This week I touch again on going offline, Brooklyn’s aesthetic exports, and quirks around sports broacasting.
📺 Watching - A Complete Unknown, Severance, Star Wars IV: A New Hope
I’m a sucker for music biopics and thoroughly enjoyed A Complete Unknown. There’s a genre of reaction videos where musicians hear their audience sing back songs to them. You can see one here:
When Dylan plays The Times They Are A Changin’ for the first time and the crowd gets the hook. So moving. Also: Timothee Chalamet. Such a wonderful, generational talent. Always adored him and his acting.
Besides continuing to watch Severance, I rewatched a New Hope again in its entirety for the first time in a loooong while. Still one of the best endings to a film as it all comes together. :)
📚 Reading - Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
I haven’t been reading the past month as I’ve focused on spending most of my time being with family and otherwise working on my novel. But my dad got this book for Christmas and I'm reading it now. Also being a writer that loves running, I want to see if there's something to his perspective that might reveal why I prefer the same. Strangely, he began actively writing and running in his 30s, which is the same for me. Speaking of:
🏃♂️ Running
I've slowed down my running while in South Africa, mostly because it's hot. Instead of long runs, I've mostly just focused on building speed and strength. Doing hills, strides, and tempo runs. It's been nice but I am looking forward to cooler weather and longer runs again.
🕹️ Gaming - Netrunner
Played Netrunner, the card game, with a friend this week. Really enjoyed the asymmetric mechanic. I’m definitely starting to tap more into card game design. Balatro is obviously one of the catalysts to this too. In August last year, I designed a super simple card game using a regular 52-card deck. Hope to one day share it, for kicks. :)
✍️ Writing - Novel #2
Work on novel #2 continues well. I’m hoping to spend a month-long writing retreat in March to finish it and I’m looking for recommendations in the US as to where. Looking for a walkable ocean/mountain town with easy access to groceries and nature for running/walks. Got some great recs already over on Farcaster. Any ideas?
💾 Links
Australian Open Broadcasting Rights
In watching the Australian Open, I stumbled on Tennis Australia live streaming the matches on YouTube with mapped and simulated cartoon avatars.
They sold the *actual* broadcasting rights, but are allowed to livestream adaptations like this.
The *real* question about this, is where the line is actually drawn? Because the livestream is a simulation of the game, at what point does it become *too real* as to infringe on the rights they had already sold away?
Looking for some IP + Broadcasting lawyer to explain the nuance here. 😅
PS. Speaking of sports. Go Commanders! 🏈🤞
The Brooklyns of Everywhere
The continued pervasiveness of the Brooklyn aesthetic continues to this day. What does an LLM think are the Brooklyn’s of other world cities?
Dataset looks a bit confused though, as Bakoven in Cape Town is distinctly *not* Brooklyn energy. While the LLMs will probably hallucinate answers, I tried this with Claude and it seemed quite decent in reasoning through it (finding the Sea Point, Cape Town of New York City).
This immediate niche transposition remains one of my favourite uses of LLMs because getting this answer would be hard with Google and even harder to manually reason through. Joe, wrote the article, resonates similarly with this power.
I have gotten a few more ideas for projects that would not have been possible prior to the wide availability of LLMs. Mostly that is because the difficulty of gathering data would have been prohibitive and now it is not. I’m excited by this but I expect to continue to grapple with the above issues.
Posting Less
I’ve written before about changing our relationship with our platforms (even last week). Culture Study has a great post on this:
But I also think there’s something larger going on, particularly with those of us who’ve been posting for most of our adult lives: on Tumblr, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Snapchat, on Instagram. We’re exhausted with the labor of self-documentation — especially when it seems that our posts aren’t even surfacing for our close friends. But we’re also tired of being perceived.
I see the exhaustion in my non-media friends, whose early Facebook and Instagram posting habits have faded into a single seasonal shot of their kids — if that. I see it in various influencers and creators quitting the business entirely. I see it from writers here on Substack, posting on Notes about how much they hate Notes because all they really want from this platform is the ability to write for an audience that wants to read their work, not react to their posts.
The most baffling thing to me last year was going on LinkedIn again (I almost never visit it) and seeing everyone that *used* to post on FB or other socials are just gleefully #business posting on there. Like, the place where they share the most of their life online is on LinkedIn. Felt like I missed a trend completely.
I think we’re going to see some rapid changes soon as more people just choose to turn off. There’s a great series currently by eugbrandstrat talking about how luxury branding is changing or going to have to change. One such example is how “going offline” is seen as increasingly as a status symbol. Here’s where he talks about privacy as luxury branding and also people being able to “waste time” in a hyper-optimized world.
PS. Due to all this and it fitting my own mood/feeling, I’ve decided to finally stop posting on Twitter/X indefinitely. Still going to read (harder to ween off that), but I’m finding that BlueSky and Farcaster as decent replacements thus far.
🎶 Music
Stephen Wilson Jnr - Calico Creek
I’ve been slowly getting more into country. Found this musician and not since Washed Out’s “Notes on a Quiet Life” have I enjoyed an album this much from front to back. Describes himself as “Death Cab for Country” and his favourite band is Nirvana. So you have heavy indie and grunge influences throughout. I must admit, it's become too easy in a sense to only focus on a single or one song that you've discovered from an artist. I want to get back to listening to albums in full, more regularly. Gourmet music vs fast food music.
That's it for this week folks. It's my last week in South Africa for now, so I'm going to enjoy as much of the beautiful sunsets as I can.
See you next week
Simon
Go Commanders!