May 19, 2023

📡 – 2023-05-19

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The theme of this week’s LISTENING section is: PRE-ORDERS ONLY! Probably one or more of these’ll make another appearance after their release date.

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Health Insurance Claim Denied? See What Insurers Said Behind the Scenes

Health Insurance Claim Denied? See What Insurers Said Behind the Scenes — ProPublica

Learn how to request your health insurance claim file, which can include details about what your insurer is saying about you and your case.

We have spoken with patients, health care providers, former and current health insurance employees and health policy experts to better understand how people facing denials can request their information. We believe it is important to share with our readers what we are learning about this process. To that end, we have collected advice on requesting your claim file and answers to common questions you may have, including a template you can use to get your request started.

Bad Manors

Bad Manors | Kate Wagner

The McMansion has survived financial crises and ecological catastrophes to become a monument to this country’s will to self-annihilation.

Seven years ago, I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. I’ve mostly tackled prerecession McMansions, just for the novelty of houses both dated and perched on the ugly/interesting Möbius strip. But I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments, and, more specifically, their construction and inhabitation. Increasing interest rates, inflation, and supply chain disruptions notwithstanding, the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boomtime fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.

A Spy’s Score: A Case Study for No One Lives Forever

https://www.iasig.org/index.php/resources/resources-menu/20-aan-no-one-lives-forever

NOTE: from 2003!

No One Lives Forever (NOLF) is a  first person action adventure game. It is a spy story set in the 1960’s,  complete with gadgets, gizmos, and guns. The player assumes the role of Cate  Archer, British spy extraordinaire! As shooters go, it is refreshingly light -hearted and sprinkled with kitsch and humor. …

NOLF built upon my adaptive scoring foundation,  improving on many aspects of my technique. This white paper will describe the  adaptive scoring concepts, the production process, and implementation process  used to create this game score. I will describe my intentions and the actual  outcome; what worked and what didn’t. I will also describe what I’d like to  achieve with future action scores.

One Year After Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny Is Provocative & Commodified

Bad Bunny’s Year of 'Un Verano Sin Ti,' Spectacle, & Commodification

A year after the release of 'Un Verano Sin Ti,' Bad Bunny the idol is much more easy to digest than Bad Bunny the prophet.

Perhaps the best person to provide us the tools to make sense of the Bad Bunny spectacle is the queer Italian Marxist artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. His greatest concern about Italy’s turn toward consumer capitalism in the post-Mussolini era was not only economic, but was largely cultural and spiritual in nature. He described a “cultural genocide” in which people felt “the degrading anxious yearning of being equal to everyone else with respect to consumption, to being happy, to being free.” This led to the loss of “a sense of the sacredness of life,” which had been sucked out by the oppressive effect that spectacles have over our collective psyche (this theme made up the bulk of his controversial 1977 film Salò).

One could easily argue that the spectacle of Bad Bunny has sucked out the “sacredness,” the deeper meaning of his artistry. Bad Bunny has become a totem of our dark, taboo-breaking impulses which we find ourselves too timid — or deem ourselves too respectable — to bring out into the light.

Cheesier, Saucier, and Drowning in Caviar: How TikTok took over the menu.

How TikTok Took Over Restaurant Menus

Everything is cheesier, saucier, and drowning in caviar.

“Every few days, we get DMs or emails from influencers asking to ‘collab’ — that’s always the word they use,” says Patricia Howard, co-owner of the popular restaurants Dame and Lord’s. “They usually list their number of followers and always ask for a free meal in exchange for posting.” Everything is organized into tiers, with the asks escalating alongside the potential for exposure: “Stories require this much, a feed post is that much, and a Reel is always the most.” Howard rejects these solicitations outright (“It’s really offensive to contact a small restaurant and say that you’re trying to help by asking for a free meal,” she says), but other chefs see value in cooperating.

Adorno, Lazarsfeld and the Birth of Public Broadcasting with Josh Shepperd

Adorno, Lazarsfeld and the Birth of Public Broadcasting with Josh Shepperd – Money on the Left

Josh Shepperd joins Money on the Left to discuss the research and activism that hastened the rise of public media in the United States. Assistant Professor of media studies at the Univers…

NOTE: Transcribed pod ep.

Josh Shepperd joins Money on the Left to discuss the research and activism that hastened the rise of public media in the United States. Assistant Professor of media studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Shepperd shows how public-interest broadcasting platforms like NPR and PBS exist in the U.S. today in large part as a consequence of hard-fought battles by committed scholars and advocates throughout the inter- and post-war periods. In particular, Shepperd traces the untold aftermath of the Communications Act of 1934 which, in addition to creating the Federal Communications Commission, gave overwhelming legal support to private for-profit networks, while stripping radio licenses from public and educational broadcasters committed to serving the common good. 

Considering AI as belief system

Considering AI as belief system – Studio D

Considering AIs as a foundation for a belief system, akin to religious texts today.

Millions (and soon possibly, billions) of people are interacting with AIs that they perceive as showing some level of “intelligence”. Fundamentally, the less a person knows prior to interacting with the AI, the smarter it is likely to seem, so that some people are significantly more predisposed to be drawn to an AI than others. In most situations the AI models don’t need to be “correct” to be considered for inclusion in a belief system, but merely “plausible”.

“Pepe the frog, the greedy merchant and #stopthesteal”: A comparative study of discursive and memetic communication on Twitter and 4chan/pol during the insurrection on the US Capitol

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448231172963

Following the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, we sought to explore how two social media platforms were being used concurrently to disseminate far-right memes and discourse. Our study employs a mixed-methods approach to collect a large data set of images from 4chan/pol/ and using the “#stopthesteal” hashtag on Twitter between 1 January 2021 and 13 January 2021. Our findings reveal how each platform influenced the usage of memes toward identity building and far-right activism in the days leading up to and immediately after the insurrection. Our findings reveal that Twitter was used to mobilize users leading up to January 6 but led to in-fighting among the pro-Trump crowd in the days after. Meanwhile 4chan/pol users took advantage of the Overton window of the Insurrection to disseminate far-right ideology and attempt to recruit and radicalize disgruntled Trump supporters after the insurrection was deemed a failure.

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I did a little VO for this one, too!

Also, helped commission a few patches for C74; here’s a sequencer from the most recent group. You can see all the patches here.

A little bit more Max stuff, as y’all seem to enjoy this kind of thing. ppooll is a modular composition environment built with and run inside Max. Most famously used by Fennesz and Tim Hecker. This is, as far as I know, their first ever official Getting Started guide.

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• New Reasonably Sound! The Scourge of Modern Civilization is out now, wherever you pod. It’s about spam and scam phonecalls, how they work, why they’re so hard to stop, and what they reveal about the state of labor at the moment. This one was a looooooong time in the making, and I’d love it if you gave a listen.
  

• Episode 02 of Precious Cargo – “The Unmapped Planet” – came out on May 12th. Precious Cargo is an Offworlders Romp run by (whomst’s Substack you should def subscribe to). In it, I play MAvIS, a mining-equipment-network personality module turned insurance adjuster.
  

• As mentioned above, I did some voiceover work in the most recent Philosophy Tube video – if you weren’t going to already (????) you should def check that out.

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That’s what I got for y’all! Hope you had a good week, have a good week, and continue – after that week – having good weeks. And hey, if 📡 makes your week a little better, maybe tell your pals. You don’t wanna bogart all the goodweekness.

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