At the 2024 Defy Film Festival I had the pleasure of seeing a ridiculous short film called Butt Crew. It's an 8-minute tale from an anonymous narrator about a crew of friends that would meet in a drainage pipe behind Home Depot to talk about butts. If that sounds absurd, you're right. It's also completely hilarious and riveting from start to finish. It just premiered online and I really think you should watch it at your earliest convenience.

The director, Josh Whiteman, has also directed a bunch of music videos here in Nashville, as well as a few additional short films like Ignoramus and Horny Kid, the latter of which I think is Oscar worthy. Seriously.

Go watch Butt Crew, leave it a like over on Letterboxd and make sure to follow Josh.

I am not familiar with the animated works of Takena Nagao but after YouTube recommended their latest short film, Midnight Vampire, I am going to take the deep dive. The hand animated claymation is hysterically gory but it's not without a moral center; which is nice for a murderous vampire film.

As soon as it ended, I couldn't wait to watch it again. I'm also taking the deep dive into more from Takena. I suggest you do the same.

I'm going to assume you have a subscription to The Daily but, like me, probably do not listen to it every single day. In fact, you may be overwhelmed by the firehose of election information. All that said, I gotta recommend this particular episode about The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.

Trump has already openly said he won't accept election results unless it's "fair and legal" - which is to say he's sowing the seeds that he won't believe the election is either fair or legal if he loses. The man isn't exactly subtle.

He's a nightmare but his plans extend beyond just his inner circle. This podcast episode is one to know about now, well before the calamity starts in November. Gotta call them on their BS before they even have a chance to leverage their BS.

I am not one to recommend (or even watch) a YouTube video that is an hour and 22 minutes long but the Joey Engelman Public Access TV Iceberg is an undeniably enjoyable and insightful watch. Admittedly, the lower you go on the iceberg, the worse it gets but you can skip Tier 6! Everything up to that is a pretty joyful celebration of the absurd, the awkward and the delightfully weird. And there's over an hour of it!

The thumbnail is strangely inaccurate and, of course, click-baity. Ignore.

Reading this Verge piece on AI resistance in photo editing reminded me that I had not yet mentioned the Kino app here yet. The app is intended for shooting video with an emphasis on "cinematic" results. This occurs by giving you manual focus control, some incredibly nice photo grading and plenty of other nitty gritty tweaking if you're keen on it. There's also plenty of auto settings but I think the draw is that you can really make the video your own.

It also applies those settings as you shoot. So there's no going back and applying a different color grade later (within the app). It's a choice to restrict your decision making and I think it's a good one. It does cost $10 right out of the gate but I literally spend that much on coffee in just a few days - it's certainly worth it in this case.

The Lux Optics company behind Kino also makes Halide, Spectre and Orion - equally clever and useful apps.

just two tracks but when Travis Trevisan has a new shoegaze undertaking, you take note

Recently I was reading the liner notes for Nite Versions, the Soulwax album that reinvents and reimagines their earlier albums, Any Minute Now in particular. This little snippet really caught my eye:

"...conceptually our biggest influence was an album from 1982 called Love and Dancing by The League Unlimited Orchestra, which was essentially the hit album Dare by The Human League remixed by them and their producer in such a simple way that to this day still sounds more interesting than the original to us. "

I'd never heard of this Love and Dancing record and drove right in. Like most folks, I enjoy The Human League and their hit "Don't You Want Me"* but this record really does steer the record in a whole new direction.

Reading through the album Wikipedia it's remarkable to learn that producer Martin Rushent created the record largely on his own in about ten days; making thousands of manual cuts to splice everything together because this was 1982. Even if the music wasn't good, it would be a fascinating read on how he accomplished the reinvention. Fortunately, it is a worthwhile reinvention as well.

This may be very old news to some of you but it was new to me, so maybe it's new to some of you as well. Enjoy the deep dive.

* Never forget the ultimate version.

The lo-fi VHS aesthetic is extremely well tred territory at this point but I can't help but appreciate the application of it in the Pizza Party Massacre trailer. It's maybe unfair to call it an "aesthetic" here since it was actually shot on the format but you catch my drift. Overall, it looks to be a quality, absurd, horror flick.

Been enjoying some AIR bootlegs as of recently. This 2017 set from The Sydney Opera House is a top quality addition to the rotation. "Alpha Beta Gaga" going straight into "Run" is a real treat.

Let this 1960s commercial entertain you and then take you on a rabbit hole of discovery about the actress Viva, Warhol movies and forgotten sodas.

During the Defy Film Festival there was a rolling loop of pre-show entertainment. This isn't uncommon but the custom footage cut together came from a bizarre variety of sources. Once such segment that really caught me was two aliens flying around Earth discussing political and ecological issues that our planet is facing. Thanks to some kind Internet sleuths, it turns out the footage is from a 1974 animation called Freedom 2000. The abstract is exactly as I remembered:

Animation highlighting the environmental problems that arise from industrialization and rapid population growth. Two aliens fly above the Earth in a spaceship and discuss how humans need to balance technological advances with ecological health. Created by Hanna-Barbera.

What I did not realize is that the piece is 20 minutes long, was created by Hanna-Barbera and contains a multitude of different styles. If you've got some time, it's most definitely worth hitting play and soaking in. And, yes, it's on YouTube if you prefer.

absolutely ridiculous collection of works from every major artist you could think of. Not unheard of but always nuts to see a single person own art like this

I grew up on PC's but had not heard of Neko until somewhat recently. Back in the 1980s, Naoshi Watanabe created an MS-DOS graphical cat named Neko. I'm not clear on what it did back in the DOS days but it was quickly ported to the Macintosh in 1989 and would chase your mouse around the screen. That's it. It's just adorable and fun.

The full history is worth a read. It was eventually ported to Windows, officially licensed by IBM for OS/2 and the author even eventually declared the images as part of the public domain. Because of that, there's a million variants and offshoots of the program. The adorable lives on.

Maybe I should install WebNeko around here....

Occasionally old mixes pop into my brain. The other day I was thinking about Summer Long, Some Aren't - a mix from McBurney that introduced me to Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra. I went to recreate the mix on Spotify and could not find anything about Track 5 - "High Life Time" by Good Friend Charles.

No streaming music service had any artist with that name. Google returned no valid results. I inquired with Mac what the story was and he said he named it that based on a best guess; as he'd heard the song from Pates Tapes, with no obvious credit.

This all sounds like a great candidate for a Lostwave deep dive but then it hit me.. this mix came out in 2012, before the ubiquity of song identifying services like Shazam or SoundHound. I played the track and got the hit for George Darko, "Highlife Time." A song from a 1983 album originally entitled Hi-Life Time.

Mystery solved but, more importantly, a nice little gateway to great record and a wonderful sampler about Oval Records. Triple win in my eyes.

I posted about the "Sound Files of Summer" episode of Never Post back at the end of June. If you have not listened to that episode yet, please do so now. The show recently did a Mailbag follow-up where listeners chime in about how streaming music vs curating a library of files has impacted them. This is some nerdy subject matter I can greatly appreciate. They tackle the music library topic at the top of the show but hop to 7:45 to get directly into the discussion about "the materiality of sound files." Specifically, how listening to sound files differs from streaming, particularly in regards to encoded errors that create. The second response gets even further into this idea and I'm transcribing the quote exactly here so there's a means of preserving it:

"I accept that my copy of Akira is a little folded up in the corner after I sat on it without looking. Or that my vinyl copy of that one Sufjan Stevens record has a locked groove that I need to get up and lift the tone arm over whenever I get to that part. We expect our physical media objects to have quirks of ownership. There was a very short amount of time where our digital media had these same quirks.

Maybe that copy of Indiana Jones that's sitting on your computer just has the Hindi subtitles burned into it and you learned to live with it. Kind of grow to love it. It's yours (although depending on how you got it, it could also be someone else's). It's just not everyone else's. Digital files are funny like that.

The age of streaming has somewhat singularized the files of digital media and I find that to be a little sad."

I love that quote. It is, admittedly, a little bit of nostalgia for a nerdier time but it's also a nice sentiment that building a "Music Library" is a physical activity. Granted, the physicality of it is bits being written on a drive but there's still something there; errors and all.

Very nerdy use of monitor subpixels. Heartily approved.

Bloomberg ran a piece profiling the Worldcoin Orb Factory - a biometric iris scanner that swaps your retina data for cryptocurrency. The company behind it is called Tools for Humanity and it's backed by Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO (at the time of writing) and many other big VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (whom I can no longer mention without citing their moral bankruptcy).

The pitch is that as technology advances, we will need a way to verify human beings vs AI. So, they set forth to scan every iris on Earth and store the information in the blockchain, which means you get a little dab of cryptocurrency in exchange called Worldcoin, which you can access with your newly registered World ID. It's like a fusion of Universal Basic Income, cryptocurrency and Persona, all verified by your eyeball. The people behind it know how dystopian it sounds but promise it's all quite altruistic.

My knee jerk for projects like this is that they are naive at best and exploitative at worst. Quotes from the Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania like this one do not waive my fears:

“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley,” Blania told the students. “You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea that, if it works, will change everything, and, if it doesn’t work, at least it was worth a try.”

It actually turns my stomach to think about how much VC money is spent on ideas like this instead of real world problems. The amount of ego involved is astounding to say the least.

Trying my best to put on an optimistic viewpoint, I can't disagree that a Universal Basic Income is a good idea. I can't disagree that technology is going to accelerate extremely fast, possibly in such a way that humans are hard to detect (tho mostly online). I can't even disagree that The Orb looks cool. It's also built on open source software and available for anyone to see how it works. But at the end of the day, it's a for profit company, with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding that eventually expects a return. They may be betting on that return to be fueled by the Worldcoin crypto value increasing but it's entirely possible that's not going to be the case. Even if it is, it's likely that the investors will be first in line to profit over the millions of people scanning their eyeballs.

As I get older, I'm trying to keep an open mind about technology and efforts of this nature. It's too easy to be cranky and pessimistic about everything. However, that forced optimism can be its own trap; skepticism can be healthy. Overall, I'm not keen on Worldcoin or The Orb for myself. Maybe one day I'll feel otherwise but I'm not convinced the privacy downside is worth the crypto gamble.

I've been keeping an eye on the Creative Works conference since way back in 2014. I even had the pleasure of attending in 2015. I still think about the presentations from Mikey Burton, Ghostly Ferns and Dan Christofferson to name but a few.

The conference has grown over the years and is now holding events on the west and east coasts. In fact, they recently announced their Creative Works EAST lineup and workshops. Lauren Hom! Meg Lewis! Jessica Hische! Lots of names I Don't Yet Know But Really Want To!

Creative Works founder Josh Horton has always had a knack for creating a compelling lineup of speakers, legitimately educational workshops and an environment that is friendly even if you (like me) do not really know anyone at all. Do recommend!

Somehow I ended up subscribed to Every - an AI / tech / thinkpiece newsletter that goes out every day. Sometimes the results are immersive and interesting, sometimes I delete them before I make it past the first paragraph. So it goes.

This piece on The Addiction Economy is much moreso the former. It's a lengthy read that takes its time to cover many of the obvious examples of how we're all becoming increasingly more addicted through technology and how that's not really all that surprising; it's a long trend!

Aside from being packed with informative nuggets about the world taking shape around us, it also ends on multiple optimistic notes. I find optimism to be a rare commodity these days, so I greatly appreciate a long - possibly dreadful - read that takes the effort to leave you with some positive feels.

The 2024 Defy Film Festival starts this weekend - Friday, August 16 + Saturday, August 17th. It's been around since 2016 but I only managed to start attending in the last few years. I feel foolish for not having attending earlier. If you are in the Nashville area, make the effort. If you are not in the Nashville area, go follow them and come out next year! The folks over at City Cast Nashville have a great interview with one of the festival founders, Dycee Wildman. She does a great job explaining how the festival comes together and what kind of programming they are on the lookout for.

If you have a filmmaker in your life, please clue them in to Defy. They are doing a great thing and I'm especially in awe of their ability to keep it welcoming, weird and small. A perfect combo.