[links] Max Headroom gets a reboot / Lego Moebius Loop / Neuroscience of whistle languages
[links] Max Headroom gets a reboot / Lego Moebius Loop / Neuroscience of whistle languages
a new study associates toxoplasma gandii with conservatism which is duh because ofcourse you would associate brain parasites with conservatism i mean what else
Max Headroom gets a reboot
Elijah Wood is producing a Max Headroom reboot together with Christopher Cantwell (Halt and catch fire, Paper Girls) as a showrunner for the company SpectreVision (Greasy Strangler, Mandy, Color out of space) and Matt Frewer, the original Max Headroom, will reprise his role.
Some thoughts about this:
This took longer than i expected with all the nostalgia and cyberstuff going on. Finally these decades of retro craze bring back one of my favorites and one of the not-that-obvious-but-actually-very-obvious-when-you-think-about-it ones.
All of the personal involved has a record of weird, strange, great, awesome stuff and I trust them.
The original had a clear anti-corporate-media edge with the villains often connected to the CEOs of the 23 network. I wonder how, and if they will to this again, because, well, you know, don't mention the culture wars.
I can't wait. I love Max Headroom and I love the stuff Elijah Wood produced for SpectreVision. He also produced "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" which is nothing but a modern classic of horror cinema. He takes artistic risks and likes weird shit and I'm all for it.
I wonder if they’ll pull a nostalgic stunt based on “the Max Headroom incident” as a promotional vehicle for this and yes, the irony of using anti-corporate hackers penetrating broadcast systems as a promotional vehicle is not lost on me.
Stray is the game that came out of the "Cat-explores-Kowloon-City"-demo a few years ago and here's a Twitter feed of cats watching "a third-person cat adventure game set amidst the detailed, neon-lit alleys of a decaying cybercity and the murky environments of its seedy underbelly".
And while we're with cats: Everybodys favorite brain parasite Toxoplasma Gondii that is spread by cats, infects humans and creates more extrovert business-people, has shown to be associated with conservative leanings and more tribalism. Beasts. Le Petit Machiavellian Prince: Effects of Latent Toxoplasmosis on Political Beliefs and Values - "This study showed Toxoplasma-infected and Toxoplasma-free participants of our cross-sectional study differed in three of four factors of PI34, scoring higher in Tribalism and lower in Cultural liberalism and Anti-Authoritarianism. We found sex differences in political beliefs associated with Toxoplasma infection. Infected women scored higher in tribalism and lower in cultural liberalism, compared with the Toxoplasma-free control group, while infected men scored higher in economic equity."
Pathogenic fungus uses volatiles to entice male flies into fatal matings with infected female cadavers - Parasites make dead flies attractive to males which fuck the corpses to spread the parasite. Haha, a necromantik parasite turning flies into necrophiles. Someone tell Buttgereit.
Ant colonies behave like neural networks when making decisions "Temperatures are rising, and one colony of ants will soon have to make a collective decision. Each ant feels the rising heat beneath its feet but carries along as usual until, suddenly, the ants reverse course. The whole group rushes out as one—a decision to evacuate has been made. It is almost as if the colony of ants has a greater, collective mind."
Consciousness is all vibes and waves, my friends: Study Suggests Brain Processes Information like Ocean Waves
My current favourite intellectual in AI-space Joscha Bach about Frodo's feelings and consciousness
TIL there is a form of synaesthesia called Tickertaping where you seeing the words you hear.
A database of chill inducing media: ChillsDB, A gold standard for aesthetic chills stimuli.
Every since watching The Whistlers i'm fascinated with the alternative linguistics of whistling languages. Here's the neuroscience of them: The neural correlates of Spanish whistle language: An exploratory EEG study.
I tried vegan sausages last week and they suck, although I think vegan "chicken" is pretty close to the real thing. However, I'll give the new labmeat sausages a shot when they arive: No Pigs Were Harmed for These Pork Sausages, But They're Real (Cultured) Meat. And while we're at it: To get to planetary wellbeing, we need a consciousness based hierarchy of food. Eating animals is better than eating humans, right? Right. Eating insects is better than eating mamals and eating plants is better than eating insects. Eating plankton is better than eating plants, and eating lab grown stuff beats everything because there is no consciousness devoured, at all. This is a consciousness based hierarchy of food. I don't want to take your steak away, but I want you to be aware of what you eat. Pigs are most likely somewhat aware of their surroundings and they most likely somewhat know what is happening to them in the moment they are killed. I think people should be aware of that when they eat their Schnitzel, i think such knowledge is what seperates humans from (yes) animals, because this is interspecies sociality of higher order on a planetary level. And we need this kind of planetarian thinking to adapt to climate change.
I have to remind myself every now and then that the most stuff we take as a given are merely 100 years old, from psychology to cars to electricity, flying and movies. None of this was there before and cultural techniques like these take time to mature and maturity only means that we haven't seen the end of these things, by far. Abundand electricity for free is one of these things that could be just around the corner: After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance. Solar energy has its own pitfalls with solar waste and rare metals and I do believe that nuclear reactors are part of the way to tackle climate change in the mid run, but the price for solar/clean energy is poised to go down down down. So i guess I'm for keeping nuclear plants up, but not building new ones, at least not the classic nuclear power plants. (There are new technologies around nuclear reactors, but I have no real clue about them.)
China to dominate 95% of solar panel supply chain Germany was worlds leading manufacturer of solar panels once. Thank you, conservatives, what a marvelous job.
Unexpected climate infrastructure aesthetics: London’s Hammersmith Bridge Gets Foil Wrapping for Heat Protection
Beware of bad science reporting: No, we haven’t killed 90% of all plankton
Microplastics detected in meat, milk and blood of farm animals
RIP: James Lovelock, creator of Gaia hypothesis, dies on 103rd birthday
Weird AI Chef creates weird food with Dall-E 2.
Interpol - PDA but everything is my voice. The guy also did Outkast, the complete first Strokes album, LCD Soundsystem and more.
I don’t know this streamer Jerma985, but he inserts himself into movies via greenscreen on a regular basis and doing this with The Truman Show but Jerma seems very appropriate.
Prompt Designers are trying to sell "high quality prompts" on dedicated marketplaces. Good luck with that, here’s a subreddit collecting all kinds of prompt design tipps & tricks and guides. (Transparency: I’m one of the mods of this sub.) One recent link from there is this collection of DALL·E 2 and AI art prompt resources & tools to inspire beautiful images, a nice overview featuring some of the most comprehensive promt design guides out there. As prompt design becomes the new AIchemy, all of this may turn out to be very useful.
Powers of ten, remade with Dall-E. He should’ve included the original narration.
Concept for integrating Dall-E into AR-environments to design CGI-Characters.
I learned some Regex the other day and then somebody made this tool which I guess I will actually use from time to time but haven’t had the chance to test in the wild yet: AutoRegex: Convert from English to RegEx with Natural Language Processing
While we’re at actually useful AI-tools, here’s a Excel Formula Generator - Excel Formula AI Bot
In the record shop with Rick Astley - What's In My Bag?
The Tōkyōiter - Beautiful covers by various illustrators for a fake magazine that is like The New Yorker, but for Tokyo.
