One of our recent Netflix rentals was The End of Suburbia. I’ve been reading quite a bit on urban planning lately, especially New Urbanism, and somewhere along my journey I found a pointer to this movie. I’ll hopefully write about New Urbanism later, but for this post I want to focus on the movie and my family’s reaction to it.
Andante sent me an invite for this survey. How could I refuse, especially since I was listed as her first victiminvitee?
Seven Things To Do Before I Die
Seven Things I Cannot Do
Seven Things That Attract Me to…Blogging
Seven Things I Say Most Often
Seven Books That I Love
(Yes, I know I went over the limit. Luckily I only went over by 1, it was hard enough to trim the list down to 8!)
Seven Movies That I Watch Over and Over Again
Seven People I Want To Join In Too Obviously there is no obligation, but it would be interesting to hear from the following people:
(Those who don’t blog, feel free to leave your answers as comments on this article.)
Just finished watching Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. (The link goes to Netflix, but I borrowed my copy from the Sacramento Public Library.) If you haven’t seen this show, I strongly recommend it. It totally skewers Fox’s “Fair & Balanced” hype and exposes their organization as right-wing propagandists.
I especially liked the “behind the scenes” featurette on the DVD. This film was made with the help of several volunteers who collectively watched Faux News 24×7, looking for the most egregious examples of yellow journalism. After these volunteers finished their work for Outfoxed, they wanted to continue their efforts; thus was born the News Hounds blog.
Another project associated with this movie is Free Press, a “nonpartisan organization working to involve the public in media policymaking,” which is becoming more and more critical as the centralization of news reporting continues. Please, if you’re an American citizen, do your country a favor–watch this movie, and check out the links above.
Well, we finally got around to joining Netflix yesterday, and we’ve already got 60 movies in our queue! Initially we signed up for the 3-at-a-time plan, but we’ll probably change to the cheapest plan once the novelty wears off.
Several of our friends already use Netflix, and they all had good things to say about the service. The only words of caution I received had to do with “throttling” of the movie pipe. This is spelled out in the terms of service, and basically says that if you burn through your queue they reserve the right to take their time sending your next movie. Fair enough, I guess.
Of course, this gives me another feature to hack/play with here on the blog: displaying our Netflix queue and/or recent activity. I was initially thinking of using Jimbo’s mynetflix 1.5 plugin, but he’s been pretty busy lately. It looks like development work has been taken over by Herichon, who recently released mynetflix2. I’ll be fiddling with this plugin and squeezing it into my page somewhere. Of course, this is going to be another customization that needs to be maintained for each theme, sigh.
If you’re a Netflix user reading this blog, feel free to add us (my wife and I) to your friends list. Our Netflix address is
netflix@thisblogsname.net
(In case that’s not clear enough, you’ll need to replace thisblogsname with SonicChicken.) My wife and I also have personal profiles to cover movies that we disagree about, for example I like Dr. Strangelove and she doesn’t. If you want to add us individually use our name instead of “netflix” in the account, e.g. jim@thisblogsname.net.
