Stream Your Music from Your Home Computer to Your iPhone (For Now)
Simplify Media allows you to listen to your home music library from anywhere (including your iPhone), and, while I think this is a service with amazing potential, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who thinks this application is doomed. Mashable certainly seems to agree. We could be wrong—after all, my friend Leslie wrote about the service last year, and it’s still around—but I think the release of an application for the high-profile iPhone is going to be a nail in their coffin, if not several nails.
With Pandora on the verge of extinction, I’m constantly looking for ways to discover new music. I think Simplify Media’s ability to let me share music libraries with up to 30 friends could be one way to do that, but I hope that it’s not dead and gone before me and my friends get the chance to really try it out.
Who is your favorite minor character on LOST?
DarkUFO has an interview with Francois Chau, the actor who plays the doctor in the Dharma Initiative training films, and it’s got me thinking about who my favorite minor character on Lost is. Chau’s character certainly ranks high up there, but I’m not sure that I can decide. There are so many great characters on this show, both major and minor.
What about you? Who is your favorite minor character on Lost? Is it Chau’s Candle/Wickmund/Halliwax/Chang? How about Rousseau, the French woman? Are you a closet fan of Dr. Artz? Let us know in the comments. And, well, you know the rules: if you can’t decide on just one, give us your top five!
Year Zero Comes To HBO?!?
Year Zero, easily Trent Reznor’s most ambitious project up until (and maybe including, depending on your perspective) Ghosts I-IV, may be coming to a boob tube near you at some point in the near future. The Nine Inch Nails frontman has been in talks with cable network HBO to bring Year Zero to the small screen, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“I just pitched it to HBO two weeks ago in L.A. It went great. Ideally, we’re trying to get them to do a two-year limited series. I prefer that over a film. We would have a second ARG tying into the second album and ties into the series and they all happen together with a budget needed to pull that all off. There would be a tour down the road. The record completes the story, the ending that no one knows. I know what happens. I knew when I started it. And it’s not what people think.”
I love the idea of doing this on TV instead of as a film. There’s just so much story to tell, and much of it would get lost as a standalone one-off movie. But I’m also really glad that he’s looking to tackle this as a limited series, which is what I think nearly all television series (and all comic book series, for that matter) should be. Serialized stories are so much more satisfying for me (and for a great many people, I’d wager) when I know that there is a definitive ending on the horizon, however far away that ride into the sunset might be. We need look no further than the example of Lost, which was entirely reenergized at the end of the third season, once the writers knew for sure when the series was going to end.
This is very exciting news, and I very much hope that it comes to fruition.
iJustine Has Nice Apps
PHOTO: The Winnies 2007 2179.jpg by luismi1985 on Flickr CC BY
Internet celebrity iJustine has five screens worth of apps on her iPhone, and it’s really something that you have to see to believe. I have only two screens worth of apps at the moment (Twitterrific, Facebook, AIM, Last.fm, Remote, Pandora, PhoneSaber, Tap Tap Revolution, and Recorder, in addition to the standard issue apps) and even I find that excessive at times. But five screens? I wouldn’t know where to look for anything. I really wouldn’t.
In other Apple news, a man said by one insider to be as demanding as iJustine’s hero Steve Jobs has been placed in charge of the company’s shaky MobileMe service. Apple vice president Eddy Cue is now heading up the MobileMe team, writes Apple Insider.
Those who are familiar with Cue know him for managing the iTunes Store to resounding global success, but he was also a force behind .Mac and the ever popular Apple Online Store. “It’s the not-sexy part of the company, but it’s the guts that make all of the sexy front ends actually work,” says von Rospach, who crossed paths with Cue during his years of managing Apple’s email lists.
Cue’s teams have long been self-contained, von Rospach adds, spending most of their time in “uncharted territory,” implementing technology that never existed before on large scales “under really scary conditions.” Over the years, he’s earned the respect of Steve Jobs by delivering projects on time, to specification, all while keeping “the darn thing(s) a secret” in the process.
As a MobileMe user, I can only hope that the faith this “insider” has in Cue will eventually be rewarded. MobileMe has run pretty flawlessly for me, but I know it’s probably only a matter of time before it once again crashes hardcore, as it did at launch. When it does crash again, I’ll be very interested to see how swiftly and how decisively Cue takes action.
“We’re not really showing any penis.” - Elizabeth Banks on Zack and Miri
Following up on his interview with Seth Rogen (previously mentioned here), Capone from Ain’t It Cool News has an interview with Elizabeth Banks, the other half of the titular dynamic duo from Kevin Smith’s next film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
My favorite quote from the piece once again brings up the asinine nature of the MPAA ratings board’s decision-making process:
Capone: This film smells a bit like a romance under all this flesh peddling.
EB: It’s very romantic. I mean, it’s uber-romantic, this movie. It’s what sold me on the movie. It’s why I can’t believe the MPAA is giving us so much shit, because really the movie has so much heart. Meanwhile Saw 2 is about people cutting off each other’s limbs and blood gushing everywhere is an R. We make this big, heartfelt movie where people happen to fuck each other, and we get an NC-17. I mean, we don’t even show dick. We’re not really showing any penis.
As you may recall, Zack and Miri won an appeal recently and will be rated R, after all. But that doesn’t make Banks’s point any less valid. We, in this country, are way too sensitive about sex and sexual imagery, and way too desensitized to violence. We are nation in love with war and gore and scared to death of love and lovemaking. What a sad state of affairs…
