netflix
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DVDs Are Flat Circles: Streamers Killed the Video Store
Since the late ’80s, San Rafael’s Bedrock Music and Video is very likely the place where a generation of Marinites bought their first CDs, rented their “Thursday Rental Specials” and otherwise browsed away an afternoon on the Miracle Mile before decamping to Caffé Nuvo. And now it’s closing for good. It’s another end to an…
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Cine-meh: Small-screen Blues
TV is not really TV anymore. It’s more like a video jukebox fed by the internet. It’s also one of the few remaining platforms on the internet that we can talk back to and only annoy the person next to us. Anything else shared online could get us digitally dogpiled, so do what my dad…
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Netflix, Your Algorithm is High
Like most of Gen X, I find myself occasionally doing recon on the 70s – that mystery moment Tom Wolfe dubbed the “Me Decade” for its social atomism and relative self-involvement. Though most of us wee ones were barely allowed to make our fashion choices “let alone find ourselves,” we could occasionally sneak some grown-up…
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Cut the Cord
?Cut the cord? has become the rallying cry for those interested in abandoning cable television in favor of streaming online video to their phones, tablets, desktops and ??forsooth! ??televisions. It’s an apt phrase, not merely for its echoes of severing the umbilical cord in the delivery room but for its metaphoric reach into that almond-shaped…
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iPhone feature film on horizon?
Dial M for Movie Zealous geeks have their own version of the Rapture and Armageddon, neither of which is terribly apocalyptic unless, you know, one needs to reboot HAL or something. If this were an SAT-style analogy, it would go something like “Armageddon is to the Singularity as the Rapture is to ______.” The correct…
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Dial M for Movie: Will iPhone change how we make movies?
Zealous geeks have their own version of the Rapture and Armageddon, neither of which is terribly apocalyptic unless, you know, one needs to reboot HAL or something. If this were an SAT-style analogy, it would go something like “Armageddon is to the Singularity as the Rapture is to ______.” The correct answer? (a) Convergence; (b)…
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Top 10 Things Killed by the Internet
Intrepid media-man Daedalus Howell laments the loss of his local video store and enumerates the Top 10 things killed by the Internet in the past decade from classified ads and travel agencies, to phone books and…
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You Are What You Watch
I’m a browser by nature. By that, of course, I don’t mean I’m Firefox or Explorer – at least not until I wet-wire into the neural network (Then you’ll see! You’ll all see!). Rather, I’m a great reader of spines, those on books, those on DVD cases, those that are shelved alphabetically, vertically and occasionally…
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Media Diet
If the surfeit of commercial real estate suddenly available throughout Sonoma is any indicator, I’d say the economic downturn has arrived in the valley. Clearly, I’m not an economist (if I hadn’t married an MBA, my accounts would drain the world’s supply of red ink), but the effect is like looking at a beautiful face…