First, we're happy to announce that the team has identified and fixed the issue with the YouTube conduit; you can now find and add videos from YouTube to your library and posts. As always, thanks for your patience!
The other news we have today is about a new addition to the Six Apart family: TypePad Micro, a new free level of TypePad that is streamlined for microblogging. We see a new form of blogging emerging that lives between the quick status updates of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form posts of "classic" blogging; TypePad Micro is designed to meet that need. You can read more about TypePad Micro in Chris Alden's post on the Everything TypePad blog.
A lot of the new capabilities we've added to TypePad this year were actually inspired by some of the best things about Vox: favoriting, member profiles, a dashboard to follow other bloggers, and easy ways to post content from other social media sites. But the things that make Vox different from TypePad are still there: Vox has always been -- and still is -- the best place for "friends and family" blogging, where you're in control over who sees what. TypePad, on the other hand, is built for the blogger who wants, no, craves, attention.
Do you have a passion or interest you want to share with people beyond your Vox neighborhood? If so, we'd love it if you tried out TypePad Micro. Maybe you've always wanted to start that obsessive blog that's just about waffle restaurants. Or want a place to share videos of your favorite band (Jonas Brothers, anyone? Anyone? ...). TypePad Micro's great for those topic-specific blogs. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.
On the Vox front, our designers are working on some cool new themes (coming soon!). We'd also love to hear your thoughts about where we should take Vox in the coming year. What are the key things you'd like to see for Vox? If you've had a chance to use TypePad this year, what are the features there that we should bring over to Vox? And, if you're thinking big thoughts, how could we connect the Vox and TypePad communities in order to bring together bloggers and their shared passions? Your feedback is really important to us, so please leave a comment here, or shoot me a message.
And again, thanks for your patience as we found and fixed the YouTube bug!
~ daisy
As many of you have noticed, the YouTube Conduit is not working. I am so sorry about this; I know how frustrating it is.
The team is looking into how to get this fixed and I will update you as soon as I hear something. In the meantime, not all is lost... There is a work-around for posting videos.
When you're in the Compose Screen, just click on "embed." Ignore the fact that it says "Widget" before everything because you can definitely use this to embed videos as well. You'll just need to input the embed code from the video, enter a title (if you want) and hit OK.
It might not show up perfectly in your compose screen, but when you hit "Save," your video should appear just the way you wanted it to.
Hopefully this will allow you to keep posting videos while we figure out what's happening on our end.
As always, thanks for your patience.
Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
Let us forget for a moment that Surrogates started out as a graphic novel. Somewhere along the movie's course of development, someone probably had the grand idea of making a movie concerning the morality of humanism - that is, that we are social creatures and need the natural input of others to be healthy and balanced, and that it is our responsibility to be a part of the larger human mechanism and advance the species, etc., etc. Unfortunately, this sentiment, noble as it is, never made it to the final product; instead, we get a wildly implausible, half-baked actioner dressed up in sci-fi drag.
Long story short, everyone (literally, everyone) on the planet has now forsaken their humanly weaknesses and uses a robotic avatar to go out in public and do their daily business. These avatars can take an astonishing amount of damage and not transmit that damage back to the "operator." This has led to an almost total drop in crime and disease (it must be noted that this movie takes place a scant 14 years from now), and life is good for everyone, except if you happen to not want an avatar and would rather go to the corner store yourself and pick up a six-pack. These people are shunned and live on reservations for avatarless "meatbags." Eventually, meatbag revolutionaries figure out a way to kill operators through their avatar's data connections, and it's up to Bruce Willis to blah blah blah.
It should be immediately obvious how blatantly implausible this movie is, even from conception. The whole story is built around this core of these telepresence machines that people use to do their everyday work. How can literally everyone on the planet afford an avatar? There are countries today that don't even have a complete electrical grid or reliable plumbing, let alone being able to supply every single person with a freaking lifelike robot.
Also, from a business standpoint, this is implausible in that this method of telepresence is insanely cost-inefficient. Imagine for a moment the sheer amount of money it'd take to construct and maintain a super-strong, super-fast robot. Multiply that by the number of employees you have. Now, compare that to the cost of setting up a camera and mic and streaming a meeting over the Internet. As one would imagine, the more business-friendly option is rather obvious. This technology could possibly be used for police officers or firemen, for example, or maybe soldiers, but it's doubtful that your pizza-delivery guy will ever see a practical need for a robot (and if somebody could afford a freaking robot, would you really be delivering pizzas?).
As far as the actual movie itself goes, it's a mixed bag, if these so-called mixed bags were filled with compost and medical waste and old leaky batteries. The important thing to remember here is that everyone in the movie is a robot, so the acting is - hopefully purposefully - very stiff, artificial, and, well, bad. Everyone - from the big names to the one-line walk-ons - is blatantly clay-faced and monotonous. The supporting actors, particularly Willis's partner (the otherwise-wonderful Radha Mitchell) and his wife (Rosamund Pike) are woefully underused and left powerless to fight the weak story.
The cinematography, particularly during the action scenes, is clunky, inefficient, and confusing. This isn't helped by ham-handed editing and frankly uneven pacing. Overall the production (again, particularly for the action scenes) looks painfully amateurish.
The visual effects on all fronts are cheap and poorly-rendered. The practical effects are obviously flimsy-looking; the studio should have sprung for Stan Winston's studio to step in and set up some decent animatronic robots. Everything that is computer-generated is obviously so; from crashing vehicles to pretty much every green-screen background, every CG element is not only poorly-rendered but badly composited as well. Even the sound effects seem isolated, blatant, and unnatural.
Surrogates is directed by Jonathan Mostow, who previously gave us the excellent Breakdown and the piss-poor Terminator 3. If he wanted to make an action movie, he should have made an action movie, and made it look like an action movie. This shoddy attempt at a sci-fi/action hybrid feels cheap and sloppy.
Also there's no such thing as the Tooth Fairy. So there.
so my brother's girlfriend is named Derya, and hails from Turkey, her mother recently visited them in Philly and taught my brother and Derya how to make yogurt. "It's Easy!" they all agree.
The Amazon Conduit will be working again on October 15, 2009. Thank you to everyone for your patience.
Have a great weekend,
daisy, Team Vox
If Gamer had a point at any time in its development, we may assume that the filmmakers had some sort of argument they wanted to make re: the fact that humans are predisposed to enjoy visceral entertainment; that we et al. get thrills out of watching and/or participating in activities that seemingly engage us in dangerous situations but leave us ultimately unharmed; and that, combined with the unsavory antisocial side-effects of the forces of socio-technological development (vis-à-vis telecommuting/telepresence/nonpersonal communication), that the next logical step in the evolution of human and machine would be the loss of some degree of humanity as we become one with machines – and that’s a bad thing.
One could further postulate that the reason this is a bad thing is that telepresence would free humanity of things like morality and responsibility, in that not only would repercussions of one’s actions – good or bad – would never truly be recognized by the participant, but also that the freedom of responsibility of community among mankind would result in not only further alienation and division, but it would free the participant from even maintaining a body in which to live.
If one were to make a movie about this and call it Gamer, one may expect some kind of conversation, a tête-à-tête between two sentient beings – one, the strong soldier, concerned for his fellow combatants in a real-life deathmatch, the other the strategic mind, the physically weaker controller, not physically committed to a bloody battle, connected through satellite. This conversation may take place entirely in the mind, and may concern the logical need and want of freedom of choice and the paradox of free will in the presence of a higher power. Or it may take a different tack and seek out the absolute borders of essentially two minds in one body, both seeking control. Or, if one were to really stretch, the conversation may concern the freedom of not having a choice, and the dominant/submissive relationship taking place on a purely cerebral level.
As I said, this may have been what the filmmakers were originally going for. Instead we got Gamer, as written, directed, and produced by the makers of Crank and Crank II: High Voltage, which, had I known that before I went to the theater, would have drastically changed my level of anticipation. It must be noted that as of this writing, Gamer is scoring an improbably high 7.2/10 on IMDB.
Essentially, the Gamer that exists today is nothing more than a montage of quick, shaky cuts that would leave even Tony (The Last Boy Scout, Domino, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3) Scott nauseous. If there was a story it’d be something like Gerard Butler is a wrongly-imprisoned death row inmate who is fighting for his freedom with the help of a brain implant that connects him to a 17-year-old videogame freak and ultimately must break free his bonds to save his wife and daughter from a fate worse than death. Also there’s a classically unambiguously evil bad guy whose intentions are literally to control everyone on Earth.
The movie comes so close to actually accomplishing something several times through the course of the movie, but quickly backs away, seemingly because the filmmakers didn’t want to have to write themselves out of any of the previously-mentioned sticky situations. There are no grays here, only a black-and-white, straightforward actioner with enough onscreen nudity to fulfill any R-rating requirements. There are no surprises; if you came up to me and, based on the trailer, told me what you thought would happen in the movie, I bet you’d get pretty damned close.
There are some positives, though. Butler brings a certain sense of blunt force to his character; watching him during the action scenes is definitely entertaining (see above), especially for a crowd that has obviously played their fair share of first-person shooters (FPS). The set pieces, particularly in the battle zones, are wonderfully detailed and remind one of fondly-played urban warfare maps in certain FPSs.
Ultimately, though, it’s a poor attempt at making a “message” movie by the guys who “brought” us (“forced upon us”) the Crank movies. Despite terrible dialog, hackneyed plot development and a complete lack of cohesive story holding it together, there are tiny spots of actual interesting development, but ultimately they are quickly ejected by the seasick editing. Unfortunately, we don’t pay to see good intentions; we pay to see good movies.
For the super, super, super-nerdy, watch for a rather shockingly in-your-face callout to Blade Runner.
