Madness

A big thank you to The Casual Optimist (aka Dan Wagstaff) for including my cover for Antonia Hylton’s Madness in Notable Book Covers of 2024. I always look forward to this list – Dan has an amazing eye for what’s going on in the field – so it means a lot to find myself on there.

Don Hertzfeldt

Animauteur Don Hertzfeldt on using Photoshop:… from this excellent Slate interview:

You don’t know what you’re not allowed to do. I still don’t know, but I’ve felt better about myself because I have spoken to people who are in technical positions in cinema who are like, “Yeah, I don’t know what half this stuff does either.” I think it’s a sign of good software where you don’t need to. A sign of good software to me is it’s intuitive, and you can put your things in, and hopefully behave like an artist and make a mess and not break things. The downside is when you realize there’s something you could have done easier a long time ago.

That last line, that is me, that is so painfully me.

Samples

The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990-2023). Some of my favourite artists in here, had no idea a lot of those beeps and boops were even samples! Got me listening to The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land for the first time in ages, and frankly I’d be amazed if they made any money off that album at all – contains presumably rather expensive samples of Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, The Who, Beastie Boys, Kool and the Gang, all sorts.

Heretic

Director Bryan Woods on putting a “no generative AI was used in the making of this film” statement at the end of Heretic:

We are in a time where I feel like creatively we’re in one of the big ethical battles, and the race is already ahead of us. The importance is to have these conversations before they force things in, just because it makes sense from a corporate structure. It’s incredibly dangerous. If there’s not people to throttle it, we’re going to find ourselves in five to ten years in a very dangerous situation. … AI is an amazing technology. Beautiful things will come of it, and it’s jaw-dropping. What is being created with generative AI and video … it’s amazing we could create that technology. Now let’s bury it underground with nuclear warheads, ‘cause it might kill us all.

Could this become standard practice please? To be posted alongside the “no animals were harmed” and “no this story isn’t real, honest” notices.

Bluesky

It’s been quite a week for Bluesky. More of a stampede than a migration, the general vibe there right now is optimistic and troll-intolerant. It’s great to see actual humans at the core of it, rather than fascism or advertising – it’s absurd that chronological, non-algorithmic conversations should feel like such a novelty! That said, I’m trying to maintain a modicum of caution about it all. It remains to be seen how long this honeymoon period will last, and surely it’s only a matter of time before the awful people start to infect the place with their awful ways.

One thing they absolutely must introduce is some form of verification process. Yes, you can change your handle to your domain name (as I have) but this is very far from perfect – not everyone has a domain to connect to, and it’s all too easy to set up a domain that looks like it could be somebody’s official site. To get a bit more understanding of why and how the Bluesky thing is happening, and where it sits in the context of other X-alternatives, check out these posts by Ian Dunt and 404’s Jason Koebler. 

Threads, meanwhile, is … I mean it’s fine I guess. Certainly better than X, but it’s so infuriating that even though the core platform is great, Meta just can’t get out of their own way and they insist on throwing the timeline into a blender, which just means everyone is scrambling for engagement. I’m just using it as a scrapbook now, flinging up nice things that inspire me and maybe others.

Thought Bubble

We’ve just returned from Thought Bubble in Harrogate, always one of the most joyful weekends of the year. It’s not one of those “Funkos as far as the eye can see” comic conventions, this is one with actual comics and actual creators. Hundreds of them. There’s just this incredible atmosphere of inclusion and inspiration, I love it. Emma Rios, Will Dennis and Jock did a great panel on the art of cover design, and my boy had a whale of a time in Neill Cameron's Phoenix workshop.

But by far the highlight of the whole thing for me was getting to meet Simon Furman. Simon Furman. And he was lovely. If you ever get to meet and thank the person who made you read as a child, it’s quite overwhelming I can tell you.

Bluesky

It’s been quite a week for Bluesky. More of a stampede than a migration, the general vibe there right now is optimistic and troll-intolerant. It’s great to see actual humans at the core of it, rather than fascism or advertising – it’s absurd that chronological, non-algorithmic conversations should feel like such a novelty!

That said, I’m trying to maintain a modicum of caution about it all. It remains to be seen how long this honeymoon period will last, and surely it’s only a matter of time before the awful people start to infect the place with their awful ways. One thing they absolutely must introduce is some form of verification process. Yes, you can change your handle to your domain name (as I have) but this is very far from perfect – not everyone has a domain to connect to, and it’s all too easy to set up a domain that looks like it could be somebody’s official site.

To get a bit more understanding of why and how the Bluesky thing is happening, and where it sits in the context of other X-alternatives, check out these posts by Ian Dunt and 404’s Jason Koebler.

Hyperblogging

“Links are the whole goddamned point of the web!” – I finally signed up for kottke.org membership (and not just because I get sort of mentioned in this post). Good old-fashioned blogging-and-hyperlinking; sites like Jason’s are absolutely essential to maintaining some humanity on this big old web.

Erin Kissane on going offline and into the dark forest

Fantastic talk by Erin Kissane from last summer’s XOXO Festival (via Kottke), in which she talks about going offline, her time with the Covid Tracking Project and how we need to to fix the social internet:

A lot of us remember what it was like to live and work on an internet that was  deeply flawed but not systematically designed to burn our emotions, time, and safety for fuel. Whether we’re network builders, designers, writers, or video game makers—the  people who make networks better just by their presence—we all have a role in making or  enriching networks that are genuinely better for all of us. There is a real crack in the  foundations of the current order right now, and I genuinely believe that if we each  brought our weird talents and gifts to bear on this problem and treated the problem  of making better networks like our problem—not something we’re just hoping someone else will  figure out—we would have this in the bag.

She mentions the Dark Forest theory of the web, a metaphor I was unfamiliar with but has helped illustrate/crystallise a lot of my thoughts on the web (as exhausted digital immigrant and terrified parent). Maggie Appleton gives a pretty succinct overview:

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

Written two years ago, she goes on to say how the forest is going to get so much darker and more dangerous thanks to the relentless infection of Ai, and oh boy was she on the money. Once reliable cornerstones of the web are falling away – as well as Google thrashing around in the snake oil and churning out ridiculous non-results to search queries, Wikipedia is now fighting a battle against an onslaught of “unsourced, poorly-written, Ai-generated content”.

I’m reminded of that Ryan Britt post about how most citizens of the Star Wars galaxy are probably illiterate – he suggests that they’ve come to rely on technology (i.e. droids) to such a degree that they no longer need to read or write anything beyond basic pictograms¹. But maybe it was more than that; maybe the written word could no longer be trusted, so they simply abandoned it and resorted/reverted to folklore. Is that where we’re headed? Everything will become a rumour or a whisper or simply fade away.

Erich Hartmann

Scrolling through Erich Hartmann’s work on Magnum’s site, this shot from 1984 stopped me in my tracks. Simply titled Pair of shoes on deck, Caribbean, it’s both wonderfully calm and really damn harrowing. There’s so little detail, nothing to imply what may lie beyond the boundaries on the frame – where are they, where have they gone – so the mood is entirely down to whatever the reader brings to it, like some kind of Rorschach test.

The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot director Chris Sanders in this month’s Sight and Sound: 

All of our surfaces, our skies, our trees are painted by human beings. There’s no geometry covered by rubber-stamping. With hand-painted backgrounds like these, we’ve come full circle to where this whole craft began. Miyazaki’s backgrounds, Bambi’s backgrounds, The Lion King’s backgrounds: they do the best job of creating a world that you can get. Our goal was to get the finished film looking as close to the initial exploratory development drawings as we could get: so abstract and colourful, loose and free and beautiful, and they reminded me a lot of some of the inspirational art by Tyrus Wong that guided Bambi.

The Wild Robot, The Spider-Verse films, Klaus, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem – do we have a name for this new era of painterly animation? New Artistry? Craftcore? Help me out here.

Ted Chiang on Ai

Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Tears for Ai

The less said about the slop smeared across the new Tears for Fears album, the better. But the universe has a way of balancing these things and has promptly delivered the new Wilco album, designed by an actual real life THREE YEAR-OLD with UNICORN STICKERS and it is of course PURE and BEAUTIFUL so stick that up your big chair.

Empire State

I popped into Tate Modern for the first time in ages. Particularly loved seeing Joel Meyerowitz’s Empire State. The thinking behind the series:

In my first year working with the large-format camera I saw how it was too slow for street work. I thought if I had a subject against which I could pit street life, perhaps I could develop a strategy for working in the city. My goal was to have the Empire State Building ever-present, presiding over the scene like a Mount Fuji, while I would watch for the signs of daily life that would make a new kind of photographic sense when seen all together.

Tempted to try something similar in old York.

Blogging to exhale

This from Austin Kleon:

What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading? Not only do I think newsletters should be letters, I’m starting to think that all writing gets better — and maybe even easier — when we simply try to sit down and write a letter.

And Nora Ephron writing about blogging in 2006, back when everyone was at it:

One of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don't have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I'm here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you're saying is true for about as long as you're saying it. Even if it's not much.

Both sprung to mind when I stumbled upon Receipt from the Bookshop, a wonderful day-in-the-life newsletter from bookshop owner Katie Clapham. As anyone who has ever worked in retail knows, there’s an awful lot of sitting around and thumb-twiddling to be done between customers. Katie has found the perfect way to fill those gaps: 

Every week I send out my free post … live from my award-winning independent bookshop by the sea. I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.

Katie could’ve blurted these moments onto X or Threads or elsewhere, but collating them into a newsletter gives them more meaning. What you end up with is a tapestry of the splendidly mundane, just people passing through the day, all adding up to something more; a vivid portrait of the bookshop. It’s not a long long read, but it does call for that extra bit of deliberate attention from the reader; a nice chunk of time dedicated to one voice. Give me this kind of blogging over social media’s torrent of microaggression any day. Exhaling letters rather than coughing up grawlixes.

D+W

Slate’s spot-on review of Deadpool and Wolverine, a film I begrudgingly went to see (because I don’t like to miss an issue) but was genuinely surprised by. Soooooo much better than the first two. It’s The Madagascar 3 of Deadpool films. I just wish they hadn’t spaffed quite so much of the casting in the marketing. People were going to show up, you didn’t need to reveal that BLANK and BLANK and BLANK were involved.