worship the glitch
This is Eric Mortensen's blog. He works @ Blip and lives in Brooklyn.
First Episodes: National Coming Out Day Edition
Anyone But Me | Out With Dad | Husbands
If you’ve never seen these web series before, today is a great day to dive in.
It’s National Taco Day and Hilah’s got you covered with an awesome vegetarian sweet potato breakfast taco.
- Marcel Vigneron, of Top Chef, explains a Tako Taco on Yum Sugar
- Honest Tom makes basic tacos from local Philly ingredients on Food. Curated.
- Jay and Sue makes picadillo and corn tortillas on The Aimless Cook
- Jen talks to the country’s only Kosher taco truck owner on Latin in LA
- The Dim Sum Truck makes a peking duck taco on Follow That Food Truck
- Akhtar Nawab explains his carnitas tacos with huitlacoche on Ozersky TV
- Gregory Ng tests a very cheap frozen taco on Freezer Burns
Here we grow some more! Hey you, Front-end Software Engineer, Back-end Software Engineer, QA Engineer, or Project Manager: Come hack with us!
Come work with us! You’ll like it.
Today we’re excited to announce a feature that both web series creators and web series viewers (pictured above) have been clamoring for.
I’m personally recommending web series to people today via the @bliptv account. If you tweet your favorite tv show, or just a topic you’re interested in, I’ll suggest a web series just for you. It’s worth a shot, right? I promise to do better than your typical automated internet regurgitation robot.
Nostalgia Chick asks some tough questions about the 1998 film, City of Angels:
It it a thought provoking drama? Contrived and cheap Hollywood schlock? Or simply a venue to show us Nicolas Cage’s sex face?
NC’s really upping her game lately.
Stuff that made me laugh recently:
Commonwealth Flats | David Mitchell’s Soap Box | Hey! We’re Back | Jack in a Box | Project Rant | The Adventures of Humphrey and Spud
Robert Llewellyn’s Carpool w/ guest Sir Patrick Stewart
The video quality is kinda crummy. It’s an old episode. But I came across it and decided Katie West would probably like it.
It’s hot here in NYC. Hot hot hot. 103F at the moment. At times like this, our thoughts turn to beer.
But what to drink?
- Beer Geek Nation (embedded above) suggests Dogfish Head Festina Peche.
- Brewery Show likes Blue Point Brewery.
- DABC endorses Czech beers.
- I Taste Your Beer likes to sip a nicely balanced Nectar IPA.
- Beer Nation happily takes on the bold flavors of Victory Brewing.
- Beer America TV guzzles down some Lagunitas Little Sumpin’ Wild Ale.
As for us? After work today, we’ll crack open some delicious local ales and lagers from Brooklyn Brewery and Sixpoint. Yum.
Folding Ideas commentary on genre (and tags and memes) in the age of the Internet.
Susan Miller’s quote from this Fast Company story about web series dramas is the last line in the article, as it should be:
“The first day we launched Anyone But Me, we got 500 views. Over the last several months since launching Season 3 our views have been between 700,000-800,000 views per month.”
The show is still growing, even though the season is over, as it has done for a number of years now. It’s doing so because Susan and Tina Cesa Ward piled heroic quantities of persistence and guts on top of their considerable talent and reputations.
Maybe it ought to be enough just to make something good. But it’s not. It’s just the beginning. What comes after that is largely unexplored territory for online dramas. Tina and Susan were among the few who did the work required to shape that new world and developed an audience any show would kill for. As a result, Anyone But Me is nothing short of a web series phenomenon.
(Pictured: Anyone But Me stars Nicole Pacent and Rachel Hip-Flores)
All Those Online Videos, Still Chasing an Audience - New York Times
New York Times TV critic Mike Hale decided to use his Sunday column to talk about blip.tv and original Web series. We didn’t pitch the story, he just decided to do it. Which is very flattering. It would seem that we’re making some waves.
Overall the article is well written and entirely fair. Hale notes that many of the series we feature have “narrow and homogenous” target audiences, and uses Hacker News Network’s “HNNCast” as an example. This is true. Most Web series today have narrow and homogenous target audiences, and this is one of the features that differentiates them most strongly from television. On TV you have massive opportunity cost and so you have to program, effectively, to the lowest common denominator. On the Web a “narrow and homogenous” audience of hundreds of thousands or single digit millions can be plenty to profitably sustain a series. This is why Web series audiences are generally more passionate about the shows than TV audiences are. You’re not just channel flipping and finding something that’s “good enough” to occupy your time. You’re going out of your way to find something interesting and engaging that fits your interests.
But a great many of the series being created and featured on blip are interesting to broad audiences and are funny, entertaining and fictional. One of my personal favorites remains Aidan 5, but our drama category and comedy category feature a great many more.
We’re still figuring out what to feature, when to do it, and how to do it. But original web series are coming into their own. The fact that Mike Hale and his editors decided to use half a page of Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section to comment on the phenomenon is evidence of this. So are the tens of millions of viewers who watch blip.tv series every month.
The one thing that bummed me out? Hale wrote that “Taken as a whole the Blip editors’ selections defined a territory for original Web video series whose borders would include reality TV, sketch comedy, geek-culture channels like G4 and, to a disturbing degree, public-access cable.” This, my friends, is not public access cable. This is TBS, CNN, HBO and MTV in 1981.
(via mikehudack)
(via jacobjoaquin)
