The Life and Death of Hollywood

A rather sad tale on how the one of my favorite boogy men, Private Equity, has ruined the film industry just like it’s ruined the gaming industry, real estate and pretty much everything else it touches. To quote “Better Offline”, “The rotten demands of eternal growth.”

“In fact, they weren’t. The streaming model was based on bringing in subscribers—grabbing as much of the market as possible—rather than on earning revenue from individual shows. And big swings brought in new viewers. “It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we mistook that, and were frankly actively gaslit into thinking that that was because they cared about art.”

“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime.” “It was also on me,” she went on, “to kind of fluff everybody involved in the entire making of the show, from the stars to the line producer to the costume designer, etcetera, to make them believe that we’d be coming back again and prevent them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from taking other jobs.”

The film and TV industry is now controlled by only four major companies, and it is shot through with incentives to devalue the actual production of film and television. What is to be done? The most direct solution would be government intervention. If it wanted to, a presidential administration could enforce existing antitrust law, break up the conglomerates, and begin to pull entertainment companies loose from asset-management firms. It could regulate the use of financial tools, as deWaard has suggested; it could rein in private equity. The government could also increase competition directly by funding more public film and television. It could establish a universal basic income for artists and writers.

None of this is likely to happen.”

And I dug up an old illustration I did when I lived in L.A. to go with this post.

The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound

It is cool how The Grateful Dead pretty much invented modern stadium sound systems. Cool little write up on some of the history of that.

“A vision during an LSD trip is what inspired Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer’s mammoth feat of technical engineering, “The Wall of Sound”, irreversibly changing live sound and engineering for the better.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer. Though incredibly frustrated with the noisy, feedback-laden, underpowered situation, they did not want to give up playing live, and the Dead had Owsley on board to help solve the sound situation.”

Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete this Revolting Apple Ad

This is a disturbing, shocking ad, not just because of what it shows but because of its seeming obliviousness to the subtext that it turns into text, as well as the message it sends to every artist alive: the tech industry will crush you, destroy you; suddenly, violently, all at once.

…

The ad arrives amid a continued furor over the ethical, moral and copyright implications of "Generative AI," which is a cool-sounding name for plagiarism software. This so-called "intelligence" is not intelligent but crudely imitative. Contrary to what its industry boosters (and their simps) keep trying to tell us, its relationship to the history of human creativity is not at all like the relationship between a flesh-and-blood art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings or a budding trumpeter playing along with Miles Davis. It's more like the relationship between the tripods in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the people that they suck up into their bellies, shred into gory paste, and spray onto their crops, as a kind of mulch. 

…

Rich Idiots Are Killing The Media To Please The Tech Industry

The Better Offline podcast is perhaps my favorite podcast so far this year and I listen to A LOT of podcasts, Here is a banger for you. The death of Vice and Sports Illustrated are pretty damn sad.

Practically speaking, this meant that outlets were forced by the idiotic executives to chase the dragon of social media and search traffic, and they'd optimize their content not for a person or a living being of any kind, but to please algorithms that they didn't control, run by companies like Meta and Google who didn't give a shit about them. As a result, it's been a fairly apocalyptic decade in journalism...

As private equity and venture capital money is flown into the media industry, so of the rotten demands for eternal growth.

…

Corey Hike is an example of the media world's failure to police itself. She is a career failure. This is now the second publication she's driven into the ground because she does not understand what she is doing, and that op ed I previously mentioned the twenty seventeen Vox one she claimed that we were in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism. To be clear, Corey Hike is not a journalist. She's not an editor. She's not a creator. She's not a creative. She doesn't write things, she doesn't speak things, she doesn't take photos, and she doesn't draw things. She is a parasite. And these walking stains on the earth. They got rich. They got rich as hundreds of people lost their jobs.

Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61

Steve Albini, an icon of indie rock as both a producer and performer, died on Tuesday, May 7, of a heart attack, staff at his recording studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed to Pitchfork. As well as fronting underground rock lynchpins including Shellac and Big Black, Albini was a legend of the recording studio, though he preferred the term “engineer” to “producer.” He recorded Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, and countless more classic albums, and remained an outspoken critic of exploitative music industry practices until his final years. Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old.

Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software

Another post about getting back into meat space. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy drumming so much I think. I get to physically touch things, tune them, reach out and touch real things. Not a mouse representing something…

A lot of us said at some point things like “I’m gonna throw my laptop out the window and start a farm”. Even my last team leader sent me a message out of the blue saying “I think I’ll run a bar. I want to be a bartender and listen to other people’s stories, not figure out why protobuf doesn’t deserialize data that worked JUST FINE for the past three years”.

Recently, when people started coming with so many unrealistic and absurd expectations and demands about what my apps should do, I started thinking if it would be possible to leave software development for a more physical trade.

You know the drill, sometimes the world of software development feels so absurd that you just want to buy a hundred alpaca and sell some wool socks and forget about solving conflicts in package.json for the rest of your life.

But the combination of the negative tone and getting message after message, some people being so persistent that they insist on sending me those messages through all possible mediums (email, Discord, Twitter, contact form, they’ll find me everywhere), makes it hard to just ignore them.

There’s also this oily smell of AI and machine learning in the tech atmosphere, where I no longer feel relevant and I seem to have stopped caring about new tech when I noticed that 8 in 10 articles are about some new LLM or image generation model. I guess I like the smell of wood better.

Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife

This makes me long for the days when I used with actual physical media in meat space and not just abstracted 2d representations of 3d things…. LeSigh…

Framing is alchemical, but it’s also just a series of steps, straightforward as a recipe. First, you measure, cut, build, and join the four sides of the frame, using an electric saw or manual chopper, and a joining machine or miter vise to attach and secure the corners. Then you cut the chosen matboard, glass, and backing to fit, unless the art will be framed with no mat or glass, as is customary when framing paintings on canvas, so that the canvas can “breathe.” Then you putty the frame—i.e., smooth and mask dings or irregularities in the wood, and fill, or appear to fill, any visible gaps in the frame’s corners using special putty that exactly matches the frame’s color and texture (which you may have to custom-mix in advance, no big deal, just keep an ice cube tray full of blobs of every possible hue stored under your worktable, and be careful to keep your putty away from the art, best to set up a kind of paper-covered putty station as far away from humanity as possible, where you can work in peace and safety, making sure to check and wash your hands, clothes, and body before re-joining your coworkers). Now place your finished frame face down on the worktable, clean the glass with non-ammonia spray and microfiber cloth—always wear glass-handling gloves for this step, do not bleed on the artwork—and then, finally, making sure you have the correct side of the glass facing outward, place the pane gently into the frame, brush it free of lint, then place the artwork in there (which you’ve attached securely and not crookedly to its mat with acid-free tape, which might take more than one try, or maybe the mat is off by one or two sixteenths of an inch and needs to be recut). Finally, place the backing foamboard on top, and use your point gun to secure everything in place with framer’s points, so that you can turn the whole thing over and inspect for lint, specks, hairs, or other glitches you may have missed, and, when you find these, open the piece back up by removing the framer’s points with pliers or your fingers—you may choose to open only one side or corner of the work if you’re optimistic—and slide your finger or a special eraser or a razor blade in under the glass to remove the debris, wear gloves or not, just don’t bleed on the artwork, then close up the entire thing with the point gun again, roll a two-sided adhesive tape gun over the outside back borders of the frame, cut and attach brown backing paper, shave off the excess paper with a razor blade, then drill holes for the hardware that holds the hanging wire, making sure to first assess the width, depth, and weight of the entire work and the length of the screws you’re planning to use, measure where you want the hardware placed, and make starter holes with an awl or a manual hand-drill before using your power driver to drill in the screws. When your drill slips and punctures your backing paper, use brown paper tape to cover the hole, and it’s a good idea to put matching tape on both sides of the frame back even if you only fucked up one side, thus giving a symmetrical, intentional look. And then you just attach and twist the hanging wire. Use needle-nose pliers or brown paper tape to tamp down any errant wire so the customer doesn’t puncture a fingertip. Don’t bleed on the artwork.

The Sodium Vapor light system for matting and compositing

Very interesting technique here for using sodium vapor lights instead of a green screen background because the lights are such a narrow bandwidth of light. It’s actually exactly 589nm. Wild stuff.

Top comment is interesting:

“I was one of the last people at Disney to use the Sodium Vapor light system. It was on "Something Wicked This Way Comes" in 1982 or 3. I was an vfx AC at the studio. The prisim was held under license from Rank. It was a hallowed object. It was kept in a steel box and it was studio policy that 2 AC's had to be with it at all times when it was removed from the storage locker. We both carried it to the stage, then carefully inserted it into the 2-strip camera. It was never left alone on stage, we took turns leaving for lunch, the john, etc. It hadn't been used for years but we had a series of tough matte jobs to shoot so they dusted off the old gear. I was aware I was watching a bit of history. The key was the didymium filter in the prism. That thing has to be around somewhere. Technically, Rank would still own it.“

Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)

——-

“Kanye West is not Picasso

I am Picasso

Kanye West is not Edison

I am Edison

I am Tesla

Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything

I am the Dylan of anything

I am the Kanye West of Kanye West

The Kanye West

Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture

From one boutique to another

I am Tesla

I am his coil

The coil that made electricity soft as a bed

I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is

When he shoves your ass off the stage

I am the real Kanye West

I don’t get around much anymore

I never have

I only come alive after a war

And we have not had it yet.”

–Leonard Cohen, “Kanye West is not Picasso” from The Flame (2018)


Embed Block
Add an embed URL or code. Learn more

Podcast- The AI Bubble Is Bursting

New podcast I stumbled into called “Better Offline”. Just finished the episode called, “The AI Bubble is Bursting” which is pretty good. Ironically enough, I’d bet dollars to donuts AI did the transcription, cause it messed up more than a few words. Quotes are from the second in the series. I just realized I listened out of order… whoops. They are in proper order below.

Some bits I found interesting, like no one can say if it is actually profitable. And side note, this is from the transcription which is wonky.

“ In October twenty twenty three, Richard Windsor, the research director at large of Counterpoint Research, which is one of the more reliable analyst houses, hypothesized that open AI's monthly cash burn was in the region of one point one billion dollars a month, based on them having to raise thirteen billion dollars from Microsoft, most of it, as I noted in credits for its Azure cloud computing service to run their models.

It could be more, it could be less. As a private company, only investors and other insiders can possibly know what's going on in open Ai. However, four months later, Reuter's would report that open AI made about two billion dollars in revenue in twenty twenty three, a remarkable sum that much like every other story about open ai, never mentions profit. In fact, I can't find a single reporter that appears to have asked Sam Mormon about how much profit open ai makes, only breathless hype with no consideration of its sustainability.

Even if open ai burns a tenth of windsors estema about one hundred million dollars a month, that's still far more money than they're making.”

“Salesforce chief financial officer Amy Weaver said in their most recent earning score that Salesforce was not factoring in material contribution from Salesforce's numerous AI products in its financial year twenty twenty five.

Graphics software company Adobe shares slid in their last earnings. It's the company failed to generate meaningful revenue from its masses of AI products, with analysts now worried about its ability to actually monetize any of these generative products. Service now claimed to its earnings that generative AI was meaningfully contributed to its bottom line.”

And I do love me a good ending rant, lol!

“ And the AI revolution, despite its spacious hype, is not really for us. It's not for you and me. It's for people at Satya Nadella of Microsoft to claim that they've increased growth by twenty percent. It's for people like Sam Altman to buy another fucking Porsche. It's so that these people can feel important and be rich, rather than improving society at all. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe all of this is the future, maybe everything will be automated, but I don't see the signs. This doesn't feel much different to the metaverse. There's a product, but in the end, what's it really do? Just like the metaverse, I don't think many people are really using it. All signs point to this being an empty bubble. And I'm sure you're sick of this too. I'm sure that you're sick of the tech industry telling you the futures here when it's the present and it fucking sucks.”

New Work in the Wild: At the Edge of the End

Some album art I did for We are Parasols just went live for their new album, “At the Edge of the End”. Fun abstract doodle using Luka noise for the ground.

Compers - what are your favorite special sauce tricks for distressing CG?

Interesting reddit thread here about distressing CG to match plates that has some good tid bits. Here are my take aways.

——-

If the plate has it, a little bit of blur on the highlights in the blue channel, added on top for those bright pings. Always adds a little something and it's not quite the same as chromabb.

——-

Was once compositing a shot with a mix of cg and green screen elements. Couldn’t get it looking meshed. Rendered the cg stuff with a green spill, layered it on a green screen, pulled a key and despill. Boom, finaled.

——-

I sometimes use a Luma key in ae to add heavier noise in the blacks to make it seem like my cg camera sensor is bad in low light.

——-

Filtering! (notch is my personal go-to. Scale up, scale back down). Then soften-sharpen. Throw on some chroma ab, looks real. If you have a beauty rebuild, divide out the albedo, blur and average with itself, the multiply back with your light pass. Gives you a nice color-bleed between different textures.

——-

The last one is a trick i have been doing for years. I also use it when doing product swaps. Basically, once you have the comped product in the frame, make it a smart object, blur it and then sharpen it to match. Really does wonders. Also, duplicate the comped asset and set that layer to softlight and blur it. That can help ”sit” the comped product into the shot. Remove all grain then add grain over everything is good one I use all the time. So much easier with AI denoising as well. I could probably write for days about all these damn tricks I have picked up over the years… lol!