This Week Pause and Learn About…
- …onset intimacy…
- …forgotten riot lessons…
- …Chicago in a day…
- …chess bluffs…
- …
Thanks to Casper and scb0212… for contributing this week… Send articles throughout the next week… to ploughmanplods … gmail… Post articles from the past week below… for discussion… Have a Happy… Friday!
For Deadline, Andreas Wiseman interviews Miriam Lucia, the intimacy coordinator for House of the Dragon on how her job works and the evolving standards since the original Game of Thrones:
I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not a therapist. I’m an actor, who is also an acting coach, who became an intimacy coordinator. I still do all three. So, I think my work as an acting coach helps in terms of me understanding how a particular actor works, and how they’re processing information, and how they’re then putting that information into their physical action, and whether it makes sense.
ReverseShot‘s Eileen G’Sell interviews documentarian Sierra Pettengill about poetic uses of archival footage in her film Riotsville, USA:
It was different in different scenarios. As a general rule, I don’t really place much value on pristine images. I’m very influenced by Hito Steyerl and this idea of the “poor image” leaving some sort of clue as to how material travels through various networks, including the internet, but also, in the case of corporate archives, there’s a lot of material in here that’s fair use, and that material comes in at a lower resolution. I have no interest in hiding that. The way that images arrive at us and have been preserved is important to me. Our digital interventions are just taking that and pushing it one step further. Part of it is to remind us that we are in a present tense, manipulating images, looking at them, and that we can intervene in society and in its images. And I don’t mean in a film editing sense. I mean, we are sitting here in 2022, receiving; we are not in some immersive experience locked in a vault.
At The Washington Post, Leigh Giangreco investigates whether the whirlwind tour of Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is actually possible:
2:02 p.m. We park and skip over a few blocks to Lincoln Avenue. The Von Steuben parade once proceeded along Dearborn before moving to Lincoln Square, a historically German neighborhood on the North Side. The parade is supposed to begin at 2 p.m., so we scan the street for a suitable float to crash. We spot the float for Dank Haus, the German American Cultural Center in Lincoln Square. There are a few women in dirndls gathering around the float, a little boy wearing lederhosen and another woman holding a long-haired dachshund. It’s perfect. The three of us approach them in our very obvious costumes and ask if I can hop on their float. Not only do they agree, but they tell us they were looking for a Ferris! Everything is going our way — just like in the movie.
At The Atlantic, Matteo Wong reports that technological advances are turning chess into poker:
In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice. That’s not the only way that computers have recently reshaped the landscape of a 1,500-year-old sport. Human players, whether novices or grandmasters, now find inspiration in the outputs of these engines, and they train themselves by memorizing computer moves. In other words, chess engines have redefined creativity in chess, leading to a situation where the game’s top players can no longer get away with simply playing the strongest chess they can, but must also engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques. In that sense, the recent cheating scandal only shows the darker side of what chess slowly has become.
Franklin Schneider takes to Gawker… to defend ellipses:
Ellipses may not be “correct,” but don’t they have the appropriate emotional affect for most of our communications? “Here’s the document you wanted … let me know if you have any questions …” Seems to me that strikes the proper register, much more so than the preferred contemporary style of exclamation points: “Here’s the document you wanted! Let me know if you have any questions!” That’s just ghoulish … the dead-eyed exuberance of a youth pastor … Meanwhile, even the technically correct and theoretically neutral period seems unnatural by comparison: “Here’s the document you asked for. Let me know if you have any questions.” Monotone, overmedicated … This response was generated by a neural network …