sawall

Paul Rudd's starring, so it must be amazing! ... not that I have gone to see it.

Then there's this: https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/reddit-stock-ipo-buyers-users-58744446

glancing back up at the thread I realize I didn't update folks that I gave up on the iPad-as-laptop thing. I think it might work for a lot of people but it isn't good for a lot of my use cases:
- I want a shell, none of my options for one are great. file management is also pretty awkward.
- the magic keyboard sleeve is good but the one on the Macbook Air is way better. also, most of the weight is in the iPad itself so if you try to laptop with it you are forced to press down on the keyboard to keep it balanced, which gets hard on the wrists after longer sessions
- some official apps seem weirdly gimped compared with their MacOS counterparts

If I was more of a graphic designer, the Affinity suite is pretty impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if artists, photographers, and designers would be able to use an iPad for pretty much everything that they do. I also think it's a lot more natural for people a decade or so younger than I am because they don't have nearly as much attachment to text-only interfaces and keyboard/mouse interface as I do.

Gaming on the iPad is also pretty great but there aren't as many adaptations as there could be. The GPU is extremely powerful and there are some great ported titles - one I've enjoyed a lot was Darkest Dungeon. There are also great ports of digital editions of board games, and something about the iPad form factor makes that feel pretty natural.

I still remember some "demo" video from Microsoft a while ago showing someone playing with Minecraft bricks on their coffee table. I'd love to see exploration of that sort of thing with AR gaming.

this is an amazing apple vision pro ... review? something? it's surreal and has serious Nathan Fielder vibes. it's a guy just wandering around NYC interacting with it heavily. he takes the subway while trying to watch youtube, texts while walking up a staircase, watches videos and types messages while on a bench in Times Square, and so on. some of the motion tracking is really surprising - when he popped open a screen on the subway when it was stopped at a station the screen "stayed in place" while he and the subway moved away from it. the way it causes him to interact with strangers is pretty wild. he comes off more than a bit like someone who's tripping balls in public - reacting to things that other people can't see, etc.

his overall take is pretty fascinating... he feels a lot of the hype while also thinking that this is probably not going to be a killer product yet.

Psychological fatigue around all of this is real. Humans are social animals and can only handle isolation for so long. What's sad is that ongoing all or nothing approaches combined with politics have made it such that we don't have a lot of cultural acceptance around taking reasonable precautions. We CAN'T be in total lockdown forever, but I wish that we had globally learned to adopt social norms.

As I've probably said somewhere up above, I started masking on trains and planes back in 2012. As I was hopping around the world I discovered that was just the smart thing to do if I didn't want to be sick for the first 2 or 3 days I was in a new location. It's extremely common for people in Asian countries to mask if they are sick.

On my flight back from the holidays I was seated near several people who were coughing throughout the flight, unmasked. Why we weren't able to normalize having people mask if they had a cough bewilders me. One common thing I've heard is "I have a cough but it's not COVID so it's ok to not mask." I so so wish that cough == mask.

I really pushed it a few days ago by playing board games with a friend who had recently tested positive but was on paxlovid. We were both in N95 masks and had a tabletop air filter between us. He started paxlovid immediately after testing positive (his wife had had some that she had ended up not using) and was barely symptomatic. He only took a test because they were about to drive to see family for the holiday. I spent time with him 2 days after the day he tested positive and he was still showing a moderately faint positive line on tests. I took a extra vitamins C, D, l-lysine, and zinc for a couple days after. My most recent booster vax was in September.

To be honest I did it partly because I was kind of seeing how it would go. At this point I am confused about what risk assessment looks like these days. I also feel a lot safer around long COVID because studies show that paxlovid almost always knocks it out enough to prevent that from happening, assuming that you start taking it early enough.

My friend's wife had it a couple months prior and they followed a similar protocols about masking and air filters in shared spaces, and nobody else got it then either. It's been enough days that I am pretty sure I didn't catch anything (negative test 2 days ago and once again this morning). His family also seems fine, again.

Also, for science, I kissed my new partner a couple months ago when she was showing a faint line and on paxlovid. She was at the 5 day mark and had a couple days left of paxlovid doses. I didn't catch anything. She tested negative a couple days later.

At any rate I am happy to report that my anecdata shows that paxlovid and vaccinations are making quarantine a lot easier to manage fairly safely than before we had either tool. I am a huge paxlovid fan and think it should just be used in general, there seems to be so much upside with almost no downside that I'm aware of. The faster you get it the better, my friend BARELY even got a cough because they were able to get on top of it so quickly. I am fortunate in that I know a couple of doctors who are willing to aggressively prescribe things like that for their friends, I think it can be a bit harder to get otherwise, sadly.

Happy Christmas!

Here's a lovely Star Wars / Christmastime AI mash up:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C1P5dH3ywua

I absolutely did the "I'll deal with that some other time" for way too long. I may be going fairly quickly because I think I entered the bowl a couple years before I actually asked for the divorce. I'm definitely not out of it entirely but I had already began a grieving process a while ago.

Sarah and I both have a ways to go with the healing process still. She possibly more so than me; in part because I think there's a lot more to reckon with when you have kids and I think I also entered the grieving process at least a year before I actually asked for the divorce. We're old friends and neither of us was looking to date, but we totally fell for each other to a degree such that it felt like there was no going back to being just friends, staying casual or taking a break.

We're careful to not do divorce grief processing with each other (no trauma bonding for us, please!) and are also leaving a lot of space for self-work. This means we tend to pack seeing each other into every other weekend when she doesn't have the kids, and then we sometimes give a few days with little to no contact here and there.  We've gotten into the habit of checking in on what we think we will both need for the next while, set an intention, then stick to it even if one of us really want to see the other in the middle of a time when we're taking time to ourselves. This isn't where we want to be in the longer run but it's working pretty well for us right now.

I'm visiting my parents and they are both 81 and I think I am starting to really see their age. They're still in a house because they are rightly paranoid of COVID in assisted living spaces. They can still get around ok (my dad was even helping me chainsaw a fallen tree on the property today)  but I can also tell one of them is going to need more help than they can manage in the next few years. The saddest thing I see them doing is holing up - I don't think they really got over having to protect themselves from COVID, and they just aren't getting out to do much other than follow their routines. It gives me a lot to think about in terms of where I want to be at that point - I want to still be seeing friends, experiencing things, and traveling up til the end.

The inside is covered with LEDs that are everywhere that the audience isn't, including the very ceiling, making it a 15,000 square meter 16k display. It's bonkers.

Here's a wide angle shot I got to give more of a sense of the scale. If you look at the audience you can see the lighting effect that I had mentioned. The image on the screen looks a little distorted in my photo in a way that it doesn't look in person:

This bit fairly convincingly displays exactly what's outside the venue itself, but if the wall was gone:

I'm here for the Wonka/Dune crossover.

Opening myself up to ridicule from all of the Irish people here: back when I was 16 I loved U2's Achtung Baby album, so they have been somewhere on my bucket list for years now. Enter their Achtung Baby-focused residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas and I pretty much had to go. They were great live but wow the Sphere is AMAZING.

Most impressively they would map spaces onto it that made it look and FEEL like we were outdoors. During one bit it seemed like we were in an amphitheater in the desert while the sun tracked across the sky. They used subtle lighting effects across the audience to augment this effect, casting shadows in the right directions everywhere, making it convincingly realistic. In another part it looked like were in a giant cube made up of falling glyphs like in the Matrix, with the ceiling slowly moving downwards to crush us. Photos of the space don't do it justice - I can see distortions and pixelation in them, but when you are actually in there with everything moving you can barely see it if at all. I think they are playing some tricks that work on the eye but not with a camera.

I'd recommend going to see almost anything there. There's an 18k nature film that Aronofksy did that's supposed to be excellent that plays during the day, and I bet that U2 has only scratched the surface of what can be done with the space since it's so new and they are the first act there.

For an art project at a recent event, a couple friends and I made a humorous phone tree and ended up using AI speech synthesis because we didn't have time to do recordings. We got a fairly convincing Alan Watts voice for chunks of it. The other parts were attempts at Emma Stone, Tom Hanks, and Glados, but none of them were super recognizable out of the box. I probably could have played around with pitch shifts and stutters to make Glados more obvious if I had had time. Some of our script writing was also AI assisted - I see it as more of a great brainstorming partner than useful for actually writing finished product.

We generated around an hour of audio content over the course of a few days. We didn't know what we were doing at the start of it and were working with open source tools on a bitcoin mining rig from 2014 and still got pretty good results. I imagine that real pros are able to accomplish astonishing things given expertise, better software and hardware, better audio samples for training data, and more time.

Attached are a couple of our Alan Watts bits. Process:

• picked clips from some Alan Watts audio books for training data
• generated script with fairly elaborate prompts into claude.ai
• used tortoise-tts (https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts) to render scripts using the training samples, sentence-by-sentence, 3 times for each sentence
• manually selected the best audio for each sentence. given more time, I would have rendered each sentence 5 or 6 times to optimize for better intonation and delivery. a lot of the rendered audio was completely unusable so I didn't have many options in some cases.
• used audacity to stitch things together. given more time I would have added some noise to the gaps between sentences to smooth things out, and tweaked more things to eliminate some of the weird intonation artifacts.

Mastodon still hasn't really taken off yet, despite Al's regular efforts to get it moving. I had been hoping that journalists would jump over there since it seems like the best place to be if you want to be objective and not tied to a company.

I just got a Bluesky invite so may get onto there. I'm not... extremely enthused about it. But it's a place? I love the micro format.

Looking back at this thread I'm amazed that it's been a year and a half since Musk acquired Twitter. I did not expect it to still be as relevant as it is now. I also didn't expect it to be able to stay up with a skeleton crew running it and advertisers bailing left and light. The company has reportedly lost tens of billions of dollars in value. I feel like his creditors will be coming after him at some point but maybe he's too big to fail?

I'll be 49 in March over here and starting to feel some "old person" age things. My near vision went wonky about a year ago so I probably need reading glasses but I've dodged that so far. As I mentioned in my Primavera post, I hurt my Achilles' tendon back in Feburary. That's mostly rehabbed now, with quite a bit of physical therapy which has also made me a lot stronger and more flexible than I've been in 20 years.

After being married 12 years Heather and I are getting divorced. We also sort of shifted into friends and roommates. I hadn't been too happy about it for the last couple of years but I didn't feel resourced to deal with it due to depression from constantly feeling unhappy about it, COVID, my old toxic job, and other things. Back in February I saw a psychiatrist and am some combination of bipolar and ADHD. So I got on a mood stabilizer and it was like waking up into my life - I no longer have nearly as severe up or down spikes and am suddenly dealing with something more approaching "normal" for the first time since my late teens. Within a couple months I was suddenly resourced to deal with the relationship problem and other issues in my life and feel so much better about my life in general.

I recently started dating someone new, Sarah, who is also going through a divorce. She has two lovely kids and has her life together in a way that's a lot more compatible with where I am and want to be. We have both been through a lot of therapy, want the same things from a partner, and are amazing communicators with each other. In some weird ways this has felt like my first "real" relationship because I am stable in a way that I've never been. Part of my bipolar is that I would attribute a lot of my internal feelings to external causes, so depression sometimes felt like it was a result of my partner, and so did hypomania. Now I'm getting a much better bead on what's because of my partner and what's because of me (protip: a LOT of it is me!), which is making for a much healthier dynamic than I have been resourced to have in the past.

Is this Paranoia: The TV Show? Because I want them to be hunting mutants and commies if we're going to do this at all.

Back when I was in my 20s I remember there always seemed to be one or two guys who stood in the back at a show, had greying hair and seemed out of place. I am totally that guy now.

There's a "Fantastic Fest" here in Austin every year that plays films that might be a good fit for Savoury Cinema...

https://drafthouse.com/news/2023-fantastic-fest-lineup

I haven't watched much of this but I have a couple friends who LOVE it. One thing they've pointed out to me is it isn't like Survivor where there are votes or weird forced collaboration - everyone is actually fully alone so it's more of an even playing field. They've also told me that the people who build cabins almost always lose because the basic game is calorie management -  more energy that you put into shelter means that you need to eat more, and there is not much out there after a certain point. Apparently someone in season 6 is worth seeing because they are a next level hunter in the context of the game.

Barbie (2023)

I went in with pretty high expectations after seeing the trailers and hearing some buzz and this was even better than I expected. It's maximalist and over the top but full of gobs of nuance and subtle quips. I thought this was hilarious and lots of bits are extremely meme-worthy. Amazing production quality, design, and writing. 4/5

I hit Primavera again this year. I got the unusual gimp experience - I screwed up my Achille's tendon a couple months before and needed a cane to walk (well at least to walk the huge walking days at Prima). There are some great handicapped spots to watch shows from and I really appreciated that I could rest my ankle between long hikes between things. (My ankle is doing WAY better now with physical therapy, I am almost back to normal again.) I managed to hang out with friends from the UK, Germany, and Austria, so a fun time was had by all.

They fixed a lot of stuff from last year. Water was easy to get to. They also rotated a couple of the stages so that the access was a lot safer. The "Bits" area was gone, which meant that the death march out to there was no longer a thing (which my ankle greatly appreciated).

fun bands:

- Depeche Mode: They sure have still got it, one of the best and most consistent acts I've seen live (4x now).
- New Order: Fenchurch and I saw them in October at one of their first shows back after the pandemic, and it was a little painful because Bernie couldn't hit a lot of notes. He's back in to his usual not amazing but still on key form. Great show with a lot of nice video.
- Ghost: I wouldn't listen to this at home but wow do they put on a fun show. They are so everything in the way that maybe only Swedes can be.
- Nation of Language: I recommend them to anyone who wants some 80s synthwave. Kind of like the voice from Echo and the Bunnymen but way more synthy. Great stuff
- Laurie Anderson: Yes, that Laurie Anderson. She hadn't played in several years and was mostly playing older songs (with some fantastic visuals). She also had some fun stuff to say about AI and one of the songs was a conversation between her and probably ChatGPT. She put on weird voice effects for the AI part of the song, and it was super surreal.
- Jockstrap: Fantastic performers. Their sound is really fascinating, mashing up all kinds of genres from 80s to funk to pop and beyond. I definitely recommend checking out their albums.

techno:
- Emeralds: This is a great avant electronic act that I've always enjoyed on album and only noticed was playing almost the day of. They put on an excellent show and I'd recommend them to anyone who likes twinkly electronica/ambient.
- Four Tet: I love Four Tet, he spun a great set that was super dancy.
- Charlotte de Witte: Wow, this was some "not fucking around" techno. She sounds like an early 90s techno/trance DJ but with WAY better production quality. Rosalia got out halfway through her set and descended upon her show and the entire upper portion of the festival was FLOODED with people. People were dancing inside the food court area. That was the last act I saw and it was a great way to finish up. I finally gave up at 4am and they were still going strong.

Part of it might be that they are taking WAY too long to get to a "team". Phase 1 was anchored by the first Avengers movie where everybody got together. Phase 4 just felt like a whole ton of intros without giving us a real sense of what's supposed to be going on. Sure there is some sort of a "multiverse" thing happening, but there are also some weird "cosmic" things happening too. Also there's this ongoing Skrull plot which seems really important in some contexts and then is totally ignored in others. I've been feeling more and more like the plots and writing are getting twisted into knots to try to fit an overarching vision that still isn't very clear. Like, it's hard for me to believe Wanda's character arc. This isn't the fault of Elizabeth Olsen, who I think is doing a fantastic job with the material she's given, it's a writing problem.

There are definitely some new bits that I quite enjoy (Ms. Marvel is up there) but there are also a lot of new things that seem totally out of place and like they'll be annoying to follow (the Eternals, for one). Even the stingers are weird - in early phases it was Nick Fury getting people together for a single purpose, now they are all over the place and seem to just be introducing even MORE new material and characters. How are they even going to fit this into a couple big Avengers-style films? Why are they holding off on those until really late?

This is actually kind of similar to why I stopped following Marvel comics back in the 90s. I had been following a handful of X-Men titles that sometimes crossed over but were mostly standalone. At some point I felt like I needed to be following a dozen different titles to even know what was going on. This coincided with me getting into music and at some point I decided I'd spend my money on CDs instead of comics, and can't say that I'm sad about my decision.

I just have a question about continuity here -- was Wonka THAT magical before creating his chocolate factory? It seems like he's pretty overpowered from the context of being in that part of his story. Is there going to be a Marvel style final battle at the end where he fights another chocolate maker with similar magic powers?

I vastly prefer cold because you can always add layers of clothing; you can't do the opposite when it gets hot.

Also the native dress of my people from Seattle is to always wear flannels, and I can't celebrate my heritage very well in the South.

On 5/30/2023 at 5:24 PM, Al. said:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/lost-tv-show-culture

 

Big behind the scenes talk about Lost.  I didn't read it all but the highlights are that Damon Lindelof is awful.  (BTW if you are avoiding Succession spoilers if you've not caught up there are plenty in suggested article headlines on this page).

Wow that's terrible. I have a lot of angst about how the writing kept changing around on LOST, and now it's racist and abusive too? What a traumatizing show all around!