YouTube updates include a pair of renamed features within advanced search. The “Sort By” menu will be called “Prioritize,” said Engadget. Likewise, the “View Count” option has been renamed to “Popularity.”
YouTube’s algorithms account for other metrics, such as watch time, to gauge how much other users are engaging with a particular video. A pair of former filter options has also been removed; there will no longer be choices to search for “Upload Date – Last Hour” and “Sort by Rating.”
The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Favreau, will be the next Star Wars film. It will open in theatres in the United States on May 22, 2026. The cast of that film includes Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White, and Jonny Coyne, although there is now news that Pedro Pascal is backing out of his role in the film.
After that comes Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter on May 28, 2027.
Star Wars Rewrites Its Biggest Rule, As the Force Ditches Midi-Chlorians, By Robert Wood
In a reversal of franchise lore, Star Wars has introduced a new way to harness the Force. This new method has nothing to do with Midi-Chlorians or natural aptitude. The prequel trilogy demonstrated that midi-chlorians exist in a state of symbiosis. They carry the life force that comes from all living things. They are the source of this ability.
Some people have a more natural connection to the Force. However, official lore says that anyone can get closer to the Force by studying it. They can communicate with it. This effort tries to open a door that is either already open or completely closed by biology. The only way to change this is via experimental midi-chlorian transplants, which have a spotty success rate.
The Luovian Gauntlet may be based on the technology of the Ascendant Cult. The Ascendants adhered to the Dark Side. They wanted to make the Force available to everyone, according to new Star Wars lore.
For The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is a feature-length film that continues from where The Mandalorian Season 3 left off. Pedro Pascal had the important role of Jango Fett. I wonder how his presence will be explained, now that he is absent, if the next major Star Wars movie is going to be The Mandalorian and Grogu.
This post might prove embarrassing, but I wanted to write it.
The unregulated black market in crypto mining is sometimes, as futurism.com puts it, “stranger than fiction.”
There was a masterclass in ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’ presented by Noor Al-Sibai on “Art Collectors.”
According to Al-Sibai, as 404 Media reported, tens of thousands of NFTs began disappearing from a collection referred to as CloneX RTFKT, a partnership involving Nike’s digital sneakers.
The crypto site Blockworks said that RTFKT NFTs sold for a price tag of $60,000 to sometimes in the millions.
At the beginning of this year, Samuel Cardillo, former chief technology officer of RTFKT and still at Nike after RTFKT, faced being “sunsetted.”
Last month, more than 19,000 NFTs from that collection went MIA after Cloudflare, a web services provider, took them down. Fortunately, Mr. Cardillo was on it.
“The reason we’re moving to the free plan is that, RTFKT is sunset, there are no plans to do any drops or anything like that,” 404 Media quoted Cardillo, “so having a paid plan with Cloudflare makes absolutely no sense anymore.”
I imagine it’s hard to fully identify whether the technical trouble impacted the potential value of any resales. There was some unhappiness among investors in the RTFKT NTFs, and Nike decided not to maintain the collection.
Although I am not very familiar with NFTs, from my research, I have found that many onlookers understand that the relative popularity of NFTs has made many collectors jaded when they realize that their primary value as art objects is the willingness of buyers to pay more for them than their original value.
It does not reflect on crypto, which is set to have a significant impact in the future.
A predominant RTKFT buyer is Jagdeep Cheema, a national of Australia.
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
A common mistake when designing something foolproof is underestimating the ingenuity of those who might misuse or circumvent it.
Even to the extent common psychological precepts are discouraging the general warp of innovation outpacing malaise, it must be admitted that in the literal onset of malaise becoming such a promising invention for tomorrow that we don’t even seem to be all that much worried, as a mortal species, about there being enough of a shortage of innovation that we’d better get to making more of it, there is still from time to time a point loudly raised all about us, that if we’d just get the jump on innovation, we’d have some.
April in Canada was a month of politics, so maybe that is why the argumentative flavour to that sentiment.
Now that springtime in 2025 is here, we are ready to have a new season of fresh beginnings, and it does seem like there could be quite a shadow darkening the doorstep of mankind, if there is any way that a shadow like that could be escapable.
I don’t know of anything that says that immediately there will be any kind of emergency that we can’t get past.
It is just that it seems like there is a world stage that is ready for a lot more possibilities to grow with than ordinarily we have, no matter how much and how many kinds of changes we have in front of us.
It is just that it seems like there is a world stage that is ready for a lot more possibilities to grow with than we have, no matter how much and how many kinds of changes we have in front of us. I don’t know if anybody has an obvious handle on where it is these weeks and months are headed.
The NYC premiere of Baby Invasion is a rare opportunity for cinephiles and art film enthusiasts in New York City on Friday, March 21. Pitchfork’s Madison Bloom had the story on February 26.
Among the highlights of Harmony Korine’s career are Gummo and Spring Breakers, two provocative films. Korine had the incredible opportunity to participate in Dogme 95 at a very young age, attesting to his genius. Gummo was Korine’s contribution to the clique of those unconventional filmmakers. It was kind of a look at a “real” America, impoverished and uneducated (here, Korine spared no pains to push boundaries), and while certainly underground gave Korine the reputation of a cult filmmaker like nothing else could have. That career began three decades ago and became, in the kind of cultural commentary circles that someone like Harmony Korine might from time to time be a focus of, a wide bearing of all manner of work, perhaps at a commercial high with Spring Breakers, the 2014 look at what a real college spring break is like, something that might have been much more purely commercial fare in studio hands but with Korine helming the show it remained as transgressive as much of what defined his filmography almost had proved to be.
Baby Invasion is the second feature film by Korine, which incorporates components of artificial intelligence; the first was 2023’s Aggro Dr1ft starring Travis Scott. Aggro Dr1ft is an avant-garde film that is the story of a Florida-state killer who is tasked with entering a demon’s palace and taking down its contingent of guards. What is positively unique about this film is that it was shot with NASA-grade infrared cameras that give everything in the movie cinematography of heat signatures, which is a pixilated blaze of colour that makes the action more of an assault on the viewer’s senses than any regular picture of a narrative. Cinematic generative AI is combined with this approach to give a distinct flair to its CGI as opposed to more standard VFX, even in the 2020s.
The dialogue of the film is mostly lost in the film’s soundtrack music, which is noisy electronics that presents more of an extreme cacophony than anything conventional. There’s no mistaking that Korine is making mistakes, like telling or not showing the action. That said, the visuals are so foreign to anything ever done in a feature film that it’s mostly a moot point.
In 2025, Baby Invasion, which was presented last year at the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, is now set for an NYC premiere with Korine in person, employing DJ techniques to live-mix the new one. Baby Invasion is about a one-man attack on a California palisade of foot soldiers, who are all curiously wearing masks that give them the faces of babies as the infiltrator makes it through.
AI is again utilized to highlight the narrative of the movie, and this time the music for the movie has been composed by Burial, the mysterious, influential musician known for atmospheric, melancholic soundscapes, not necessarily the first thing you might think of when you think of the provocative style of a Harmony Korine film. The action for Baby Invasion is shot as though this film were the events of a first-person shooter game, as when a video game character takes the player into a game setting where much of the challenge is surveying the locations just as the game character does. That commonplace style of video games is exactly what Korine has drawn on for his feature Baby Invasion.
The release date for Baby Invasion on Apple TV and Prime Video streaming is March 21. Available to stream on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and EDGLRD.COM on March 21.
Our society of human beings has become heavily impacted by Generative AI.
The way we structure our society makes sense fundamentally to us. Within the last few years, Generative AI has emerged as a powerful technological advance that is destined to completely transform modern society, virtually unguided by humans.
That is the prediction of AGI. It could be soon. It could be within twenty years, within five years, or two. I hope that people can keep their potential under control.
In the last couple of years, I have begun to identify as an artist (and perhaps as a filmmaker as well). The subculture of people who use AI for art isn’t tiny (it’s a significant contingent of forward-thinking people).
While I did not know this when I named it, finding environs has come to represent a path to art for me (where none previously existed). It is a substantive reason to continue to believe in God.
In the end, we will need God if we are to maintain our present-day society intact without losing what we currently have due to those in power who are pursuing AI advancements.
It is as exciting as a belief in the paranormal.
It is interesting to me what the Catholic church will say about changes in AI. The Pope has spoken favourably about artificial intelligence, as far as I am aware.
When I was in college, my art history professor, when I was studying art history 101, told me that I wouldn’t make it. I don’t think the issue was simply that she didn’t like me. In regard to what I was doing and what my outcome would be, she was trying to be fair with me.
I knew very little about a lot of things. A field like art requires youth, and I wasn’t using my time well.
Nevertheless, there are great changes in the world now, and maybe doing art and the like as a hobby would be of great value to my satisfaction. I am sure I will find out.
Robin B. James contributed the linked review in this post for the Igloo magazine, a publication I presently enjoy for free online.
Unfair, because the web pages I enjoy in igloo enrich the moment without fail, and that’s sincerely a blessing. For this review, Robin has used narration as though experiencing meditation while listening to Mount Hibiki, an underground project that Robin is enjoying mentally visualizing being somewhere in the mountains. The review was unusual to me in that Robin explains that this contributes to both inner strength and stability. I became much more focused on becoming centred, having this additional starting point for beginning to stream the music selection.
The artist is Mount Shrine.
When I find a web page that feels significant to me, I usually try to take a kind measure by sharing it with social media, or, as with this review, writing a blog post about it. I get quite a kick out of it. It is pleasant for me to gain trustworthy feedback. Please do consider liking my post to indicate how great it turned out to spend the time being appreciative of the Mount Hibiki project that you have given to it.
Meditation in the higher mountains
The spiritual currents wafting into the air around these mountains is very auspicious for spiritual upliftment, imagine echoes of warm, rainy and masterfully crafted drones. The Mount Hibiki Tapes compiles all currently known underground albums, singles and EPs produced with the Mount Hibiki project
With the Microsoft firm Windows 11 service packs installation backlash, it wasn’t the change to some Windows 11 tablet I had never seen the likes of, I feared a bit.
Eisenberg has been linked to the controversial figure numerous times due to his Oscar-nominated performance as Zuckerberg.
The filmmaker voiced his opinion of the tech tycoon following Meta’s announcement that it would be substituting X-style “community notes” for independent fact-checkers on Instagram and Facebook:
“These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed, and what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hate. That’s what I think… not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.”
How to Collaborate on Pinterest: Tips for Success
Twenty years after college, I don’t need a brand. Having said that, Pinterest is a great place to find visual content and is easy to use. There is a wild AI art community, maybe a little deviant (a little damaged), but it is not evil.
Risking my security, if anyone thinks being a collaborator over there is ever something you would consider because you have a brand and you care about the value of the dollar, the link below is how you can collaborate that way over there.
My account is open to one or more collaborators, and one of my boards is called The black cat. My People board and my Digital Portraits board are two of my favourite boards.
It would be great to have someone as a Pinterest collaborator. As far as using their social is concerned, I am not too hands-on, but it might be a good idea to use it.
There’s a chance it’s a platform that has considerable appeal for women, but it’s hard to justify a soft skills lifestyle without some interest in that.
Google had a great tool to navigate to webpages for fifteen or twenty years, but this year it’s not the same. You can understand this AI feature if you understand how Google wants you to have a ready-to-use answer to what you need. It just came in pretty subtly and pretty comprehensively.
There are some consequences that people making good with the tried-and-true Google links probably don’t like that there was such a sweeping change, but it isn’t such an awful change that the internal Google workforce isn’t going to boycott their office hours or anything like that.
One thing is that, in addition to that, while the top headlines in AI technology were often about how Big Tech was going come out of this sea change, that only got older people thinking, well, of course, there’s OpenAI, and Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft. Having something as pervasive as Google Search on the desktop was not something I expected to die. Veo 2, however, is something else.
It was supposed to be the best AI video generator available, all of a sudden, better than the top five that usually are dominant in the AI art communities. There is only one problem: it came with a $200 price tag ($200/month!), which seems excessive for something that could be gained for much less.
Now, today, it’s being said that Google decided to let that $200 monthly charge go, and at once, the AI video generator with the best reputation is free. Maybe I can get a Veo account like that and see what other Veo users might be able to offer if it’s an AI service that includes social elements like that.
This is interesting stuff if you understand a little about it. It is too hard to contribute pieces of data to Google to make that a useful requirement.
I’m never alone. You want that disposition to stay in place once the news has been out of sight.
I suppose you could call it gaiety. You want that disposition to stay high, based on the consistency of good feelings about you.
As soon as you realize that whatever upgrade you’re enjoying isn’t what you’re looking for, you need to get away from everything that can persuade you otherwise. If this makes sense to you, I suppose that’s what I am, I enjoy creating content.
When all is well, it’s not hard to let those persuasions that there are extremely difficult obstacles ahead yet sit in the air and let yourself forget about that.
Realize that whatever upgrade you’re enjoying isn’t what you’re looking for, you need to get away from everything that can persuade you otherwise. If this makes sense to you, I suppose that’s what I am, I enjoy creating content.
When all is well, it’s not hard to let those persuasions that there are extremely difficult obstacles ahead yet sit in the air and let yourself forget about that.
I like a flow when something like that seems within reach. Who doesn’t? It’s a little hard to explain how to combat those troubles that could turn up again sometime soon, but it means a little self-deception and a willingness to surrender to the possibility that you just want to enjoy the feeling of legitimacy you’re enjoying in the here and now and you probably have to present those defences you have because, as the sailors say, a rising tide lifts all boats.
You know, if you’re young, you’ve got a lot to prove, and if you’re nearing the last months you’ll have with the strength you have in you today, you know those situations are as disparate as the difference between what you might surrender as a person in the start of their adulthood and what you little possibility of holding onto when you finally reach those years that you’re not walking in the image of God, which I hope you did if it ever crossed your mind. I deem I’m okay today, and as long as I remember that come the day I need to be contrite in the face of mortality, I’ll have my work cut out for me, I would really be happy to think that it doesn’t seem that it’s like that today.
I really do wish you were as you fathomed.
‘Social Network’ star Jesse Eisenberg distances himself from ‘problematic’ Mark Zuckerberg
The thing I’m most scared to do is to try to buy my way out of my living address. I live in what might have been called a rent-controlled apartment in the nineteen-seventies. It’s pretty cheap, but I have doubts that I could afford a bigger apartment, let alone somewhere outside of my hometown (I’m in my forties and my parents are in their seventies–I live independently of them.) My dad keeps me on the books of his golden years retirement business, Maple Lawn Properties. It’s a cemetery that he got for goodwill as the municipality only would have been required to care for its upkeep three times a year and my dad is willing to keep up the care it deserves every week of the year.
I would want to live in a one-bedroom, partly because I have pet cats. Without finding someone to cohabit, I would have trouble affording a new place on my salary.
I don’t think I could take on the responsibility of holding down a job outside of my father’s business (does that make me a “nepo baby”?”). I guess I have a few extra freedoms in life owing to the arrangement. For those, I’m grateful to my parents for their support. My mother sometimes feels guilty, I think, that she didn’t try to nurture the passion in me the kind I would like to have for writing. There’s a glut of aspiring writers in the world and it isn’t the kind of career path that you can count on to grow old and put grandchildren through college.
For the New York Post, Dorian Geiger and Nicole Rosenthal report that two Queens bars booked bands with Nazis as house entertainment before their management was informed.
On Jan. 26 and 27, Volahn and Zoloa, two Nazi-sympathetic bands, were scheduled to perform punk shows on consecutive nights. The two shows would have included Eduardo Ramirez, whom I hadn’t heard of before, but who has appeared in public wearing a Graveland T-shirt, a band considered neo-nazi by Hellseatic.
Todd Patrick, owner of one of the bars where Zoloa was booked, told the New York Post: “When the Reddit post explaining Eduardo Ramirez’s controversy was forwarded to us, it was news. The investigation quickly confirmed that this guy has a history of connections to neo-Nazi groups.”
The New York Post story, which MSN carried, didn’t specify what genre the bands were in. This makes me wonder if they are punk rock bands or black metal bands.
He leads a collective of black metal bands with Aztec and Mayan themes. Unfortunately, that’s not good news. A spate of artistic aesthetics on Facebook has been dismissed as slop, but I know it’s very far out, and from what I know about it, I hope I’m right, that kind of aesthetic is in the same vein as 1980s shoegaze album covers or something more trendy, such as prints of Warhol, fashionable in the 1960s.
People who are straight ahead don’t always like those vibes.
Messed up!
Wednesday 2026-01-14
This morning, Google was again saying Pavement is soon visiting the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It sounds like it is becoming an occasion for a celebratory concert, given the enthusiasm which the Stephen Malkmus-penned biography entitled “Pavements” was enjoyed after its recent theatrical release and availability on the Mubi video service.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 