Two films I want to see

The Hurt Locker came out in NY and LA on Friday, and will be released nationwide on July 24th. Critics have been raving about the film, and Rotten Tomatoes shows that out of 51 reviews, it has a 96% “fresh” rating.

The Way We Get By is a smaller film, but looks absolutely incredible. Just watching the trailer gave me tears, so I can only imagine what the entire film would do to me. Screenings of The Way are currently being shown in select cities, but it opens in NYC at the IFC Center on July 17th. Not sure how many New Yorkers check out the blog, but if you live in the city, don’t miss this film.

He’s Barack Obama!

I loved this. Good stuff.

Click the pic for the video from JibJab:

The Coolest Twittercloud Ever

(HT: Hugh Hewitt)

From Jeff Clark at Neoformix:

(Click to zoom)

Description from Clark:

This is a Shaped Word Cloud created from the text of approximately 84,000 tweets containing the term #iranelection. The larger the word the more frequently it appears in the text.

Feel free to follow JeffClark on Twitter to get more updates on my work.

Twitter Reschedules Planned Site Maintenance

UPDATE @ 5:42pm: You can contact NTT America here, and thank them for suspending Twitter’s site maintenance.

________________________________________________________________________

Wow, I am seriously impressed with Twitter and its partners.

On the official Twitter blog earlier today, @BIZ had written that there was nothing they could do in terms of changing the time for their site maintence. He said it was out of their hands, and was up to the network host.

Well, @BIZ just wrote a new blog post, with the headline, “Down Time Rescheduled.” Here’s what it says:

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).

Our partners are taking a huge risk not just for Twitter but also the other services they support worldwide—we commend them for being flexible in what is essentially an inflexible situation. We chose NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services early last year specifically because of their impeccable history of reliability and global perspective. Today’s decision and actions continue to prove why NTT America is such a powerful partner for Twitter.

Solidarity.

YouTube is Down

UPDATE, 12:45pm: YouTube is now fully functional.

If the videos on the blog aren’t coming up, it’s because YouTube is down right now. Hopefully they’ll get it back up and running in a bit.

Google Honors D-Day By…

…honoring Tetris.

Patriotic.

Who Needs REAL Friends When You Can Have…

…this kid be your friend?

So, what do you think?

I happen to think this reflects incredibly poorly on our society, and just goes to show how me-oriented we’ve become. Instead of encouraging us to go out into the world to meet new people, these video game developers are telling us to stay inside and interact with some fake kid in a video game system.

Quite sad.