we’re all stoned or pacified while the boogeymen organise

We’re indebted to Hyperallergic’s Edward M Gómez’ graceful and accomplished interview with Yoko Ono’s urgent reprisal and nimbler, svelter remix of a selection of her earlier recordings with Warzone. Re-mastering her repertoire with the knowing passion that indeed our future depends on it, Ono (previously) with the help of keyboard artist Doveman and a chorus of animals revisits her classic anthems that have retained their resonance and taken on a new currency. Check out their encounter and dialogue at Hyperallergic at the link up top.

fancy dress party

In case you are in need of a bit more inspiration to come up with a Halloween custom as the holiday creeps closer and close, why not consult your friendly neighbourhood AI.

Outdoing last year’s training session, Janelle Shane taught her neural network (previously) on a dataset of over seven thousand outfit ideas and had her efforts profiled in the New York Times, with illustrations of the learning process, trial and error illustrated by Jessia Ma—even the ones that seemed to defy sense and representation.

Check them all out at the links above and perhaps find a character that speaks to you for trick-or-treating or your office party—and yes, there’s even a whole sub-set of ill-advised sexy costumes.

What are your favourites?

protestzug

A peaceful march was organised as a counter and what turned out to to be a larger and longer-lived assembly began at the main train station and would face off a campaign rally staged by Alternative für Deutschland ahead of Hessen casting their votes on Sunday, most European elections falling on that day of the week since with most businesses closed, participation can be maximised.
Constituencies in the US probably still merit a holiday to help fight aggressive disenfranchisement and other barriers to the ballot. Police presence was reassuring, including this one figuring sporting a jacket reading POLIZEI SOCIAL MEDIA. I couldn’t quite comprehend the way that that’s supposed to be read.

first duty assignment

Via Slashdot, we learn that CBS is in the pre-production phase of a new animated series of the Star Trek franchise from contributing writer and voice actor of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty show (also consummate fan, membership being a bit like being able to speak Esperanto) Mike McMahan.
The half-hour episodes will take on life and culture in the Federation and working in Star Fleet with a comedic angle and is named Star Trek: Lower Decks, in reference to one of the more compelling episodes from The Next Generation (previously), the storyline following the lives of four junior officers vying for a promotion to advance their careers. This portrayal that offers a peak behind the scenes and focus that brings background members of the crew into the foreground (the term bottle episode comes from the original series, referring to shows with a non-recurring cast and mostly confined to existing interiors as “ship-in-a-bottle” shoots) has proved particularly appealing to audiences. Learn more at the links up top.

semantic shifting

Via Marginal Revolution, we are directed to Merriam-Webster dictionary Time Traveller service that tracks the first occurrences of English words at least in print. Plugging in my birth year—1976—the results are a little bit jarring, think such concepts are either more veteran or truly contemporary neologisms, we find that among manner other borrowings and coinages the language has received: boat people, body piercing, cosmic background radiation, dream catcher, exit poll, killer bee, meme, restless leg syndrome, waitperson and wannabe. A century ago in 1918, we had minted: cabin fever, D-Day, deep-dish, Europocentric, extrovert, goop, humanoid, plaintext, processed cheese and wonky—just to date a few.

bobby (boris) pickett and the crypt-kickers

We enjoyed this appreciation of the quintessential Halloween anthem, the 1962 novelty song “Monster Mash,” from Tedium—delving into the piece’s musical inspirations and long legacy of homages.
Aspiring actor and musician Pickett was performing a cover of the Diamonds’ “Little Darin’” one evening but substituted the middle monologue with a horror movie exposition of a bridge (in the voice of Boris Karloff)  and the audience cheered, and drawing from the earlier novelty hit, The Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop,” and the dance sensation the Mashed Potato, captured by Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time” and “Gimme Gravy,” Pickett went on to collaborate and compose the graveyard smash. Among the original Crypt-Kickers was pianist Leon Russell. Listen to the song, covers and everything adjacent at the link above.

perfect play or macky, micky, mucky, mocky

As an experiment to explore how norms and ethics might be introduced to artificial intelligence in a broad and general fashion, researchers, as Slashdot reports, have trained implicitly one such programme to play Pac-Man and win without gobbling up the ghosts.
The training was a balance between the programme’s drive for optimisation tempered with lessons from human players that avoided the ghosts, even at their most vulnerable, and eventually netted more ethically informed play. It’s not quite the level of trust that I would want in a moment of pursuit but I suppose it does illustrate the potential to build in moral false-safe measures.

scullery

A ride-hailing service that’s disrupted the business of food delivery and ordering-in—once nearly exclusively the domain of pizza, we learn via Duck Soup, is creating an empire of virtual franchises that only exist as menu-options when ordering from the service.
Of course it’s nothing new or novel to set up a booth or a concession within a larger venue, but it is strange to think of a branded concept “restaurant” existing only in the corner (without seats or a storefront) of a host kitchen of a larger food preparation operation, as hundreds of affiliates are revealed to be. What do you think? It’s an interesting way to pool resources and reputation but there’s also an inscrutable and alienated quality to it, like a letterbox business that’s not open to public inspection—sort of like the couriers themselves.