Fierce and Nerdy’s What The Tech columnist Michele Agius joins Tom and Josh at their North Hollywood studio.  Topics include the great and mighty (ego of) Kanye West, why Hanson matters, the latest Beck single, World War Z and The Bling Ring, staying in shape, why Samsung rules, and much more. Pub Trivia 10 Score = 2/10 Listen to it here: Listen to this episode Or download here: Download this episode (right click and save)...

A lot of F and N readers are from film and literary nerdship, so here comes a little helping of cross-cultural columnizing. Games and Movies have shared a sort of awfully awkward sisterhood since the early eighties. We could talk about their first public spat when the ET movie became a classic and…the ET game famously infamously found its way into a landfill somewhere in the desert, because so many units of it were un-bought, returned, and generally avoided. Games and movies made a lukewarm truce when James Bond’s Goldeneye became a hit, and hence the poster child for why to make a movie-based game, “we really should make a game for Comic Book Movie 19, remember Goldeneye? It was good.” Or we could talk about all those Uwe Boll Movies… But we aren’t doing that today. Today we’re gonna over-simplify a really complicated thing. The question that most film people ask me:  What’s the difference between making a movie and making a game? You know I hate when people ask that. How do games get greenlit? The super duper simplified version. Just like the pictures, there are lots of types of games that all have different money paths. There’s a term in the industry called a AAA (“Triple A”, like the roadside towing thing) game. I’ve seen game designers debate this over hot pockets in the studio kitchen for hours on end, so let’s keep it simple; it’s the game version of a blockbuster. It’s a big budget game. Things go boom. Pretty vistas. Lots of other things that costs millions of dollars. These type of games are usually rained down from biz/marketing of a publisher. I said usually. (Please game friends, don’t email me about Valve.)  Publishers are the gods of this...

If you ask me, I blame the Prius. Recently, a big name celebrity came to see a show at the theatre where I work. For security and convenience reasons, we allowed him to park in the loading zone in front of the theatre rather than the slightly farther Peon Lot. Since this isn’t exactly legal, I arranged with his people (He has people. I want people! Even midgets would be fine. Do they work cheap? Can I get two for the price of one? I could stack them on top of each other, put them in a really long trench coat and pretend they are a super-tall publicist named KiKi. That would get me in to Sky Bar) that I would hold on to his car keys and watch his car while he was watching the show- never mind the fact that giving me car keys is about as useful as handing a bone to a monkey and telling it to drive the big black monolith around the block in case the cops come. You’re just going to end up with a smashed cow-skull and a big parking ticket. As I waited for him, I fantasized about the sort of supercar that would soon be at my disposal. Certainly, it would be some kind of Italian Dream Machine- a Maserati or Lamborghini or some other juicy word that sounds like food but isn’t food but still makes you drool like lasagna made out of money. A car designed to look like a spaceship if spaceships were designed to look like naked ladies (NOTE TO NASA: Next time, hire Italian designers. Endeavor is whatever but Endeavero is magnifico!!!) Maybe I would slip inside and sit behind the wheel in the tan leather interior all snug...

Soda is delicious. But to the ancient Callatians, so was the flesh of dead relatives and nowadays no one outside of gourmand serial killers would salivate over a dish of foie gras d’ humain.  That soda and junk food have followed in the footsteps of flesh and cigarettes to become the consumptive Voldemorts of the 21st century presents a great challenge for corporate confectionerians: How to produce products with addictive deliciousness without fattening the populace into lumbering Elephant Men. PepsiCo’s quest of attaining this snacktopia was chronicled recently in a fascinating New Yorker article written by John Seabrook. In the article, Pepsi’s strategies for creating healthier food — developing a brand new type of salt with the atomic-age name “15 Micron Salt” and building a “taste testing” robot hardwired with cultured cells featuring the genetic sequences of the four known taste receptors — seemed more like excerpts from a science-fiction novel than the evolutionary next step for Cool Ranch Doritos. Instead of spending hundreds of millions dollars on cutting-edge scientific research, all the folks at Pepsi really needed to do was look west toward Los Angeles. During the past fifteen years the marketing, distribution, and accounting departments inside Hollywood studios– the real imaginative forces of the dream machine—have discovered a can’t-miss business algorithm: making movies that no one likes but everyone goes to see. Or, to be more precise, the Orphan Blockbuster. Like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Hollywood hive mind has now confused audiences to the point where they can’t tell good from bad.  Let’s look at two recent releases, both on their way to making more money than the GDP of Guinea-Bissau: Fast Five and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Both films may be built with...