Month: July 2008

Seek the Six

I knew any exhibit as obtuse as the one I saw at Comic-Con this weekend had to be about The Prisoner! I visited the address on the card I was handed: 70.87.154.219. After staring at an unhelpful splash screen for an awkwardly long time, eventually the site loaded: six screens of 6 x 6 images apiece. All I had to do to unlock their hidden meaning was to click on images with six of something in them. I’m starting to detect a theme here…

Anyway, here are some of the images I found which worked for me.

  • six red locks on teal wooden door
  • 6 sign on green brick wall
  • black stadium seats among red seats
  • roulette wheel on 6
  • six-fingered hand
  • rotary phone face all 6’s
  • six stacked stones against blue sky
  • digital stock chart
  • six diamonds
  • Q-bert blocks

Pictures with six things in them, easy enough. This list can also be described as “things they already know at kotaku, io9 or toplessrobot”, but I thought I’d list it here anyway. After you solve this little puzzle, it takes you to a place to enter your email address, then dumps you out on an already available blog following the remake of The Prisoner. The number they gave me is 590875… but I refuse to answer to it.

And thus my viral marketing role is fulfilled. Enjoy!

Are the corporations of WALL-E really all bad?

Cracked recently ran a scathing litany of 5 Terrible Life Lessons Hollywood Loves to Teach You. It is just painful to read because I can make no solid argument against what Cracked is saying; in particular what they have to say about the irony of casting corporations as villains:

Each and every one of these films are made by a corporation every bit as huge and unfeeling as the ones being portrayed in the movies (and the Walt Disney corporation could crush all of them like a grape). There’s almost something condescending about the way enormous companies are willing to cast themselves as the villains, knowing we’ll give them more of our money to watch it.

Corporations: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.Speaking of Disney, in the movie WALL-E the earth has been ruined by the excesses of humanity, fueled by a greedy, uncaring, ubiquitous corporation with the cute name of Buy ‘N Large. But here is the thing I don’t get: if Buy ‘N Large is the corporation that made everything, then they’re the same ones that created WALL-E, the robot who saved humanity, and they also made EVA, a robot tasked with finding plant life, a sign welcoming people back to earth — www.buynlarge.com even says they make robots. So wouldn’t this mean the big, bad corporation that caused this mess is also the one with a plan to solve it? Surely someone within Buy ‘N Large was looking out for people after all.

Sadly, I don’t think this was the message the movie intended.