Here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.

After SOPA and PIPA, Hollywood now looks like a dinosaur, and as out of touch as someone trying to kill the radio or home video cassettes. Venture capital firms are actually now actively looking to fund companies with the aim of dismantling the industry, as the current model of movie making seems outdated. The internet is producing a talented crop of filmmakers working on shoestring budgets, hungry to get themselves noticed.

Perhaps A-list actors do not need multi-multi-million dollar salaries when there are thousands of hardworking amateurs trying to get noticed. Perhaps not every graphic novel and board game needs $100M or $200M thrown at it in order to become a feature film when there are hundreds of creative, original screenplays that get tossed in the trash. Perhaps you don’t need to spend an additional $100M marketing a movie when everyone is fast-forwarding through commercials and has AdBlock on their browsers.

The most baffling thing about the entertainment industry today is that by being so scared of totally collapsing, they are just standing still while the ground under their feet collapses.

It's almost election season, and I'm hoping that the ads this year will be up to the ... caliber ... of the following spots:

I think both of them needed more gunfire.

I love this. Rich Eisen, NFL Network anchor, runs the 40 yard dash every year at the Combine.

I won't give away the result, but be sure to watch both videos, especially the second one, which un-ironically analyses his performance against other Combine participants.

A lot of the articles and videos I've come across lately are about being productive at work and how to really get work done.

I read an article by Michael "Rands" Lopp about setting aside one hour a day to just sit in silence and create something.

It meshed up very well with this video by Jason Fried, who hypothesizes that work operates in cycles, much like sleep.

In order to achieve "a good night's sleep," you have to go through several stages of sleep. If you're interrupted, you have to start back at the beginning.

So it is with work.

God knows I'm guilty of spending 12 minutes on a project, only to hop over to Facebook and see that, once again, nothing has changed.

I'm going to issue myself a personal challenge. I want to see if, for the next week, I can spend 30 minutes a day with my cell phone turned off, my email client closed, and my social media sites logged out.

For 30 minutes, I will do nothing but edit or program. I will ignore all others (sorry Shannon) and fully immerse myself in a given task.

I'm sure there's no such thing as a "paleo diet" for working, but I bet this is a good first step in that direction.

My family has a sort of love/hate relationship with tennis, insofar as that my mom loves it, and the rest of us hate it.

This 2006 David Foster Wallace piece in the New York Times, however, may have convinced me to give it another chance.

And besides, any chance to mention Federer gives me a great opportunity to post this ridiculous video:

With social media being a big part of my job (and a big part of maintaining clients as a freelancer), I know I can't totally get rid of Facebook and Twitter, and I certainly can't shed myself off of YouTube. But since the latest "Google Privacy Scandal of the Week," I've really been trying to ween myself off of as many free services as I can. It's really pretty stupid: why are we willing to give so much information to these companies who are more than willing to sell it to the highest bidder?

This is a great article in the New York Times about the various organizations who mine and utilize the information we give to companies like Facebook every day. This part, in particular, really worried me:

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy.

Even more scary:

The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.

Just searching for something like "diabetes symptoms" could disqualify you for health insurance, even if you were just doing research for an article on the disease.

I bet the first person who makes a social network that values its users' privacy and operates on a model that can make money without selling out their users will become very, very wealthy.

An older story but still a good lesson for 21st-century journalists.

I really like this quote:

The bigger issue that may or may not apply in this specific case (I can't decide): Over the past 25 years, being a sports fan somehow flipped from "I believe you" to "I don't believe you until you prove to me why I should believe you." We don't trust anyone any more.

I think you could substitute "sports fan" for many different groups of people these days, most obviously "constituents".

Being the massive Simpsons snob that I am¹, I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Bill Oakley, a writer for the Simpsons during the greatest seasons of the show's existence.

Additional required reading: How We Wrote Classic Simpsons Episodes and The Making Of "Homer At The Bat".

A really great video about a woman who wants to get rid of an old accordion she has been holding onto for a long time. Instead of simply selling it on craigslist, however, she puts an ad up with an interesting proposal: you come to a dinner party that she's hosting and perform in front of her guests (and judges a la "America Idol"). The winner receives the accordion for free.

I think my favorite part about this video, however, is the guy you see in the bottom corner at 3:24. Keep looking for him throughout the video, because his reactions are simply amazing (I just about spit my water all over my iPad when I first saw his annoyed/apathetic reaction).

I missed this during the last holiday season, but Barack's got a pretty good voice.