Usually, we have a hard time getting shoes on Katie. She throws an incredibly huge fit. Today, however, we decided to take her outside for a walk and she thoroughly enjoyed it, up until the very end of course. We’ve uploaded some photos to the gallery and a video for your enjoyment.
Amanda’s Leaving Rocketboom. Here’s my response to the Videoblogging list, which I thought would make a decent blog post with my insightful commentary on stardom:
You’re onto it Deirdre. The fact that the offers are pouring in doesn’t have anything to do with talent or beauty. There are tons of talented beautiful people out there.
It’s the same reason Kirsten Dunst or Julia Stiles get movie roles. Celebrity. They aren’t that talented or beautiful, but they have fame. And nothing against those two, I’m just using them as an example. They’re mediocre, but very successful. It just takes that one break.
So when people see this shit happen, they automatically associate it with old media stylings. Videoblogging is TV. And there are plenty of no-talent hacks out there perpetuating this myth. FrenchmaidTV comes to mind. A large portion of the iTunes video podcast “recommended” section actually. It’s all shitty and everyone knows it.
This is why I wretch when I read someone cooing to Amanda about her extraordinary talent and “you don’t deserve this treatment, baby. Come to me, it’ll be alright”. It’s fucking disgusting and embarrassing.
Advice to anyone who is listening: Don’t be a whore. Or if you already are a whore, stop being a whore.
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Adam Quirk
thepan.org
Eh, I can agree with your sentiment to a certain extent, but celebrity and fame are inevitable. People exalt other peers who may not be more worthy than they are to celebrity and stardom, but they do it because they want to believe they also could be there as well.
I talk a lot about Rock and Roll and how it is the American Dream. Videoblogging, and Amanda’s leap to semi-stardom is a great example of yet another facet of the American Dream. The reason Rock and Roll is still popular, 50+ years later, even though it’s many different stylings and forms, is that anyone can pick up a guitar, get in front of a microphone and, if enough people like their work, become famous. How much more American can an idea get?
Videoblogging, blogging, podcasting, etc, are the Rock and Roll of our time. Anyone can pick up a video camera, and if it’s enjoyable enough, they can become stars. No need to wade through a Hollywood bureaucracy, just stick it up on the Internet. As much as we’d all like to be counter-culture, the culture dictates that we exalt the few as examples of what the many could be.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t all bitch about how the culture is the way it is.
Nice to see Robert and Jason posting on the list. Either one of you is free to hire me, but I’m afraid I’m unwilling to relocate. 
Katherine Elizabeth Sharp was born March 27th, 2006 in Fort Smith, AR. She is 7 pounds, 8 ounces, and beautiful.
This is a must read from the NY Times. If you were unaware, Verizon, AT&T, and others have proposed implementing quality of service on their networks which they would then sell to companies to have preferential treatment in the case of bottlenecks and also I presume express forwarding (lower latency). What this means is that they would be able to put their own traffic (read IPTV) at higher priorities than say a Google or Yahoo IPTV product. This concept has been in use on private IP networks for years, however, the idea was that when it was to be implemented on the public Internet, that everyone would have a fair chance at utilitizing higher priority traffic, rather than allowing the large ISPs to put it up for bid and hold it for ransom. These companies already have the potential to put third party players like Vonage out of business when they’re in direct competition with them by blocking ports or subversively lowering QoS priorities on those packets without telling anyone. It’s a dangerous time for the open Internet. Everyone needs to be writing their representatives about this in support of this bill.
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is having an excellent Turkey Day. It just now sits at Dallas 7, Denver 7. Go Cowboys! Thanksgiving isn’t truly complete without a Lions loss and a Cowboys win.
I’m not a huge stats hound, in fact I only check them once a month. However, imagine my surprise when I logged into my FeedBurner account and saw my subscribers drop from over 100 to around 24. Something is seriously fucked up. I know some of the guys over there, like Rick Klau who I met at Gnomedex, perhaps I should email them. I have over 21 subscribers in Bloglines alone which are currently being shown as 1 subscriber in my Readership stats. Seems to have happened on October 20th. Oh well, I know you’re still reading.
I’m not one of those bloggers who normally adds to the pile, but this one’s important. Scoble is reporting via various other blogs and Memeorandum that Weblogs, Inc. (maker of Engadget, TUAW, etc) has sold out to AOL. I love Jason Calacanis’ blog. He’s a guy who understands how to run a business. I met him at Gnomedex and he seemed to be a nice, intelligent guy. This one’s important. In other acquisition news, Newsgator bought NetNewsWire. Google the names, I’m tired of typing in links. I really need to switch to Markdown or something…
I’m back from vacation. I spent Friday-Monday at The Gorge watching the Dave Matthews Band. They put on an excellent show, and I thoroughly enjoyed all three nights, but Saturday was definitely the best show. Setlists are available at Nancies.org. I’m still catching up on things, so if you’ve sent me an email or there’s a blog post of yours I should have read or watch, hang on and I’ll be getting to it this week hopefully.
How do people live here? It’s oppressively hot in the summer. The whole area outside Miami is all sprawl. Nothing much taller than a story. It’s been a long time since I’ve spent so long driving when I wasn’t stuck in traffic.
I left for the airport last night about 10:30 PM, and arrived there right on time at 11:00 PM for my flight at midnight. I walk up to the self-service check-in kiosk, swipe my credit card, nothing. I get out my AAdvantage Platium card, swipe it, finds it. It won’t let me check in. Weird. Then I notice why. Apparantly my flight was booked for 8/1, not 7/31. Whoops. I guess I’ll be a day late getting to Miami. Word of advice, double check your reservations before you click the confirm button :). Of course, my same bitch still holds true. They were overbooked by 4 on the first flight and 6 on the second flight, so there was no way to even get there early on stand-by. What is it with airlines having no excess capacity anywhere in their networks these days? Sucks to be a frequently flyer when things go wrong and there’s no seats available.
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