Week wrap-up: Sept 29
Here's what I've been doing/finding online this week!
Eric Adams throwback: "Combating gun violence"
Eric Adams, the mayor of NYC, has been indicted for taking bribes. Now's a good time to revisit his classic creation, the "combating gun violence" video where he searches the room of a child (which is probably actually a lawyer's office? Or something?) to find guns and drugs in the most improbable places, all while insisting over and over that children have no first amendment (????? Eric are you okay????) rights. This video is unbelievably dark but extremely funny. (Was alerted to this one recently on the If Books Could Kill Patreon feed.)
Volega no.1 - Ghoulnoise
I really enjoyed this blog post from Priscilla Snow about the creation process for the conlang (used in both regular dialogue VO and as lyrics in music) in JETT: The Far Shore!
Cool game dev finds - Brody Brooks
My friend Brody posted a useful list of game dev utilities, including asset collections!
Sortition Social
Blackle Mori has created a RSS feed randomizer, sortition social.
Sortition social is a community RSS feed reader. Every day, a random feed is selected from our database and added to the timeline. After seven days, the feed falls off the end of the timeline and is replaced by a new one at the top. The timeline always shows the latest entries from the feeds it features.
Seems like a fascinating way to discover RSS feeds from the Cohost community--a lot of the feeds submitted so far are from there. You can add your own on the About page!
YTCH
Found this recommended by Jae - it's a set of "television channels" which run thematic collections of long-form videos from YouTube as if they were TV shows.
Reducing your control over YouTube content selection isn't new - I've seen various projects before which do this kind of thing. The thing I like best about YTCH, however, is the channel list. It's got some fun groupings and distinctions. Among its 30+ current channels, there's typical tv-esque stuff like food, travel, and cooking, but also a bit more "YouTubey" ones like product reviews. There's also a channel for short films, a separate one for horror short films, and even a whole channel just for UFC specifically. It is fun and strange to be reminded that the biggest difference between online video hosting and traditional broadcast is that the worldview of the broadcaster is reflected in the limitations and categorization of the content. The vast majority of YouTube I personally watch would not be reflected in this channel listing at all, either because it crosses topics, it's too niche, or not formal/produced enough.
Hadi Safa, the person who runs this site, has said online that the videos are "hand picked"... they've been adding new channels over the last few weeks, which is pretty cool. I'm curious about what kind of curation labor goes into building one of these channels, and I hope they write about it online in much more detail at some point!
American flags photographed in infrared
Nick from Cohost posted a bunch of infrared photos of American flags. Nick says:
Historically, infrared imaging has been used for military aerial surveillance and scientific and agricultural purposes, because living foliage reflects infrared very strongly, but dead foliage does not, even if it is still green to the naked eye.
Infrared photography also has a number of other quirks, my personal favorite being the unpredictable way that IR interacts with dyes and pigments on various materials and surfaces. This can result in unpredictable and often surreal rendition of ubiquitous symbols, such as flags. I find this oddly liberating.
These flags often look completely washed out, with the stars and stripes only barely visible if you squint. It's a powerfully strange and challenging way to depict this symbol and I like Nick's work on the topic a lot.