Posts by matt

Somehow, the Assimilated Negro has come up with a worthy follow-up to the Blink Don’t Wink™ campaign: the Netflix Neighborhood Challenge. His theory is that different neighborhoods get completely different tiers of Netflix service. If you’ve had Netflix delivered from different addresses, you’ve experienced the disparity in service; some places it’s lightning-quick, others it’s just speedy. Quoth the Negro:

So now I’m thinking there’s probably some “neighborhood priority system” going on behind the scenes at the ‘flix. And I’m planning to break the case. I’m going to be bringing my netflix returns around with me to the various neighborhoods I visit in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And we’ll see who gets the shaft, and who gets [insert smart funny line that plays off the ‘who gets the shaft’ setup here].

Do we have any other case studies on this matter? Have you noticed any difference in Netflix return speed based on your neighborhood, or um, level of education/body odor?

I think we should blow this up nationwide, and give it a Google Maps mashup.

From Ask MeFi, which movie critics do you trust?

My answer: I use the incomparable MetaCritic to figure out which films to see. Aggregated critical opinion really is a wondrous thing. (And MetaCritic, as one astute AMeFi commenter puts it, “is what Rotten Tomatoes wants to be when it grows up.”)

So critics have a different function for me. My favorite critics give me smart, unexpected analyses that make the moviegoing experience richer. Often I read their reviews only after I’ve seen a film, to see what they saw in it that I didn’t. For this purpose, my favorites are the NYT‘s Manohla Dargis, Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek (especially for commercial movies), and James Berardinelli. And my second-tier critics are The New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, Slate‘s David Edelstein, and Ebert.

Quick, while you can still pull up all of Flickr’s most interesting photos for a given day on one page, check out FlickrLeech.

I’m not going to link to a single thing from Infosthetics.com, ’cause the whole site is so darn best. (If you’re into information visualization. Whoo!) But the site is filled with interesting visual experiments, most of which I haven’t seen anywhere else, and I’m surprised I haven’t run across it before.

It’s one of many wonderful links in a particularly stellar Things Magazine entry, up to and including:

Google Earth goodies of many wonderful kinds. 3D landmarks! Stereographs! And more!

Somehow more than an ad-blog.

Realize every homeowner’s dream.

And I’m not sure I understand this anecdote, but I certainly intend to repeat it:

When James Ivory entrusted Anthony Hopkins with the construction of that fantastic character, the servant in The Remains of the Day, Hopkins at a point had a problem of a conceptual nature and asked for help. Ivory advised him to talk to an old Windsor butler, an expert on the subject. Hopkins invited him to tea. They sat down and chatted for a while, but in fact, when the meeting came to an end, Hopkins had a feeling that this old servant had not told him anything. He walked him to the door and as he was about to leave, determined to extract something from the character, he blurted out, “Tell me, finally, what is a servant?” The old man turned, thought about it for a second and said, “A servant is someone who, when he walks into a room, makes it look emptier than it was before.”

I’m not even going to link to it, because 1) you’ve already seen it, and 2) you know where to find it,¹ but the Natalie Portman video really is a masterpiece. Even as a ripoff of an Easy E song, it’s pretty breathtaking. I can even live with the random Viking segment.

¹ If 1 or 2 is not true … my child, I give you the Internet. Try not to break it.

² Brokeback was robbed.

I imagine it will be BoingBoinged within the hour, but this video of real people reenacting the Simpsons intro is much too Waxtastic not to post.

Now that everyone else in Minnesota is hyping it, I guess I gotta give up the goods for the Snarkerati. Chasing Windmills is a cinematic daily black-and-white vlog exploring revealing and troubling moments in the life of a fictional couple. All episodes are written, shot and edited by the two main characters, who are a couple in real life. It is fantastic.

It’s also kind of awkward when I occasionally spot the couple in my travels around Minneapolis, given the nature of the material. I kind of want to go up to them and say, “Hey! I love your vlog!” But I feel even more voyeuristic than when I meet other folks I’ve known through their blogs.

Who said maps have to be on Google to be cool? Clearly not Bill Rankin. The interface is the jank, but the pretty maps are worth it. Manhattan mapped according to building heights. America’s international economic footprint. The many shapes of South America.

Dammit, Apple. Wi-fi, not hi-fi. What do you think this is, 1973? I’ve seen frickin’ iPod speakers.

Malcolm Gladwell has a blog. I am already edified. (MetaFilterrific.)