This week in the Terminator Salvation ARG, Skynet has started talking via video (not just videos from our future anymore) and at the end of a video featuring one of Skynet’s partner companies, a series of numbers was flashed. It was a code, and together the ARG players cracked it.

The message: “Skynet Research initiate phase two judgement day.”

No surprise, then, we get our first viral video from the Skynet labs themselves, featuring a few blank-staring hosts. Creepy.

Marketing gurus, social networking nuts, online bloggers and people tweeting to the ether; Twitter is ever expanding in different directions. Leave it up to the Terminator Salvation team and their already-complex viral/ARG marketing campaign to bring the first summer-tent-pole interactive marketing to the new social networking client.

What we know abut the Terminator Salvation ARG universe thus far is that Skynet is online at SkyNetResearch.com, there’s the ReisistOrBeTerminated.com RPG game and now…

This might be where I get off the Terminator Salvation ARG. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still monitor it, but, let’s talk for a sec…

Now, eHarmony has basically labeled me undatable, because I’m in the 20% of the population that can’t have their personality rated and matched via whatever eHarmony’s system is. So, let’s not pretend that this post, though including eHarmony, is about eHarmony. Because until eHarmony stops blacklisting me, I have nothing good to say about eHarmony.

Nor do I usually have good things to say about Lindasy Lohan, who recently broke up with long term lex-partner Samantha Ronson. The Ronson family is rumored to be persuing a restraining order and the gossip circles of the net are cautiously waiting for Lindsay to break down…again…

…but while we wait, Funny Or Die comes through with it’s best type of humor video: one where a celberity realizes thier public persona and embraces it (remember the McLovin’ Fund?). Props to Lohan for getting her face out there. Now, if she’d get another job instead of another girlfriend, we can maybe talk comeback.

Maybe…

Yay for super-fun movie marketing time. Today, you can use the magic of the consumer-powered internet to advertise one or two of this summer’s bigger blockbusters with your own face!

Or, as the digitized Vulcan tells us at TrekYourself.com: “Knowing that you enjoy sending virtual messages through clever, technologically advanced methods, the Cheez-It cracker people logically thought you’d like try it Star Trek style.”

Upload your photo, choose a Kirk-like head, a Spock like head, a Uhura head or a Romulan head, then it makes a creepy digital model that looks sort of like you, but is totally into saying things like:”I’m the Big Cheese…not!’ on command.

Terminate Yourself is more familiar to anyone that’s used quick masking in photoshop. Use your webcam to take a picture, line up your eyes and mouth with the boxes on screen, then use a slider to determine damage and a pen/eraser tool to add more in certain places.

I’m told by a digital Vulcan that you guys like to do this.

Want to see how the Terminator Salvation viral campaign plans to go ahead? Broadcast through time:

Keep an eye out at the blog ResistOrBeTerminated for more resistance-side communications in the near future. Well, the relatively near future. : ).

Let’s just say that these future communications might also be popping up elsewhere besides that particular blog.

There’s a part of me that will always have great respect for fan films that aren’t horrible. It just takes the part of indie filmmaking I really like (the whole “labor of love” aspect) and amplifies it into something cool to watch. Like, if you spend your time making something like Batman: Dead End that features Batman, The Joker, Predators and Aliens, you’re basically spending all this money to shoot something you feel passionate about, but will never have the rights to make any money off it.

THAT’s what I think really hits me about fan films. At a certain level of indie, producers are just trying to attach the right stars to the right director and get enough funding for small films to build a heart through acting, story and character. Fan films, on the other hand, collect people who make cool Special Effects for fun or work with After Effects in their rooms after work. They’re made for virtually no budget and with no promise of ever going anywhere, yet still they crop up and impress.

This one was created by Christopher Johnson, who plays Freddy in the trailer, but also wrote and directed it. Is Johnson going to get to play Freddy? Probably not, but he did it, it looks awesome and Johnson has a calling card…