Really great piece here from the NY Times and Christoph Niemann - Sketched Out: An Illustrator Confronts His Fears About A.I. Art. This isn't a 10,000 word rambling about copyright infringement or ownership but, rather, an interactive graphic novel taking you through the worrisome ponderings of an artist looking into the void of a new era.
Obviously there are a ton of great drawings throughout this but there are also a lot of excellent thinking points - how will AI influence the future of art given that AI tends to deliver "popular" training data? What happens the brilliance of errors - if artists aren't making as many mistakes, do we lose out on this happenstance? "Does art require an artist?"
I don't have any answers here but I do like thinking about it and considering this situation with histories prior hurdles. Definitely a great read - please go through it all!
How in the world are we supposed to be able to tell the difference between reality and AI conjurings when things like the World's Narrowest Fiat Panda exists? It's fully functional and every photo of it looks like a bad Photoshop job. That single headlight is downright adorable.
The other day I mused about the origin story of the Computer Cowboy - a gif that has had a persistent presence in every Slack I've ever been in. Its meaning is diverse and dynamic, which I think is a huge part of its ubiquity.
I asked around in my circles for any insights or resources that might help track it down and I was pointed to some absolute treasure troves of antique animations featuring cowboys, computers and (only occasionally) both. Steve (of Abandonware, naturally) steered me towards Discmaster, a browsable repository of art files uploaded to archive.org. A search for "Cowboy" yields thousands of results. So, I just started digging until I found our guy.
The image is taken from a CD-ROM of art files called Art Explosion 600,000, a tome of illustrations from 1998 consisting of 29 Discs of artwork. The Cowboy is on Disc 9, in the "Western & Rodeo (Part 1)" group. There are lots of other characters in the same folder but none come close to the depicted scene we've all come to love. It's clear why someone out there worked to disseminate his visage. His official name is Cowboy - Techno.wmf
Knowing that the image was spawned from an Art CD-ROM is a huge piece of the puzzle but there's certainly many holes left to investigate. Who was the original illustrator of the image before it made its way to the disc? This will be quite difficult to answer unless we find an employee of Nova, the company that published the disc. Additionally, we have no insight into who animated the cowboy. There are some brilliant decisions made by whomever did so - a slight change in color palette, thickening of lines, changing the monitor color and adding endless garbage, the best finger dancing movement the Internet has ever seen. Awards are deserved. They even seemed to have left his silver ear intact.
The search continues. If you have any insight on this character - maybe he's a subtle William Gibson Console Cowboy reference? Maybe he's a proto hacker? Maybe he's an AOL fever dream? - get in touch! I'm on Bluesky and all the other spots (check the footer for your options).
In talking all this through with friends, it was inevitable that a more modern rendition of our western surfer should arise. The inimitable Chad Pugh whipped up this guy and I find it to be a worthy tribute for the world to enjoy. May Cowboy Techno persist through all times.
Back in October of 2024, the band announced a vinyl release of their 2001-2002 demos. I snatched it up quick! But it was not available digitally in any form until now. I do not believe these are streaming in any form, you'll have to snag them on Bandcamp. I really can't recommend it enough (clearly).
Anyone know the history of that GIF? I'm so curious and, yet, can find nothing. Regardless, here's some little drops of joy:
Scream to Unlock - a Chrome plugin that blocks social media websites and requires you to yell "I'm a Loser!" into your microphone in order to bypass the block. This little detail is superb: "The louder you scream, the more time you get to browse."
Cheating OpenAI transcriptions - If you use OpenAI to create transcriptions of audio this is a very clever little hack that uses ffmpeg to speed up your audio 2x - 3x. Since OpenAI charges by the minute and speeding up your audio decreases the overall length, you just got cheaper transcriptions (with "almost no drop in quality").
Busy Bar - need a clever little LED display screen to let people know not to bother you? This is, surely, the best option for exactly that.
Getting Started with Dia - the folks at The Browser Company have put Arc in the icebox and are focsed on Dia now. The pivot is a bit controversial but it's all quite interesting to see how its unfolding. Love that someone is attempting to push some innovation!
Friday Videos is no longer a weekly feature but I still enjoy it when I've compiled enough ridiculous things to share with you. You know how crazy it is out there, give yourself a few minutes to unwind and enjoy the absurd.
DRAM - Cash Machine - found myself revisiting this video recently. Still an absolute delight start to finish.
NES Commercial? - I could not begin to tell you if this was real or parody. Either way, I think this aesthetic is making a comeback.
Two Talking Tom Test - this is 13 years old so it's likely you've seen it or it's even been on this site before.. but I enjoyed the revisit. I was impressed it had an upper threshold!
Steve Jobs Opera - in all honesty, if I saw this in person I would be delighted. But seeing it as a 30second Internet commercial, I'm aghast there was funding for this to exist.
Paving - I found myself visiting more modern works from Yoshinao Satoh. I really admire how much he is able to do with constraints and repetition.
"Bring Me Everyone" - you know that outlandish scene in Leon: The Professional where Gary Oldman screams his line like a madman? Apparently that was just meant to be a goof!
The Goof - been a minute since I watched this chunk of The Ten. Great goof.
Can We Fool The VFX Wizard? - I'm unfamiliar with the Nounish channel but have been enjoying what I've seen. Sort of like Dropout, there's a lot of recurring contributions.
The 11 Body Systems - nurse Reup gives you a real education on the human body!
600m Glass Water Slide - YouTube loves to serve me up first person perspective experiences of rollercoasters around the world. Watch this and maybe it'll start doing it for you too.
I've also really been enjoying this Full Comedy Actor Roundtable with Seth Rogen, Adam Brody, Jason Segel, John Mulaney, Julio Torres and Ted Danson. There are many of these from The Hollywood Reporter, so let this also be a door opening your recommendations.
The debut album from Matt & The Watt Gives was released last Friday. This is the new undertaking of Matt Pelham - previously the singer and songwriter for The Features. Back in 2016, the band quietly disbanded and fans were left to wonder if there would be new music from any of the members. Fortunately, drummer Rollum Haas answered that question with The Robe but there was always some curiosity about Pelham's future output.
I'm happy to share that the debut, full-length, self-titled record is now available. For anyone that was a fan of The Features, it's immediately familiar because of Pelham's distinctive voice but the sonic palette of the record is unique to Matt & The Watt Gives.
We pressed 100 records in Apple Red and the rest in standard black. There are still some of those red records available but not many! If you want one, they are here (if you're international, they are here).
The high energy rock songs of the record are an absolute treat but I actually think the record soars during the more vulnerable songs. "Wilder Days", "'Til You", "For Every Dream" and "The Chemo Blues" are heart heavy songs but all the more impactful for it. I'm clearly biased on my love of the record but I do hope you'll spend some time with it!
While I will unlikely ever play it, I am rather enjoying the aesthetic vibe of this trailer for indie game The Drifter. I'm not sure what this specific flavor of pixel art is called but it reminds me of the mid-90s adventure games and more modern games like Sword & Sorcery, Hyper Light Drifter and Zwaard. It's chunky but not lacking in detail - a great balance.
I will admit, 100%, that this is driven by schadenfreude - a bit of pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune. I will also admit that I have no reason to feel such a way! I've got nothing against anyone involved in this story personally or otherwise, I'm just enjoying the drama.
If you have not been following, this Stereogum story on Vinyl Me, Please: What Went Wrong is a great place to start. The TLDR is; a vinyl subscription service known for high-quality, highly curated releases decided to open their own manufacturing plant in Denver and basically everything crashed and burned from there. The company overspent, the existing vinyl orders were never fulfilled and board members were expelled. High drama!
It looks like that drama may have a light at the end of the tunnel tho as VNYL has acquired VMP and will likely clean things up. If you're not familiar, VNYL is a different vinyl subscription service but they do not make their own records, they serve as a direct to consumer distributor. They have purchased several yk Records titles in the past and it's been a real boon.
Be interesting to see how it all shakes out in 6 months! I hope customers get their money back or their products or both. Best of luck to VNYL (sincerely) and my apologies for enjoying this delicious drama maybe a little too much.
As it happens from time to time, I was revisiting Supergrass and then following that down the rabbit hole to drummer Danny Goffey's underrated side tangent Vangoffey while reading Wikipedia. As you do. There's a little bit in there about a period in 2007-2008 where Goffey and singer Gaz Coomes go off on their own tour:
In 2007 and 2008, while Supergrass bandmate Mick Quinn was suffering from broken heel and vertebrae, Danny and Gaz Coombes went on a short tour of the country playing at small venues as the Diamond Hoo Ha Men. The tour was captured on film for a Rockumentary called Glange Fever, released in 2008.
I knew Diamond Hoo Ha was the name of a Supergrass album but had never heard of them touring in such a way. And I'd certainly never heard of, or seen, the Glange Fever documentary. Fortunately, someone has been kind enough to put it on YouTube.
Never seen it so I am not sure I am vouching for it but, at the very least, whenever you're reading this - use it as an opportunity to revisit Supergrass and Vangoffey.
Marcus piece is not dense or unapproachable. If you have the slightest interest in AI and how the ongoing advancements are proceeding, it's a very thoughtful discussion. A friend of mine called it "Some good cold water on how close AGI." Meaning, we're not that close to Artificial General Intelligence despite what some of the hype may lead you to believe. The pattern matching on current LLMs is incredibly impressive but "thinking" is the wrong word for it - a 7-year old has better reasoning skills.
I do not consider myself an AI evangelist or expert in any regard. I am a fan of it and use it regularly but also agree with a great many critiques of it. Mostly I try to remind myself that it is early days. Of course OpenAI and Claude and Google and all the rest want you to believe they have the best models - they want you to pay them to use the software! It's all marketing! But that doesn't mean it's not also impressive! It just has to be taken with a grain of salt, like all marketing does.
Marcus and Apple make a great point about the state of things - they are not wrong. AGI is not impending and AI "thinking" has a long way to go (for now). That's good for us because we need to figure out how these tools fit into our landscape from an ethical standpoint and how we can regulate them.
Arlo recently clued me in to !Camera, a photography app that uses a big, chunky, fun interface to surface some premium settings. The settings are not overwhelming and it's fun to use an interface that actually feels like a childhood toy - a bit of whimsy, if you will.
I like the standard Camera app on the iPhone - it's hard to complain about. It takes nice photos and it has a lot of features if you know how to use them. But apps like !Camera and its ilk - see also, Kino for a different flavor of a similar thing - find a nice balance between giving you manual control and letting you choose what kind of post-processed filter. I'm not sure I'm ready to subscribe to such a thing but I am happy to play with it and use all the free features.
If you're unfamiliar, Mitch Hedberg was a rather unique stand-up comic. Tragically, he passed away in 2005 but his style is unmatched - one-liners and absurd scenarios that somehow manage to be funny over and over again even tho they are incredibly short.
Comedian Doug Stanhope recently shared this cut of The Mitch Hedberg Project, a 2001 MTV pilot featuring Hedberg and a cast of friends (including his wife, comedian, Lynn Shawcroft) simply touring around California. It has some rough moments - it's not confusing why it wasn't picked up - but it's nice to see a little historical relic make its way out into the world.
I've been friends with Davis for a long time. Longer than I can actually remember when we met. Over the years he has always dabbled in various music projects, some more straightforward than others. The latest, Rime, is a mixture of ambient soundscapes, a bit of noise and something entirely unique.
When it was released, Davis included this note - which I think really frames it up nicely:
Over the past few years I've been working to build my own pedals and instruments - my goal is to just make something I haven't heard before. Beyond the usual assortment of synthesizers and drum machines, on there are some tape-looped organs, found sounds, baritone guitars, thumb pianos, and even the recorded sounds of my own birth (?!), which was a SURREAL experience to discover on a hand-labeled cassette tape from home.
If you're the type to put new music in headphones and walk around, this is a great batch of songs to do it with. While there are plenty of electronic elements to the compositions, there's an atmosphere to many of them that hints toward the subtle beauty of natural things. Like tree limbs swaying or staring into the night sky, remembering you're a pale blue dot. That may sound esoteric but this is some great music to let those sorts of ideas wander into your head.
Artist Mattia Bioli spent three years creating this short film - Cubit. I've no idea how it was created - tho Bioli states that some innovative techniques were used (tell me more!). I also have no idea when it will be fully available anywhere to watch - such is generally the fate of a short film.
What I do know is that it has a fantastic dithered vibe and I'm excited to see more. There's a making of that I'll queue in the meantime- thank goodness for auto-translated auto-transcribed captions!
I recall a few years ago, a trailer emerged for a documentary about the band Failure. It's been a minute since I've heard anything about it but just today I noticed that there's a brand new trailer. It's a lot of similar footage but some very intriguing additions - namely from the members of the band itself.
Still no stated release date but I'm very much looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'm headed back into their full discography once again. Always a treat.
I am fortunate enough to hang out in a small Discord with a bunch of very talented people. One of them - Jazzy Chad - recently launched a new game called Letters. It's a daily wordplay game where everyone gets the same grid of letters and your task is to spell the highest scoring word - using double and triple scoring tiles similar to Scrabble.
It's addictive in juuuust the right way. It's a daily experience but it's not overly eager. It's challenging to find high scoring words but it's possible to do well without knowledge of some obscure word set. All told, a damn good game. It's in the App Store now.
Oh, and if you do not have an iPhone or do not want to install another app - it's also on the web! You can give it a whirl right now. I suggest you do.
Hopefully you've got Neal.fun in your bookmarks for revisiting occasionally to delight and entertain you. If not, maybe you missed the Wonders of Street View - a repository of delightful, odd and poignant captures across the planet (and across time). I've seen Alien Bugs, a Barack Obama gas station, a street view camera on a camel, a steampunk station wagon and a McDonald's airplane. And that's just from 2 minutes of enjoyment!
If you're looking for more, it's never a bad idea to revisit the archives of 9 Eyes. I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.
I stumbled across Albuquerque artist Beedallo by way of this Future Islands cover - an album I've never heard but am captivated by the art.
The Lapis Room art center has some excellent biography information about the artist, her history and her inspiration but you really just need to browse the work. I love the fusion of styles and the balance of humor, grotesque and melancholy. Riveting across the board.
