For some reason, I am getting some kind of strange pleasure out of the fact that Katie had to wait to tell her coworkers I had tricked her into getting married because she didn’t want to take any attention away from the Internet’s Andre Torrez’s wedding.
Katie: haha, i just changed my relationship status as engaged to you on facebook
Katie: and it said it would send a notification to confirm with you
Love in the time of email confirmation.
We posted the fifth episode of our new podcast, I want to see that podcast. Much like our previous episode, this is THE BEST PODCAST EPISODE EVER MADE.
Dear Internet,
Yesterday, Katie and I recorded the third episode of our weekly podcast about movies we haven’t seen. It is fun to have a project to work on with Katie. She is funny and creative and a hard worker, especially when I dangle carrots in front of the camera, just out of her reach.
We are off to Texas on Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with Katie’s family, then heading up to Austin to see my brother for his birthday, and to see the newly renovated bathroom in my Austin home. I cannot wait. I am going to poo so hard in my new toilet!
At all times, I have a pretty strong desire to go back to Texas. I find California to be mostly filled with schmucks. This desire has been especially strong since seeing No Country For Old Men. There is something about the emptiness of Texas that appeals to me in a nature way, but also in a philosophical way. I want for there to be open land between me and everyone else.
This weekend, we went to a bunch of parties. One was for my friend Lane’s company, Satisfaction. The second was a party for my friend Andy who just quit his job at Yahoo two years after they bought his company, Upcoming. At the first, people kept congratulating me on creating a new web site. At the second, people kept congratulating Andy on quitting one. I think it is great that Andy is going to be working on stuff for himself, obviously, and I am excited at the potential for IWTST, but web site congratulations are high up on my list of reasons why I want to get the hell out of this state.
Dear Internet,
Katie and I have launched a new site called I want to see that! We’ve also launched a companion video podcast or “comvplobcast” called I want to see that podcast! I don’t care which one of those you subscribe to, as long as you subscribe to both!
The idea of our awesome new site is pretty simple - on Monday, we post all the movies that are coming out over the next week. You click on the ones you like. So do your friends. On Friday, you come back and see who wants to see what, and we’ll create a little throw-away social network for you to use to coordinate your plans. Then, you go see movies with your friends!
You may say, Ben, how hard is it to see a movie with your friends? And to those people, I say, you obviously don’t live in a coastal city where nobody actually talks to let alone sees their friends.
The idea of our awesome new podcast is also simple, but also slightly ridiculous. Every Monday, Katie and I will review the movies that are coming out on Friday without having actually seen them. We base our reviews on the trailer, IMDB trivia pages, and our gut feelings, because that is all we need.
So, dear, loyal reader of this web site, please click on our links and subscribe to our websites, because if you don’t we will cry and if you do we will be rich beyond our wildest dreams! Rich in friends who want to see movies with us!
Love,
Ben Brown
Dear Internet,
How are you? Well, I hope. There are some new things I need to show you that I think you will like, made by friends of mine who are cool. You like to click links, right? If you don’t like to click links, then wtf are you doing all day?
My friend Regina Allen who normally spends her time making sexy paintings of ladies looking sexy has opened up an Etsy Shop where she sells hand made jewelry. When she told me, I was like, yeah right Regina, you make jewelry too, sure you do. But then, when I looked at her shop, I realized that not only does she make jewelry, she makes great jewelry that is stylistically similar to her paintings, and that she is truly an artist.
See that clever image above? That is one of Regina’s paintings with one of her sets of earrings super imposed on top of it, as if they were both present when the picture was taken. Amazingly, I created this image in a pirated copy of Photoshop - this NEVER HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE! I didn’t want you to be confused.
Buy jewelry from Regina Allen for your girlfriend, wife or wives.
My friend Jen Robbins has just relaunched her awesome TV show, Cooking With Rockstars. Not only does this show predate almost all other web tv shows making it authentically badass and oldskool, it is a fucking awesome show on its own. First, it features Jen Robbins, who is smokin’ hot. Second, it features real life rockstars. Third, it features food. And fourth is the awesome fact that Jen now records new episodes in a LIMOSINE-BASED-MOBILE-STUDIO. If there is one thing good about the terrible future we’ve wreaked upon ourselves, it is the idea of Jen Robbins recording a tv show in a limo filled with rockstars.
Praise Goo!
Another great thing about Cooking With Rockstars is that there are already almost 20 episodes online featuring people like John Vanderslice, Ben Gibbard, and my personal favorite, Jack Black. WELCOME TO JIMBO. You can even subscribe to it in your iTunes, which means that I will always have episodes to watch on plane rides, THANK YOU JEN.
(Side note to Jen: I stand by my assertion that Internet Rockstars should be considered equivalent to Music Rockstars, nudge nudge, wink wink.)
I am so lucky to have so many talented, saucy lady friends. You are jealous, Internet, I know. And I’m ok with that.
Oh! One last thing. Do you watch Heroes?
Dear Tim Kring, creator of Heroes,
I know you’re all apologetic about how crappy season 2 has been, but I think you are still missing the point. Super heroes are fun because they fly around and fight bad guys and do heroic stuff. But the “heroes” on your show don’t do anything like that! Mostly, they complain. A lot of the time, when faced with a tough decision, they wimp out and do what they are told. That’s not very heroic at all!
Also, it seems that most of the powers involve being able to magically move to another set. I know you’ve got a limited budget, but come on! OMG, when is Hiro going to cause a wild jump cut next? Or will it be Peter this time? Or maybe the fat cop guy? Holy shit, what would happen if two “heroes” caused a wild jump cut AT THE SAME TIME? Would we even know what set we are on? Would we even care at that point about these mediocre powers?
I want to see someone throw a truck through a national landmark.
You clearly consider yourself to be influenced by super hero comics, or at least I hope that is where you got the super lame idea to have someone’s power being the ability to paint dialog-free comic book panels. BTW, I have seen a lot of this kind of “art” hanging in coffee shops, and it sucked there too! Anyways, I wonder why you didn’t learn that ALL super heroes are EITHER solo players OR team players, but NO super heroes just wander around all the time guessing at what is going on and getting it wrong! That is a super lame plot device, and should have died when they canceled LOST.
Wait, they haven’t canceled LOST yet? Oh give me a break!
My suggestions to you for “volume 3″ (lame) of Heroes:
That’s it for now, Internet. I have to go back to my high paying job now. Have a good weekend!
Love,
Ben Brown
This Halloween, my personal Website turned 10-years old. I registered benbrown.com on October 31, 1997. I was 19. Holy crap! I also registered Flabjab.com that day for the Webzine I ran out of my dorm room at the University of Maryland. I actually hosted the domains on a linux box I hacked onto the school network that lived underneath my bed. My friend Emory ran DNS for me - back then it was a big pain in the ass to find DNS hosts! Everyone I knew in college had an account on that machine, and I constantly yelled at people to post stuff to their little ~ homepages, or to contribute something to Flabjab. Those were the days!
I could probably ramble all nostalgic for you for paragraphs and paragraphs, but I think it will just make me bitter about how things have changed. I will just say this: it was really great to be online in 1997 when there was a feeling of real discovery and innovation and of being part of a new frontier of art and communication. The people who were online back then were doing things that had never been done before! It was really mind blowing and inspiring to watch and to be a part of.
And now we all have blogs!
Happy Birthday, Website! I love you! And I thank you for everything you’ve let me do for the past 10 years.
My post about Consumating’s points got linked from a pretty awesome array of blogs, including Waxy.org, Torrez.org and Matt Haughey’s A Whole Lotta Nothing. It caused a 15x spike in this blog’s traffic, from an average of 50 visitors a day to 780 visitors on October 30. Woo! Thanks, guys!
Adam Mathes, the genius who cofounded Consumating with me, also plays the role of ombudsman for this web site. After reading my post about Consumating’s point system, he dug up this email exchange from April of 2005. At the time, he and I were working on the code we had written for a jokey personal ad site called Über Personals to turn it into the first version of Consumating.
On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Adam Mathes wrote:
We should really get rid of the popularity stats — that was an Über Personals thing and I’m not sure it makes sense for Consumating.What do you think?
Ben Brown wrote:
Nope. Popularity is key. Its like high school. People love it. In fact, I
was thinking of adding a little “Your popularity score” thing in the
corner.It adds to the game-like aspects of the site. People want to know where
they stand, and trying to become more popular encourages repeat visits.
Apparently, my mea culpa was not enough for Adam. I stand corrected sir - it was all my fault!
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