Items of Interest, January 15-27, 2024
First off, apologies for delays! I’ve been working on commissioned art and it’s taken all my time and attention. For more information on what I’ve been up to during January, read this Patreon post. For more on commissioned art you can buy, check the latest commision sheet on DeviantArt.
Also, I now have a YouTube channel of my very own: Reinder Dijkhuis on YouTube. Technically, I’ve had it since 2006 but there are now three videos on it, plus a bit of personalization and some recommended playlists, so it pretty much only counts as a real channel as of now.
Now, on with the link roundup. For the reasons mentioned above, it’s going to be a short one..
Justice Lost In The Post: How the Post Office wrecked the lives of its own workers - the satirical magazine Private Eye has made its damning and extremely non-satirical report on IT failures, malpractice and abuse of power at the UK Post Office available to the public for free as a downloadable PDF.
The future of media is this: 404 Media needs your email address. I’ve seen some people complain about this but as far as I can tell, the arguments for why 404 Media will now withhold most of their journalism from strangers holds water:
Requiring an email address to read our articles has, for the moment, stopped our content from being scraped and repurposed by AI. It will also, we hope, serve as a preventative measure against the impacts of the internet being flooded by all of this AI-generated drek. We are worried that a flood of low-quality, AI-generated bullshit—articles written by robots to appease a robotic search ranking algorithm—is going to drown out what we do, and make it harder to organically find our work. This idea is not a random thesis we have, or paranoia about AI progress. The authors of a study about the general degradation in the search results of Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo warn that “AI will only exacerbate the problem,” and told Jason in an email “ChatGPT is absolutely capable of producing content that is indistinguishable from what we typically classified as a ‘content farm.’ AI can easily serve as an accelerator for this, probably making it even harder for search engines to produce good result pages.” Being able to email you our articles will let us bypass Google altogether.
And here’s your weekly palate cleanser, a new old The Hooded Crow track: Senescence by Johan Dijkhuis.
Senescence was written by Johan Dijkhuis, and appeared on our second demo from 1994. I still love this one.
We got to mess around with guitar sounds and layer things up as much as we could using 4-track cassette technology. So there’s auto-wah on there, a compression pedal, and at the end of it, while Patrick is belting his final note, I get to make a ‘Zworp’ sound over that, resulting in a thick sound that, if I have any criticism of this demixed and remixed release, doesn’t sound quite as thick here. Never mind, I’ve made a sample from the original and will be using that in the near future. Meanwhile Michel got to pretend he was The Edge for a hot minute.
So you’ll be hearing that ‘Zworp’ again in the near future. In fact, I ’ve already used it on a track on my own YouTube channel, but it’s a bit buried, so I want to give it another chance to shine.
All of this is happening over a much more meditative, thoughtful song than my brother usually wrote, with chords he didn’t usually use.
Because I’ve left it for so long to post this, the next video is already online. The song is Fatal Flaw, and it’s the main subject of that Patreon post I linked above. Here it is again as an embed in this post:
Thank you for reading.
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