When we were married, my ex-wife and I had a rule. No watching mutual TV shows without the other. After years together, raising a toddler, managing a strict budget, television shows became an easy, reliable escape for the two of us. We didn’t watch exorbitant amounts of television. Usually less than an hour a night. But we did not have much time to spare every night, so that hour of TV time was something we both nurtured.
When I suggested to my ex-wife that I might rent a storage space to house some of the stuff I wanted to take with me, she voiced concern.
“That’s how the hoarders always start out.”
Neither of us watches the hoarder TV shows that have cropped up, but she’s seen enough Oprah to have an idea of how the problem begins. At first I started to protest.
“Source Code” is not just good science fiction, it’s also a good movie. This has been a solid season for movies with sci-fi-like concepts that did not rely heavily on special effects. “The Adjustment Bureau” was a solid film. “Limitless” may not have been as bright as its main character, but it was a fun ride throughout, and even if I wanted to complain about the Hollywood ending, I have to admit that sometimes it’s nice to see the good guys win. I’m not going to tell you who wins in “Source Code,” but needless to say, if you’ve seen the previews and the commercials, you’ve only started to unravel the layers of this movie.
I found out that my sister broke up with her last boyfriend because Facebook told me. Not a Facebook friend, the Web site itself. She had linked to him as her “relationship,” so when you went to her profile page, it said that she was “in a relationship with . . . ” that guy. Then they broke up. Being children of a digital age, they decided to tell Facebook before they told actual humans. They both changed their relationship status to “single,” and Facebook sent out a message to all of their friends. The message said they were “no longer in a relationship.” Facebook is a bit too smart for its own good. It saw their relationship status change and put two and two together. Or rather, it subtracted from two, and came up with zero.
I’m a movie fan, and a Netflix subscriber. In fact, I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, since the first year the service started mailing DVDs. It’s my preferred method for getting new movies and watching them at home. Sometimes I’ll rent from iTunes, usually if I can’t get the wife to agree to watch one of the three movies I’ve received from Netflix, or one of the long list of films I have in my instant queue. I don’t use Blockbuster anymore, and I certainly don’t use Redbox. I’ve learned that I’m very lazy about returning movies, so I prefer the flexibility that Netflix and iTunes offers me.
When I walked into Square Burger for the second time, it wasn’t hard to notice that the staff was treating me a little bit differently. The bartender remembered my name and the beer I had drunk on my last visit. They have a few dozen beers on tap, so that was something of an accomplishment on both counts. I sat at the counter and ordered lunch. The first time I had eaten a burger with bleu cheese and balsamic onions. This time I went for a cheeseburger with bacon. I stuck with the sweet potato fries, because they were awesome. I’ve been to Square Burger five times in the last year and a half, and I’ve never tried the regular fries. Those sweet potato fries are better than they deserve to be.
When I was 14 my parents bought me an account on the Prodigy network. This was back in 1989, before I had a clue the Internet existed, and four years before the first graphical Web browser would be introduced. I did all the things on Prodigy that you did when you first discovered the Internet. I had email conversations and grew addicted to the chiming sound when I fired up the 2400 baud modem and discovered I had new mail. I posted messages on bulletin boards and got into long-winded arguments with people for no good reason. I did research for school projects, played games and read news, and generally poked around the seemingly limitless world the growing network offered. I also pretended to be someone else.
I worked in the North Orange, New Jersey school district for one day. It was a training day. I had accepted a job as a teacher in a fine High School (read: rich) teaching Journalism and Theater Arts. As a challenge, this was a step down from the English teaching I had been doing at inner city High Schools for the past five years, but it would have been a very cushy teaching job. I had been offered a salary of $75,000, which is more than I thought a teacher could make. On my first day of training, a couple weeks before the school year started, I got a call from a Web site to which I had also applied for a job. They wanted me to work for them as a product reviewer and news writer.
Having reviewed some of the worst movies of the year for this SlashGear column, I can finally set my sights on the best of the best, just in time for the Oscars. I’m only going to focus on one category, the most important one, the Best Picture. Full disclosure: I haven’t seen all of the movies, but I’ve seen more of the ten nominees this year than in years past, and I’ve probably seen more than you have, because you didn’t want to sit through the movie where the guy cuts his own arm off.
When I was a kid, my dad would clobber me at video games. He’s not a gamer. He didn’t grow up playing games, and he didn’t have much interest once games became popular. But we had an Atari 2600, and I remember spending rainy days playing games with my dad. We would play Basketball, which consisted of two jagged stick figures bouncing a square. I was probably 10 years old, or so. We would play for money. He would beat me out of a month’s worth of allowance, then I would cry until he let me welch on our bet. So, obviously when I had a son of my own, I couldn’t wait to get him started playing games.
As SlashGear’s self-appointed movie reviewer, I’ve seen about a half dozen 3D movies this year on behalf of the site, and another half dozen on my own recognizance. After Avatar, it was clear that 3D was more than just a fad, that the new technology was a potential cash cow and definitely here to stay. But has it finally become mainstream? Is this really the year that 3D finally took off, or was the glut of 3D movies just another flash in the pan? After enjoying some of the best – and suffering the worst – that 3D has to offer, here’s what I’ve learned this past year.
As the new year approaches, I decided to make a different kind of new year’s resolution list. Instead of a cheesy list of things to watch or things I’d like to see, I thought I would make a list of the things I will resolve not to do in 2011. As a columnist writing about digital living for the last half of the year, I think the ways in which we remove technology from our lives can be as important, if not more so, than the ways in which our lives collide with the digital frontier.
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