DS026: Using some geometry nodes to adjust materials.
Get you a paragraph that can be targeted by the html for special styling and slip it in on the second edit when you realise the text is all over the place because you forgot first time. This is that paragraph.
It’s almost definitely a short one this week. I’ve been chin-stroking more on this question of the diegetics of Covid-19 and while was listening to this BBC podcast on delusions I came across the idea of parasocial relationships. This is the feeling that you have a social relationship with characters from TV, radio or other media. The notion has been extended in recent years to include celebrities and then social media personalities. In fact, social media lend themselves particularly to parasocial relationships because they encourage perceptions of intimacy that aren’t real or authentic to increase engagement. Parasocial relationships came up in the context of delusions for their relationship with paranoid delusions of being watched or followed, particularly the spate of these delusions that have been informed by reality television.
Now interestingly, the podcast was quick to point out that firstly, almost everyone engages in some form of delusion and it’s only rarely that they become harmful or debilitating: Delusions of grandeur can help us with confidence and self-esteem while paranoid delusions can make us cautious and prevent potential social harm. Parasocial relationships are particularly important to children where they contribute to identity formation and learning, for example.
Of course parasocial relationships have been seized upon by marketing and PR whizzes as a way of hawking stuff through podcasts, vlogs and particularly social media personalities and there’s ongoing study about the long-term effects of this barrage of attention-seeking para-friendships on individuals, particularly when in isolation as many are right now.
Anyway, there’s more to this I feel. Like speculative parasocial relationships where the foundation of that relationship is impossible. Think Roger Rabbit (or the dark, adult alternative, Cool World) or Hatsune Miku.
Short Stuff
Told you it’d be brief this week. I’m really behind with other things, I have some marking to do, a lecture series to write a website to build and then all the admin stuff that comes with this job.
I got a GoPro for Christmas and have been (on the rare occasions where I’m going out), experimenting with it. It’s not as easy to use as they make it seem. You can get passable footage quite quickly but to get something HD film-worthy is hard. I’ve been trying out a bunch of different mounts. This one from the weekend I used a grill mount (you bite on it) which seems to work better since the head is a natural gimbal. There’s also a problem with brightness flickering which I read can be solved by using faster HD cards so I’m going to try that when I next go out, probably hill climbing on Friday.
Sorry, I have a bunch of open tabs for things to read and tell you about but I’m just swamped atm. There’s also a bunch of your names in reminders up there ↗ because I owe you emails or whatever. Love you and speak next week.
DS025: More hair simulation, this time with more complexity and added quality steps. There’s no easy way to do this. Just keep brute forcing it until it’s at least satisfactory.
There was snow very briefly, but London took its revenge and there was grey slush. Meteorology is complexified by a city that grunts, smudges its makeup, stomps upstairs, slams the bedroom door and blasts Fugazi at full volume any time you dare to say it looks pretty.
You may have noticed some changes ’round here. The footer was bugging me and I’ve messed around with it a bit, moving recent posts over here ←. I’m still not entirely happy. Natalie ran some tests and the tag list wouldn’t fit over there on small screens so I need to find a way to make this thing searchable – mostly because I search it.
This Again?
I was kindly invited to Clubhouse a few months ago by Monika but have struggled to settle into it. I’ve noticed a recent upsurge in people on it but I’m not sure how to use it. I think while we are isolated and atomised it’s providing a great space for people to meet and socialise but my experience of it has oscillated between echo chambers of self-helpy-startupy-vibesy-Californian ‘hangs’, a mix of events from people I hear from and read otherwise anyway (with notable exceptions) or good-vibes-chill-startup-founders-make-money-quickly rooms which may just be a product of the nature of the platform rather than the users.
I suppose it made me think about this pattern of platform-hopping we’ve got used to. Much like the sort of social construction of device obsolescence, we always seem to get to a point where platforms become derided or obsolete then expect to move on: Think of the mass popular exodus from WhatsApp this month. Or alternatively, something with a new gimmick pops up like Clubhouse and is vaunted as the new thing. I’m reluctant to sign up to new things having seen one or two or three generations of platforms descend from verdant pasture to barren desert, (Ello) flooded radioactive ruins (Twitter dot com) or neo-Imperialist dystopia (Facebook). New platforms tend to be attractive because of a new gimmick, a feature of media, privacy or interaction that is genuinely new. Clubhouse’s focus on serendipity, rooms and audio draws on the vacuum left in lieu of IRL meetups but from what I’ve experienced, I haven’t seen a way of it to become sustainable once the big platforms start to copy it and offer the same thing to larger captive audiences or it’s just acquired by one of the bigger sharks and wrapped up into Instagram or whatever.
Look, I remember when we all went to Ello and stood around with our hands in our pockets awkwardly posting pictures of boats and bread. I had maybe eight or nine made-up bands on MySpace. This churn is real and was fine when it was just messing around and being emo but as social networks have become the backbones of communities and organisation tools, the technological uncertainty of them becomes a threat to sustaining sociality. If you establish a community on one of these new platforms, it’s a pretty safe bet it’s going to have a short life span as the platform falls out of favour, is sunsetted, acquired or is shut down. What if, instead of assuming in that sort of unspoken way we do with new things that “this is the one! This is the one platforms/device/update that will solve all my problems!” we just accepted that platforms have a limited lifespan? That just like relationships with work-mates, childhood friends and peers that eventually they will drift apart after a certain time. What if these platforms gave themselves a time-limited feature?
I’ve become more and more interested in this idea that a way to prevent falling into the need to constantly reproduce limited forms of success in projects is just to say; ‘it’s going to end when it meets x criteria or once y amount of time passes.’ We could set up degrees that run for 3 years, do a project and then close them instead of having to re-justify them for the changing world all the time. It reframes disciplinary arguments around the specifics of what’s going on right now in the world. Sometimes, the party is meant to stop and that’s fine. Go home, sleep it off, come back the next day and do something new and fun.
I doubt we’ll see this happen with social networks though because the logics of capitalism (limitless growth) run up against the idea that things are meant to come to an end. I can’t imagine securing VC funding for a new technology that’s meant to stop. Are there any examples? Maybe pharmaceuticals? If you’re going to eradicate a disease then there’s going to be a criteria for the successful implementation of the drug; when there’s no more of that disease.
The alternative then to sustainable or time-limited social platforms is to have ones that allow the users to select the ways they socialise. What features, limitations and times they want to use rather than the pressure of keeping up with new gimmicks. Ironically, this is something very close to Facebook: It has a bunch of features but can be startlingly simple if you want it to be – not forcing you to do anything more fancy than sending someone a ‘Hello’ privately or publicly which they can respond to at any time. Perhaps that’s a reason for its doggish persistence? Rather than innovating new features (for users) it has become a backbone infrastructure of communication amongst the 25+’s by not relying on gimmicks to increase engagement but just maintaining reliability.
By way of comparison, Twitter’s longevity strategy was to implement emergent features that users developed them selves like @’s and #’s. The problem with that is that a decade or so later there’s a baffling array of tacit social rules, complex etiquette and walled gardens that prevent anyone new from getting into it and affirm shitty behaviour.
And Instagram, poor Instagram just keeps adding stuff to keep up with whatever it last saw on Bloomberg: YouTube ‘er- er- er- IGTV?’ Snapchat ‘… stories! TikTok ‘you mean reels?!’
Incidentally, that’s the nicest thing I’ve ever said about Facebook. I risk my cool dude critical credentials if I go further by maybe saying things like it’s helped folks who are older and less connected than ever to stay in touch with people through the isolation of lockdown. They also tacitly support genocide ok let me back in the club.
Short Stuff
Danah Abdullah has made a call for pessimism in design on FUTURESS: Against Performative Positivity. As well as pointed and accurate barbs against kitschy appropriation of social movements and ideas, she points to the lack of discourse on power in talking about global challenges in design education. You can also sign up to her newsletter here.
I’d agree that sometimes designers can be misled, complacent or focussed on the wrong thing. I’ve certainly been that way pretty consistently my entire adult life but at least we’re not generally guilty of actual deception and fraud. Nonetheless, Germany had to step in to ban Dark Patterns – deceptive designs that encourage user behaviour that isn’t in their interests.
Speaking of regulation and design, a rambly chat with Tamar about Shrek’s Law resulted in her sharing this US Supreme Court case with me: A fascinating story of copyright in the world of cheerleader uniforms which pivots on the issue of what is identifiable as design; utility or aesthetics? Literally a legal ruling on whether form follows function.
Crypto Art is – depending on your outlook – a way of legitimising the material properties of digital art such that it can have value and collectibility or a way of extending the ruthless creep of the financialised art market into digital production. Newly-minted doctor of philosophy Memo Akten has been doing a deep dive into the ecological impact of putting art on the blockchain. It’s a super in-depth analysis of the methods and discussion of his own methodology but basically you’re looking at pieces of art that could power a household for a month. And just as in the real art market, there’s a kind of artificially hyper-inflated value around a slither of artists that could power a nation. Akten’s site Cryptroart.wtf calculates the ecological cost shows you the end product of these calculations for random pieces of Crypto Art.
Ok. I started this post by writing ‘no long rant this week’ and then wrote a long rant and deleted that line. Life’s a carousel you know? You take what you’re given; sometimes it’s the unicorn, sometimes it’s the helicopter. Either way it’s just fibreglass with faded paint and a bit creepy. Love to you and yours. Speak next week.
DS023: Hair simulation! This is actually recreating a sketch I did years ago. I don’t like the grass. I think there’s something about the way it renders ribbons in Cycles that I don’t like.
It’s just sheer black out there. The window may as well just have blackouts over it. Some folks assembled some scaffolding at the weekend so every afternoon around two or three there’s some meaningful, concerned chatter and banging around. I’m not sure what they’re doing but I hope it involves better sunrises.
Well, happy pardon day! I’ve sort of been looking forward to it but now just feel sorry for all the editors with ‘historic self-pardon’ ledes ready to role. I expected it too. I suppose there’s still a few hours.
I suppose we all know that Trump coverage will continue for the foreseeable future. He’ll be courted by the populist arm of the Republicans for the mid-terms and incumbents in purple districts will live in fear of boat-shoe-fascist-grunt Don Jr.’s threat to fund primary opposition to any who fall out of line with Trumpism. The ideal situation would be one in which coverage of Trump recedes to the same awarded other far-right-failed-business-leader-sexual-predators rather than the spectacle of a bitterly enraged former president railing against everyone given call-ins on Fox and interviews on OAN for the next half a decade.
I can’t watch the rolling news. I suppose it’s the idea of a constant stream of people listing all the things they don’t know which turns me off. Most of my analysis comes either through a check of the news online first thing and podcasts where you can get a level of analysis and depth. In the case of US politics, most of that is through the Obama-bros’ Crooked Media empire and Pod Save America chiefly. But there’s something about American political satire which is quite friendly, it doesn’t have the venom of British satire. I suppose it’s not as confrontational. There has to be a punchline.
For other stuff – particularly Brexit – I adore Talking Politics which is based out of Cambridge University but it can be a bit difficult to want to listen to because it isn’t based on humour. In-depth long-term analysis of the shocks of Brexit and Covid or the immorality of Johnson and Trump are just anxiety-inducing without a rasp of even American satire to temper them.
Anyway, there was a particularly good analysis of long-term Brexit effects which was, yes anxiety inducing because of the inevitability of the pain to come. Generally, hosts and political scientists David Runciman and Helen Thompson tend to balance things pretty well. Recent episodes on Covid and Biden have been wary of hyping change or progress, neatly separating issues between the political and the systemic to highlight realistic opportunities to change and where there will be sticking points but this one on Brexit was just ‘it’s bad, it’s going to get worse.’ The guest, Diane Coyle, suggests there are five world-leading exports in the UK; financial services, artificial intelligence, green technology, higher education and the creative arts. And the government has, for political reasons, declared a culture war on the last two.
Incidentally – while I’m here – I still don’t get the fish, no one has explained why the fish was such a thing! No one even talks about the fact that it was such a thing! To this very day, journalists stillwriteabout what the deal means for the fishing industry and like someone turning up nude at a party that no-one will look at, talk about or explain, it’s just there; ‘Yeah that’s Simon.’ ‘Why is he not wearing any clothes?’ ‘Hm?’ ‘He’s not wearing any clothes, why is that?’ ‘Oh.’
Anyway, both Tory Brexiteers and moderate Republicans have started to build permission structures to excuse their collective inequities. In the case of the US, party figures are piping up to peddle the ‘you may not have liked his methods, but look at what he did’ argument. In the case of the UK a mix of Covid and a narrative of ‘EU viciousness’ is being set up to justify the failings of the thirty-year project of removing the UK from Europe. Both of these narratives appear both unfair and untrue to more left-leaning folks like myself. Particularly in the case of the US. I’d like to see one of the Republican mouthpieces on BBC News grilled as to how the complete inaction on Covid and the collapse of federal agencies which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands can be interpreted as presidential achievement. Probably won’t happen, but these cover stories will no doubt continue to secure the thin minority rule by which both parties hold (somewhat fluctuating) power.
This is also why I’m skeptical of a post-Trump and/or post-Johnson reckoning in either party. For reasons already explained, their populist hold remains strong but also to their maximalist Reagan/Thatcherist ideology the ends always justify the means. I’ve argued (unpopularly) before that a reverence of norms, principles and moralism on the left prevents opportunism and compromise to achieve change. The almost explicit aim of the Republican party since Bush senior has been to secure the judiciary in order to concretise conservative and constitutionalist values for a generation. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the other party leaders have always been pretty open about not caring how that’s achieved. The whole point was to prevent progressivism getting to the courts and lock down conservative heartland issues for decades to come – gun rights, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights and broadly white supremacist constitutional provisions.
Issues of deregulation and climate change are useful political footballs along the way and Trump and Brexit became neat opportunities to drum up political popular support for the more outsize causes of conservatives. I’m not sure we could point to the Tories as having such a cohesive multi-decade ideological project beyond the general jingoism and regressive imperialism that keeps the right-wing press excited but in both cases, parties which maintain minority rule require bending the ‘rules’ to maintain it; something which the left’s commitment to fairness generally prevents it from doing. Looking at how Biden (or in fact the dim, distant possibility of a left-wing UK government) approaches electoral reform will be an interesting tell. This won’t be a first hundred days project but the right-wing have demonstrated more than ever their willingness, to lie, break the law and deceive to secure election victory. I’m not suggesting the left should embrace the same guerrilla tactics but don’t mistake ‘fairness’ for complicit conservatism.
Short Stuff
I don’t normally go on political rants, I’m sure you know, but I haven’t been to the pub in ages.
There are 32 possible records in Mario Kart 64; one for each of the 16 tracks and one for the fastest lap of each track. Here’s the story of the person who over 8 years almost held them all simultaneously.
This Twittering from Sarah Brin reminded me of the story I’ve told before about FIFA buying player data from Electronic Arts. I’d like to see analysis of more ways, beyond the technological, that the video games industry impacts on other sectors like this but I don’t know where to find it.
The US Covid Relief bill had a clause giving 180 days for the Office for Naval Intelligence to release an unclassified report detailing what it knows about UFOs (via Matt Webb)
What are the good video game podcasts?
Ok, that’s it. There was more but there isn’t now. Listen, you know I love you. I haven’t had time to read anything yet in 2021 so I sort of have a deficit of interesting-ness right now. Speak to you soon.