Weekend Reads (Nov 4): Matthew Perry (RIP), Godzilla, SEO vs. Google, Sam Bankman-Fried
Recommended weekend reading for November 4, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Matthew Perry, best known for his role as Chandler Bing on Friends, died last week from an apparent drowning. He was 54 years old. Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall reflects on the importance of Perry’s wit and sarcasm to Friends.
That he had already been through so many career ups and downs so early in his life gave him a world-weariness that nicely contrasted with the baby face he still had in 1994. It made Chandler into the perfect emotional foil to the more upbeat pals like Monica and Phoebe. And Chandler’s snarky, guarded response to the world became an essential, hilarious counterweight to the sentimentality of the rest of Friends. Without Chandler, the more sincere elements of the show could have drowned in their own schmaltz. He is to the early Friends seasons what Han Solo is to the original Star Wars trilogy: not the main character, but the one whose sheer irreverence prevents more central pieces of the story (Luke learning about the Force, Ross falling in love with Rachel) from seeming too serious and self-important.
Meanwhile, Greg Cwik considers how Matthew Perry embraced his own flaws through his characters.
Perry’s brand of comedy was the flustered failure, and his forays into drama were modern men afflicted with inner anguish; he brought to both a singular woebegone quality, the crestfallen character who not may not like himself, but tries to be better. And it’s not just characters he was hired to play: the characters he wrote, the people he created, are mired in the same melancholy. His 2016 play The End of Longing, which he wrote and starred in, concerns a bibulous, broken man having an existential crisis, struggling to find meaning in the mundanity of his existence. It’s even in guest roles on shows like Scrubs, where he plays an air traffic controller who finds out his father isn’t really his biological father, and must decide whether he will give the man a kidney. (He does.)
There are so many classic Chandler moments in Friends, it’s hard to pick a favorite. But one of my favorites is from “The One with All the Resolutions,” in which Chandler takes a bet that he can go a week without making fun his friends. The stress of keeping so many jokes to himself finally gets to be too much, though.
Not surprisingly, numerous tributes have come pouring in. But even with all of his success on Friends, Perry often struggled with addiction, which led him to help others who struggled — and that may be his true legacy.
A new Godzilla film — Godzilla Minus One — is coming to theaters, and for Chris Plante, it’s a welcome rejoinder to the recent spate of Godzilla-related media.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve enjoyed the near-decade of Godzilla entertainment in America. But as someone who has Shin Godzilla at the top of his Godzilla tier list, who introduced his child to Mothra at far too young an age, and has a Hedorah anatomy poster sitting behind him at this very moment, this is the Godzilla I’ve been waiting for.
Godzilla films provide filmmakers a precious opportunity to tell political stories not just about individuals, but about communities, or even entire nations. And because Godzilla movies will always feature a kaiju destroying famous cities and landmarks like a toddler let loose in a Lego museum, people will show up. It’s a fantastic entertainment vessel for big ideas. For years now, Godzilla has been giving us plenty of sugar. But considering the state of the world, I’m glad he’s once again showing up with a bit of medicine, too.
Related: Watch the first trailer for Godzilla Minus One on Opus.
Luke T. Harrington explores the curious case of BuzzFeed’s “terrible new” horror movie, and ultimately reflects on modern internet culture.
When New Line Cinema first bought the rights back in 2018, it struck me as both inevitable and stupid — inevitable because the Dear David story was extremely viral Content™️; stupid because it really wasn’t that much of a story. It was mostly just a parade of tropes, but by slowly releasing details on Twitter, Ellis had made it all feel brand-new. It felt like anything could happen — that at any moment, Ellis could pop up in your timeline with definitive proof ghosts were real. How do you turn that sort of Content™️ into a traditional, three-act movie? I have no idea, and apparently neither did New Line, seeing as they eventually re-sold the rights—back to BuzzFeed.
So, yes, since “firing” me, BuzzFeed has apparently become a movie studio. In 2020, having failed to make either serious journalism or low-effort clickbait profitable (in the long term, at least), they announced a new partnership with Lionsgate to produce “socially relevant and high-concept feature films for global millennial and Gen Z audiences,” which just might qualify as the biggest, most belated, and most desperate “pivot to video” of all time. A year and a half later, the partnership announced Dear David as its third film, which might lead you to believe they’d finally cracked the nut on how to turn it into a movie. They had not.
Apple’s recent “Scary Fast” event was notable for the announcement of the company’s new “M3” chips, which boast some impressive specs. But what’s really got people talking is the revelation that the entire event was shot using iPhones.
Throughout the video, you’ll see that Apple used a lot of hardware and technology beyond the iPhone 15 Pro itself. Some important context here is that Apple would also use a lot of this same hardware if it were shooting using more traditional camera hardware.
“We were able to get the same complex shots with iPhone 15 Pro Max,” Oakes explained. “It’s amazing to see that the quality from a device that is so small and so portable can rival a large $20,000 camera.”
Some have mocked Apple’s announcement, claiming that it implies that all you only need an iPhone 15 to shoot footage that looks that good. But John Gruber isn’t having it:
This is ridiculous. Do these people think that previous Apple keynote films were shot with just a single camera person wielding something like a $40K RED cinema camera and no crew, no lighting, no cranes? That the iPhone “needs help” that traditional cinema cameras do not? I mean, guess what, they used professional microphones too.
The Kotaku staff have compiled a list of 16 video games that felt ahead of their time. Most of the games are pretty obvious, but there are some surprising selections, like Ghostbusters, which I played all the time on my cousin’s Commodore 64 back in the ’80s.
David Crane’s 1984 computer game Ghostbusters is a favorite of mine, but glancing at it today, most people would be hard-pressed to find anything it does that seems particularly extraordinary. In 1984, though, the magic was obvious, thanks to its remarkable “bank account” system. Effectively an early example of the sort of video game password that saves your progress which would become ubiquitous in the NES era a few years later, it was more than the technology that made it so cool. It was the implementation.
In this lengthy feature, The Verge’s Amanda Chicago Lewis travels to a party for people who specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) in order to figure out why Google’s search results seem so much worse these days.
Google had started with a noble cause: trying to make the internet easier to navigate at scale. The company did accomplish that goal, but in doing so, it inadvertently and profoundly changed how the internet looked. The problem lay in Google trying to be an objective and neutral arbiter of an information landscape that was meant to pretend it did not exist. You cannot design a free, automated system to help people find information without some people trying to game that system. You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at.
For the past 25 years, the internet as we know it has been almost entirely defined and controlled by Google. What the SEOs do matters for all of us on a daily basis, distorting how we perceive the world in ways we can hardly begin to imagine or understand. Yet any money that any SEO has made is a fraction of a crumb compared to Google’s 10-layer cake. The company brings in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, profits that skew Google’s choices and priorities. As Google’s founders wrote back in 1997: “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that too many people write websites for search engines first, and humans second. Consider practically every recipe blog out there, and the endlessly long preambles that begin every recipe; those are written to game Google, not for a potential chef’s benefit. It’s annoying and arguably making things worse. But so long as people can make truckloads of money doing it, it’s going to keep on happening.
Also from The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto has done impressive work covering the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed FTX crypto exchange who was convicted of fraud and conspiracy this week, and now faces up to 110 years in prison. In a sobering piece, she looks at the impact of Bankman-Fried’s trial and sentencing on his parents.
There are some questions about how much Bankman and Fried knew about the schemes at FTX. But there is no doubt in my mind that they truly suffered through the monthlong trial. Whatever delusions they may have had about their son’s innocence dissipated over the course of the trial. By the end, I think they knew how this was going to go. I think Bankman-Fried did, too.
I have been wondering since opening statements why Bankman-Fried didn’t simply plead guilty. Sure, he might not get a deal like his co-conspirators, Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh. But pleading guilty, showing himself to be sorry, and throwing himself on the mercy of a sentencing judge — well, it could have played. At minimum, it would have spared his friends and family the humiliation of this trial.
Speaking of SEO and clickbait, check out this headline: “Scientists Solved the Mystery of an Ancient Continent That Disappeared.”
For decades, researchers have been puzzled by the disappearance of a huge 3,000-mile-long landmass, known as Argoland, that once bordered northwestern Australia some 155 million years ago, during the Jurassic era.
Scientists know that Argoland existed because it created an immense patch of old seafloor as it moved north, known as the Argo Abyssal Plain. The tantalizing footsteps of this ancient landmass lead into Southeast Asia, but then the trail suddenly seems to go cold, with no sign of a huge continental chunk buried under the region.
Now, if only scientists could figure out what happened to Mu…
YouGov polled almost 30,000 Americans concerning their book-owning habits, and the results are in.
Overall, counting the 9% who say they own no physical books, at least 69% of Americans own no more than 100 books (6% are unsure how many they own). Another 25% own at least 100 books, including 4% who own between 500 and 1,000 books, and 3% who own more than 1,000 volumes. (The wording of the poll allowed for some overlaps on round numbers, such as choices between owning “100 - 200 books” and “200 - 500” books.)
Not surprisingly, the results were affected by demographic factors. For example:
[A]mong Americans who earn less than 75% of the median national income, 15% own no books and 16% own at least 100. In contrast, among Americans who earn at least 200% of the median national income only 4% own no books and 40% own at least 100.
Looking at age, 19% of Americans between 31 and 35 years old own at least 100 physical books, compared to 31% of those between 51 and 55, and 42% of those between 71 and 75.
I’m not sure how many books we own, but it’s well over 500, especially if you count all of our kids’ books.
Finally, the Southern Baptist Convention was rocked recently when the SBC’s leadership filed a controversial legal brief that contradicts its efforts to protect victims of abuse — and many, like Chris Davis, are feeling betrayed.
The genius of Southern Baptist polity — in which any church messenger can make a motion or submit a resolution or propose directives to entity trustees — was finally working in the favor of survivors. While some found the progress to be too little, too late, real energy was stirring. In the back of the car, it seemed like we were finally heading in the right direction.
And then the car pulled into the parking lot of Killary’s case, and the SBC’s considerable legal resources were put to work against a survivor’s pursuit of justice and to protect the institution that enabled her abuse.
Not only was this move not discussed by anyone in the car, it was diametrically opposed to every step our gathered convention had affirmed over four years. Here we are — survivors and pastors and therapists and attorneys who thought things were changing for the better — wondering what had just happened.
I’m Presbyterian myself, not Baptist, so I don’t pretend to know all of the legal ins and outs of this. (I’m still trying to figure out PCA polity as a relatively new church elder, never mind SBC polity.) Regardless, situations like these ought to be alarming and eye-opening; institutions should never be held up as more important or worthy of protection than the people in them.
From the Blog
While digging through a box of childhood mementoes that my parents gave me several years ago, I came across a nearly intact promotional magazine for 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (one of my favorite Star Trek movies). Obvious nostalgia aside, it got me thinking about how differently we engage with movies nowadays.
Thumbing through the pages of this promotional magazine certainly brings on a wave of nostalgia, not just for the original Star Trek crew, but also for that era where information about movies was often sparse and limited to a magazine or two. It’s a modern paradox. On the one hand, we have access to so much information, making it easier than ever to learn even the most trivial bits of info about the most obscure films. On the other hand, we now take all of that information for granted, and I do think that movies — and art in general — have lost a little bit of their special-ness compared to when access wasn’t so great.
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