Tag Archives: Jason Kottke

Nothing is real…

This fascinating video montage (apparently a promotional tool for Stargate Studios) shows just how much of what you see in outdoor scenes in movies and TV shows is really done with green screen. Surprising, amazing, and kind of disappointing. I’ll never believe anything I see on-screen again. (Not that I ever should have anyway.)

I think it would have been better with “Strawberry Fields Forever” as the soundtrack though, but I suppose they couldn’t get the rights. Maybe they should have used the “simulated live performances” from BlueBeat.com instead. (Source: LA Times)

Via kottke.org, via that’s how it happened.

Let me keep stealing your bandwidth, or I’ll sue!

Here we have a message from someone who is, quite possibly, the world’s biggest douchebag:

images-on-your-site

And just for what it’s worth, I’ve stolen this image the right way: I downloaded it and am serving it from my own site.

I know a bit about bandwidth theft myself, as more than once someone has decided to link directly to either the image, the audio, or both, from my Christmas with Chewbacca page. I’ve since taken actions to prevent direct linking to content from my site, and I encourage other site owners to do the same.

(Credit where credit is due: the trail of the above image led from here to here to here via here.)

Update: After a bit of research, it seems to me that this may be a hoax or an old meme that’s been circulating for years, or both. But regardless, there obviously are people who think this way, even if they may not be so brazen as to threaten legal action, because bandwidth theft is a pretty common occurrence.