Reasonable Doubt

Joining Twitter is like joining a triad in HK movies. Who you follow matters. A lot.

I follow a bunch of geeks who like to share links. Of course there's Bill Simmons, former LA times writer JA Adande, AZ Central journalist/film review **Bill Goodykoontz (I became a fan after I read his Basterds review. Now THIS is how you write a movie review. Just a perfect combo of plot summary, analysis, KNOWLEDGE--spotting Bowie in the film--and the right tone) and others.

I also follow local media people, like Kristie Lu of CNN Asia and Napoleon Biggs, somewhat of an online-media expert in this city. Then I follow Media-ite, another site focused on online media.

I follow Ah-nold so I can keep up to date with the state budget. No actually I follow him for comedy's sake.

Between these cats, I have a constant flow of the latest fun reads, informative news, media/technology updates, and pop culture buzz.

As impossible as it sounds, my man-love for Bill Simmons jumped 7 levels after Twitter because not only does he link sports stuff, but movies, music, and informative journalism bits (example: the that whole Washington Post vs online blogger alleged plagiarism thing a couple of weeks go). Too bad my love is unrequited. Bill Simmons has his own one-way crush on Kevin Durant, who I'll be talking to in a few days. If I could get Durant to love me, then we'll have a three-way triangle bromance going. Now that's some TVB soap opera shit right there.** my awesome photoshop skills. maybe i should change my occupation on this blog to graphic designer **Alright, seriously though. I wish Hong Kong wasn't so behind on twitter (although we're already ahead of the rest of Asia by far in Tweet-usage), this is a great platform to communicate. For example: movie distributors in Hong Kong all complain about one thing--keeping a huge contact list of media people and their constant turnovers and jumping around (talking about Chinese media here). I, on the other hand, am getting annoyed of 17 emails about one movie just because they changed two sentences in the production notes.

If only Twitter was more a regular thing here. Distributors can announce screenings, updated release dates, and whatever via Tweets. Instead of attaching huge pictures that freezes my crappy computer, they can provide the short urls to their own FTP. That way us media people only download images we want (say for example: screenshot of Amy Adams in underwear from Sunshine Cleaning) and skip the images we don't give a shit about (One of 17 million car crashes/explosions in Transformers 2). They can tweak the tweets (pun intended) to allow only media people to have access. And us media can give instant feedback, meaning i would have pissed off Edko more because I would have been bashing Aaron Kwok's Muderer as the movie is happening during the screening.

Anyway, a** **few months ago I discovered iGoogle, basically a customized google page for you to group all your favorite news outlets into one page. I thought it was pretty rad and I still like it, but Twitter tops it--because it's a real time flow and you can filter and cater the newsflow to your liking.

BTW, the SLATESTis great idea. Almost as great as heated toilet seats in Japan. Everytime I've been in Japan it's been during the summer, it is my GOAL to go to Japan in the winter just so I can experience the joy of a warm toilet seat. What, don't act like you haven't dread taking a dump at 3am during them chilly December nights.**