Weekend Reads (September 7): Cinematic Universes, Bluesky, NaNoWriMo, the Internet Archive
Recommended weekend reading for September 7, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Luke T. Harrington considers the fate of cinematic universes like Star Wars and the MCU.
[T]hat’s the inevitable conflict you’re always going to run into when you seek to turn a movie into a Cinematic Universe™️: half the people who liked the original film liked it for how much it caught them off-guard, and they’ll want each new installment to surprise them just as much, while the other half will have such affection for the first installment that they’ll want each new one to be like a warm blanket, making them feel the exact same way the first one did, forever. Even if you can deliver on one of these things (a difficult enough task), there’s no way to deliver on both. Best-case scenario, you eventually alienate half your audience. Worst-case? Pretty much everyone walks away disgusted.
There was a time when every new Star Wars or MCU title was a must-see event here at Opus HQ. Nowadays, far too much of it’s boring and repetitive. It’s hard to get excited about a film or TV series that feels like it serves no purpose beyond maintaining an IP’s standing in the public consciousness.
Kotaku’s staff has compiled a list of the 50 best sci-fi movies of the last 50 years. Their list has plenty of expected titles — e.g., Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix, The Terminator — but it’s nice to see a few oddities, like Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
You may have noticed by now that I’m a sucker for romance movies, and ones that blend them with sci-fi elements tend to be near the top of that list. I believe Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was my first run-in to that hybrid genre, and to this day, it’s probably still one of the most effective.
Related: My review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from 2004. (Somehow, I totally missed that Gondry’s film turned 20 earlier this year.)
The Discogs community recently selected a list of the most underrated albums of all time, such as Portishead’s sophomore album from 1997.
When listeners first think of Portishead, they’re most likely to conjure up the dusty grooves of their debut, Dummy, one of trip-hop’s greatest records. Due to the album’s legacy, the group’s self-titled sophomore effort gets lost in conversation. After the sample-heavy approach of Dummy, the trio regrouped for an offering almost void of outside material. Still, the smokey, backroom vibes and spectral storytelling remain.
Writing for Plough, Peter Biles weighs the pros and cons of having so much music at our fingertips.
Roger Scruton, the late British philosopher, believed much of modern music had devolved into a vacuum of senseless chatter: “For the most part, the prevailing music is of an astounding banality. It is there in order to not be really there. It is a background to the business of consuming things.” This kind of music lacks a basic ingredient: real musicians. Songs are generated largely by computers instead of humans playing instruments, and “electrical pulses” stand in for rhythm. As a result, the musical landscape of the modern world is becoming “less and less human.” AI has exacerbated this problem by divorcing music production from human expertise. “Music is no longer something you must make for yourself, nor is it something you sit down to listen to,” Scruton continues. “It follows you wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard.”
Via The Dispatch.
The problem, as Biles indicates, is not listening to too much music. Rather, it’s listening to music without focus or intention, and just letting it sink into the background. (Although some music, like ambient music, is intentionally designed to function in the background.)
Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn has written a beautiful and brutally honest article about living with her husband’s long-term illness.
Looking back to 1992, when this all started, I realise that Ben and I were only 29 years old, and were utterly traumatised by what happened. But no one talked much then about mental health. PTSD was for war veterans, and no one ever suggested we have counselling to cope with the flashbacks or triggering episodes. He’d nearly died, and I had sat helplessly by, watching him suffer and nearly die, and that did something to each of us.
We can both feel impatient now with the way illness is discussed in public, where it is framed as a battle to be won. Positivity is the key! You have to boss your illness! You have to kick it in the balls! We grit our teeth when this language permeates the discourse. It simply isn’t helpful in relation to something that lasts so long.
Following Brazil’s recent ban of X/Twitter, over two million people have joined Bluesky, which arguably comes closest to matched the “traditional” X/Twitter experience, but with the added benefit of being decentralized (i.e., users can download and install the Bluesky software on their own server).
As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the No. 1 app in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.
You can follow me on Bluesky @opus.ing, if you’d like.
As AI-generated content grows increasingly ubiquitous, regardless of its quality, that ironically might pose a problem for future AI development.
All this A.I.-generated information can make it harder for us to know what’s real. And it also poses a problem for A.I. companies. As they trawl the web for new data to train their next models on — an increasingly challenging task — they’re likely to ingest some of their own A.I.-generated content, creating an unintentional feedback loop in which what was once the output from one A.I. becomes the input for another.
In the long run, this cycle may pose a threat to A.I. itself. Research has shown that when generative A.I. is trained on a lot of its own output, it can get a lot worse.
Via Futurism.
For example, when an AI image generator was trained on other AI-generated images, its outputted images all began to look the same within just a few generations — a technical problem to be sure, but also a problem given AI’s diversity issues.
NaNoWriMo’s recent AI statement, in which criticism of AI was labeled “classist” and “ableist,” has put the organization — best known for its November writing event — in hot water with authors and (former) board members.
After word of the FAQ spread, many writers on social media platforms voiced their opposition to NaNoWriMo’s position. Generative AI models are commonly trained on vast amounts of existing text, including copyrighted works, without attribution or compensation to the original authors. Critics say this raises major ethical questions about using such tools in creative writing competitions and challenges.
“Generative AI empowers not the artist, not the writer, but the tech industry. It steals content to remake content, graverobbing existing material to staple together its Frankensteinian idea of art and story,” wrote Chuck Wendig, the author of Star Wars: Aftermath, in a post about NaNoWriMo on his personal blog.
The Internet Archive was dealt a major blow this week when a court ruled that its book scanning program is tantamount to copyright infringement.
“We conclude that IA’s use of the Works is not transformative,” the decision states. “Instead, IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read. IA’s Free Digital Library is meant to — and does — substitute for the original Works,” the ruling continues, adding that “to construe IA’s use of the Works as transformative would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners’ exclusive right to prepare (or not prepare) derivative works.”
The appeals court also easily dispatched with the idea that the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending is permissible because it is done within the framework of “controlled digital lending,” a set of protocols designed to mimic physical library lending.
The court’s ruling could endanger the Archive’s “Great 78” project, which digitizes 78rpm records and makes them available to the public.
Although I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive and the work they do, I’ve always thought their defense of the book scanning program’s legality was shaky at best. (Alex Brown and Mike Dunford elaborate on this better than I can.) As such, this ruling didn’t surprise me one bit. And if this makes it all the way to the Supreme Court, I’ll be very surprised if it’s overturned.
That said, I hope this situation causes people to (A) ponder the issues surrounding the access and distribution of digital goods; (B) question the state of our current copyright laws, and (C) realize that decisions like these probably benefit publishers and media companies as much as authors, and perhaps even more so. Also, it’s a bit rich that the Internet Archive is being ruled against even as AI companies insist that they ought to be able to ignore copyright.
Finally, Tom Nichols reflects on the upsides and downsides of yearning for “the good ol’ days.”
When people look back and feel loss, I understand. But I am old enough now to know that these were not good days, and that the nostalgia is mostly a lie.
I remember Batman and Barnabas and Bobby. I also remember the alcoholism and drug abuse that plagued our neighborhood (and my family). I remember rampant domestic violence, although as children we didn’t know what to call it. I remember hospitals and nursing homes that now seem medieval to me. I remember air-conditioning being a luxury.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.