short stories, Uncategorized, Verse

It’s on, Nahtflix

 

Ron Spector has spent many sleepless nights in his living room. They amount to countless hours of scouring the Internet, streaming supergiant Nahtflix.com’s archives, to accomplish a feat that no one, especially Nahtflix, saw coming. His record for adding Nahtflix streaming movies to his personal queue, or “Un List,” in one sitting is 173. Yet, what’s more impressive about Spector’s acumen at the point-select interface is the frequency in which he enacts such marathon selection sessions.

“Some weeks I’ll sleep a total of seven hours,” the 33-year-old software engineer said. “I’ll run straight for 36 hours at a time. I’ll take quick power naps, lasting 5-10-15 minutes. Then I’ll launch a series of selection sessions. I can usually break 100 in under a minute. Up around 150, I usually run into dead ends, where I can’t select any new ‘net flicks. I’ll take a deep breath, jump out of the window (system operationally speaking) and select another movie from the main browsing section. I’ve logged up around 40 individual selection sessions in an hour—all snatching at least 50 movies apiece.”

His goal is to acquire every movie Nahtflix has to offer online, in his personal queue. He’s also tracking the patterns by which new sets of movies result from each preceding single selection.

“I want to study the living and dying of movie contracts on this popular entertainment website,” he said. “As you see new releases sprouting up, I also want to keep track of the movies that fall off the map. I think, from the observation of this living, breathing, cybernetic organism, we can determine an algorithm that defines a universal explanation for the natural growth and decay of life.”

Nahtflix officials, however, are not backing Spector’s online campaign at discovery. Chairman Ricardo del Flixo issued a statement Tuesday calling for imposed limits to cap high-volume members’ personal queues.

“Supersaturated ‘Un List(s)’ would lead to unlawful transparency of our assets,” del Flixo wrote in his 370-page motion, that also included an official request for a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search and seizure of Spector’s hard drives and any cloud services that he’s had access to since the inception of Nahtflix, Inc. back in 2008.

The real question is will Spector achieve his goal before Nahtflix, Inc. can legally stop him? The mega-website must wait for Federal Courts to pore over written affidavits of online, business and financial experts to determine whether Spector should cease and desist all interaction of any kind with Nahtflix.com. If they find cause for alarm, both parties could testify in front of the Senate.

This, of course, raises more questions, like “Why doesn’t Nahtflix just cancel Spector’s account?” or “Or why don’t they set a cap on his queue alone?”

Those answers are simple: the company can’t. This case has already reached a national stage and, at this point, the publicity alone would send Nahtflix stocks plummeting, within hours of it hitting news sites.

Or so says Fox News Financial Analyst Frank Steamhed.

“Discrimination like this, by Nahtflix, on one of its members would be like the meteor that smashed into Earth and killed all the dinosaurs,” said Steamhed, a former hedge fund manager turned TV shock jock of stock talk. “No, they need to handle this in the courts and seek legality of their claims. The fact is, from a practical standpoint, no sanctions have been preset by the FCC to regulate such abnormal activity of a single user to his respective online service. At the very least, Ron Spector is testing Nahtflix’s ability to provide its service, whether he means to or not.”

Still, Spector maintains that he’s merely acquiring data for his human experiment.

However the empiric validity of Spector’s cause, the clock winds down to next Monday, when it will be wise yet imperfect judges who decide the fate of his unexplored science.

Courts, Wednesday, said they’d be willing to allow a temporary hold on Spector’s Nahtflix account pending trial. Spector, thus, has three days to complete his master ‘Un List’ before an indefinite halt on his account occurs.

“I estimate that I’ve logged only 5-10 percent of Nahtflix’s total offerings. And I’ve been at this for nearly six months, before the company caught wind of the abnormal activity by one user and then waged this legal battle against him.”

So Spector has taken to the Internet community and they have responded in electronic droves.

“I’ve developed a map that outlines the entire structure of the Nahtflix library,” Spector, a former hacker said. “I’ve shared it online and we’ve been able to assign different sections to willing extractors. This has certainly expedited the process.”

Regardless, courts could rule that all online behavior of this kind cease and desist for the entire Nahtflix nation of online users. With pedigree data of a person so interwined with everyday Internet usage nowadays, the FBI would have no trouble isolating those who would ignore this decree from the high court.

Penalties have been reported to include up to $10,000 in fines and one year in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

Ever vigilant over the long dark weekend, Spector and his band of loyal surfers point-select-search through the night. Spector has published a website for those who wish to join, in the 11th hour of this race between big business and discovery.

Visit www.findalltheflix.net for more information.

Standard
Top 10 Lists

Top 10 Movies Narrated by Main Characters

  1. “Election”
  2. Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”
  3. “Fight Club”
  4. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”
  5. “The Royal Tenenbaums”
  6. “The Shawshank Redemption”
  7. “GoodFellas”
  8. “Zombieland”
  9. “The Princess Bride”
  10. “Juno”
DOWNLOAD "get weird." SCREENPLAY

 

“Election” is narrated by all four of its main characters throughout the story. Maybe the director took a page from William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.”

The Grinch shares the same voice as the narrator in this animated, Dr. Seuss holiday classic. This leads me to believe that maybe the Grinch himself is narrating his own rhyming epic. And then I wonder if we can even believe him. Maybe the greatest trick the Grinch ever pulled was convincing the world how he saved Christmas.

The main character in “Fight Club” is actually named “the narrator.” So this one seemed like a no-brainer. I am Jack’s propensity to state the obvious.

John Hughes, the writer/director of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” took a fairly unique approach to progressing the plot of his 1986 masterpiece. Inserted between the lines and the scene descriptions, Hughes broke the fourth wall with full passages where Ferris addressed the audience. He was like the host of his own holiday.

Hughes was supposed to write a teleplay for some TV show, one night. Instead, he stayed up writing a script that would forever “Save Ferris” in the hearts and minds of the eternal American zeitgeist. The original screenplay for “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is largely what made it to the silver screen. Although, if you do read it, there’s a little more about the Charlie Sheen character, the druggie whom Bueller’s sister Jeanie encounters in the police station toward the end.

One of Ferris’ soliloquies mentions this kid, Garth Volbeck. He was a “serious outsider.” Ferris used to sleep over Garth’s house as a child. Baby Bueller could hear little Garth crying himself to sleep. Eventually, Garth succumbs to the fate of his delinquent older brother and was banned from the Bueller Household. But Ferris, the people person and ever the optimist, knew Garth Volbeck was still a good kid.

Ferris mentions Volbeck fairly early in the story, but we don’t see him until much later, giving Jean some much needed worldly advice, on the waiting room couch inside Shermer Police Headquarters. Of course, this paradigm shift in Jeanie is what ultimately saves Ferris, from evil Ed Rooney and losing the trust of his loving parents. I’m not sure why they didn’t leave Volbeck’s backstory in the final cut… “Drugs?”

“The Royal Tenenbaums” is narrated by Alec Baldwin. He doesn’t actually appear as a character in the story. So this one’s sort of an exception to this particular Top 10 list. Although Alec Baldwin is, himself, a character. He’s also a comedian who likes to get coffee. And I’m sure if I told the man himself that he won a spot on this list, despite never appearing on screen nor having any impact on the plot of the Wes Anderson joint, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” he’d look me in the eye and say, “Are you surprised?”

“The Shawshank Redemption” is narrated by Red, played by Morgan Freeman. Great narrating voice. Red does a lot of documentaries these days.

As far back as I can remember, “GoodFellas,” is narrated by main character Henry Hill, played by Mr. Ray Liotta.

“Zombieland” interweaves through the lattice of main character Columbus’s infallible list of tips for surviving The Land of Zombies. In the end, the squirrelly protagonist played by the equally awkward child-prodigy Jesse Eisenberg learns the most important lesson of all: some rules are made to be broken. Aside from being the main character of the 2009 cult hit “Zombieland,” Columbus is also our hero, albeit a beta male. Of course, alpha sidekick Woody Harrelson fills the testosterone gap by assuming the tough-talkin’ Tallahassee role, a zombie assassin outfitted with a unique, supernatural talent for taking out the undead.

“The Princess Bride” is a framed story about a grandfather reconnecting with his grandson. I only have two words for this comedic gem: Peter Falk.

Finally, the eponymous lead role’s narration in “Juno” takes up a fraction of the feature film’s runtime, but the movie’s just that good. And there’s enough first-person narration to warrant its spot as No. 10 on this list. Even when Ellen Page isn’t talking directly to the audience, the dialogue with which talented screenwriter Diablo Cody graces each script page is about as good as it gets in terms of an authentic account psychoanalyzing the mind of a teenage girl dealing with issues way beyond her maturity level.

Standard