Andrew Barker

@barkerrant.bsky.social

Posts

In early 2020, I was offered a chance to fly to Texas to moderate a 50th anniversary screening of “Brewster McCloud,” with Shelley Duvall as the guest of honor. This was going to be her first public appearance since the unpleasantness with that asshole quack TV doctor, and I was hesitant at first…

It’s honestly shocking how often I’ll be doing medium-intensity research on something that happened in, like, 2012, and half of the sources on Wikipedia are dead links.

Today in always save backup PDFs of your clips if you're a journalist in the year 2024: MTV News has vanished variety.com/2024/digital...

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offlinevariety.com The website of the already-defunct MTV News has been fully pulled offline.

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This is a war between management consultants and the rest of the world. They have harnessed the tech industry as a means of prolonging the growth-at-all-costs rot economy. The poison of growth has taken big tech down a very dark path. They must have more.

Our tech overlords would like to make clear that your fantasies of universal health care and affordable housing are childish while their fantasies of infinite energy to power their AI girlfriends are reasonable expectations and will come true imminently. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.www.washingtonpost.com Some data centers need as much energy as a small city, turning companies that promised a clean energy future into some of the most insatiable guzzlers of power

I literally moved to Henderson, Nevada immediately after *dropping out* of college. I guess I love a challenge.

Where are the best places for recent college graduates to live? A study ranked 100 U.S. cities on their suitability for post-grads based on economic, social and employment opportunities. Here are the best and worst options. nyti.ms/4cxUe1n

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If only we had a system where somehow money from families and local businesses would be used so children could eat a meal at school without a fifth grader doing the work

A fifth grader has paid off the entire meal debt, and then some, for his elementary school. In a video shared to his mom’s Facebook, Daken Kramer had challenged “friends, family and local businesses to donate what they can to this cause.” He wound up turning in a check for more than $7,300.

A Missouri fifth grader raised enough money to pay off his entire school’s meal debt | CNNwww.cnn.com Kids can now eat without breaking the piggy bank – at least, at Thomas Ultican Elementary School – thanks to fifth grader Daken Kramer.

“Come on guys, go easy on our billion-dollar product we designed to take your job.”

@NBCNews: Social media has been buzzing with examples of Google’s new, “experimental” AI tool going awry. A Google spokesperson said the company believes users are deliberately attempting to trip up the technology with uncommon questions. https://t.co/Wj9iuKzzHk

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oh my god

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The AI stuff reminds me a lot of how movies from 1995-2005 just made up shit about what the internet could do. There was a Dianne Lane movie about serial killers where her car stops on railroad tracks and she goes “he hacked the car!”

About to head out to the first of three Kraftwerk shows I’m seeing this week. Pregaming with black coffee, some crackers, and a crossword puzzle.

Real missed opportunity on my part not to write an opinion column every time someone declines to talk to me and refers me to a spokesperson instead.

Wow Peggy Noonan and Michael Powell both report that they went to Columbia and the protesters didn't want to talk to them, this definitely reveals something about somebody

First NYT report on UCLA says “clashes broke out,” “firecrackers exploded” and “people sprayed what appeared to be irritant sprays” without at any point mentioning who was doing those things to whom. Seemed pretty obvious on videos! www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/n...

Police Officers Respond as Clashes Erupt at U.C.L.A. Encampmentwww.nytimes.com The university called in law enforcement officers to help after “horrific acts of violence” occurred on campus Tuesday night, an official said.

But do SCOTUS justices still have friendly card games and go to the opera together? That’s the important thing, really.

The oral arguments in the Trump immunity case feel like sort of a watershed. The Court has already made a mockery of the Constitution, but now they’re attacking the most basic foundation of democratic governance: that the people and the law are sovereign, not the head of state.

I’d never heard of any of these people before and I’ll probably never read anything else they’ve written, but I’m genuinely happy to learn there’s still a community of martini-swilling young literary essayists who all live in New York and Berlin and hate each other. Wasn’t that always the dream?

You wanna see a dead body? 😳 "Of course, Oyler doesn’t want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature." www.bookforum.com/print/3004/l...

Star Struckwww.bookforum.com Lauren Oyler’s meditations on Goodreads, anxiety, and gossip – Ann Manov

I tend to be tolerant, or at least sympathetic, toward most of the major vices. But I worked at a casino on the Vegas Strip for almost two years, and man, I saw some shit. There's a particular type of desperation and fury that often accompanies gambling addiction, and it can be monstrously ugly.

Love to drain all the joy and magic out of sports and instead turn it into grist for anxious, sweaty inveterate gamblers

Gambling has made ends of games miserable for end-of-bench playerstheathletic.com Prop bets, which NCAA president Charlie Baker wants to ban, are just the start of problems for players thanks to the rise of legal gambling.

It's cool how often we hear about some new AI product that sounds like a cautionary hypothetical with exclusively negative implications, and every time it's like, "oh, no, they actually made this already, it'll be on the market in June."

A new OpenAI tool can recreate human voices — from just a 15-second recording. The technology, called Voice Engine, is currently available only to a small group of early testers. nyti.ms/3TGZIyS

OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voicesnyti.ms The start-up is sharing the technology, Voice Engine, with a small group of early testers as it tries to understand the potential dangers.

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accept all substitutes; they're basically the same

The sanest and most wholesome fan community.

Everyone knows the next 10 months are going to be a waking nightmare, but if we can’t pause for just a day or two to enjoy one of the worst people in America eating shit as bad as anyone has ever eaten shit, we’re not going to make it.

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i understand my fellow writers’ hunger for an app that can ‘replace’ twitter professionally but i don’t share it. just like with twitter, i come here to fire off a half dozen mentally ill quips per day and if i see any professional benefit from doing so that’s an embarrassment for everyone involved

Been feeling much more normal after several months off Twitter…also just got some worried looks after making an offhand reference to “Goofy, present at the crucifixion” in casual conversation.

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Having gotten trounced in local school board races across the country, Moms for Liberty debut a new campaign to win back the hearts and minds of normal Americans: publicly arguing with social pariah and despised cultural figure LeVar Burton

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