Links
Staurt Ian Burns on Marvel and its impact on the film industry:
Also, there’s no point blaming a studio which turns out two-four films a year for “ruining cinema” as though the audience is a sheep like mass. Hollywood has had its own hand in this by producing so many average films which strain for mass appeal to the extent they don’t appeal to anyone.
These two muppets are amongst the richest people on the planet, with a global impact on human relationships. And then they do this.
This piece from Robin Sloan is looking more prescient by the day: the last decade’s platforms are over.
Yes, the Inuit have dozens of words for snow – but what does each one mean exactly?
What a fascinating watch.
“It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline. That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.”
In other words, it’s time to build ActivityPub clients, not just Mastodon ones.
Universities are already rethinking teaching and assessment in the light of AI tools.
D&D’s OGL was a corporate con job
Cory Doctorow on the Hasbo D&D OGL rugpull:
If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked – and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along – there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t – but they could.
Source: Pluralistic: John Deere’s repair fake-out; Good riddance to the Open Gaming License (12 Jan 2023)
The science of stupidity
Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
Source: Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid - Psyche Ideas
Holy crap, this Rackspace email outage looks very bad indeed.