Strange (effective?) advertising

I'm listening to Pandora right now, and the large sidebar ad is for a Sprint service of one sort or another. All well and good, except overlaid on the ad itself are some little animated figures that I think are supposed to be people (viewed from the top down) walking around at random:

I'm honestly not sure what the original idea here was, but given the shape of the figures and the way they move, when I see them out of the corner of my eye they look like bugs crawling all over my screen.  So, great job, Sprint - your ad makes me want to whack my computer screen with a newspaper even more than most ads do. 

Strange (effective?) advertising

I'm listening to Pandora right now, and the large sidebar ad is for a Sprint service of one sort or another. All well and good, except overlaid on the ad itself are some little animated figures that I think are supposed to be people (viewed from the top down) walking around at random:

I'm honestly not sure what the original idea here was, but given the shape of the figures and the way they move, when I see them out of the corner of my eye they look like bugs crawling all over my screen.  So, great job, Sprint - your ad makes me want to whack my computer screen with a newspaper even more than most ads do. 

"Our Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."

A while back, Slate had an article on a popular BitTorrent uploader who went by the name of aXXo, and who has a sterling reputation for providing high-quality digital rips of new films.  Popular theory holds that s/he/they have connections to the film industry, which could explain how they can provide crisp versions of movies that haven't even made it to DVD yet; however the method, aXXo is apparently quite revered in the movie pirating circles. 

I found the article interesting from a social psychology standpoint, but the technological aspects didn't thrill me as I personally don't pirate films much myself.  I don't have anything in particular against the practice - yes, it's ethically questionable, but if the movie studios would bother to provide a means of reasonably-priced digital distribution I have a feeling that (just like the music business did when iTunes came along) most downloaders would happily buy legal copies.  However, when you're a home theater enthusiast, especially one on a crappy Alaskan bandwidth connection (where downloading HD movie files would take days), the lack of quality with pirated films becomes a pretty big issue.  And besides, Netflix has pretty much everything I'm interested in watching, anyway.

That said, I've recently started following the industry (especially the indie/alternative circuit) a bit more closely than I have in the past, and there have been a couple of films that were making the rounds of the festival circuit that I'm quite interested in seeing.  Unfortunately, neither were released in theaters here (no big surprise), and neither seems planned for a DVD release.  So, what's a young filmgoer to do?

Five minutes with Google and I had torrents open for both of them, both provided by - you guessed it - aXXo.  I still don't plan to pirate movies regularly, but in this particular instance I'm glad the option was there - and given some of the experiences I've had in the past with downloading fake or poor quality files, I have to admit it's nice to have a "trusted brand" to go to.  So, aXXo, although I'm not quite ready to declare you a god, I have to say - thanks for being there for me.

"Our Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."

A while back, Slate had an article on a popular BitTorrent uploader who went by the name of aXXo, and who has a sterling reputation for providing high-quality digital rips of new films.  Popular theory holds that s/he/they have connections to the film industry, which could explain how they can provide crisp versions of movies that haven't even made it to DVD yet; however the method, aXXo is apparently quite revered in the movie pirating circles. 

I found the article interesting from a social psychology standpoint, but the technological aspects didn't thrill me as I personally don't pirate films much myself.  I don't have anything in particular against the practice - yes, it's ethically questionable, but if the movie studios would bother to provide a means of reasonably-priced digital distribution I have a feeling that (just like the music business did when iTunes came along) most downloaders would happily buy legal copies.  However, when you're a home theater enthusiast, especially one on a crappy Alaskan bandwidth connection (where downloading HD movie files would take days), the lack of quality with pirated films becomes a pretty big issue.  And besides, Netflix has pretty much everything I'm interested in watching, anyway.

That said, I've recently started following the industry (especially the indie/alternative circuit) a bit more closely than I have in the past, and there have been a couple of films that were making the rounds of the festival circuit that I'm quite interested in seeing.  Unfortunately, neither were released in theaters here (no big surprise), and neither seems planned for a DVD release.  So, what's a young filmgoer to do?

Five minutes with Google and I had torrents open for both of them, both provided by - you guessed it - aXXo.  I still don't plan to pirate movies regularly, but in this particular instance I'm glad the option was there - and given some of the experiences I've had in the past with downloading fake or poor quality files, I have to admit it's nice to have a "trusted brand" to go to.  So, aXXo, although I'm not quite ready to declare you a god, I have to say - thanks for being there for me.