Category Archives: Media

Happy Thanksgiving

By Bryan | Published: November 27, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Here’s a little random update on some random stuff.

I worked as an extra on this past week’s episode of Cold Case. I didn’t see myself at all but I did see my car… waaaaaaaaaay in the back, haha.

Cold Case

A little over two weeks ago I bought Forza III for XBOX 360. I played it for about two hours before I had to go somewhere. When I came home I went to turn on my xbox and I got the dreaded red ring of death. It was quite frustrating to have that happen right after getting a new game, haha. Well I finally got it back the other day and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Forza. I don’t think I’ll be needing a Playstation 3 or waiting for Gran Turismo 5 anymore. It’s awesome.

And now on the topic of thanksgiving. I recently came to the conclusion that rule of law is the most taken-for-granted thing in America. Few people who grew up here know what it is like to live without it. Let me tell you that without rule of law, everything pretty much sucks and nothing can get better.

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When the news only reports on the news

By Bryan | Published: March 4, 2009

You may have noticed by now that I get a lot of my news from the Internet, and one disturbing trend that I’ve noticed lately is that it seems like a very large proportion of news stories that are published are actually just reports that another news agency reported on something, and it seems like hardly any real investigation or fact checking is going on.

Maybe the idea is that when you start a report with, “[Some Newspaper] is reporting that [So and So] is saying [such and such],” it absolves you of having to do any fact checking. After all, if you get something wrong, you can just claim that you were reporting what someone else reported! Is there any such thing as journalistic integrity anymore?

A big problem with this is the way the media will quickly latch onto a story and repeat what someone else has said — misinformation is often being fed under the guise of authority to an unsuspecting public who rightly assumes that someone should be checking all the facts before they make it to air.

Last night’s Colbert Report made fun of TV news coverage of a supposed CDC report stating that beer pong spreads herpes. Sensationalistic coverage about this supposed CDC report was spread to multiple sources without anyone bothering to check if such a report actually even existed (it doesn’t). This is a breakdown of journalistic integrity on many levels:

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Steele vs. Obama on the economic plan

By Bryan | Published: February 7, 2009

While I was watching my news subscription clips on YouTube today I noticed that the AP had posted a clips of both Obama and RNC Committee Chairman Michael Steele talking about the economic stimulus package.

I don’t know anything about macroeconomics but I do know about film making and thought it would be kind of interesting to compare and contrast the qualities of the videos themselves:

Like I said, I don’t really know much about macroeconomics so I’m not really going to try to compare and contrast their competing policies. Instead, I’m going to talk about what I do know about and compare and contrast the quality of the videos themselves and what it might mean.

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Superbowl XLIII Advertisements

By Bryan | Published: February 1, 2009

Wow, I’ve been pretty poor about maintaining this site. I often get ideas for things to write about but then I’ve failed miserably at writing about them in a timely manner, until eventually the events I want to write about are so old that nobody cares anymore. Well not today!

The end of the Super Bowl is being played as I type this but I was unable to watch most of the game as I was busy. Also I’ve been having a hard time following NFL football (and sports in general) as I’ve been without SportsCenter for the last three years.

However, one thing I can’t miss is the ads. In many ways, high-end television commercials represent the pinacle of the art and craft of cinematography. The biggest budgets (per minute of final product), the newest toys, and the highest emphasis on visuals out of any other kind of motion picture format. So for me, watching those commercials is like research on the latest trends of filmmaking.

Of course a lot of people just watch them for fun as well, so if you’re interested, they’ve got a bunch of Super Bowl XLIII ads up on Hulu.com.

UPDATE: They are also available on this YouTube playlist.

-Bryan

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Top Gear America!

By Bryan | Published: July 26, 2008

I heard that they were taping the studio audience portion of the pilot episode of the American version of Top Gear right down the street at Downey Studios, so I signed up to be in the studio audience because I was very interested to see how the show came out!

There has been a lot of speculation about the American version of Top Gear and whether or not it will be any good compared to the British version. There’s especially a lot of people wondering about the format of the show and if it will remain true to the original, and all of that.

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