Barbenheimer eating Cheeseburgers in Octogarden
Non-AI-Links for 30/2023
Only non-AI-links in this issue because it’s a lot. I’ll publish another edition of this newsletter tomorrow with only artificial shenanigans.
This is such a sweet and cool idea for a movie promo: For Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, they hired the original Zombie Kid who totally still likes turtles. Makes me feel exactly as old as i am. You can find the final trailer to the animated film below.
I wouldnt be too surprised if the success of the Spiderverse-movies and possibly this in combination with the advances in AI image synthesis may bring about a new age for animated films, after more than two decades of CGI-animated movies which all looked kind of the same. I for one welcome these new hyperstylized, more comicbook-ish animated flicks.A new comicbook will continue the, uhm, “adventures“ of Patrick Bateman based on the 2000 movie adaption of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho, the only novel i ever deemed near too violent for my taste. If you've only seen the movie, trust me, you have absolutely no idea about the level of violence in the book. I say this as a hardened horror head who sat through August Underground and Andreas Schnaas' crappy oevre.
The great David O'Reilly published a video essay on his award winning game Everything, which has a decidedly panpsychist edge: "The most distinctive ability in Everything is being able to be anything, to be able to see something and then be it and see from its point of view. Everything can be embodied and moved around, from one place to another, and this means that whatever is in the background can become the foreground. You're playing as the substance of the game itself. Everything can have thoughts, so beyond movement, the first ability that you have is to listen. From this you see that things are aware of their ecosystems, they are aware of the weather and the season and time of day. They have an idea of what they are and of what you are. You can absorb these thoughts into your mind and once you have enough of them, you begin to generate your own"
David O'Reilly is an award winning animator who worked on movies like the Hitchhikers Guide and Her and you really should check out his early stuff like RGB XYZ or Please Say Something, and his Adventure Time-episode A Glitch is a Glitch. He's up there with Don Hertzfeld and Peter Burr as one of the greats in modern experimental animation.A million horrormovies start like this headline: Scientists Resurrected an Extinct Animal Frozen for 46,000 Years in Siberia.
Likely, you've heard about the heavily contested room temperature superconductor paper, and likely, like me, you understood nothing. Here's a twitter thread from a superconducting magnet engineer for non-experts after which i understood a tiny bit more which is still pretty much nothing. But even he's saying that, if that paper holds up, then this is big news and the solarpunk utopian future one step closer to reality.
A roughly broadsheet sized e-ink display of an updated daily front page of The New York Times is surely something i'd hang on my walls, even when i find the declaration as 'artpiece' to be pretentious and the price tag of 2500$ an insult. So, here's Hyepaper, a DIY-project in the same vein which sets you off maybe a hundred bucks or so, and you can even build your own newspaper from different sources with it.
Reddit brought back r/place and when switched on, it went about about as well as expected, given the blackouts against monetizing their API. In my estimation this was on purpose, to consolidate protests and give users a literal place to vent, taking pressure from single subs.
Ofcourse a Zork themed glow in the dark cross-stitch-pattern exists.
Vince Weaver is porting classic point-and-click adventure Myst to the Atari 2600. And staying with the classics, Atari has launched collectible arcade circuit boards.
"A mini-thread on fictional arcade videogames from the Neo-Tokyo of classic anime movie Akira"
Here's an Archive of a billion chiptunes from retrogames of a bygone era.
NES Party and SNES Party: “(S)NES Party is a way to play (S)NES games with your friends in online multiplayer all from within your browser.“
Some guy applied High Voltage to Kids Toys and the result is an unintentional metaphor for our ADHS-inducing electronic age.
The winner of the Tiny Awards has been announced and it's the SSS (Single Serving Site) Rotating Sandwiches, which i linked in this newsletter a while ago. Good choice.
Today in cool-and-weird Apple-patents: Modular Laptop With Attachable Turntable, which suggests laptop hardware-addons for Deejays, and even more interesting: EEG-integrated AirPods, which will read your brainwaves allowing BCI-features for coming Apple devices, like the upcoming AR-headset, about which i wrote: "imagine the Vision Pro reading your brainwaves". Well.
The best take on Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’ comes from TechCrunch, of all places. It's funny and won’t take up much of your time, that’s a promise.
In a more serious take, Charlie Warzel writes about his three explanations about this killing of a sacred bird, and i think all three of them are correct. Also, here's the "World's Shortest FAQ about That X Logo, from the founder of a type foundry who's spent 35 years at the intersection of letterforms and IP law".Here's a fitting sign of our bullshit times: WandaVision gets a physical release which lacks the series. I loved WandaVision both as a comic and as a series and it sickens me to see this thing ripping off collectors. Nerd-Capitalism, now even sans product!
Strawberry fields forever 🍓 Daily strawberries boost cognitive and cardio health. Strawberries are by far my favorite fruit, and the farmer planting them on the fields behind our house for one season surely wondered why all those berries were gone after one night of us kids running around the field devouring them all. The good times.
In other healthy food news, Wayne Dang is trying the Real Cheeseburger they serve in thai Burger King restaurants, which is a real thing and no bullshit at all. Steve Urkel and me approve this message.
Six years ago, i blogged about a photo of a pigeons' nest built from syringes, most likely from heroin junkies. A sad image which tells you a lot about urban living in modern times.
Now philosophers have written a paper on the 'building technique': Why do some bird species incorporate more anthropogenic materials into their nests than others? The writeup at Scientific American features an image of a birds nest which is not so much sad, but more a clever comment from nature on human hostile architecture: The birds built it from spikes used by the city to keep pigeons away from trees.The Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', meaning this happens once in 7.5 million years. Look at this graph. Just look at it.
In other climate news, and i won't even mention all the global wildfires with the mediterranean states going up in flames and Phoenix baking its residents alive whose republican voters seem to be used to receiving Darwin awards anyways, so they surely don't give a fuck — Yes, I'm fingerpointing, but: July to be hottest month on record as UN warns of 'global boiling', Global warming will cause more multiyear La Niña events, study finds, Indonesians in sinking village forced to adapt, Sicily is ablaze, Oceans are growing hotter, triggering global weather disasters, Florida ocean records ‘unprecedented’ temperatures similar to a hot tub. We are watching the brutal reality of what climate scientists told us would happen. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Meanwhile, the MFs at Exxon, who knew that climate change will happen for 40 years and burried the information and will hopefully see another lawsuit for that, are betting that carbon will be the new oil. And they are 100% right about that.
As soon as insurers feel the pressure and property becomes uninsurable, both of which is already happening, societies will have no other choice but incorporate carbon output into economic calculations. Once that happens, carbon becomes a valueable good, with carbon taxes already pointing into that future. But i sure as hell don't want the same business fuckers like Exxon which are ultimately responsible for the situation to profit from that. Assholes. Make them pay.In other climate news, Marginal Revolution is revisiting Geoengineering, and while i don't share their stance that “climate change is a solved problem“, i do see some optimism in form of ever falling prices for solar tech and worldwide technological adaptions on all sides. One sure shot emerging industry in my estimation is Carbon Removal tech, because we simply have no other choice but suck the stuff out of the atmosphere. This is modern, non-scifi geoengineering.
The other environmental biggie we will have to deal with in the coming decades is plastic pollution. Some years ago i blogged about Plastiglomerates, that is: Melted plastic on beaches fuses with sand and becomes a new geological form of matter, a new kind of rock. These Plastiglomerates have been found in Hawaii, and another new form of plasticstone has been observed on the coast of Portugal, where plastic waste in the ocean gets shredded on the coastal rocks fusing the material to form so called 'Plasticrust'.
Plastic doesn't decompose for hundreds of years, and this stuff will surely leave traces in the geological record, which is why i consider plastic pollution as the prime indicator of the Anthropocene.
Having said all of that: A new study found that artificial rocks from macroplastics threaten ocean health, which is a bit of a nobrainer but — what the hell are we even doing? Keep in mind that we're using this stuff roughly since 150 years only, extensively maybe since the 1950s, and this shit is in the geological record already. We'll have a fun ride with this stuff, that's for sure.Anyways. Barbenheimer. Here's a cool Trailer for the box office smash hit created with image synthesis, and here's a great movieposter by Sean Longmore. People are dressing up in Barbie costumes when going to the cinema, which does remind me of the Rocky Horror Picture Show craze back in the days, minus the subversive gay midnight cinema shenanigans, plus a somewhat feminist-capitalist subversion of itself or something, which sounds great in it's own right tbh, even when Mark Fishers capitalist realism is totally on display here, and i'm saying this as a capitalist who thinks that it works best with some socialism on top.
Both films are on their way to save filmmaking from the superherofastfurious monoaesthetics by leading an 'anti-CGI backlash', so i guess i'm fine with all of this, and I'm looking forward to the Mattel Cinematic Universe, especially the View-Master movie, about which i'm actually only half-ironic here.
Red Letter Media gets into what they call ‘watchbait’, the mass of new trash movies coming from “studios“ like The Asylum or Gravitas Ventures.
I like that term, it describes the modern exploitation cinema that grabs famous movie titles like Amityville or Poltergeist or Ouija and slaps some surrounding stuff to it, making them perfect clickbait movies for the streaming age.
I recently did exactly what these guys did: Go down the rabbit hole of cheap horror schlock with Amityville and other stuff in the title, but at ten movies in or something, i just gave up — though i did kind of enjoy Ouija Shark for its sheer ridiculousness (seriously, watch the trailer… un-be-lievable! If you, uhm, “like“ Birdemic, this is for you).
I usually watch trash to discover the pearl among among the dreck, that one movie that may be cheap but has something great going for it. But not with these new school exploitation flicks.
The comparison to clickbait is exactly right, these are not real movies, they are pure attention grabbers made to be confused in the streaming services, new school exploitation minus the classic Corman talent factory, from people like Scorsese or Jack Nicholson emerged. These movies lack any of these qualities, they are pure aesthetic nihilism.
I, one more time, blame democratization through technological progress. All of these 'movies' look like they shot them not even with an iphone. Everybody and their mother can make this crap — and companies like Asylum or Octane or whatever those 'studios' call themselves simply provide a platform and capitalize on this.
The whole phenomenon is interesting af, both from a movie buff perspective, and from a more economical theory perspective.The latest trailer for Uzumaki, the legendary manga by horror master Junji Ito, in which a town is haunted by mysterious spirals which make your eyes go bonkers. This looks wild.
Fun movie art project by Sam Lavigne: 'Claire Hentschker and I attempted to reduce the overly-dimensional film Avatar 2: Way of the Water into a single dimension'.
RIP Harry Frankfurt, whose essay on Bullshit i read circa 20 years ago, when nobody expected the new internet age to become the biggest BS-factory ever. For a few years now, bullshit studies are an actual field of academic research. At Calling Bullshit, you can find a syllabus of one of these bullshit-courses.
Goodnite Harry, and thanks for being true.RIP Sinéad O’Connor, who died at only 56 in London after just arriving there, writing songs for a new album. I never got around to listen to much of her music, but i had tremendous respect for her fierce stand against child molestation by the catholic church, which resulted in the irish public condemning her and booing her while on stage, as you can see in the recent documentary Nothing Compares.
Morrissey condemned the tributes from the music industry: "She had proud vulnerability… and there is a certain music industry hatred for singers who don’t ‘fit in’ (this I know only too well), and they are never praised until death – when, finally, they can’t answer back."
Goodnite, Sinéad, and thanks for taking a stand. Here she is, in happier times, with one of my favorite songs from the 80s:
Incredible content! I just joined and I’m amazed at how broad and sharp you go. Keep up with this! Will be looking forward to the next one
Good