Weekend Reads (May 18): Roger Corman (RIP), Godzilla, Eurovision, Humane Websites
Recommended weekend reading for May 18, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Widely considered the “king of the ‘B’ movies,” legendary filmmaker Roger Corman died last week at the age of 98.
Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).
I don’t think you can really over-state the impact that Corman had on modern cinema. If nothing else, he was responsible for launching the careers of Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Dennis Hopper, and William Shatner — to name but a few.
Corman directed a lot of “B” movies with truly fantastic titles like It Conquered the World, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. But his elaborate adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g., House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum) are gothic horror masterpieces, and helped establish Vincent Price as an icon of the macabre.
Many of Roger Corman’s films are currently streaming on Kanopy and Tubi.
Cole Burgett continues his celebration of Godzilla’s 70th anniversary with a look at the franchise’s Heisei era, which ran from 1984 to 1995.
Here, very much like the 1954 original, the films portray a world grappling with the ramifications of forbidden knowledge and scientific hubris, with subjects ranging from genetic manipulation to the perils of time travel. Deepening the lore of Godzilla series and raising urgent questions about the moral responsibilities inherent in periods of rapid technological advancement, the Heisei Era films reflect a society increasingly aware of the complex relationship between human innovation and its unintended side effects.
Heisei-era Godzilla movies include The Return of Godzilla (1984), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995).
The Playlist writers have put together their list of 35 must-see TV series to watch this summer, including new seasons of Sweet Tooth, Bridgerton, House of the Dragon, and The Bear.
While many Americans were enjoying the recent aurora borealis caused by unusually strong solar activity, farmers were probably less enthused.
The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.
One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years.
Let this be a sobering reminder that our modern technology, with all of its amazing capabilities and benefits, is still at the mercy of forces we can’t control.
Cue the nostalgia! Here’s a list of essential alternative and modern rock albums from the ’90s.
Were the 1990s rock’s last stand as a dominant cultural force? Too soon to say, but if so, it went out with a bang. In the ’90s, the alternative scene that began in the ’80s blew up bigger than anybody could have guessed — Gen X took modern rock in a million directions, blending it with electronics, funk, pop, prog, and anything else that pushed the meter into the red.
Related: Discogs’ list of 12 essential post-punk albums.
This year’s Eurovision song competition was one of the most controversy-laden of all time. The winner, Switzerland’s Nemo, criticized the competition for not allowing fans to bring non-binary flags into the venue. (Nemo is Eurovision’s first non-binary winner.) The 2024 competition was also subject to pro-Palestinian protests due to Israel’s participation. (Eurovision is officially billed as a neutral, non-political event.) And finally, the Netherlands’ Joost Klein — who was favored to win — was expelled and will now likely face legal charges after being accused of making illegal threats.
Related: Photos of the top moments from Eurovision 2024.
Eamonn Forde argues that the music industry’s greed and hubris are setting it up for a big fall.
Greed only begets more greed. An incrementally bloated and stretched belly needs more and more to fill it when feeding time comes around again. So the industry is turning to even more ways to squeeze cash out of its most loyal customers. It is calling them “superfans” now, but the more cynical might suggest “stooges,” “marks” or “patsies” are more apposite names. Charge them more for their subscriptions and charge them extra for access to “exclusive content.” Build “superfan apps” for them. Make even more “vinyl variants” for their next album and suggest to fans that they are not real fans unless they buy them all.
By the way, be sure to check out The Quietus’ slick new redesign, which they launched earlier this month.
Related: The House recently passed new legislation intended to make ticket pricing more transparent. “The TICKET Act would require sellers to list the total cost of a ticket to buyers, including fees. They would also have to disclose whether the ticket they are selling are speculative — meaning not currently in their possession.” You know the ticket industry is bad when it can make Democrats and Republicans set aside their differences and work together.
Google’s plans to integrate AI-generated answers into its search results might result in a better user experience, but it could also have a devastating effect on publishers.
“Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers,” read an accurate headline in the Washington Post on Monday. Until now, publishers have been able to rely on significant volumes of traffic coming from the blue links that appear under many queries. But what the company is now calling AI overviews often obscure these links, requiring users to click to see them, or simply abstracting them away in an automatically generated summary. Analysts who have studied the company’s early experiments with SGE say a bloodbath is coming.
Casey Newton also has a brief rundown of everything that Google announced at their recent I/O conference.
The above is a reminder that if you have some favorite blogs and publications, be sure to subscribe to get their latest content, via email or RSS.
Related: Google has added a “Web” filter to their search results, which will just display old school text links sans any AI-generated content. (Now, if only there was a way to make that the default view.)
Researchers have resurrected the internet’s very first search engine.
Archie, first crafted by Alan Emtage while a student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, allowed for the searching of various “anonymous” FTP servers around what was then a very small web of universities, researchers, and government and military nodes. It was groundbreaking; it was the first echo of the “anything, anywhere” Internet to come. And when The Serial Port went looking, it very much did not exist.
I love these kinds of stories, and I applaud any and all efforts to chronicle the internet’s early days. Technology evolves so quickly, which is cool and exciting and means there’s always something new to learn, but that also means that so much gets lost in the midst of the constant rush to improve and enhance.
The U.S. government has announced an ambitious plan to overhaul and standardize over 10,000 .gov websites in the next 10 years.
“It is a personal pet peeve of mine that you can go to a government website and they all look different,” Clare Martorana, [Office of Management and Budget]’s federal chief information officer, tells Fast Company. “The public needs to know they’re interacting with the government.”
“One of the things that we’ve been working on is that visual language that will show you without having to use words, this is all within a family,” Martorana says. “I recognize it, it’s trusted. I can click on this link and I’m not going to be worried about being taken to some place or intercepted by a private sector company.”
Via TLDR Design.
Earlier this year, I helped my mom file a request via a government website, and one of her biggest concerns was whether or not it could be trusted. Was it, in fact, a legitimate government website, and not some scam? In light of that, I welcome any and all efforts to standardize government websites. Rightly or wrongly, there’s already plenty of suspicion of anything government-related; no need to add to it.
Of course, as the article points out, the private sector could probably get things done faster, but the government must be more exacting and rigorous in their approach, especially since accessibility is a priority — and that’s a good thing.
Speaking of improving websites, Michelle Barker offers up a manifesto for a humane web. But why do we even need such a manifesto?
The web is becoming hostile to humans. Users are tracked and their privacy is routinely violated. Search results are populated with ads. We are constantly spammed by bots. Generative AI threatens to turn previously useful public forums into soulless marketing soup, while sacrificing the livelihoods of the creators that unwittingly power them. Power-hungry data centres demand the burning of fossil fuels, and divert water and energy from communities, emitting tonnes of carbon in order to power this digital junkyard. Users abandon hostile websites that take too long to load on low-powered devices, or are forced to upgrade, as the pile of electronic waste grows.
Via Frontend Focus. Everything Barker highlights is pretty much common sense in my book, and I think there’s something to be said for her use of Michael F. Hauben’s classic term “netizen” to describe our current relationship to the internet: “Even when we go online to read the news, or find a recipe, it is virtually impossible to prevent our data being harvested and used to mould our browsing experience. We all shape the web of today, whether or not by choice.”
From the Blog
One of my most anticipated albums of the year — Luxury’s Like Unto Lambs — was released this week, and it did not disappoint.
Like Unto Lambs may be Luxury’s shortest album to date, its nine songs barely passing thirty-seven minutes, but it’s no less full or complete than its predecessors; there’s nothing lacking in its relative brevity. As always, Luxury adhere to quality over quantity, and these are high-quality songs to be sure.
In addition to Luxury’s music, I highly recommend watching the Parallel Love documentary, which explores the surprising twists and turns of their decades-long music career.
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