Watch the trailer.

Stills:

The Academy Awards is set to begin in a few hours, so I’m throwing out some of my picks for Oscars. I’ll first list my choice followed by who I think will actually win. I’ll update this post after the awards are announced and I’ll see how I did.

Animated Feature
√ UP / UP

Visual Effects
District 9 / Avatar √

Art Direction
X Sherlock Holmes / Sherlock Holmes Avatar

Documentary
√ The Cove / The Cove

Supporting Actress
Vera Farmiga (gorgeous) / √ Mo’Nique

Supporting Actor
√ Christoph Waltz / Christoph Waltz

Actress
√ Sandra Bullock / Sandra Bullock

Actor
Jeremy Renner / Jeff Bridges √

Director
√ Kathryn Bigelow / James Cameron (Bigelow’s Ex-Husband)

Picture
√ The Hurt Locker / Up In The Air The Hurt Locker

Secret Menu Item of the Day:The greasy monstrosity known only by a select few as “The Mc10:35”.

1. Go to McD’s right when they are transitioning from breakfast to lunch.

2. Order one of the remaining Egg McMuffins from the breakfast menu and also order a McDouble since the lunch menu is now open.

3. Take the egg and Canadian bacon from the Egg McMuffin and put it on the McDouble.

People call it a Mc10:35 because that’s pretty much the only time you can pull this off.
Sounds like a horrible unhealthy mistake. I must try it.

Yesterday I was making a sandwich and the news was on explaining how the US Postal Service is trying to deal with a gigantic revenue gap. They were proposing closing down hundreds of post offices, discontinuing Saturday delivery, and a slew of other hurried ideas to meet budget. They cited the increased use of email by individuals and companies as the reason for the shortfall and decreased general use of letter postage.

Similarly I read articles almost daily on the web discussing “the end of print” and the explosion of digital publishing and e-book consumption. Many technology evangelists are extolling a day when we won’t need books, we’ll just pull out our iPad or whatever and read volume after volume.

These two scenarios and their respective social reactions are typical when strange, new, and seemingly revolutionary technologies seem to threaten the societal norm and wreak havoc on the ways we’re used to doing things. In both of these cases, I believe everybody has it wrong. Email is not going to bring about the demise of the postal service, just as e-books on your iPad will not bring about the demise of the printed page.

Think about it. The Post Office is bound to enact new ways to bring in revenue that will ultimately raise the cost to the average postal consumer to use their products and services. It’s not going away, it’ll just be more expensive. While you might think this is a negative thing, I prefer to look down the road just a little bit more, to a time when it is no longer affordable for companies to send mass amounts of junk mail through the postal system. MoneyMailers, CreditCard companies, and all the other junk mail will see their margins shrink and try to make up for it by reducing the amount sent out, combined with other conventional advertising methods. The price of entry into using mail will go up, right along with the quality. It’s funny how the TV news didn’t say one word about package mail, but referred to mail as the traditional letter.

And with books, the same dichotomy applies. It will no longer be an economical decision for publishers to run XXXX copies of certain comic books, magazines, web design and cooking books. Those types of publications already lend themselves perfectly for a tablet / e-book platform.

The books we will be left with will be the books that were meant to be books. High quality hardcover books made with purposeful and high quality materials that lend themselves to the visceral experience of physically reading a book and feeling the pages. It sounds weird to even talk about reading a book as something grandpa used to do back in the early 2000’s, but seriously, in 20 years, kids will have an entirely different view of ‘real books’ than we can even understand now.

The books that will be printed will the ones that were supposed to be experienced in the physical realm. Making them into an e-book would only diminish their reading experience. You will most certainly see the price of high quality books go up, but instead of filling your bookshelf with publications that would have easily existed better as a PDF on your iPad, you can fill your bookcase with books that beg to be handled, touched, opened and consumed in true physical form.

All of the throwaway media, especially newspapers and magazines, anything with advertising in its pages belongs on the digital tablet along with the paperback. The Tablet should be the new ‘paperback’. If you want the newest Harry Potter, you can get it at a paperback price for your iPad, or get the high quality Hardcover. No more paperback novels that just sit on shelves never to be read again, only the important hardcover books that you want to display in your home, knowing you’ll want to read them multiple times, and share them with family and friends.

Ok, enough ranting, my point is that when you hear about all of this new fangled digital technology overtaking the old analog way of doing things, think about all the analog trash it’s going to filter out, leaving us with higher quality physical content. Let the junk go digital, heck, we might end up saving a tree or two in the process.

Here’s my attempt at recreating the opening titles to Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. A little blocky, but not bad for a few hours of messing around. You can check out the hi-res here.

It took 4 entire months just to set it up — who knows how many tries it took to get it right!

Enjoy!

(click for video)

My brother just emailed me a YouTube with just the subject line, “Aaaahhhhh” with the following video attached. Click the image.