Weekend Reads (Jun 4): Star Wars, Netflix, Supercomputers, Jordan Peterson
Recommended weekend reading material for June 4, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
With each new Star Wars title, like the currently airing Obi-Wan Kenobi, the franchise is becoming increasingly insular and focused on ridiculous minutiae.
By this point, what truly worked about the original Star Wars movies — the awe of invention and discovery, and the momentum of the propulsive storytelling that left details and common sense behind in the rush to get to the next emotional beat — has been lost almost entirely, replaced by a compulsive need to fulfill nostalgia and comfortably mine existing intellectual property. Whereas those first three movies were the Big Bang that started everything and built a galaxy far, far away, what we’re witnessing now is an implosion of fractal storytelling, with each spin-off focusing on a smaller part of the story leading to a new spin-off focusing on an ever smaller part of that smaller part.
This has been my biggest issue with Star Wars for awhile now. While the Star Wars universe has been expanded over the years, thanks to Knights of the Old Republic and The High Republic, that doesn’t seem to matter: it’s still basically stuck in the same ~80-year timespan and the same batch of characters (i.e., the Skywalkers and every one pulled into their orbit), which just serves to shrink it back down.
That’s one of the reasons why I like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order so much. As I wrote in my review, “Fallen Order is a good example of how to take the familiar and use it as a means to an end, i.e., telling a broader, more vast story that adds to the existing universe instead of simply remaining beholden to it.”
Personally, I’d love to see Star Wars venture into the distant future instead of constantly stuck in the past. What does the galaxy look like in a few hundred years? Is it still stuck in the same light/dark dichotomies between the Jedi and the Sith, between the rebels and the Empire? Is the Force still at work? What new discoveries have been made? We have this vast and fantastical universe, so why not do some exploring?
Back in 1980, Octavia E. Butler published an essay titled “The Lost Races of Science Fiction” that considered the dearth of diversity in the sci-fi genre, and why that might be the case.
Back when Star Wars was new, a familiar excuse for ignoring minorities went something like this: “Science fiction is escapist literature. Its readers/viewers don’t want to be weighted down with real problems.” War, okay. Planet-wide destruction, okay. Kidnapping, okay. But the sight of a minority person? Too heavy. Too real. And, of course, there again is the implication that a sprinkling of blacks, Asians, or others could turn the story into some sort of racial statement. The only statement I could imagine being made by such a sprinkling would be that among the white, human people; the tall, furry people; the lumpy, scaly people; the tentacled people; etc., were also brown, human people; black, human people, etc. This isn’t a heavy statement—unless it’s missing.
Given the racist responses to Moses Ingram, who plays the Third Sister on Obi-Wan Kenobi, Butler’s essay is still as relevant now as it was more than 40 years ago.
In light of subscriber losses and increased competition from other streaming services, Netflix is changing its approach to making movies.
As it moves forward, Netflix wants to focus on making bigger movies, making better movies, and releasing fewer than it previously did at a gluttonous pace. “Just a few years ago, we were struggling to out-monetize the market on little art films,” Netflix co-chief Ted Sarandos told analysts on the company’s April earnings call. “Today, we’re releasing some of the most popular and most watched movies in the world. Just over the last few months, things like Don’t Look Up and Red Notice and Adam Project, as examples of that.” But what this “bigger, better, fewer” directive means is unclear to those inside and outside the company.
Among other things, this will probably mean fewer animated titles and fewer high-profile “vanity” projects like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.
Matt Zoller Seitz responds to Netflix’s move: “The moral: artists, get your money while you can, anyway you can, because these people do not care about your art. They certainly don’t care about your politics. It’s not a revolution. It’s always just capitalism.”
The recently released She-Hulk teaser highlights Marvel’s CGI problems, writes Darren Mooney.
More to the point, the debate over the She-Hulk trailer is just an example of a long-simmering tension boiling over. Recent years have seen renewed criticism of the use of computer-generated imagery in mainstream blockbusters, particularly the uncanny effect that it can create when trying to replicate real environments like in Jungle Cruise. However, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has attracted a lot of this criticism by virtue of being the highest-profile example of this trend.
Critics have been quick to single out questionable digital effects in movies like Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, along with the recent Moon Knight streaming show. Even positive reviews of these projects allude to “CGI soup.” There is a sense that the She-Hulk trailer just had the misfortune to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the point at which something that might otherwise be excusable or forgivable happened to reach critical mass.
I wouldn’t be surprised in She-Hulk ends up looking better than it does in the trailer. After all, the first Iron Man teaser got slammed for its effects, and the final product was demonstrably better. That said, Mooney raises some valid points re. both Marvel’s reliance on CGI and the cavalier approach to using it, especially in light of the massive amount of money involved in these productions.
Donald Trump has his own social media network, and now he’s launching his own “non-woke” streaming service.
“TMTG+ intends to offer programs including, but not limited to blue collar comedy, cancelled shows, Trump-specific programming, faith-based shows, family entertainment, shows that embrace the Second Amendment, and news,” the filing says. “TMTG intends to license, produce, and deliver news, sports, and non-woke entertainment content through this platform.”
There are also plans to launch a podcast network.
Related: Truth Social is Donald Trump’s Latest Boondoggle
The Animation Obsessive staff revisits the lost world of anime fansites.
The early internet was an awkward and often embarrassing place — it’s well known that anime fansites were no exception. Many people of a certain age like to laugh about the Anime Web Turnpike girl. But, while the period was often funny, it also wasn’t a joke.
These fansites represented an intense passion. It was an era when bleary VHS tapes with unauthorized fansubs were the only access people had, outside Japan, to many classics we take for granted now. These fans cataloged that work, wrote about it, raised awareness of it, grew demand for it and in some cases translated it themselves.
Back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, I spent countless hours on anime fansites like EX and Macross Mecha Designs, giving full rein to my nerdy obsessions and learning everything I could about my new favorite anime titles (which, I might add, I had precious little chance of actually seeing back then).
While I certainly appreciate the accessible, responsive, and performant web of today, I do miss the wild, idiosyncratic days of the old web, as typified by anime fansites. Modern equivalents like Fandom.com can’t quite compare, nor do they exude the same amount of love, labor, and pride.
Scientists have established a new computing milestone: The Frontier supercomputer is capable of exascale computing, or more than a quintillion calculations per second. (A quintillion is a one followed by 18 zeros.) By comparison, the iPhone 13 is capable of a mere 15.8 trillion operations per second.
The Frontier supercomputer was announced as the fastest supercomputer today in the 59th TOP500 list. It uses Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, and consists of 74 purpose-built cabinets. Contained within them are a mix of AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and AMD Instinct 250X professional GPUs. In total, there are more than 9,400 CPUs and 37,000 GPUs for a total core count of 8,730,112.
The Frontier supercomputer, which becomes available for scientific use next year, will be used to generate super-complex simulations, including weather patterns, cancer cells, and nuclear reactions.
Of course, what everyone really wants to know is, can you play Doom on it?
Last month, Jordan Peterson — already no stranger to controversy — got in trouble on Twitter for criticizing plus-size model Yumi Nu as “not beautiful.” But why would Peterson tweet that in the first place, asks David Mills?
He seems to have thought that the magazine featuring such a model on its cover meant to impose its “woke” view of feminine beauty. That’s the only way he can explain the editors putting Ms. Nu on the cover, instead of a classically thin but buxom young woman.
The culture-warring instinct runs deep in Mr. Peterson. Deep enough to drive him to insult a young woman of whom he had no reason to speak at all. But she’s not the point. Attacking the wokesters is the point.
From the Blog
As a pop culture obsessive, I wanted a way to track my watching, reading, etc., habits. But as a fan of DIY web development, I didn’t want to rely on even more third-party services like Goodreads or Letterboxd. So I decided to make my own, and thus was born the Cultural Diet.
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