Link Dump

Just the usual link dump of interesting stuff from the depths of ye olde internets:

• TV’s Streaming Bubble Has Burst, a Writers Strike Looms, and “Everybody Is Freaking Out” – A pretty accurate sentiment, as I do think we’re about to see some consolidation in the streaming space (after an absurd push for streaming that was never really supported by reality – though I guess the pandemic threw a major curve into the mix), and we’re definitely seeing a return to theatrical releases, but then all of it could be derailed by the writers’ strike (and, to be clear, I’m on the writers’ side on this one – their asks are eminently reasonable and it feels like studios have already lost more money than they would have if they just paid their writers. I seriously don’t understand Hollywood’s outright hostility to writers.)
• Netflix’s DVD End Is a Warning Sign for Film Lovers – Of course, streaming isn’t going away… and this is a sad milestone, but one I think we could all see coming. For the record, I did have a DVD subscription because they actually had a deeper library than streaming does (though in recent years, it was thinning out).
• Hollywood’s Coming “OS Wars” – This article proposes an interesting idea about the future of streaming: that the real competition will be on home screen aggregators like Roku or Fire. I’m not entirely convinced, but any improvements in aggregation, navigation, curation, and discoverability on streaming can only be a good thing.
• Trafficking the News – This review of Ben Smith’s book “Traffic” signals a potential end for online journalism’s absurd push for traffic for traffic’s sake.

Having now worked in journalism for almost 20 years (he typed, arthritically, bones turning to dust at the mere thought of it) and having lived through various cycles of how journalism pays for and propagates itself, I’ve never been more sure of anything than the idea that chasing traffic for traffic’s sake has been disastrous and that cultivating a base of subscribers is the only way forward. But there are dangers there as well.

• Star Wars by Wes Anderson – I keep seeing AI generated videos and they’re almost always filled with horrifying grotesques, but this one is almost pitch perfect. It turns out that the approach was to use AI to generate still images in a proposed style, then add some minor motion and sound to them, and stitch them together (at least, I think that’s what they did). It turned out pretty great, though it’s also obviously patterned after the SNL parody from a few years ago. Anyway, the Owen Wilson as Darth Vador “Wow” moment is pitch perfect.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie Battles The Pope’s Exorcist At The Box Office In A Troubling Display Of Italian-On-Italian Violence – I know it’s a few weeks old and the article itself is just normal box office droning, but it’s a perfect headline.
• Into Thin AirPods – Have you ever lost an Apple product and wanted to use the Find My app to mete out vigilante justice? A bit anticlimactic, but it’s a fun read.

This is the part where I say I’m aware that everyone—Apple, law enforcement, any friends with good judgment within earshot—strenuously discourages ever, under any circumstances, trying to do vigilante justice with the Find My app. If you so much as mention the possibility, like four people will jump out of the woodwork with stories about someone they knew who was shot or assaulted trying to confront a thief in the act. I’d like to emphasize that I’m firmly on the side of reason, and a steadfast believer that having crime done to me is not an occasion to show off how brave I am.

But! I have watched Veronica Mars so many times.

• Needed: Generic Father Figure for Backyard BBQ – Since it’s grilling season, it’s time to revisit this classic Craigslist ad.
• Raw footage from the recording of Chili’s ‘Baby Back Ribs’ (1998) – The best part is the end, when everyone realizes that they’ve just witnessed a magical creation that will endure for centuries.

That’s all for now, Happy Mother’s Day!

Just the usual collection of links dumped from the depths of ye olde internets:

• It can be annoying to be online – Bijan Stephen responds to a viral article declaring that “We are a generation of adult babies,” which is, of course, based mostly on what people do online (and, more specifically, on social media). Which, as those of us who’ve been on the internets for a while know, is not the same thing as real life.

The thing about this that I really don’t like, other than its childish universalizing, is that it doesn’t actually describe offline behavior. The internet is a place where people post things — and, crucially at this juncture, where people know what it means to post things. In other words: at this point, posting is performance. You do it with an awareness that other people can see what you’re doing; everyone knows that anything posted online can go viral and change the poster’s life. …

A better piece might have asked: why do the algorithms that govern online popularity incentivize people posting infantile sensory content? For my own part I’d guess the answer is some combination of “it’s inoffensive and therefore appealing to many different kinds of people” and “people have very strong reactions to it” — which is a different way of saying that it boosts engagement and therefore increases a site’s all-important growth metrics.

• In The Age Of Streaming, TV Preservation Matters More Than Ever – Streaming continues to take hits on all fronts. It’s so convenient that it’ll never go away or anything, but the promise of streaming continues to disappoint. As usual, the physical media dorks were right.
• Astronomers still scratching their heads over population of ocean-world exoplanets – The notion that earth-like water worlds might be rare is certainly a valid conjecture, but there’s nothing head-scratching about this. As per usual, the details of exoplanet detection are the confounding factor, not the results. Still, the idea that water worlds are rare could represent a great filter would be good news, I guess. If we could ever confirm it (which would be difficult).
• The Stunt Awards – I meant to mention this last week: After decades of fruitless lobbying to the Academy Awards, which still doesn’t have a Best Stunt Oscar, Vulture writers (led by Bilge Ebiri and Brandon Streussnig) decided to just do their own. And it’s good! Folks like Scott Adkins and Albert Pyun garnered awards, which is fantastic (and exactly the sort of thing the Oscars might get some mileage out of if they ever get their act together).
• It’s Evil and Someone is Going to Make It – March is rife with jokey March Madness style brackets for goofy stuff, but I do kinda love this one, which is about fictional companies with evil products. OCP, Cyberdyne Systems, etc… Fun!
• Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience – If streaming isn’t doing so great… well, neither are theaters. I’m lucky in that my local suburban cadre of Regal theaters seem to be pretty well run (in that I don’t get a lot of the issues described in this article), but if theaters can get their act together, maybe they can scrape back some share from the streamers (so far, so good this year, at least).
• Roundball Rock – It’s always funny when you see an old SNL sketch and you suddenly recognize Tim Robinson (who clearly had a hand writing this sketch).
• “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by George Lucas? – Perfect. Also of note: 2001: A TikTok Odyssey…

And that’s all for now…

The usual link dump of interesting stuffs found in the depths of ye olde internets. Hard to believe it’s been almost 3 months since the last one of these, so strap in:

• Report: Holy Shit, There Still 50 Minutes Left In Movie – We take the Onion for granted. There are times of the year when my movie watching is focused on one theme or the other. One is obviously the Six Weeks of Halloween, which is interesting in this context because they tend to be rather short, 90ish minute affairs. But I’m currently still catching up with 2022 movies, including the rush of prestige flicks released at the end of the year… and I rather frequently get to that 90 minute mark and see that there’s still, like, an hour left in the movie and my only thought is “How? How is there so much movie left?”
• seinpeaks – This account is dedicated to setting Seinfeld to Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score, and it’s surprisingly well done.
• Woman found lookalike online — and killed her to fake own death – Alright, fine, I’ll read your stupid article.
• Whole ‘nother Story – February – Tough but fair.
• Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and More React to 2023 Oscar Nominations – Buried in this story is this gem from Todd Field (director of Tár):

What would be Lydia Tár’s favorite movie of the year?

Oh, I think you know the answer to that.

“Tár”?

I think it would be “Tár.”

Do you have a favorite “Tár” meme?

People send me hysterical stuff. People have taken it so far beyond what any of us would have allowed ourselves to imagine. I think Lydia Tár, herself, would appreciate it, being a lover of anagrams and wordplay.

Did you ever expect the character to resonate so deeply?

Are you crazy? Of course not. But she’s very real to me. That’s a testament to Cate Blanchett.

• Cheating Rumors – This happened less than two weeks ago and it was all over the place for like a day, but I doubt anyone remembers anything about Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Joey King anymore, but this video is funny and probably took longer to create than the whole news cycle covering it.
• Fake trivia for Do the Right Thing on the IMDB Trivia Page – Dude made up a ridiculous bit of trivia about how the heatwave in Do the Right Thing was inspired by an early script for Predator 2. It’s still on the IMDB trivia page and has 35 likes.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, for the Top 10 Movies of the year post is coming… soon?

We’ve finally come to the end of the Six Weeks of Halloween, and as I cope with the withdrawal symptoms, I leave you with this dump of interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• The Psychological Weirdness of “Prompt Engineering” – Apparently folks studying AI art prompts have discovered that the AIs have developed their own nonsense language. And I, for one, welcome our new artbot overlords. I’d like to remind them as a trusted blogging personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Scientists who’ve probed the inner workings of artbots have documented some truly odd inner states of these machines. Recently, two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently discovered that DALL-E 2 generates apparently gibberish phrases that, within the model itself, appear to have some sort of consistent meaning. They noticed the model generating the phrase “Apoploe vesrreaitais” — and when they fed that back to DALL-E 2 as a prompt, it drew birds. Similarly, “Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons” gets it DALL-E 2 to draw bugs or pests. “Wa ch zod ahaakes rea” produces pictures of seafood. Why? How did the model generate this weird, internal new language? The scientists have no idea, though it seems like some stray artifact of the adversarial nature of the DALL-E 2’s text encoder.

• A Matter of Rights: A Talk with Lee Tsiantis – Short interview with a lawyer who does rights research for TCM and Warner Home Video. Rights issues are complicated and somewhat infuriating when you realize that, most of the time, studios can’t distribute the films due to nonexistent creators and the difficulty of tracing who owns what after the original creator died decades ago.
• Chloe Grace Moretz on Martin Scorsese – Buried in this interview are a few fun anecdotes about Scorsese that really prompt additional questions: What were those 25-30 movies? And what did they sing for karaoke? 

AVC: What was it like to star in a Martin Scorsese movie when you were so young, especially one as grand and epic as this one?

CGM: It was all-encompassing, and I feel like [Scorsese is] very all-encompassing. He is such a cinephile, and he really imparted that knowledge to me, just in the time that I got to spend with him. One of the first things he did when I showed up to start preproduction is he had a big box dropped off, and it had probably 25, 30 movies in it. And he was like, “Before we start production, you have to watch all of these.” The movies that he gave me were different than movies he gave Asa [Butterfield]. So we had to do our homework, and then he would basically pop quiz us on it. He’d be like, “So, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?” He really got our muscles flexing.

AVC: I love that Scorsese just gave you a giant pile of movies to watch. That’s exactly what I would imagine him doing.

CGM: That’s exactly it. And we spent Christmas dinner together, basically, and we all just sang karaoke on the floor.

• Here’s Everything That’s Leaving Your Brain This Month – You know those “Here’s everything leaving Netflix this month” lists? This is like that, but for your braiin mannnn…
• We performed magic tricks on birds to see how they perceive the world – This sounds like it might be a silly link, but it’s actually a pretty clever way to explore how animals perceive the world: see what kinds of sleight of hand fool them.
• What’s Your Favorite Pop Tart – This feels like a pitch perfect parody of dudebro podcast hosts, and yet it appears to be real, such that anyone parodying this sort of thing really has their work cut out for them. Anyway, I’m team strawberry, but do you guys remember Toaster Strudels? Good times.

That’s all for now…

Just the usual interesting dump of links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• AI Movie Posters – Yeah, yeah, I know, Dall-E has the momentum right now (and it’s great), but these AI generated, avant-garde movie posters are fun too.
• List of Stories set in a future now past – Wikipedia has fun stuff if you know where to look.
• The Market Basket on Boston Road – This is phenomenal. Not even sure if it’s real or not, but does that really matter?
• Old Japanese Commercial – I don’t even know what it’s advertising, but it’s absolutely terrifying nightmare fuel.
• Sam Raimi Defends Horror Films on UK’s Central Weekend in 1987 – TV is not as adversarial these days, this is a hell of a show (and boy do a lot of folks not come off well in their dismissive criticism of films they haven’t seen).
• Who Ate the Pizza? – Feels staged, but it’s still funny
• In defense of crypto(currency) – I’ve linked to some stuff that’s been (highly) critical of crypto in the past, but the underlying data structures and technology are interesting. I’ve always thought of crypto as a solution in search of a problem, and while it has solved some problems (i.e. thwarting man-in-the-middle attacks, enabling criminal enterprises, etc…), they’re, um, not all favorable. As currently constructed, these systems aren’t especially useful, but the engineering problems aren’t entirely insurmountable and the amount of money tied up in these schemes (even with recent tumbles) means there’s a big incentive to fix them. Healthy skepticism still warranted though.

And I’ll leave you with the tweet of the week (those poor librarians, but I can’t stop laughing):

renting and returning ten books a day from my local library while subtlety increasing the size of my cranium with latex and makeup until they say something pic.twitter.com/6hkTDGkG5f

— Omniscient Orb of Pancakes (@OmniscientOf) June 1, 2022

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!

The usual collection of interesting links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• “Look At What We’re Doing With Your Money, You Dick”: How Peter Thiel Backed An “Anti-Woke” Film Festival – An interesting, bizarre story with a weirdly tragic end. All of this seems overanalyzed to an extent, a consequence of everything being political now.
• My Service – What am I looking at here? “It’s not sweat. But it’s not exactly just water either.”
• Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported – This sort of thing will, sadly, become more common.
• Architectural Models in Film – Niche websites live on!
• Big, Invasive Parachuting Spiders Will Begin To Cover Entire East Coast, Experts Say – A big ol nope here. (In fairness, they don’t seem especially dangerous, but still, the whole “using their webs like balloons or parachutes to ride the wind” bit is vaguely terrifying.)
• Oscars: Academy Infighting Mounting Over Categories Controversy – The Oscars removed 8 categories from the live show, including seemingly big awards for Editing and Score. I’ve long been a proponent for leaving out the short films category from the broadcast, but this takes things too far. One thing I will continually point out here is that the Academy does good work on things like film preservation and storage, and that their budget is almost entirely based on the broadcast deal for the Oscars ceremony. Sadly, I don’t think the length of the broadcast is really the problem, it’s the movies they award and the dumb political posturing and whatnot that are turning off viewers.
• The Ultimate Engineered Solar System – More than you ever wanted to know about loading up a solar system with as many habitable planets as possible.
• Translation of FSB Whistleblower – You can never tell if this stuff is real, but there does seem to be some corroboration about this floating around. It’s interesting reading for sure, but I still think some skepticism is healthy. Whatever the case, we’re in for a strange few months…

That’s all for now…

The usual spin through the depths of ye olde internets:

• RoboBee Can Now Pivot on a Dime – Researchers at Harvard have been working on tiny, insect-inspired flying robots for a while now. They first achieved flight in 2007, and have been making incremental progress in the intervening years, leading to a steady stream of articles like this one or Harvard’s Robot Bee Is Now Also a Submarine. Not sure what the end goal of all this is, though it’s probably world domination. And I, for one, welcome our new flying robot overlords…
• There have been 2,432 American science fiction conventions since WWII, and I fed their programmes into an AI. – I know these are fake, but I’d totally go to a convention panel called “Duneklatsch” or “Cake is Our God Now”. Indeed, “cake” seems to show up a lot. What is it with this AI and cake?
• i am so stressed out from running my pet lizards instagram account i’m about to have a nervous breakdown – This is a masterpiece. Underrated aspect of this is that she has someone else running the camera instead of doing a selfie thing. The zooms and whatnot are perfect.
• Rating the grips in the new Lord of the Rings posters – I’m sure this is exactly what the Amazon marketers had in mind when they chose the aesthetics of these new posters…
• Little Caesars Announces ‘The Batman’ Tie-In Food That’s Part Pizza, Part Calzone – Matt Singer continues his quest/burden to review all movie tie-in meals/abominations from giant chain restaurants.
• Cult Classic ‘Fight Club’ Gets a Very Different Ending in China – It’s just some text that says “the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals”. This is not a joke, though I guess it is kinda funny. Personally, I preferred the book’s ending, but that’s just me.
• Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs – I don’t know that I needed to watch 2 hours and 18 minutes of a guy taking down Crypto schemes, but it’s entertaining enough along the way that it’s worth the watch. YMMV…

That’s all for now. Still working on the Top 10 movies of 2021 post, coming soon!

The usual spin through the depths of ye olde internets:

• SR-71 Pilot tells an LA Speed Story – It’s really cool being an SR-71 pilot, great story
• Juice That Makes Your Head Explode – I’ve explained this before, but back when bookmarking services like del.icio.us were still a thing, I had a tag called “idontknowwhatthefuckisgoingoninthisvideo” and this video would have been tagged as such.
• Kids more inspired to work harder while dressed as Batman, study finds – One presumes the study breaks down when kids dress as batfleck
• Loving Lies – Stephen Glass’ biggest lie. I don’t know what I expected, but it was not this level of cosmic irony.
• The Quorum – One of the fun things about the movies used to be weird horse race analysis of box office stats. This activity has taken two hard hits in the past few years. The obvious one is the pandemic, which makes comparisons and analysis more difficult. The other is that Box Office Mojo was redesigned and isn’t anywhere near as useful as it used to be. The Quorum is a new data site that is based more on pre-release awareness, which is something that is especially volatile now in the pandemic and thus quite interesting.
• Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult to Understand (and How to Fix It) – Ironically, improvements in sound technology make it harder to do sound better because filmmakers are so used to being able to fix sound in post (and other similar stuff)

That’s all for now…