Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Borges and Sharknado

I really like this little post on “Borges and the Sharknado Problem.” The gist:

We can apply the Borgesian insight [why write a book when a short story is equally good for getting your point across] to the problem of Sharknado. Why make a two-hour movie called Sharknado when all you need is the idea of a movie called Sharknado? And perhaps, a two-minute trailer? And given that such a movie is not needed to convey the full brilliance of Sharknado – and it is, indeed, brilliant – why spend two hours watching it when it is, wastefully, made?

On Twitter my friend Ryan Catbird responded by pointing out that that’s what makes the Modern Seinfeld Twitter account so magical: They give you the plot in 140 characters and you can easily imagine the episode (and that’s really all you need).

July 30, 2013 // This post is about: , , , ,

How Well Did Sharknado Actually Do?

In case you were on Twitter a few nights ago, there was a show on SyFy called Sharknado. It was, as you might expect, about sharks getting caught in a tornado. If you judged it’s popularity by Twitter alone you would have thought the whole world was watching. That, however, turns out not to be the case:

But Sharknado may have broken the mold; the movie blew up on Twitter last night, giving the impression that everyone with a TV was watching it. “Omg omg OMG‪ #sharknado,” Mia Farrow tweeted last night, while Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza joked that he was writing an article about how Sharknado would affect the 2016 elections. But were all these people actually watching? According to the Los Angeles TimesSharknado was watched by only 1 million people, which makes it a bust, even by Syfy standards. Most Syfy originals have an average viewership of 1.5 million people, with some getting twice that.

[Via Washington Post]

July 14, 2013 // This post is about: , , , , ,