Infested is a French movie about a low-income apartment building in Paris overrun by an invasive spider species. Locked in by the police, the residents have to battle the spiders and try to make their way out to safety. I saw this movie getting some pretty great early reviews. Having just had the somewhat disappointing experience of Late Night With the Devil not living up to the hype, I went into this one not expecting much.
🔗 The web is not dying – Manu: The current AI chaos is prompting people to write all sorts of posts and articles about the imminent death of the web. The current debacle surrounding the TikTok ban (forced sale?) in the US is making journalists believe that the internet as a global town square where people can interact is over if governments start banning these huge platforms. I don’t believe the web is dying.
Can we just start calling e-bikes “motorcycles” and be done with it? Barely anyone I see riding one around town here—and there are a lot of them—is actually using the pedals. They are just motorcycles with electric motors. To be clear, it is much better to have a bunch of electric motorcycles driving around than a bunch of gas-powered cars. Or even, for that matter, a bunch of electric cars. Bikes are smaller, slower, quieter, and vastly less likely to kill people than cars.
I’m not sure why I waited so long to deploy this filter.
🔗 Is the web falling apart? - Eric Gregorich
And everyone who hates seeing this happen seems to constantly write it. How they hate what the internet has become and miss what it once was. This seems to feed into the negativity.
I hope things settle soon. I hope we get back to smaller, stronger communities where we can have civilized discussions about our concerns but still have fun and share interesting things.
I see this too and it makes me sad because—as Eric points out—communities and platforms do exist to make the web better.
I think I first started hearing about Late Night With the Devil a few months ago. It looked like a novel take on the found footage horror subgenre—which I generally enjoy—and I was intrigued. It’s been getting pretty good chatter on the festival circuit, so I had been waiting for it to show up on Shudder. (Shudder, by the way, has turned out to be among my favorite streaming services. I didn’t even mean to sign up for it, but only discovered that I had access to it via the AMC+ account I had signed up to watch their Interview With the Vampire series last year.
Most movie “criticism” on YouTube is objectively terrible. I wouldn’t care so much, because people being wrong on the internet is an age-old problem and we should not have to get worried and upset every time it happens. Unfortunately, it is no longer just randos being wrong (or obnoxious, or creepy) on their own sites. They are being wrong on platforms that puts their fingers on the scales for their own reasons.
🔗 One weird trick for fixing Hollywood - by Max Read:
Maybe more than any other sphere of human activity, “wasting time” has been utterly disrupted by smartphones and the app ecosystems built on top of them. Businesses that used to specialize in helping people kill time have come under existential threat1 thanks to group chats, Candy Crush, Tower Defense, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It’s much cheaper and more convenient to scroll listlessly on one’s phone for two hours on the couch than it is to buy a ticket and sit in a theater.
I remember this! Going to some random movie in the theater because there was nothing better to do!
I have a weird theory that maybe some old TV series and movies should languish in obscurity and not be released on blu-ray/4K or streaming services because they were objectively crummy, even if I remember them fondly through the lens of nostalgia because of the point in my life when I first happened to see them.
🔗 Premature Evaluation: Taylor Swift The Tortured Poets Department
On her new album, Taylor Swift would like us to know that this was an act. She wants us to know that she’s a big weirdo, a crazy-passionate self-saboteur who has come to resent the gilded prison of overwhelming fame. She’s worked so hard and done so much, and as a result, millions of people feel entitled to tut-tut her life choices. That’s the message that I’m taking from The Tortured Poets Department, anyway. That’s a pretty interesting message, but it would be more interesting if it came attached to some bangers.
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