Anyone who is at all interested in the future of the internet should take a good look at Scripting News. Dave Winer (who I’m going to add to my web heroes page as soon as I get around to it) is doing some amazing stuff emphasizing content on the web. His Manila web content management system is cool, and if it can evolve a few more steps to be usable by the general public, it could be truly revolutionary.

The web is the printing press of the 21st century. Traditional publishing, whether it be newspapers, magazines, hardcover books, or whatever, is not the vehicle for the average person. It never has been, but now we have an alternative. We need to hang on to weblogs for dear life. Expressing ourselves keeps us alive.

Jean Teasdale, my favorite Onion columnist, has become a union organizer.

Two examples of the blurring of entertainment and reality have come to my attention recently. Both are quite interesting but somewhat creepy and disturbing at the same time – pop culture as traffic accident. The first is Series 7, an independent film shot on digital video about a (at least for now, fictional) television series called The Contenders, where the contestants kill each other until only one is left. Then the champion must face a new crop of players in the next season. The movie website is unsettling in its deadpan depiction of training “ordinary” citizens to be killers.

I can’t wait to see it.

The second development is an internet-based adventure game called Majestic, where you sign up to play the game, and get real-world faxes and phone calls that advance the story, with you as a character. Sounds fun…sort of. Also scary, in a slippery slope kind of way. I guess I don’t want to blur the lines any more than they already are.

I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately.

“So my mother is always saying to me, ‘Judy, you’ll never amount to anything because you always procrastinate.’ And I said, ‘Just wait…’ “
-Judy Tenuta

“Touched by an Angel” has got to be one of the most horrifying pop culture phemonenons of the last decade. In what seems to be an unending string of “I was too lazy to change the channel” epiphanies, I caught about 2/3 of tonight’s episode, where the plucky angels help a mother dying of cancer, her confused daughter, and the evil atheist father, who just happens to be (*gasp*) a science teacher. God must be pretty upset that his existence and love are being peddled like a Veg-O-Matic on Sunday night television, on the backs of women with ovarian cancer. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Watched “Silence of the Lambs” on Lifetime tonight. This was a compelling pop culture experience, firstly because, what the heck is “Silence” doing on the channel that keeps Lindsay Wagner employed in “women in peril” weepies? At first I was just too lazy to change the channel; I have the Criterion DVD of the movie that includes things like a cool second audio channel commentary, so I didn’t need to depend on Lifetime to show it to me. But then it became a classic case of “watch for the TV edits,” which were all too easy to spot since I know the movie like the back of my hand. The second question is, why can they show Buffalo Bill sewing up a suit made of women’s skin, but they can’t have a character say “asshole”? We are a strange and conflicted people.

This new administration is fascinating. I can’t even imagine what happened between Tuesday, when White House Chief of Staff Andy Card announced that the AIDS and race relations offices in the White House would be closed, and today, when the press secretary said Card was mistaken. The chief of staff was mistaken. That’s really a shame.

When no one’s running the show, it’s apparently kind of hard to know who’s supposed to be on stage. Let’s hope they get their stories straight next time.

Survivor is back. It’s too early to pronounce sentence, but until they really started to get nasty with one another about a third of the way into the second episode Thursday night, I was wondering why I was even watching. While I have a handle on most of the “personalities,” it’s hard to remember even which tribe they belong to. Right now, they just seem like a bunch of snapping turtles, emphasis on the snapping. You just can’t recreate the newness that washed over the Pulau Tiga beach last year. Because they all know how to play the game, they don’t play a very interesting game, if you know what I mean.

I think my S1 favorite, Colleen, summed it up quite well when she was talking about one of the later challenges, which took the form of questions and answers: “I got so excited because I thought, ‘We’re going to be on a game show!’…And then I realized, *we are* on a game show.”

Last week, I left my steady job to enter the exciting and frightening world of full-time freelance. It’s exciting because the doors to the world are thrown open, with no limitations except your own talent and drive – the exact same things that make me feel a little (sometimes more than a little) queasy inside. What I’m most excited about is the opportunity to make the web whatever I want of it; I can’t imagine a medium with more potential. If I can communicate that excitement to even a few people, I’ll have enough work to sustain me, especially in my current anti-consumerist frame of mind. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this in the days and weeks to come.

Did I mention I need work?

All fans of stupefyingly bad movies must be told of perhaps the zenith of the art form: Zardoz. A middle-aged Sean Connery, alternatively dressed in an orange diaper and a full wedding dress, wanders through this post-apocalyptic tale of, well, I’m not sure exactly. There are giant projection-screen televisions, lots of bread baking, discussions of erectile dysfunction, topless women on horseback, huge stone heads spewing rifles, embryonic pod people, and a bunch of other stuff I must have blocked out.

I have absolutely no idea what this was about, and only vaguely understand what in fact happened, if anything. Go rent it, now, and let me know what you thought.