Thursday, December 31, 2009

Track 3: The Degradation

So get this. I'm at home watching college football and enjoying all of the bowl games. Then what do I see on come on the tv? An utter piece of garbage commercial. Now before I get too much further, it's an advertisement for skinit.com. This website specializes in making custom adhesive skins for a number of electronic gadgets such as video game consoles, phones, and computers. Just to be clear, I don't have any sort of problem with the business of this website.

But the commercial they've chosen to make?

Completely awful. It's a white guy singing with a vocoder (aka "The Auto-tune Effect") about all the different things that one can put a skin on through the website. What's even worse is the fact that whoever made this video actually won an open contest. And they still chose this...

First of all, Jay-Z might've been talking about another conspicuous fellow, but he said it best. "This is death of auto-tune. Moment of silence." Yes, I do realize that the fad of using auto-tune was very popular in its day. It was a nice change of pace within the music world. But did you just pay attention to what I said? In its day. This crap is dead. The fact that two-bit website companies are trying to milk money out of it, backs up this fact even more. Need I mention "Party in the USA"? Therefore. Stop. Using. Auto-tune.

That's it. That's all I have to say. You auto-tune users disgust me. Get out of my face.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Track 2: "Balancing Black Aspirations With White Fears"

So I saw the movie Invictus today with a friend that I haven't seen for a while. My thoughts on it you ask? Well, it's a pretty decent movie. Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood. It focuses on the presidency of Nelson Mandela, the South African National Rugby Team (The Springboks, which apparently are antelopes), and the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The movie is more or less the predictable, inspirational, based on true events sports movie. One of the major drawbacks is that it never really explains how rugby is played. I understand most of the concepts, but a good deal of the rugby scenes had a tendency to confuse me. All I needed was a good five minute explanation of the sport, but the movie never gave it to me. This definitely detracted from the movie viewing experience in my opinion. In other news, Morgan Freeman looks eerily similar to Nelson Mandela. The beginning of the movie contained historical footage from the Apartheid era, and it was incredibly hard to tell whether it contained Freeman or Mandela. The movie did a pretty bang up job of portraying the fears that surrounded the transition into the Mandela presidency and the South Africa of the future.

Overall, I'd say the movie is generic, but well-made. I definitely want to learn about rugby now. 7.25 out of 10.

Track 1: Intro

So this is my introduction to this blog. Here goes. My name is Nick Demorest. I'm a student at Georgia Tech and majoring in Aerospace Engineering. Now a fact about me that I want to make clear from the beginning: I'm a huge fan of hip-hop/rap. Huge as in this is what I exclusively listen to. I'm not going to get into all of my favorite artists now, because you should hopefully be able to figure this out over time. A friend of mine gave me the nickname "DemoTape" because of this interest in rap and my last name. I also enjoy video games, reading, surfing the internet, and all the other nerdy stuff that you can think of (mostly). I don't want to keep rambling and rambling to open the blog up, so I'll make it simple and sweet. I'm going to talk about whatever I want to on this blog. Hopefully, you'll enjoy. So welcome and hope you stick around.