Still more awesomeness from Jonathan Coulton (music) and Mike Spiff Booth at Adobe (video). This one is my third favorite, right after “Creepy Doll” and “re: Your Brains”, and it has the added “awwwww” factor. Very catchy tune and slick video editing. Yet again, you don’t need to be a Warcraft fan to enjoy it.
I saw a video set to this song featuring characters from Stargate: Atlantis, but I wasn’t nearly as fond of it. The person who produced that video made what I think of as a common mistake among amateur video-makers: the video consisted almost entirely of talking heads mouthing lines meant to match up roughly to the lyrics in shape. Boooring, sadly. You need actions and movement in a video, and that’s what makes Booth’s videos so good–he has a much better grasp of that concept. Most of the talking in his videos is used to underscore action and brief moments of emotion. Much better.
We’re doing the usual pre-election research, because we don’t blindly vote along party lines–we vote for whoever we think will do the best job, whichever party they happen to be in. Sometimes that means we vote Democrat and sometimes that means we vote Republican; it almost invariably means voting a split ticket. After being raised in a family that contained extremists on both sides of the fence, I ended up firmly Independent–I believe in individuals, not parties. Parties exist to get as many of their people in office as possible; it’s those people who actually do (or don’t do) something with that.
Unfortunately, politicians these days are such bastards that we were looking at one of the races and ended up coming to the conclusion that we’d have to vote for the guy we’d described as “one corrupt f***er” because he was the best option available. Ugh. Seriously, I think no one in their right mind would want to get into politics these days except the power-mongers, and those aren’t the folks you want in office by and large. It seems like there’s almost no one left worth voting for.
I really wish most Democrats (among others) didn’t seem set on taking a “vote for us–we’re not those guys” stance this time around. I won’t vote for someone whose positions and viewpoints I can’t find any information on, and I don’t like voting for someone simply because they’re the only candidate who’s willing to admit what they stand for. As it stands, there are local candidates I could end up voting for simply because they’re the only ones I can get any information on that don’t seem like complete and utter sleazeballs. It’s possible one of the other candidates would be better, but I can’t figure that out because they’re so afraid of losing votes by saying something that they aren’t willing to say anything at all! Until they figure out that this strategy won’t work, they (and we) are screwed.
Holy Cow!
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Technorati Tags: Jonathan Coulton, music, politics, elections, videos, Warcraft, World of Warcraft
gah. i had a comment written, and then youtube ate my browser window.
anyway, it makes you wish more politicians were as straightforward, honest, and competent as zaphod beeblebrox, doesn’t it?
It was always Google Video that ate my browser windows… at least until I switched to Firefox. Sigh. Ahh the wonders of modern technology, eh?
My favorite (heh) of the politicians we looked at was one that looked really good. Great ideas, great agendas, great ideals. But you have to look closely. He was listed as wanting to increase spending on all these good areas on the survey he filled out… and also decrease taxes. Nowhere did he give any indication of where the increased money for spending was supposed to come from. Which means either he was lying somewhere, or he’s so impractical when it comes to money that he’d never accomplish all those lofty goals. What’s the point in that?