Why do I have to be Mr Pink?

I spent Saturday afternoon hanging with Stormtroopers.

Still pulling the footage off the camera, but here’s something I did on the LG Viewty:

More to come…

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

No need to look so worried, Kristen. I think you pulled it off.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I admit that I wasn’t expecting much from this movie*. The trailer was kinda uninspired, the comedy looked obvious and worst of all it had Russell Brand in it. I’m still only vaguely aware who he is (and I’m quite happy for things to stay that way) BUT he was one of the more unexpected surprises that the film offered up. The biggest one is that I never imagined I’d be writing this next sentence:

Go and watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s fucking funny.

I had the pleasure of taking a bunch of bloggers to a preview screening last week. I’d been looking to do something like this for a while after the success of the Juno screening last year, but had to admit early on that the wait for another Juno would be a long one. I hadn’t seen The 40 Year Old Virgin, but thought both Knocked Up and Superbad were decent enough comedies. I enjoyed that they weren’t as juvenile as most American comedy, but was a little put off by the trade off for overbearing sentimentality. Decent enough Friday night movies though so I figured hosting an advanced screening of the latest movie from the Judd Apatow stable would be an easy sell via Twitter.

It was a cool little screening of I guess around 30+ bloggers who had answered my shout out. Some of them were friends and some of them are now friends. That’s how Twitter works. The film was shown in the Soho Screening Rooms, somewhere I’ve never seen filled before. It’s usually just me and a handful of journalists at some early morning preview, drinking coffee and stifling yawns as expensive things explode in front of us.

The first thing that struck me was that this was not a romantic comedy. It was a comedy with a big C… and a lot of cock. That’s not another prod at Mr Brand. The plot is summed up in the trailer, but it’s the abundance of one liners that keep the thing going. There’s a feeling you’ve seen similar situations before but before you get a chance to over analyse anything ZING there’s a pubic hair gag to deal with. Which actually works quite well.

The main draw for me was seeing how a TV actress continues to cope up on the big screen. Not so much Mila Kunis who’s pretty good, but rather Kristen Bell who was the heart and soul of Veronica Mars before it became a huge mess and was put out of its misery. I’ve seen her in a couple of films before - most notably the horrible remake of Kairo, Pulse, which gets a damn good kicking in one delighfully uncomfortable scene here. Just as I’ve heard that the role of name was built around Russell Brand it’s startlingly obvious that Ms Bell’s career to date was a huge part of the character of Sarah Marshall. Which was a brave move and a damn funny one.

The UK marketing for the movie was luke-warm at best - horrible looking bus posters for one and a half hearted website that was a shadow of the American one. I liked the fact that the lead character kept a blog, but am already using this unfinished idea (obviously thought up late in the day, poorly executed and with no link back from within the movie itself) as a proposal for future blog and movie integration so thanks for that.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall again which is kinda rare and it also made me go back and look up The 40 Year Old Virgin to see what I was missing. Be interesting to see if they can keep the ball rolling here…

* When Jess said she’d had a better offer to go to a sex shop anniversary party I could see her point.

Ahh Hoxton

All a bit too Mighty Boosh for my liking, but a good night out.

We’ve had Jessa from Bookslut staying with us for the week as she was covering the London Book Fair, so a bit of a book geek bash seemed in order.

Pub / Thai / pub / tube/ home/ whisky and kittens.

With Jess, James, Liv, Ben, Mecca and… oh yeah… after a drop of single malt we finally saw Rob’s alter ego: The Hinch

We also saw the Hoxton locals share an expensive looking wheel chair which seemed to be the latest fashion accessory, a guy looking very relaxed waiting for the tube as he filled his shoes with vomit and then we somehow managed to catch the Death Carriage with the puke guy and yet the smell of fresh human excrement seemed to be coming from another part of the train entirely.

I love living in the city.

Musing while looking for a muse

Thinking more about events.

Watching what’s going on in Austin right now and coming to the conclusion that once again the focus is on the partying and hookups rather than the actual conference. This is the first time I’ve recognised so many friends having fun out there. Some of them are doing some really creative stuff and others just seem to be drunk

I mentioned this morning on Twitter that I’d like to see some new Brit events that focussed on the outcome rather than the actual presentations/drinks. We have Hack Day of course and a lot of cool stuff comes out of that, but I’m thinking more about Christian’s Geek Retreat (but with maybe less of a retreat because there’s no fucking way I’m going to Wales) with an emphasis on creation by people with a host of different skill sets. Put a bunch of madly creative bastards in a room and see what gets shoved out the door. It’s kinda how Google foster stuff…

Speaking of events, Mike mentioned on Twitter that tonight’s Mobile Monday is being held at the Transport Museum. I recently did an event with them (old friends WebJam are now hosting a follow up site for that) and the museum is a good example of a perceived dusty old institution understanding what we’re trying to do with 2.0. More venues like this and the Coach & Horses and we may yet find a nice balance between the very old and established city we live in and the mad fuck crazy ideas some of us want to get off the ground here.

That said I had a very frustrating week on my return from San Francisco. Moving from sunshine to storms became a spot on metaphor as my email replies switched from Let’s Do It to Why Do It. The upshot of that is that I cut loose a bunch of finks that I no longer want to work with. Life’s too short to try and lead a dinosaur to water.

But on a lighter note let’s loop back to the beginning and watch Christian and Jo do some karaoke 2.0:

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid (CC license)

Leaving the comfort zone

I hate reminders that I live in a very insular space. I try and make my interests as wide as possible, but I keep hitting language barriers and that’s down to me to fix. I hate learning new languages and yet it’s obvious the pay off would be huge.

I saw some interesting statistics earlier today while doing some research and what jumped out at me was this:

the Japanese language is the most used language in the blogosphere (37%), with English following closely behind at 33%… While this is impressive, research efforts by JR Tokai Express, however, have indicated that almost 67% of respondents worked in companies that did not have corporate blogs. The majority of Japanese blogs online then must be credited to individual content providers. (via)

Can you imagine all the good stuff I’m missing? Drives me nuts.

The biggest value that Google Reader now gives me is the ability to see just how many blogs do nothing, but feed on the exact same carcass. Something I’ve also been guilty of in the past. The same old same old, or as Beckett put it The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Accept we have an alternative. Sort of.

Anyway while I’m talking about language barriers here’s a video by fellow STAB TRUCK devotee, Fred, in Paris. This is his first video in English. Can you imagine me even attempting to do something in French? Thought not:

DATE: March 12 HOMEWORK: Do something…

So that QR Geek Lunch…

… was pretty damn good.

We had a huge turnout for the Tuttle Club. I got there around 10.30 and it was already standing room only. I spent the morning catching up with friends (which is a nice side effect of the Social Media Café) but failed miserably at meeting anyone new until our QR experts arrived for the Geek Lunch. By this time we were a small, but formidable little party.

Myself, Gia, Laura, Lee, Nik, Francine, Mecca, Suw, James, Martin, Andy, James, David and Kimm (we were also hoping to meet Anthony but he had to go back to Australia at short notice which was a shame). It was a nice range of expertise and interested geeks. The feedback so far has been great.

I think the most important thing that I took away from the discussion is that while Japan may be years ahead of us in their use of QR they haven’t really done anything inovative with the technology yet. It so quickly became accepted as part of day to day life that it kind of faded into the background. The same way that here we take a regular barcode for granted.

While others were more interested in the practical aspects of QR I’m hugely interested in making some very impractical projects so you’ll probably start seeing a lot more QR stuff around me.

Maybe even on me.

The most interesting thing that came up in conversation was when Mecca announced that Moo had opened up its API. This is a HUGE deal and I can’t wait to see what people come up with. Seeing as Moo have already been experimenting with matrix codes in their sticker books it was a logical step for them to open that procedure up to the users and they’ve done just that Richard Pope has done just that with the Barcode-Sticker-O-Matic.

I’m confident that this will be a big leap forward in generating interest in the codes. Once these little squiggly squares start turning up regularly at geek meets on moleskines and laptops things will get very interesting very quickly…

Then once the I-nigma reader gets embedded into your handset: BOOM.

Watch this space. And that one. And the one over there…

Quick Response

Please excuse the meat*.

I’m co-hosting a dialogue about QR codes at the Coach & Horses tomorrow afternoon. You can read a bit more about it here - Yeah, I’m now also blogging for The Tuttle Club.

I just got outed as an “Esteemed international social media playboy” too.

Elsewhere (ie Twitter) I also found out that a simple repetition of the word fuck on Twitter can lead to a STAB TRUCK echo. Something to mine there.

Oh and the cat had a better day than I did. Thank fuck I’m in the pub tomorrow.

* Cheers to James for sending on the Japanese QR pics from his mate Joe in Japan. If you’re into your mobile trickery then have a word with James at the next Tuttle meet or better yet go along to his Mobile Geeks of London event.

Luxembourg Part I

Click To Play

No time for love Dr. Jones

The plan this month was to get a decent Twitter/Seesmic event sorted out. The first Tweetup with TrustedPlaces was a lot of fun and the second one at the Juno screening seemed to be an interesting place to take the concept. I’m all for just getting together for drinks with like minded folk, but the idea of pointing cool people at something just as cool that’s mostly off their radar (like a movie for example) really appealed to me.

I was all set to get that going for the end of January, but decided to hold off until one of my favourite Twitter and Seesmic people gets back from Australia. So stay tuned for an update on that as we’ll certainly be doing something in February. But I still got to flex my event planning muscles… Dean and I got asked to arrange a little get together for Loic, Vin Vin and Seesmic this Thursday. We had to keep the numbers down so it was capped at 20 people which make it nice and cosy. However, we’re now having some press pop by too so we’ll probably be eating out of each others’ laps…

Nice group of people though and I even get to finally make friends with Thayer depsite our previous differences over this kind of thing.

Which reminds me I still need to write about Seesmic too.

AND the vlogging event I was in Brighton for last weekend.

I’m seriously considering taking an extra day off a week just to catch up with the writing…

Twitter Meets Juno

A few months back I was asked to pitch some ideas with my friend Gia at some movie bods for something fun to do with bloggers as a pre-release event for a movie. One of the ideas was a little shindig based on the earlier Twitter event that I ran. With that particular movie it didn’t quite work out and we just ran with a screening.

Since the first London Tweetup I get asked a lot if there’s going to be a second one. The plan was to do one in November, but I was too busy to sort it out. Now with December filling up fast I wanted to get something nailed down. Not just another little drink and nibble session, but something that we could build into a regular series of events in 2008.

Then I took my favourite video blogger on a Tuk Tuk ride through London. Then I got word that the blogger event was back on, but for a different movie. Then said Tuk Tuk partner, suggested we try and merge the two…

So we did just that.

I’m happy to invite any London Twitter users to a preview screening of Jason Reitman’s Juno on the 4th of December. The movie will be followed by an (also free) pre-Christmas party at the Union Bar.

Because this is a combined event the places I have are limited. Right now I have 25 seats for the movie, but if we go through those quickly there’s a chance I’ll get more. This is a FREE event just as long as you’re already on Twitter and are able to get to London on the 4th of December. This is strictly a first come first served basis so please leave a comment below along with your Twitter name so I can shove you on the list.

I saw Juno at the London Film Festival this year and it’s hilarious.

This year’s critically acclaimed film, Juno stars Ellen Page as MacGuff, a confident teenage girl who faces an unplanned pregnancy. She calls the shots with a nonchalant cool and an effortless attitude as she journeys through an emotional nine-month adventure into adulthood. Juno and best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) hatch a plan to find Juno’s unborn baby the perfect set of parents, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), who are longing to adopt their first child. Luckily, Juno has the support of her dad and stepmother (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney). Juno conquers her problems head-on, displaying a youthful exuberance both smart and unexpected

I’m really excited to invite friends to see it. This works well for Twitter users as we get a free movie and a little get-together and it works great for the film company as people on Twitter just can’t shut up

Some of you may have already been invited to the screening as ‘prominent bloggers’ in your own right. If that’s the case there’s no need to ask for another place as you’re already in.

Thanks to Rupert for suggesting the merge and Sheena and Fox Searchlight for being open to the idea of a social media gatecrash.

If this proves to be a fun night out (and I’m guessing we’ll have a great night) what I’d like to do is set up a maybe-monthly Twitter event based on the model. A bunch of us go to see a movie early, or perhaps an art show preview or anything else I can throw a group of us together for. Then we use Twitter to talk about it. But I also want to pepper the calendar with simple - let’s all go to the pub - events. And if I can wrangle someone to pay for a bar I will.

Let’s get December out of the way first though. Let me know who’s coming in the comments below…

UPDATE: The screening itself will take place in Soho Square at 6pm for a 6.30 start. The bash afterwards will kick off at 8pm at The Union, Soho in nearby Greek Street which is booked until midnight.