Friday, February 17, 2006
It really IS better than television.
Click the picture or right here to watch a brief (1.5", Quicktime) Public Service Announcement
(remember those?) about the coolness of watching videoblogs on your desktop with the help of FireAnt. Or just read below!
Don't get me wrong. I like television well enough. I like to indulge in stickygooey treats like "Pimp My Ride" and "Strange Love" and "Lost" and award shows. I like how NY1 puts the tempurature in the lower left-hand corner. Can't leave the house with out that. Sometimes I need to totally zone out and TV is fabulous for that. It's pre-programmed, it's not interactive at all, it just sits there and hurls stuff at you. Hundreds of channels of not-a-whole-hell-of-a-lot. But there was no show that sucked me in this past season. Nothing I felt compelled to watch. Nothing that made me want to race home and see it...or record it for later. The last show that really got me was "Buffy". Last year I loved me some "Lost" but this time around? Eh. "24" swept me off my feet the first two seasons but now? How many bad days can Jack Bauer really have? He's far exceeded his "bad day" allowance. Last I heard he was supposed to be dead. Poor guy can't even disappear properly. He needs to get out of the covert operations business and manage a Dairy Queen, or something.
In NYC, I work overnight shifts three or four times a week, leaving me with few primetime television opportunities in the first place. During the day I'm up and about (and usually too disoriented to set a VCR), running errands and cooking dinner and getting ready to go back to work. No time for tv there and really, there's nothing on. In New Orleans, we don't have a tv at all. So as a far superior tv substitute I turn to videoblogs. Some are pure entertainment, some are educational, many are personal, some explore current events, a couple are "shows" and several are just...weird & wonderful. See that link list called "Watching" over there in the sidebar? That's about half of what I've been watching lately and a fraction of what's out there.
Just like you can keep track of all your blogs in one place via RSS feeds, you can view all your vlogs in one place, too. You can watch them on the web, which is cool, or on a video iPod, or you can just bookmark all the webpages and hop from one to another, but I like them on my desktop. That's where FireAnt comes in.
I like my "tv" as interactive as possible, thanks very much.
"This Ant Don't Sting"
by MC MissB
Appears Courtesy of BadAnger G.A./Anagram Recording
