The 13th and Waco location is commonly known as The International Dillons, but it will always be El Dilonso to me. The Lincoln and Hydraulic location is commonly known as The BTK Dillons, but it will always be Timewarp Dillons to me because it has not changed one bit since I shopped there with my mom when I was little.
At least we don’t have to suffer the ridiculously named and notoriously sucky Homeland stores anymore. Who in their right mind would name a grocery store Homeland?
[Background: Kyle is thinking about buying a new bed. He is a reasonable (cheap) person and I am sure he will make a well-thought-out decision. However, I have a slight shopping addiction, so I have been trying to "help."]
IT IS TWELVE FEET WIDE. That’s like…a first down. That is exactly 2.2994 Katie-heighths wide. You wouldn’t need to change the sheets more than once a year, you just scoot over to a clean section of the bed. WHO DOESN’T NEED THAT KIND OF MODERN CONVENIENCE?
I expect he will ignore this email.
But I will be dreaming of doing cartwheels across a four-yards-wide bed.
I have privately entertained creating a new recurring feature here, but have long struggled to decide what to name it. Ideas include:
The Most Crass Thought I Had Today
A Pretentious Thought I Had Today but Was Too Ashamed to Say Aloud
I am an Asshole
But people would get offended and I don’t really want to be a Sarah Silverman ripoff.
Because girls can’t get away with that kind of assholery.
But if I did have a recurring feature like that, today’s thought would be:
“As an act of charity, I should give Legos to poor kids so that one day when they are bagging my groceries, they will have the spatial reasoning to do a decent job of it.”
(All I think about is The Industry these. I’m sorry I’ve got none of the personal dirt you’ve come to expect from me. I’m considering a format change.)
I got bored this weekend and ended up watching a lot of shows on Hulu.
What is Hulu? It’s News Corp. (Fox) and NBC Universal’s attempt at a video-on-demand site, built so they can make money and so people will maybe stop illegally uploading TV shows to YouTube. It’s a greed thing, basically.
But I kinda love it. The site’s easy to navigate, there’s quite a bit of content (OPENhulu has an incomplete list, but it’ll give you an idea), the ads are unobtrusive and the video player has lots of options (pop the video into a separate window, make it full screen, embed a customized clip somewhere else, etc.). Will it stop people from uploading copyrighted videos to YouTube? Hardly. But will it make money? Sure.
So I’ve decided it’s my duty as a media type, TV freak and beta tester to report on my findings.
Reasons I love Hulu:
I’ve got a wide range of options. Current shows like Heroes and Friday Night Lights, shows from my childhood like Doogie Howser and Buffy, shows that Real Growups reminisce about like WKRP, and a few random movies like The Jerk thrown in.
You can create a custom clip by setting the in and out points of the video. Want to post a single scene to your blog? Easily done. (I dream of the day CBS gets in on this so I can make clips of favorite Barneyisms from How I Met Your Mother.)
The videos play smoothly, with shorter commercial interruptions than any of the network’s other video players. I only saw it buffer once in MANY hours of playback (this is how I pass time while doing laundry), and that was during peak traffic, I think. One video took a few extra seconds to load, but that may have been because it was fetching a “for mature audiences only” pre-roll. (Who knew It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wasn’t for children?)
It’s easy to find what you’re looking for. I haven’t used the search because it’s so easy to browse to the exact video I want.
The site layout is clean. It’s getting slightly more cluttered with time as they integrate the advertising (pretty sure that wasn’t there earlier), but it’s far less ugly/busy/confusing than, say, NBC.com’s video pages. Maybe that’s because they’re trying for a Web 2.0 look. I’m sure it won’t last.
You can review each episode/clip. If you’re into that. Not sure if user reviews impact the “most popular” listings.
Things that suck about Hulu:
They’re still holding back content. They’ve got the first season of Buffy, but where’s the rest of the series? Maybe I haven’t gotten my fill of human-on-vampire makeout sessions.
New episodes don’t show up as quickly as they should. Friday’s episode of Friday Night Lights was on NBC’s site on Saturday morning. Why doesn’t Hulu have it yet? Where is Wednesday’s episode of Project Runway? They’ll both be there eventually, but by the time they turn up, I may have resorted to piracy to get my fix. You can’t keep a TV addict waiting, NBC.
It’s not available internationally (yet). I know there’s lots of legal whatever that has to be done first, but…come on, this is the internet. Open it up.
The “related videos” make no freaking sense. Watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and they suggest Firefly. Huh? Watch Heroes and they suggest Family Guy. Hmm. Maybe they’re related by…also being on Hulu? I often play the videos in the popout window, and if they’d just link to the next episode in the series, I could keep watching (increasing the number of ads I see and boosting that valuable time-spent-on-site statistic).
So that’s more good things than bad things, and all the bad things are fixable. In a time when TV is as threatened as we newspaper people are…
…it’s nice to see TV companies making a right step in the web direction. Hulu, I’ve got high expectations. Keep up the surprisingly good work.
This season of The Wire features storylines from The Baltimore Sun. The only difference I can tell between the fictitious scenes on the show and real life in the newsroom is that the show’s writers slightly overestimate the sophistication of our speech patterns.
I hear that The Eagle used to have a photographer who pulled the exact same stunt way-back-when.
