Brutalist Papercrafts

GOODLINKS 2024-02-05: Selfie Rats / 54 Atom Knot / Rightwing Mental-Seizures / Futurists forecast 2040 / The 50ft Woman-Remake / Doom on Microorganisms / and much more.

Feb 05, 2024

Some housekeeping: Substack now allows for more payment methods in more currencies, including the european iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort Überweisung and SEPA direct, so if you feel like you want to support this blog and don't want to rely on my Patreon or Steady or Paypal, you may consider these new options and

UPGRADE

In other news, i somewhat restructured the roundup, did away with the colored topical dividers as they were pretty much unreadable on mobile and went for a more text-based approach. I also try to write more on a few selected items, provide a "mid range"-section of one paragraph comments, and additional "just the headlines"-section, with only marginal commenting. These new roundups are even longer than they were before, but i kind of like it that way. One big fat pile of interesting stuff you can gnaw on and bookmark the shit out of.

These roundups take up a lot of work, and i need a whole day to produce them, so i think i'll stick to sending them out once a week or so.

I hope this makes sense, and if not, i'll shuffle the stuff around again until it does.

// ART & DESIGN

Brutalist Papercraft

The Brutal Kits by Zupagrafika studio from poland is one of my favorite design items of all times. They sell papercraft kits for some famous examples of brutalist architecture from London, Paris, Warsaw and many more and i just love the idea to fold and glue together tiny lightweight and playful version of monstrous concrete architecture from the 70s.

I loved this idea so much that i ripped it off when i did a promotion for Ben Wheatleys movie High Rise, where we organized a screening in Berlin, did an interview with the director for my old blog and gave a bag of goodies to the audience, containing a papercraft model of the high rise they used as a filming location in the movie.

Here's some of the original brutalist papercrafts:

Paper model view of Hong Kong that bears resemblance to Le Corbusier's unrealized Plan Voisin

A detail of the paper model of the main tower block at Cho Yiu Chuen

Brutal Poland by Zupagrafika, a book exploring Polish Brutalist architecture

Yes We Scan

The Shepard Fairey: Raise the Level exhibit in the STRAAT Museum in Amsterdam is a welcome opportunity to tell the short story of my NSA-Prism artwork-remix. Here's a short clip about Fairey in Amsterdam first:

Back in 2013 with the Edward Snowden-NSA-surveillance story making headlines worldwide, i took Faireys famous Hope-poster, shopped Obama with some headphones and edited the typography to say stuff like "Yes We Scan - Deal With It" and "United We Progress Towards A Perfectly Monitored Society". The thing went through the roof right into the stratosphere.

My Fairey-remix-poster, which is still up on Flickr in its original mid-res size, was in the New York Times, was used for signs at protest marches worldwide, has been seen on television and in newspapers globally, and was ultimately approved by Sherpard Fairey himself, who said that "Subversion of well known symbols and images for social commentary has long been a technique in my repertoire, so I’m glad to see it in the work of others". Maybe the coolest place this poster popped up at was a website selling LSD blotters -- i was just delighted by that.

I had some experience with virality at this point, but this was something else. Thanks, Shepard!

Interesting Newsletter on How Comics Were Made from Glenn Fleishman who i remember from his Tiny Type Museum project. This newsletter builds on notes and interviews for his upcoming book of the same name, in which he "wants to tell the story of the whole comic-strip evolution: from the Yellow Kid and early syndication through the very latest webcomics—the whole ball of wax of how artists knowing their newsprint medium drew their comics and marked drawings up for color reproduction, how printers put that work through the most arcane and impossible-to-believe operations to get them onto paper, and how modern cartoonists produce online cartoons."

Whenever i see this Printernet service which prints out "a reading list, periodically shipped to you in a beautiful print issue", i am reminded of David Kolitz' old internet art thing The Printed Internet which he turned into The Data Drive later together with Sam Lavigne, in which he printed out websites and social media feeds and made Burroughsian cutouts from them. Surely not as cute and hipster-compatible, but at least it's not pretentious crap.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

In Tokyo, Rescuing the Residential Spaceship That Fell to Earth: "Fifty years ago, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was hailed as a marvel of organic architecture. Now its legacy lives on through 23 orphaned capsules."
There's nothing above manipulating tiny digital people with your hands
Animated Short Cosmohedron

// AI

Futurists forecast 2040

Interesting paper in which researchers interviewed "technology futurists about potential trends towards 2040 and their societal impacts": Interlinked Computing in 2040: Safety, Truth, Ownership, and Accountability. Sabine Hossenfelder comments on the paper here, the initial results are here, here's the big five forecasts on which most futurists could agree on:

In 2040, competition, both among states such as the United States and China and among big tech companies, will have led to corners being cut in the development of safe AI.
Quantum computing will have limited impact by 2040.
In 2040, there will be ownership of public web assets, and it will be identified and traded using technology such as tokenization. (ed. But they also agreed that "Blockchain has now proved its irrelevance" and "Indeed, no interviewees made forecasts specifically around blockchain technology".)
In 2040, it will be more difficult to distinguish truth from fiction because widely accessible AI can mass-generate doubtful content. AI will be a threat to objective truth and verification.
In 2040, there will be less ability to distinguish accidents from criminal incidents due to the decentralized nature and complexity of systems. All of this seems pretty straightforward and realistic to me, but some of it seems paradoxical (if AI will blur the boundaries of authenticity even further, you can prove authenticity with the also suggested widely used tokenization technologies) and some seems a bit far fetched:

They suppose that by 2040 "Generative AI will permit practical contextual generation by non-experts of virtually any text, image, video, and code", with any meaning i can prompt "Star Wars with only black female actors set in a mushroom universe and funny bunny spaceships". 2040 is just 16 years away and while gen AI is improving fast, i don't see this level of longform generative content anytime soon, given that you have to synchronize generative audio and video together with movements. This is highly complex, and only the creation of datasets for AI-systems train on to generate this kind of stuff will take a decade. I have no doubt this will happen, but i'd suggest more like 2075 for this level.

For the other stuff (any image, text or code) i don't have these reservations and i think they're right.

The Taylor Swift Mental Seizure of the Right

Anyone could be a victim of ‘deepfakes’. But there’s a reason Taylor Swift is a target and The Deepfakes Reckoning and The Crazy Playbook and America’s Paranoid Taylor Swift Super Bowl MAGA Fever Dream: My thoughts here are not really connected to AI, but i'll file it here anyways because i largely ignored the Taylor Swift-themed mental seizure of the right until the AI-porn scandal, which in combination led many people to talking about Why Men Are Drifting to the Far Right and why Gen Z boys and men more likely than baby boomers to believe feminism harmful.

Rachel Kleinfeld has a short, clear answer to that which i think is correct: Young men are failling in education and the workforce, and there are no good rolemodels for young men searching for purpose, and rightwing clowns with easy answers fill in the void, so we need to improve economics for blue collar labor. I'd add to that we need to increase the number of male teachers especially for lower grades, raise teachers wages and adress the absence of fathers by strengthening core family as a value, to solve for this accelerating (but age old) tendency.

Related: Lawmakers propose anti-nonconsensual AI porn bill after Taylor Swift controversy: "The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act would add a civil right of action for intimate 'digital forgeries' depicting an identifiable person without their consent, letting victims collect financial damages from anyone who 'knowingly produced or possessed' the image with the intent to spread it."

Also related: To rile up people a little more, 4chan-psychos developed an AI-tool named DignifAI to put clothes on photos of barely clothed women. As @bigboobsnoheart correctly says: "Women who dress modestly are getting unclothed with AI, while those who dress immodestly are getting clothed with AI. This paradox reflects the control men seek over women's attire, regardless of modesty."

AI music still is shallow crap, but the industry gets into the game anyways

The New Yorker has a long rambling about the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments. Technologically, if you're in the loop, there's not much new stuff in here, but it's an interesting read from an business insider perspective. They get ready, and all of the stuff seems to come true: Artists licensing their style to producers of AI-models so you can generate songs in Youtube and TikTok or whatever.

Meanwhile, a french-german study found that 71% of musicians fear AI and that the generative AI music market to be worth $3bn by 2028. The same study also found that AI-music could diminish the income of musicians by 25% and calculated a loss of 2.7 billion bucks for the same time period, mostly for music which can easily substituted with synthetic sounds (Stock Audio, Jingles, Muzak, EDM).

And a funny thing is happening to Google who were caught training AI on copyrighted music and who now are negotiating deals. The Music Biz doesn't fuck around, and i wonder if all the illustrators and artists and writers have the wrong lawyers here. Tik Tok also seems to ready a song generator and all of this looks funny to me, because as proven by the viral crap that is AI-Drake and confirmed by the beforementioned study, we shouldn't expect any good music coming out of this anytime soon.

The internet amnesty: A proposal by Philosophy bear makes me think about the ways in which AI will contribute to the already rampantly misused gossip culture on the web. Once we have AI-agents ready to surf the web for you and "do the research", you can dig up any dirt on anyone who has ever been exposed on the web, for wrongdoings big and small. I can't wait for the political influencers and tabloid media outlets exploiting this, or the AI enabled stalking methods. This is a moral nightmare in the making.

I linked to these bird-identifying AI-binoculars a while ago and now Ars has more on it including a xkcd reference i missed: Famous xkcd comic becomes reality with AI bird-identifying binoculars.

With the Glif StyleHunter browser extension you can use any image on the web as a style prompt: "find cool image styles on the web --> right-click-remix them with your prompts --> quickly get a new image in the same style" (@fabianstelzer).

Grounded language acquisition through the eyes and ears of a single child: Cool paper from Wai Keen Vong et al, who trained a Neural Network on the data coming from a camera mounted on the head of a toddler, correlating the video data with the proto-language use of the child: "Our model acquires many word-referent mappings present in the child’s everyday experience, enables zero-shot generalization to new visual referents, and aligns its visual and linguistic conceptual systems."

I haven't watched the debate between AI-doomer between e/acc leader Beff Jezos and AI-doomer Connor Leahy yet, but summaries confirm to me that "the e/acc position doesn't pass a basic sanity check". Idiots gonna idiot, what can you do.

Rhyming AI-powered clock sometimes lies about the time, makes up words: "Matt Webb launched a Kickstarter funding project for a whimsical e-paper clock called the "Poem/1" that tells the current time using AI and rhyming poetry. It's powered by the ChatGPT API, and Webb says that sometimes ChatGPT will lie about the time or make up words to make the rhymes work."

The AI supply chain"It makes visible the connection between an engineer training an algorithm in the UK, a miner extracting tantalum in Kazakhistan, an engineer in Mexico working in a data centre, a worker in Taiwan manufacturing GPUs and a worker in Kenya dismantling e-waste".

StrokeNUWA: Tokenizing Strokes for Vector Graphic Synthesis. This seems to be a milestone in AI vector graphics and I expect good AI fonts within two years, if they can get stuff like Ligatures and Kerning to work.

// JUST THE HEADLINES:

Mistral CEO confirms 'leak' of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performance
Meta is bucking just about every AI trend, including the ‘boys club’
Zuckerberg Boasts He Will Be AI God King Because We Already Gave Him All Our Data: "On Facebook and Instagram there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos, which we estimate is greater than the Common Crawl dataset and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well."
Microsoft AI engineer says company thwarted attempt to expose DALL-E 3 safety problems
Rich People Don't Talk to Robots but Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island. Good expensive humans for the rich, cheap synth crap for the rest of us.
Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain
New AI-Powered Google Chrome Browser: End of Human Internet?
Kevin Roose reviews Perplexity for The New York Times: Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.
The Cult of AI: "What I saw (at CES) this year and last year, from both excited futurist fanboys and titans of industry, is a kind of unhinged messianic fervor that compares better to Scientology than to the iPhone."
Bodycam Maker Axon Is on a Mission to Surveil America with AI
A Technologist Spent Years Building an AI Chatbot Tutor. He Decided It Can’t Be Done.
OpenAI says there’s only a small chance ChatGPT will help create bioweapons. If they say so, phew, lucky us.
An AI-Generated Content Empire Is Spreading Fake Celebrity Images on Google
Deepfake Robocalls Could be Outlawed After AI-Biden Gives New Hampshirites a Ring

// TECH

Doom on Microorganisms

There's a whole subreddit devoted to weird stuff running ur-egoshooter Doom and the latest addition is perfect: E. coli gut bacteria displaying Doom in a "simulated 1-bit, 32x48 cellular grid at a blazing 0.00003 fps."

The game itself is running on a computer with the bacteria grid serving as the display: "Using a Python model, Ramlan calculates that it would take 8 hours and 20 minutes for a glowing 'E. coli cell to return approximately to its starting state', including 70 full minutes to 'reach the peak display output' during the cycle. That translates to a 0.00003 fps frame rate that would stretch a five-hour Doom run into a 599-year slog more appropriate for Ent attention spans than human life spans."

An image from Ramlan's paper shows a sample of the model's (nearly indecipherable) 1-bit, 32×48 output.

Elmo said a thing

So, Elon Musk said that Neuralink implanted their first chip in a brain and this newsbit is not very interesting, maybe except for the fact that the implantation was done by a surgical robot, which is an essential part of the tech developed by Neuralink and the actual innovation here, but which many of the reports don't even mention because they are experts or whatever.

The first BCI in the US was implanted in 2022 by Synchron and globally, the tech is applied in experimental settings since the mid 2010s. However, besides from that fact, there are already dozens of people on this planet living with BCI chips in their heads and which are organizing in the BCI Pioneers group, so Neuralinks newsbit is hardly newsworthy, except for, you know: Musk said a thing. Wake me up when there's something actually newsworthy, like the guy playing Pong.

And apropos Musk, i love the fact that a thrash metal drummer cost Elon Musk $56 billion bucks, which also gives me a reason to link to my favorite Wilco song Heavy Metal Drummer in the tech section of my shiny shiny newsletter and that's nice. "A double kick drum by the river in the summer".

The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism. When Mark Andreessen published his screed, i thought long and hard and came to the conclusion, that in the name of both-siding my opinion, it would be wise and scratch all that. I called it what it is: Techno-Extremism. If you quote and refer to fascists to paint a glorifying "utopian" vision of acceleration at all costs, that's extremist. Adrienne LaFrance seems to agree, and writes about techno authoritarianism, hiding behind a supposedly "inevitableness".

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion from the owners of a now defunct piracy site.
Crusty, the Indestructible Mac
Smoother sailing: Studying audio imperfections in Steamboat Willie
Romeo and Juliet compressed into a 55kb PNG

// SOCIAL MEDIA & WEBCULTURE

We're Rats

Augustin Lignier built a photo booth for rat selfies to make a point about social media. Every time they shoot a selfie, a sugar dispenser gives them a small sweet shot. After a while, they stop shooting selfies purely for sweets, but keep playing with the cam, as we do on the socmeds when our dopamine systems are long numbed.

Rats deploys a three-stages experiment with a group of rodents. Trained with a sugar distribution system connected to a camera, a group of rats produces images of themselves by interacting with the photographic apparatus. At first driven by the trained compulsion to eat sugar, they eventually just playfully snap pictures. By echoing addictive behaviour engineered by social media companies to keep users captive, Lignier humorously addresses what cultural theorist Yves Citton calls ecology of attention, a coercive system, which commodifies our attentiveness with a mechanism based on sheer pleasure.

How "Sorry" can Mark Zuckerberg be, when he personally defunded work to improve child safety on his products?

Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel apologize to families of online harm victims at Senate hearing while Senators find tech CEOs’ responses hollow after four-hour hearing and the Senate blasts tech CEOs over child safety because ‘They’re addicting kids and they know it’.

It's amazing to me how the utterings of those tech CEOs at those hearings amount to pretty much nothing, and Zuck can shove his apology after he "had the tools at his disposal to make Instagram, in particular, safer for teenagers but the company has chosen not to make those changes".

Courtesy of Erin Kissane, you can "read long internal Meta email chains that amount to 'Adam Mosseri feels there's a big gap between perceived harm and actual technical violations' and 'Mark Zuckerberg declines to fund any work on improving known and terrible Meta performance on abusive everything' this is a 'fun' read".

Here's Cory Doctorows My McLuhan lecture on enshittification at the Transmediale Berlin. I'd like to point out that Cory's german URL "go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel" tanslates to "Go nuts buddies, I'm a baked apple", and i have no idea what that means.

How Beloved Indie Blog 'The Hairpin' Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm: "Vujo was able to purchase The Hairpin because its original owners let its domain expire." I hate to break it to you, but a lot of the decline of the open web has to do with its former heroes not giving a shit. I can right now name 10 people that made a carreer out of blogging and professionally complain about platforms and who let their own blogs rot into nonexistence. That's maybe not the story of The Hairpin, but it's a point that pretty much never, ever get's mentioned.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

// CLIMATE

Norway makes Fossil Fuel Industy account for its entire carbon footprint

This is the way: Oil firms forced to consider full climate effects of new drilling, following landmark Norwegian court ruling. Norway forces fossil fuel companies to calculate the full costs of the environmental impact of the exploration and production licenses in new fields, and not only that, but the cost of the burning of the newsly extracted fossil fuels too. It should be able to apply the same logic to already existing fossil fuel plants (but that will never happen ofcourse).

At least for new oil fields and drillings in Norway: No more reaping the profits while socializing "external" costs, but the legal obligation to "account for the industry's entire carbon footprint". And suddenly, when you have to take the whole carbon footprint of your product into account, the whole fossil fuel burning thing looks much more expensive than on nicely calculated excel sheets in neoliberal think tanks.

Now please make this legislation international standard, and apply it to already existing fossil fuel plants, pronto, because we need this to have a realistic, actual price on carbon emissions. Then tax the shit out of this, too.

On the coming Climate Populism

This sounds like a logical next step in "idiots ducking away consequences": Climate populism will be the next great conspiracy complex.

as the impact of climate change becomes more disruptive, you might see a more mainstream, definable political movement emerge, in which politicians and pundits exploit worries about the climate emergency for political and economic gain.
Climate populism – the political stance that is imagined surfing on the back of climate-related conspiracy theories – would have a number of features in common with populism as studied by researchers today. Just like other populisms, we cannot expect it to form a coherent ideology or worldview – apart from the usual trope of pitting ‘the people’ against the malevolent ‘elite’. The goal of the climate populist will be to seize power in democratic elections by playing on the populace’s worries regarding their rapidly changing natural environments as well as their changing lifestyles. The climate populist would achieve this without providing two essential elements that all good, climate-focused political movements should feature: long-term solutions and responsibility-taking. What the climate populist would seek to do instead is to provide justification for voters so they do not feel pressured to change their usual lifestyles and consumer choices.

‘We’re All Climate Economists Now’: With more and more natural desasters resulting from climate change, it affects everything, including the economics of everything. This is related to my kind-of focus on insurance, which soon may become unaffordable, when it comes to climate change.

From 2009, The Time Is Now: "a poster size version of this infographic showing the era of fossil fuels as compared with the long and awesome human history. It shows how the carbon fuel era is only a very brief interlude, and makes evident that the choices that we make today will have an impact on what happens on the other side of what is really an exception to the ongoing state of affairs".

If you're in the UK, join The Big Plastic Count to provide data for researchers informing the UKs position in negotiations on The Global Plastics Treaty, an international legal agreement to prevent the harmful impacts of plastic.

Judge throws out case against Greta Thunberg and other London protesters: "The judge said the protest was 'throughout peaceful, civilised and non-violent' and he criticised evidence provided by the prosecution about the location the demonstrators should be moved to, saying the only helpful footage he received was 'made by an abseiling protester'."

Canadian tar sands pollution is up to 6,300% higher than reported. Has there ever been a moment in history when the fossil fuel industry was not a lying piece of shit?

Move to sustainable food systems could bring $10tn benefits a year, study finds. Meanwhile in the UK: Government-Backed Meat Ad Campaign "which will reach 9 out of 10 adults, is misleading and ignores the global warming impact of UK diets."

XKCD: We figured out the greenhouse effect closer to the start of the industrial revolution than to today:

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Biden’s delay of ‘carbon bomb’ projects could be a big deal – but will it last?
Climate scientist Mark Maslin: ‘We have all the technology we need to move to a cleaner, renewable world’
Earth boiled in 2023 — will it happen again in 2024?
Activism as Art: "The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world."
Trees struggle to 'breathe' as climate warms, researchers find
Sabine Hossenfelder wasn't worried about climate change. Now she is.

// PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MIND

Cave Hermits

The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave. Being an introvert who likes to read books and stick to himself and likes the mountains and caves too, this resonated with me.

I can be an outgoing party animal, and pretend to be a loudmouth on socmed, but that's an act and i can do it only for so long. I'm what is called an ambivert, someone with both extrovert and introvert characteristics. Mostly, i like to tinker with stuff and read a lot, but when i have to, i can party hard all night long. But secretly, i'd like to live in the mountains or in a forest for a whole long while, all by myself with a big pile of books and a dog.

However, 500 days in a dark cave with nothing but headlights, which ruins your eyesight, gives you hallucinations and also affects your short term memory -- this seems a bit much, doesn't it?

Everything vibes

New Proof Shows That ‘Expander’ Graphs Synchronize: While this is about math, i'm mostly interested in synchronization in neuropatterns and behavior through memetics, so I'm putting this here, because everything synchs simply because everything vibes, from particles to fireflies to brains to people. Neurons can feel the pulse in the brain.

Everything has rythm, and synchronized rythms show distinct qualities from singular rythms, and what we experience as consciousness may be "merely" sophisticated interference patterns of various synchronized rythms in brain activity.

I honestly think that the math of synchronization may provide scientific insights beyond our common understanding of perception and cognition, which seem to be much more dynamic and vibrant than the static images of "information processing" and "computation" makes us believe.

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Stephen Fry, who has a Substack now, and writes about Trump and Group Dynamics: The One and the Many.
How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
Paul Bloom has a Substack for a year or so and in Showing and sharing , he writes about why "sharing means caring", as they say.
The Inquisitive Biologist reviews Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

// ENTERTAINMENT

Tim Burton does "Attack of the 50ft Woman"

First things first: I have a knack for movies in which people shrink or grow to unusual proportions, in other words: Movies about everyday people becoming giants or miniatures. One of my favorite movie of all times is The Incredible Shrinking Man and i sometimes watch it in tandem with Attack of the 50ft Woman for good measure, and it's that last one that now will get a remake: Tim Burton To Direct ‘Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman’ at Warner Bros.

I'm happy. Tim Burton may have had a not-that-good run in the 2000s with his Dumbos and Alice in Wonderlands, but i have (very) high hopes for his Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sequel (how can i not) and with Mars Attacks, he has proven to be one of the best directors for fun, big scale (!) films with 50s-scifi-B-movie-lore. Now he's doing my favorite giant woman movie, so i'm already sold and i hope for a Daryl Hannah cameo.

Mondo is back

The team that built the original Mondo are back with Mutant, which is run by Elijah Wood's company, Spectrevision (which also produced wonderful movies like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour or The Greasy Strangler which, if you know it, aaaaah), and they are doing what they do best: "limited-edition posters, limited-edition vinyl records, and working with all the big studios and artists fans have come to expect. In the press release, Disney, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, Legendary Pictures, and Netflix are mentioned, as are artists Aaron Horkey, Nicolas Delort, Matt Taylor, Deb Lee, Phantom City Creative, Rory Kurtz, Matthew Woodson, Greg Ruth, Francesco Francavilla, Teagan White, Daniel Danger, Murugiah, We Buy Your Kids, and Ken Taylor."

It's great to see the original Mondo artists back in the game after Funko gutted this formerly legendary popculture brand, and anyone who owns Funko toys just proves his very bad taste anyways. Who in their right mind buys Funko figures with those big stupid heads which all look the same? Suckers, that's who. Suckers who support a brand that destroyed a company who cared about making good popculture collectibles, and because we can't have nice things, they were gone, lost to stupid ass bobbleheads.

However. Before... some shit happened, i owned the legendary Mondo GNK Power Droid-print by Jeff Soto which I've seen for 1200 Dollars on Ebay once. Gonk also was the very first Star Wars toy i ever owned, a thousand years ago at the age of 8 or so.

Here it is, my favorite Mondo print ever:

Rebel Moon, Fan Fiction and Generative AI

Unfortunately the movie of the hour: Rebel Moon Part 1 – A Child of Fire – Review & Analysis: Wolfgang P. Schmidt Junior is, by a far shot, the best movie critic we have in germany. There is no one better. He came to fame with his Youtube channel and he also releases english version of his show from time to time. Now, he released his excellent take on Zack Snyders non-movie Rebel Moon (about which i wrote here).

Give it a shot, and come for the style, marvel at his epochal taste in suits (he wears a different one in every single episode), then stay for the wide ranging, in-depth analysis that goes way, way deeper than anything you usually find, on Youtube or elsewhere.

// TRAILERS

The teasers for Longlegs by Oz Perkins (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Blackcoat's Daughter) have been amazingly minimalistic and mysterious (1, 2, 3), and the new trailer is no exception: You've got the teeth of the hydra upon you. Here's the plot: "FBI Agent Lee Harker is assigned to an unsolved serial killer case that takes an unexpected turn, revealing evidence of the occult. Harker discovers a personal connection to the killer and must stop him before he strikes again."

The Wages of Fear: So, Wages of Fear is one of my favorite action movies of all times. In Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 film, an adaption of Georges Arnauds novel from 1950, we get a cynic parable about the exploitation of workers who have to put out the fire for big oil corporations and are literally squashed into mud and oil by machinery for a buck, leaving behind a sole survivor looking at a wall of fire. Judging by the trailer, i doubt you'll find these metaphorical dimensions in this Netflix remake, but maybe they'll surprise me.

The latest Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire trailer has a lot of familar faces and, ofcourse, a Slimer.

The Seeding: "When a hiker gets lost in the desert, a gang of feral children propelled by haunting legacies traps him in a sadistic battle for survival with a frightening endgame."

New trailer for the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. The hairdresser already has my vote for the next years Oscars.

Parallel: "A young woman loses her boyfriend in a tragic accident, then wakes up in a parallel dimension in which he's alive."

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: "A top-secret combat unit uses unconventional techniques to battle Nazis during World War II." Another new Guy Ritchie thing after The Gentlemen and it looks kinda good, too, but i'm sure Ritchie will disappoint me again. We'll see.

The Bad Shepherd: "In remote wilderness, a group of friends embark on a fateful hunting trip that takes a dark turn when they unintentionally take the life of a mysterious stranger carrying a bag brimming with illicit cash."

// JUST THE HEADLINES

Christopher Nolan Praises ‘The Curse’: ‘Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’. I've only seen the first episode yet but he's definitely right and Emma Stone is so so brillant in it.
Brad Pitt Cast in Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic. Tarantinos last movie is taking shape.
The Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism: "A mass of young musicians are fucking around", as it should be.
‘Every piece of filth that comes out of my mouth – that’s mine’: inside Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final season. Larry David has been saying it's the final season since forever, but this time it seems to be real. Finger's crossed that he's just bullshitting as always, because the world needs Larry.
Goodnite Wayne Kramer and thanks for kicking out the jams motherfuckers.

Goodnite Carl Weathers and thanks for all the punches. Here's Sylvester Stallone paying tribute.

// MISCELLANIA

Knot made from 54 Atoms

Like every sane person of earth, i dig knots. They bind stuff together, they spin cords into cool weird shapes, they make funny pimples on them, they make you pull out your hair when you can't untie them and the Inca collected data with them using their Quipu knot writing system. Knots are great.

Some chemists from China and the US now made them even, well, maybe not greater, but cooler, and "tied the smallest knot ever, using just 54 atoms". Here's the paper.

They were attempting to connect carbon structures to gold acetylides—typically, such work results in the creation of simple chains of gold known as caternames.
But, unexpectedly, the result of one reaction created a chain that knotted itself into a trefoil knot with no loose ends. Trefoil knots are used in making pretzels and play a major role in knot theory. The researchers noted that the knot had a backbone crossing ratio (BCR) of 23. Knot BCRs are a measure of the strength of the knot. Most organic knots, the team notes, have a BCR somewhere between 27 and 33.
The knot represents a record—its three-leaf clover shape beats out a previous record held by a different team in China that created a 69-atom knot back in 2020.

Infinite Craft. A fun AI-powered toy from Neal Agarwal in which you combine elements on a whiteboard and unlock new objects and materials growing in complexity.

The numbers 0–99 sorted alphabetically in different languages. The modularity of german languages Wortzusammensetzungen (word compounds) visualized by sorting numbers alphabetically.