Weekend Reads (March 29): ’90s Movies, Sundance, Punk Rock, AI Slop, Signalgate
Recommended weekend reading material for March 29, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
Writing for Collider, Mason Morgan ranks the 10 best movies that defined the ’90s, including Clueless, The Blair Witch Project, and The Matrix.
For as many great movies as the 1990s spawned, certain filmmaking efforts shaped the decade and defined the specific era as one of the most pivotal and exciting periods in cinema history. Whether it be the monumental success of blockbusters such as Titanic or the low-key yet profound impact of experimental horror such as The Blair Witch Project, the ’90s was a formative year for moviemaking.
Via The Retro.
In an attempt to lure back moviegoers, theaters might consider resorting to extreme measures, including selling pot and lifting a ban on texting.
While the idea might not appeal to purists, cinemas need to attract younger folks to keep theaters in business. So maybe it’s time to find some middle ground on iPhones. That could mean hosting select screenings that allow texting. That way, second screeners could enjoy themselves at the theater, while serious moviegoers would know to stay away. Another possibility is in-theater partitions that allow guests to text while not bothering other customers, which was tested by Megaplex Theatres last year.
No thanks… I think I’ll just stay home.
If you’re a fan of obscure Japanese pop culture like I am, then I think you’ll get a kick out of Sean O’Mara’s introduction to the work of Hiroshi Yamaguchi.
The industries behind the stuff we love that came out of Japan during the ‘80s and ‘90s — the anime, the films, the manga, the garage kits — were filled with folks who managed to thread their way through familiar projects but are seemingly unknown by English speaking enthusiasts. It’s always fascinating to stumble across the work of a person like this; someone whose connections to Japanese media during the decade of excess fostered a web of creators and personalities we’re familiar with today.
FWIW, Zimmerit is a true goldmine for fans of ’80s and ’90s anime and manga.
After four decades in Utah, the Sundance Film Festival — one of America’s most iconic and influential film festivals — is moving to Boulder, Colorado.
In recent years, Park City has been seen as a less-than-hospitable home. Many agencies and studios have been sending far fewer people to Park City, where housing for Sundance can easily reach into the tens of thousands of dollars, as Hollywood has tightened its belt due to industry-wide cost-cutting. Locals also have grown increasingly tired of the influx of people to their small town, with public transportation being co-opted and traffic inundating what is commonly an already busy time with peak ski season.
Via 1440.
This list of the greatest American punk bands contains plenty of obvious selections, but also some not-so-obvious ones, like Blondie.
It can be argued that Blondie is more new wave than punk. But, the band's first two albums — Blondie (1976) and Plastic Letters (1978) — had undeniable elements of the latter while becoming a major force out of the underground New York City music scene. Of course, the iconic Debbie Harry was at the forefront. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famer started as a folk singer, but make no mistake, Harry was and still is a true punk. Regulars at famed CBGB, Blondie, and Harry, more specifically, played a major part in taking new wave and punk mainstream in the U.S.
Steve Baltin sits down with a couple of Bandcamp staff to find out why the online music store is so artist-friendly.
[O]ne of the factors in what artists we shine a light on is well is this person going to be covered by everyone else and are they going to get a ton of ink elsewhere. We’ve got X amount of calendar spaces, we’ve got X amount of juice that we can give, let’s shine that light on an artist like Etran de L’Air, this band from the Sudan who’s touring America or something like that. Let’s use our power to shine the light that way because I love Julien Baker to death. Julien Baker’s going to be good, we want to shine our light elsewhere.
404 Media’s Jason Koebler chronicles how AI-generated slop is dramatically affecting our online experiences.
The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.
What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.
Last October, I wrote about the threat that AI poses to our communal ability to determine 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.”
Amit Katwala writes about the ramifications of “Q Day,” the moment when quantum computing becomes a reality and changes everything.
Grimes, the author of Cryptography Apocalypse, predicts enormous disruptions. We might have to revert to Cold War methods of transmitting sensitive data. (It’s rumored that after a major hack in 2011, one contractor purportedly asked its staff to stop using email for six weeks.) Fill a hard drive, lock it in a briefcase, put someone you trust on a plane with the payload handcuffed to their wrist. Or use one-time pads — books of pre-agreed codes to encrypt and decrypt messages. Quantum-secure, but not very scalable. Expect major industries — energy, finance, health care, manufacturing, transportation — to slow to a crawl as companies with sensitive data switch to paper-based methods of doing business and scramble to hire expensive cryptography consultants. There will be a spike in inflation. Most people might just accept the inevitable: a post-privacy society in which any expectation of secrecy evaporates unless you’re talking to someone in person in a secluded area with your phones switched off. Big Quantum is Watching You.
Theodore Morley is curious: Why do programmers and developers express a desire to do something decidedly non-tech, like farming or woodworking?
Across tech, it appears that many people are tired of working in offices, with computers, with meetings or emails, and want to abandon this life and start anew in more meaningful labor. In fact, over the last few years, there’s been a noted increase(see here or here) in a style of content that portrays idyllic lifestyles in times perceived as simpler, especially in short form video content. I can’t help but propose this “cottagecore” type content as deriving from the same zeitgeist.
Via TLDR Tech.
This post was fascinating in part because, like Morley, I grew up on a farm. (I spent my formative years on a goat farm, and even after we moved to Omaha, my brother and I would spend summers helping out on our grandparents’ farm in the Nebraska panhandle.) As such, I don’t necessarily have any romanticized notions of farm life, though I certainly see the appeal of the “cottagecore” lifestyle as its often depicted on social media.
But if I’m being honest, I have struggled to see or believe the value of my work. I’ve been a web developer for almost 30 years now, and though I still enjoy what I do, the profession’s abstract nature — which Morley briefly highlights — does make it difficult to see its worth. Comparison is, of course, the thief of joy, especially with regards to professions and careers. But compared to the work of, say, a farmer, doctor, or teacher, sitting in front of a computer and writing code can seem awfully trivial at times.
Related: Sophia Bricker considers the appeal of the “cottagecore” aesthetic. “How much more pleasing it would be if, instead of riding past littered parkways, I could walk through the screen of my computer and sit near a meadow in the calmness of nature. Or travel down the woodland paths in paintings, unhurried and unworried by blaring horns and speeding cars. What a refreshing change it would be to live in a storybook-like world that resembles Anne of Green Gables or The Secret Garden. Life would seem so much better and more beautiful.” (Disclaimer: I edited Bricker’s article.)
Given that DNA-testing company 23andMe recently filed for bankruptcy, now might be a good time to delete your personal data before it can be sold to another company.
23andMe says that genetic data is anonymized and stored separately from personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, and payment information. Anonymization has been known to fail in other situations, however, so here’s how you can proactively remove as much of your data as possible if you’d rather not take any chances.
Like many people, I’ve been fascinated/dismayed by “Signalgate,” during which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared sensitive military information in a Signal chat with Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. The Trump administration claims nothing bad happened — shocker, I know — but former Army lawyer David French says it’s much worse than just a simple security leak.
So you had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, leading attorneys in the military, the JAG officers, JAG generals in the military, relieved for political reasons. Then you have the secretary of defense retained in spite of the fact that he violated every standard of operational security in a way that would lead any other soldier to face dramatic consequences. He’s still in office, and as of the moment of this recording, there seems to be no indication that he’s either going to step down or be fired.
So what does that say? It says that we’re replacing standards of professionalism with standards of political loyalty. I have seen far greater consequences applied to service members for far lesser security breaches than the kind of hand waving that we’re seeing now from the administration, where it’s minimizing what occurred, denying that it’s significant. This is not the way any other soldier would be treated under similar circumstances, but the rule is there’s one standard for MAGA, especially the MAGA loyalists, and there are other standards for everybody else.
Not surprisingly, military pilots have expressed anger and incredulity at Hegseth’s actions.
On air bases, in aircraft carrier “ready rooms” and in communities near military bases this week, the news that senior officials in the Trump administration discussed plans for an impending attack on Signal, a commercial messaging app, angered and bewildered men and women who have taken to the air on behalf of the United States.
The mistaken inclusion of the editor in chief of The Atlantic in the chat and Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that he did nothing wrong by disclosing the secret plans upend decades of military doctrine about operational security, a dozen Air Force and Navy fighter pilots said.
Worse, they said, is that going forward, they can no longer be certain that the Pentagon is focused on their safety when they strap into cockpits.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall (via Daring Fireball) argues that “Signalgate” reveals Trump’s ultimate goal: a complete lack and avoidance of accountability.
Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed.
The Trump administration’s playbook is to never admit mistakes or wrongdoing, ever. To do communicates weakness. Thus, most of the people involved in Signalgate are pointing fingers, shifting blame, and playing dumb.
Administration officials have defended themselves by saying no classified information was shared in the chat and, regardless, the strike on the Houthis was a success. None of those in the chat have expressed regret about discussing the sensitive material, which some former and current officials do believe may have been classified at the time it was sent.
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