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Category: links and bookmarks

links and bookmarks

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

Paying To Be The Product

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

And this, I suppose, is how it ends.

Instagram and Facebook users will now be able to pay for a blue tick verification, parent company Meta has announced.

Meta Verified will cost $11.99 (£9.96) a month on web, or $14.99 for iPhone users.

It will be available in Australia and New Zealand this week.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta chief executive, said the move will improve security and authenticity on the social media apps.

The move comes after Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, implemented the premium Twitter Blue subscription in November 2022.

Separately, Twitter announced on Friday it would provide SMS-based two-factor authentication only to users who are subscribed to the US$8-a-month ($11.65) Twitter Blue service from 20 March.

The company currently provides free two-factor authentication through third-party apps and a security key, which are considered more secure than SMS-based systems. If non-subscriber accounts that use SMS authentication do not switch before the deadline, Twitter said it would disable two-factor authentication for that account.

The main social media systems will only work properly for a user if the user pays for them to work properly.

We all used to say that social media isn’t free: if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product. Which meant that all your usage information was sold to entities that would pay social media companies for it. This is a new -ish territory, maybe: now you pay to be the product.

METROPOLIS And The Confusion

Warren Ellisfilm, links and bookmarks

Happened upon this METROPOLIS gif at Experimental Cinema. I’ve read the original novel by Thea von Harbou a few times over the years. It’s a good deal weirder than the film. She also wrote the film, directed by her husband Fritz Lang, which is a remarkable adaptation of her own work, given how much it cuts from the novel.

Von Harbou had a weird, confusing life. Her marriage was troubled by Lang openly chasing women, apparently, although the cause of the marriage’s dissolution was reportedly that she was caught by him in bed with a young Indian journalist, Ayi Tendulkar. Who she later married in secret, because the Nazi regime – which she otherwise appeared completely loyal to – was not about to let a high-status Aryan woman marry a brown man. Lang bugged out of Germany, Tendulkar was sent back to India, and von Harbou stayed, ending the war in a prison camp making hearing aids and later insisting she only became a Nazi to aid Indian immigrants. There, she received a medal for saving people from air raids.

Immediately after the war, she became a “rubble woman,” a member of the female teams that cleared bombed-out German cities. One imagines her underground like the workers in METROPOLIS. One wonders if she felt like Maria, transformed back from a Nazi robot into a virtuous worker.

An Injection For Hunger

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

In which writer Paul Ford tries a new drug for Type 2 diabetes management and discovers it completely switches off his previously hyperactive hunger signal and basically goes crazy-wall for a while:

“Something’s happened,” I told my wife. She is a veteran of watching me try to fix my body. I told her: Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume—there was sudden silence. It was confusing. Would it last?

I went alone that night to a Chinese restaurant, the old-school kind with tables, and ordered General Tso’s. I ate the broccoli, a few pieces of chicken, and thought: too gloopy. I left it unfinished, went home in confusion, a different kind of sleepwalker. I passed bodegas and shrugged. At an office I observed the stack of candies and treats with no particular interest.

Decades of struggle—poof. Apparently the Mounjaro molecule targets the same hormone as Ozempic, plus a second one, so it doesn’t just stimulate insulin production but also boosts energy output.

“I urgently need,” I thought, “an analog synthesizer.” Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal. And I was also manic, dysregulated, and wide-eyed, sleeping five hours a night, run-walking, with pressured speech; my friends, happy for me but confused, called me “cocaine Paul.” I bought more synthesizers off a guy from Craigslist, meeting him in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a grand in cash. A body is not designed to lose 25 pounds in eight weeks, starting during the holidays. Beep. Boop.

The Mirror And The Sword

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
The largest bronze mirror and largest dakō iron sword in Japan were discovered at a late-fourth century tomb mound in the city of Nara, its board of education and an archeological institute that supported the excavation said Wednesday.

Mirror and shields are considered to be tools to protect the dead from evil spirits. The sword is thought to have been enlarged to increase its power…

Notebooking Patrol 2feb23

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks
Being an author really means running a small business and there can be a lot to keep track of. I have, in the past, used one notebook to track all my writerly business, but they fill up fast when you’re keeping busy. Enter a big set of seven lovely notebooks…

Most of my notebooks are pocket size journals and sketchbooks. I tend to go through them fairly fast, and I’m not that hard on them. They get broken-in but they stay in pretty good shape. I’ve had a few notebooks where the spine tore apart– my first Moleskine softcover, and a Markings/CR Gibson notebook come to mind (photo in this post). But nothing has gotten as abused as this Picadilly notebook that I’ve been using for cooking notes!

Corecore Discourse: “The Zoomers Discovered Hauntology”

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

Corecore’s recent ascent has been fueled not just by the actual videos but by a discourse emerging around it. The scene has become a battleground for TikTok critics, YouTube essayists, and video makers proffering an array of theories about corecore’s original intent, how it was corrupted over time, and what it says about zoomers. On one end, people argue corecore is more than memes: it’s a politically charged art movement critical of capitalism and technology’s atomizing effect on society. The other camp says the videos are all about surreal humor and vibes; the amorphous essence of subjective interpretation; intangible emotions. 

As bizarre as it seems, the comment sections on these corecore dissertations feature some of the more lively debate I’ve read about the political potential of short form TikTok content. And on Twitter, there’s no end to the discourse—the reactions to corecore are sometimes more intriguing than the videos themselves: it’s “soundtracks for a Blade Runner funeral home”; “the zoomers discovered hauntology”; “communist psyop”; “the greatest invention of the alt-right pipeline”; “Marshall McLuhan died too soon”; “a Harmony Korine movie trailer”; “upcycled Tumblr”; “someone call Adam Curtis”; “crowdsourced Luis Buñuel”; “AI-generated emotional hypnosis.” It’s ridiculous, but it speaks to how people really want corecore to be something profound, to wrench meaning out of it.

Looking Back On November 2022

Warren Ellislinks and bookmarks

Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.

Fluxonium! – it was a good month for new words. Also Elaliite and Elkinstantonite

Content – god I hate that word

Filtered For: Avant-Garde – connecting up previous posts.

The Sound Of David Lynch – an important-to-me piece of the book I later wrote about in more detail here.

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