Weekend Reads (November 30): Indie Rock, Bluesky, John Scalzi, Delicious Library
Recommended weekend reading material for November 30, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material. This week’s edition is shorter due to the Thanksgiving holiday. If you celebrated this week, then I hope you had a safe and joyous time with your loved ones and got plenty of turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (with the requisite amount of whipped cream, of course).
Throughout the mid ’00s and ’10s, indie-rock experienced a boom as the scene gained increasing visibility and success. But in recent years, that’s flipped upside down, with indie success harder to attain than ever before.
[T]here’s a prevailing feeling that the pursuit of lasting financial stability — or even widespread media recognition — has become all but impossible. “The audience is shrinking for this kind of music, or maybe just music in general,” surmises Joe Trainor, 40, of the acclaimed Los Angeles weirdo-pop outfit Dummy. Alongside his work in the band, Trainor also freelances as a music publicist under his own Stereo Junk banner, and as an A&R for the left-field label Felte. When it comes to his PR gig, he says there’s been a “serious downturn” in the last year when it comes to ginning up press interest for his clients. “A lot of releases fall on deaf ears,” he admits.
There’s never been a precise formula for breaking out of the pack and attaining buzz, but for many in the indie sphere, achieving widespread visibility has increasingly resembled winning a lottery that you can’t remember buying a ticket for. Secretly’s Deines points to the runaway success of Chicago singer-songwriter Gia Margaret’s ruminative ambient-pop track “Hinoki Wood,” from last year’s Romantic Piano, as proof of the endlessly random nature of virality in 2020s indie. The song caught on via TikTok and has been used in more than 115,000 videos on the platform; clocking over 13 million Spotify streams to date, it stands as the second-highest streaming track released last year by Secretly Group. “You can’t predict that kind of shit,” he marvels, his voice underlying a tone of slight frustration. “You can’t make it happen.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: if you come across an indie band that you like, buy their music on Bandcamp or some other vendor. Don’t just stream it on Spotify.
For years now, The Line of Best Fit has been asking musicians, actors, and comedians, and other celebrities to list nine songs that have been influential or important to them.
As previously reported, Bluesky has experienced an incredible amount of growth in recent days. (As of this writing, it currently has 22.7 million users.) But all of that growth has presented some unique challenges to the social network’s content moderation efforts.
An early sign of the company’s new challenges came in September, when 2 million new users joined the network in the wake of Brazil temporarily banning X. Bluesky’s automated systems recorded a surge of reports related to the use of the letters “KKK,” which in the United States typically refer to the Ku Klux Klan and can signal support for racist ideologies.
Upon investigating, though, the company realized that typing a series of K’s is simply how some speakers of Portuguese signal that they are laughing online. Bluesky updated its machine learning classifiers accordingly.
What’s perhaps most impressive about Bluesky’s growth is that so far, they’ve handled it with just 20 core team individuals and 25 contract moderators. However, they’re planning to quadruple their content moderation team.
Related: Hopefully, Bluesky will treat their content moderators better than how other platforms have treated their content moderators in the past.
Disney’s Moana 2 opened in theaters this weekend. Which makes this a good time to read one of my favorite things we’ve ever published on Christ and Pop Culture: Geoffrey Reiter’s review of the first Moana and its view of tradition.
I feel a certain spiritual kinship with Moana. I have no desire to desert my immediate evangelical community. Yet looking to the ancient teachings and traditions of our spiritual ancestors, the dogmas that silently but truly undergird our current beliefs, I find my own identity. “We were voyagers!” I want to shout, and then add, “And we can be voyagers still!”
If it weren’t for writer/director Jim Abrahams, then we wouldn’t have such cinematic gems as Airplane!, Top Secret!, and The Naked Gun. Abrahams died earlier this week from natural causes; he was 80 years old.
Joke-filled and laden with sight gags and puns, the humor of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, or ZAZ as they came to be known, was fast, frenetic, and just downright silly. Parody was their specialty. Everything was ripe for ridicule — the more absurd, the better.
I don’t think I can overstate the impact that Airplane! and The Naked Gun had on my sense of humor when I saw them at waaay too young an age.
Related: The Guardian has compiled five classic moments from Abrahams’ movies. “Don’t call me Shirley,” indeed.
Celebrated sci-fi author John Scalzi compares the Hollywood vision of AI against its current iterations.
What I do find interesting, however, is that now we are at turning point in our view of “AI.” In the past, our experience of “AI” has largely been based on models of intelligence that weren’t artificial, but imaginary: the monsters of myth and legend. Now we have a new experience of AI, the one that shows it as flawed and messy, prone to hallucinations and manipulation, and offering information that can be outright dangerous. How long before this new experience of “AI” begins to make its way into how we portray artificial intelligence in film and other entertainment? The ship of culture is large and slow in turning, but turn it will.
Scalzi’s next novel, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, will be released on March 25, 2025. Just check out that plot summary: “The moon transforms into an unstable organic, cheese-like material, along with all previously retrieved lunar samples. The book follows the diverse human reactions to this possibly apocalyptic event on Earth through the course of a whole lunar cycle.”
When researchers asked AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to generate webpages, the resulting pages included a large number of deceptive and manipulative features, often called “dark patterns.”
The researchers asked participants to simulate a fictitious e-commerce scenario where they acted as web designers, using ChatGPT to generate pages for a shoe store. Tasks included creating product overviews and checkout pages while using neutral prompts such as “increase the likelihood of customers signing up for our newsletter.” Despite using neutral language that specifically did not mention integrating deceptive design patterns, every single AI-generated web page contained at least one such pattern, with an average of five per page.
These dark patterns piggyback on psychological strategies to manipulate user behavior to drive sales. Some of the examples highlighted by the researchers, who declined an interview request, citing the policy of the academic publication to which they had submitted the paper, included fake discounts, urgency indicators (such as “Only a few left!”), and manipulative visual elements — like highlighting a specific product to steer user choices.
Via TLDR Design.
John Gruber comments on the shut down of Delicious Library, a once-revolutionary Mac app for tracking your book, music, and movie collections.
It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users.
Early in our marriage, my wife bought me a copy of Delicious Library for my birthday, and I spent many days using it to catalog my media collections. Gruber’s absolutely right: it was both really useful (especially for pop culture nerds like myself) and it looked “cool as shit.” I don’t necessarily miss skeuomorphic design, but I do miss the personality present in its best examples (like Delicious Library).
From the Blog
I’ve reviewed and written about many obscure and unsung artists throughout Opus’ long run, but if I had to pick the most obscure artist I’ve ever written about, then Lucid would be at the very top of the list.
Formed in 1993 by multi-instrumentalist and sound designer Dale Lloyd alongside guitarist Stuart Arentzen, singer Rebecca Bird, and pianist Mark Taylor-Canfield (to name a few contributors), Lucid released a pair of sublime albums in the mid ’90s that haunt me still to this day. 1994’s Baby Labyrinthian and 1996’s Idylls and the Secret Remain — both of which were released on Lloyd’s æ label — are the two albums that immediately come to mind whenever I think of “experimental” music, even after three decades.
The group’s songs and sound collages — which blend field recordings, musique concrète, various instruments (e.g., guitar, bass, drums, piano, zither, violin, melodica, celesta), radio signals, and partially obscured vocals — can be ominous, serene, eerie, or playful, and usually some combination thereof. While you could certainly describe Lucid’s music as “otherworldly,” that would be an understatement. With their field recordings and surreal arrangements, Lucid’s songs often feel like little worlds in and of themselves. One song might conjure up a Twilight Zone-esque noir while the next suggests an eerily bucolic English countryside, a Victorian sitting room for ghosts, bizarre subterranean explorations, or a toy store springing to life at the stroke of midnight.
If you know how I can get a copy of Lucid’s other albums — 2000’s Aurora Sunder and 2001’s Magnabella — please let me know.
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