At the end of the day, we don’t know what is going to happen next with Twitter or any of these platforms. We don’t know what changes Web 3.0 is going to bring to the internet. We do know that we will all still be here, wanting to share our thoughts, talk about anything and everything, and commune with our people. Personal blogging is the simplest and fastest way to do all of that.
I don’t know if blogging is as easy as The Verge are making out in this article. They talk about owning your own platform so that you can be sure that your content won’t go away. But to do that, you really need to host your own blog, and that brings its own set of headaches (Ask me what my backup strategy is for this blog! Ask me if it’s something I worry about!) And toxic social media has made me extremely reluctant to share intimate details of my life on the internet. And the whole rise of AI has made me extremely wary of contributing anything to the corpus of things that will help train them.
But, all that being said, it’s a noble goal. Godspeed.
Oh wow! Spycraft was one of my favourite games of the 90s but it’s been pretty well forgotten by most people, despite the fact it did some really interesting things both narratively and gameplay-wise. And it had Charles Fuckin Napier!
So fair play to Polygon for going back and revisiting it now for a making-of documentary that sounds like it’s been in the works for a while. The documentary is coming in 2023 but you can watch the trailer now. And if you want to play the game, it’s available from Steam and GOG and it runs pretty well in Dosbox, even on a Mac.
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’s tweets.
With the implosion of Twitter and the move towards Mastodon and the federated web, the internet of late 2022 is feeling more and more like the internet of 2002: ours.
A wonderful deep-dive into a tiny, tiny moment that had a lasting impact. I also love that as well as interviewing game developers and critics, they also spoke to people like Katie Mack and Yanis Varoufakis.
Bo Burnham has put up an hour-long video of the outtakes from Inside. But it’s more than just your usual outtakes – some of it is really cleverly done. Like showing all the takes of a song all at once, and turning off the unused takes as he messes up, so that at the end it’s like a Super Meatboy level replay and you’re just left with the take he used in the final film.
I wasn’t originally taken by Inside (although this might have been overly harsh because of, you know, everything) but I really appreciate the amount of work he put in.
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.
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I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.
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