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."