Weekend Reads (Sep 2): Google, “Starfield,” Netflix vs. South Korea, Nebraska Volleyball

Recommended weekend reading material for September 2, 2023.

Jason Morehead

Sep 2, 2023

For over 20 years, Google Search has arguably been the most important factor in determining what content we see online. However, that appears to be changing as people turn to other sources (e.g., Reddit, social media) for info.

Marwick said that within the internet landscape of the 2000s, Google was the thing that sat on top of everything else. There was a sense that as anarchic and chaotic as the early social web was out in the digital wilderness, what Google surfaced denoted a certain level of quality.
But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”
“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”

The article mentions recipe blogs as one example of how Google has affected online content, and subsequently, how that content has grown worse in an attempt to appease Google’s algorithm. I spent some time earlier this week searching for a good way to make burgers in a cast iron skillet — my past attempts have always resulted in a smoke-filled house — and every article was an interminable and unreadable mess of pointless anecdotes and ads.

Compared to normal recipe blogs, anecdote-free sites like IOnlyWantTheRecipe, No Bullshit Kitchen, and YepRecipes are a virtual godsend. (To be clear: I don’t blame the recipe bloggers themselves. Hate the game, not the player, and all that.)

And for the record, I’m still looking for a good way to make burgers in a cast iron skillet. (If you know of one, please let me know.)

WordPress, arguably the world’s most popular website content management system, recently announced their 100-Year Plan, which will ensure that your website remains up and running for a century. I love the idea behind the plan — we’ve lost too many great websites over the years — but the $38,000 price tag effectively puts it beyond the reach of most folks.

Also, WordPress is pretty stable right now, but if there’s anything the tech industry has taught us, it’s that there’s no telling what will happen to even the most successful companies in even just a few years’ time.

Bethesda Softworks’ Starfield is one of 2023’s most anticipated and ambitious video games, a massive sci-fi/actioner that allows the player to explore 1,000 planets throughout the Milky Way — and wrestle with some theological implications, too.

I grew up Catholic, obviously, but I think [Starfield] has more to do with where I’m at in my life now. I’ve flip-flopped from agnostic to atheist probably five times in the course of making this game. That’s why both views are represented in the game. There’s the atheist view, there’s the more agnostic, religious view, but we don’t answer that question for the player. We don’t say what’s out there or what’s causing their thing — it’s open to interpretation. Players have gotten other things before, the science, the exploration, meeting the alien race that wants to invade. Those are all great. I love all those things. But we wanted to know if we could tackle a bit of a larger story in a game, something that one of these great movies accomplished.

Hollywood studios have lost the strikes, writes Mary McNamara; they just don’t realize it yet.

Whatever short-term financial gain the studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers hoped to gain by forcing the first dual strike of writers and actors in 40 years has long since been overshadowed by all that they are losing.
Public support, brand loyalty, individual reputations and group unity, not to mention, as the strikes threaten the fall TV lineup, theatrical release calendar, film festivals and the Oscar race, months’ — perhaps an entire year’s — worth of profit and prestige.
The writers and actors have already won the battle of solidarity and righteousness; the question now is how long before the studios get over themselves and make a deal.

With the success of titles like Squid Game, Bloodhounds, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and Physical 100, Netflix has grown increasingly reliant on South Korean productions. That success, however, hasn’t necessarily trickled down to the people actually making those shows.

A-listers negotiate their own deals and oftentimes treat any foregone residuals as baked into their one-time payday, which industry insiders estimate have now broken $400,000 an episode — about on par with the cast of HBO’s “Succession.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, per-episode rates for supporting actors — who receive neither residuals nor premiums — start at about $300.
These rates are based on network television pay scales negotiated by the actors union before the takeover by streaming. But because Netflix shows have far shorter seasons than the typical Korean network drama — the 16-episode miniseries was once the television standard — total payouts are much smaller, according to the union.
In addition, Song said, shooting a Netflix episode often takes far longer than the one or two days that were typical for Korean network shows. “Shoots for Netflix originals, especially genres like zombies or creature features, are far more labor-intensive,” he said. “Actors are still expected to show up for however many shoots it takes to film one episode without enough additional compensation.”

The Vanity Fair staff has compiled a list of 25 perfect TV episodes from the last 25 years, including selections from Friends, Arrested Development, The Wire, Lost, and Breaking Bad. Via Kottke.

Back in December, I wrote about a lawsuit claiming that movie studios should be held liable for false advertising based on their movie trailers. This week, a judge dismissed the lawsuit.

[T]he court found that Woulfe, who rented the movie a second time on Google Play under the belief that de Armas could appear in a director’s cut, “lacks standing” to bring a suit because his “injury is self-inflicted.” Wilson concluded Woulfe didn’t watch Yesterday because of statements from Universal that de Armas appears in the movie. He also found that there was no reason to believe that the “version of Yesterday they accessed on Google Play would be a different version of the movie” than the one they watched the first time.

Brian McBride of Stars of the Lid died this week at the age of 53; no cause of death has been announced.

In 1993, McBride and [Adam] Wiltzie formed Stars of the Lid in Austin, Texas, alongside Kirk Laktas, who left after 1995’s Music for Nitrous Oxide. Inspired by Brian Eno, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Polish film composer Zbigniew Preisner and the more experimental output of the English pop band Talk Talk, Stars of the Lid forged, warped and wondered at new pathways for ambient music. Guitar feedback, field recordings, unusual samples, sumptuous drones and, later on, strings and horns, gave ease to an unsettled axis.
The duo recorded several albums, first together in Austin, then remotely as McBride moved to Chicago and later Los Angeles, and Wiltzie to Belgium. The Ballasted Orchestra, released in 1997, was an early triumph of eerie atmosphere balanced by fragments of forlorn melody — “Taphead,” named for the Talk Talk track, and the two-part "Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30" make worthy tributes to the band's influences. But it would be The Tired Sounds of Stars of Lid (2001) and And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007) that reshaped how listeners understood ambient music. McBride and Wiltzie approached string and horn arrangements not as a textured afterthought but as fully integral to the whole — melodies entering, receding and repeating with the grace and grandiosity of a slow-motion space opera. These double albums are long, sprawling works, rewarding patient listeners with a depth of not only sound but emotion.

Tributes have appeared online from Hammock, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Chris Walla, Hotel Neon, Eluvium, A Closer Listen, Dead Leaf Echo, and many more. Meanwhile, Pitchfork has compiled a list of ten essential Brian McBride recordings, including a collaboration with Kranky labelmates Labradford.

If you’ve never listened to Stars of the Lid before, then do yourself a favor and check out The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. You’ll hear some of the most beautiful sounds you’re ever likely to hear.

A brief history of Monotype, which has come to dominate the font market — for better or worse.

According to Quartz, Monotype has claimed its purchases made life better for customers, who only have to navigate a licensing agreement from one company to access a bevy of fonts. But one font designer believed the acquisition of Hoefler & Co. felt like “a kraken eating up the industry.”
“A market with one very large player and a lot of smaller players is not a healthy market,” Gerry Leonidas, professor of typography at the University of Reading, told The Hustle. “It essentially stifles the competition and makes it difficult for alternative models to grow.”
While boutique foundries still exist and do work for big companies, Monotype owns most major fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman. Its main competitors are Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts, the latter of which gives away fonts for free.
In addition to the giants, there are thousands of other designers, some hobbyists and some full-time font makers, who try to sell their typefaces. Most of them have to go through — you guessed it — Monotype.

Via 1440. And of course, there are AI-related concerns.

And finally, a moment for some school pride: My alma mater set a world record for the largest crowd to ever attend a women’s sporting event when 92,003 people crowded into Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium to watch the UNL women’s volleyball team play.

On what was dubbed “Volleyball Day in Nebraska,” the match was the culmination of months of planning for a program and state that have long led the way in enthusiasm for the sport. The crowd, at what is usually the home of Nebraska football, broke the previous world record for women’s sports attendance — 91,648 — set on April 22, 2022, in Barcelona, Spain, for a Champions League match between FC Barcelona and Wolfsburg.

My friend Catherine was at the game and wrote about her experience:

I want things like a female VP and a massive fan following for women’s athletic teams to be normal things for girls to grow up seeing, not historic aberrations. It has to start somewhere, of course. And that’s why this display of investment and support has the potential to be so important.

Nebraska is usually considered a football state, but women’s volleyball has grown in popularity while the football team has struggled in recent years. Former head coach Scott Frost was fired due to poor performance and his replacement, Mickey Joseph, was fired after he was arrested for domestic abuse. I don’t envy new head coach Matt Rhule; his work’s cut out for him and Husker fans who remember the Tom Osborne glory days can be merciless.

From the Blog

CNET — one of the oldest tech news websites — recently announced that they were deleting thousands of articles from their archive in order to boost their search engine rankings. It’s a decision that kinda sorta goes against the promise of the internet.

One of the internet’s great promises was that it would free content from physical formats (e.g., books, CDs, DVDs) that were expensive, wasteful, took up too much space, and were only useful if they were within reach. Once it was online, content would become accessible from anywhere, at any time, forever, so long as you had an internet connection. But now that we all have internet connections, it’s strange whenever content disappears — when that aforementioned promise fades a little bit — and for no good reason whatsoever.

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