This week, we're discussing platform apocalypses, internet mysteries, and singing Toads.
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Letterboxd defies god, pays price
Anime, as they say, was a mistake. Film-reviewing platform Letterboxd compounded that mistake this week by deciding to remove anime masterpiece End Of Evangelion from eligibility of their top 250 narrative features list. Site mods reasoned that End Of Evangelion wasn't a standalone feature, functioning more as an endcap to the 18-episode Neon Genesis Evangelion series.
Said removal was not taken lightly, prompting widespread anger across X, Reddit, and a handful of nerd-culture sites. Over the past decade or so, Letterboxd's top 250 list – compiling the site's user ratings, with a handful of statistical guardrails – has come to have a real cultural weight attached to it. The placement of Hideaki Anno's apocalyptic reverie in the overall top 30 was one of the list's better overall correctives to the preexisting canon. (The presence of both Spider-verse movies in the top 50 is one of its worse correctives, but that's how user lists work.)
Anyway, two days later, Letterboxd reversed their decision, and End Of Evangelion is back on the list. No specific reasoning was cited beyond the obvious: one does not trifle with Evangelion.
The internet loses one of its best gathering spots
cohost, a blogging platform that was launched in 2022, is shutting down. anti-software software club, the team of four who created the site, announced this past week that the site will go into read-only mode in October. While the team intends to keep the servers online throughout the end of the year, they’re focused on exporting and archiving as much as they can. They cite issues with monetization, user retainment, and burnout as the primary reasons for their decision.
It’s sad to see cohost go. Throughout its limited lifespan, the platform has served as a home for users who have grown weary of social media: Twitter and Tumblr veterans who skew older and prefer self-selected communities over infinitely scalable ones. It’s where you might go to read a dense personal review of a video game or an urbex photoessay, only without the threat of being assaulted by integers of alarming sizes. This sense of intimacy and intentionality is what set it apart from other Musk era Twitter competitors like Bluesky or Mastodon — though it’s also what made it difficult to monetize. It was a noble cause, nonetheless, and eggbug will be sorely missed.
Chum Box
AI
- Ted Chiang continues his series of New Yorker pieces on the aesthetics of AI: "The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists." [link]
Games
- This godlike Call of Duty edit brings an impossible dream to life: fragging out inside of 2003’s Need for Speed: Underground [link]
- Here’s a perfectly sardonic Team Fortress 2 bit [link]
- A sick compilation of tricks by the legendary skater Rodney Mullen, originally featured as an extra in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, now recirculates annually on Reddit; it’s perfect nostalgia bait for elder millennials [link]
- "THIS IS THE NAME OF THE GAME: B.C. PIEZOPHILE. IT WILL NOT BE CHANGED EVER." [link]
- "Fixing shit," "Guns & Magic," "Revenge": Finally, a videogame roadmap we can all believe in [link]
The Internet
- Based Australian senator delivers speech in semi-fluent brainrot [link]
- "Carpentopod" is the ultimate in craft IPA delivery [link]
- It's no Backrooms, but internet mystery "Celebrity No. 6" has been discovered [link]
Other media
- "Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? Once a week, some people. We have no idea what they do with them.” [link]
- The good but perhaps eye-rollingly named video essayist Every Frame A Painting has returned with their first piece in 8 years — a characteristically tight and insightful look at sustained two-shots [link]
- That eerie Faye Webster x Elden Ring mashup has been expanded to full length [link]
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One Last Thing
Charli XCX x Toad [link]
