faboo mama

Image via CrunchBase

Last summer when I was first introduced to Hulu, I thought it was a nice service. There were a few movies on there that my kids enjoyed, some clips of TV shows I had once found amusing, but for my taste it was definitely lacking.

I’ve been a Netflix customer since 2001 (You can add me as a friend here). Naturally, the service is more appealing to me; the DVDs come and they go back when I feel like it. But Netflix changed the game when they offered up Watch Instantly. Suddenly, we were hooking up our laptop to the TV so we could watch the available movies & TV shows.  Last fall, when Microsoft enabled Netflix on our Xbox 360, we saw no reason to keep our bloated cable package.  We still have our basic cable +HD tier, but we’ve scaled back our other packages losing HBO, Starz, IFC and Encore; the movie channels we’d watch on those rare times we turned on the TV to zone out. But since the only show we actively watch on TV is LOST, anything else flies under the radar. (Sidenote, we never actually sit down to watch LOST when it’s on, instead we watch it on the DVR about 30 minutes to an hour after air time. Even if we didn’t do that, we could still watch LOST on ABC.com the next day.)

These past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of checking out Hulu. If you’re subscribed to me on FriendFeed or have clicked the FriendFeed tab above, you’ve seen the recent Hulu clips I’ve posted. (You can also subscribe to me on Hulu if you’re in the US and have an account.) Yes, the site is still a headache to navigate, but if you take the time to go through the genres available, you’ll find a lot of gems.  One feature I’m in love with on Hulu is the embed feature. On Friday, I took the movie Jesus Christ Superstar, narrowed down to the song I wanted and embedded that clip into my Tumbler blog.

I used to rely heavily on YouTube to show my kids clips of old TV shows I used to watch. On YouTube, the quality of these old show clips are usually quite horrible.  Last night, I pulled up several Sesame Street clips that I’ve watched on YouTube and was amazed at the high-quality of the clips.  Even comparing movies available on Hulu versus movies available on Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu wins out with the better quality video watching on the same computer. Piping Netflix through the Xbox 360 as a Time Warner Cable customer leaves a lot to be desired. The video quality is on par with watching an old VHS cassette on a VCR taking its last breath.

With Netflix you’re paying monthly, naturally that means no ads.  On Hulu, short ads (30 seconds) are interspersed throughout the episodes or you have an option of watching all the ads at once and then have uninterrupted play.  You can also vote on the ads, which makes viewing them a little more tolerable. The ads you rate down, don’t get shown any more. The ads are so non-invasive that I’ve never even bothered to count how many times you get interrupted during a show. Unlike say, watching ABC.com, where the ads are way too long, and you have that 15 second - 30 second buffer at the end of each 1 minute bank of ads. I can not speak to YouTube’s ad policy on their Shows page, as I haven’t witnessed any ads during the short test periods.

YouTube recently announced its Shows page. The genre breakdowns mirror Hulu’s and most of the content available on YouTube is also available on Hulu.  Running on my netbook, where a Hulu show can take about 13 seconds to load, YouTube shows take about 2 minutes. The only appealing thing YouTube has that Hulu doesn’t is a Foreign movie section, with automatic subtitles. That means, for me several full-length Bollywood classics. This works for me because I often rent them from the local Indian markets and the quality of the DVDs are often bad.  Some of the same Bollywood movies are available via Netflix Watch Instantly, but then we’re back to the quality, and yes YouTube offers better quality than Netflix in this case too.

Between Netflix, YouTube and Hulu, I’m hard pressed to find a valid reason to keep my cable. It seems the only reason I have it, is so that the kids can watch their shows and my husband can watch the HD channels in the wee hours of the morning. Sure, there are bonuses of cable, such as the ability to let the kids watch OnDemand in our bedroom, streaming music from MusicChoice, even though we use Last.fm or Pandora more often than we play our physical albums. Right now, having cable is the only thing keeping our internet bill low, but that’s becoming more and more less valid as a reason. After all, why pay for something we’re not using?

It’s official, this campaign has a lot more funny than the last one.

I have no words as I’m still laughing.

Because this is not totally disgusting:

I had to barf at #8. Are they really teaching their daughters shit like that?  I was going to post a comment, but the person just seems so proud of their little talking dolls.

I know I’ve taken pictures of my daughter with her Obama sign and her buttons, but I don’t let her wear that stuff when we go out.  I didn’t force her to like Obama.  She was a fan of his last fall, I didn’t even support him until January.  I wouldn’t give her skit to memorize and fucking post it on the Internet.  That’s some seriously twisted stuff you know?

Man…folks is crazy.

And I bet that those people do not have the backbone to stand in front of a video camera themselves and say that bullshit.  That’s a shame.  No integrity at all.

Not fair. And totally uncool. My right inner ear has been itching for sometime and I’ve definitely been having yellow sneezes*, but after almost a week of this and nothing, I thought that I had avoided Ilia’s cold. Well, last night, after dropping Ilia off for her ballet class I realized that I was really getting seriously sick.

I went to bed at 9:30pm thinking I should rest a bit. I was out in 2 minutes. Baby boy woke up screaming his damn fool head off (let me just say, I’m really sick and tired of him not sleeping through the night and these nightly tantrums are really, really, really old) and was up for almost an hour just generally being grumpy. Usually Adrian takes care of the kids in the middle of the night since he’s already up, but last night (this morning!) was my lucky night to wake up. So, I got to spend an hour chasing a baby around the house to change his diaper, cleaning up milk he spilled on the floor and watching him be destructive…until I dumped his ass back in bed.

I did wind up getting back to sleep, but it’s 2pm and I’m still in my jammies. All I want to do is crawl back into bed, but every time I lay down, I start thinking of all the things I have to do. So here I am, not doing those things. Instead I blog.

*yellow sneezes are like regular sneezes it just that if they were real, they’d be yellow.

Those stone-aged, zany, torture loving Taliban GOP candidates have decided to come out of hiding and actually do the CNN/YouTube debate. You’ll remember that after the Democrats did their CNN/YouTube debate, the Taliban GOP candidates all quickly decided that having regular people ask them questions was more than they should have to deal with and all of a sudden “scheduling conflicts” arose.

If you read CNNs website, you’d be under the impression that Serious People have been doing Serious Research in filtering what questions will be shown. If you watched the Democratic debate, you’ll see that the Serious People were more interested in showing clips from people who seem to get their news from Faux, repeating old lies and distortions. Which makes this statement all the more interesting:

“This debate is to let Republican voters pick from among their eight candidates,” said David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief and senior vice president for CNN. “We are trying to focus mostly on questions where there are differences among these candidates.”

I seem to recall more than a few Republicans asking questions of the Democrats (click here for a link to all shown questions) and even looking at the submittals, I wonder how they determine how the people are registered. Very few of them claim a side, they generally go straight to their question. One can only assume from this that one of the negotiating points for the GOP candidates to actually show up, is if they get only Taliban GOP-friendly questions.

This should make for an interesting evening regardless. I know that each Taliban GOP candidate is nutso in his own special way, some of them crazy in 5 different ways, but each debate allows you to learn just how bass-ackward these dudes are. Hey, maybe tonight we’ll learn that none of those white males on stage think that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, or people of color should be given an education.