Blogbook

Shutterstock has made a hilarious recreation of the Fyre Festival promo video, using stock video from its website, as part of the It’s Not Stock campaign. Via AdNews:

Shutterstock has cleverly recreated the infamous Fyre Festival ad using its own stock footage as part of its new global campaign “It’s Not Stock”.

The ad capitalises on the hype around Fyre Festival with a new video that looks incredibly similar to the original event trailer. It even includes the swimming pigs.

Originally sold as a luxury music festival, Fyre Festival invested heavily in marketing, hiring a slate of celebrity influencers to promote it on social media, including Kendall Jenner, who was rumoured to have been paid $250,000 for one Instagram post.

The festival collapsed and and subsequently created one of the biggest PR storms of the year with Netflix and Hulu later releasing documentaries on Fyre Festival’s failure.

A key observation in the documentaries is just how much the founders of the festival had spent on marketing the event instead of the production of Fyre. With celebrity influencers the major draw card to the festival, the downfall of Fyre has sparked questions about trust in the influencer marketing ecosystem. While Fyre Festival would have spent hundreds of thousands on its video, Shuttershock CMO Lou Weiss said the clip, which was a compilation of 18 different bits of footage licensed through Shuttershock, cost just $2062 to create.

Australia Lamb had a new ad campaign out in time for Australia Day, which hilariously proposed merging with New Zealand to become New Australialand. New Zealand Tourism has since responded in equally hilarious fashion, given that Lamb forgot to buy the URL. Via News.com.au:

New Zealand has hijacked a key part of the popular annual Australia Day advertisement campaign promoting lamb, in a cheeky swipe at us from across the ditch.

On Sunday, Meat and Livestock Australia released its latest lamb pitch, following in the footsteps of previous successful efforts, suggesting the country has “lost the plot” and should merge with our neighbours to form a new nation.

“We used to be the greatest country on Earth but we’ve lost the plot,” Gary, a government official, laments as the commercial begins. “Cheating at sport, we can’t even hang on to a prime minister.”

The solution to our woes? “We finally make New Zealand part of us,” another official suggests.

“Genius, we create one nation!” Gary enthusiastically responds.

That new combined country would be called New Australia Land, the ad suggests, although it seems the marketing gurus behind the lamb campaign forgot one thing — to register a website domain for newaustralialand.com.au.

Breath of the Wild is an incredible flagship game for the Nintendo Switch, and some fans have responded with this amazing fan animation. Youyang Kong (with help from Qianya Yin) have created an animation about a key enemy encounter in the game. Technology and nature have a key relationship in the game, as mentioned in Eurogamer:

Here’s what happens. Link’s big gadget in the game is the Sheikah Slate, a kind of ancient iPad that does various useful things over the course of an adventure that I am still nowhere near completing. To unlock a tower, Link must first work out a way to climb it, and then, once at the top, must essentially download the tower’s information, by putting the slate into a raised platform that sits below a stalactite. The slate always makes the sound of rock on rock when it is docked, which is weird enough in itself because it has a glossy screen and all that Apple jazz. Then this strange and fascinating animation kicks off. Music starts to build and the stalactite starts to flicker with what is unmistakably code, racing down over its surface. Because this is a stalactite, a drop of glowing dew starts to form at the very tip, and there is an overwhelming sense that this dew is made of the scrolling code, and is filled with it, in fact. Eventually, the dew falls from the stalactite and splashes onto the face of the slate. Packages have been delivered, or whatever the technical term is. It’s a wonderful moment in its very refusal to become a metaphor. Instead, in this world, and quite plainly stated, digital technology is also the stuff of geology, of elements, of nature itself.

A big part of the reason that this strikes me as being so fascinating, I think, is because it lays bare a truth about the game that is easy to see but hard to believe. It essentially unsuspends a central disbelief that most fantasy games rely upon. Zelda games have often brushed up against technology – I’m thinking, for example, of the camera from The Wind Waker, which in my memory at least is a wonderful brass and wood confection straight out of the world of Fox Talbot. (And Tom Phillips has just reminded me of the Ancient Robots from Skyward Sword.) But Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda, as far as I can remember, to concern itself with digital technology. Sure, there were those Daft Punk rift-beings who fizzed and popped across the screen in some of Twilight Princess’s colder moments, but they felt like an incursion from outside of Hyrule. (I can’t remember how the plot actually tied up, come to think of it. Maybe they weren’t from outside at all.)

National Geographic discusses the history of the internet in Internet 101, starting from how it used to be ARPANET and beyond. No, it wasn’t invented by Al Gore. In the future, however, key bits of its infrastructure may be sunk underwater:

When the internet goes down, life as the modern American knows it grinds to a halt. Gone are the cute kitten photos and the Facebook status updates—but also gone are the signals telling stoplights to change from green to red, and doctors’ access to online patient records.

A vast web of physical infrastructure undergirds the internet connections that touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Delicate fiber optic cables, massive data transfer stations, and power stations create a patchwork of literal nuts and bolts that facilitates the flow of zeros and ones.

Now, research shows that a whole lot of that infrastructure sits squarely in the path of rising seas. (See what the planet would look like if all the ice melted.)

Scientists mapped out the threads and knots of internet infrastructure in the U.S. and layered that on top of maps showing future sea level rise. What they found was ominous: Within 15 years, thousands of miles of fiber optic cable—and hundreds of pieces of other key infrastructure—are likely to be swamped by the encroaching ocean. And while some of that infrastructure may be water resistant, little of it was designed to live fully underwater.

“So much of the infrastructure that’s been deployed is right next to the coast, so it doesn’t take much more than a few inches or a foot of sea level rise for it to be underwater,” says study coauthor Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was all was deployed 20ish years ago, when no one was thinking about the fact that sea levels might come up.” [Learn about how cities may be underwater soon].

Nighthawk is an award-winning short film about police running into a dead badger, which they try to clear off the road until they realise it’s just drunk. Via Short of the Week:

Drunkenness can be at once comic and tragic, and both moods are encompassed in this freaky, freewheeling animated short. Spela Cadez’s Nighthawk is, in the simplest terms, a cautionary tale about the misery of alcoholism. But the boozer in question is a badger, his poison a bunch of rotten pears, his night on the town more of a road trip into nightmarish abstraction.

The film opens on a surreal scene that Cadez and her screenwriter Gregor Zorc lifted from a news report. By the roadside, two policeman encounter a badger inebriated on fermented fruit. The true-story element ends there, as the bleary-eyed mammal commandeers their vehicle and embarks on a bumpy ride down dark country roads.

The rest is a study in minimalism. The badger eats more pears and gets drunker. Like Tom Hardy’s Locke, he growls defensive non-sequiturs at an imaginary passenger: “Think it’s easy for me?” The lights and markings on the road start to blur and dance to the funky music on the radio, recalling the colourful experiments of early animators like Len Lye. Cadez and Zorc are bold enough not to load the film with didactic dialogue and plot turns. Essentially, Nighthawk is a portrait of the bleak, progressive confusion that comes with too much alcohol.

Netflix’s IO is a post-apocalyptic film about a dying earth starring Anthony Mackie and Margaret Qualley, and whether to save it or leave. IO is part of Netflix’s bid to increase its viewership by funding more and more original films, including the highly acclaimed Roma. Via Multichannel:

Netflix is slowly easing back on its reliance on licensed movies and TV shows, and it will generate half of its audience with its own originals by October 2019.

That’s the conclusion of a new report just jointly published by research companies Parrot Analytics and Kagan.

According to the research companies, Netflix originals’ share of total audience increased an average of 1% each month from June 2017 to July 2018. Reliance on licensed content dropped 10.9% over that span.

Based on this data, Parrot and Kagan forecast parity between originals and licensed content late next year.

Earlier this month, WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey delivered a shot across the ol’ bow, telling investors that Netflix and other top subscription streaming platforms can expect a “thinning” of their libraries when WarnerMedia launches its own direct-to-consumer platform in late 2019. In April, research firm 7Park Data released a report suggesting that Netflix was getting 80% of its viewing from licensed shows at the time.

Although it is well known to be spending top dollar on leading creative talent, Netflix has been criticized by analyst for not effectively promoting its shows.

How Video Games are Built — and what are all those tiny triangles about? Modern video games are extremely detailed, and this is how that’s possible. Video via developer Cleo Abram. About the evolution of polygons in video games:

A polygon is a triangular shaped flat surface, used in 3D graphics technology to build three dimensional figure. Polygons are connected to one another, creatively positioned, and together make up a 3D image. As a general rule of thumb, the more polygons that can be used, the better quality the 3D image will be.

The only problem is, of course, that the more polygons used, the more powerful the hardware required to display the numerous polygons. So, one can gauge the power of technology based on the number of polygons used in 3D based video games.

Polygons have been used in video game graphics for a very long time, much longer than many would assume. Although, of course, the earliest use of polygons was extremely crude, and unappealing to the eye. But, as early as 1980, polygons have been a part of the video game world.

After a period of polygons gradually being refined, more advanced versions of them began to appear in games, with an increase in how many were used to make a single three dimensional model. A notable benchmark was reached in 1996, with the release of Quake. The game is widely regarded as the first true 3D FPS game, and was celebrated for massive leap in graphics technology.

At any given time, Quake could render 200 polygons.

Did you know that there are Star Trek Minisodes out there? They’re meant to tide viewers over until Star Trek Discovery–often in a hilarious way. Via Gizmodo:

Star Trek: Short Treks has so far been the perfect way to while away the time until Discovery’s return in a few weeks. “The Escape Artist,” the fourth and final minisode in the series, shines a spotlight on the infamous Harcourt Fenton Mudd — and to learn more, we spoke to Mudd himself, Rainn Wilson.

Wilson, who also directed the short, stars once again as the cosmic conman Harry Mudd, wheeling and dealing his way across the Star Trek galaxy after his prior Discovery appearances in the morally murky “Choose Your Pain” and the excellent time-loop episode “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad.” While those episodes gave us some intriguing sides of Harry to explore, “The Escape Artist” instead focuses on the more humorously zany side of Mudd’s many escapades—digging into a lighter humour that Discovery at large is looking to capture more often in its second season.

Asked about humour and Star Trek, Wilson said:

Yeah, people kind of forget the original series—and The Next Generation—have a lot of humour in them. And some episodes were almost straight-up comedic. And so, there’s another aspect of the Star Trek legacy that’s not just the humour and the banter, but, humour in the situations. Think about “The Trouble With Tribbles,” so many other episodes that were almost like watching an hour of comedy, you know? And Discovery— and I think it was a good choice that we made—that this modern world, if you’re rebooting a Star Trek franchise, I think it was the right way to go to have it be more episodic and have a through line.

National Geographic takes its viewers behind the scenes of a traditional Chinese medicine shop in Chengdu and its herbal tea remedy. Via National Geographic:

Few subjects ignite more heated debate in health circles than traditional Chinese medicine. It’s further complicated by the work of researchers like Iaizzo and many others who are looking at traditional cures through the lens of cutting-edge science and finding some interesting surprises—surprises that could have profound impacts on modern medicine. Cultures from the Arctic to the Amazon and Siberia to the South Pacific have developed their own medicine chests of traditional cures. But China, with one of the oldest continuous accumulations of documented medical observations, offers the biggest trove for scientists to sift through.

The Chinese record dates back to the third century B.C., when healers began analyzing the body, interpreting its functions, and describing its reactions to various treatments, including herbal remedies, massage, and acupuncture. For more than 2,200 years, generations of scholars added to and refined the knowledge. The result is a canon of literature dealing with every sort of health problem, including the common cold, venereal disease, paralysis, and epilepsy. This knowledge is contained in books and manuscripts bearing such enigmatic titles as The Pulse Classic (third century), Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold (seventh century), and Essential Secrets From Outside the Metropolis (eighth century).

Traditional medicine remained the primary form of health care in China until the early 20th century, when the last Qing emperor was overthrown by Sun Yat-sen, a Western-trained doctor who promoted science-based medicine. Today Chinese physicians are trained and licensed according to state-of-the-art medical practices. Yet traditional medicine remains a vibrant part of the state health care system. Most Chinese hospitals have a ward devoted to ancient cures. Citing traditional medicine’s potential to lower costs and yield innovative treatments, not to mention raise China’s prestige, President Xi Jinping has made it a key part of the country’s health policy. He has called the 21st century a new golden age for traditional medicine.