Week round-up: September 21
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause - Ta-Nehisi Coates
The defining piece on the events of the last two weeks.
It's behind a paywall but I was able to get through. I bet you can too.
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape - Bogdan Ionescu
Here is the website in question. A copy of it not hosted on a vape can be found here.
I wouldn’t want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as “disposable”. Thankfully, I don’t plan on pursuing law anytime soon.
Can Anyone Help Me Find This McDonald's Arcade Machine? - Egan
I can't tell whether I actually remember this arcade machine or whether the description of it is evocative enough that it is causing me to hallucinate it.
The other night before bed, I suddenly remembered an arcade machine that used to be at our local McDonald's growing up, and I haven't been able to find evidence of it anywhere.
Hugo Best Game: a look at the stats - Andrew Plotkin
A breakdown of the Hugo voting for best game which illuminates something I have also noticed in other events and awards, some of which I participated in as a judge. There often seems to be a kind of split in focus between small-budget games and large-budget games.
If you look at the chart, every indie game that was eliminated (Lorelei, TBW, Resist) handed the majority of its votes to the other indie games. And when Zelda was eliminated, the largest share of its votes went to Dragon Age. So the fans of each group tended to favor their entire group over the "opposite" group. Half the Zelda didn't bother to put Qud or 1000xResist on their ballot at all.
Cohost repost: real moon/fake moon - v buckenham
Glad to see this post I remember from Cohost on v's blog.
But the really interesting thing that's happening in this article is not really the technology, but seeing culture collectively trying to make sense of it. Trying to decide on the boundary lines, trying to define what a "photograph" is. Photography has never been a neutral process, it has always involved setting up lights & staging & pushing the exposure & dodging & burning & airbrushing & composites & all the fussing called "editing". And at the same time, it's always derived a lot of its power from its uneasy relationship to that promised neutrality, to that idea of the objective flat capture of the world. It's "Photoshop", the software manifestation of the place where photographs are developed, that is the catch-phrase for manipulated images.
V posted this article again in response to a recent BBC article about Youtube's decision to alter Shorts on the platform with AI without permission from the uploader.