Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Dark Shadows

Storyline

In the year 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son Barnabas, set sail from Liverpool, England to start a new life in America. But even an ocean was not enough to escape the mysterious curse that has plagued their family. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet-or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy...until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire, and then burying him alive. Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better.

Cast                   
Cast overview, first billed only:

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Clarney





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Trailer
























source: www.imdb.com/




































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Twitter



 Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". Unregistered users can read the tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices.


Creation

Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".

    "...we came across the word 'twitter', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey

The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.


Reaction

The tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it."

Reaction at the conference was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSWi. Social software researcher danah boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the conference. Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"

The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 "tweetups", events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants' social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA.

In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp.'s Fox Audience Network.
 
On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo.


 source: http://en.wikipedia.org/



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Thursday, April 5, 2012

My Neighbor Totoro

In 1958, the Kusakabe family reunites when a university professor and his two daughters, Satsuki and Mei (approximately ten and four years old, respectively) move into an old house in rural Japan to be closer to the hospital where their mother is recovering from an unnamed, long-term illness. The daughters find that the house is inhabited by tiny animated dust creatures called susuwatari— small house spirits seen when moving from light to dark places. When the girls become comfortable in their new house and laugh with their father, the soot spirits (identified as "black soots" in early subtitles and "soot sprites" in the later English dubbed version) leave the house to drift away on the wind.
While she is playing outside one day, Mei sees two white, rabbit-like ears in the grass. She follows the ears under the house where she discovers two small magical creatures (chibi or "dwarf" totoro and chu or "medium" totoro), who lead her through a briar patch and into the hollow of a large camphor tree. She meets and befriends a larger version of the same kind of spirit (ō or "large" totoro), which identifies itself by a series of roars that she interprets as "Totoro" (in the original Japanese dub, this stems from Mei's mispronunciation of the word for "troll"). Her father later tells her that this is the "keeper of the forest".
One rainy night, the girls are waiting for their father's bus and grow worried when he does not arrive on the bus they expect him on. As they wait, Mei eventually falls asleep on Satsuki's back and Totoro appears beside them, allowing Satsuki to see him for the first time. He only has a leaf on his head for protection against the rain, so Satsuki offers him the umbrella she had taken along for her father. Totoro is delighted at both the shelter and the sounds made upon it by falling raindrops. In return, he gives her a bundle of nuts and seeds. A bus-shaped giant cat halts at the stop, and Totoro boards it, taking the umbrella. Shortly after, their father’s bus arrives.
The girls plant the seeds. A few days later, they awaken at midnight to find Totoro and his two miniature colleagues engaged in a ceremonial dance around the planted nuts and seeds. The girls join in, whereupon the seeds sprout, and then grow and combine into an enormous tree. Totoro takes his colleagues and the girls for a ride on a magical flying top. In the morning, the tree is gone, but the seeds have indeed sprouted.
The girls find out that a planned visit by their mother has to be postponed because of a setback in her treatment. Satsuki takes this very hard, having reached the age where she fully understands the concept of death. Frustrated and frightened, she yells at Mei, then stomps away. Mei, believing that her mother can be cured by healthy food, sets off on foot to the hospital with an ear of corn.
Mei's disappearance prompts Satsuki and the neighbors to search for her. Eventually, Satsuki returns in desperation to the camphor tree and pleads for Totoro's help. Delighted to be of assistance, he summons the Catbus, which carries her to where the confused Mei sits. Having rescued her, the Catbus then whisks her and Satsuki over the countryside to see their mother in the hospital. The girls perch in a tree outside of the hospital, overhearing a conversation between their parents and discovering that she has been kept in hospital by a minor cold and is otherwise doing well. They secretly leave the ear of corn on the windowsill, where it is discovered by the parents, and return home on the Catbus. When the Catbus departs, it fades away from the girls' sight.
The closing credits show Mei and Satsuki's mother returning home and feature scenes of Satsuki and Mei playing with other children, with Totoro and his friends as unseen observers.
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