Author: Jer Clarke

I’ve been listening to the free weekly podcast of This American Life for about a year now, and it never fails to deliver. It’s a public radio show that tells thoughtful, well-produced stories about relatively average people in the U.S. It always has smooth, catchy musical segues and at least one lough out loud moment per episode. (The most recent episode is always free to download/podcast and you can listen to the archives but not download them without paying)

In the most recent show, the host mentioned an Onion article about the show that cut deep, and if you’re familiar with the show it’s the best summary you’ll ever read.

An excerpt from “This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence“:

Also aiding the [show] were the many contributors to This American Life, who took time from their best-selling essay-writing careers to donate personal anecdotes about dropping out of prestigious art schools, taking harrowing but poignant childhood vacations to the Grand Canyon, and the unique challenges of growing up in families supportive of their homosexuality.

Anyway, just thought I’d take a minute to plug both This American Life and The Onion for being super high quality and super free.

Bonus Content:

The Onion: American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie – Amazing parody of the “9-11 feels like a movie” phenomenon written in September 2001.
YouTube: POWERTHIRST!!! (via. Sarah)

Amazing video argument against the movie 300 for being racist and homophobic. I’ve defended 300 and Frank Miller in the past as being partially ironic and completely ridiculous, but the video’s creator did a great job with the title cards, and it really summarises the stereotypes that are present in the film, whether they’re dangerous or not. Link

The audio is Rage Against the Machine, it’s actually pretty exciting. (Found with Miro)

Coming off of two days of planning and executing a giant hard drive and OS upgrade to my MacBook. Luckily everything went well so all my careful backing up was probably unnecessary. Now have a comfy 160gb hard drive and Mac OSX Leopard.

Best part: Leopard means I can finally run ies4osx, an amazing hack that downloads old versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (5, 5.5, 6 and 7) and runs them in emulation inside your Mac OS. Any web designers/developpers out there shouldn’t even think about it. Run, don’t walk. (I was previously using the original Linux version, ies4linux, which worked well but forced me to use Linux : P )

Worst part: Above. The Photobooth app in Leopard now offers a 4-shot grid, officially ending the tyranny of the so called “real” photobooths of the world.

The U.S. presidential campaign is starting to get serious. Just a few candidates on each side, all looking relatively good, spending millions on ads before the election is even started.

For you to chew on (via. onegoodmove) :
Edwards discussing his low results in Nevada. Humble and confident that sanity will prevail. LINK
Obama and Clinton bickering about who’s got better rhetoric and who loves Reagan more (as if anyone is confused that either of them is a Reagan supporter), followed by Edwards pointing out how stupid they are being and giving concrete examples of tax reforms he wants to implement. LINK

My pick so far has got to be John Edwards. Obama and the Clint are okay, but when they talk there’s this buzzing in the back of my head. It might be my speakers are too loud – though they are truly crappy speakers – or it might be the sensor in your brain that buzzes when someone is shovelling shit down your throat.

Continue reading “John Edwards Seems Okay”

(via. icanhascheezburger, see Sisyphus@wikipedia)

Shawna Nelles, a friend and former officemate of mine, is in Rwanda right now travelling and learning. Her thoughts and photos of this memorial to the masacred thousands from the town of Murabi are thoughful and heartbreaking. A shocking reminder of the nightmarish normalcy of such situations. Link to the post.

[Note: No spoilers ahead, feel safe]

Just came out of a Mix96 (ugh, FM-Radio. I boo’ed at the announcer) free screening of Cloverfield, a kind of Blair Witch Project v. Godzilla handheld video camera mashup featuring all our favorite shots from the only good disaster movie we’ve seen lately, 9-11 (it takes place in New York and involves several buildings falling down or being struck by things).

The marketing behind the movie involved trailers that gave away that there was a disaster but not what, and posters with the intensely cheezy slogan ‘What is Cloverfield?’.

Well I’ve seen it now, and I can tell you what Cloverfield is: it’s the revolting, nauseating feeling you get in your stomach while watching all the maddeningly shaky handheld shots that compose the entire film. It makes Blair Witch look like it was shot with a steadycam. They must have given the actors direction like “good shot, but try shaking it more, we want the audience to feel distressed!”. Dozens of people left the theatre as the movie went on, which was good, because my friends and I needed to get farther from the screen to avoid vomiting in our free cloverfield branded gas-station mugs.

Some other things that Cloverfield is:

• The feeling you get after 5 hours in a dirty school bus on a sunny day.
• Too many kinds of alcohol in one night.
• Some milk that didn’t smell that bad…

Anyway, you get the idea.

The plot, acting and special effects were all amazing by the way. You really feel like the situation is believable if only because the characters have no idea what’s going on, which is how real life works in my experience. But if you’re going to see it, find the smallest screen available and get as far as possible from it before hitting play. (IMPORTANT: DO NO SIT AT THE FRONT OF THE THEATRE! GET A REFUND AND SEE SOMETHING ELSE IF THERES NO GOOD SEATS! 3/4 OF US COULDN’T HANDLE IT, AND WE’RE BADASS!).

Sometimes I feel like the cute animals with poorly spelled captions meme is running out of steam, but
ICanHasCheezburger continues to blow my mind regularly by expressing things in a way that just doesn’t work without cute animals. It’s weird that they can be so sad and heartbreaking sometimes, while still being so cute and funny. Anyway, I wanted to share this one, truly a nightmare scenario.

If you’re looking for more consistently serious fare, LolSecretz uses the same kinds of photos as ICHC, but with captions reminiscent of the whole Post Secret thing. Sometimes they suck but there are some real gems in there.

And while I’m at it, the newest A Softer World really slapped me in the face, which is what I want from my webcomics.