Well, A24 was nice while it lasted
Plus: San Francisco hills, the fall of Airbnb, the cutest robot you have ever seen, and more.
Welcome to another edition of Follow Friday! I am carried to you this week by the joy of finally finishing Only Murders in the Building, Season 3 (way better than Season 2, IMO).
Usually, when I’m lucky enough to find a moment of peace and stillness, my brain surprises me: It’ll wander to fun memories, or new creative ideas. But for the past six days, it has exclusively filled the vacuum with songs from “Death Rattle Dazzle.” I’m sure this is perfectly normal and not at all a problem.
So quick as a whip gotta pick which Pickwick triplеt did it
🏆 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week: I’m not on Reddit anymore, for reasons, but my partner shared a thread this week from the /r/SanFrancisco subreddit that was too good to ignore: “Is falling a big problem in San Francisco?”
As you might imagine, the comments are very silly. A few favorites:
“I personally wear knee and elbow pads on a regular basis to prevent further injuries.”
“All our hospitals are actually located at the bottom of the hills for this reason. They have cat flap doors to catch the rollers safely.”
“falling on Lombard St is like playing pinball”
🍴 The second-best thing I’ve seen online this week is this 5-minute video that YouTube has been nagging me to watch for months. It’s about how to load a dishwasher better and you know what? I’ve been putting its tips into practice … it works! Stop pre-rinsing your dishes!
⚡ On Grit, 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner joined Joubin Mirzadegan from Waterloo, Ontario to talk about growing at the “speed of technology,” why the company waited 14 years to raise outside funding, and why he set his title on LinkedIn to “Chief Eliminator of Obstacles.” I really, really admire the fact that 1Password seems to have consciously tried to do things differently from most startups in Silicon Valley, for example by only hiring after it’s certain it can make payroll. An investor would probably counsel their portfolio to not do this, and hire ahead of the signals, but as a longtime 1Password user I feel good knowing the employees are taken care of.
🏢 Related: Speaking of taking care of your employees … why do so many of us hate the office so much? “The world nearly ended; there’s no such thing as business as usual anymore,” writes Justin Myers.
🎬 On Wednesday, Hollywood news outlet TheWrap published a disturbing story: “A24 Expands Strategy From Arthouse Gems to More Commercial Films.” Citing an anonymous source, the story said a $225 million investment valuing the company at $2.5 billion is putting pressure on the film studio to start chasing the same thing that everyone else in Hollywood cares about, familiar IP.
My reaction:
For the 99% of you who don’t pay attention to which studios’ logos appear at the start of a movie, A24 has distributed some of the best movies of the past decade: Moonlight, The Green Knight, The Florida Project, Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Room, Minari, The Farewell, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, just to name a few 4.5-5 stars.
As anyone following Disney over the past 15 years knows, the cost of highly profitable IP like Marvel and Star Wars is borne by artists who want to make literally anything else.
I don’t have a subscription to TheWrap, so I haven’t read the full story, but I’ll let The Reductress sum it up: “A24 Announces They’re Done With the Emo Shit, Finally Rich Enough to Fund a Movie With Big Explosion.”
📉 Related: “Marvel’s TV experiment wasn’t a failure—until Marvel decided it was.” I’ve given up on at least three Disney+ series in the past year, something I rarely used to do for TV shows; if the IP machine is going to keep churning, I’m glad they’re at least recognizing that something is broken.
⚡ On Lock and Code, David Ruiz reconnected with past guest and interpreter-for-the-youngs Nitya Sharma what teenagers and Gen Z are afraid of online. As Malwarebytes found in a recent research study, Gen Z is more likely than older generations to fear things like having their personal information exposed, being bullied, and having compromising photos shared online — which kind of makes sense. We’re witnessing in real time what happens to the first generation that has never known a world without the internet.
😋 Speaking of Gen Z: The youths have decided that “Nirvana” t-shirts are now “preppy.” Sarah Stankorb reports “from beyond the grave” about the history of “preppy” fashion and why this trend maybe kind of makes sense.
🏠 The Atlantic’s Kate Lindsay has a great article out about how Airbnb has changed — and, many guests would say, declined — since its humble early days of couchsurfing and renting spare bedrooms.
… the difference between Airbnb and hotels has become smaller and smaller. The standard Airbnb host still has an average of just 1.5 listings, Lane said, but “mega-hosts”—larger companies or wealthy individuals with 21 or more properties that throw their significantly more substantial resources behind them—now make up 30 percent of active listings.
As Lindsay notes, “You can still find a spot that’s cheaper and better than a hotel room—especially for families and larger groups,” which is true. But if I’m traveling by myself, or just with my partner? With almost 100% certainty, I’ll tell you that I’m going to wind up at a hotel.
🔎 Here’s a really fun article about what gets left behind at restaurants — including 50 American Express black cards at one restaurant in Beverly Hills, $14,000 in cash in Miami Beach, and a 4-year-old child in Washington, D.C.
⚡ This week on The Smart Home Show, Adam Justice and Richard Gunther were joined by The Verge's smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, to talk about Amazon and Google’s fall hardware events. Most of the show is focused on new and updated products for the connected home announced at Amazon’s event, but pay special attention to the discussion of how the two companies are applying generative AI. It seems we’re not too far away from being able to talk to our devices as if they were people … kind of creepy, TBH.
Speaking of human-like technology…
🚨 Help I’m obsessed with: Researchers at Disney Imagineering in Zurich have unveiled a new robot — who, to my surprise, doesn’t seem to have been given a cutesy name — that can “strut, prance, sneak, trot, or meander” to convey emotion. I assume this technology will be applied to named characters to the Star Wars lands at the theme parks, but whatever, I just want to meet this little guy.
👩💻 I’ve been a fan of Taylor Lorenz’s writing about the internet for many years, and was planning to read her new book Extremely Online but Dan Kois’ review in Slate has given me pause — apparently, it doesn’t go as deep as I would have expected: “Lorenz seldom engages in any truly critical way with the events she recounts in her book, rarely interrogates or seems to think deeply about them.” As Kois notes, Lorenz seems to be the perfect person to write about the dark side of online fame, having frequently been the target of bad-faith brigading and hate campaigns. Maybe she’s saving that for the next book.
📱 The best thing I’ve read this week: “For all of us, constantly changing technologies can be frustrating,” writes Bartunde Thurston for Puck. “For seniors experiencing cognitive challenges or physical limitations, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up.” Spurred by an encounter with an older person at the airport who couldn’t order food because she didn’t have a smartphone, Thurston collected hundreds more stories from the “digital chasm” and proposes some very reasonable fixes that tech companies can and should embrace. The full article is paywalled, but I think this gift link will let you read it even if you don’t have a Puck subscription.
😛 Palate cleanser: I cannot explain this. Last night, I found myself Googling “potato of the month club” and made my way to the website of a tater farm in Maine. In addition to offering bulk deals, seeds, recipes… and also a page of notable quotes.
I clicked thinking these would be quotes about potatoes … right?
There’s more than a hundred of these. Probably, this farm posts these hideous memes on Facebook to drum up business … but, no! I choose to believe that this is just someone’s private collection that they use to hype themselves up before they head out to harvest spuds.