Weekend Reads (October 26): John Wick, Andrei Tarkovsky, WordPad (RIP), Political Fundraising
Recommended weekend reading material for October 26, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of John Wick, which stars Keanu Reeves as a hitman who comes out of retirement after some goons kill his dog. It seemed kind of ridiculous at first — I confess, I did my share of mocking on social media — but that movie has since become an acclaimed franchise that’s dramatically changed modern action cinema.
That little action movie and its one lead would soon become bigger movies with more stars. Martial arts favorites begin popping up, to the delight of action fans who’d been trading tapes for decades. Guys like Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, Mark Dacascos, and Daniel Bernhardt were just some of the faces that John Wick shined a spotlight on.
The series also made room for exciting opportunities for women in action. While the first may have fallen into the age-old trope of “sad guy, dead wife,” the series quickly made room for some of the most memorable women we’ve seen in Western action. Be it Ruby Rose, Halle Berry, or Rina Sawayama, there was never a shortage of women for Wick to get his ass kicked by.
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: The first John Wick movie ran out of funds 24 hours before filming began. It was saved by actress Eva Longoria, who invested $6 million of her own money in the film. Needless to say, she made all of her investment back, and then some; the film earned $86 million on a $20–$30 million budget.
Related: After watching the fourth and final (for now) John Wick movie, I tried to figure out how the franchise’s highly stylized and assassin-filled world might actually work. “If the world’s ruled by its most violent and notorious criminals, then how do politics work? Do election disputes, international grievances, and trade deals get hammered out by hitmen like John Wick? Do political concepts like nations, borders, and democracy still matter when criminal organizations rule everything?”
For her “Science Fiction Film Club,” Kali Wallace reviews Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Soviet sci-fi classic.
There is a constant truth in all the writing and criticism about this film: everybody wants Stalker to be about something. Something specific, something definable, a singular theme or allegory that can be nearly described in a more accessible format. Life in the faltering latter days of the Soviet Union. Faith in a secular world. The sanctity of the family unit. Imprisonment and freedom. The transcendence of love and devotion. Something.
And it is. It’s about all of those things and probably many more. But it still resists the thematic clarity we’re accustomed to seeking when we talk about fiction, and especially science fiction, which often carries with it an assumption that there is a single underlying theme. Right alongside this decades-long critical search for Stalker’s meaning is, unsurprisingly, a parallel backlash; beloved arty movies always have their share of vocally unimpressed haters.
I’ve only seen Stalker once, many years ago, but the movie still haunts me (due, in part, to its striking visuals). I’ve been meaning to watch it again — the entire film is available on YouTube — but it’s the sort of film that I feel like I need to prepare myself for. One does not enter into a Tarkovsky film lightly.
Although streaming movies is certainly more convenient than lugging around boxes of Blu-rays, one thing that’s often lacking from streaming services are special features like director commentaries and behind-the-scenes-featurettes — stuff you only get on physical releases.
We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: films are more than just content. They’re more than just escapism, and more than just distractions. At the very least, they’re the sum total of several years worth of work from a legion of artisans and technicians. They’re also a window into a specific moment in time. Special features add that much needed context to how the film came to be and to the impact it may or may not have had.
Thousands of artists and creatives — including actors Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore, and Rosario Dawson; musicians Geoff Barrow, Robert Smith, and Thom Yorke; and authors Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, and James Patterson — have signed a statement condemning the unlicensed use of human creative work to train AI tools.
The lack of federal regulation around generative AI amid its rapid proliferation has contributed to a growing maelstrom of confusion and criticism around what datasets AI companies are using to train their models. Artists and companies in recent years have called out these tech giants and startups for allegedly scraping their work without their knowledge or consent.
Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and former executive at Stability AI, said this movement for regulation comes at a critical time for creatives worldwide as legal battles and legislation over unlicensed AI training continue to unfold.
Via 1440.
As of right now, the full list of signatories is currently at around 20,000 individuals, and growing.
Related: I recently wrote about the threat that AI represents to our ability to comprehend truth. “AI’s ultimate legacy may not be environmental waste and out-of-work artists but rather, the damage that it does to our individual and collective abilities to understand, determine, and agree upon what is real.”
Will Rinehart compares the legislation that was created to govern the burgeoning internet in the late ’90s to the legislation being considered for AI, and why the latter is so much more stringent and overbearing.
That older era, which is giving way to something new, might be thought of as the era of minimally viable regulation. In the startup world, the minimally viable product (MVP) is the simplest form of a product that solves a core problem and allows for quick user feedback. Like a MVP in business, thinking about the minimally viable regulation focuses us to seek the least amount of regulatory intervention necessary to achieve a specific policy goal. The idea is to start with simple, essential rules and adjust them based on outcomes, feedback, and technological or societal shifts, rather than imposing a complex, fully developed regulatory framework from the outset. Issues largely got worked out in the courts but in some rare cases, a case might make it to the Supreme Court or catch the eye of a leader in Congress.
The experience of the last decade with social media has irrevocably shifted the politics of tech regulation at all levels of government. Constraint has given way to more muscular policy agendas.
I’m torn when it comes to tech-related legislation. As someone who got online during the mid ’90s, I still feel connected the anarchic, hacker-minded ethos that drove the internet in those early days and pushed back against any sort of heavy-handed oversight. As Rinehart puts it, “The internet boosters saw themselves as vanguards resisting government interference.”
I hate undue regulation. But then I reflect on the last 10-15 years and the increasing omnipresence of technology, the rancor of social media, the security and privacy violations, and the reckless growth-fixated mindset that seeks to disrupt all the things — as typified by Facebook’s old motto, “Move fast and break things” — and subsequently, I don’t think that more of the same will solve anything. Maybe, just maybe, that anarchic mindset backfired because it didn’t worry enough about corporate greed and human foibles.
Electrosensitive people — i.e., those who claim to experience illness and adverse effects as a result of cell towers and Wifi signals — are flocking to remote areas like Green Bank, West Virginia to find sanctuary and relief. But sanctuary comes with a cost.
Nearby towns have more trappings of modern life but not many. In Cass, almost seven miles down the road, a roadhouse grill and general store has a plastic marquee boasting beer and WiFi.
Sue has to visit the nearby town of Elkins, about 50 miles north of Green Bank, to go grocery shopping. “It’s like driving into a brick wall,” she says of her trips there. Her symptoms begin re-emerging, and it takes her several days to recuperate.
So they help each other out.
“You’re so isolated from civilization,” says Audra Bogacik, a former dental hygienist in her late 50s who moved here from Pittsburgh to heal from nosebleeds, burning skin, gallstones, you name it. “You don’t go to movies anymore. You don’t really go to restaurants. You don’t hang out with your friends from home. It’s very difficult.”
Via The Dispatch.
Last week, popular Twitch streamer Zach Hoyt, who goes by the handle Asmongold, launched into a racist rant against Palestinians. His rant, and subsequent apology, offer a glimpse into the moral rot at the core of online streaming.
Streaming and social media reward people for being their worst selves, and it’s starting to have noticeable effects. Hateful rhetoric, like the kind Hoyt used, is on the rise. External political factors like the rise of anti-LGBTQ policies, political candidates, and sentiments contribute to this. Clips of streamers espousing discriminatory views get pushed on social media, creating the kind of viral moments streamers chase. With the resurgence of Gamergate and “anti-woke” reactionaries, streamers have found that appealing to — or at least not alienating — those who agree with those subjects can lead to an audience boost. Those communities are delighted to show up in force now that their opinions are no longer relegated to the fringes of the internet but validated by its biggest voices. Reactions to Hoyt’s apology across social media featured many comments stating that he said nothing wrong.
A recent update to Microsoft Windows officially removed WordPad — the company’s stripped down word processing software — from the operating system.
WordPad has been installed by default on Windows computers since the launch of Windows 95. The program offers users a basic word processor and document editor.
Microsoft recommends that users turn to Microsoft Word for “rich text documents like.doc and .rtf” and Windows Notepad “for plain text documents like .txt.” (Access to Word requires users to have an annual or monthly subscription to Microsoft 365.)
Chances are, most people didn’t even know WordPad still existed. Fortunately, it’s possible to reinstall WordPad if you don’t want to deal with the bloated monster that is Word. (Why would you if you didn’t have to?)
Political fundraising uses deceptive and manipulative tactics to take advantage of elderly donors, including those who suffer from dementia. In some cases, individuals have unwittingly donated tens, and even hundreds, of thousands of dollars to political campaigns.
Donors identified by CNN were often in their 80s and 90s. They included retired public workers, house cleaners and veterans, widows living alone, nursing home residents and people who donated more money than they paid for their homes, according to records and interviews.
The money they gave came from pensions, Social Security payments and retirement savings accounts meant to last decades. Donors took out new credit cards and mortgages to pay for the contributions. In some cases, they gave away most of their life savings. Their cell phones and email inboxes were so full of pleas for money that they missed photos of their grandkids and other important messages.
At least one person continued to be charged for contributions after his death.
Related: Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is the biggest beneficiary of these shady tactics. Back in 2021, I wrote about the “dark patterns” used in his fundraising efforts.
The Euclid Space Telescope — launched last July by the European Space Agency (ESA) — is slowly building a 3D map of the universe. The first map images have been released, and some of them are so mind-blowing they don’t even look real.
The vast cosmic mosaic was constructed from 260 Euclid observations collected between March 25 and April 8, 2024 and contains 208 gigapixels of data. The region charted is around 500 times as wide as the full moon appears in the sky over Earth.
Perhaps most astoundingly, the mosaic accounts for just 1% of the total survey Euclid will conduct over the next six years as it tracks the shapes, distances and movements of galaxies as far as 10 billion light-years away. Not only will this result in the largest 3D map of the cosmos ever created, but the vast scale of this map will help scientists investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, sometimes collectively known as the “dark universe.”
Related: Back in 2019, I wrote about how stunning space images — which would include those from the Euclid Space Telescope — reveal the extravagance of God. “Instead, he chose to create, well, what you see above: thousands upon thousands of galaxies containing billions upon billions of stars. He chose to create extravagantly — and indeed, well beyond extravagantly — and quite possibly for no other reason than because that was His free desire.”
Finally, the concept of zero was developed hundreds of years ago, in seventh-century India, and has become a fundamental aspect of modern mathematics. Nevertheless, our brains still have to work a little differently to make sense of it.
Zero is the “eccentric uncle in the family of numbers,” Nieder said. To use zero in calculations, mathematicians had to establish all sorts of rules. You can’t divide any other number by zero, but you can divide zero by any other number. A nonzero number to the power of zero gives you one; zero to a power of a nonzero number gives you zero, but zero to a power of zero gives you a calculator error — and a headache.
Yet “the idea of zero, or something that plays the role of a zero, somehow appears all over math,” said Neil Barton, a philosopher of math at the National University of Singapore. Without it, modern mathematics wouldn’t exist — you wouldn’t be able to solve a function, do calculus or distinguish between 1 and 1 million.
However you look at it, zero is unique. For researchers interested in how the brain handles numbers, zero was “the most fascinating number of them all,” Nieder said. He suspected that if zero is special in history and math, then the brain must process it specially, too.
Via MetaFilter.
From the Blog
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