iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 2h

Bittersweet to see that “Eccentric Vicars in British Pathé Newsreels, Ranked” is still the definitive work on eccentric vicars in British Pathé newsreels. There is so much more work to be done!

slate.com

Eccentric Vicars in British Pathé Newsreels, Ranked

It is award season, after all.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 2h

It’s a bad movie, but it’s not bad enough!

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Reposted by Matthew Dessem

Jacob Oller @jacoboller.bsky.social · 2h

David Ellison has arrived at the Criterion Closet attempting to smuggle in multiple copies of the straight-to-DVD comedy Frenemy, which features his final film performance

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 3h

What would David Ellison choose from the Criterion Closet?

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 3h

This is exactly why the current merger is such a disaster. None of those previous owners were movie studios, so they didn’t have entire departments that suddenly became redundant.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 4h

There’s no savvy view of this to be had. Filmmakers and crew are not making an unreasonable fuss over business-as-usual, this really is going to be bad for Los Angeles and the entertainment industry in a different and bigger way than the usual corporate merry-go-round.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 4h

Warner Bros. has been acquired many times by many different companies over the years, but AFAIK not by another movie studio, so they didn’t have the same redundancies in marketing, distribution, home video, etc. This is a merger, not an acquisition; New Line Cinema is a better predictive model.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

$30 for access to a laser-based analog format?!? Buy it, obviously.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

In cities like Las Vegas where hotels compete on service rather than price, housekeeping has started leaving branded bookmarks in any book that does not have one. This is the greatest innovation in hospitality since the single-serve ketchup bottle.

A copy of "The Killer Inside Me," opened to the title page, where there is a Waldorf Astoria bookmark.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yes, I have also followed the news. They didn’t have to pay “the fine,” which is up to $150,000 per infringement if it’s willful, they settled with the Authors Guild.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

*Napster and LimeWire. I didn’t believe that musicians owed me copies of their work, and if a specific artist wants to go after me for that that is their prerogative. I would not assume they were lying or faking offense!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Of course not. I used Napster and back in the day. At a certain point I got good speakers, realized what I was missing, and went back to CDs (and eventually, lossless streaming). I would not argue that I did no harm to the people whose work I pirated!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Of course I realize that. That is why I did not post the full text of my work to the Internet. The public is welcome to my Bluesky posts, and I assume I’m granting some kind of perpetual license by posting.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Well, I was on the internet then (I was on the internet in 1991) and I don’t do that. If you want my work, you have to pay me. Your work is your problem.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is not a case where Anthropic found a clever way to do something legally but the public didn’t understand the nuances! They knew what they were doing and they knew why it was illegal.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

It takes some kind of nerve to suggest that the people who are mad about this do not understand copyright law. All the leaked communications from these cases show that the AI companies DID understand copyright law and knew they were violating it, they just didn’t care.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don’t care about the money; I don’t need it and my book was not worth much. I care about the idea that I am not sincerely pissed off about this, or that I was not actually wronged.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Well, that’s a big assumption. The settlement only covers people with copyrights registered before the piracy. In my specific case, the publisher was obligated to register the copyright but did not. I am mad at the publisher but have no recourse to the law.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Okay: it’s already piracy. Retreating into statistical weights is a distraction from the fact that, e.g., Anthropic bought NO copies of my book and instead pirated it.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

That is Not My Problem. i wish you luck!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Making a pdf of my book without my permission and distributing that is already stealing, we don’t have to get this far into the weeds.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I appreciate the artistic qualities of code and math but a coder who does not think they put any of themselves into their work and does not care who uses it is probably correct that they personally are not making art. At least I see no reason to disbelieve them!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Code can be beautiful, just like math. That is one reason we attribute some of it to its creators: it’s Cantor’s Diagonalization Proof, not The Uncountable Infinity Proof. There is still a stigma to taking credit for someone else’s work in STEM, just as there was in Lehrer’s day:

youtube.com

Lobachevsky

YouTube video by Tom Lehrer - Topic

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

No computer trained on pre-1997 cinema could have dreamed up that dead and muffled sound design, or Blake’s makeup, or the just-a-few-frames-too-long takes in the editing. The uncanny valley is pretty creepy but the uncanniness humans can build on purpose is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have “Lost Highway” on in the background, so I am particularly unsympathetic at the moment to the notion that computers can make art.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Well, those folks didn’t love it either!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You write code, you don’t write prose. You are not making art. Your understanding of this is limited and flawed because of your area of expertise is narrow and does not include the kind of work in question.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

(Similarly, you would not expect the bankers to applaud B&C for careening through town shooting cops and running over pedestrians *without* robbing a bank, why should this be any different?)

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

He does know someone, he knows me!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Yeah, seriously, the one thing I take away from Gyges’ contention that artists are acting in bad faith and only pretending to care here is that he does not know many writers or artists socially.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Also you can surely see how bad this logic is. Those bankers don’t really care that Bonnie and Clyde took their money! I know because they also have complaints about the dead cops and reckless driving!

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

You will have to do this and see how I react, I guess. Again, we had this conversation and eventually you decided you believed me about this, but no one else. I don’t know anyone whose work was used who is happy about it.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

No one you are arguing with thinks the current copyright laws are good. You could have the entire creative world on your side in that fight and everyone would benefit. Instead, it’s Uber all over again, asking forgiveness instead of permission.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If the public domain does not include enough text to build these models, your first step is expanding the public domain, not building the models! It is equally impossible to build a cocaine empire without breaking a few laws, but we don’t take that dilemma into consideration when sentencing.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

We have had this tedious argument before. Many, many people whose work was used sincerely care about it, including me. On this topic you sound like a Republican who thinks all the protestors are being paid.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Maybe they were splitting the difference between the studio convention of all-caps and the print convention of italicizing in search of a way to indicate “these characters are part of the film’s official title?”

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This was so strange and unpleasant to read I tracked down a print copy. Looks like they had the same italic conventions, typeset with a better-looking set of fonts, which they attempted to imitate for the ebook by reducing the size of the font they had, fucking up the midline in the process.

The same text, with movies with an uppercase non-italic first character followed by lowercase italic, rendered slightly less objectionable by more pleasant typesetting.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

My favorite foreign change-of-title:

The Italian poster for “Choice of Love: The Story of Hilary and Victor,” or, as we know it in America, “Dying Young.”

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I would read nothing into that; they touted New Line and WB too, and Abdy and De Luca are gone as of this morning.

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Reposted by Matthew Dessem

depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

losing my mind at how ruthless this sentence is

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

If anyone has the right to do this…

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Then we agree! A small, 95lb bag of weed will still get you pretty fucking high.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

If Turing had run around telling people the bombes were conscious and office jobs were over forever—and people who believed him spent a lot of dumb money in awful ways—the submariners would still be just as dead, and I think you’d criticize Turing, not argue the bombes didn’t “really” break Enigma.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Well, brute-forcing a solution to something IS impressive, and so is solving a problem with a stack of comorbid tricks. Once you stop worrying about the nature of thinking or whatever paper crown you think AI boosters are pinning on their machine god, you are left with a useful and impressive tech.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

From my perspective, you keep making strong but incorrect claims about machine learning based on the well-documented perfidy of the Musks and Altmans of the world, but there really is a baby in that bathwater, even if it’s Bart Harley Jarvis.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

*everyone else does not include programmers, scientists, or mathematicians. But yeah, I am not talking about Grok, I am talking about machine learning. It is an impressive and useful tool that will help us accomplish many things, independently from Copilot or whatever.

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Matthew Dessem @matthewdessem.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Okay! But one of them is still impressive, and we are back to the 95 lb bag of weed.

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