"Hey David, what was that chord?" "It's a secret!!!"
Flappy Bird is coming back in 2025, so I'm getting all my work done in advance.
Hey friends, welcome back to Follow Friday! This week, we’re talking about dumb tourists, Will Ferrell, Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, and more. But first, here are some AI-generated ducks re-enacting their favorite scene from a James Earl Jones movie. (RIP)
📰 What I’m reading
Is Shein unstoppable? “None of the anger from creators or reports of grim working conditions or alleged links to human-rights violations appear to have slowed Shein’s march. Shein has picked up billions of dollars in outside investment, including from major American private-equity firms.”
Idiot tourists at Yellowstone: “The NPS can plant as many warning signs as it likes, but those signs are powerless in the face of visitors who are bad influences on one another. We came here to see nature. We weren’t going to settle for seeing it from a road, a path, or a patio. We wanted to get closer, and getting closer is the one thing you really shouldn’t do here.”
Surveillance is getting worse: “How does the store know which bag of chips you picked up? The answer is located on the ceiling: over two dozen surveillance cameras dangling on stalks, watching every move of each customer in the store. They’re like jungle creepers hanging from tree branches in the depths of a rainforest, if that ecosystem had evolved to spy on humans.”
The Biden era’s signature TV show: “Some TV shows — through no fault of their own — become almost inextricably tied to certain presidential administrations … such that they tend to feel a little dated as soon as the country has moved past them a bit.” I’d literally never heard of Emily’s pick until I saw it mentioned on TikTok two weeks ago, and it’s a HUGE show.
Oh, no: “A self-described ‘team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world’ says they’ve acquired the rights to Flappy Bird, the iconic mobile game whose creator took it offline less than a year after it was released. Now, ‘The Flappy Bird Foundation Group’ will relaunch the game on Android and iOS in 2025.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
On Search Engine, PJ Vogt talks to The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey about the nuances of animal welfare, and what veganism actually means as a choice. Like PJ, I eat meat, but I found this to be a fantastic listen, carefully constructed and free of personal judgment. FYI, there are frank explanations of how livestock turkeys and cows are frequently treated, which may be upsetting.
“Meet Me at the Fair” is a classic This American Life setup: Ira Glass and a team of producers (including Dana Chivvis and Chris Benderev) descend on the Iowa State Fair, looking for extraordinary stories. They’ve done this sort of thing before to great effect, and I always marvel at how quickly they can make me care about something as seemingly low-stakes as a 4H rabbit competition.
Only a few weeks ago, Conspiracy, She Wrote covered the various conspiracy theories that Taylor Swift has to contend with, which I’m sure are in no way getting worse and weirder post-Taylor’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Sociologist Brian Donovan explains to CSW host Cristen Conger what makes some of these theories creepy and insidious (shocker), but “Gaylor” expert Leah Dajches explains that it’s not all bad. (Via Hurt Your Brain)
I edited this: On Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan interviews Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus about disrupting the video game industry, how the company fumbled the handoff to a new CEO in 2013, and making the virtual real. I admired Mark’s candor about mistakes he had made, and how he realized that Facebook was going to win the social networking era.
And I also edited this: On Lock and Code, EFF director of cybersecurity Eva Galperin talks with David Ruiz about the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and why the so-called encrypted messaging app has historically been less secure than advertised. Plus, is the arrest just an excuse to try and break end-to-end encryption?
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💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week
is this short and sweet video about “the sustained two-shot” from Every Frame a Painting. Fascinating!
🍿 What I’m watching
I Capture the Castle (2003) - ★★★ ½ - A cozy coming-of-age romance anchored by Romola Garai with great supporting performances by Bill Nighy and Rose Byrne as her father and sister, respectively. You can see the seams that formed when Dodie Smith’s book was adapted into a two-hour screenplay, and we don’t get nearly enough time with one of the most interesting characters, the main characters’ bohemian artist step-mother, played by Tara Fitzgerald. I suspect the pacing is a little cleaner in the original novel.
V For Vendetta (2005) - ★★★ ½ - A stylish and compelling dystopian thriller set 5 minutes into the future, anchored by an impressive Natalie Portman performance. The adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask by weird 4chan nerds over the past two decades has undermined the coolness of the V character, and the big finale doesn’t quite connect because it hasn’t been convincingly set up. It’s also hard not to notice how overwhelmingly white this film is, despite allusions to post-9/11 xenophobia. Would be fascinating to see how the Wachowskis might write a new adaptation of the same source material today.
The Wrestler (2008) - ★★★★ - The script doesn’t deliver any surprises, but that doesn’t really matter. Mickey Rourke is so compelling as Randy “the Ram” that even before you see his face for the first time you can tell this is a man burdened by pain and regret. Each tantalizing window of hope is that much more crushing if you, like me, watch this with a strong suspicion of how everything “has” to work out.
Will & Harper (2024) - ★★★★ ½ - SO much better than I expected — a beautiful, sweet, laugh-out-loud funny documentary about former SNL head writer Harper Steele, who transitioned to living as a woman in middle age. The “Will” in the title is her longtime friend Will Ferrell, who joins Harper on her first cross-country roadtrip since coming out. Ferrell seemingly has a supernatural sense of when to clown around and when to be a shoulder to cry on. His famous face opens a lot of doors but also invites public scrutiny, and it’s a testament to their friendship how real they can get about it all.
Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!
▶️ What I’m YouTubing
My friend sent me this video essay about Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah and said, “thought you might find this interesting.” He was absolutely right:
And here’s an even better video essay, this one about the music of The Shining. I know it’s not really spooky season yet. I don’t care!
💀 What I’m TikTok-ing
Pirates of the Caribbean (the ride), recreated in Lego (!)
That’s a-moray (no but really)
🦆 About the Ducks
Originally, I asked ChatGPT to draw these two ducks: “One of them is holding a red lightsaber in its wing and wearing a darth vader mask, while the other is holding a knife and wearing a guy fawkes mask.” However, the AI said, “I wasn't able to generate the image due to content policy restrictions on certain themes.”
OK, I thought: There’s probably a restriction on violent images, so I removed the words “holding a knife" … and got the same error message.
So, maybe anything involving the wannabe destroyer of Parliament was off limits. Let’s take Mr. Fawkes out of there entirely and focus on two James Earl Jones movies:
“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. one of them is holding a red lightsaber in its wing and wearing a darth vader mask, while the other is dressed as mufasa from the lion king, with a red lion's mane”
Nope! Content policy restrictions.
Finally, I got it: It was my use of trademarked character names that was causing the problem.
“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of a duck dressed as a lion, with a red mane. it should be standing on top of a tall pointed rock, with several other ducks looking up at it.”
Bingo! And we get the picture you see above.
Weird that the "Starbucks cup” in last week’s prompt didn’t cause any such problems. But now that we know the words “guy fawkes” probably weren’t causing the problem. Which means we can do this….
“draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of a duck wearing a guy fawkes mask leading a mob of other ducks wearing guy fawkes masks towards parliament in london”
lol