Alan Is Good

No apologies for any bias or skew this post may contain.  The past 5 years have been horrendous for American horror, and original films like the SAW franchise have been our only saving grace from throwing in the towel and letting Japan go ahead and handle the entire genre.

Yes, the SAW franchise is five sequels deep.  I strongly recommend watching them chronologically, as the story definitely builds upon each previous movie.  In an age with remakes abound,  films produced around gore/new CGI tricks instead of storyline and plot, the SAW franchise is original, unpredictable, and THE most successful horror franchise ever.  Fact.

I put together a rough breakdown of the box office success the SAW franchise has seen to date:

(Hover over the movie posters to see movie data) More »

According to the Rolling Stone and other entertainment news sources, Trent Reznor threw in the Twitter towel last week.  A few weeks ago I wrote about the ongoing trolling by Twitter users from across various message boards and forums.  Reznor said he was going to use Twitter solely to announce news and tour dates, but the @ reply trolling didn’t calm down, and succeeded in frustrating him further.

I’m truly surprised at the number and intensity of anti-Reznor blog posts and comments.  It seems like every time someone posts that “Reznor is God,” a troll is born.  Even though I disagree subjectively with a lot of the angles, I respect this post written by AndreaUrbanFox, which fully details and maps out the Reznor vs. anti-Reznor trolls saga.

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It’s like when you finally convince several of your friends to give your favorite TV show a chance, and then the episode they watch is the lamest one of the season.

Thanks, Tom.

Unveiled sometime in the past 24 hours, Tom’s latest trick is the new integrated MySpace IM.  I know it’s not like that anymore, but I still like to imagine MySpace president Tom Anderson and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg viciously coding away night and day to vanquish the other.

The custom IM friends screen looks a little something like this: 

And when you pop the chat window out:

10 Cool Things About MySpace IM 

1. Easily turn off that annoying “pop” sound 

2. Pop-out window chat function 

3. Ability to go ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ and still chat

4. Bulk add/Bulk remove friends for customized friend IM list

5. Easy to add individual friends to IM list/Block list

6. Option to chat with ‘Everyone’ (strangers)

7. Uncluttered layout for multiple chats

8. Epic smiley selection (including pirate)

9. Option to hide the MySpace Chat bar

10. Option to disable MySpace Chat completely

I bet my social networking wrestlers would have loved to use this as fodder earlier this week.  MySpace quietly unveiled the integrated MySpace IM sometime in the past 24 hours, and it resembles closely the ‘new’ Facebook Chat we were treated to earlier this week.  (MySpace previous released their IM service as a program you download, install and use just like AIM – only it was horrible, unlike AIM)

Copying Facebook?

Well, Shabooty thinks so.  MySpace IM functions the same way – see who’s online, chat them up, some of them may have the “inactive” icon next to them (it’s a moon on Facebook Chat), and at first there’s an annoying “pop” sound whenever someone enters/exits/IMs you.  Some people may see it as a copycat move, or that it’s too little too late, but I disagree.  Copying Facebook would have been releasing an inferior integrated chat service that everyone finds annoying and opts to avoid, and then two months later fixing all of the problems even though you’ve lost everyone’s attention.  MySpace always had a silently weak chat service, and then they quietly launched that lame IM service you can download, but those were betas that no one noticed (and probably weren’t harmed by negative feedback).  I think their foray into the “all up in your face” IM world is far more polished and was arguably executed better.

Facebook made some good changes to their chat earlier this week, but I still have issues with their approach to the integrated chat.  I feel like Zuckerberg’s over-thinking it.  

AlanIsGood on MySpace:

Another Xtranormal video by AlanIsGood:

Enter: Cisco Fatty

This week, the Cisco Fatty was born.  This girl applied for a job with Cisco, and apparently they made her an offer.  Then she goes and updates her Twitter profile with this: 

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

Of course, someone with Cisco sees her update, and replied to her – on Twitter.

“Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

Laugh, laugh.  Get it all out.  You can see what everyone is saying about the Cisco Fatty in the Twitter Search results for – of course, Cisco+fatty.  The story is spreading quickly, and it will reach ‘meme‘ status in no time.  Someone even made a quick blog in her honor just to make sure she cries about this, at http://ciscofatty.com.   She made her Twitter updates private, but Twitter search archives all.  Long live the Cisco Fatty.  

Social Media Censorship

I’m not a fan of this growing wave of censorship in social media.  It’s interesting to see how it affects different people across various industries.  Here are a few cases I’ve seen recently:

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