Top Ten Reasons to Watch the New Season of Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica's new season begins this Friday on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Google turns out the lights

Google draws attention to "Earth Hour" by darkening its home page for a day.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Read more about Earth Hour.

Sprint pay incentives aim to slow cancellations

Mobile phone company Sprint Nextel, fighting to retain customers, is changing employee bonus plans to double the importance of stopping cancellations, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed on Tuesday.

Sprint treated me so badly that I paid a good amount of money just to be rid of them. Comparatively, AT&T (whose corporate logo used to be called the Death Star as a joking reference to their monolithic presence and evil customer service) has been a dream. Their cell service and their customer service are miles better than Sprint, so I'm not at all surprised that customers are kicking Sprint to the curb in droves. They deserve it.

Read Sprint pay incentives aim to slow cancellations | Tech News on ZDNet.

Good Gear: SkullCandy Ink'd Earbuds

I have traditionally eschewed earbuds for over-the-ear headphones. Earbuds never seem to fit my ears and I spend half my time repositioning the damn things when they fall out. Headphones, on the other hand, are awkward to carry around, can be uncomfortable in Texas heat, and never provide quite the sound isolation I'm looking for in a pair of really good earbuds. Not wanting to shell out a hundred bucks or more for high end earbuds, however, I opted to suffer in headphone land. Until now.

I'm not sure why I thought these SkullCandy Ink'd earbuds might work for me, but I was attracted by the shiny metal accents and the iPhone-compatible jack connector. (One of the great frustrations of owning an iPhone is that it is incompatible with 99% of the headphone/earbud products on the market by dint of its recessed input jack.) The price ($15) seemed right, though, so I took a gamble. It was only after opening the packaging that I realized the genius inherent in these deceptively stylish earbuds. The silicone earpieces are replaceable and come in several sizes. I'd seen similar adjustable earbuds in the Jabra line of telephone headsets and in high-end stereo products, but not in discount earbuds.

So I thought to myself -- am I a large? a medium? a small? And then I realized -- my ears could be different sizes, and that's why no one set of earbuds ever seemed to fit right.

Sure enough, my left ear snugly fits a small earpiece, and my right ear takes a medium. Now I have a great fitting pair of earbuds that completely block out exterior noise (just ask my office mate) and deliver great sound at a ridiculously low price. I'm going to by a few more pairs to guard against loss or damage. Products this good tend to disappear, so git while the gittin's good is my thinking.

I'm fully aware that I could be completely unaware of similarly great products, so check out Ink'd Earbuds on Amazon and tell me about your favorite headphones/earbuds in the comments.

SxSW MADNESS!

If things have been a little quiet, it's because I'm swept up in the South By Southwest film festival. Check out the coverage over at Slackerwood and, for you filmmakers in the crowd, Film Festival Secrets.

Cult Movies Podcast Episode 51

"All The Glamour Hollywoood Can Muster." In this episode we talk about the Oscars, why we hate the Razzies, some summer movies, and the death of HD-DVD.

100 days, 100 movies and Film Festival Secrets.

As you probably know, Stomp Tokyo is currently in hibernation while Scott and I recharge our mental batteries. Back in November we decided it was time to formally acknowledge the fact that we were on a break from the b-movie biz and pursue the other projects on our plates.

Scott has reverted to type and is passing the time on his blog with a concept that is, admittedly, 100% Awesome: 100 days, 100 movies. In his own words:

My plan is to watch a movie a day for at least the next 100 days, and write something, however brief, on each one of them. Movie will mostly be on DVD, though I imagine I’ll get out to theater every now and again. There will also be a few digital download movies in there too.

For my part, I'm doing a bunch of writing on the small corner of the film world that has become my professional life: film festivals. After talking with hundreds of festival directors and staffers, I realized that every day they receive a deluge of questions from filmmakers -- the same questions, over and over again. And so I started the Film Festival Secrets blog with an eye towards answering those questions, eventually in the form of a book.

So now you're caught up on what we're up to at the moment. Look out, world -- it's gettin' crazy up in here.

Podcast Catch-up - new episodes

The last time I posted here about a new episode of Stomp Tokyo - the Cult Movies Podcast, it was November. If you don't subscribe to the podcast with an RSS reader you could be forgiven for thinking that Scott and I hadn't recorded anything since then. But how wrong you'd be! Here's a recap of the episodes since then:

Stomp Tokyo Podcast #47 - In another catch-up episode, we talk about HD DVD and new theater experiences, as well as No Country for Old Men and Cat O'Nine Tails.

Stomp Tokyo Podcast #48 - In this episode we discuss the WGA strike, HD-DVD, and Rambo. Featuring special guest and occasional Peter Cushing impersonator Freeman Williams.

Stomp Tokyo Podcast #49 - Subjects this time include Cloverfield, Slamdance, and B-Fest.

Stomp Tokyo Podcast #50 - We Always Shoot With a Steady Cam. Subjects include documentaries, Cloverfield, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.

And there's another episode on the way, we're just editing it together. Enjoy!

The B-Masters Cabal Roundtable #25: The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back

The B-Masters are back with another roundtable, this time centered around Turkish ripoff cinema. I've long been in love with any movie prefaced by the words "The Turkish," so I'm sorry I missed participation in this particular roundtable.

Fortunately Scott was there to pick up the slack, even during Stomp Tokyo's sabbatical. His review of Badi (the Turkish version of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial) stands proud (?) with the other reviews from the industrious members of the B-Masters Cabal -- watching crap so you don't have to.

Read The B-Masters Cabal » 25: The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back.

Barack OBollywood

If YouTube videos were delegates in the electoral college, Barack Obama would be president. Here's my favorite ObamaTube so far.