blast-o-rama. • issue 074 • 2023-02-05
blast-o-rama.
issue 074 • 2023-02-05
actively deciding your midlife crisis
Happy Sunday, welcome to another week with your dear blast-o-rama. newsletter. As always, I’m Marty. And I’m proud to say that this week, I’ve made a decision.
As I am at the ripe age of 38, I decided it was time for me to pick out my midlife crisis. Some buy a sports car. Some get really into barbecuing — and I considered this! But realized I don’t think I have the space or the patience to get into meat smoking as I’d considered. And in the hopes of pushing off any pathetic decisions, I called my shot this week.
I’m going to be a soccer guy.
Now, this probably doesn’t come as a massive shock, given that if you know me, I really love Ted Lasso, and couldn’t shut up about Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny’s Welcome to Wrexham documentary, but a switch just flipped while watching this year’s World Cup. It’s an exciting game, there’s international intrigue, and you can just jump in and enjoy. With the MLS season about to kick off, and a bunch of Premier League games available to me every weekend morning via Peacock, this felt like the move.
I promise to not be completely insufferable about it. For now.
AI gets into the content game
This week, I stumbled upon the wildest thing. For the past two months, a stream has been airing on Twitch, non-stop of Seinfeld. But it’s not the Seinfeld you knew — it’s a version of it where the scripts, voices, artwork, and more are all decided and put together via artificial intelligence.
I first learned about it via this Gizmodo article, which breaks it down pretty eloquently…
There’s a lot of strange, awkward pauses in Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated show based on the Seinfeld TV sitcom. As the name suggests, the Twitch stream running the channel never actually ends, and all the dialogue was created using a base of GPT-3, which most laypeople would recognize as the system that laid the groundwork for ChatGPT.
Each “episode” lasts just a minute, and revolves around inane conversations between characters Larry Feinberg, Fred Kastpolous, Yvonne Torres, and Zoltan Kakler. They’re all stand-ins for the main cast of the award-winning ‘90s television show, though all of them lack any noticeable personality. Their conversations often flow together, and the show occasionally seems confused who is leading the scene, or who was just speaking.
The endless show repeatedly flips back to Larry doing standup, where he might tell a bad pun or a joke that makes no sense. Try “What did the computer do when it was mad?… Throw a tantrum.” It then cuts to an establishing shot of a row of New York brownstones before moving into an apartment setting.
It really is a show about nothing, forever. These characters talk endlessly about unseasonable weather, about the latest date they had (how did it go? Always “great”), what they had for lunch, and on and on. To put it mildly, the show is bizarre, but in such a way that’s its captivating. Seinfeld promised a show about nothing, but this AI-generated endless repeat of brainless conversations held by some of the most boring people on the planet truly is “nothing.” For those who were never fans of Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer’s antics, the AI stand-ins are much more entertaining overall.
I watched a few minutes — you can too over here on the Nothing, Forever Twitch page — and while there’s nothing that makes me fret for the future of Hollywood writers, it’s an interesting experiment.
Or…at least it was, until I read the Vice interview with the creators, where Skyler Hartle, the “shows” co-creator said this…
“As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you're gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don't just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars,” Hartle said. “Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that's truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality.”
…why do the worst people get the most traction on their ideas?
What makes books, television, etc. great is that there’s a defined beginning, middle, end. The stories are told, we learn from them, we move on. What’s suggested here? A nightmare. No quality control: just more.
woof.
also from across the web
Other reads I enjoyed this week:
- The Last of Us: When the world is ending, why does everybody wear flannel shirts? - British GQ
- The Apple Lisa: The OK Computer - The Verge
- Inside the Art of ‘Breaking’ Video Games: How Speedrunners, Map Clippers Operate – Rolling Stone
- Why Does It Feel Like Amazon Is Making Itself Worse? - Intelligencer
- What We Learned From DC Studios’ Chapter 1 Presentation - The Ringer
- Dave Bautista Has Become the Rare Wrestler Turned Character Actor - The Ringer
- Apple’s hardware VP on the HomePod’s return - TechCrunch
- The Fragile Humanity of Top Gun: Maverick (2022) - Bright Wall / Dark Room
- MrBeast Curing 1K Blind Folks On YouTube Isn't The Real Problem - Kodak
- How Hollywood is breaking the VFX industry - British GQ
- How The Last of Us Pulled Off One of the Decade's Greatest TV Episodes - Esquire
- Should you delete TikTok? A guide to the real privacy risks. - The Washington Post
- J. Kenji López-Alt thinks you'll be fine with an induction stove - The Atlantic
thanks for reading.
Huh, look at British GQ producing the good reads this week. Step your game up, American GQ!
Stay toasty. See you in seven.
-Marty