bandcamp.com – David Bazan has consistently produced music that scratches my itch. Careful lyrical slices of a life rife with internal struggles, his Pedro the Lion records are embedded into my amygdala. In my opinion, Winners Never Quit and Control are quintessential albums that sit in my teenage requiem. Bandcamp interviews Bazan on some of his influences, past and future, and of course, his bandcamp picks. Highly recommend reading, and happy listening.
Links
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David Bazan Picks His Bandcamp Favorites
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The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2 — Josh Holtsclaw
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joshholtsclaw.com – An incredible blog post from Josh Holtsclaw, an Art Director at Pixar. I love coming across these. This post in particular documents a lot of the process, design thinking and iteration that goes into the art direction for the film Incredibles 2
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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
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And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business – not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
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Kinky Friedman has died
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A Texas legend. A prolific satirist. A poignant and irreverent political superstar in a state full of bullshitters and snake-oil salesmen, Kinky was a breath of fresh air.
Friedman gained a reputation as a provocateur. In the early 1970s, he formed the satirical country band Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys — which penned songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.” Later, he published novels that often featured a fictionalized version of himself, including “Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola” and “Armadillos and Old Lace.”
In politics, Friedman staked out unusual positions at the time for someone seeking statewide office in Texas, like legalization of marijuana and casino gambling. He supported same-sex marriage in 2006, long before the Supreme Court legalized it nationally, quipping, “I support gay marriage because I believe they have right to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”
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The last time I saw Crawford’s work at the MoMA it was maybe around 2021. It left me filled with anguish and a lot of contempt for industrial progression. Which, frankly I needed the perspective. Immensely thankful I live in a city where I can go visit the MoMA to experience Anatomy of an AI System in person.
Calculating Empires is a little different in some respects, but also very much a similar research visualization. From the about page of calculatingempires.net:
Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.
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Kwon is best known for capturing the burgeoning New York hip-hop scene from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, featuring iconic figures such as Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, and De La Soul.
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Paul Nicholson, designer and creator of the Aphex Twin Logo shares his creative design process
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Back in 2017, Resident Advisor visited Paul Nicholson. He shares his creative design process for Aphex Twin’s (Richard D. James) Selected Ambient Works Volume II (sometimes abbreviated as SAW II) album artwork. Novel and fun to hear him talk about some of the design choices he made. You can tell he’s giddy to expand on some of the deliberate artwork choices (like the chart symbols corresponding to different tracks on SAW II).
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Fruit Stripe Gum has been discontinued
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A common and disappointing fact of life is products (like all things) inevitably meet their end of life someday. The mark of a great product, are those that transcend their makers.
The chewing gum, Fruit Stripe has been around since 1960. While the gum and brand has changed parent companies several times, the original gum has largely remained the same product since it was introduced. Unfortunately, the gum is now going the way of the do-do.
The manufacturer Ferrara Candy said that they will cease the manufacturing of Fruit Stripe Gum this year. End of an era. Just looking at a photo of the gum makes me salivate. I can practically smell the fruity gum from this photo.