Had enough of Hollywood? Sick of driving to an out-of-town cinema, your local one having been destroyed, with the result that you are forbidden alcohol, but forced to consider instead a menu of sugar and corn oil?
The cinema lobby, with its sticky carpet, is a bazaar. Queue with potty-mouthed teenagers and lobotomised adults to chuck an hour's pay at the wage-slave behind the glass. Here you must pronounce the name of the product you intend to expose yourself to. You will have made this decision several days before, based on the messages you received from the corporate marketing piped via the popular media into your home. You already suspect that this offering will not deliver the delirium you were promised, but you hope you will be able to tell your friends that it was pretty good. So you pay for your ticket, and in you go.
You are then invited to eat, drink, and gamble. There is real evil here, because the management has robbed these activities of their meaning. They hope you will hand over your money, and ignore, rather than enjoy, the effect on your belly and your wallet. The cinema is about film, but the business model of the house relies on your buying cola, popcorn, and chocolate before you file into the auditorium.
The auditorium has been supernaturally chilled and aurally overamplified, and you must endure two and a half hours of this environment before you are allowed to leave, blinking, and wondering what happened to your individuality and personal ambition. Gone, is the answer, replaced by three litres of normalised cultural experience.
Do yourself a favour. Don't ever go to the cinema again.
An American company called Netflix, which rents out DVDs, has appealed to the global community of software developers to help it improve the way it models consumer behaviour. It has made available a data set to train on, and invites you to predict the number of stars a customer will give to a film he's just rented.
I'd like to have a real crack at that, especially given the $1,000,000 prize, but I'm too busy doing other things to do it justice. I did take a quick look, though, and you might find some of these pages useful. Let me know if you do.