— I apply simple tests to assess the quality of a movie or TV show. How much do a fiddle with my phone when I’m supposed to be watching is one? For TV shows, another is how much I anticipate what is going to happen next when an episode ends. Do I want to watch the next episode right now, or do I feel indifferent?
Fargo‘s latest instalment passed both these tests. It’s a dense story posing many questions. What does a wife owe her husband? A mother a child? A small town police women with a man-child husband to her debtors? And how is this debt paid? All set in the familiar chilly atmosphere of the
Minnesota winter, inhabited by familiar nice Minnesotans.
John Hamm playing a right-wing Sheriff, who only beholds himself to the word of the Bible, is his best role since Mad Men. In most of his characters I only see the sleek, charismatic and immensely good-looking Don Draper. Here he’s overweight and has nipple piercings. Nipple piercings! Also refreshing is Juno Temple in a real role, after her talents were wasted in Ted Lasso as the prototypical Essex marketing gal covered in thick make up and pink fur.
(2023) Cast: Juno Temple, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richa Moorjani, Jon Hamm.
One of the sculptures in the park at Pt Leo Estate winery. Sculpture art doesn’t speak to me, not conceptually, seldom aesthetically. But it sometimes makes for decent pictures.
— Pong Wars is utterly mesmerising. I’ve had it running on my second screen to find out which side wins. Day had night down to 70 squares but then night bounced back.
— I never followed tennis. After all, it’s just two, sometimes four, humans whacking a yellow fur ball back and forth. But seeing it in person, close to the court, with the players playing the ball at up to 200km/h, that’s different. The game is much faster than on TV. If I tried to return one serve, the ball would smack the racquet out of my hand.
Equally impressive are the ball-kid squads. You don’t realise on TV how much they work during a game. The groups function like a machine; collecting balls, and getting them across to the other end of the court so the ball can be handed out to players. All without speaking a single word, they just look at each other and nod.
In an interview over video chat, Mr. Rader asked to be presented with a batch of sports photos so that he could be tested on the spot.
Amid a series of uncanny comparisons, Mr. Rader needed about 2.7 seconds to match a photo of “The Catch,” Dwight Clark’s touchdown reception for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1981 N.F.C. Championship Game, to “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” an 18th-century painting by Jacques-Louis David.
Friday, 26 January 2024
— Use Mastofeed to send RSS updates to your Mastodon account.
— DaftSocial. What a name. It’s a social network where you post via email, but you can only use the subject line.
I love the simplicity: No text formatting. You can post images but you have to upload them first and include the link in your post. There’s no way to follow people or reply to posts but you can subscribe to someone’s RSS feed. Doesn’t this sound more like a blog than a social network? But who’s splitting hair?
For a social network, why not allow following people and send a digest via email once a day? A static list of content that doesn’t grow. Slow down social media to the cadence of a daily newspaper.
Wednesday, 24 January 2024
— The Verge’s top five RSS readers. Great that this kind of content is newsworthy again. But it’s the top five web based RSS readers, really. Not mentioned is NetNewsWire, a classic that doesn’t require an account and that has native apps for Mac and iOS.
— Old’aVista is a search engine for the old web. Enter keyword and it returns links to sites archived on the Wayback Machine and The Old Net. (via)
— Unzoomed is another fun game by Benjamin Td, maker of the London Tube memory game. You guess the city from a satellite image. You start at a large zoom level, the more you guess the further the map zooms out.
Before, going online had felt like being a solo hiker, exploring unknown territories. Now I felt like I was putting out a billboard for myself on the highway.
— The Royal Hotel has to be added to the curriculum in film schools; as a reference for awful writing.
Two free-spirited woman having the time of their lives backpacking and partying in Australia. Until they run out money. And because Sydney is renown for the lack of casual job opportunities, they have no choice other than accepting a job in an outback pub. Of course the pub’s patrons are all men; all with a juvenile sense of humour, most of them covetous, some outright predatorial.
You know where this goes but I bet you didn’t expect that the women’s saviour shows up at dawn, out of nowhere, at exactly the right time. What was he up to since he left the pub earlier? Was he lurking around in his car? Was he drunk-driving through the desert for hours? Could he smell the danger? We don’t know, but it’s not important because we’re closing in on the ninety-minute mark and the film must end soon. And it soon does when the two women set this temple of misogyny on fire. They walk off as the hotel blazes fiercely in the background. The symbolism!
(2023) Director: Kitty Green. Screenplay: Kitty Green, Oscar Redding Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, Toby Wallace, Hugo Weaving.
— Soldiers convicted of serious crimes are sent on a special mission behind enemy lines to infiltrate a meeting of Nazi generals. In preparation to the mission, they build their own camp in a field. At some point they stop washing. The only time they see women is when the mission commander organises a couple of ladies of the night for a sweet send-off. The majority of the men die honourable deaths during the mission.
What a manly movie. It makes you want to move to Alaska—alone—to work as a lumber jack and kill bears with your bare hands.
(1967) Director: Robert Aldrich. Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, Lukas Heller. Cast: Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas.
— Condé Nast is closing Pitchfork and folds its remains into douchebag magazine GQ. This is indeed an absolute travesty but it follows a familiar pattern. A niche publication becomes successful with a dedicated audience. Big publishing house acquires the publication to „develop the format.“ Big publishing house realises there are limits to the growth within the niche audience and that the revenue isn’t what they expected. Big publishing house expands the topics covered in the publication—here to include pop and rap coverage—but still the numbers aren’t satisfying for the suits. Big publishing house closes the publication. It’s an ongoing cycle of money destroying culture, unless the culture is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé.
— If Chinatown were made today, the majority of the two-hour runtime would be car chases, fighting and sex scenes. But we only get the occasional kerfuffle and one kiss. Polanski instead uses the time to tell this story set in 1930s Los Angeles about greed and corruption, where money means all-encompassing power. It feels uncomfortably relevant.
(1974) Director: Roman Polanski. Screenplay: Robert Towne. Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway.
— The Internet Archive now hosts more than 350 thousand hiphop mixtapes from DatPiff. Kids, before Spotify started numbing you with algorithmically curated playlists, we used to discover new music through other humans. Rap music had very little airplay on the Radio or music television; sharing mixtapes from friends and popular DJs was the only way to find new stuff. Mixtapes are an essential part of Hip Hop culture and this is an invaluable archive of the genre’s history.
1. Alone in nature you can talk to yourself, shout, scream, laugh, sing, dance and be weird. In a city you have to pay to do these activities in special rooms which are called pubs, nightclubs and karaoke booths.
8. Men playing pool naked are not a pretty sight from behind when they bend over the table.
12. American men who sit alone in small town bars talk in well-rehearsed catchphrases instead of forming new sentences.
23. Hiking naked whilst listening to a podcast in a rattlesnake area is dangerous and you shouldn’t do it.
45. Spending a week living in silence with nuns is honestly fucking boring and I wouldn’t do it again.
The European Commission expected that the GDPR would result in websites prioritizing the privacy of E.U. users — a better web in Europe than elsewhere. Instead, the result was increased user annoyance under a nonstop daily barrage of consent popovers — a worse web in Europe than elsewhere
So what’s the alternative? That we just get on with excessive data collection and user tracking practices from big tech? The Web was already in a bad state before GDPR. It’s not the European Union that ruin the Web, it is the practices by US American companies fuelled by insatiable greed. GDPR just surfaces how bad it is.
Ken Fritz built a custom stereo system, with massive speakers and a 750 kilogram floating record player to reduce vibration affecting the sound. Not just that, he also built a room around it optimised for audio.
This is truly impressive. Shame the documentary doesn’t feature anyone describing if and how much better Fritz’ system sounds compared to other hi-end stereos.
I came out of this event much more sanguine about the way this is unfolding, a bit more optimistic about the future of the decentralized or social web, and interested to see where things go from here.
I won’t question the good intentions of the folks working on Threads. But I do question the intentions of Meta executives now and in the future.
Think of a scenario once Threads and Mastodon can talk to each other. I can see posts from Threads on Mastodon, like them, I can reply. I can follow people on Threads. And vice versa. Now users have a choice. You can choose your server; not based on where most people are but which service has the best product.
So what happens if Threads objectively has the best app the best user experience, where it’s easiest to sign up and start posting? This is a real scenario because Meta has the funds and expertise to build a good user experience. And they have the ability to scale Threads to billions of users.
Now, Meta’s board decides it’s time to make money from all the content posted into the Metaverse via Threads. Will they be cool and say, well, we‘ve got all of these users, and we can show ads on our own app and we won’t worry about all the other clients that consume our content? Or will they start to close off Threads and make it hard for users to leave? Will they stay open initially but close off Threads once they notice that users are leaving to other instances because Thread’s user experience takes a hit with ads and algorithmically curated content?
All of Metas products were very enticing at first. I had Facebook and Instagram accounts very early on. But I deleted them because they became insufferable over the years. Why would it be different this time? Meta‘s board will, at some point, ask why the company spends all this money on Threads, but there is no revenue. What happens then?
Friday, 12 January 2024
Four Set — Loved
— Is this what Eton Mess is? The school is closed because the sewers nearby can’t cope with over 1,000 boys taking care of their morning business.
Of course, the bathroom situation at Eton is not the United Kingdom’s most pressing issue. But the incongruity of such a grand institution being laid low by a mundane problem could not help but attract some smiles here and there.
Indeed it does. Thoughts and prayers to all those poor wealthy parents who have to raise their sons themselves for a while.
— RSS Anything promises to “transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed.“. I get frustrated when regularly updated websites don’t offer RSS feeds. Twitter is dying after all so we need to get our updates delivered through different means and RSS has been a stable protocol to receive updates ever since. (via)
— I first visited Sydney ten years ago when I spent a lot of time in or close to the city centre. I went to posh bars with rude bouncers and moronic bar keepers who correct your pronunciation of drinks. It’s Tooheys not Tootheys; there’s not extra “T”. The city beaches were full of fake-tanned women and men on steroids, arriving and leaving and beefed-up convertibles, blasting Eurodance hits from three years ago. All very plastic, superficial and pretentious, a southern-hemisphere Miami.
I went back to Sydney after Christmas. I stayed north of the bay this time, an area that is suburban but lively. Yellow sand beaches where children learn to surf, beautiful rock pools where seniors swim laps with graceful technique. The pine trees lend the are a northern-Californian vibe.
The walk from Bradleys Head via Chowder Bay and Middle Head to Balmoral leads through dense canopy. Oftentimes all you hear are birds. It’s so green you easily forget you’re only twenty minutes away from the bustling city, if it wasn’t for the spectacular views of Sydney’s harbour and the never-ending supply of million-dollar homes so big you start to question your life choices.
Kandinsky and Louise Bourgeois at the Art Gallery NSW were worth visiting but not impressive. Kandinsky, whose time teaching at the Bauhaus made him a local hero where I grew up so we covered his work ad nauseam. I had seen a lot of his work before, except his later stuff, which could easily pass a contemporary graphic design. And Bourgeois is just not my jam, way too conceptual.
I’ve changed my mind. Sydney is nice. It has things to do for adults. It has leafy neighbourhoods with nice pubs. It has functioning public transport. Even in suburban neighbourhoods there’s frequent bus service. There is live on the street during the day.
Melbourne on the other hand feels more and more like Berlin. A place that is popular with the young and hip, lauded for its art scene and sprawling creativity. But its streets outside the inner city are deserted between 5am and 10pm. It’s a place that very desperately tries to be a city, but it’s really just a small town that is only big because of its sprawling bland suburbia.
