NPD has been publicly posting the video game console hardware sales numbers for the last year.  It’s fueled the fanboy wars, and also made Sony’s lack of traction with the PS3 embarrassingly easy to track. So suddenly, with a lot of posturing and puffing, and probably more than a little pressure from the console manufacturers, they decided to stop. Now they’ve changed their minds.
At least they had the good sense to point out their own mistake:
NPD Group’s David Riley admitted in an e-mail Monday, “Honestly, it was terribly naive of me to …

It’s good to have Heroes back on the air, even if it is such a mass-market show that it hurts to watch sometimes.  As much as it has its moments of greatness there’s no denying that a whiff of “product” that comes off of it sometimes.  I suppose it’s good for the long-term health of the program, for maybe it’s too baby-proofed for its own good.  Everything feels a little too delicate, as if the writers are worried that if they push too far they’re going to piss people off, …

It wasn’t that long ago that high quality video game trailers were being treated as if they were valuable treasures.  Sure, you could see the Halo preview on YouTube, but game imagery seems to lose a lot of it’s pizzazz when it’s pushed through their deflavorizing algorithms.  So gaming “news” sites like IGN, and some of the pay to download sinkholes decided that they were actually doing the fans a favor by letting them see what are essentially hi-rez commercials.  For those of us who were unwilling to pay a …

When the history of modern media is written the authors had better include Mystery Science Theater 3000. In the decade that the show was on the air it paved the way for the kind of post-modern mash-up of the pomposity of big media and the ironic deconstruction that fueled the rise of YouTube.
But cheap media manipulation tools were hard to come buy in the early 90s, so it took the resources of a local television station to launch the show, and a staff of talented and committed people to make it …

MTV and Britney Spears both have similar problems these days. Declining numbers, lack of direction, and an upcoming younger generation that is no longer interested in pre-packaged product when they can see cooler, better, and more personally appealing stuff on Youtube.
So what’s an aging Diva to do? Most of the genuine success stories have a similar arc. Plucky artist digs down into their soul and/or wallets and manages to produce a piece of content that reminds everybody why they loved them so much in the first place.
There …