blast-o-rama. • issue 071 • 2023-01-15
blast-o-rama.
issue 071 • 2023-01-15
it’s january, right?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but as I write this, the month of January has been an odd one. And I mean that, specifically, towards the weather. After a Christmas where it was a whopping 9 degrees, and a New Year anchoring close to 60, we’re actually feeling the “cold” for the first time this weekend…and even then, it’s still above freezing.
In turn, it’s made the whole Seasonal Affect Disorder even stranger, as the darkness comes early, but the cold doesn’t exactly follow through, and my brain doesn’t know what to do with it.
How are your brains out there, Internet? You doing OK?
real images from a fake movie
After a dalliance with things like “crypto”, “blockchain”, and “Web 3.0”, I feel like 2023 is actually ending up, in terms of tech, the Year of A.I..
I’ve tossed some stories as of late in the across the web section with some different takes on AI, but the latest story which grabbed my eye also was arresting visually, as the Artificial Intelligence discussion comes directly to my interests, with truly believable movie stills being generated for films that never existed.
So much so, that real documentarians are getting fooled.
Frank Pavich, the director of Jodorowsky’s Dune (a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt to create a film version of Dune in the 1970’s writes for The New York Times:
It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analog struggle to create his “Dune” — pencil on paper, paint on canvas, inventing the practical effects required to deliver his onscreen spectacle.
It’s different with A.I. No struggle was involved in creating these images of “Jodorowsky’s Tron.” It didn’t require any special skills or extensive direction from Johnny Darrell, the Canadian director who made these pictures with an A.I. program called Midjourney. A simple prompt is all it took. A few words — in this case, slight variations on “production still from 1976 of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron” — followed by under a minute of waiting, and a computer deep in the racks of a data center somewhere, sifting through the numbers encoded into its memory banks associated with the words “Tron” and “Jodorowsky.”
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all. There seems to be a correlation between how Alejandro’s work was absorbed and referred to by subsequent filmmakers and how his work was ingested and metabolized by computer programming. But these two things are not the same. I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure?
also from across the web
Other reads I enjoyed this week:
- How Danhausen Became Professional Wrestling’s Strangest Star - The New York Times
- Legend of Zelda cartoon: An oral history of the Nintendo TV show - Polygon
- Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic - The New York Times
- The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions - Clive Thompson
- Tipping Is Weird Now - The Atlantic
- Gerard Butler Knows Exactly Who He Is - The Ringer
- The table-slamming, ketchup-spraying, life-saving Bills Mafia - Sports Illustrated
- I Was Almost Elon Musk’s Twitter Voice - Defector
- How Florence Pugh Became Hollywood’s Most Grounded Superstar - Vogue
- A Chicago Attorney Is Getting Justice For Hundreds Of Wrongfully Convicted People All At Once - Buzzfeed News
- Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro & Alejandro G. Iñárritu, The “Three Amigos”, Take Us On An Odyssey Through Their History And The Future Of Cinema – Deadline
- 5 Unintended Consequences of the EV Revolution - Vox
- A Q&A With the CEO of Axciom, the Guy Who Has All Your Data - Gizmodo
- Inside the VFX Union Brewing in Hollywood - Vulture
- You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is - The Atlantic
thanks for reading.
Hope your Sunday is an interesting an awesome one.
And your week? Even better.
See you in 7.
-Marty