Last week I mentioned that I was reading Tokyo These Days, a manga about the production of a manga magazine. I have paired this, somewhat accidentally, with Shirobako, an anime about the anime production process. I’m four episodes in and there’s almost no drama to it that isn’t drawn directly from the difficulties of that production, to the point where the main tension of episode three hinges upon an FTP server being down. Wonderful. Sunday will be for watching a bit more of that, then, and avoiding the heat.
Ever wonder if the oversaturated trailer showcases of not-E3 and demos of Steam Next Fest actually produce a return for developers? Simon Carless’s always interesting newsletter GameDiscoverCo dug into the numbers to discover the top announcements of not-E3 and who won Next Fest. These events clearly work for some – in particular those with huge marketing budgets announcing the ninth mainline entry in a beloved 30-year-old series – but standing out has never been more difficult.
Lush video game print magazine A Profound Waste Of Time is running a Kickstarter to reprint its first three issues. It has already tripled its target, but if you always regretted not grabbing issues 1-3 the first the time around, here’s your chance.
Jeremy Ettinghausen trawled through all the data Amazon Alexa had collected about his family, with a Richard Curtisesque sentimentality about family dynamics and how quickly children grow up, and barely a moments notice of the privacy breaches involved or his own complicity in them.
Coco’s relationship with Alexa is, in our family at least, uniquely hers. For a start, she is of an age where she wants to know the answers to questions that may be too personal or embarrassing to ask a parent or sibling. And then she is the only one of us who has an Echo in their own private space. Coco tells me she speaks to Alexa less now than she did two or three years ago, partly because she knows that I’ve seen transcripts of everything she has asked, but mainly because she now has her own phone and WhatsApp and can chat with “like, actual friends”.
I re-watched Spotlight a couple nights ago for the fifth time. It’s an odd movie to return to so often, but as per all of the films I have on repeat, it’s about hyper-competent people performing their jobs steadily in the face of systemic counter-pressure. It sits comfortably alongside other movies like Broadcast News, Moneyball or TV shows like The West Wing (on which co-writer Josh Singer previously worked). It turns out I’m not alone in this either, as my latest re-watch was inspired by Geoffrey Bunting in The Guardian explaining why he has seen Spotlight over 30 times.
The serenity that belies the horror at Spotlight’s core, however, makes it a primo Sunday afternoon movie. Never bombastic, it’s an engaging yet relaxing antidote to the threat of the post-Sunday dinner carbohydrate pass-out. If I’m exhausted, miserable or stressed, Spotlight is always something I can watch – that I will watch – even if I can’t imagine being able to concentrate on anything else. After breakups, I watch Spotlight; when my grandmother died, Spotlight; after a horrible day at work, it’s Spotlight.
Is Google about to destroy the web, asks the BBC in the face of Google’s planned ‘AI mode’ search. (Meanwhile, the BBC are threatening AI firm Perplexity with legal action because their chatbot is reproducing BBC stories “verbatim”.)
“If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current form, it’s going to have a devastating impact on the internet,” says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive. “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivise content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more. Google holds all the power.”
If that sounds depressing, and it should, Sacha Judd has advice on how to “escape the algorithmic doom loops and reclaim our digital lives”.
Poptimism argued that music ought to be judged on its own merits rather than written-off as inauthentic based solely on the means of its production. W. David Marx overstates that argument, downplays the forces it was fighting against, ignores all adjacent cultural and technological movements, and places the blame for an undefined but clearly maligned present cultural moment at the feet of a handful of music critics and bloggers from 20 years ago. But I can’t say I didn’t enjoy reading and thinking about it.
In the subsequent weeks, the loudest voice in support of Ashlee Simpson was not a teenage fan but one of the great American music critics, Kelefa Sanneh. He used the SNL incident as a hook for his mega-influential The New York Times essay “The Rap Against Rockism” In the piece, he dismissed the anti-Simpson backlash as a symptom of an ideology he called “rockism,” which was responsible for the elevation of “authentic” white, male, guitar-oriented singer-songwriters over “inauthentic” pop acts who often came from marginalized communities.
The notorious trolls at The Telegraph had to apologise for their latest provocation.
On May 25 we published an online article “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays” which included stock photographs and not, as the article indicated, images of the family referred to in the article. In addition, we have not been able to verify the details published.
Alice’s next book is now available for pre-order.
I listened to a lot of new music this past week and… didn’t love any of it. So [rummages around in back of drawer] here’s Beach Bummer by No Vacation, a perfect piece of dream pop from 2015 in two and a half minutes.
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