing that is fucking it up royally – regionalization. The same moronic, antediluvian thinking that means that you can’t watch a DVD you bought in one country, in another is being applied to nearly all legitimate TV on the web. Its a disaster, something that doesn’t apply for music or text and is ruining something that could be great.

The usual excuse for this not being possible is the impossibility of handling things like the payments of residuals to actors. Like the music industry, the people who deal with this feel very threatened by the Internet and are actively trying to hold up progress.

The sad thing is that people won’t notice. You can’t miss something you never knew. But imagine if people in the UK could watch Hulu or people in the US could watch the Channel 4 in the same way that they can read the BBC online.

Link

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Sorry for light posting

April 30th, 2009 · 4 comments or link to (permalink)

Me, Justine and baby Spike are moving from NY to Geneva for a bit (talk about a difference). Meanwhile, I’m in San Francisco for a few weeks – damn it’s nice here! (Although Spike managed to find a dead rat at the playground in swanky Russian Hill).

In the interim, if you haven’t checked out one of my other sites which are based on our visual aggregation engine called curations, have a look:

Oobject is a site all about technology, it has technology news, but without the crap. I.E. just things that are decently designed. The real focus, however, is on lists of things in a particular topic that are interesting. The idea being to take the most moronic thing on the web – top 10 lists, and do them really well.

Then there are 3 curated sites (I pick out the best 500 or so websites in a particular topic, based upon whether the people that run them have a keen eye) and then run the visual aggregator over them and pick out the most interesting items each day:

Cribcandy (household design), Popgloss (fashion design) and Yokiddo (kids stuff)

Like lists, this could be awful, but the aim is to do the aggregation thing well, and with pictures. (Yokiddo, I have to confess is not good enough, so I’m going to redo it or ditch it).

Lastly there is Wists which is an online visual bookmarking application – like delicious but with thumbnails of a particular portion of a page.

If you like watching grass grow, have a look at my physics notes in the right side bar of my blog, under ‘notes’ : This is what really keeps me awake at night.

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The Ascent of Money

March 2nd, 2009 · comment or link to (permalink)

When three bodies spin around each other, their movements can be approximated if there is a dominant one such as is the case with the Sun, the Earth and Mars. If this status quo is disrupted, no super-computer can accurately predict the movement of three spheres revolving around each other under a simple force like gravity, a fact, whose implications, few people seem to register.

The economy has many more than three moving parts and the status quo has been disrupted, becoming temporarily unpredictable. No esoteric hedge fund model on earth will guarantee consistent short term gain until the system settles down, and you do not need to know anything about economics to be certain of this. It doesn’t make sense to look at wobbles, only past trajectories.

Although historians and academics as often perceived as quixotic theorists who are naive to the machinations of the real world, this is a period when the only reference point is the long term, where the strategists trump the tacticians and where short term speculation is largely pointless even if there are colossal opportunities based upon secular trends, because there is proven unpredictability coupled with massive social and political dangers.

This is a period when the people that smoke pipes and wear cardigans, draw modest salaries that are guaranteed for life and reside in collegiate ivory towers are suddenly in a relatively envious position and get listened to, perhaps for no other reason that people are fickle and don’t listen to ‘losers’.

Nevertheless, they should be the ones listened to for a bit. You shouldn’t be reading the newspaper every day (they won’t be around for much longer anyway), or watching the stomach churning lurches in the stock market, perhaps you shouldn’t even be looking at the weekly snapshot of the Economist magazine, but you probably should be reading the canny, non-hysterical analysis of someone like Niall Ferguson.

We’ve previously linked to clips of Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson’s excellent series to accompany his latest book, ‘The Ascent of Money’, which will sell much more owing to the descent of the latter. PBS have now put the whole series online.