Let this 1960s commercial entertain you and then take you on a rabbit hole of discovery about the actress Viva, Warhol movies and forgotten sodas.

During the Defy Film Festival there was a rolling loop of pre-show entertainment. This isn't uncommon but the custom footage cut together came from a bizarre variety of sources. Once such segment that really caught me was two aliens flying around Earth discussing political and ecological issues that our planet is facing. Thanks to some kind Internet sleuths, it turns out the footage is from a 1974 animation called Freedom 2000. The abstract is exactly as I remembered:

Animation highlighting the environmental problems that arise from industrialization and rapid population growth. Two aliens fly above the Earth in a spaceship and discuss how humans need to balance technological advances with ecological health. Created by Hanna-Barbera.

What I did not realize is that the piece is 20 minutes long, was created by Hanna-Barbera and contains a multitude of different styles. If you've got some time, it's most definitely worth hitting play and soaking in. And, yes, it's on YouTube if you prefer.

absolutely ridiculous collection of works from every major artist you could think of. Not unheard of but always nuts to see a single person own art like this

I grew up on PC's but had not heard of Neko until somewhat recently. Back in the 1980s, Naoshi Watanabe created an MS-DOS graphical cat named Neko. I'm not clear on what it did back in the DOS days but it was quickly ported to the Macintosh in 1989 and would chase your mouse around the screen. That's it. It's just adorable and fun.

The full history is worth a read. It was eventually ported to Windows, officially licensed by IBM for OS/2 and the author even eventually declared the images as part of the public domain. Because of that, there's a million variants and offshoots of the program. The adorable lives on.

Maybe I should install WebNeko around here....

Occasionally old mixes pop into my brain. The other day I was thinking about Summer Long, Some Aren't - a mix from McBurney that introduced me to Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra. I went to recreate the mix on Spotify and could not find anything about Track 5 - "High Life Time" by Good Friend Charles.

No streaming music service had any artist with that name. Google returned no valid results. I inquired with Mac what the story was and he said he named it that based on a best guess; as he'd heard the song from Pates Tapes, with no obvious credit.

This all sounds like a great candidate for a Lostwave deep dive but then it hit me.. this mix came out in 2012, before the ubiquity of song identifying services like Shazam or SoundHound. I played the track and got the hit for George Darko, "Highlife Time." A song from a 1983 album originally entitled Hi-Life Time.

Mystery solved but, more importantly, a nice little gateway to great record and a wonderful sampler about Oval Records. Triple win in my eyes.

I posted about the "Sound Files of Summer" episode of Never Post back at the end of June. If you have not listened to that episode yet, please do so now. The show recently did a Mailbag follow-up where listeners chime in about how streaming music vs curating a library of files has impacted them. This is some nerdy subject matter I can greatly appreciate. They tackle the music library topic at the top of the show but hop to 7:45 to get directly into the discussion about "the materiality of sound files." Specifically, how listening to sound files differs from streaming, particularly in regards to encoded errors that create. The second response gets even further into this idea and I'm transcribing the quote exactly here so there's a means of preserving it:

"I accept that my copy of Akira is a little folded up in the corner after I sat on it without looking. Or that my vinyl copy of that one Sufjan Stevens record has a locked groove that I need to get up and lift the tone arm over whenever I get to that part. We expect our physical media objects to have quirks of ownership. There was a very short amount of time where our digital media had these same quirks.

Maybe that copy of Indiana Jones that's sitting on your computer just has the Hindi subtitles burned into it and you learned to live with it. Kind of grow to love it. It's yours (although depending on how you got it, it could also be someone else's). It's just not everyone else's. Digital files are funny like that.

The age of streaming has somewhat singularized the files of digital media and I find that to be a little sad."

I love that quote. It is, admittedly, a little bit of nostalgia for a nerdier time but it's also a nice sentiment that building a "Music Library" is a physical activity. Granted, the physicality of it is bits being written on a drive but there's still something there; errors and all.

Very nerdy use of monitor subpixels. Heartily approved.

Bloomberg ran a piece profiling the Worldcoin Orb Factory - a biometric iris scanner that swaps your retina data for cryptocurrency. The company behind it is called Tools for Humanity and it's backed by Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO (at the time of writing) and many other big VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (whom I can no longer mention without citing their moral bankruptcy).

The pitch is that as technology advances, we will need a way to verify human beings vs AI. So, they set forth to scan every iris on Earth and store the information in the blockchain, which means you get a little dab of cryptocurrency in exchange called Worldcoin, which you can access with your newly registered World ID. It's like a fusion of Universal Basic Income, cryptocurrency and Persona, all verified by your eyeball. The people behind it know how dystopian it sounds but promise it's all quite altruistic.

My knee jerk for projects like this is that they are naive at best and exploitative at worst. Quotes from the Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania like this one do not waive my fears:

“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley,” Blania told the students. “You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea that, if it works, will change everything, and, if it doesn’t work, at least it was worth a try.”

It actually turns my stomach to think about how much VC money is spent on ideas like this instead of real world problems. The amount of ego involved is astounding to say the least.

Trying my best to put on an optimistic viewpoint, I can't disagree that a Universal Basic Income is a good idea. I can't disagree that technology is going to accelerate extremely fast, possibly in such a way that humans are hard to detect (tho mostly online). I can't even disagree that The Orb looks cool. It's also built on open source software and available for anyone to see how it works. But at the end of the day, it's a for profit company, with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding that eventually expects a return. They may be betting on that return to be fueled by the Worldcoin crypto value increasing but it's entirely possible that's not going to be the case. Even if it is, it's likely that the investors will be first in line to profit over the millions of people scanning their eyeballs.

As I get older, I'm trying to keep an open mind about technology and efforts of this nature. It's too easy to be cranky and pessimistic about everything. However, that forced optimism can be its own trap; skepticism can be healthy. Overall, I'm not keen on Worldcoin or The Orb for myself. Maybe one day I'll feel otherwise but I'm not convinced the privacy downside is worth the crypto gamble.

I've been keeping an eye on the Creative Works conference since way back in 2014. I even had the pleasure of attending in 2015. I still think about the presentations from Mikey Burton, Ghostly Ferns and Dan Christofferson to name but a few.

The conference has grown over the years and is now holding events on the west and east coasts. In fact, they recently announced their Creative Works EAST lineup and workshops. Lauren Hom! Meg Lewis! Jessica Hische! Lots of names I Don't Yet Know But Really Want To!

Creative Works founder Josh Horton has always had a knack for creating a compelling lineup of speakers, legitimately educational workshops and an environment that is friendly even if you (like me) do not really know anyone at all. Do recommend!

Somehow I ended up subscribed to Every - an AI / tech / thinkpiece newsletter that goes out every day. Sometimes the results are immersive and interesting, sometimes I delete them before I make it past the first paragraph. So it goes.

This piece on The Addiction Economy is much moreso the former. It's a lengthy read that takes its time to cover many of the obvious examples of how we're all becoming increasingly more addicted through technology and how that's not really all that surprising; it's a long trend!

Aside from being packed with informative nuggets about the world taking shape around us, it also ends on multiple optimistic notes. I find optimism to be a rare commodity these days, so I greatly appreciate a long - possibly dreadful - read that takes the effort to leave you with some positive feels.

The 2024 Defy Film Festival starts this weekend - Friday, August 16 + Saturday, August 17th. It's been around since 2016 but I only managed to start attending in the last few years. I feel foolish for not having attending earlier. If you are in the Nashville area, make the effort. If you are not in the Nashville area, go follow them and come out next year! The folks over at City Cast Nashville have a great interview with one of the festival founders, Dycee Wildman. She does a great job explaining how the festival comes together and what kind of programming they are on the lookout for.

If you have a filmmaker in your life, please clue them in to Defy. They are doing a great thing and I'm especially in awe of their ability to keep it welcoming, weird and small. A perfect combo.

Miles recently invited me to Record Club - a new(ish) site for cataloging music. Simply put, it's "Letterboxd for music." I'm just getting started but if you end up on there, give me a follow!

My initial impression is that the aesthetic of the site is very nice, the onboarding was insightful and easy but the kind of music I listen to simply may not be in their database! Much like how Letterboxd uses TMBD as their backend, Record Club uses MusicBrainz for theirs. No repository of open source information is going to be complete (especially with music) but I've found that a great deal of what I'm listening to lately is simply not on there. I think my niche local listening may just be too specific.

That said, I've literally been signed up for less than an hour so any critique I have is way too early to be truly insightful. I'm happy it exists and am looking forward to getting it into my daily rotation.

open source version of Postman. count me in!

Doyle often does not get the praise he deserves for his involvement in this beloved record store. Glad Billboard took note!

TimWalzFixedYourBicycle.com is just the right dose of silly Internet. Refreshing to just have a little fun because a political candidate seems to be a pleasant person. Imagine it!

A few weeks ago, I got up at the crack of dawn and joined up with Tower Defense to film a video for their forthcoming song "Repeat." I am happy to report that song and video is no longer forthcoming! Drummer Jereme Frey did an astounding job doing all the things to make this gem come together. I won't lie - I enjoy that I get to make a cameo in the final product. The single is available on Bandcamp along with a b-side cover of Devo's "Girl U Want," which is also quite good.

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A few years ago, I had a casual meeting with the band and they told me they wanted to start a new cycle of home recording, DIY videos and releasing music more often. "Repeat" is the fourth single and video (along with an EP) that they've released in the last few years and it's really great to see that they set a goal, achieved it and did it with an ever increasing bar of quality. Ya love to see it.

Right at the tail end of July, The Robe released two brand new tracks - "Lights" with "River in the Ocean." This continues the ongoing series of singles that have been releasing monthly (you can hear them all here or here) and I gotta say, it's among my favorites yet. And that's saying a lot. Obviously I have bias with any release coming out on yk but I am really stunned by the evolution of these songs. "Evolution" being a questionable word choice as the songs are changing but they were always good from the very start.

I'm intrigued by the concept of Quantum computing but, like a lot of big physics ideas, I find it hard to understand on a practical level. There's a lot of language to comprehend (qubits, superpositions, probabilistic output, et al) and it's very easy to get lost in the sauce.

So, when YouTube served me up this Ted Talk from Hartmut Neven called Quantum Computers Aren’t What You Think — They’re Cooler, I assumed I was in for a real treat! Neven is the founder and lead at Google's Quantum AI division so he most certainly knows what he is talking about. For roughly half of the talk, I was following along just fine. Once it hits the real meat and potatoes of the talk, I must admit that I still have no idea how any of this works on a practical level.

Regardless, worth watching and learning about. Seems like it could be a real game changer in the speed of computing or maybe the key to unlocking some disastrous multi-verse disaster. Maybe both! Still, worth a watch.

The bullet list of 3 ways to combat X is great. Read it and follow if you’re still using X… please!

A rather innocent and amusing Australian prank.