Weird A.I. Yankovic, Sloppy Biographies, and RollerCoaster Tycoon
And a new look for Follow Friday ... what do you think?
Substack’s stats tell me that lot of you missed last week’s newsletter — maybe the subject line got it banished to spam? — with about 1/3 as many people opening it as usual. So, ICYMI: I’d like to shake things up a bit and made a brief survey about Follow Friday. It won’t take more than a couple minutes, so please give it a look.
This week, I’m doing the newsletter equivalent of an unplugged concert: It’s all acoustic (minimally formatted) and re-arranged. So if you’re into this, or not, you can say so in the survey — or just reply to this email. Thanks!
🏆 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week: “What if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life. This was a terrible idea and I regret everything,” writes Andy Baio.
😬 Related: Hey, let’s check in on how some other people are using Bing’s newest generative AI features … oh, no.
🤓 “What about this internet thing, do you know anything about that?” Bill Gates explains the web to a very skeptical David Letterman in 1995.
👻 Why do people think this abandoned prison in Philadelphia is haunted? Science — and some unusual architecture — can explain it all.
🤯 If you have the chance, go see the new 4K restoration of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense while it’s in theaters. I went knowing only knew a few Talking Heads songs, and came out a fan. All I knew about Stop Making Sense was that it was supposed to be one of the best concert films ever, and if anything that’s an understatement; seeing it with a crowd was a euphoric experience. We applauded, often.
🤖 Another great movie: I just saw Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence for the first time, and wow! Beautiful, thought-provoking, heartbreaking, underrated. Haley Joel Osment should have been nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
🎻 An incredible performance of Howard Shore’s “The Fellowship Theme” from Lord of the Rings, by the WDR Funkhausorchester in Cologne, Germany. This piece makes me more emotional than any religious or patriotic melody.
👁 Related: Brennan Lee Mulligan from Dropout surprises everyone with his impression of “Sauron, but it’s Donald Trump” (via Garbage Day)
⚡ On Grit, Anduril CRO Matt Steckman talks with Joubin Mirzadegan about trying to build a new “defense prime,” focusing on what you can control, why his team spends a “comical” amount of time recruiting top talent, and more. The one thing they don’t talk about is whether Matt — who previously worked at Palantir — is only willing to work at companies that took their names from Tolkien.
🏎 With Formula 1 races and a traffic-inducing giant sphere, Las Vegas is trying to become a year-round tourist destination. (I’m going back to Vegas soon. Your recommendations of non-gambling, non-gun-shooting things to do are welcome and appreciated).
🐏 A charming story on This Is Love about Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter, her farms, and the Herdwick sheep that have grazed that land for millennia. Come for the good vibes, stay for the audio of Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer trying to navigate the English countryside.
🦘 On the other side of the world: On Everything Is Alive, Ian Chillag interviews two kangaroos, one of whom doesn’t want to leave the other’s pouch.
🇨🇳 The rise and fall of a controversial Chinese theme park in central Florida.
📚 It sounds like Michael Lewis didn’t want to be outdone by Walter Isaacson’s sloppy Elon Musk biography. Crypto & web3 critic Molly White read his new book about former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and y’all … “Save for a few hasty footnotes referencing the eventual collapse, the first half of the book or so reads as though it was written while Bankman-Fried was still on top of the world, and it doesn’t appear to have been substantially revised after that changed.” Yikes.
⚡ On Building Better CMOs, Greg Stuart had a delightful conversation with Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder about investing in yourself, the danger of falling in love with your own ideas, the art and science of marketing, and much more. Dara also used to work at Apple, and has a really insightful take on their recent “Mother Nature” ad starring Octavia Spencer.
🧼 Blank Check is covering the oeuvre of David Fincher, and this week was a big one: A 3.5-hour discussion of his divisive and widely misunderstood 1999 film Fight Club, which I initially hated but have warmed to over the years, with some lingering reservations. They never miss, it’s a great discussion. But, and this is the real reason I’m sharing it in this newsletter, they did something amazingly silly on Blank Check’s Patreon feed. As everyone knows, the first rule of fight club is that you do not talk about fight club, and the second rule of fight club is that you DO NOT talk about fight club. So, they released a special edit of the episode where they excised all mention of the movie Fight Club and left in the tangents (1 hour and 23 minutes!).
🔫 Speaking of unnecessary violence: “As the bride was about to walk down the aisle, what was supposed to be a day of love in Denton, Neb., turned into one of unexpected panic: The wedding officiant accidentally shot his 12-year-old grandson in the shoulder.”
☕ Why does your latte cost $7? Vox is on the case.
🚨 Help I’m obsessed with: Videos about RollerCoaster Tycoon. I played a LOT of the first two RCT games in the early 2000s and have occasionally dipped back in as an adult; on a previous Mac computer, I installed the virtual machine software Parallels specifically so that I could play old PC games like RCT 2. But I haven’t thought about the game much until this week, when I’ve suddenly been thinking about it a lot, thanks to my discovery of Marcel Vos’ YouTube channel. Some of Marcel’s videos are practical guides, like this one busting some common misconceptions about the game, or this one explaining how to get a good rating with a custom rollercoaster design. But he has also done some truly insane things with the game, such as beating one of the single-player scenarios in just a few seconds, or designing a rollercoaster that is so long, it will outlive the universe.
🐶 One night in 2019, my partner and I — who, I must stress, were 100% sober — stumbled across a “dog TV” channel on Roku and spent way too long watching it. We did not have a dog then, and we still don’t now. I don’t know, it was kind of mesmerizing. In our stark sobriety, we should have found a way to invest in this channel, because Dog TV is booming.
🇺🇸 Two great, provocative reads: First, The 19th CTO Ben Werdmuller explains why he hates flags, and how businesses take advantage of “blind fascism … a core part of American culture.”
🎬 Also: To quote the film critic David Ehrlich, “People change, movies don’t. That’s what makes them worth seeing again.” In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Betsy Houston reflects on her experience watching Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy three times over the course of her life; first when she was still in the closet, then again after she began identifying as queer, and a third time after her mother passed away. “I can forgive the film its missteps, with the same tenderness I forgive its players for their messy communication and the chaos of their choices,” Houston writes. “It’s the same tenderness with which I’ve forgiven people in my life who have caused me harm, and with which I too wish to be forgiven.”
😛 Palate cleanser: Simon Pegg impersonates all four Beatles in 12 seconds. I’d seen this before, and now I’ve seen it three more times.
Re: last week's newsletter, I somehow have no record of it in my email. Even in the Spam folder.
And thanks for sharing those Roller Coaster Tycoon videos!! Brought back some awesome memories of playing the game a couple of decades ago.