Quickfire Round ⚡️
- If any of you find yourselves in Melaka, go to Wild Coriander and order their brinjal sambal and udang masak lemak nenas. The most delicious meal I’ve had in months, and at a really reasonable price.
- Anyone else who deals with time anxiety please hit me up and let me know how to quell the paralysing fear of there just not being enough time.
- For my fellow millennials (old people): a Twitter account documenting nostalgic 2000s pop culture moments, guaranteed to make you feel as old and as dead as Elizabeth II.
Watch This 📺
This section’s been tough to write for, because unfortunately I haven’t really watched much that I can really outright recommend. Here are some things that I watched, ranked from ‘Warming Up’ to ‘Do Not Watch This’.
Warming Up – Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 🦾
This anime which takes place in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, shares a lot in common with the game. Visually, it’s amazing. In concept, it’s got an interesting story and ultimately the near-future cyberpunk setting is very cool. It’s enjoyable and I personally am liking it a fair bit—like I did the game— but it’s let down by its very… traditional sensibilities.
Like others have said before about Cyberpunk 2077, it’s not a modern vision of what the future will look like. Instead, it’s a vision of the cyberpunk future by way of the 80s. It’s also very masculine in that awkward, male-gazey way of the time period, where all the women are just extremely sexually depicted. Amplify that by how sexualised anime women are in general too, and you get Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
… Meh – Do Revenge 💋
Full review on my Letterboxd.
It’s not all bad. For one, the movie’s fun to look at; it’s a well-assembled visual pastiche of gen z aesthetics, drenched in TikTok pastels and Pantone’s Color of the Year 2022. It’s Pinterested to fuck, but still — pretty to look at.
The real cherry on top are the pretty heavy socio-political themes that the film pulls into its story to give their characters a bit more colour. They talk class, queerness, bullying, narcissism, rape culture, fake wokeness.
With all that, you must have something to say. […] But that’s it. That’s the furthest it goes, which is true for every single one of the other themes here. They’re paid lip service, turned into “wokeness” as a marketing gimmick, set dressing to achieve the pristine aesthetics of #queertok and #feminist instagram.
Do Not Watch This Movie – Mat Kilau ❌
It’s just hit Netflix and it’s at number 1 in Malaysia, but please do not watch Mat Kilau.
On the one hand, I’ll give it this: it’s an anti-colonial film that depicts the Malay struggle against British occupation.
On the other hand: it’s an anti-colonial film that depicts the Malay struggle against British occupation. It’s been rightly criticised for it’s wildly racist depiction of Sikhs as British lapdogs and its general portrayal of non-Malays as villains. It’s anti-colonial sentiment blended with ethno-nationalist Malay supremacist ideology, designed to conflate national patriotism with Islamic-Malay fascism. That’s not even mentioning that it’s possibly funded by one of the most vehemently racist political organisations in the country.
Truly our Birth of a Nation.
Listen to This 🎧
I have two things to say:
- Look at my brand new Spotify playlist organisation system (so pretty, so systematic).
- Go stream Hold the Girl, the second studio album from British pop girly Rina Sawayama.
Read This 📚
The past few weeks have seen a huge amount of conversation about the ethics of AI art. I’m concerned; there are clearly ethical issues and economic implications here which could legitimately hurt art and artists.
I’ll leave you to make up your own mind with these articles which you should read.
Perhaps in a world where anyone can generate any images, graphic designers as we know them today will be redundant. However, history shows human creativity finds a way. The electronic synthesiser did not kill music, and photography did not kill painting. Instead, they catalysed new art forms.
–Rodolfo Ocompi, The Conversation
Established artist communities are at a tough crossroads because they fear non-AI artwork getting drowned out by an unlimited supply of AI-generated art, and yet the tools have also become notably popular among some of their members.
Stable Diffusion helped fund a nonprofit and gained access to a dataset that is largely compiled using a different academic nonprofit’s dataset, in order to build out a commercial tech product that takes billions of randomly gathered images (many of them the creative work of artists) and turns them into art that may be used to replace those artists’ traditionally commissioned artwork.
An independent analysis of a 12 million-strong sample of the dataset found that nearly half the pictures contained were taken from just 100 domains. […] In other words: sources that contain copyrighted content, whether from independent artists or professional photographers.
This copyright aspect adds a new dimension to complaints that tools like Stable Diffusion are taking work away from human artists. Not only is AI stealing artists’ jobs, say critics, but it’s doing so by bootlegging the skills it took these individuals hours and hours to hone.
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