My friend Melissa Gira Grant and I recently attended GayVN Awards, the biggest gay porn industry awards show. Both of our tickets had been gratis through our office jobs, hers as a consultant at the St. James Infirmary (an occupational safety and health clinic for sex workers) and mine as a webmonkey for NakedSword (a hardcore streaming gay porn website). It’s one of those weird, neat little perks of my place of employment, which is otherwise an office job like most any other.

We’ve got health insurance and mysterious 401K paperwork and a sign above the kitchen sink asking people to please wash their damn dishes and cliques and birthday cards passed around and we go on the occasional “team-building” outdoor excursion or out for lunch around the holidays. Except, you know, our raison d’etre is pornography, so we can use dirty words in office emails and it’s perfectly okay to put up pictures of naked hunks if one is so inclined. Best of both worlds.

(Sidenote: my new favorite adjective is “hunky.” It’s often used in movie blurbs, as well as episode synopses for our webcast The Tim & Roma Show, i.e. “Tim and Roma are joined by hunky Jason Adonis…” I have no idea why, but it makes me laugh every single time.)

Sometimes we need to de-porn the office for a sensitive visitor (like one of our “straight” web design clients, or the boss’s nephew), and even though the relaxed corporate culture allows me to decorate my workspace like the gloomy, media-saturated teenager I’ve never stopped being, there’s no nudity on my walls. Three (count ‘em, three) Marilyn Manson posters, sure, magazine covers from Bizarre and Fetish and Skin Two as well as one-sheet movie posters for both Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and Cronenberg’s Crash, both of which are among the most sexually outré films of the nineties, but no porn. Because, really, that would just be tacky.

Melissa’s actual day job is writing for Valleywag, and in addition to Medialoper I write for the Eros Zine (or at least I did, until it folded this week). Our post-modern ironic-yet-sex-positive credentials were solid. Granted, to get in the door all that mattered was that we had our tickets in hand. Like David Cross said, indie hipster cred won’t buy you a house in the country, and at a hundred bucks for regular tickets (and two hundred for my “industry” ticket), we wouldn’t have been there if our bill wasn’t footed.

Read the entire entry …

The Midnites for Maniacs series at the Castro Theater in San Francisco aims to “emphasize dismissed, underrated and forgotten films,” usually in the form of double or triple features. Not all the movies are dismissed, underrated and/or forgotten, but I’m the first to admit that not all the movies we do at Bad Movie Night are necessarily bad, either. (Though some, like Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights, are so horrifyingly bad as to defy any sort of rational description.) Though they frequently unearth genuine obscurities like Skatetown, U.S.A or Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, for what’s probably is a combination of practical and nostalgic reasons the movies tend to be teen or horror movies from the early eighties. Which is cool, and I got to see a 70mm print of Tron because of Midnites for Maniacs, so it gets nothing but the love from me.

This sort of show is always more fun when grouped into themes, and tonight’s was Burt Reynolds: At Long Last Love, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Smokey and the Bandit. I was mostly there to see At Long Last Love, legendary among film buffs as one of the most critically reviled films ever made, mortally wounding director Peter Bogdanovich’s career. Whether or not it was one of the worst movies ever in addition to being the most hated made was difficult to say, since few people saw it during its brief theatrical run, it’s never been released on video, and it only played on teevee a few times.

For better or worse, its reputation was kept alive by the Brothers Medved kicking it when it was already down in their insufferable books The Golden Turkey Awards and The Fifty Worst Movies Ever Made (the latter of which was directly though unintentionally responsible for the (re)discovery of Ed Wood in the early eighties). As lost films go, it’s only slightly less mysterious than The Day the Clown Cried. More people have seen At Long Last Love than The Day the Clown Cried, but that isn’t saying much.

Read the entire entry …

I’d been resisting doing a review of Spiral Frog for awhile. I’ve written about it negatively at least twice before, and so I want to say this up front: there is just no way for me to be objective about this site.

As a crazed lifelong music fan, I do not believe that there is any value for me in advertiser-supported free downloads. I’d much prefer to pay for a song once and play it wherever I wish, instead of wading through an ad, and not having any freedom with it. And besides, the advertising-supported model already exists: it’s a little thing called “radio,” where I can listen to music and stuff if I want to suffer through ads.

I realize that there is a difference: when you listen to the radio, you have absolutely no choice whatsoever as to what you are getting, and with Spiral Frog, you can choose the song. However, given all of the DRM restrictions, you still don’t “own” the track, and just like radio, you still have to do the equivalent of tuning in to Spiral Frog to listen to the track again.

Read the entire entry …

Yesterday, we posted our review of the Star Trek / DuroSport Video Download Service. As is usually the case with things involving the DuroSport Electronics Company, we thought that it was ill-conceived and kinda amateurish.

Today, the link to the service has been removed from the Star Trek website. While we don’t think that our review had anything specific to do with the removal — officially, that is — it seems like the people over at Star Trek came to their senses, and cut their losses pretty swiftly.

Read the entire entry …

Yesterday we told you about DuroSport’s new retail outlet in Second Life. It was everything we expected a DuroSport store to be — which was exactly the problem. DuroSport has become so predictable that even their failures no longer surprise us. But there is a new development that even we find quite surprising. DuroSport has just announced an exclusive partnership with the most highly respected content franchise in history: Star Trek.

Yes, you read that correctly. Star Trek. Starting today, Star Trek and DuroSport Electronics have partnered to release what they are calling “DeMastered” episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. The episodes are being made available exclusively through DuroSport’s new video download service called — predictably — DuroView.

Read the entire entry …

The first thing you notice is the boxes. The huge, huge boxes, piled high on top of each other from the floor to the airplane-hangar sized ceiling.

What, you wonder, could these gigantic boxes possibly contain? The only possible items are washers and dryers, refrigerators, sofa sets, even SUVs. Maybe a really huge television. But if you’re the DuroSport Electronics Corporation, then these impossibly large boxes contain your latest product: a portable virtual media player.

During the past year we’ve had more than our share of laughs over the ongoing foibles of the DuroSport Corporation. From the company’s unbelievably bad portable media player to an embarrassing t-shirt recall last summer, it sometimes seems like DuroSport can’t do anything right. As it turns out DuroSport’s problems are not the result of poor engineering and horrendous customer service. No, according to company officials DuroSport has been victimized by “the current technological limitations of reality.”

So what’s a consumer electronics company to do when reality lets it down? Open a store in the virtual world known as Second Life, of course.

Read the entire entry …

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had many incarnations. Originally, it was a not-so-good movie starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. Despite the lack of success, creator Joss Whedon was given a chance to do it again, and because the network he was on was still in the “we’ll try anything” mode, turned it into an brilliant, iconic TV Series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

That show was funny, sad, witty and at times, even operatic. It was also one of the most influential series of the past decade. After spinning off Angel — perhaps the weirdest TV show ever — it also spun right into the realm of the comic book.

Read the entire entry …

I admit it — I’m a bit skeptical about the new “Browse Inside” feature being rolled out by HarperCollins, even as I am very enthusiastic about a book publisher is actually trying something new and exciting. Similar to Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, the HC model allows readers to digitally browse a book before buying. The service is powered by software developed by LibreDigital, and it’s, well, certainly slick…but is it going to get the job done?

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. When accessed from the HC website, the interface is easy to use. It works with Firefox on a Mac. This is important because if it works there, it’s gonna work most places, or so I like to think. The controls are simple, the text quality is good, and things move fast.

These are not small considerations. The harder it is to use the feature, the less likely it is that, well, people will use it. The goal, I believe, is to get website owners to add the “Browse Inside” widget to their sites. This is what you’ll see if you do:
Read the entire entry …

About five years ago I started phasing CDs out of my life entirely. I digitized my entire music collection and moved the jewel boxes into the garage. I stopped buying new CDs and committed to only acquiring new music in a digital format (eMusic helped tremendously). Then I began looking for the perfect stereo component that would play my digital music collection through a traditional home entertainment system. Ultimately, I bought a Turtle Beach AudioTron.

The Audiotron fits into a stereo rack and connects to a receiver like a normal audio component, but it also has the ability to connect to a home network and play audio stored on a PC or media server. The AudioTron was an amazing innovation in its day, effectively liberating digital music from the PC and bringing it back into the living room where it belongs.

My AudioTron served me well over the years, becoming an integral part of our household, until last week when it suddenly died. In our home the death of the AudioTron qualified as a stage-one emergency. All other activities ceased while I considered my options.

Read the entire entry …

Kirk’s debunking of the Amazon myths briefly discussed the prices and restrictions being imposed on consumers who use this service. Simply put, it ain’t good for the customer.

Which, I suppose, will ultimately be bad for the studios.

Amazon has perversely chosen to ignore consumers wants and needs in an effort to bow to studio concerns about piracy. The result is prices that reflect the last century — apropos, as it was pointed out that the suggested technology for linking to your television gives you a picture straight out of 1995.

Read the entire entry …