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The Independent Variable

Posts on page 36

šŸ¤– Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood

Over the next six months, Van der Velden toiled with her 15-person team to nail down the look of her leading lady, creating 2,000 iterations of an actress unbound by the limits of physical ability, age or talent.
In recent weeks, she has signed about 60 nondisclosure agreements for hybrid movies (with real actors), full AI films and Tilly-specific projects, most of them in the $10 million to $50 million range.

This is so embarrassing. It took a 15-person team to ā€œnail down the lookā€??? There are thousands (if not millions) of individual artists who can draw a person with any detail and look you desire. And why would someone pay a human actor $5 million when you can pay an AI actor $50 million. What on earth are we doing here???

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🪿 Will Geese Redeem Noisy, Lawless Rock and Roll?

In the months since Geese released its third studio album, ā€œGetting Killed,ā€ the band has been rhapsodically heralded as the redeemer of a certain kind of noisy, lawless rock and roll.

Spoiler alert: Getting Killed is making my top ten albums of the year. Easily. I wasn’t a huge fan of their last album, but singer Cameron Winter released his debut solo album, Heavy Metal, which made my top ten last year, and they’ve done a great job of combining the sounds and styles to make something that’s absolutely wonderful.

šŸŽµ Pay per stream is a messy metric

So I’ll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money?

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The whole point of the conversation is to move people off of Spotify and to other places. If more people move to other streamers, those streamers will start paying the artists more… So if an artist had a choice of where they’d prefer people listen to their music, they’d choose the one that pays more per stream every day. This is even before getting into the real ethical issues with Spotify when it comes to how they do business and the actions of their leadership. Plus, if you have only now heard of Qobuz, then it’s clear this isn’t actually a topic you’ve spent much time on or cared about before… (For the record, I use Apple Music because we pay for Apple One as a family.)

šŸ§‘ā€šŸ’» Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

When that happens, companies (especially the VC-backed kind) now need to contrive new and increasingly stick-like reasons for customers to pay again. From made-for-marketing ā€˜features’ that suck to use IRL, to breaking compatibility with older versions, to spamming you with marketing notifications and embedded ads. Their relationship with customers goes from symbiotic to parasitic.

Pirijan, the creator of Kinopio, is always incredibly thoughtful with his approach to building and his writing—this is no exception. Longtime readers will know my distaste for where the economy is going with ā€œventure predation,ā€ and the growth-at-all-costs approach in the tech and financial spaces. As Pirijan notes, it all leads to parasitic relationships. Rather than build the best product that users want to use and pay for, they do their best to look flashy, attract new users, and trap them in their ecosystem.

šŸŽ‰ 5 literary magazines for sci-fi and fantasy readers

Anyone can start a literary journal, but it takes dedication and care for one to prosper and grow into something with potential. Foofaraw Press is an independent zine of surreal storytelling and worldly observations. Though there is an argument to be made that all of the magazines on this list are ā€œindependent,ā€ Foofaraw Press stands out for their accessibility to emerging authors.

My litmag, Foofaraw, was featured alongside Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and two others in this list, which is truly an honor.