Link Dump

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…

The great comedown from the Six Weeks of Halloween has begun, so let’s just enjoy some links from the depths of ye olde internets:

• Tenet – A Misunderstood Masterpiece – I’ve seen Tenet a couple of times, and I think I’m in the same boat as this guy.
• Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Licorice Pizza’ and Moviemaking – This interview is getting a lot of play because PTA said four magical words: “I liked ‘Venom 2’.” I really appreciate how PTA’s tastes vary so greatly. This reminded me of that great interview he did with Jordan Peele in Fangoria a while back. They kept talking about all these trashy horror movies they enjoyed, and PTA was very enthused about Hostel 2, which just stuck out in my mind. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Licorice Pizza (the movie, not the food, which sounds like a grotesque fusion of flavors).
• I Tried 30 Mustards This Summer. These Were the Best. – I like the sheer variety of mustard…
• Guy Who is About to Die in Space – Making fun of the video diaries you find in video games
• Use the voice – New meme template dropped. This is probably my favorite, but there’ve been many excellent ones out there.
• Sentient Fire Alarms – I ran across this and have no idea if it’s real (I mean, I hope it’s not, but I’m not going to expend the energy to figure it out), but it brought back memories of The Rebel Fire Alarms, one of those tandem stories visitors to this site wrote decades ago (yeesh)
• Man gets eaten by piranhas after drowning in lake while escaping bee attack – Alright, fine, I’ll read your stupid article.
• If libraries were like delis – These kids with their tiktok videos.
• The Minus Man (1999 Trailer) 34th Best Trailer Of All Time – Maybe the strangest teaser trailer I’ve ever seen, in service of an obscure 90s serial killer movie. This thing makes no sense and is, indeed, psychotic.
• Interstellar Lightbulb – Perfect.

That’s all for now…

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

• The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius – It’s become fashionable to decry the lone genius changing the world with their ideas, but maybe the pendulum has swung too far?

… uncritical acceptance of the lone genius myth is one more cultural force among many that is making it more and more difficult for individuals to do innovative work (and last time I checked, humanity is made up of individuals). In a fast-paced world full of intense economic/scientific/intellectual competition and decreasing opportunities for solitude, it is harder than ever before to justify spending significant time on intangible work that may or may not pay off. You can’t put on your resume – “I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas and scribbling notes that I don’t share with anyone.”

I guess what I want to counteract is the same thing that Stephen Malina, Alexey Guzey, Leopold Aschenbrenner argue against in “Ideas not mattering is a Psyop”. I don’t know how we could ever forget that ideas matter – of course they matter – but somewhere along the way I think we got a little confused. How this happened, I don’t know – you can probably broadly gesture at computers, the internet, big data, etc. and talk about how these have led to a greater societal emphasis on predictability, quantifiability, and efficiency. Ideas (and the creative process that produces them) are inherently none of these things; as Malina et al. remind us – Ideas are often built on top of each other, meaning that credit assignment is genuinely hard” and “Ideas have long feedback loops so it’s hard to validate who is good at having ideas that turn out to be good”. I would also mention increased levels of competition (as a result of globalism, increased population sizes, and the multitude of technologies that enable these things) as a major culprit. For any position at a college/graduate school/job you are likely competing with many people who have done all kinds of impressive sounding things (although it is probably 90% bullshit) so you better stop thinking about crazy ideas (remember, there are no such things as lone geniuses) and starting doing things, even if the things you are doing are boring and trivial. As long as they look good on the resume…

• Free The Heartbreak Kid: Why One of the Best American Comedies Has Disappeared – As a movie dork, I often hear about movies that, for some reason, aren’t available in any format. This article looks at Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, but the same reason applies to other difficult to find movies (man, I could really go for a restored version of Sleuth).

The confounding nature of the film’s inaccessibility has to do with who currently owns its rights. Though the film was distributed by 20th Century Fox, the distribution rights fell into the ownership of pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb. At one point, the company had their hand in buying entertainment properties, acquiring Palomar Pictures International. The production company was originally a subsidiary of ABC but it severed ties in 1969, which allowed Bristol-Myers Squibb to swoop in and take up a majority stake in 1972. Along with May’s The Heartbreak Kid, some of the films produced while owned by the pharmaceutical company included Sleuth, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Stepford Wives. But only two years after creating this entertainment arm, Bristol Myers-Squibb dissolved it.

• Ricky Jay Does a Card Trick – Always worthwhile.
• Scottish distillery tour guide – I’ve never been to Scotland, but this feels pitch perfect to me and if I ever do go, I’ll be supremely disappointed if my tour guide isn’t equally disaffected.
• Greatest Ping Pong Volley – It’s amazing and unfortunately not from the Olympics, but then someone in the comments unearthed this absolute gem about an, er, adjacent sport? (Make sure you turn on the sound on that second one, the announcer is doing some heavy lifting here.)
• In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction – I don’t think there’s a real rule here – like a lot of things, info-dumps are really difficult to do well, so the general rule seems to be against them. But then, folks like Greg Egan are masters at this sort of thing and his novels wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t for the info-dumps. SF readers are probably much more tolerant of this sort of thing, and there’s almost a different way of reading that encourages it.

What distinguishes this genre isn’t so much plotting, characters, or concepts, but its special relationship to information. In a certain sense, an effective piece of hard science fiction comprises one world-sized info dump. Expert discourse is simply the most efficient delivery mechanism for this volume of information.

Maligned almost universally in fiction workshops, the info dump is a device that supplies a sizable amount of background information or other narrative material in order to make a story intelligible to the reader. Egan is a master of the trick. Yatima’s birth, an enormously complicated process that takes place in the first three pages of Diaspora, may be the most magnificent info dump I’ve ever read.

• The Coen Brother – Ethan Coen recently announced that he’s done making movies. His brother Joel will probably continue, but what does this mean for the output of some of the most original and interesting filmmakers of the last few decades? Well, I guess we’re about to find out.

That’s all for now…

The usual collection of links I found perusing the depths of ye olde internets:

• Please, critics, write about the filmmaking – Matt Zoller Seitz wrote this plea in 2014, and, well, I think things have probably gotten worse:

Q: Jazz critic Ted Gioia recently lodged a complaint that “music criticism has degenerated into lifestyle reporting” because most most critics lack a musical background and theoretical tools. Do movie critics need filmmaking experience or an understanding of film theory to do their jobs?

Gioia’s piece, which was published at The Daily Beast, was the op-ed equivalent of a nun rapping inattentive students’ knuckles with a ruler. It’s mostly an argument in favor of music critics knowing a little bit about the actual process of writing and performing music, and finding a way to work that knowledge into their reviews. “Imagine, for a moment, football commentators who refuse to explain formations and plays. Or a TV cooking show that never mentions the ingredients,” he writes, “or an expert on cars who refuses to look under the hood of an automobile. These examples may sound implausible, perhaps ridiculous. But something comparable is happening in the field of music journalism. One can read through a stack of music magazines and never find any in-depth discussion of music.  Technical knowledge of the art form has disappeared from its discourse. In short, music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting.”

It’s a good piece worth revisiting because the last four years have probably only exacerbated the issue. It’s funny, because I feel like one of the trends we saw in these last few years is a bunch of critics wanting to write about nothing but politics, while political reporters wanted to escape the partisan tribalism by writing about art, movies, tv, whatever. In any case, it’s definitely worth keeping in mind.

• John Swartzwelder, Sage of “The Simpsons” – An interview with a famously reclusive comedy writer, it’s a pretty great read.
• Twisted: Urban Legend or Insane True Story? – Remember that time when a drive-in movie theater got hit by a twister while showing the movie Twister? Or was it just an urban legend? This documentary short breaks it down in an unexpected way.
• How Many Hershey’s Chocolate bars does it take to stop a bullet? – Less than I thought, honestly.
• What it was like hearing Freedom by Rage Against the Machine in 1993 – There’s a bunch of these by the same guy, and they’re all pretty funnny…
• Program Not Responding – Wistful sigh…
• Kate Winslet Describes Being Awestruck By ‘Mythical’ Wawa – I love Wawa and all, but let’s not oversell it. Still, always fun to see celebrities exposed to regional stuff like this. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to walk to my local Wawa and grab a Sizzli breakfast sandwich.

And that’s all for now. I was going to kick off the 1978 Project Kaedrin Movie Awards, but got bogged down with other stuff this week… but it’s coming soon!