Category: Links of Interest

2023.08.08 – media_log

Ridley Scott Regrets Not Directing Blade Runner Sequel
I love the Blade Runner 2049 we have and realize I’ve not watched Alien: Covenant yet. Also, AV Club saying 2049 is better than the original is just plain stupid. Different eras, subgenres, everything. Comparing apples and batteries.

The Prosecraft Controversy
Dunno, fren. If you want to know how many words are in a memoir, then look at memoirs, not 25,000 different books. I happened to be on “Twitter the X” when this started and it’s down to directly benefiting (lo its tilt or not) off of someone else’s work without their consent and compensation. Also, I don’t know why you would want to sound like another author outside of marketing purposes, I guess.

Conspiracy theories: how social media can help them spread and even spark violence introduces us to the author’s research in how conspiracy theories are spread. What I’m interested in is how I can work this idea into my class discussion of discourse communities. I think this is a good way to connect it to our later technology conversation.

America Already Has An AI Underclass
“In the coming era of AI, can the people doing the tech industry’s grunt work ever be seen and treated not as tireless machines but simply as what they are—human?”
The program might write multiple recipes for chocolate cake, which a rater ranks and edits.” Does anyone make the cake?
“the machine-learning company Hugging Face” the fuck?
“there’s nothing flexible about precarity”
There’s nothing more I can say that these quotes don’t already convey.

I did not know they made a film based on this chapter from Dracula, but I’m going to try to get to see The Last Voyage of the Demeter before my exams start.

Zoom Returns to the Office
I think there’s a way to make an adjustment without requiring people to be in the office and that’s Zoom Communal spaces- like Zoom sessions with four to five people online working together occasionally chatting and helping each other stay on task. I don’t know why employees don’t do this or maybe they do co-working all the time and companies just need to justify the high rental rates they’re paying for office space.

Seven Books That Will Make You Put Down Your Phone
I will check some of these out now that I took social media off my phone.

The Loneliness Epidemic
A generation of kids who stayed home alone because their parents didn’t make enough money for child care is part of this. Also, Reagan, it’s always Reagan.

2023.08.07 – media_log

  • I guess government agents find it too hard to tell which border they’re patrolling and which brown people they’re killing. Land back. Native Americans Caught in Border Strife on Their Own Land.
  • “So we asked some of the best and brightest people who think about cities — economists…” Wait…what? The future of cities, according to the experts is interesting, if not predictable in its summations. People who have money will always want lawns until we stop valuing lawns. Also, a cashier should be able to live in the city in which he works. The Economic Innovation Group quoted in the article is led by the Napster guy, so, that’s there.
  • The Criterion Channel’s latest email said that Anatomy of a Murder is showing this month and I realized I’d never seen it. I also saw the title card and thought, “Those are some Saul Bass credits, I betcha.” So I went to check and found this page on Art of the Title dedicated to all the Bass credits. Jackpot, baby!
Who would you rather have in charge of publishing?
  • Simon and Schuster to be sold I’m not sure what’s more annoying: another publishing merger or the fact that they didn’t expand the KKR acronym at all. (It’s just some dudes’ names.)
  • Hao Qun: “The act of writing — of making sense of one’s experiences — is so bound up in the language a person speaks, along with all the little intricacies and inexplicable imagery within it.” This profile of Hao Qun and other writers working in the heavily censored Chinese literary world is informative and moving. The Art of Telling Forbidden Stories in China Yang Ying: “Literature is our last refuge.”
Did a boss write this study?

2023.08.06 – media_log

I was feeling a bit under the weather for the last few days, so there’s not as much here as I would like. I think I’ll find a median amount over time. The goal is to be consistent in posting and not meet some other daily requirement.

Also, I still hate WordPress block editing. It’s needlessly cumbersome.