[a pleasurable headache] like flipping a coin
So many links! Apologies for the formatting of this issue. Buttondown seems to have changed up the formatting options/layout and everything in between. No longer can I just paste Markdown into an empty box. Simplicity be damned!
Phoenix Nights: A Tribute to a Vanishing British Institution
Phoenix Nights: A Tribute to a Vanishing British Institution
Two decades after it first aired, Phoenix Nights' wry portrayal of a northern working men’s club remains a vital celebration of a vanishing working-class culture too often ignored on screen.
This one is probably going to be a bit of a tough sell for anyone outside the U.K. This Tribune article though points out the dearth of working class voices working in modern comedic circles on broadcast TV.
Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights was one of the last hurrahs for that kind of setting and viewpoint. Whilst some elements of the show are dated it was an absolute smash when first released and projected Kay's star into the strastosphere. It was disappointing to learn the reasons as to why the show has never been shown since, or seen any physical release since the initial DVD run back in the day.
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Legendary Sci-Fi Magazine Halts Submissions Amid Deluge of AI-Written Stories
Legendary Sci-Fi Magazine Halts Submissions Amid Deluge of AI-Written Stories
“We don't have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn't going away," the editor of Clarkesworld said.
Saddening to hear and yet completely unsurprising that something like this would happen. Stalwart of the genre short story, Clarkesworld, has had to close it's submissions temporarily after receiving a glut of AI-scripted short stories. In the age of streaming I feel the trending model seems to be story by committee/algorithm (shades of Season 3 of Barry), but this is something else entirely.
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The Tao of Rick Rubin
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rick-rubin.html
A transcript of a fairly recent episode of the Ezra Klein Podcast, a truly wonderful interview with the legendary music producer Rick Rubin. I've been seeing a lot of great things about Rubin's new book and what it has to say about creativity (plus the presentation and aesthetics of the book itself are beautiful). This interview is a great primer and introduction for many of the concepts Rubin explores in his book.
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Stephen Graham Jones on Trilogies, Deaths, Slashers, and Dog Nipples
Stephen Graham Jones on Trilogies, Deaths, Slashers, and Dog Nipples | LitReactor
With the second book in his Indian Lake Trilogy out, I sat down for a little talk with the great Stephen Graham Jones.
The always wonderful Gabino Iglesias interviews Stephen Graham Jones on the back of the release of Don't Fear The Reaper, the second in his planned 'slasher' trilogy. I'm currently halfway through the book myself and it's a wonderful sequel to My Heart Is A Chainsaw, exploring grief, resilience and Native American identity.
"To me the slasher is a coin flipping through the air. On one side, there’s a scream, and on the other side, there’s a laugh, and, with the slasher, you never know which it’s going to land on in any given moment. I think that’s the appeal, moment by moment. Stepping back a bit, though, I think that engaging a justice fantasy, which is what the slasher is, it...it doesn’t quite heal us or anything, but it does give us hope, I think. That the world can be fair. That justice can prevail. That the bad people don’t always get to win. Sometimes one final girl, who’s been running away the whole story, she’ll turn around, and she’ll face the horror down. And that can be all of us."
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SUELLA BRAVERMAN & the Hard Right Capture of the Conservative Party
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/23/suella-braverman-and-the-hard-right-capture-of-the-conservative-party/
A depressing piece over at Byline Times about the Tory party lurching even further to the right. The quote that stood out to me here is the assertion by Braverman (the UK's Home Secretary) that far-right extremism is not at all a burgeoning problem. Why go after your own voting bloc, am I right?
"It is a bogus equivalence to equate the threat of extreme right-wing terrorism and the threat of Islamist extremism, and that is what we all need to be honest about,” she told the House of Commons, adding that the Prevent programme must be “oriented” away from focusing on the far-right."
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Close Encounters
Close Encounters | Jesse Robertson
Have UFOs become a two-for-one state-sanctioned conspiracy theory, serving both security and propaganda functions?
Jesse Robertson at The Baffler charts the changing attitude towards UFOs by the American public.
"Cover-up theories were conditioned by the prior decade’s erosion of public trust in the U.S. government. The Pentagon Papers exposed the deceptive escalation of the war in Vietnam. High-profile political assassinations shattered the neat logic of historical causality. On the heels of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, the Church Committee revealed in 1975 that intelligence agencies had systematically weaponized, surveilled, drugged, and tortured U.S. citizens. Americans’ growing penchant for conspiracy theories was intrinsically linked to power relations and matched the state’s own expanded capacity for conspiratorial conduct. To boot, the nation was gripped by economic woes. Neoliberal policymakers doubled down on free-market orthodoxy in response, rendering wages comatose and deferring distributional conflict to the future."
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How Many More Governments Will American-Trained Soldiers Overthrow?
American Trained Soldiers Keep Overthrowing Governments in Africa – Rolling Stone
There have been at least seven coups led by soldiers who trained with Americans forces in Africa in recent years and the security situation only seems to be getting worse
Nick Turse (whose work and books are excellent) has a new piece over at Rolling Stone. There is a long list of men, trained by American forces or at American military facilities, that are involved in coups up and down the African continent.
"The State Department isn’t the only arm of the U.S. government with its head in the sand. U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, which provides most of the training to African officers, doesn’t know how many coups its charges have conducted nor does it keep a list of how many times it’s happened. “AFRICOM does not maintain a database with this information,” Africa Command spokesperson Cahalan told Rolling Stone. “AFRICOM does not actively track individuals who’ve received U.S. training after the training has been completed.”
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You Are Not A Parrot
ChatGPT Is Nothing Like a Human, Says Linguist Emily Bender
And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.
Elizabeth Weil has an excellent piece on Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist, and ChatGPT/AI sceptic.
"Bender and Manning’s biggest disagreement is over how meaning is created — the stuff of the octopus paper. Until recently, philosophers and linguists alike agreed with Bender’s take: Referents, actual things and ideas in the world, like coconuts and heartbreak, are needed to produce meaning. This refers to that. Manning now sees this idea as antiquated, the “sort of standard 20th-century philosophy-of-language position.”
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Walking Zelda
Walking Zelda â Ridgeline issue 157
I leave you with a recent entry from Craig Mod's excellent newsletter, Ridgeline. In this entry he talks about navigating the world of the original Zelda game on the NES, the cartography involve and the landscape that existed in his head between the pixels on the screen and his mind's eye.
He talks about the more recent games and the influence of the Japanese landscape on the overall look of the series as a whole. It's beautiful, thought-provoking stuff.
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Right, I'm off to get some fresh air. See you in two!