kip/bot/blog

NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”

This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).

I can’t remember if I liked the first Harold and Kumar movie.  I LOVED the DVD menu, though (*), seriously.  Anyway, I’m very excited about Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay.  I love Kal Penn (who’s in House, some charming movie about fobidden love outside of one’s ethnicity, and, sadly, was in the last season of 24) and haven’t seen enough of John Cho.  The trailers were funny, but some of them were locked for mature content.  When you try to unlock them, you get this gate:

Points for being funny.  It reminded me of iD software’s abusive prompts in the first couple of Quake games.  But it seems odd that you have to give so much more information than what I’m told is your typical adult entertainment site.  Over the top MPAA regs?  Cheap attempt at getting data?

(*) The DVD menu on the first one had the usual menu items, but the background was a video of Harold and Kumar in a car talking to each other and doing schtick.  Since it’s funny, you keep watching, and then eventually, the two start talking to the viewer, trying to convince them that there’s no more funny stuff and they should watch the movie already.  It was awesome.