This time Charlie looks how Politicians, the Media and the Voters interact. And how we all became like Richard Nixon. Excellent as usual. Enjoy!
This time Charlie looks how Politicians, the Media and the Voters interact. And how we all became like Richard Nixon. Excellent as usual. Enjoy!
BBC Science Documentary – 60 minutes
Once again the Brits excel in explaining the unexplainable. This time it’s all about numbers and infinity. Sounds boring? Think again.
Watch it before it disappears – and if your bandwidth allows it watch it directly in HD.
Once again the Brits deliver some highly amusing moments. Enjoy!
This time Charlie Brooker attacks the media’s handling of Haiti and why Celebrities suck at raising awareness for important issues.
Very smart as usual!
Satire / History about 30 minutes
Educate yourself: Do you know who Harriet Tubman was? I didn’t!
Mark Steel once again delivers a brilliant and highly amusing historical lecture. Can we clone this guy and send at least one to every school?
Argumental is a great BBC TV Show based on the good old British tradition of the debate club.
Once again Charlie Brooker dissects the News Business and shows us how all that crap is made (up).
All media education should be as brilliant and nasty like this.
Political Debate – about 90 minutes
Finally Obama takes the fight to the enemy. It’s amazing how easily Obama deflated the GOP spin machine. But it was also impressive to see such a great Intellect at work.
Could Sarah Palin do the same?
But I wonder if normal Americans even noticed the event or watched it?
And one more thing: it shows that Presidents or Prime Ministers SHOULD DEBATE in Parliament and explain their policies to the opposition. That is real political discourse.
BBC about 30 min.
Once again Mr Brooker pleases Misanthropes like me by dissecting the madness of daily life and the media frenzy we all live in.
Some excellent insights into the Newsbusiness and the so called "narrative" that is behind the Group Think of large Broadcasters.
An old, yet brilliant Beethoven performance send in by S.Quinn! Thank you so much – this is a great catch.
Leonid Kogan was completely unknown to me – until I saw this video. This is why I love YouTube: it helps us to preserve and share such treasures … one only has to find them ….
BBC Documentary about those little buggers that can kill us. Highly recommended!
You know that watching cute and cuddly animals is good for your psyche. It gives you that warm and fuzzy delight the evil world denies you constantly …
To own a digital camera at the end of the 1990’s was pretty unusual and expensive. Ten years later almost every gadget seems to be able to shot photos and videos – even in High-Definition …
The arrival of cheap sensors and storage allowed cell phone and computer manufacturer to stuff a camera into almost every gadget we carry around. There are hardly any cell phones or notebooks without a cam these days.
And the Quality! There was literally an explosion of pixel power – who would today bother with a 1-Mega-Pixel-Camera? Sure pixel resolution is not everything, but the image quality has equally improved with pixel quantity.
Early Nokia prototypes …
But the Revolution of the Pixel includes LCD monitors – which are now huge and cheap (my current 24"-Samsung-Display would have been astronomically expensive in 1999). The analogue monitor is dead – LCDs have overtaken our eyes. Their sharpness and extreme colour range has redefined our viewing habits.
Big sensor create big images – but today we also have the CHEAP big memory cards, sticks and chips to store them – as well as fast broadband to send our crappy holiday shots to all our friends and social media appendices via eMail or Social Media website (like Flickr and Facebook).
Because not only Big Brother has CCTV cameras everywhere we mere mortals can and do record anything. Thanks to YouTube and Flickr (and their clones) we can and do share everything we record.
In the last ten years there has been a flood of digital videos and photos. I suspect we all shot more images and hours of footage in these last ten years with our cheap gadgets than all generations before us?!
And the pixelated flood will continue.
On the web you can videos of any occasion and situation: from airplanes crashes, terrorist attacks, amateur sex and children’s birthdays. It alls there.
I wonder how he feels about that (public) video in twenty years?
The new global sharing culture enables us to share our lives with others and see how others live their life’s. It has never been so easy to experience, study and learn the human condition.
Since we love Social Porn (<- see my essay on that subject here) this trend will continue. It’s not Big Brother watching us – we love to show ourselves and watch others. This was first limited to celebrities and personal holiday snapshots. Today we can record and broadcast our own lives 24/7 – and some people already do.
That also means that social acceptance of being watched by the government and others has risen. In a world were everybody can record, share and watch everyone the old idea of privacy is gone …
We all know what you did ten summers ago … and you will never be able to delete that image …
The global visual sharing culture has just begun, already billions of images and videos are online. And the web never forgets …
In the last century your parents were probably the keepers and guardians of your embarrassing childhood shots – today compromising material will sooner or later land on the web.
Many employers as well as "friends" check on Facebook and other social media your history before they get closer.
Thanks to Geo-Tagging and Facial Recognition it will be much easier to find a specific person in a gazillion images and videos. There is no such thing as anonymity in this brave new pixel world.
Reality – captured from many slightly different perspectives.
Soon there won’t be a place that hasn’t been photographed or captured in video. We will have a complete visual memory of our planet.
But there is more: all these images and technology will not only allow us to "find" each other – it will allow us to merge all that huge image and video pool into synthesized memory spaces (<- read my essay here).
Smart software literally stitches photos into a 3D-environment and connect / compute additional information into that "space".
When you think that Google Streetview and Google Earth are pretty amazing than hold on to your socks – the new kind of search will finally feel like stranger than any science fiction movie you have seen …
Is it real or is it … HDR?
The last ten years have also brought a different change: the way we perceive what "reality" should look like.
Cameras, monitors and videos have slowly changed from the old 4:3 format to 16:9. The future is no longer square, but widescreen …
But the sharpness, colour range and contrast of images has changed dramatically, best illustrated by so called HDR-Images.
Before and after the HDR treatment …
Similar to before mentioned synthesized memory spaces already available cameras can combine several shots into one "High dynamic range image" that looks more real than reality.
Before the arrival of digital tools (read Photoshop or Paint Boxes for professional TV and Film productions) it was very hard to manipulate images.
Today almost any cheap camera or cell phone cam offers "image improvement filters" ranging from simple red eye removal to face finders and even body slimmers.
All these technologies have changed our perception of reality: old black & white television was unreal, even analogue colour TV looks unreal to a certain degree – and so do "classic" photos.
But today’s image technology allows us to create images and videos that look and feel more real than reality, but catching and synthesizing more details, sharpness and speed than ever before.
Remember him?
The last ten years saw the Perfection of Fakery – thanks to tools like Photoshop, After Effects and many other image manipulation tools.
Movies like Jurassic Park and Matrix paved the way for CGI in movies – and helped the directors to tell amazing tales. But today many movies and TV shows feel boring, because there are too many "amazing effects". Special effects have turned into a big bore …
But Photoshop & Co are now also the #1 toys for Fakery – from Beauty Magazines and Advertising to Viral Videos – Fakes are now everywhere.
Every time people see today an amazing photo or video they distrust what they see: "Is it photoshopped or is it real?!"
Fakery is increasingly hard to spot and image manipulation is now standard for almost anything you see printed or on TV.
Especially advertising was always about fake reality, but now that advertised reality looks absolutely real and can be even more beautiful than ever before. Especially woman still try to "achieve" the beauty standards in advertising – but these fake beauties are unreal and do not exist … their "level of beauty" can never be reached by any real person …
LonelyGirl15 – the first YouTube Superstar?
When 8 mm movies came out it was touted as the Hollywood revolution for everyone. But the technology was cumbersome, expensive and difficult to master.
Today a GOOD video camera is affordable even for amateurs and the quality is amazing. Editing and special effects software is also cheap and basically the same the real Pros in Hollywood use.
But most of all there is now a global and cheap way to show and distribute your videos: the web.
New talent and film students can create movies and no longer rely on movie theatres, Hollywood studios or TV broadcasters to bring their work to the masses.
That means there is a wider platform for artists, moviemakers and crap alike – but it is most of all a true democratization of moviemaking and broadcasting like never before.
Low Budget series like LonelyGirl15 became global brands / phenomenon’s. Becoming a superstar on a budget was no possible!
Hello Human! Do you know where are you going to?
Today we are quite used to "live" in 3D spaces, either in games or car navigation systems – not too mention Google Earth …
The visuals of Computer Games have made a huge leap forward in the last 10 years. The X-Box, Playstation 2 and Wii can deliver incredible visuals.
Games have been pushing simulated 3D worlds for now over 20 years. New games look incredibly realistic and have left it’s visually primitive forefather Pong far behind.
But 3D engines, geo-tagging, camera sensors and search engines will merge into a new technology called Augmented Reality.
Here you look at the world through a computer display – and the computer will analyze what you and it sees – and add additional information.
The simplest form of this technology have been car navigation systems, but newer versions will go much further.
This is just a simply version of AR …
They could tell you for example which people or businesses are in a building nearby, because a search engine show you all information regarding the location you are currently at – and also know thanks to other peoples computers and cell phones who is currently near that exact spot you are standing.
Like other technologies this will make us even more dependent on our little gizmos. The pocket calculator robbed us of the need to learn math. The cell phone is our external memory for phone numbers, addresses and even our schedule (be honest how many phone numbers can you remember?).
Augmented Play Time …
Most people could hardly read maps anyway, but Augmented Reality will make them totally dependent on where to go. And thanks to "smart software" it will tell them what to shop where and that the person in front of them is their wife …
We are developing a totally new visual culture. Once the invention of photography radically changed how we captured reality and made it permanent – so will the digital capture, global storage and synthesizing of photos and videos.
Everybody needs a cam like this and everybody will wear some form of camera in the future anyway …
Thanks to a coming 24/7 always-on camera capture we will also develop a new form of Telepresence we have developed in the last century: first there was the telegraph that allowed almost instant reporting of events far away. Then came the telephone and radio, which allowed us to hear live events far away. With television we suddenly had eyes and ears all over the globe. We could watch catastrophes and music concerts unfold live.
A global web connected camera network will allow us to watch anything everywhere. It is not just a network for "watching" – it also will record, store and cross connect everything it sees.
The new telepresence and visual network will let you watch such events even from "unrecorded" angles …
This global camera network is not like Big Brother – it is a decentralized sister network, which consists of millions of independent digital eyes and ears that record and record …
Like a computer game all that data can be used to replay and synthesize the events it captured.
A great mash up with some of my greatest heroes. Where is our next Carl Sagan?
Thanks to S. Quinn for sharing this with me.
I love social art like that and thanks for YouTube for allowing us to share these Kodak moments …
PS: This post is free.
Great documentary about the alternative German music scene. The Brits named these great experimental category “Krautrock“, which is basically a reason to start another war.
But the documentary is brilliant! Now you see what David Bowie got from being in Berlin and that Kraftwerk is hardly the oddest German music formation from that era …
We need more bizarre and surreal short movies like this. Thanks to YouTube and Vimeo more and more talented movie makers find an audience and inspire each other.
Make sure to watch it in HD on YouTube – if your internet connection is up to it.
His words are once again painfully true –and complements my recent rant on Europe not defending it’s own values.
Yes, Nerds can make music … all they needs is some gadgets to get rappin’. Brett Domino and his crew are brilliant. Make sure to visit his website or his YouTube channel.
Uh, all this nerdy excitement and brilliance makes me giggle like a little girl!
Warning: This video might be unsuitable for people who still believe in the good of human nature.
Actually I am doing this all the time in my cellar with my "Hello Kitty" collectables, but please don’t tell anyone …
PS: You can’t "unsee" this video, it will be stuck in your mind forever.
Just go and watch the Battle For Milkquarious. If you are not killed by laughter, the sheer brilliance of it’s cheesiness will end your life or your sanity.
Enjoy!
Nevermind the German dialogue – this is hardcore Kitsch. But like all pain it has to be shared to be truly effective …
I think the Microsoft campaign has done it’s job well: everybody is talking about those cute (more Kylie here) or stupid ads (the dreadful Launch Party video).
When you live outside the US you can’t watch many web videos of commercial shows: “this content is not available in your country”
Bugger.
I can understand that copyright owners want to sell their shows to foreign markets, but often the shows arrive a year later and there is usually NO WEB option to watch the stuff. And often I want to see the original version – not a cut down and dubbed mess …
But don’t despair! With FoxyProxy and a proxy server you can watch all that great stuff – if you are willing to fiddle a bit with your browser and pay for a good proxy server to watch restricted videos from YouTube, Hulu or the BBC iPlayer …
Basically all you have to do is this:
* find / buy a free proxy server suitable for the restricted website you want to access
* download & install FoxyProxy in Firefox
* enter the proxy servers address and your account info when you buy a commercial proxy service
* and switch FoxyProxy on or off when you need to access restricted content
I love this movie and I love Kronk! The Emperor’s New Groove is one of the best recent Disney movies. Enjoy and if you like clip buy the movie …
If you can than watch this amazing video on HD on YouTube. I love space pr0n like this …
Friday Fright Night! Time for another cheesy horror movie with some great actors: a very young Jack Nicholson and a very old Boris Karloff.
Enjoy!
Friday Fright Night – enjoy this cheesy classic horror flick. As usual Vincent Price makes this trashy movie quite amusing … enjoy!
Just watching this hurts … a lot! Wanna see some closeups? Click here! Wanna know what this madness is all about? Click here! And you can even visit the local website with loads of images here …
I love the Brits for their weird traditions, but I also applaud them for still allowing such dangerous stuff. People should be able to kill themselves for the amusement of others …
I know it’s a bit late and outdated, but still worth watching and highly entertaining – if you have a dark soul like me.
Thanks Mr Brooker!
Is it 20 years already? Wow! Nice video from the EU and a nice reminder that Freedom is not "free".
Another masterpiece by Mr Brooker and his team – plus an extra section by the revered Mr Adam Curtis.
Once again some great insights and humor.
Charlie looks at the evolution of news anchors and compares them to their US counterparts, including Bill O’Reilly. Enjoy!
Technological progress is amazing. In hardly 50 years we have developed very capable video chips to incorporate in almost every gadget.
Most modern cell phones or digi cams can now record video in a higher resolution and more frames per second than the first TV heavy duty cameras. And thanks to innovations like YouTube or Ustream.tv you can broadcast yourself globally at no extra cost …
It’s hard to say if they are simply amazing musician or gifted comedians? More comedy should be like that: gifted and able people performing intelligent act of humor – instead of flat jokes and silly sexual innuendo.
More? Official Site