Weekend Reads (June 8): Uno, Christian Romance, Joe Hisaishi, ICQ, Ansel Adams
Recommended weekend reading for June 8, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
My family just returned from vacation, during which I played many rounds of Uno with my daughter (and lost most of them because she’s an Uno phenom). The card game debuted 52 years ago, and remains one of the most popular and successful games in the world.
Uno currently holds the top spot in the traditional games category — which includes everything you would find in the games aisle at a Walmart or Target, including board games (with the exception of trading card games such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!) — according to retail tracking service Circana. It has held this title for two years globally, and three in the US.
The card game is now for sale in over 80 countries. Its many editions range from a braille Uno to a nonpartisan edition, where the usual red and blue cards are swapped for orange and purple to avoid associations with American politics.
This year alone, Mattel has released 27 new Uno decks. These includes the launch of Uno Fandom, a category that “celebrates fandoms big and small across TV, film, sports teams and pop culture,” Mattel’s Vice President and Global Head of Games, Ray Adler, tells CNN. These decks, commemorating everything from Harry Potter to the NFL, include special rules and collectible foil cards.
Via 1440. For the record, we are a pro-stacking family. (Which means we might need to buy a copy of Uno’s “Show ‘em No Mercy” edition.)
As a literary and film genre, Christian romance is experiencing new levels of success. But the authors behind such titles as Redeeming Love and Someone Like You consider their works evangelical as much as artistic.
Though romance is at the heart of these novels, their plots also take on real-world suffering, including suicide (Love Comes Softly), abandonment (The Shunning by Lewis), abuse and assault (Redeeming Love by Rivers), and grief (Someone Like You). The spiritual support they offer is particularly relevant to readers who’ve experienced similar hardships. Characters pray and get saved, worship and read the Bible. Endings are happy — and redemptive.
From the outset of the genre, Christian romance has had missional intentions. Many novels today include back-of-the-book discussion guides with Bible passages and devotional prompts. Oke has stated, “I see my writing as an opportunity to share my faith. … If my books touch lives, answer individuals’ questions, or lift readers to a higher plane, then I will feel that they have accomplished what God has asked me to do.” Kingsbury has defended Christian stories not just as escapes but as an “unbelievable force” in our faith journeys.
Sarah Welch-Larson reflects on the music of Joe Hisaishi, best known for his soundtracks for Hayao Miyazaki’s movies.
When I think of his work, I think of the lush quality of the strings, the sweeping grandeur of the massive trees at the beginning of Princess Mononoke and the mournfully grand tone of the main theme he wrote for the movie. His songs are usually lively and playful, or else thoughtful, as in my favorite song from Spirited Away, “The Sixth Station,” which has strings and piano in measured conversation with each other over a stretch of the movie that's mostly silent montage of a train journey through a watery land.
Hisaishi is the very definition of a master. I get chills even just thinking about the Princess Mononoke theme.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently came under fire for tweeting that “the cost of creating content [is] close to zero.”
Needless to say, the tweet soon spared backlash from many users, with numerous music fans and artists highlighting the struggles that are still faced when trying to make a career out of being a musician.
“Music will still be valued in a hundred years. Spotify won’t,” one wrote in response. “It will only be remembered as a bad example of a parasitic tool for extracting value from other peoples music. (or “content” as some grifters like to call it).”
Producer and musician Rusty Egan shared: “Cost of time to write music, cost of equipment to record music, cost to master and to upload to all platforms is not zero. Zero is the cost and value of tiktok hits.”
Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie Butler simply wrote: “Fuck off you out of touch billionaire.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it over and over again: streaming is great, but if you really want to support musicians (and artists of all stripes), then buy their stuff as often as you possibly can.
The Treble staff have released their list of the 42 best albums of 2024 so far, including releases from Broadcast, Cloud Nothings, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Beth Gibbons.
Just about all of the music that we cover, whether we love it or not, comes from artists who probably merit a much larger audience than the algorithm will allow, and we hope that in being advocates for those artists, we might move the needle just a bit. And given how much music there is to cover, and how much more motivated we are to cover it, we’ve expanded our best of 2024 so far list to 42 albums.
Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn wrote a lovely piece about music’s unique ability to create surprising connections and bring memories to life.
How does this happen, though? It’s mysterious to me. Nothing had changed in the music itself, which was recorded 50 years ago, but something had changed in me. Somehow I was in the right mood, or the right place at the right time, to be fully receptive. It made me realise once again how much of ourselves we bring when we listen to music; that it isn’t a passive experience, but an active one — songs fly out into the air, and something in us flies out to meet them.
ICQ, one of the internet’s very first instant messaging tools, is shutting down on June 26.
It’s hard to overstate just how big ICQ was at the turn of the millennium. It was released by Israeli developer Mirabilis in late 1996; I came to it in ’97 by way of an in-the-know friend who breathlessly regaled me with tales of this exciting new program that let us talk to online friends anywhere, at any time — no more having to wait for your pals to show up on Undernet! Believe me, this was huge.
At one point ICQ had more than 100 million registered users, but it didn’t take long for other companies to get in on the IM action, leading to ICQ’s slow decline. AOL, which had acquired Mirabilis in 1998, sold it to Russian company Digital Sky Technologies — despite its decline in the West, ICQ remained popular in Russia — in 2010, at a significant loss.
I used ICQ all the time circa 1998 to chat with friends and classmates. Back then, instant messaging felt so revolutionary and futuristic. As far as I know, my ICQ account still exists, but I don’t remember my password and the email address associated with it disappeared into the ether a long time ago.
Adobe was recently criticized by the estate of Ansel Adams — one of the most celebrated and well-known photographers of all time — after they started selling AI-generated imitations of Adams’ art.
“Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists’ estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms,” said the Adams estate on Threads. “It’s past time to stop wasting resources that don’t belong to you.”
Via TLDR Design.
Related: The upcoming (and highly anticipated) Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse will contain no generative AI content according to one of its producers. “One of the main goals of the films is to create new visual styles that have never been seen in a studio CG film, not steal the generic plagiarized average of other artists’ work.”
Some might claim that AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a “victimless crime” because no actual children are involved in the creation of the images and videos. But Samantha Cole and Emanuel Maiberg explain why that argument’s a load of bullshit.
For people who do cross from collecting or even generating images online to becoming “contact offenders” who abuse minors themselves, illustrated or computer generated CSAM is often used as a grooming tool. “We see it with the use of Simpsons characters, to Dora the Explorer,” Bryce Westlake, an associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies and a faculty member of the department's Forensic Science program, told 404 Media. “These materials are used to groom children. For example ‘Look, Dora the Explorer is doing this thing. She is someone you learn from right? If she is doing it, then surely it is okay for you to do it too.’”
The normalization of child sexual abuse through these images affects minors as well as the people creating it. “At some point, the fantasy and the image/video no longer elicits the same response, therefore the person needs to increase the stimuli,” Westlake said. “This either means more graphic 'fake' material or moving on towards offending against a child in the real world, or via a webcam or something.”
I’m increasingly convinced that humanity, as a species, is simply not evolved enough (morally or otherwise) to properly consider, much less handle, AI’s potential for harm. We focus on the tech bro promises or the visions of AI that popular culture has installed in our minds. We never stop to consider how it’ll promulgate all of the horrible things that we still haven’t fixed, like CSAM.
Ryan Burge, a social scientist and a pastor, reflects on the growing trend of Americans simply dropping out of the many social aspects of American life (e.g., religion, politics, education).
As both a social scientist and a pastor, the growing phenomenon of people who just walk away from many of the key social aspects of American life is incredibly worrying. Putnam wrote at length in Bowling Alone about the importance of social capital, which are those invisible bonds that hold society together. It’s the reason people care about the local high school even though their kids graduated decades ago. Or, they want to see money spent to clean up the city park even if it’s on the other side of town. It makes us feel like we are part of a larger community.
Where is social capital generated? In the social institutions that used to be woven into the very fabric of American society. And now they have disappeared, and it’s pretty clear that a growing number of people are actively rejecting all the vestiges of what remains. They don’t seek out education, they don’t feel like they fit into traditional political categories, and they seem apathetic to the political process.
Via Jake Meador.
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