This week, we're discussing toads, monkeys, replicants, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
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Did Toad kill E3?
As everyone knows, the game industry trade show E3 is no more. Like a great marketing mirage, it disappeared as soon as a few companies stopped believing in it. But while its death has often been blamed on rising costs and changing consumer habits, there may be a simpler explanation: it was cursed.
A 2021 animation with an extremely threatening aura, called “E3 don’t be late,” is now sometimes blamed for the convention’s demise. In it, three Toads with Alvin and the Chipmunks voices sing a gamer’s Christmas carol that includes wishes for “Sakurai [to] give us Gex” and an ominous prayer that “this year won’t be your last.” Commenters have revisited the artificially compressed and encrusted video after each wave of bad news for E3. Following the show’s cancellation in 2022, the Toads returned to say it was “gone forever, and it’s never coming back” — one year before the organization’s permanent death was confirmed in December 2023. Whether the Toads predicted or caused the death of E3, their expanding faces remain lodged in the consciousness of many viewers, as a recent thread about their source image demonstrated.
Planet of the Apes minus apes
The new (and good!) Planet of the Apes movie is getting an interesting Blu-Ray feature: a full-length “raw cut” without any special effects. This is particularly noteworthy for a movie which contains only 38 SFX-free shots in its entire 145-minute runtime. What you have instead is an illuminating mixture of people pretending to be monkeys in front of blue screens, various real-life vistas, half-finished placeholder sets, and completely blank screens for images that are entirely computer-generated. It’s a real glass-half-full(?) situation, either showcasing Hollywood’s reliance on CGI to futz with every minute detail of the image OR highlighting the incredible craft that goes into not only CGI creation but also motion-capture acting.
Chum Box
AI
- This AI-generated video of Donald Trump taking ayahuasca and having a spiritual awakening is a) good and b) apparently not intended as satire, a tension that heightens its curative properties [link]
- The corporatized writing workshop NaNoWriMo introduced a new clause on their site that claimed it was "classist and ableist" to condemn AI, a possible preview of new rhetorical battle-lines for the technology [link]
- "Wanna sword fight man, come on, I'll sword fight you man, let's sword fight [unintelligible chittering]" [link]
Games
- An anti-woke Steam curator gave Disco Elysium a “not recommended” rating, but couldn’t decide whether it was for or against communism [link]
- The rapturously well-liked indie RPG OneShot (rated "overwhelmingly positive" with over 40,000 reviews) is getting remastered with a bunch of extra stuff and Steam Deck support [link]
- "AAAA" is now an all-purpose roast for games, or at least all Ubisoft games [link]; previously [link]
The Internet
- This video of a hotel-review guy "accidentally clipping into the backrooms" is really a triumph of editing and repositioning [link]
- Slate dug into the nostalgia-bait accounts that farm attention (and money, per the genius revenue share of X's premium tier) by blasting inaccurate pop-culture anniversary dates at you [link]
- Preview of the Presidential debate this week [link]
Screens
- Here's Blade Runner recreated as 12,597 aquarelle paintings, now reposted to the Internet Archive [link]
- "iShowSpeed is the new Tarkovsky": Harmony Korine is out here murdering film buffs, but the sentiment isn't that far removed from the director's long interest in low-art provocation and verite video [link]
Music
- The subreddit for the frequently maligned but very influential Witch House subgenre has been closed because its moderator found god [link]
- Massive Attack's aggressive efforts to create a carbon-neutral music performance reached a peak in a day-long festival in Bristol [link]
- Good King Krule impression [link]
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One Last Thing
#Awareness [link]
