MoviePass is dead. Long live MoviePass.
Well, I guess I should say that, technically, MoviePass is on life support. It’s not quite dead yet.
The movie service has now removed its previous utterly amazing offer – one movie a day for $9.99 a month – and now the offer for new subscribers is for four movies a month for $9.99. So far, this highly unwelcome change hasn’t affected those of us – such as myself and Rhino Times Creative Director Anthony Council – who were wise enough to get in on the action earlier, while the getting was good. (In fact, last November, I went ahead and paid up front for a one-year subscription because I was worried about this very type of thing happening.)
If you are now left out of the picture and have to settle for a four measly movies a month for $9.99 dollars, well, it wasn’t because I didn’t beg and plead hard enough for you to get a MoviePass while you could.
Fortunately we can all be relieved that the MoviePass I hold in my hand is still too good to be true, and let’s hope it stays that way.
MoviePass says they may bring back the unlimited offer (I seriously doubt it!) but, in the meantime, this whole incident is just one more indication that you would be wise to take my advice when I give it and not sit around for a long time asking yourself if what I’m suggesting makes sense or not …
The government’s IRS website crashed in a big way on Tuesday night, April 17, in the hours leading up to midnight. Government officials say the website crash was due to a strange and unexplainable spike in traffic to the site that night.
Government officials are trying to discover the cause for the sudden spike in web traffic that brought the site down. Those officials say they are also hoping to find ways in which to predict the times when use of the site will be heavy.
Speaking of income taxes, it scares me a little how amazingly fast the US government runs to the bank with the IRS checks. You know, I sent in my check for income taxes on April 17 and, then, before I even thought the check would have gotten there in the mail, I looked at my Wells Fargo account balance, and, boom, the check had already been deposited and the money already gone.
It makes me wonder if the US government is in more dire financial trouble than they are letting us in on. Frankly, the only other people who cash the checks I give them that fast are the ragged-looking strangers who show up on my doorstep offering to mow the lawn or rake the leaves for money. They also cash the checks with lightening speed. It is only those shabby looking guys and the US government – everybody else takes a few days before they make it down to the bank.
I’m just saying, it makes you wonder …
Who knew that the town of Whitsett, NC – our friendly little neighbor to the east – is so wildly popular on the internet. The town has been holding a photo contest that is apparently one of the most successful contests in the history of the internet or even the world.
I went to the Whitsett website and clicked on link that said “Whitsett Demographics,” and, across the top of that page it said, “We are giving away $1,200 in prizes – enter simply by sending us your own city pictures!” The promotion adds, “If you took a good photo of Whitsett that you’d like to display on this site, you can upload it to our server here. We get around 20,000,000 million visitors/month, so it will get a wide exposure. We prefer pictures of the city itself, without people’s faces in them.”
Wow, wait a minute: Pictures of Whitsett posted on the site get 20,000,000 million views a month. By my calculations, 20,000,000 million is 20 trillion; that’s 20 trillion views every month. To give you an idea how many that is, the most watched video in the history of YouTube (an internationally popular Puerto Rican Music video by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee) currently only has 5.08 billion views in all.
Listen, Whitsett is a great town but I have no idea in the world why a photo contest for that town with prize money of $1,200 dollars gets 20 trillion hits a month. Though I should point out that it doesn’t say whether those are unique hits or not, so it may be that, instead of it being an amazingly popular site, there is just a core group of people who really, really enjoy photos of Whitsett.
In case you missed it or somehow weren’t paying attention, you should watch the video of the cop arresting the killer in Toronto who ran down all those people with his van. I can’t stop watching it because I have never seen anything like it and I’m astounded at how that arrest went down. Here’s was the situation …
(1) The guy has just murdered tons of people with his van.
(2) The man announces twice that he has a gun in his pocket.
(3) He whips out a metallic gun-sized object and aims it at the officer. (It turned out to be his cell phone, by the way.)
(4) Three times he reaches rapidly into the waistband area behind his back and, in sudden jerking motions, acts as if he’s drawing a weapon and firing it at the officer.
(5) He is literally pleading with the officer to kill him. “Kill me! Kill me!” he shouts the whole time.
If that guy had been in LA instead of Toronto, he would have been shot about 3,400 times.
First, when it came to the Trump administration, there were all these revelations about secret meetings with the Russians and, recently, the Trump news got even worse: It turns out that incontrovertible photographic evidence has surfaced proving that a Trump administration official was meeting secretly with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Do the scandals never end?
I am not only a proud MoviePass holder; I am also, as of last week, a Movie pass stockowner.
The guy who is running the company started Netflix and Red Box, so I figure he’s not completely insane and must have some plan, though I have no idea what it is. The stock (HMNY) was at about 40 bucks a share not long ago and it recently hit $2 a share so I couldn’t stand to not buy it at that price just for fun and I pulled the trigger on it.
Even at that price, I know it was a stupid thing to do (Do as I say, not as I do), but I simply could not help myself.
On the Cultcast podcast I listen to each week, they talk about MoviePass a lot and – before MoviePass went from an unlimited model – the guy on Cultcast had a pretty good summation of how crazy the MoviePass people are:
“They keep touting how popular their app is getting, and I’m like – of course! You’re giving away free movies! I mean, if a grocery story said all groceries are going to cost you $10 month – you just pay us $10 a month and you can come in and get groceries anytime you want – of course it’s going to be popular. That’s an insane deal. I mean, it’s not a business model; you’re just giving away money.”
I don’t care whether you hate Trump with a passion or love him with a passion, you have to admit that his crazy nuclear threats to North Korea and his “strategy” of verbally abusing a ridiculing that country’s leader Kim Jong Un – Little Rocket Man, LOL – is working in big way.
Jung Un is clearly stunned. There’s not question that he’s looking at Trump and going, “Good Lord – this guy is actually crazier than I am!”
Speaking of Trump, I want to know where I can find an attorney like his. If you don’t know, Trump’s attorney took out a bank loan to pay $130,000 to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and didn’t even tell the president he was doing that for him.
With my attorney, if I run into him at the Harris Teeter and say hi, he sends me a bill.
But Trump’s attorney takes out a bank loan to pay off a porn star who’s going public with some story, and doesn’t even mention it.
Now that’s quality legal service. I guess I could imagine a friend of mine who happened to be an attorney paying off a porn star to keep me from being subjected to public ridicule, but, I imagine that, if he did, then one night after a few drinks, he’d spill the beans and say, “You know, I never told you this, but a while back I paid 130 grand to shut up some porn star who was threatening to go public with a story about you.”
I would be like, “The drinks are on me tonight.”
