nothing here but burnt offerings

issue 248 - 3rd March, 2024

CJW: This issue is frankly too long, but I hope you scan over it carefully and pick out the parts that interest you, because there are plenty of interesting and important pieces shared.

As usual, if you'd like to support us (and are able), you’ve got a couple of options:

• $5 monthly subscription.

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Both options give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. Another thing you can do is help spread the word.

Thanks for joining us.

The Team

• Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey

• Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Middle-aged greying goth.

• Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, glitch dreamer.

• Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. 

Climate Change & The Environment

CJW: ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals - Dharna Noor at The Guardian 

Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice.

The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.

I've talked before about how recycling is largely bullshit - but I was referring to the way that much of the recycling consumers put out is not actually recycled due to costs and capitalism. It is, however, entirely unsurprising that petrochemical companies and plastics manufacturers took part in a decades-long, tobacco industry-like misinformation campaign to convince us all that recycling is a great fix for our waste issues despite knowing better. 

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• “AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity’s environmental footprint. But legislators, regulators, activists, and international organizations now want to make sure the benefits aren’t outweighed by AI’s mounting hazards.” The Growing Environmental Footprint Of Generative AI by David Berreby at Undark

• The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud - Steven Gonzalez Monserrate (via Dr Damien Williams)

Just the headlines:

• This disused mine in Finland is being turned into a gravity battery to store renewable energy - at Euronews (via Sentiers)

• How a Leaking Barge Became an Oil Spill Disaster Off the Tobago Coast by Logan Williams at Bellingcat

Geopolitics & Empire

CJW: Officials Keep Admitting Biden’s Anger at Israel Isn’t Real - Branko Marcetic at Jacobin

But there’s a coherent picture that’s been painted by this reporting: of Biden near-singularly setting a policy of unconditional support for Israel’s horrific military campaign, issuing public statements of concern solely as a way to buy Israel and his own administration more time to keep the war going, and where the only private US pressure on Netanyahu is motivated by White House fears that public outrage at Israeli crimes will cause what it sees as a premature end to the operation. That a US president would facilitate the horror we’ve seen in Gaza out of political expediency is depressing; that he would do it because he genuinely supports it is something else entirely.

Great piece clearly outlining that the bullshit about Biden privately being vewy vewy mad with Netanyahu was exactly that, and everything coming out of the White House has been manufactured to give Israel more time to complete its genocide - sorry, self-defense operation - as people all over the world are increasingly and rightfully outraged.

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CJW: The obliteration of Gaza's multi-civilizational treasures - Ibtisam Mahdi at +972 Magazine (via Foreign Exchanges)

“Archaeological sites are tangible, physical evidence attesting to the right of Palestinians to the land of Palestine and their historic existence on it, from the Stone Ages to the present day,” she told +972. “The destruction of these sites in the Gaza Strip in such a brutal and systematic manner is a desperate attempt by the occupation army to erase the evidence of the Palestinian people’s right to their land.”

Israel is (obviously) conducting a cultural genocide as well as an actual one. The interview subjects here detail the many centuries- and millennia-old cultural, historical, and religious sites that have been destroyed.

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CJW: Related: In His Right Mind - Keira Havens at Current Affairs

Those mocking or denying Bushnell’s self-immolation have already allowed their fear to consume them. In attempting to shred his reputation and cast aspersions on his motives, they reveal that they are unable to recognize the best parts of ourselves—courage, honor, self-sacrifice, and compassion. It is impossible for them. To acknowledge the conviction and agony of this person is to realize that their own lives are a lie, built on pain and empty of meaning.

It's hard to know what to say when Bushnell said the most important part - Free Palestine! - with unspeakable courage. He had more honour and courage than any of the IDF war criminals taking part in the genocide in Gaza, more courage than the politicians refusing to act, or the journalists spreading propaganda because it's easier than doing the work and standing against power.

DCH: “My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the US Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest — but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Self-immolation by Thich Quang Duc, Jan Palach, and Mohamed Bouazizi lit the spark of mass protests and revolutions from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia to the Arab Spring respectively. Hopefully Bushnell’s sacrifice can have a similar impact and wake people the fuck up. 

After all it's not everyday that a disillusioned soldier commits such a stark protest. Especially an American serviceman.

More context here and bold emphasis mine since it seemed to escape a lot of media attention:

To ask whether self-immolation is good or bad, justifiable or non-justifiable, effective or ineffective is in large part to miss the point, which is that it is an option, whether anyone else likes it or not. It illuminates our powerlessness in negative space, but it also affirms the irreducible core of our freedom, that small flame of agency that no repression can extinguish. Since Aaron Bushnell’s death by self-immolation this week in protest of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his detractors have warned about the risk of “contagion,” suggesting that his protest will encourage imitators (who, they imply, share his alleged mental instability). There may or may not be additional self-immolators before the slaughter comes to an end, just as Bushnell was preceded by a woman, yet to be identified publicly, who burned herself to death outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta in December. But the purpose of lighting yourself on fire is not to encourage other people to light themselves on fire. It is to scream to the world that you could find no alternative, and in that respect it is a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.

 - Burnt Offerings by Erik Baker at N+1

I also found this on social media:

From Aaron Bushnell's Will:

"I am sorry to my brother and my friends for leaving you like this. Of course, if I was truly sorry, I wouldn't be doing it. But the machine demands blood. None of this is fair.

"I wish for my remains to be cremated. I do not with for my ashes to be scattered or my remains to be buried as my body does not belong anywhere in this world. If a time comes when Palestinians regain control of their land, and if the people native to the land would be open to the possibility, I would love for my ashes to be scattered in a free Palestine."

CJW: I’ve seen on social media that Lilly was trans and out to her friends and community, but not to her family, with speculation that she chose to sacrifice herself as Aaron so as to be taken seriously. It adds another layer of heartbreak to this story.

//

• "Today, the phrase "kids in cages" lives on as a shorthand for the barbarism and havoc of the Trump years, but the horrors of “zero tolerance” have since been overshadowed by other crises: wars, a pandemic, an insurrection, a new fight about the border. In the meantime, many more families have been added to the steering committee’s roster. Out of more than 5,000 children separated from their parents by the Trump administration, as many as 2,000 still haven’t been reunited. These figures are estimates at best; three years into a new presidency, it appears likely the U.S. government will never be able to provide a thorough accounting of the policy’s victims. The damage grows with every year that passes: Separated parents have been murdered after being deported, and others have vanished during another attempt to cross the border. Kids, too, have died; Chadwick has had to help two sets of parents to reunite with their children’s remains. “We are making an attempt to right the wrong,” she said. “But it needs to be a complete attempt if it’s really going to be done.”" Left Apart by Piper French at New York Magazine

• “At least 112 Palestinians have been killed and more than 750 wounded after Israeli troops opened fire on hundreds waiting for food aid southwest of Gaza City.” Flour massacre: How Gaza food killings unfolded, and Israel’s story changed by Al Jazeera (dch: more detail “After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul said, reporting from the scene” Tanks! They shot them with tanks and then trampled the bodies. Absolute barbarism. This is a horrific war crime.)

Just the headlines:

• IDF Sent in Handcuffed Prisoner to Evacuate Hospital, Then Killed Him When He Left - Kavitha Chekuru

• US kills 4th UN call for peace in Gaza, helping Israel violate Hague's genocide ruling - Geopolitical Economy Report - Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

• ‘Western dominance has ended’, EU foreign-policy chief admits, warning of ‘West against the Rest’ geopolitics by Ben Norton at Geopolitical Economy Report

Science & Space

DCH: Who owns the moon? by Alëna Kuzub, Northeastern University at Pyhs.Org

She says the landscape of legal regulations of any activities on the moon is untouched, but she does not see any new treaty being signed anytime soon in the current political climate around the globe.

The Outer Space Treaty, a multilateral agreement signed in 1967, provides some guidelines, Hanlon says, rooted in the principles of free exploration and use of the celestial bodies exclusively for peaceful purposes.

Another piece that briefly touches on The Outer Space Treaty, The Artemis Accords, and the Russian-Chinese space alliance. The writers have a pollyanna view of corporate space interests in my opinion but I’d love to share their hope that space can still be an area of cooperation rather than colonisation.

Tech & Design

CJW: How artists are fighting generative AI - Paris Marx 

In terms of regulation, we need so much action and we need it yesterday. There’s a specific and wonderful term that sounds metal as hell called “algorithmic disgorgement.” It’s an act the FTC has engaged in before — basically, the destruction of any algorithm, dataset, or model that contains ill-gotten or illicit data. These definitely fit that bill without a shadow of a doubt. Specifically, we recently found out that even child abuse material has been found in these datasets. So we need algorithmic disgorgement. We need destruction of these models right off the bat because once a model is trained on data, it can’t forget.

This is a really great interview with Karla Ortiz covering generative "AI" "art" (specifically from her POV as a well-regarded concept artist), and the current fights against it. A lot of interesting stuff here, but the above jumped out at me as the only truly fair answer to this situation. Destroy the current models because they were built using stolen and sometimes illegal art and imagery, and build again from scratch using only work that is public domain or where the artist consents and is paid.

If that's a deal breaker for the techbros, then it's simply further proof that it never should have happened like this in the first place.

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• "Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives—including a chatbot," Rivers wrote. "It does not explain why it believes that is the case" or "why the webpage titled 'Bereavement travel' was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot." Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot by Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica

• "The fear is that the content that LLMs produce will overwhelm all the spaces from which human-made content is currently being harvested, and the models will start being retrained on their own excrement. Instead of modeling what occurs in human discourse, the models would begin recursively modeling their own predictions at an ever further remove from contemporary human practice, eventually succumbing to what some researchers have called “model collapse,” a kind of mad cow disease for machines." Summaries without originals by Rob Horning

• "If once there were images and then moving images, dependent on being printed in some definitive form for their existence, now there is only video, the phenomenology of the screen. Screens organize the full breadth of our existence, so video can therefore be a “world simulator” — nothing (at least nothing that matters) is left out, and it can all be capture in the language of a prompt, which is of course perfect transparent to itself." A photo of a hamburger by Rob Horning

Just the headlines: 

• Ghost Kitchens Are Advertising AI-Generated Food on DoorDash and Grubhub by Emanuel Maiberg 404 Media

• Behind a Secretive Global Network of Non-consensual Deepfake Pornography by Kolina Koltai at Bellingcat

• Google’s Gemini problem will be even worse outside the U.S. by Russell Brandom Rest of World

Society & The Culture

CJW: Students at Nex Benedict’s Oklahoma school walk out to protest bullying policies - Jo Yurcab at NBC News

Nex Benedict, 16, died Feb. 8, a day after a fight in a bathroom on the school’s West Campus. In body camera footage from a police officer’s interview with Nex, he described how three students “jumped” him after he threw water on them because they were bullying him and his friend over the way that they dressed.

Nex’s mother, Sue Benedict, previously told The Independent that Nex told her he faced bullying due to his gender identity. Friends said Nex was transgender and primarily went by he/him pronouns at school but also used they/them pronouns, which Nex's family also used. Several other friends said Nex preferred he/him pronouns. In the body camera footage, when the police officer asked Nex if he ever reported the bullying to the school, Nex said, “I didn’t really see the point in it.”

I had a few other articles I was going to share, but the story has changed quite a bit since I first learned about Nex Benedict’s death. The story breaks my fucking heart - not just because Nex’s family and friends and community lost him to senseless hate peddled by fucking soulless grifters, but because so many other trans kids are suffering and more will die because our existence has become a front in the culture war. These kids deserve so much better. They deserve the safety, acceptance, and love that any child deserves.

But sadly that hasn’t been the main focus of the coverage of Nex’s death…

• I Don’t Care About Your Brand - Jude Doyle

Of all the things you’re going to hear about that video, here’s the most important one: The name “Nex Benedict” doesn’t come up for twenty minutes and eight seconds. Twenty-one minutes and ten seconds into the video, Lorenz has moved on to talking about something else.

One minute, two seconds. That is the worth of a trans child. One minute, two seconds, out of fifty-three minutes and fourteen seconds: That is the time Taylor Lorenz could spare to think about Nex, talk about Nex, before she just. Moved. On.

[...]

Chaya and Taylor, the “ally” and the “enemy,” represented two sides of the same baseline contempt for trans people. Both of them were equally determined to make sure that trans people did not become the focus of this story. Neither of them believed that trans people ought to be allowed to speak for themselves. Taylor Lorenz is not Chaya Raichik’s adversary. She is her collaborator, in a very successful joint project. Both of them set out to make bank and boost their brands on the back of a dead fucking kid.

If you feel any need to defend Taylor Lorenz or her work - and particularly that interview - read this first. This is an incredibly important and heartfelt piece written from a place of experience and empathy for the dead. It has more value than anything coming out of Lorenz's mouth.

It finishes on this note:

You don't have to wonder. You can ask. You can do some fucking halfway decent reporting. I hate to tell you this, but I already know what Chaya Raichik thinks about trans people. I know it because she talks about it, constantly, on her extremely large public platform. I know all about what transphobia sounds like, because I never fucking stop hearing it, from legislators and influencers and presidential candidates and the editorial board of the New York Times; I don’t need anyone to “expose” or “shine a light” on all the hatred I never stop seeing. What the world hasn’t seen yet — what the world needs to see, needs to hear — is us, and what we’re going through. It needs our humanity. It needs our voices. 

We have been giving you those voices, and what I am learning is that you do not want to hear them. You want a story, a hero, a villain, a click, a controversy. We live and die in the spaces between the words.

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• A gunman killed and injured protesters at a BLM march. Why did police blame the victims? - Robert Mackey at The Guardian - CJW: Because fuck the police.

• “But when you sat down and watched the thing, you found yourself being blown away by the sheer warmth that radiated from the screen whenever they were on it. Myers and King were sensitive, erudite and boundlessly enthusiastic. They weren’t just unfailingly polite to their host countries, but the ease with which they could access their emotions felt genuinely groundbreaking for the time. It was, in retrospect, a fairly accurate depiction of the perfect male friendship.” ‘Genuinely groundbreaking’: how the Hairy Bikers’ Dave Myers redefined masculinity on British TV by Stuart Heritage (DCH: I’ve lightly mentioned some of my struggles with loneliness before. Watching Dave and Si over the years showed me the kind of platonic friendship I’ve been longing for. I cried when I heard the news.)

Health, Cooking, and Related

CJW: Alabama's targeting of IVF is the Christian right's attempt to control motherhood - Amanda Marcotte at Salon

A lot of people are understandably shocked to learn that the anti-abortion movement also hates IVF. After all, the movement claims to be all about motherhood. One would think the people who are always yammering on about how a woman's greatest purpose is giving birth would celebrate those who endure IVF, which is both painful and expensive, just so they can have a baby. But no, the Christian right wants to end IVF for two reasons: First, because of the bottomless misogyny and homophobia that fuels the movement. Second, because the end goal for the Christian right is to turn the U.S. into a theocracy, and banning IVF helps them get there.

It's important to understand that what the Christian right really wants is not motherhood, per se, but a social order where women are second class citizens. They take a dim view of not just abortion and contraception, but all reproductive technologies that make it easier for women to exercise autonomy over their lives.

A great run-down of the various reasons why the US far-right's attack on bodily autonomy has now expanded to IVF.

I remembered the other day that Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero was a concept album about the rise of an autocratic Christian theocracy in the US. It was interesting sci-fi (for a NIN album at least), but I never thought it would prove prescient.

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DCH: The Zombie Law Trump Wants to Use to Ban Abortion Nationwide by Melissa Gira Grant

Since Dobbs, concerns over Comstock’s application have circulated, though they have not led to much action. Since Biden would rather run on “Codify Roe,” that leaves defining the possibilities of Comstock to the right. They are numerous. Some of the earliest fears about Comstock Act enforcement were mainly around speech issues—the Telecommunications Act of 1996 updated the Comstock Act’s prohibitions on using postal mail to include the internet. That update meant that discussing abortion online could come with a potential punishment of up to five years in jail, $250,000 in fines, or both.

The Republicans are never going to stop trying to eradicate a woman’s right to choose. And the Democrats are never going to take the necessary steps to stop them. 

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DCH: The West Is Sabotaging a Global Pandemic Treaty by Leigh Phillips at Jacobin

With little light being shone on the talks, the negotiators from Western powers have quietly backed away from any notion of equity between developed and developing nations, in service of the protection of the intellectual property (IP) rights of pharmaceutical firms. Efforts toward even beginning a conversation about the substantial financing necessary for pandemic preparedness, including funding monitoring and sharing of information on pathogens, have also come to naught.

Still waiting for the day when Big Pharma realises that dead customers buy no products. As macabre as it is to say, we got off lucky with Covid. It could have been much, much worse. And maybe the next pandemic will be. Especially with lobbyists with more interests in profit than public health driving the process.

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• “Even so, COVID and the flu are nowhere near the same. SARS-CoV-2 still spikes in non-winter seasons and simmers throughout the rest of the year. In 2023, COVID hospitalized more than 900,000 Americans and killed 75,000; the worst flu season of the past decade hospitalized 200,000 fewer people and resulted in 23,000 fewer deaths. A recent CDC survey reported that more than 5 percent of American adults are currently experiencing long COVID, which cannot be fully prevented by vaccination or treatment, and for which there is no cure.” Why Are We Still Flu-ifying COVID? by Katherine J. Wu The Atlantic

• “Every time you get infected [with COVID], it does harm to the body in some way,” says Avindra Nath, a neurologist at the National Institutes of Health who has led research on long COVID and other postviral conditions. For example, a pulmonary infection can leave scars in the lungs or trigger blood clots. COVID may also interfere with the immune system itself, he says. Nath notes that the protective sheaths of many viruses include regions that can interfere with the immune system. Separately, one study that followed up with participants after a flu infection found that in about 30 percent of people, the immune system remained somewhat impaired two months later." How Risky Are Repeat COVID Infections? What We Know So Far by Meghan Bartels at Scientific American

• The Pandemic’s ‘Ghost Architecture’ Is Still Haunting Us by Yasmin Tayag The Atlantic

• Tax records reveal the lucrative world of covid misinformation by Lauren Weber at The Washington Post

• Florida’s Experiment With Measles by Daniel Engber at The Atlantic

• The Empty Adderall Factory by James D. Walsh at New York Magazine

Labour & Economics

DCH: The UK’s Economy Is Awful Because of Permanent Austerity by Grace Blakeley at Jacobin

The Office for National Statistics is now estimating that the UK economy grew by just 0.1 percent throughout 2023, meaning there was effectively no growth last year — the worst performance since 2009, following the financial crisis of 2008.

The UK political class is addicted to austerity. And sadly that’s not going to substantively change even if Labour (under the feckless leadership of Keir Starmer) gets into power in the next general election. Labour will be ousted just as weekly at the following one if they don’t start investing where it matters the most. 

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• “But the trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but they don’t have morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear. In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.” AI ‘dream girls’ are coming for porn stars’ jobs by Tatum Hunter at The Washington Post

• “Though the struggle is far from over — organizing will need to ramp up to unionize thousands of stores and keep the bosses from backtracking — all signs point to a simple, if still hard to believe, conclusion: Starbucks workers are going to win a first contract. Not only have they taken on and beaten one of the largest corporations in the world; they’ve inspired a grassroots labor effervescence that could upend some of the pillars of America’s political economy — especially if other workers follow suit and established unions finally rise to the moment.” Seven Lessons from Starbucks Workers’ Historic Victory by Eric Blanc at Jacobin (DCH: Solidarity!)

//

Just the headlines:

• Unionized YouTube Workers Learn Google Laid Them All Off During City Council Meeting by Jason Koebler 404media

Books

LZ: Starry Speculative Corpse, by Eugene Thacker

The second book of the Horror of Philosophy series. Honestly, I didn't like it very much and felt dizzy at several points, felt like the author was stretching too hard in his argumentations… but as a series, it's that painful but absolutely necessary part. I think the first book, In the Dust of this Planet, has more pop philosophy and cultural references, so it is naturally more engaging, but you do need to show the grounds of your argumentation and inevitably go through the canon. It's a lot about Schopenhauer and Kant, a bit of Nietzsche, and some pitches of what's been going on in philosophy currently. Thacker talks about pessimism, nothingness in philosophy, the utility and the ultimate implosion of philosophy as a discipline, and a literature review of these concepts in Western history. The good thing is that by the end of the book he kind of summarizes everything and sort of checks with readers if everyone is on the same page. It felt like watching a class: it's boring, it's hard, but you know you needed it before carrying on. 

Movies + TV

MJW: The Holdovers

When I saw the 70’s-style trailer, I knew immediately the vibe that The Holdovers was going to take. It’s the story of three lost people holding over for the Christmas holidays at a boarding school in 1970, each with their own little hell to deal with. I particularly liked that the instigating event that brings our three characters to the fore is that a rich dad shows up in a helicopter, and takes all the other holdover kids skiing – except student Angus, who’s mother can’t be reached for permission. It’s funny, sad and sweet, though not as sad as I found Sideways (director Alexander Payne’s 2004 film with Giamatti) when I watched it many years ago. Paul Giamatti does a great take on that familiar movie teacher role - the hardass prick with a heart of gold. The character of Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a kitchen worker who lost her son in Vietnam, is the most heartbreaking, but Randolph plays her with joy, humour, sorrow, and bitterness in just the right measures. Good if you want to escape the world’s horrors for a different time and different horrors.

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DCH: The Way

https://youtu.be/fYGscmdJX2A?si=hiA7YeemUXo06s6P

The Way is a 3 part contemporary dystopian political thriller (/family soap opera?) created by James Graham, Michael Sheen and Adam Curtis. Written by Graham and directed by Sheen in his directorial debut. It’s not clear to me what role Curtis performed but his voice, areas of interest, and aesthetics are clearly present throughout.

The plot in a nutshell is part Matewan, part V for Vendetta. A family with roots in the real-life Welsh Miners Strike from 1984-5 are at the centre of a steelworkers strike in Port Talbot, Wales. A protest March turns to riot and quickly descends to open Civil War thanks to the presence of a Blackwater/Palantir type private paramilitary group called Gordius. Oh and there are Freemasons (friendly swinger Freemasons at that) by the time the final ep kicks off.

The first episode is an incredibly strong start (A+). Second episode is a hot mess (C-). The third wraps threads from both with the soap opera elements dragging down the much stronger political thriller parts (B-).

The common criticism in the media was that it’s unimaginable that things could get so bleak so quickly but I think we just need to look at Gaza stats to realise shit can go from bad to worse to war crimes in the blink of an eye. There’s a lot to like in the show—Sheen is a very capable director, Curtis’s worldview is at the core and it’s fascinating to see it in a fictional narrative—but there’s an awful lot of eye-rolling particularly around the family drama aspects.

The Way is streaming in the UK on BBC iplayer.

Comics

DCH: It’s Alive! EC Comics Returns by George Gene Gustines at The New York Times

EC Comics, which specialized in tales of horror, crime and suspense, and was shut down in the “moral panic” of the 1950s, is making a comeback.

Oni Press will publish two new anthology series under the EC Comics banner. The first, Epitaphs From the Abyss, coming in July, will be horror focused; Cruel Universe, the second, arrives in August and will tell science fiction stories.

I’m pumped for this. Fingers crossed it’s good.

Podcasts

DCH: The Rot Economy ft. Robert Evans by Ed Zitron at Better Offline

Ed Zitron has kicked off his own podcast recently. Zitron is a tech critic we’ve linked to more than a few times. This episode is dedicated to the enshitification of tech. Well worth a listen.

The Process

CJW: Donald Glover and Maya Erskine on Real-Life Marriage, Professional Divorce and When to Walk Away - Lacey Rose interviewing Donald Glover and Maya Erskine at Hollywood Reporter (via APH)

Was taking on this Lando project an easy yes?

GLOVER No. Maya and I talk about nos a lot, it’s the only power you have in this industry. But I said yes because I like the characters and my kids love Star Wars. 

ERSKINE And you get the reins. 

GLOVER Yeah, and at this point, I just know when something’s going to be good, because you’re really fighting the industry when you [put your imprint on a franchise of that magnitude]. And it’s not like … I was going to say, and it’s not like I hate the industry, but now I’m like, “Do I hate the industry?” (Laughs.) I feel like I have enough control. And maybe you get painted as a control freak, but it’s like, yeah, control allows for the vision to be singular. And if the vision is singular, people want it more. The less it’s singular, the less people want it because they feel like they could’ve made it. Look, we live in a time where anybody can fucking make anything. You go on TikTok, there’s literally every type of thing. There’s documentaries, there’s puppetry, there’s yarn stop-motion. So why would you want to see something you feel like you could have made?

Emphasis mine. Donald Glover always makes an interesting interview subject, and I liked this section here - obviously he's talking about taking control of a project within the Hollywood ecosystem where huge amounts of money mean choking oversight, and suits with delusions of creativity are always trying to have their own say, but it's still worth remembering the value of your vision in your projects. Forget about the market, forget about the eventual reviewers, forget about any expectations you or others might have for the work. What do you want to make? What do you have to say? What can you create that no one else could?

(Of course, it's a bit different with collaborations where you need to find a balance, but still remember it's your specific perspective that you're bringing to the partnership. Don't dilute that for any perceived external expectations, or you'll be ruining the project before you begin.)

The Memes