Month: August 2020

  • Battle for open platforms + more stuff

    Epic’s battle for open platforms ignores consoles’ massive closed market | Ars Technica – and the majority of games played on Fortnite are played on consoles. Epic’s battle for open platforms rings hollow. More gaming posts here. More on other (more legitimate) battles for open platforms here. Epic’s battle for open platforms is about extra revenue…

  • Mamahuhu + more things

    Scarlett, Shanghai and Me is a short film by comedy troupe Mamahuhu. They describe it as a film about coming to the end of your life as an expat in China. But I thought it was interesting as an examination of our lives with technology. Major Chinese cities now routinely use facial recognition as a…

  • Facial recognition + more things

    This tool could protect your photos from facial recognition – TODAYonline – this kind of prevention of facial recognition from photographs is interesting. Presumably it can also be done to make sure facial recognition works for a ‘person’, even when their passport photo has subtle differences. This kind of facial recognition manipulation technology is probably something…

  • Frank Miller – Ronin

    Frank Miller – Ronin (often called Frank Miller’s Ronin) was a graphic novel written in the early 1990s. In the story Miller looks to combine is love of myth and legend a la 300, with cyberpunk. The story leaps across time from medieval Japan to the distant future of New York. The Ronin of the…

  • Anti China + more things

    This was the last place I expected to see anti-China sentiment addressed. I like Steve Guttenberg’s writing in the past for CNet on all things hi-fi and now follow his videos. What he does in in video makes up in enthusiasm, what he lacks in production skills. It was interesting to see him shoot a…

  • Memes as protest tactics + more

    Why Protest Tactics Spread Like Memes – The New York Times – often, she noted, the images’ similarity was unwitting. In their spread, their simultaneity and their indirect influence on each other, the protest videos had all the characteristics of memes, those units of culture and behavior that spread rapidly online. The same cultural transfer…

  • Empathy delusion + more things

    Ian Murray of House 51 takes on some marketing sacred cows such as brand purpose in The Empathy Delusion. His presentation sets out to show how different marketing and agency folk are from the general public. Positive traits, like the gumption to move to London put a difference between them and the general public. This…