Month: November 2023

Blinded by the shite

So a bunch of NFT owners went to some event in Hong Kong and, well, went a bit blind…

Attendees of a Yuga Labs’ ApeFest event on Nov. 4 in Hong Kong have reported burns, damaged vision and “extreme pain” in their eyes, which they attribute to the use of improper lighting.
“Woke up in the middle of the night after ApeFest with so much pain in my eyes that I had to go to the hospital,” wrote one attendee, CryptoJune, in a Nov. 5 X (Twitter) post. […]
A Yuga Labs spokesperson told Cointelegraph that they were aware of the situation and were taking it seriously; “we are actively reaching out to and are in touch with those affected. We’re also pursuing multiple lines of inquiry to learn the root cause.”
“Based on our estimates, the 15 people we’ve been in direct communication with so far represent less than one percent of the approximately 2,250 event attendees and staff at our Saturday night event,” they added.
Of the hundreds of ApeFest attendees, at least 15 reports of vision damage have appeared on social media, suggesting the concerns were limited to guests who were in close proximity to the stage lighting.

This is apparently not the first time something like this has happened in Hong Kong; the article notes some other event there in 2017 used the wrong of UV lighting—the sort that they use to disinfect surfaces rather than the sort that reveals just how much dust and dandruff there actually is on your supposedly clean black t-shirt at a club—and it appears this is the case here too. Here’s what it looked like:

So who to blame? Not everyone’s happy with Yuga Labs’ somewhat minimal response on Twitter, and at least one golden meme has already resulted:

I probably shouldn’t find that as funny as I do, but I’m going to go blind myself from diabetes one day, so. This, on the other hand, was an even funnier response in a way:

Yuga’s status as “good guys” is kind of questionable, by the look of things, and I dispute that they care as much about the people at their event as the sadly unidentified author of this post seems to think except insofar as they can bilk said people out of their money for their fucking hideous NFTs. They might care a bit more, though, if a class action lawsuit results from this idiocy…

C’est des conneries, Marine

Marine Le Pen’s support of Israel seen as move away from party’s antisemitic past

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s support of Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks is being seen as part of a long-running drive to move her National Rally party away from its toxic, antisemitic past before a run for the presidency in 2027.
National Rally, which is now the biggest opposition party in the French parliament and is polling ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s centrists for next year’s European elections, has firmly supported Israel’s right to defend itself since the Hamas attacks on 7 October and the ensuing bombardment of Gaza. […]
Le Pen’s support of Israel has been seen by some commentators as a certain political opportunism. She has long sought to “normalise” her party and move it away from its jack-booted, antisemitic past, which was seen as a brake on the party’s new political ambitions. In 2015, Le Pen expelled her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party founder, after he reiterated comments belittling the Holocaust, for which he has several convictions. She later changed the party name from the National Front to National Rally.
In a highly symbolic move, several of Le Pen’s parliamentarians attended a march in Paris in October led by Jewish groups in support of Israel. This was a radical change from previous years. In 2018, Le Pen attempted to take part in a march commemorating Mireille Knoll, a Jewish pensioner killed in an antisemitic murder, but had to move aside amid comments by some of “Fascists out”.

Yeah, they saw through these cunts in 2018 and they should be seeing through them now too. There seems to be a lot of this going about at the moment with far-right figures coming out on Israel’s side in the current debacle, because it’s handy for them that Muslims are the “official” bad guys in all the discourse; they still hate Jews too, of course, but taking Israel’s side makes them look more respectable, more part of the common conversation and less of the extreme fringe. Which is all that Marine’s trying to achieve here, too, I’m sure… under whatever name they trade, I’ve no doubt she and her party are every bit as antisemitic as they were when her dad was running it; they’re just more careful than him about saying that shit out loud…

Art for fuck’s sake

This is a piece of classic art:

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, or rather a variant upon the latter painted some years after the original. This, on the other hand…

This is a piece of shit, or rather a poster advertising a piece of shit, that being Walerian Borowczyk’s La bete from 1975… I’ve never understood how a basically respectable arthouse filmmaker got so trapped in the porn ghetto in the way Borowczyk did, so much so that he wound up making an Emanuelle sequel; even Jean Rollin (whose films are arguably arthouse but was not exactly “basically respectable”) never went quite that low and got out of the porn rut eventually. I don’t know who did this Italian poster for it, but when I found this via Tumblr I knew that whoever it was had evidently seen the Fuseli painting and thought it was worth ripping off.

In doing which, they arguably managed to kind of misrepresent the film a bit, cos the horse isn’t the titular beast—that’s actually some sort of rat/bear thing with a similarly mighty cock—although you do get quite a scene of two horses going at it in a not even remotely softcore manner. But looking at that poster, you might perhaps expect something else…

…and, looking at this other Italian poster for the film, you might expect that something else even more. Whoever was doing the promotional art for the Italian release was really trying to hype up that horse for some reason I’m not sure I want to contemplate…

On choosing your words carefully

OOF. This comes from someone I follow on Facebook; they do a podcast that looks critically at conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, “high strangeness”, etc., so that last of questions they bring up is the sort of thing they would cover (though I don’t know if they’ve actually covered those specific things). But when I read it earlier, I was kind of struck by one of the inclusions on the list of “objectively, provably false statements”… you know, the one with the word starting with H.

That’s a really unfortunate bit of phrasing, though I’ve no doubt that’s all it is; I was listening to their podcast episode about the Protocols while writing this and have no reason to believe they’re a bad person who denies the Holocaust… I’m sure what they meant was something like “Is the Holocaust a hoax?”, cos there’s obviously plentiful evidence that it wasn’t. But putting the question as they actually did—i.e. asking “Did the Holocaust happen?”, whose answer is “yes, OBVIOUSLY”, among a bunch of other questions whose collective answer is “no, OBVIOUSLY”*—was kind of yikes. And I can’t even comment on it cos they’re one of those people you have to be friends with to comment on their posts, so… sigh. Like I said, almost certainly just a very poor choice of words, but my eyebrows are raised even so… I’ll be watching that one a bit more carefully now.

* I mean, I’m assuming that’s the answer to the “are Black people secret Cherokee?” question, which is one I’ve never heard before. Given that some Native tribes did actually own black slaves, that could be… embarrassing. Or something.

Habemus Fabs

So the much-anticipated “new” Beatles song is out. I actually just discovered a few days ago that it was actually originally going to be the single from Anthology 3 way back in 1996, but they couldn’t get satisfactory results from it back then (particularly in George Harrison’s opinion, he apparently called it “fucking rubbish”); technology has progressed sufficiently that now they can. And it’s out at last after quite a few months of hyping it up as the “last” Beatles song and all the talk of using AI to separate John’s voice out from the demo and…

…and it’s OK, I suppose.

I don’t know, for some reason I expected something more upbeat than it is, and I think I expected it to sound more “Beatles”. It’s nice but it sounds less like a Beatles song and more like what it is, i.e. a late 70s John Lennon solo demo recorded when, let’s face it, he was far from his peak that his two surviving former bandmates and Giles Martin have buffed up a bit. “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” started out the same way and both ended up sounding like the Beatles in a way this didn’t somehow, even though all of them (yes, even George, who appears via parts recorded during their initial attempts to finish it) are present and correct. It’s not “fucking rubbish” but it’s not particularly special in and of itself. Giles Martin’s string arrangement is nice, but I suspect it might actually have been better as a John Lennon solo song or given a more minimal treatment.

Look, it’s good. It’s fine on its own terms, and I think the hype around it will ultimately hurt it. I think It’s an album track, not a single. And ultimately a footnote. I think that’s how I feel about it.