Bunny Blog

I did some poster art for our friend and colleague Jared Yeager’s new iPhone game (to be released early 2010) called Zombonie.  In case you hadn’t guessed, you ride around on a giant ice-smoothing, death-dealing device, killing zombies.  Good clean fun for the whole family!

I woke up this morning to discover we had been bombed by a foreign aggressor.  Before you get too alarmed – particularly if you are a certain business partner of mine currently honeymooning in Hawaii – I should disclose that the target of these attacks was this blog, and the foreign aggressor was “BestDP.com”.  This site appears to be an aggregator of reviews and an Amazon.com affiliate store, which is probably why our blog was relentlessly hammered with an unusual series of positive reviews for Amazon’s Kindle digital book-reader.

“Oh, so someone spammed your blog.  Big deal.”  That’s a rational response.  But what I found interesting was that these reviews were not the usual gibberish full of links - no, they were actual reviews apparently written by actual humans.  Now, of course, they weren’t written for this blog or in any way relevant to what we’re discussing, and it was pretty obvious they were spam by the way 14 separate reviews were posted in the span of about 4 minutes.  So it might seem hardly worth discussing – except that this indicates a real problem in our current connected culture.

Humans are generally very easily influenced.  We want to believe what others tell us.  But “others” has become a very nebulous term.  Why are all of these Kindle reviews so overwhelmingly positive?  Is it because the Kindle is a great product?  Is it because of the psychological nature of reviewing (I might go so far as to call it the inherent corruptness of reviewing) – by which we feel compelled to give passing marks to even truly flawed dreck?  I don’t own a Kindle; I can’t say.  I hear they’re rather nice, actually.  But my guess is this: it’s Christmas season and you can sell a lot more widgets if you cherry-pick reviews.  Everyone wins.

Or do they?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying: look out, folks, there’s a “scam” going around.  When anyone can be a publisher, anyone can be a con man.

Remember back in the heady days of 2005, when Lost was a huge hit and there was a sudden flurry of longform serialized sci-fi dramas on network television?  Ha ha, yeah, those all got cancelled in a season or less.  But at least one of them was well worth watching, and while it’s a shame it only lasted one season, I am here to highly recommend “Surface.”

The show follows a disparate cast of characters as they uncover the secrets behind a strange new aquatic life form (giant sea monsters!).  The creature FX leave a little to be desired, but the characters and stories are engrossing, and continually paying off in new ways.  What begins as a mystery centered around these sea creatures and where they came from swiftly opens the door to a much larger mystery, with much more radical implications.  There are several moments of “whoah! Awesome!” and a few “I can’t believe they did that!”s.  The series ends on something like a cliffhanger, they’ve resolved enough mysteries that you still feel satisfied.  It’s just a good solid sci-fi mystery/action show, and at 15 episodes, it’s easy to watch the whole thing.

12 of the 15 episodes (for some strange reason) are on Hulu, and you can get the whole thing on Netflix Instant Streaming.  Do yourself a favor and enjoy the ride.