#media
Week Notes - 7th September 2020
Ideally all the books in the API should stay in the store even if they haven’t been included on any of the named shelves in the last Goodreads scrape. When a new scrape is run it would add any books that don’t appear, shift any books that are in the store but don’t appear in the latest scrape to a no-shelf status (representing books I know about but have no relation with, I guess). All of that is much easier if Goodreads has a persisting book ID. If the data persists I can add my own columns to the data...
Boys State
We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties*, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor. I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured with the charismatic and thoughtful liberals Steven and René. Conversely, I found myself predictably horrified with the mini-demagogue-to-be Robert, and the Steven Miller Jr. in Ben Feinstein. Ben was interesting...
Rewatching Pixar short films
I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling. A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different consistencies and levels of water saturation is amazing. Also, there’s experimentation with really pushing the virtual camera’s naturalism. There’s a shallow depth-of-field to emulate a macro lens like we’re used...
Men in evening wear slapping one another on the back
The latest issue of the All My Stars newsletter got me reading about Crash (1996). It was obviously a very contraversial film, that much I remember. There was some monocle-popping from Francis Ford Coppola on the Cannes jury; he refused to present the award that the film went on to win. What's funny though is that the film won the Special Jury Prize, not just the Jury Prize. What's the difference? Well I looked it up: There's something about the "criticism about the whimsical nature of these awards" that really tickled me. Of course these guys (yeah, guys) were just...
My top miscellanea of 2020
I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world, organising the information so I can take it in, or turning it into stories so I can connect with it on some emotional level with my burned out stump of...
My top films of 2020
I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at the time; it didn’t seem like a big deal. A couple of weeks earlier I saw 1917 in the Picturehouse in Dalston. I really loved it. Of course when I...
Drink up
London, United Kingdom
I can’t stop watching and listening to things again. I’m back in a cycle of cueing up a continuous stream of video content from dawn until dusk. I walk into the bathroom watching TikTok, I come out casting a podcast to the speakers in the living room, where I work from home. I get on my bike and put my headphones in, queue up another podcast episode while I ride through the streets. It’s getting dark in the evenings. If I don’t get out in the morning before work I don’t go outside. Today I went outside to drop off...They give it away
I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly, to the point that we became a sort of insufferable clique. The product problem was interesting because it was one of the few places working at a publisher where you...
A year in ads
When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team. Proposition: online publishing is generally supported by some combination of a paywall, donations, a benefactor, affiliate commerce, or ads. Financial Times is entirely behind a paywall....
The layoff business
London, United Kingdom
When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment. At least in the time since I’ve entered the profession, software engineering has been a “seller’s market”. The pay is good, there are lots of...Links, August 2022
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It's astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond "pretty funny clip". It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it's a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the...
Good screen, bad screen
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing. Limit then, itching, fidgeting, coughing, sneezing, farting, and throat clearing. I, of course, might start scrolling through my phone if I...
BuzzFeed News
I'd like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they've finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did. I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company. Those times are well and truly over, both at the personal level and the macro economic level. The backbiting merry-go-round...
Building a computer
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn't play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one. As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do...
Links, August 2023
While I claim that the reason I haven't emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don't have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: "I am more interested in his insurance affairs." A dragon guarded the literary estate of Borges and made anybody who wanted a part of it suffer. I think I love her. In shocking news that nobody could have predicted, it turns out that the women of...
This is not the apocalypse you were looking for
— This is not the apocalypse you were looking for, Laurie Penny in WIRED
The Bosses Are In Their Country Houses
— Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses., Ben Smith in The New York Times
Michaela The Destroyer
— Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You' Will Tear You Apart, E. Alex Jung
Thandie Newton Profile
— Thandie Newton Is Finally Ready To Speak Her Mind, E. Alex Jung in Vulture
Demonise Spotify
— I Am Here To Demonize Spotify, Richard Beck in n+1
The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
— The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free, Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs
Rich writers showing themselves up about COVID-19
— The Afflictions of the Comfortable, Michael Massing in The American Prospect
The daily paper in e-ink
— An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall, Alexander Klöpping