Flutterby™! (short)

Depending on final details, we plan on getting one of these flip phones for Charlene, and what the heck, if a referral link leads to goodies, so much the better...

https://order.commodore.net/ca...ref=ZGFubHlrZUBmbHV0dGVyYnkuY29t

Nature: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in — and they’re not good.

If you have intermittent access to an "AI" tool, your skills drop dramatically when it's not available.

Harvard Business Review — Generative AI: Don’t Let AI Slop Muck Up Your Company’s Processes

If you're out of free reads, Futurism: Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way is a take on that article.

Via

Somehow, back in my interest in film years, I'd managed to skip Jean Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless. We watched it last night, and it felt kind-of of its time socially, but there were things that kept making me go "wow", the use of the camera as active observer, the intimacy of the indoor shots, the breadth and messiness of the outdoor shots which still made every moment count, cuts which felt way more modern.

The subtitles and French made it challenging, and the social aspects of "of its time" left me feeling like I'd watched something of historical importance, but not particularly relevant to modernity.

We watched it as a prelude to watching Nouvelle Vague. As the "Fin" faded from the screen I did a quick search and realized it was on Netflix, which we'd accidentally gotten subscribed to when Charlene went to watch an older episode of The Way Home and Google misdirected her, and our subscription ended... today, as it turns out.

So, back to back, we watched Richard Linklater's comedy/drama about the making of Breathless. Also in black and white, and in French, with subtitles, and...

Nouvelle Vague is genius. The casting worked amazingly well. The film tells enough in action and leaves enough space for the subtitles to work. It carries the frenetic improvised feel of Breathless while being clear that the entire film had to be meticulously plotted and planned to tell exactly that story with, I assume, an amazing amount of effects and set work, especially given the budget.

Much like Breathless, the film both is and isn't about its primary plot, and it lets those personal evolutions be told through small beats.

Anyway, we loved it.

I'm listening to the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's "Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas", and... ad blocking is a start, but I need to be doing more to control the external impacts on me.

https://rangedtouch.com/2022/0...1/43-schull-addiction-by-design/

A good reminder, as we disproportionately enforce laws in order to create modern slavery: Jermaine Fowler: Everyone Reads the First Line of the Juneteenth Order. Never the Second.