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FMRL Screen Scene

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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Culture FMRL Media & Tech Screen Scene

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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Culture

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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Media & Tech

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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Culture

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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Media & Tech

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)…