Pop quiz. You’re art director on a project. Your mission: sell DVD box sets of a resurrected 1970s sci-fi show to as many nerdy dudes as you possibly can. What do you do? Why, stick a hot blonde with crazy cleavage on the cover of every set of course. Duh! Oh, and it doesn’t matter if she’s the sixth billed character on the official web site’s cast list.

I know, I know. She’s probably some major character or something. But still…according to these covers, her boobs play as big a part as she does.

There’s nothing worse than losing all of the data on your computer, especially when most peoples’ lives revolve around their digital companions. Over the holidays, my brother and my sister-in-law both lost everything, one due to a hardware malfunction and one to an accident while installing Apple’s Leopard operating system. Now they’re forced to start from scratch. The data on the malfunctioning hard drive could theoretically be recovered…for about $500. This is a scenario that can easily be avoided. You can hop online and find tons of deals on external hard drives to make backups of your important files. Most desktop and laptop computers nowadays have DVD burners built in. USE THEM! A single-layer DVD-R can hold 4.7 gigabytes of data. That’s a crap-load of pictures/songs/documents. If you’re lucky enough to be running Mac OSX Leopard (10.5), the built-in Time Machine application is absolutely brilliant. All you need is an external hard drive and it will automatically make backups of everything on your computer.

In short, take advantage of the tools that are easily available to you and don’t risk losing important data.

Generally speaking, everyone feels pretty similarly when it comes to advertisements. Sure, there are some funny commercials that people talk about and enjoy, but a commercial break is usually a good reason to exercise the fast-forward button on a DVR remote. For advertisers, the popularity of DVRs and the increased usage of the internet as a media portal has forced creative thinking in terms of how to get their messages to the masses. For consumers, that means some seriously annoying and potentially frightening assaults on other aspects of our daily lives. (more…)

It’s rare that a movie can completely surprise me nowadays. Trailers usually give so much of a movie away that by the time you’ve finally watched it, you feel like you had already seen it once before. That was not the case for me when I saw I Am Legend. I went into it completely unaware of the plot and I think it helped me enjoy the movie a lot more than if I knew exactly what to expect. (more…)

It’s the holiday season. The Christmas spirit is in the air. The Oscar movie season has begun. Sadly, none of those things apply to our latest comedy by Judd Apatow, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. You may be asking, “Who the hell is Judd Apatow?” He’s the man who brought us Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad.

Ahhh yes, that guy. (more…)

Editor’s Note: As of February 19th, 2008, the HD DVD format is dead. Blu-ray has won the war. I liked this guide though, so I’m going to leave it up.

There’s a war going on right now, only it’s not the kind that’s fought overseas with guns and tanks (not yet, anyways). Its battles are fought with marketing dollars, on message boards across the internet and on store shelves. It’s the worst kind of war, besides those ones mentioned before with the guns. Those are worse.

It’s a format war, and it’s causing mass confusion and apathy.

(more…)

A new IBM patent would allow for companies to stick advertisements right in the middle of a DVD movie. So you’d sit and watch a bit of the film, then all of a sudden a commercial would start to run, disabling your fast-forward button. Once the commercial is over, you’d be returned to the film. The point of the patent is to offer lower-priced ad-supported DVDs to consumers and provide another revenue stream for movie studios. Personally, I think I just shit my pants.

[Ars Technica]