The usual spin through the depths of ye olde internets:
- The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? – (Wikipedia has a much shorter summary.) Named after the fictional species from Doctor Who, the reality of this situation is much more mundane and boring than you might think. It turns out that not much would actually survive very long (certain plastics or nuclear waste, for example). Ironically, if this theoretical civilization made it to the Moon or Mars and left something there, it’d be much more likely to be intact…
- Jason lives? The court battle that’s killing ‘Friday the 13th’ – Since another Friday the 13th has passed, it’s time to check in on the legal battles that have kept Jason from the screen since 2009. It turns out that copyright law is complicated and while the original screenwriter technically has rights to the characters and sequels, he doesn’t have rights to the title Friday the 13th or to international distribution. Arguably, he doesn’t even have rights to do a movie with an adult Jason. Ultimately, this thing won’t end until Victor Miller and Sean Cunningham come to some sort of agreement.
- The Thing That Makes It Work Means It Doesn’t – Ryan Broderick on the paradox at the heart of social media:
…platforms are still stuck in a perpetual state of being terrible and, thus, good. Twitter and Tumblr are both fantastic examples of this bizarre tension, with user bases that are valuable in vastly different ways, but drawn to the apps because of features that make them unmonetizeable. Tumblr is essentially the greatest archive of possible copyright infringement ever created, which has led to an inscrutable and dense remix culture that conversely also drives a lot of what’s cool online. Meanwhile, Twitter is a poorly-incentivized battle royal for rich people, artists, and furries that only works because the barrier of entry for logging on and threatening to kill a columnist you don’t like is low enough that you can do it while still enraged from something you read while on the toilet.
- Spider-Man Rated-R – Incredible. There’s a behind the scenes video that goes on forever explaining how they did it, but the result is very funny/gross video of Spider-Man dying in ridiculously gory ways.
- “Mindhunter” S3 Would’ve ‘Gone Hollywood’ – Dammit, Netflix. Why can’t you let us have good things? Maybe you’d retain subscriptions if you didn’t keep canceling stuff people want to watch.
- NFT collector gets $280 top bid for the Jack Dorsey tweet NFT he bought for $2.9 million last year – NFTs are going great.
That’s all for now!