Weekend Reads (Dec 2): Time Travel Movies, David Fincher, K-dramas, Spotify, Whales
Recommended weekend reading for December 2, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Time travel is a staple of modern science fiction, and has been used in countless movies. But when it comes to scientific logic and/or entertainment value, some movies are better than others.
[N]ot all time-travel movies are created equal. Some make for fantastic entertainment but the time travel makes no scientific or logical sense, while others might err in the opposite direction, sacrificing good storytelling in the interests of technical accuracy. What we really need is a handy guide to help us navigate this increasingly crowded field to ensure we get the best of both worlds, so to speak. The Ars Guide to Time Travel in the Movies is here to help us all make better, more informed decisions when it comes to choosing our time travel movie fare.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, we selected films that represented many diverse approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then evaluated each one — grading on a curve — with regard to its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final combined score determining a film’s spot on the overall ranking. For the “science” part of our scoring system, we specifically took three factors into account. First and foremost, does the time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel somewhat realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in narratively interesting ways?
Via 1440. Some of the movies discussed and analyzed include The Terminator, Back to the Future, Timecop, Primer, and Avengers: Endgame.
Of course, no list of time travel movies is complete without David Giancola’s 1994 classic, Time Chasers, which was featured in one of my favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In light of David Fincher’s new movie on Netflix — The Killer starring Michael Fassbender — Theodoor Steen reflects on Fincher’s past as a director of music videos.
While his music videos are iconic, in some ways, Fincher doesn't really have his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, tho. He often, outside of Madonna, seems to work for musicians who are on their way out, or had their best years behind them. Case in point Don Henley, Billy Idol, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake and even Nine Inch Nails, all had their better years behind them when Fincher got involved with their work. But in some ways he was working with the greats, not because he was lucky to work with the biggest names in the business. No, the biggest names in the business wanted to work with him, cause Fincher is a music video god.
The Playlist has compiled a list of 2023’s best movie trailers.
[I]t’s easy to dismiss trailers are just promotional items, but true believers of movies know they can be crucial tools, excitement launching pads, expectancy harvesters, and hopefulness catalysts that make Johnny Q realize they are going to see this movie by hook or by crook in theaters. And hell, in some cases, some are so good that they can resemble something close to the art itself.
Luke Larsen compiles a list of the 9 definitive types of Star Wars fans.
I, for one, count the diversity of the fanbase as a positive. It’s what’s led to the wide range of stories, genres, and media types over the years, each generating its own small base of fans. More broadly, these fanbases are created based on your generation and what part of the series you gravitated to first for whatever reason. I hope you’ll be able to find yourself among at least one of these waves of Star Wars fans and start to see that there’s enough room at the table for us all.
Consider me a “Gen X OT” fan. (Big surprise there, I know.)
Kayti Burt breaks down the history and increasing cultural prominence of K-dramas like Coffee Prince, Boys Over Flowers, Crash Landing on You, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo.
Prior to the development of the internet and the streaming technology that would eventually come with it, Korean TV was accessed almost exclusively by Korean Americans in major U.S. cities through a few broadcast stations, cable channels, and Koreatown video rental services. That began to change in the 2000s, when populations outside of Korean American communities started to find and seek out K-dramas.
This is the story of the slow, steady integration of Korean dramas into the U.S. “mainstream” — a journey tied to development of the internet and streaming video technology, and spearheaded by a woman-dominated fan culture.
Due to licensing issues, PlayStation users are about to lose a bunch of TV shows that they previously bought.
The promise of digital media is that it can last forever, pristine and undisturbed by the forces of entropy constantly buffeting the material world. Unfortunately, a mess of online DRM and license agreements means that we mostly don’t own the digital stuff we buy, as most recently evidenced by the fact that Sony is about to delete Mythbusters, Naked and Afraid, and tons of other Discovery shows from PlayStation users’ libraries even if they already “purchased” them.
The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. “Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library,” read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.
Yet more evidence that you should buy physical copies of your favorite movies, TV shows, albums, books, etc. You simply can’t trust that digital versions — even those you’ve bought — will always be available.
Sports Illustrated has been accused of publishing articles by fake AI authors without disclosing it.
Futurism found the associated author headshots for sale on an AI-generated image website, and someone involved in the creation of the content told the outlet that there are “a lot” of similar fake writers. Rachael Fink, a spokesperson for The Arena Group, which publishes Sports Illustrated, disputed the suggestion that the stories themselves are AI-generated.
After Futurism reached out to The Arena Group, the fake writers disappeared. On articles bearing the AI-generated writers’ bylines, there’s a disclaimer: “This content is created by a 3rd party,” it reads in part. “The Sports Illustrated editorial staff are not involved in the creation of this content.”
Sports Illustrated attempted to clarify with a statement, saying “The articles in question were product reviews and were licensed content from an external, third-party company, AdVon Commerce… AdVon has assured us that all of the articles in question were written and edited by humans.”
There’s certainly a legitimate use for AI in news coverage, and especially in sports coverage (e.g., compiling and generating all of the stats that are inherent to every sport). But any such use ought to be disclosed and never passed off as the work of real humans. (See also CNET.)
Not surprisingly, the union representing Sports Illustrated’s human writers was none too pleased by this revelation, stating that they “deplore being associated with something so disrespectful to our readers” and demanding transparency.
Related: Last month, the first song by Anna Indiana — a fully AI-generated “singer/songwriter” — was released via Twitter, raising questions about who really wants AI-generated music… especially when it’s this soulless. As one person pointed out, record labels would almost certainly want this. What’s better for them than churning out pop music they don’t have to pay anyone for?
Jonathan M. Katz argues that Substack has a Nazi problem as more far right and white supremacist authors migrate to the platform.
Ultimately, the First Amendment gives publications and platforms in the United States the right to publish almost anything they want. But the same First Amendment also gives them the right to refuse to allow their platform to be used for anything they don’t want to publish or host.
“Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and helping writers publish what they want to write,” McKenzie and the company’s other co-founders, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement when asked for comment on this article. “Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes — like incitements to violence — but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.” Still, some decisions seem obvious: If something that bills itself as “a National Socialist website” doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against “hate,” what does?
Content moderation is tricky at scale, and I certainly don’t envy Substack. As one person interviewed notes, simply banning Nazis and white supremacists may end up backfiring. However, Substack could do a better job when it comes promoting writers:
There’s a big difference between a platform hosting content and then maybe not co-signing what they’re saying, but giving them a microphone in an institutionally approved way: “I am inviting you onto my podcast and I’m going to let you speak.”
Also, I wonder how other newsletter services like Beehiiv and Buttondown might approach this problem. Would they adopt an approach that’s similar to Substack’s or take more of a hard-line stance?
’Tis the season when folks starts posting those “Spotify Wrapped” images on social media to show their top artists, most streamed songs, etc. But for Damon Krukowski, those images serve only to highlight the inequality that Spotify represents for smaller artists and labels.
For the rest of us, this is the quiet end to a number of loudly promoted ideas that would enable working- and middle-class creators to benefit from micropayments in the platform economy: the “long tail”, the “democratisation of content”, the “end to gatekeeping”. We’ve been hearing these slogans for decades, while watching our incomes from creative work go down and down, until finally now, for many of us on Spotify, they will hit absolute zero. This while those at the top of the pyramid — the platforms themselves, and the handful of rights holders they benefit the most — continue to swallow a greater and greater share of industry revenue.
You know my thoughts on this. Streaming is all well and good, but when you find an artist you really like, buy their music from Bandcamp or iTunes, or better yet, directly from their website. (And maybe buy a shirt while you’re at it.)
Finally, scientists are fairly certain that the Cross Seamount beaked whale exists, but they’re not sure because it’s only been heard, never seen.
The underwater microphone first picked up the distinctive ping around 4:00 a.m. In the water off Hawai‘i, there it was: the unknown whale’s signature call. Jennifer McCullough, a biologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), checks her monitors. From her station on the research ship’s lower deck, her instruments are telling her the sounds are coming from only 200 meters away. She radios up to the bridge, guiding the crew to keep the whales in front of the ship. For 18 years, scientists have been sporadically recording the sounds of this mystery animal. With a bit more light, McCullough might finally, finally, be able to spot one.
From the Blog
It’s hard to believe that 1993 was thirty years ago. Sometimes, it seems like only yesterday that I was just starting my senior year of high school — which just so happened to be a year of incredible musical growth for me. And looking back at it now, 1993 was a phenomenal year for music, with excellent albums by Daniel Amos, Mortal, Slowdive, and Dead Can Dance (to name a few).
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