Bad news for local art house cinemas from Consumerist:
IFC Entertainment has reached a deal with Comcast and Cablevision that pipes all its films, in HD, to cable boxes, giving moviegoers an option to ditch their local art houses.
Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke reports Cablevision charges $6.95 for either standard definition or high-definition, while Comcast charges $6.99 for SD and $7.99 for HD.
Coincidentally, my own local “college town ghetto” art house cinema just expanded. It will cost $2 more to see a movie there than to see it at home through Cablevision. Luckily, we have Time Warner round these parts so the threat isn’t so immediate, but it’s in the mail, that’s for sure.
It’s really sad to see a beloved cultural icon like this die, but I suppose people want what they want, and society evolves.
(Really, though- if you copy this post maybe we can get a nice googlebomb going)
Local web designer Tyler posted something that annoyed me enough to make me want to repeat it.
Some talentless hacks are copying his designs, verbatim, and have the gall to call themselves “web designers”.
I know the designs are fab, but really, shouldn’t you use them as an opportunity to learn from, and maybe attempt to improve upon them, especially if this is something you want other people to pay you to do?
Just to be clear, Tyler is being much more diplomatic about this, and I am probably more annoyed about it than he is.
Last night Voltaire played his very last show in his very first full-band tour right here in Ithaca. Of course, I was there, and of course I have some pictures!
The last time I saw Voltaire perform with his full band at Blacksun III, where the performance was limited due to time restraints and the number of bands that had to perform. This time there were no such limitations, so there was time to play all the crowd favorites. It was a really great show and while I do miss the banter you get during his solo performances, I appreciate the chance to hear his music as it sounds on the CDs. Unfortunately I was too busy dancing and having a good time (and lending my real camera to a friend to collect video footage) to take more than a blurry camera phone shot of the show:
After the show I posed with him:
And then Keegan posed with him in his usual way:
And then I got an Ithaca tour date poster signed, which I am going to have to frame and hang near my signed Creature Feature poster.
On a related note, have I ever mentioned how a google image search of ‘voltaire goth’ currently returns two different images from my site on the first page? Yes, apparently I have.
I went to a Roller Derby match for the first time ever today, to support Beth, who is co-captain (Cruisin’ B. Anthony). I went alone, because most of my friends who I asked to go suck. I did end up seeing Will there though, who doesn’t suck.
But no matter! It was still fun! And we won, 115-96. Here is a crummy quality cell phone video I took of part of the first period:
Look! Circles! Listen! Cheering! No one flipped out and killed anyone or broke anything in this segment, but things like that are hard to plan.
Anyway, I was told by two separate people that I should try out for the team (none of who were on the team, of course). There may be something to that, as this is probably one of the few sports where lack of depth perception really doesn’t matter. Now if only I were better coordinated…
I’m sorry, but once you have kids, you stop being cool. Really.
The sooner you accept this, the happier you’ll be. If you wait until your kids grow to be teenagers and forcibly prove it to you, the shock may destroy you.
Truth!
For some weird reason, almost nobody came to work today. It snowed last night, but only a few inches and this is Ithaca, so people should be well used to that by now.
It probably says a lot about me that on days like this I wonder if the zombie apocalypse has started and I’m missing it. Of course, I’d surely find out later (with my luck, I’d leave work only to be munched on my way out the door).
In quasi-related news, studded snow tires: 4/~$850. Yep. Life is a money-sucking misery.
For the zillionth year running, Ithaca has once again voted local pizzeria Pizza Aroma as the best pizza place in town.
I don’t get it.
Pizza Aroma pizza is gritty, doughy, and boring. The cheese tastes more like milk than cheese. The tomato sauce is overpowering in its marinara-y blandness. After one and a half slices, you feel like you’re eating vomit.
New York style pizza, it isn’t.
Imagine my surprise when, after I complained to a co-worker about Pizza Aroma’s laudations in the face of execrable taste he disagreed. And when I offered up Gino’s (Ithaca’s only NY style pizzeria, ironically, as Ithaca is in NY) as my favorite local pizza place he went so far as to say the crap pizza in the mall’s food court was better. As he’s generally an okay sort of guy, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even subjected happicow and Peter to a Pizza Aroma dinner taste test, in case all previous experiences with them (all two!) were flukes.
And we all came to the same conclusion: BLEAAARGH. Ithaca, what is wrong with you? Why must you continue to encourage the perpetuation of such terrible food?
Happicow calls it hippy pizza. Maybe it tastes good while stoned? Maybe the secret ingredient is hemp?
Anyway, I think the local bad taste is because we all hail from the only part of the U.S. that actually makes good pizza, and Ithaca is just far enough away from there to think that their bland pizza is good, and to disdain the flavorful stuff for it’s lack of bland (”The spices! They add flavors! They buuuuurrrrrrn!”) :)
I think I’m taking this all way too seriously, but stuff like this makes me wish I lived in a real city. Sure, all non-NY pizza is terrible, but at least in, say, Chicago, they have the decency to make distinctive terrible pizza; as opposed to pizza that is mostly terrible for it’s lack of distinctness. I can respect that. I don’t agree with it, but I don’t think people who prefer Chicago-style pizza are crazy- just wrong.
Ithacans on the other hand…
Today I was walking through the commons, and one of those pamphlet-weilding religious whacks was gonna offer me one of his tracts or whatever, but thought twice of it when he saw my black dress, eyeliner, fishnets, and knee-high Dr Martens. It was great- he turned to me, and started to offer his paper, thought twice of it, and kinda pulled back and pretended to be looking off in some other direction. He then tried to give one to Peter (a friend visiting from New Jersey), who was walking a few feet behind me and looking much less gothic. Peter pretended to be one of the enlightened, and the pestering summarily ceased.
So, in short:
(a) When asked “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior”, say “I certainly have!”, in otherwords, be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
(b) Look to be what a born-again would consider “Satanic”, in otherwords, be a wolf in goat’s clothing.
I don’t know whether metaphorically pretending to be other livestock works as well or not, but these two methods seem rather effective (with the caveat being that the latter method may make the braver zealots try harder, unless you are very intimidating; and that the former method makes you a lying bastard).
Yesterday after work I went for a walk in a local cemetery, where I saw this:
Yep, I actually found a largely-intact hunk of skeleton, just sitting there. It was about human-length, so at first I thought that perhaps someone had gotten into some mischief (there were other signs of [minor] vandalism in the cemetery, though nothing so large as exhuming a body), but upon inspection of the girth of the ribcage I concluded that it was possibly a greyhound-shaped dog, or more likely, a smallish deer.
I still think it was there as a result of some mischief (possibly voodoo! wooOOO!) though, as the caretaker lives on the grounds and I find it extremely unlikely that he/she would simply let an animal rot to nothing more than a skeleton on his front lawn (the smell alone during this process would surely cause it to cease).
I nearly took it home to clean and hang up somewhere, though it seemed rather grody, so I wasn’t particularly akin to touching it. Plus, cleaning something so large would have probably been out of my league. Doubleplus, if it was there as a result of some voodoo, I probably don’t want to mess with it anyway.
And no, I’m not glowing yet (I still have nearly four years left!).
Today was my last day at SGN. I think I got everything that was likely to be gotten into order into order, and have wiped the hard drive on miinips1, which is now my ex-laptop. We went out to Sangam’s for Indian buffet on Cornell’s dime, and I left a pile of text files and a few sheets of legal paper with notes on them for my replacement. I’ll probably have to volunteer some more effort to the cause over the next week or so, ‘cuz the project I was working on yesterday won’t be tested by people other than me until this weekend.
Later, I went over to my new place of employment for a party; where I found out that my purple hair is actually more popular with them than I had, in my wildest dreams, hoped. Apparently, the purple hair implied creativity, which they were looking for :) They just may not want to introduce me to some of the more conservative clients at a first meeting…
After that I spent some time buying cool stuff at Target (I’m always surprised at just how much cool stuff they carry), buying other stuff at Greenstar (like Boo-opoly!), and realizing my keys had been locked in the apartment, where I was not (I borrowed happicow’s), before going to Nokturna at The Haunt with Rob. Surprisingly (?) he really dug it, and at the end of the night ended up inheriting a small pile of my black makeup (eyeliner, lipstick, nail polish [I had extras]), wanting to get his eyebrow pierced (apparently that’s not new), and wanting to buy big black stompin’ boots.
Yeah, I am a bad influence. But I make the world a better place (for some definition of better which basically equates to ‘more interesting and anti-establishment’)! >;-)