Six Links Worthy of Your Attention #680

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Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

  • The Infinite Conversation. “Does a never-ending conversation between Bavarian director, Werner Herzog, and Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, sound amazing? I thought it might. So of course, someone built it.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  • Pat Rocco: Sign of Protest – UCLA Film & Television Archive – YouTube. “The West Hollywood restaurant Barney’s Beanery had a sign on its wall for decades: Fagots Stay Out. It became a flashpoint of protest in the gay rights movement of the seventies, prompting porn filmmaker, Pat Rocco, to record a 20-minute documentary. The sign (and matchbooks printed with the slogan) finally came down when LA’s city council passed an ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals. LA Mayor ,Valerie Terrigno, along with the entire city council, entered the restaurant and Terringo unscrewed the sign herself. Turns out the doc is on YouTube.” (Alistair for Mitch and the video is below.).
  • Naked Making Lunch – TeoTosone – YouTube. “I recently watched one of my favourite movies from my university days, David Cronenberg‘s Naked Lunch, based on the William S. Burrough‘s book, and life around the creation of the book. Loved the film maybe even more now than I did back in the 90s. Here’s an interview with William S. Borroughs about the making of the film.” (Hugh for Alistair and the video is below).
  • Ornette Colman’s Meltdown – Jon Sadleir – YouTube. “Free jazz pioneer, Ornette Coleman, plays much of soundtrack to Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch, and I’ve been listening to Ornette a lot in the past few weeks. Here’s a short documentary on Ornette and his music.” (Hugh for Mitch and the video is below).
  • Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips – Wired. “This furthers the important social conversations many of us are having these days. We went from ‘AI will never be creative’ to ‘AI can be very creative’ in a blink. Some might argue this is semantics, because it’s hard to define what is ‘creative,’ and one person’s art is another person’s trash. Still, we all know that we are currently grappling with a serious paradigm shift in our understanding of AI’s potential in creative industries (and beyond). With an art process now open and accessible to anyone, what happens when a painter struggles to generate a great prompt, but someone with a strong prompt acumen might be able to create a stunning painting? What about the collaboration between artists and AI? Or artists and individuals who are great at prompts? The impact runs deep – from ideation to creation to rights to what it means to the job market and the greater economy. There’s more… so read on…” (Mitch for Alistair).
  • Who killed Google Reader? – The Verge. “Oh, how I still miss Google Reader. For those who remember (and those who don’t), one of the core functionalities – at social media’s genesis – was the RSS feed and reader. The ability for an individual to ’subscribe’ to any RSS feed (a little piece of code that would notify them that a website, blog, etc. had been created/updated). This meant we (the users) could vacuum up the websites and blogs and podcasts that we wanted to follow, and have them cleanly organized and displayed in one space (from most current on down). Google Reader was one of the best (there were others). Now, watching the proliferation of newsletters, emails, Substack, etc. it makes me yearn for my simple, elegant and always updated Google Reader. How about you?” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on TwitterFacebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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