Posts by matt

Brick was a blast. It definitely deserves to inherit the college-boy quote-fountain crown from Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, and The Usual Suspects. According to David Denby, it was shot in 20 days and edited on a home computer. (A Mac, says an interview on the official site.) Go trailerize, then go see it.

If you’ve been following my efforts to scrape together an RSS feed for the Romenesko sidebar, you might have thought I’d have either given up, learned regular expressions, or convinced Robin it was every bit as cool as Charlie Rose. Since the Wotzwot RSS tool I’d been using to make the feed introduced a couple ridiculous measures to prevent folks from ever using it, I’ve been without my Romenesko link-loggy goodness.

But now I’ve found another, much better tool for scraping together feeds. The new Romenesko sidebar feed is not only much more functional, but it also has a URL that makes sense.

Today, Garrick Van Buren introduced me to Cin-o-matic, which is a) my new favorite thing, and b) apparently made by a local. Sorta like MetaCritic, only you can choose from a list of critics whose movie scores you’d like to aggregate, and it’s mashed up with information about what’s playing at your local theaters.

Starting this week, we’ll finally be able to purchase and immediately download (some) movies. The fact that we have not been able to do this until now is the best demonstration of the film industry’s idiocy. We’ve long been able to easily acquire these movies online for free, but because Hollywood is a giant, dull-witted beast, we couldn’t pay to do this legally even if we wanted to.

Before iTunes launched, I would have said selling music online was a lost cause. It was too easy to get songs for free. But the introduction of a good, comprehensive, well-organized music service which gave me fair-to-middling rights over what I purchased ended up completely winning me over. In 2005, by my count, I bought 465 songs through iTunes.

Of course, for me to start using Movielink or CinemaNow with anywhere near that fervor, they still have a looooong, long way to go:

• The sites will have to stop redirecting me from the home page to an error message because I’m using Firefox.
• They’re going to have to get a much, much better selection. No, I don’t want to see Transporter 2 or National Lampoon Presents Barely Legal, but thanks.
• They’re going to have to get rid of the ultralame DRM that won’t let me burn my files to DVD.
• They’ll have to be acquired by NetFlix, to which my heart and movie tastes already belong.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Mariah Carey. Sample: [“Vision of Love”] begins with several bars of lovely, wordless melisma, as if Carey were warming up, and it ends with two very loud passages of melisma, one of them an a-cappella expansion on the word

A combo lock that uses words instead of numbers. I dig it. (Ferreterrific.)

It’s exciting to be finally able to say this is official. This deal has been in the works for what feels like ages. But Robin and I are thrilled to announce we will be joining the Yahoo!^® family. When we started Snarkmarket almost two-and-a-half years ago, we really didn’t know what to expect, and we definitely weren’t expecting to sell this baby off. (Under the terms of our acquisition, we’re really not allowed to discuss figures, but I think saying there are three commas involved is oblique enough.)

But as we’ve evolved into a media powerhouse, with a user base of almost 7 regular commenters, it became clearer and clearer that the only responsible thing for us to do was to partner with a large organization that could give this community the resources it needed to realize its potential. Yahoo!^® is certainly the best partner we could have imagined. We’re excited about what’s in store for us, for you our users, and for the world.

For more info on the acquisition, see here, here, and the official Yahoo!^® announcement here.

Pixel patterns, where have you been all my life?

Three years ago, in a spectacular issue of The Atlantic Monthly (“The Real State of the Union,” done in partnership with the New America Foundation), Ray Boshara wrote a fascinating proposal. What if we gave $6,000 to every American citizen at birth, and invested that money in a safe portfolio until the citizen grew old enough to use it?

Wealth inequality in the US, Boshara pointed out, is much greater even than income inequality:

By the close of the 1990s the United States had become more unequal than at any other time since the dawn of the New Deal

Why haven’t I seen the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix before? It’s great! You can just go through and instantly see what two Web-2.0-y things haven’t been mashed up yet, and have at it. E.g. noone’s put together Del.icio.us and EVDB yet! Here’s your chance to get angel funding!