Fri, 02 Dec 2005 04:08:34
What a waste of paper
I have a magazine fetish...I am always on the lookout for cheap or free magazine subscriptions. We get about 20 mags a month, fully half of which are pop culture stuff. The newest? GIANT magazine. Wow, what a piece of crap this is. It’s like the worst of Interview (which is 98.95% advertising) smashed up in a blender with the worst parts of Maxim (meaning the pages where there are 10 or 12 little items on a single page with those oh-so-witty one-liners).
There are the ocassional feature pieces in GIANT, one of which is soemthing that looks like it’s titled “Rant.” in the December issue, it’s penned by comedian Patton Oswalt, who apparently has never actually met a Republican.
Here’s a scene from a screenplay I’m finishing up right before I blow my brains out:
Int. hi-tech penthouse - Irvine, CA - morning
A sweaty, toned Republilcan Douche-nozzle is on his cell phone. We split-screen, and he’s talking to a Blonde Conservative Skeeze.
Republilcan Douche-nozzle: Hey, Cindy. Just hopped off the elliptical trainer. Let’s get some egg white omlets and buckwheat pancakes before we continue ruining everything for everyone!
Elliptical trainer? Egg white omelettes? Buckwheat pancakes? Who is Oswalt parodying here? That’s classic Hollywood douchebags, Patton...and I don’t know anyone who would pretend that Hollywood is dominated by Republicans. Get your head out of your ass and try to see beyond the narrow confines of the greater Los Angeles area. There’s a whole country beyond the Nevada border, dude.
Another piece, one GIANT was proud enough to feature on the cover, is a story about BitTorrent. If you aren’t familiar with exactly what BitTorrent is, and most people aren’t, you’d want a small explanation, right? Once again, though...a media outlet bastardizes what it is and paints a piracy-only picture.
SO WHAT IS BITTORRENT? IT’S A NETWORK AND ONE of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever, far superior to the one everyone knows, Napster.
Wow. So many errors in two short sentences.
- BitTorrent is not a network. BitTorrent is a PROTOCOL. The web runs primarily on the HTTP protocol. Do you call the web “HTTP?” No, of course you don’t. Do you call streaming Windows media “MMS?” No, of course you don’t. Do you call the Internet “TCP/IP?” No, of course you don’t. That’s a really stupid blunder, but an intentional one designed to demonize the name “BitTorrent.”
- BitTorrent is not a peer-to-peer program. See 1. BitTorrent is a protocol that is accessed by other programs. My favorite is µTorrent. Fast, powerful, low memory usage, simple.
- Napster isn’t even the peer-to-peer Napster anymore. It’s a paid music service like iTunes.
Yeah, I’m being picky. So what? GIANT sucks, is my point.
Posted by JimK at 04:08 AM on December 02, 2005
Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email to a friend |
Categories: Entertainment
Tags:
Technorati: GIANT magazine BitTorrent Patton Oswalt
Comments:
#2 Posted by Rann Aridorn 
on 12/02 at 03:51 PM -
Because just throwing in near-random insults is comedy GENIUS. I mean, he must have sat there and pondered for hours how to pull that one off.
#3 Posted by Drumwaster on 12/02 at 04:07 PM -
Speaking of BitTorrent, does anyone know a good quality search page for files offered through the Torrent?
#4 Posted by Rann Aridorn on 12/02 at 07:15 PM -
Drum, if you use Firefox, I suggest downloading the extension Torrentbar. It’s a toolbar you can turn on in your browser that lets you surf around six different tracker sites.
#5 Posted by Drumwaster on 12/02 at 09:23 PM -
For some farkin’ reason, though, I keep getting blocked when I try to download any FF extensions. It tells me to check my Tools/options, I do, but I don’t see any reason why it won’t allow me to download them.
I just updated to FF 1.5.0, so if I need to go back, I will.
HELP!
#6 Posted by JimK on 12/02 at 11:41 PM -
Drum, your best bet is to save out your bookmarks.html, signons.txt and cookies.txt from your profile folder (that will be in C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Profile\ long string of random characters for a folder name. Once you;ve saved those, uninstall FF altogether, then go in and manually remove any traces of the folders. Do a totally fresh re-install...upgrading from 1.0* to 1.5 really screwed me up, nothing worked right until I rmoved everything and started fresh.
#7 Posted by RonM on 12/03 at 12:01 AM -
Buckwheat pancakes? Republicans only eat flour pancakes...with bacon...and country fried steak...and I’m suddenly hungry. By the way, this magazine is like that kid in school who wore ‘ghetto’ clothes just to be ‘cool’. GIANTposer Magazine.
#8 Posted by Drumwaster on 12/03 at 04:09 AM -
Okay, I’ve done all that, and I now have FlashGot, but Torrentbar is incompatible with ver. 1.5
*sigh*
Any other ideas?
#9 Posted by Sean Galbraith 
on 12/04 at 12:23 AM -
Jim: I prefer RAZOR magazine. Much classier.
#10 Posted by Sean Galbraith on 12/04 at 12:28 AM -
Actually… nevermind
#11 Posted by Drumwaster on 12/04 at 08:53 PM -
Patton Oswalt… Wasn’t he that goofy Radioman in “Down Periscope”? I gotta say, he was pretty freakin’ funny in that, but I have never understood these entertainers who think that we should take anything they say about subjects outside the field of entertainment any more seriously than we do any other college dropout…
Bradley Whitford (starring on ‘The West Wing’) was interviewed once about the 2004 Presidential campaign, because, after all, he works on “The West Wing”, right?
He said, “Why are you asking me? I’m an actor. That’s like two steps up from a trained monkey...”
RSS (Subscribe)
Tip jars (Donate today!)
#1 Posted by Buzzion
on 12/02 at 11:31 AM -
Yeah Oswalt sucks horribly. If you’ve seen his comedy central special all his act is, is rants and complaints, a lot about republicans as well as hippies. There’s also a thing comedy central plays sometimes about the 51 greatest smartasses of all time, and he does his rantings on republicans there too.
In short its not funny, and if he were doing it to almost any other group of people he’d be labeled a racist, sexist, homophobe, bigot of the worst calibur. Its filled with that much hatred towards republicans.