Weekend Reads (Aug 13): The Simpsons & Church, GeoCities, Elon Musk, Crypto’s Cost, Excel Esports
Recommended reading material for the weekend of August 13, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Although The Simpsons has earned many Christians’ ire over the years, the series’ observations of American religion are quite trenchant.
Despite some early conservative queasiness about the show, The Simpsons is very old fashioned when it comes to faith. It’s one of the few shows on TV in which religion is portrayed as a normal part of American life. The Simpsons go to church regularly if not necessarily cheerfully. The pray before they eat. They may not be as faithful as their doofily goofily neighbor Ned Flanders, but it’s safe to say they would qualify as what most researchers call “engaged Christians.” That is, the word “Christian” isn’t just a nominal label — it’s something that has a real impact on their life, including where they spend Sunday morning.
I knew that the Cornerstone Festival (RIP) was something special when, in addition to seeing a bunch of great bands, I attended a presentation on The Simpsons and religion that was very complimentary of Homer, Marge, et al.
A number of Hollywood films, ranging from classic Westerns to sci-fi hits, can trace their origins back to Japan. A classic example is 1960’s The Magnificent Seven.
It’s a little-known but mighty relevant fact that Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai was actually released in the U.S. as The Magnificent Seven. So, it made perfect sense that John Sturges’ adaptation bore the same name. Thanks to Sturges and a top-notch cast that included Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, and Eli Wallach as the hiss-worthy baddie, they created a classic — translated to that most American of genres, the Western — that works on its own merits while honoring Seven Samurai.
Alex Jones may have to fork over tens of millions of dollars for his defamation of Sandy Hook victims and their families, but don’t expect this to stop other hucksters and blowhards from following in his footsteps.
Other conspiracy theorists are less likely than Jones to end up in court, in part because they have learned from his mistakes. Instead of straightforwardly accusing the families of mass-shooting victims of making it all up, they adopt a naive, “just asking questions” posture while poking holes in the official narrative. When attacking a foe, they tiptoe right up to the line of defamation, being careful not to do anything that could get them sued or barred from social media. And when they lead harassment campaigns, they pick their targets wisely — often maligning public figures rather than private citizens, which gives them broader speech protections under the First Amendment.
A longtime seller of vintage video games has been accused of selling forgeries for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Investigations into Ricciardi began when collector Kevin Ng became suspicious of fakery upon examining his copy of Akalabeth, the first game that Ultima creator Richard Garriott released in 1980, as well as a Japanese copy of Mystery House by Sierra On-Line from 1980. This was followed by several similar revelations on the part of other collectors; Dominik Reichardt was the first collector to share his suspicions publicly via Twitter. Several collectors have since stated that these goods were bought as far back as 2015, according to a FAQ about the situation released by BBPCGC.
With retro games and their memorabilia becoming increasingly valuable, how did this apparent forgery go undetected for years? In hindsight, the impacted collectors say there were several telltale signs. Hang-tab holes on the packaging of these disks resembled hand-cut ones, while some of the stickers were not cut perfectly round. Furthermore, printed materials had blemishes that appeared to be printed on, such as dirt and creases, and CMYK dot patterns were found in places where they shouldn’t be, such as the sky in a black-and-white photograph printed on a package of an Ultima counterfeit.
The article also reveals how the rising speculative costs of vintage video games can impede efforts to preserve older games for future generations.
For years, Mobile Fidelity had a reputation for releasing high-quality vinyl reissues that were sourced directly from analog masters. But then the truth came out, resulting in what’s been called “the biggest debacle I’ve ever seen in the vinyl realm.”
In a sometimes halting video posted to the YouTube channel of his Phoenix record shop, the ‘In’ Groove, Esposito said that “pretty reliable sources” told him that MoFi (Mobile Fidelity), the Sebastopol, Calif., company that has prided itself on using original master tapes for its pricey reissues, had actually been using digital files in its production chain. In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.
Cue the analog vs. digital debate in 3… 2… 1…
I’m no audiophile — all of my musical consumption these days is digital, due mainly to convenience — but I’ve always found the analog/digital debate rather amusing. While I appreciate the physicality of analog releases, and the joy of poring over the artwork and liner notes, etc., I’ve never understood the fetishization of analog. But if you have the time and money to buy expensive reissues, and your listening experience is somehow improved by analog, then you be you, and let that be the end of it.
The creator of GeoCities was recently interviewed about the modern era of the Web vs. the “old” Web.
[W]hat has surprised me is how far away we’ve gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It’s so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. There’s various sites, of course, like Reddit and others. And so, you know, maybe it’s because it was early, maybe it’s because of the time. But I’ve been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we’ve seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And GeoCities was not about self-promotion. It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge. That’s something that frankly surprised me.
Paris Marx pokes some holes in the mythology surrounding Elon Musk and his various visions for the future.
As his profile has been elevated by relentless media attention, Musk has become the figure everyone was looking for: a powerful man who sold the fantasy that faith in the combined power of technology and the market could change the world without needing a role for the government. (Just don’t talk about the billions in subsidies that kept his companies going over the years.)
But that collective admiration has only served to bolster an unaccountable and increasingly hostile billionaire. The holes in those future visions, and the dangers of applauding billionaire visionaries, have only become harder to ignore.
Related: Two members of Musk’s “Twitter army” explain why they’re fans and how they combat lies about Musk and Tesla.
Crypto has been experienced a rough couple of months, and that may continue as people focus more on the tremendous energy costs of Bitcoin mining, and its impact on communities like Plattsburgh, New York.
In 2017, when the Bitcoin company Coinmint set up in the vacant space behind the Family Dollar Store in Plattsburgh, a city of less than 20,000 residents, electricity costs were one-third of the national average. Bitcoin miners had registered as industrial consumers, says Colin Read, a professor of economics and finance at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, who was also Plattsburgh’s mayor at the time. “And our industrial rate was less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour, which might be the lowest in the world.”
But Plattsburgh, which manages its own municipal utility, also has a monthly quota for electricity use. If the city exceeds that quota, it has to go looking elsewhere for electricity, forcing everyone’s utility bills up. In the winter of 2018, residents who heated their homes with electricity saw costs rise 30 to 40 percent, according to Read.
To give you some idea of just how much energy Bitcoin consumes: “In May of 2022, the world’s sum total of Bitcoin mining operations had an annual energy budget nearly equal to the entire country of Argentina, or the Czech Republic, or, according to Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, all the tea kettles in England boiling water for 26 years.”
As people acquire online fame, they might change themselves in sometimes shocking ways to ensure that they’ll continue to receive their audience’s approval.
When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.
The caricature quickly becomes the influencer's distinct brand, and all subsequent attempts by the influencer to remain on-brand and fulfill audience expectations require them to act like the caricature. As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.
After seeing him mentioned in the article, I went to Nikocado Avocado’s YouTube channel, which currently has over three million subscribers. In addition to showing him eating obscene amounts of food, Nikocado’s videos are filled with infantile outbursts alongside tear-filled confessions about his health issues and relationship woes. There’s something incredibly exhibitionistic about it all, though, such that it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just part of the Nikocado act/persona.
In any case, I shudder to think of all of the fans, friends, family members, etc., who are enabling behavior that’s so clearly self-destructive, both physically and mentally.
TikTok’s content moderators are being trained using a potentially illegal cache of images and videos of exploited and abused children.
TikTok is hardly alone in its struggle to purge child sexual abuse material. The most powerful social media platforms on the planet have long used machine learning and third-party human reviewers to catch and remove such content before it’s widely shared, and many companies work with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC, to alert law enforcement of such problematic imagery in their apps.
What is unique, however, is the way TikTok and its outside consultants are handling this material — an approach experts say is ham-handed and cavalier at best, and harmful and re-traumatizing at worst. They say showing sexual images of kids in content moderation training, censored or not, only re-victimizes them. And storing the images in a widely accessible document is reckless and unnecessary.
It might be a necessary evil, but there are few jobs that I’d want to do less than content moderation for a social network like TikTok or Facebook. There’s the unavoidable mental and spiritual damage, of course, that comes with looking at the worst of humanity day after day. But there would also be the knowledge that these multi-billion-dollar companies are tackling the problem in such a half-hearted, misguided, and bumbling manner.
Best case scenario, they’re just overwhelmed and struggling to keep up. Worst case scenario, they don’t actually care, either about the problem or the people they’ve hired to deal with it. And even worst case scenario, they don’t care because such content, terrible and illegal as it is, means engagement, and engagement means profit.
Finally, when they hear “esports,” most people probably think of competitions centered around video games like League of Legends and Rocket League. However, did you know that Excel — yes, Excel — has its own spirited competition?
The Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) hosts regular international competitions, both invitational and open to anyone, in which Excel pros strive to solve as many questions as possible from a complex task. You can download all three of the tasks used in last weekend's battle for free.
ESPN showed a 30-minute edited version of the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle between previous champions. The ESPN broadcast showed one of the three rounds; it focused on calculating how many points different spins of a free, online slot-machine-like game would generate for players. There were many spins and some quirky scoring rules.
From the Blog
Last month, I finished reading The Expanse series of novels, which served as the basis for one of my favorite sci-fi TV series of all time. Naturally, I wrote an in-depth (and spoiler-filled) review of the series.
Indeed, one could easily make a case that The Expanse is a masterclass in fictional world building, in striking a balance between what’s fantastical and bizarre, and what’s realistic and requires little-to-no suspension of disbelief. (It helps that one of the series’ key points is that the more things change, the more they stay the same, insofar as human nature goes. More on that in a moment.)
Related: How much do I like The Expanse TV series? Well, back in 2020, I called it “the best sci-fi show on TV right now,” an assertion by which I still stand even though the series concluded back in January.
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It's interesting, one of my records that I think sounds the best is The Postal Service - Give Up, and that for sure didn't come from an analog source.
Fortunately for my bank account, digital has supplanted analog since I got some new Edifiers. They sound fantastic hooked up to my Mac. They're fairly inexpensive, mass market speakers, but they beat my more expensive Kantos. With Apple Music lossless and those new speakers, I like the sound better than my records, I'm surprised to say.