social-creature

If you have been digging what I write and do and think about — or if you’re simply lost on the internet and wondering what to do with the next 30 seconds of your life — Please vote for my panel at SXSW Interactive 2011! There’s a quickie little account setup first, but IT’S EASY, [...]

A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930’s, and [...]

True Blood’s Anna Paquin wearing SkinGraft blackbird jacket in the current Venice Magazine.
If, in the course of watching True Blood, you’ve found yourself thinking “damn, those vampires look hot,” — and, seriously, who hasn’t? — here’s (well, one reason) why. The stylist for the “postmodern” vampire series has been consistently dressing its characters in the [...]

Image: Jordan Chesney
I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 [...]

For the past two years, Espresso has taken a stab at answering a simple, compelling question: “What The F**k Is Social Media?” The answer has turned into a series of presentations that have been viewed over 750,000 times, translated into about 10 languages (including Russian, so I’ve finally been able to explain to my parents [...]

Above, is a poster for an animated Nickelodeon movie called Rango, starring Johnny Depp, coming out in 2011.
Here is a poster for a movie Johnny Depp made a decade ago:

The same cactuses in the background, the big bug-eye aviator shades and the big lizard bug-eyes, the horizontal, grimacy mouth, the psychedelically twisty neck, with the [...]

The ‘Source’ in the Distance
Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk anti-hero [...]

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Read: Sex, Drugs, & The Internet – Inspired By A True Story
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You know those movies about characters trail-blazing the business of some terrible vice? They’re always set in a not-too-distant past, have trailers full of period-specific songs, and include the words “inspired by a true story” on the poster. There’s the initial meteoric rise to power and wealth, followed by a period of unbridled excess — [...]