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http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dolly-

Rose/579685838713391
also buy any posters and merch of me on;

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Why before every show I watch must I see an advertisement for “this show’s” new Two Screen Experience…Just log onto your smartphone or computer or twitter or Facebook to tweet live, post live, see extras etc. etc”…

Why are the people involved in creating the shows (actors, directors, writers) not supremely pissed at this trend. The whole point behind great television is that you get immersed in the story, acting and production of the episode! Encouraging people to concentrate on other extraneous shit will eventually ruin the viewership of the show. Dont get me wrong this is perfect for Mtv or the WB where the shows are CLEARLY crap and need as much filler as possible…but not AMC.

With the major strides television production has taken in the past decade to become cinema quality products, the “Two Screen Experience” is tantamount to begging the audience to play with their cell phones throughout the showing of an entire theatrical release. My best guess at the reasoning for this is some douche-bag corporate executive, whose kids showed him how to use twitter last Friday, decided that this decade old marvel MUST be used to try and garner a profit with that new spangled viral marketing.

I have no problem if they want to put extras online, but how fucking entertained do the monkey brained masses of this country need to be?!! I’m invested in the story..I don’t really care how hot Atlanta was for the actor playing Daryl while he shot “this scene”.  I don’t want constant reminders that what I’m watching is a farce and I don’t want to know that the actor just killed on screen thought that the fake blood tasted like Fritos…kinda kills any emotion you might have felt for the characters.

I know my griping wont make a difference…but i just thought I’d point out, yet another thing ruined by corporate America and marketing.

What are your thoughts?

Chart taken from MYCE.com

I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to buy them and I love to follow the ever emerging technology of watching movies. The next  step is to go digital and contain one’s movie collection on a hard drive, in much the same way that the music industry eventually went for the MP3 format. I have transferred my entire movie collection to digital so that I can search through with a nice netflixesque GUI,  and make portable anything I may want to watch on a plane or long car ride etc.

Every week I check out the newest of the new releases and if there is something worth owning I make sure to pick up the Blu ray/dvd/digital copy pack. I need this combo pack so I can rip the dvd to a digital file because the digital copy is almost entirely useless due to Digital Rights Management. 

Digital Rights Management is an encoding put onto the digital files which disallows one to play the file on any device that inst proprietary to the owner of the DRM. For those unaware, that is like purchasing a blu-ray distributed by Sony Pictures that wont play on anything but a  Sony brand  Bluray Player. The most common DRMd “Digital Copy” must be viewed through an Apple licensed device. I watch my collection through a Western Digital WDTV which doesn’t support iTunes Drm, Amazon Drm, or Microsoft DRM. To add insult to injury none of these company are compatible with each other so if you purchase from all three, you need different devices to play each. On top of that Paramount has its own Cloud service Ultraviolet…not everything is meant to be stored in the fucking cloud. Sometimes I like to watch movies without worrying about my internet connection. So how is this good for the movie studios?

It isn’t. DRM is currently only good for the company issuing the proprietary DRM. Because of the greed of the company distributing the movie, they want to make sure that the only thing they can use to watch it is another one of their products, however this makes the whole process overly complicated . Not everyone likes and uses iTunes, has an apple tv, likes to use the xbox as a streaming machine, or wants their movie collection stored in the cloud. I hate streaming movies because my internet connection causes stuttering and artifacts in the picture. I would prefer just to have a local digital HD copy so I don’t have to have 500 plus blu ray cases sitting in my living room.

The movie studios complain endlessly of people pirating movies, but fail to learn from the mistakes that the music industry made ten years ago. If they work quickly they can avoid the point of no return that the music industry just ignored. There was a time when everyone illegally downloaded music, but now its just easier to get it from legal vendors and people do so. Right now far fewer people illegally download movies than did music 15 years ago, but as technology gets better more and more people are going to catch on, and essentially ruin the movie industry.  I don’t want the movie industry ruined…I like the Movie industry and support it by purchasing almost every decent movie they release…However; Like everything else nowadays it seems that it is being driven over the cliff by corporate executives that care little for long-term growth and only want to see the short-term financial gain.

Right now they are at a crossroads and could invigorate the industry by looking past their immediate profits and change the industry to fit the needs of the future consumer. This would also mean better profits for them in the future rather than an industry crash, which would only result in even poorer quality movies being released (after they leave with their golden parachutes) punishing the consumer who in turn stops seeing and buying the ever declining “quality” movies.

If you make it easier for the consumer to buy a legal digital movie (that works immediately with all of their devices) than it is to download an illegal copy that someone else has spent the time converting,  sales will go up and so will profits.  When I spend over 20 dollars on a movie I would like to be able to use it without having to find a conversion program  to play on all my devices. The masses are always going to take the path of least resistance…make the legal option that path!

This whole diatribe comes from the fact that I purchased A Good Day to Die Hard from the Zune marketplace this weekend and still have yet to watch it. The File wont play through my WDTV due to DRM (EVEN THOUGH I BOUGHT THE FUCKING MOVIE ) and I really don’t want to stream it to my noisy as fuck Xbox, and I can’t even burn it to a DVD for a hard copy. So now I essentially wasted $14 on a useless movie file, and will end up having to repurchase the movie in the Blu Ray Combo pack. That’s great for the studio (this time) since I now have to double purchase, but I will never buy another Digital movie from them  until they relax the DRM to an acceptable level…that is bad for the studio.

What are your thoughts on the issue?

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The new Xbox One was finally unveiled today to the excitement of the gaming community. It not only is a gaming system but also becomes your cable box, your Skype enabled video phone,  and there’s interactive layering of data over TV programming which allows multitasking while watching tv and gaming.

It will bring improved, incredibly sensitive voice and gesture controls (via the new kinect) to watching TV. There’s an interactive guide for live TV, which is fully voice controllable; Changing Channels, recording TV, etc. will be as easy as saying  Watch SyFy.  XBOX ONE will also be competing against streaming services like Netflix and Amazon announcing its first exclusive television show, Steven Spielberg’s Halo: The Television Series.

As For Games Microsoft Studios showed off the new Forza racing game and “Quantum Break,” a  sci-fi horror title.

Microsoft and its partners will roll out a solid lineup of 15 exclusive games, including 8 brand-new franchises and a few staples. ”Call of Duty: Ghosts” The all-new title has revamped multiplayer and a new visual engine that lets gamers get close up to guns and other objects, and interact with environments with more “immersion.

The machine has an accelerated processing unit (APU) chip from Advanced Micro Devices. AMD, which also makes the APU for the PS4, is making a semi-custom chip for Microsoft, using eight processing cores, or computing brains, based on Jaguar micro-architecture designs. The chip will combine graphics and processing on the same sliver of silicon, and it represents a shift away from IBM’s three-core Power chips that were used in the  previous Xbox 360 game console. Oh and one more thing this XBOX will include the Blu Ray Drive along with its 500gb Hdd.

XBOX ONE is slated for release before the end of this year with no price details except the rumor of a $299.00 price tag. Your Move Playstation

Sources:1 2

The Sequel to the best Zombie flick in a decade is finally coming to light with a trailer. Enjoy

For those who don’t know Aliens Colonial Marines takes place 17 weeks after the events of ALIENS and follows a platoon of the USCM to LV-426 answering the distress beacon sent by Corporal Hicks. [spoilers ahead]

CAMPAIGN: Even though last reports found the Sulaco passing through the Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161 system (at the time of the events of ALIEN 3),  It looms around LV-436 in a ghostly orbit. Apparently your ship is late arriving because the previous boarding party has been all but taken out and the Sulaco has been overrun with ALIENS. You board to retrieve the flight recorder and figure out what happened to the doomed ship.  Long story short Weyland Yutani has also sent a recovery team (which is assumed to be the reason the Sulaco is back in orbit) and have set the weapons system upon your ship. You fail to shut them down in time and the remaining personnel escape the ship via drop ship and crash land on LV-426.

You then proceed to Hadley’s Hope (the colony) which doesn’t make much sense since there was a thermonuclear explosion at the end of ALIENS. Either way the environment is pretty well done and fairly accurate to the movie but no where near as good as it could have been. From this point you travel throughout the colony, the alien nest, and the derelict ship. In the Process you find that Hicks was pulled from the Sulaco and replaced with someone else when Weyland Yutani recaptured the ship and ejected Ripley and Newt, and has been kept as prisoner. You have to fight your way through the labs to save him…but really he serves no other purpose. Eventually you escape, blow a queen out of an airlock and kill a fake Peter Weyland (bishop droid) leaving it open to a sequel.

I can see what they were trying to do and they were almost successful and with a few tweaks it could have been. Unfortunately I didn’t really give a shit about the story or the characters, and in a post Bioshock world that is a big no no (unless the game is Call of duty). The Story was Almost there but it seems like they pulled a Phantom Menace, and just started building pretty levels and tried to figure out the story afterward.

What they should have done is follow Hicks from the moment he was dragged out of Hypersleep, gone full boar with explaining the issues that appear between ALIENS and ALIEN3. There is a story there; Who was in Hick’s escape pod if not Hicks? What is “the Company’s” plan? Why was there an Egg aboard the Sulaco to impregnate Ripley? DID WEYU put it there?
Either that or they should have just said “Fuck it”, made ALIENS and follow the marines and Ripley through the movie we all know and love. Anyhow beyond the cheap thrill of being in the world of ALIENS and on LV-426 there is not much there in the Campaign unfortunately. They should have taken a cue from Dead Space as the game is neither frightening or exciting for that matter and could have been much better realized as a frightening 3rd person survival horror game. And then there is the Multiplayer…..

MULTIPLAYER: I was all but ready to write off this game until I decided to try out the Multiplayer, which is surprisingly fun. Each round half the combatants play as Xenomorphs and the other as Marines, in a number of familiar game modes, including Team Death-match, Survivalist etc.  Each side has a completely different method of seige ; When an Alien you have to be much more cunning and find ways to avoid coming straight at the marines  or else get blown up, and as a Marine you have to dig yourself in and always watch your back. I am having much more fun in MP than I did with the Campaign. The only downside is that the controls are a bit wonky and are not as intuitive as one would want. It is hard to achieve effective attacks with the aliens melee based combat and its difficult to be accurate and quick with the Marines projectile based weapons. After playing for a while you get the hang of it, but even with these limitations the Multiplayer mode is by Far scarier and more tense than the campaign,. As a marine you really see how quickly you would be wiped out by the Alien Horde.

Playing as the Alien is one of the more fun things about this multiplayer mode. You are able to play as a couple different types of Alien with different abilities (spitting, tackling etc.) , and are able to “equip” mutations as you build experience. You can also see through walls to aid in your hunt of the marines, but as mentioned before unless you manage to flank the enemy you will get blown away.

Overall I think Ill give Aliens Colonial Marines 3/5 seals, but most certainly not for the Campaign, now that you can buy it for 9 bucks on Gamefly its worth it for the Multiplayer goof.