frames

Things have been busy. I’ve got a big move coming up, and I’ve been reflecting on living here in Boone and Southern Appalachia and what will be similar and what will be different about living in the Upper Valley. Culturally, it’s going to be a huge shift, but it is still the Appalachian Mountains after all.

Midwife’s music has been with me a long time—all of Madeline’s work on The Flenser is awesome, and I spent the first part of lockdown in 2020 replaying “S.W.I.M.” over and over and over. This collab with Matt Jencik really stuck with me too.

Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin

A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster, because the company would keep collecting its monthly fee. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.

I read this excellent article about the state of Netflix and the streaming industry. Content (term used intentionally) is “designed to be played but not watched” despite huge budgets and A-list talent. It’s important to remember that our media environment is already full of content slop now, even before generative AI becomes widely used in these type of productions. I have to imagine that it’s already being used in script-writing but I guess it would be hard to tell.