Thursday, April 23, 2009

President Evil: The Web Series

Some of you may know that last November Adam, Jessica, Holden and I attempted to revive the President Evil concept that Jay and I made in college. We filmed three episodes and then Adam moved to Dubai, but he came back and we finally got episodes 2 and 3 off his computer.


President Evil is a web series about a zombie that becomes President and two men who find it their duty to kill the new leader of the free world, President Grogg.


The idea began in 2004 during the George Bush / John Kerry election season. "President Evil: The Beginning" was entered into the Mercer University Halloween Film Festival and won 1st place. Heroes Chip and Jim feel their patriotic duty to slay this surprisingly effective new President to save mankind from zombie...kind


Four years later, while Obama and McCain led campaigns, a new set of heroes found themselves fighting against the zombie executive branch after a re-election keeps President Grogg in office. After saving the economy, balancing the nation budget, mending foreign affairs, and saving the country, President Grogg is still just a zombie to Nick and Mack who are fed up with brains on their pizza in "President Evil: Re-Election Day".


Nick and Mack hit the road bound for Washington DC and with a little help from their friends, they aim to take down the zombie empire with guns blazing.


Episode 1: "Re-Election Day"



Episode 2: "Campaign Strategies"



Episode 3: "Right To Bear Arms"



And, in case you've never seen the original one that Jay and I made in 2004, here it is. As a fair warning, we only had one night to write, film, and edit it. Plus, it ran longer than expected, so we had to cut it short (film festival had a 6 minute limit)


Episode 0: "The Beginning"


Friday, April 17, 2009

The Pirate Bay takes on a Ship Load of Damage





If you have never been to The Pirate Bay website, it's essentially the Napster of the late '00s. Rather than download a program that lets you search for peers with mp3s, The Pirate Bay is a website that allows users to post links to bittorrent files. The bittorrent files are then used in a bittorrent client which uses the file to find users sharing the file you are trying to download.

After a legal battle, The Pirate Bay founders were each sentenced to one year in prison and an alltogether fine of $3.6 million (yowsers!). They were originally charged with "assisting copyright infringement" which was dropped; but were convicted on "assisting making available copyrighted material".

It sounds as if they made up that charge to fit exactly what they were doing. I do agree that they did break that law, if it is in fact a law. I always enjoy seeing the progress of internet law as the internet seems to move much faster than lawmakers can keep up with, but it seems like this time the law won. As we move farther and farther away from cds and dvds and more into pure software, I think we'll see more agressive action on the music, movie, and gaming industry's part to eliminate warez (pirating).

Blockbuster and Netflix both offer forms of watching movies directly over the internet and most television stations have now posted their show episodes online. It's only a short time before Blockbuster ends up having to shut it's stores down and netflix stops mailing you DVDs. I imagine within the next 5 years, we'll see the beginning of the collapse of cable and satellite television. Everything will be streamed via the internet to a small computer hooked up to your TV or straight to your hand held devices. And as history has shown us, the less hardware, the lower cost of pirating.


Thursday, April 16, 2009

Obama Sends a Firm Message with New High Speed Rail Line


President Obama has been supporting this new high speed rail line, or so the headlines would leave me to believe. Despite the title of this post and the associated picture, I am actually quite excited about this. The sooner we can rely less on oil, and cars in general, the better. I am all for public mass transportation. I wish Atlanta had a better public transportation system. For those of you non-Atliens, we have Marta which makes a plus through Atlanta, one line going north and south, and one line going east and west. It's great if you want to go to somewhere on the plus, but otherwise, you're up shit creek (which is also 7 blocks away from Marta).


This new high speed rail line gives a lot of potential to lower travel costs, I imagine it will also bring down the cost of airline tickets. When I first read about the project, I got very excited at the possibility of having a high speed rail line straight from Atlanta to Vegas, or at least maybe Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I won't be making the cross country journey via train, as the tracks don't go anywhere near the mid west. It's great if I chose to take a trip up to Washington DC, but the map is set to for the most part keep me on this side of the mississippi. It's as if the people who designed MARTA were asked to make a train system that made it easier to travel around the country.


It really does nothing for the West coast. I suppose it lightens up traffic on I-5 a little. The entire Mid-West is omitted from the track, though I imagine - I hope - the plan is to eventually connect all of the lines. There are even plans to hit two canadian cities, yet none to bridge the East and West sides of America. This is why we have such strong tensions between gangs on opposing sides of the country.


I'm sure there were several considerations taken, but I would have foreseen something more along the lines of this (Ignore the circles and highlighted Oklahoma). This plan hits the biggest cities in America as well as sweep into several of the other high travel cities that are in path along the lines between the large cities. This also hits most of the major airline hub cities (which I'm sure is part of the reason Obama's map doesn't look like this).



Cities this map covers:

  • Miami
  • Atlanta
  • Nashville
  • Washington DC
  • Houston
  • New York
  • Boston
  • Detroit
  • Chicago
  • Kansas City
  • Oklahoma City
  • Dallas
  • Denver
  • Salt Lake City
  • Seattle
  • San Francisco
  • Albaquerque
  • Pheonix
  • Los Angeles
  • (After drawing the map, I realize I should have maybe included New Orleans btw Atlanta and Houston)

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Some much to do! So little time!


Feels like I have so much I want to do with so little time. Here's a list of thing I hope to do within the next 2 months before I go to China. These are not necessarily in any particular order.


  • Complete current big web development project (est. 2-3 more weeks)

  • Learn how to program iPhone applications

  • Get a band together for May 9th "Fame" party and learn 20-30 songs

  • Finish putting together ADL Directory site and start marketing it.

  • Finish filming Ting Ting's "Thats not My Name" music video and edit it.

  • Bang out a solid script for President Evil series / movie.

  • Come up with a new name for President Evil series / movie (the PE name is flooded on youtube)

  • Finish at least half of the BNS2 novel.

  • Finish planning Deuces Wild Vegas Trip

I might just cut out sleep for the next 2 months, that should help me get more of these things accomplished. I would estimate that within the next 60 days, I should be able to cap off at least half, if not 3/4 of these To-DO items.

Funny License Plates

Found a bunch of funny license plates online at various sites. I couldn't upload them to blogger for some reason, so they may take a while to load as they are all coming from their original hosting sites. For that same reason, some may not load at all if the original publisher changes the link or removes them.

RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com
RobIsTheBomb.Com