Hollywood's next big step, the extinction of humanity, demoscene, privacy invasions, Elon Musk, and tons of video artwork!
Interesting coverage on the sea change in Hollywood is coming (and has already come), especially as Amazon and Netflix drink Hollywood's milkshake, whose incredibly detailed analytics allow them to pump out original after or original that they know will almost hit a guaranteed success.
The comment prompt says "The Universe will (probably) end one day. Should we start thinking of doing something about that?" Holy shit, what? I can barely imagine getting through this next fifty years. What can we even do about the end (or rebooting) of the universe? In any case, this is a great article about contemplating the deep future ahead of us and whether or not humans go extinct in it.
I'd recommend you don't, either. Backup and wipe your phone, meditate so you can focus solely on a black square in your mind, and buy a cheap Chromebook. Schneier on Security has an interesting little blog and comments section on duress codes, but most of the comments pretty much agree that wiping your phone during an interrogation will only be seen as suspicious and due cause to be even more invasive.
Looking for a documentary that will appease your need for fantastic music video effects, extremely nerdy subcultures, and obscure art? Boy, is this the video for you! Note that you'll want to turn on the English closed captioning since a lot of it is in other languages. Thanks to Benjamin N. Summerton for the forward.
Researchers can derive your personal social media identity by computing the probability that you're a given user based on which of your friends' links you've clicked on, without sharing or tweeting anything. The algorithm has a 72% accuracy rate, and 81% of the time, it's in the top 15. More details on how the study was conducted in the article, and what implications this has for powers that aren't just researching this stuff for fun. (Also, it basically ends on, "Use Tor.")
Let's be real - we all already knew this was the case. But hey, bless Elon Musk for bringing the fringe to the mainstream. Also, is it just me or is an Elon Musk-led utopia-authoritarian dictatorship sounding kind of good right now(*)?
* i am shitposting do not hold me to this
You know things are dire when indie hackers and students come together to protect the digital equivalent of book burning.
Alex Badham, talented music video director from Australia, reached out to me with this video he produced with some datamoshing effects he learned from a tutorial on Glitchet. Awesome! It uses datamoshing very minimally at the end and in quite good taste, and the actual track is a solid EDM track with a video that manages to remain interesting for the full 6 minutes.