Jacob All Trades #311
Public social media, pharmaceutical karma, cancel culture, Wordle, the Beatles, dog poo, a new cartoon show I worked on, and more...
Hello there! I’m writing this from what feels like a very lucky scenario: I volunteered to take my wife’s car to the tire shop and brought my laptop in case I had to wait a while. I was imagining working, mask on, in the waiting room on some forty-year-old couch while breathing in grease fumes… but by coincidence, this tire shop is across the street from one of my favorite coffee shops I hadn’t been to since the pandemic.
So, now, I’m watching from across the street with a croissant and a view of the San Gabriels. What else is going on? I’m really enjoying Andor, I struggled through Matrix Resurrections and thought they did a good job but also felt like “why?,” I’ve started playing Hearthstone again, and I can’t figure out what kind of blight is killing our Calandrinia Grandiflora, and yesterday Wilder and I baked blueberry muffins. Mostly, I’m relieved about the midterm election results while simultaneously being absolutely infuriated about how much influence money has in our politics.
Aaaaanyway, here’s a newsletter for ya,
Jacob
A QUICK NOTE! A special ‘discussion thread’ edition of this newsletter will go out early next week as I start crowdsourcing my 2022 Gift Guide. If you’ve got any fun ideas, or need some, keep an eye out!
HERE’S AN IDEA: PUBLIC SOCIAL MEDIA
In the early days of the web, things were driven by users and communities. As for-profit social media seems to be collapsing, it would be a great time to re-examine the early web. USENET is still around, apparently, but when it was invented in 1979 by two grad students at UNC it was the first online discussion board. The most important feature (in my amateur opinion) of USENET is that it was decentralized and community-owned.
Some have argued (including ppl I tend to agree with like Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich) that social platforms should be regulated like utilities. I think this is a very compelling idea, but admit I don’t know enough about the ramifications. Based on some reading, it seems the main argument is made by billionaires and claims that regulation is the enemy of innovation… which…. is kind of their argument for everything.
But whether or not social media platforms become regulated, I believe there should also be a widely available public alternative. Like PBS or NPR… but for Twitter.
What do you think?
CONSUMPTION JUNCTION
Three+ things I’ve seen, heard, or otherwise experienced recently that have been on my mind.
If you haven’t been following the implosion of Twitter, you may have missed how an internet troll spent $8 spent to cause Pharmeceutical Robber Barons Eli Lilly to lose $15 Billion dollars in market share. It’s a spectacular story - summed up efficiently by Gizmodo here.
Unpublished photos/foogtage of the Beatles is hard to come by and often a delight. I really enjoyed seeing photos, video, and reading an account of how the ol’ Beat-heads (trust me, everyone cool calls them that) crashed an LA garden party in 1964 . Via Los Angeles Magazine.
I am a total sucker for process videos and watching Mike Myers talk about how he comes up with and refines characters is very fun to watch.
Ijeoma Oluo has quickly become one of my favorite writers/thinkers. Her thoughtful, and well researched takes on politics and pop culture often articulate gut feelings I’ve not been able to articulate. Her books So You Want To Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America are two of the best things I’ve read in the last few years and This piece on Dave Chappelle and cancel culture expresses how groundbreaking and seemingly self-aware artists can slowly turn into egomaniacs. Heads up, there’s a paywall to read the whole thing but consider supporting her… she’s great! Article here.
DO SOMETHING
This Thanksgiving, please consider supporting Union Station Homeless Service’s Dinner in the Park. From cooking food in your own home, helping serve food and coordinating, or just supporting financially, there are a lot of ways to get involved. Learn more here or via the image below:
And, thanks to Erin Whitehead for sharing this on her Instagram, where I found out about it.
BEAUTIFUL DATA
If you play Wordle or are any kind of word nerd, you’re going to love WordleBOT. WordleBOT is a beautifully designed interactive from the New York Times that analyzes your most recent Wordle (if you’re logged in) or your upload of any completed Wordle screenshot and breaks down your strategy. It also shares fascinating data on how word choices are narrowed down and how different percentages of players made their guesses. Spoilers have been removed below, but usually are shown.
WEEKLY WIKIPEDIA WORMHOLE
Did you know the Mall of America is owned by an Iranian-Jewish family whose patriarch hosted Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in his apartment during the Tehran Conference? It’s true! Start your Wikipedia Wormhole by reading about the Ghermezian Family
A QUICK AND(NOT)DIRTY CLIMATE SWAP
If you have a dog (and, I don’t), you probably use tiny bags to clean up their poop. That’s good. Don’t stop doing that. But, even if you use so-called ‘biodegradable’ bags your bags might become plastic pollution. Apparently, biodegradable refers to anything that degrades over time… so, basically anything. Styrofoam cups are technically biodegradable… they just take more than 500 years to biodegrade.
What you really want is compostable – which means something biodegrades with human intervention and does so rapidly. There are a variety of doggy bags that biodegrade. Treehugger has a round-up of a few, but recommends “The Original Poop Bags.” A simple swap!
*As a HUGE caveat: Corporations are spending billions of dollars to make us feel like our individual choices are responsible for the climate crisis. Yes, we can help, but the biggest thing any of us can do is work to hold corporations and governments responsible. Also, I’m collecting all of these as a highlighted story on my Instagram so they’re all in one place.
I COULD WATCH THIS ALL DAY
Theo Jansen is a dutch artist I first learned about in art school in the early 2000s. He builds organic ‘animals’ that live on the beach and get their energy from the wind… ‘so they don’t have to eat.’ They’re at once mechanical and organic, and the longer you watch them, the more they seem like they might actually be alive.
I MADE THIS FOR YOU
In late 2020 / early 2021 I directed a pilot presentation for a show called Stay Tooned. It’s a hosted docuseries about the reciprocal relationship between cartoons and culture. When the production company first met with me, they envisioned a show shot on a white cyc with cutaways to an animated sidekick and needed to solve the problem of how to make zoom interviews not look shitty.
My pitch was that the show should exist in a nostalgic living room, where it always felt like Saturday morning, that the animation should be fully integrated into the live-action, Roger Rabbit style, and that when the host talked to people remotely, he should do so through a retro TV. Here’s the sizzle reel I directed:
I brought together a killer team to create the look of the show including one of my favorite collaborators, cinematographer Eric Bader. Long story short: the Canadian production company decided to make the show non-union, the (American) DGA ended up adding language to future deal memos to erase the loophole they used, and I ended up not being able to direct any of the show… which generally has the look and feel I developed. Here’s the trailer:
It looks great and is totally the kind of show I would want to watch! And hey, I’m still a producer on this version, which begins streaming next month. Wish I could have directed it, but go watch it anyway so they can get picked up for a Season 2, and maybe I’ll jump on for that.
Alrighty, that’s it for this week. Feel free to leave a comment or share the newsletter using the links below.
Party on,
Jacob
I always learn something from you.