The novelist created the HBO series Bored to Death, starring Jonathan Schwartzman, but had nowhere to watch it the Sunday before last because he didn't own a TV. Insert your own "precious Brooklyn author eschews television" joke here if you like, but Ames insisted on Twitter he's "just very bad at shopping" and, in any case, had frantic fun watching his own show on other people's televisions for two weeks. Or at least that's how things seemed from his tweets.

And then HBO, where because they got tired, worried or charmed by Ames' Twitter begging, finally just bought him a set. Which, frankly is almost too perfect; we wouldn't put it past the network to set up the whole escapade as a publicity stunt targeted at the show's hipster target audience.

It's some comfort, then, that Ames has used Twitter as a cashless flea market before, offering free foreign editions of his books at a Carroll Gardens bar. That experiment didn't seem to go as well: One of us happened to drop by that night and Ames was there, but not one had yet come looking for his very pretty books. Apparently there are some giveaways even Twitter can't facilitate. Sorry, book lovers.

(Pic by mtkr on Flickr)

Which, granted, has a long tradition on YouTube (even Williams has admitted to gaming his view counts in his early days on the site). How might it hurt the popular video distribution platform? But once again, it's not the kind of thing advertisers like to hear — especially while YouTube's parent company, Google, has CEO Eric Schmidt telling anyone who will listen how awesomely transparent online advertising is.

If YouTube doesn't act to stop a content partner from gaming the viewership numbers, it will have a hard time convincing advertisers to buy inventory when those advertisers feel some of that inventory is fraudulent. Especially when those advertisers can create distribute their own ads using YouTube for free and get reliable data for themselves by simply not manipulating audience metrics.

SXEPhil, "Doda Elektroda has some huge......": 4,871,621 views

Jessica Rose as Lonelygirl15, "My First Kiss": 2,645,339 views

KevJumba, "Ask KevJumba": 3,868,597

Kevin Nalts, "Farting in Public": 5,565,515

Michael Buckley, "Britney Spears & Paris Hilton new tape w/ OSAMA?!": 4,514,905

Charles Trippy, "Boobs Are Awesome!": 1,034,687

Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams, "The Mean Kitty Song": 12,413,649

Scarcity. Viewers can access NBC for free from their TVs, NBC.com, Hulu.com, and, oddly enough, from their iPhones. Other than an ongoing trial in Wisconsin, HBO shows aren't available on the Web and viewers even have to pay to see them on their televisions. And isn't the difference between NBC's Crime Scene and HBO's The Wire worth paying extra for?

The Internet just imploded: HBO, television's supposed savior, has paid "six figures" for the rights to a Second Life "documentary" titled "My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alva." For the uninitiated, machinima, short films recorded entirely within the game world, is a rather popular genre among the videogaming set and usually parodies of the originating property.

The most famous machinima series is the five-season long Red Vs Blue, which is based on, and in, Bungie's Halo 2. Apparently HBO hopes to cash in on the virtual world/machinima hype with My Second Life. The short segments star Molotov Alva, a dude who disappears from his first life and winds up recording video diaries in his second one in an attempt to figure out how he wound up there. Sounds like most Second Life users I know. I'm always wondering what happened to their actual first lives, too.