Essays lost

I had originally planned an essay called Writing on glass for this issue, but then I got a nice little Apple Pencil tip from PenTips in the mail, and GoodNotes decided to revamp their app. All in all, It's pretty obvious that I need to take a closer look at these things, and figure out how it fits into my workflow, not to mention how it changes the whole writing on glass thing.

With that essay postponed, I wanted to talk a little bit about, and show you, the new studio. This is a creative space we've splurged on, in addition to our agency office. It's shaping up nicely, but it's not ready yet. Delays, in bureaucracy and shipments alike, means that I'm not ready to talk about this. Another essay lost to the future, then.

Normally, I don't cut it this close with my essays, but as regular readers know, it's been a hectic couple of weeks. This one's no different. I try to remind people to have evergreen content ready, things that don't go bad because you don't publish it right away, but I've failed to live according to that rule myself, it would seem. Time to remedy that for the future. Alas, that won't be possible in a while.

I'll leave you with a pretty hefty linkage section then, and promise to get back to you on writing on glass as well as the new studio space in the somewhat near future.

Linkage

🥊 AI is finally being used for something good: The Celebrity Kombat video spoofs the Mortal Kombat series, and the follow-up is even better.

🇳🇿 Less good: An AI bot run by a supermarket in New Zeeland suggested cocktails with bleach, among other dangerous things. Maybe put some human eyes on AI generated content, yeah?

✋🏻 Don't want to be indexed by ChatGPT? You can block that now, as I did and wrote about earlier this week.

🤖 And finally, Nick Cave tells it like it is when it comes to using AI to write music, or create any art really. Preach!

🎬 The Barbie movie is the second highest grossing movie at the cinema this year, and the highest ever with a female lead, among other things. Well done, all. (The Super Mario Bros. movie is the highest grossing one, if you were wondering.)

⌨️ Speaking of Mario, here's a beautiful NES (or Famicom) styled mechanical keyboard from 8BitDo, known for their controllers. I'm struggling not to pick this up.

👾 And speaking of movies, journalist and author Dan Ackerman, of Gizmodo fame, claims that Apple ripped off his book for the script to the Tetris movie, so he's suing them. Tricky lawsuit, I'm sure, but it'll likely lead to a settlement of some sort. Here's the documents filed, if you're curious.

🤡 The Verge finally came to the conclusion that Elon Musk is a liar, so they'll be more critical from now on. Well, duh. If you're wondering how that fight between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is coming along, know that Zuckerberg finally gave up on Musk, calling him out. Yeah, that fight is not going to happen, is it?

💸 Remember that $100,000 daily charge in Norway if Meta doesn't shape up? Well, it's starting today (August 14th), and it's actually $98,500 per day.

🍾 Congratulations to Kai Brach and 250 issues of his truly excellent newsletter, Dense Discovery.

Got something I should read? Send it to me, either by replying to this letter, tweeting to @tdh, or hitting up bored.horse on Bluesky. Thanks!

Currently

📚 I finished White Night, another Jim Butcher book from the Dresden files. Not too much to say about this one, it was a good read, is all.

🎵 Swedish rock band The Hives have a new album out, called The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, and it's pretty good.

📺 Air was a cute movie, and the best I've seen Matt Damon ever.

🎮 No real time for gaming this week. I tried to get hooked on Stardew Valley but failed, again, so it's just been some Slay the Spire session.

Remember to breathe. That's what I'm telling myself, and practicing doing in a more organized sense than the oh god please breathe stupid body or you'll die way. It helps when things get tough.

Until next week, try not to be me.

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡