Believe

Lee Pace on the final days of Halt And Catch Fire:

The season two people were like, "Oh, there's something here. I can see what they're trying to sniff out." And then season three was when we really hit our stride. So I would say that AMC believed in the group of people that they had assembled. The writers were trying to figure it out and focus it, as were the actors. Every episode, we met to read through the script and work on the characters and challenge each other. So we got to know each other very well as actors, as we developed that show over the years. So I think that AMC figured out a way to make the finances of it work because they really believed in the show. 

Now playing: Translate to English

1. Pizzicato Five - 'Arigato We Love You'
2. The Album Leaf - 'We Once Were Two'
3. Arisael Guzman - 'Sweet Harmony'
4. Fantastic Plastic Machine - 'First Class 77'
5. Johan Agebjorn (feat. NINA) - 'Little Fluffy Clouds' (remix)

It's the little things

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

"For a remarkably long stretch, Apple's in-house icons represented the pinnacle of an art form worth celebrating. They were exquisitely crafted, and quite obviously the work of the most talented artists in the field. Apple's application icons in the OS 26 releases — MacOS Tahoe especially, because MacOS has the most first-party apps — look like they're the work of people who have zero artistic ability whatsoever."

With my pencil turning moments into lines

In the same way The Bear freaked me out by hijacking my playlist (Harmonia's 'Welcome' and The Cocteau Twins' 'Pearly Dewdrops' Drop' and Eno/Cale's 'Spinning Away'? Three times is enemy action), The Lowdown is my bookcase stalker: not only the same titles, but the same editions. I picked up on the show because of an NYMag.com headline that compared it to Terriers. I'll take it. Maybe things are coming round. Maybe things are in the right place.

Now playing: When your life is always part of your surroundings

1. Night Tapes - 'Drifting'
2. Preface - 'Palace Hotel'
3. Haruomi Hosono – 'Tokyo Rush'
4. JRMX - 'Lady (Hear Me Tonight)' (Extended Mix)
5. Yppah - 'R.Mullen'

Florian Schneider's typewriter

Available now.

Later

Jim Downey on David Letterman:

He was willing to do things that he knew wouldn't get huge laughs, but he loved them. I always think about how much he paid attention to language. He had this very Midwestern fondness for odd turns of phrase. [When I was head writer on "Late Night,"] we once did a bit where we had this weeklong project upgrading his desk, adding little features. The NBC crew guy was there with a power drill, and Dave said, "My dream is for 'Late Night' to get its own three-speed drill — and someday, God willing, a variable-speed drill."

It's been such a long time, and I know

I prefer new music to old but recently when Scritti Politti's Provision came up on shuffle I was shocked by how good it still sounds. Even as a fan my impression of the album at the time was that the band had defaulted to a style. Listening to it now, it feels like a fresh vein of smooth R'n'B. Recently Green Gartside spoke to John Earls about the possibility of releasing new material:

"I keep telling myself, 'Yeah, this is all going to get done,' but the problem is, I can't finish songs. Starting something new in music, that's the greatest feeling I've ever had and it happens every day. But the task of finishing a song? That's when I go, 'Oh, really, do I have to?' That's..."

 And then he paused.

Starter for 13

Co-showrunner Shawn Ryan on how he teamed up with Ted Griffin for the FX show Terriers:

"We said to Ted: 'Hey, if you ever have a TV idea, come to us," Ryan recalls. "We told him that we'd love to hear it and maybe work with him on it. And after a certain amount of time, he said he did have an idea. It was very loose at the time, but he talked about classic '70s buddy movies. He also talked about The Rockford Files. I don't think he used this word, but I did — 'vibe.' He kept talking about a vibe, and he kept trying to explain [the show's] tone and how the tone was more important than the story in some ways, although the story had to be good. So I think I just said, 'Why don't you just write some pages?' And he did. A lot of the magic that was in the show was in those early pages. I just loved the writing from the beginning."

Popper

Ex-UBS commodities analyst Julien Garren on what makes AI a bubble:

"So, in summary; you can't create an app with commercial value as it is either generic (games etc), which won't sell, or it is regurgitated public domain (homework), or it is subject to copyright. It's hard to advertise effectively, LLMs cost an exponentially larger amount to train each generation, with a rapidly diminishing gain in accuracy. There's no moat on a model, so there's little pricing power. And the people who use LLMs the most are using them to access compute that costs the developer more to provide than their monthly subscriptions."

Going, going...

Patrick Modiano on the fading city:

"In Baudelaire's time the whole Carrousel area was destroyed. He wrote a poem about it ... nowadays Paris is rather aseptic and everything has become more uniform, yet there is still something strange and mysterious about certain quartiers ... I often have a sense of Paris being covered by a layer of cellophane and I feel as though my own memories have become almost imaginary. It's rather like a favourite pet – a dog or a cat – that has been stuffed and sent to the taxidermist. You recognise it, but it's no longer alive."

Traffic

Putting the finishing touches on something no one cares about.

Now playing: Sequel nearly finished

1. Billie Toppy – 'Men'
2. The National – 'Tropic Morning News'
3. Babe Roots feat. Milly James – 'Falling'
4. Bar Italia – 'Calm Down With Me'
5. T Rex – 'Cosmic Dancer'

Slop stars

Speaking of what used to be movies, the real-life Charles Pulliam-Moore on a new animated character:

A lot of Tilly Norwood's rollout feels like a stunt that could easily be ignored. But buzz-generating stunts like this can also lead to nonsensical ideas like "AI actors" becoming normalized in people's minds.

Pulp lives

Shane Black will not be the last filmmaker to make a movie based on books by Donald E Westlake (1933-2008):

Westlake [as Richard Stark], who created the Parker character, started in the '60s, and he continued writing the character all the way through to his death in 2008. So each generation seemed to have a Parker movie for them. There was Lee Marvin's Point Blank, and he was indelibly stamped in that 1967 production. There was a progression from Robert Duvall's The Outfit in 1973 to Mel Gibson's Payback in 1999. Each new movie that came out was slightly more modern, and so rather than go back in time and try to capture the vintage Parker, our job was to now do our version for this generation.

6ft Wasp

It's all marketing and advertising: 

Microsoft is getting ready to announce an ad-supported version of Xbox Cloud Gaming. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the software maker has started testing ad-supported games streaming internally, allowing employees to play select titles free without a Game Pass subscription.

Every deadline was a crisis

"The Colorado Bureau of Investigation is currently conducting a case review into the death of renowned journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, at the suggestion of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office following a request from his widow, Anita Thompson... The review process is expected to take an unspecified amount of time, and there is no firm deadline for its completion."

"We're all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, and we keep waiting for something to happen." He looked up. "You know—I'm a rebel, I took off—now where's my reward?"

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

Small talk

Jim Jarmusch gets non-political:

I agree that everything is political in a sense, as Godard said. To not directly talk about politics does not mean something isn't political. But for me, the political thing is to protect empathy in a way. The last time I saw Joe Strummer, it was like five weeks before we lost him. He was in New York. He walked me back to my home from a restaurant because I had the flu or something. He stopped at my door and looked me in the eye, and I'll never, ever forget this. I repeated it recently. He said, "Jim, our job is to protect empathy at all costs, and to live groovy lives."

The Glasses

Making Curb Your Enthusiasm:

Larry's glasses were the property department's daily heart attack. I was only on the final two seasons and by that time, the glasses protocol was already established, but what I can say is that it is impossible to get the exact frames today. What I was told was that a few seasons before me, a producer went down the rabbit hole in search for the manufacturer of the exact pair of glasses. She was able to find someone in a small cabin in Switzerland to make four pairs, which Larry inherited. So every day, the prop department was in charge of his personal irreplaceable glasses. Remember, in some episodes we even had to drop them in a toilet or bend them!

Now playing: Cloudy, High 18°

1. Warpaint - 'Hard To Tell You'
2. Lucas Perazzi -'City of Souls'
3. Inre Kretsen Grupp - 'Loggia'
4. Henry Green - 'Closer'
5. DRAMA - 'Hold On'