Spider-Man: Far From Home spoiler video review

I was really grateful to Ben Pearson for joining me to discuss Spider-Man: Far From Home. We delve into what this movie does to Peter Parker’s arc, the reliance of these movies on the legacy of Tony Stark, and the possibilities of future MCU films.

Also: I ran into some difficulty with my video in this one. My Sony A7III ran out of battery while I was shooting the first half of my video. Despite the camera’s promises to recover the file after I booted it back up, it didn’t work and I lost the entire first half of my side of the video. Making things even worse: I was monitoring the battery life the entire time and it plummeted suddenly from about 18% to 0%. This genuinely shook my faith in the camera system. How can I record interviews with this thing if the camera might die and take my video with it?

In any case, I’m grateful to Daanish Syed for stepping up and helping me out with some photoshopped images that I used to fill in the video above. Check them out. I hope you enjoy them.

Interesting links from around the web (early June 2019 edition)

It’s been awhile since the last link round-up, so here are a bunch of interesting things from the internet:

Netflix’s “Always Be My Maybe” from an Asian-American Perspective: Details You Might Have Missed

I was thrilled to see that Netflix recently released a new romantic comedy featuring two Asian-American leads (Randall Park and Ali Wong). There were so many things that the film nailed that I made the above video with my wife to talk about them. We discuss what the film gets right about the Asian-American experience, and dive into details you might have missed. Check it out.

One Second for Every Day of My Life (2018-2019)

For the past seven years, I’ve recorded one second of video for every day of my life, then combined them all to create a 5-6 minute video that summarizes that year. Here is this year’s video.

Highlights from this year:

  • I saw David Byrne live in concert at the very last Sasquatch Music Festival
  • I attended XOXO fest in Portland
  • I climbed to the top of Kokohead Crater in Oahu
  • I joined a new team at Amazon (at Prime Video!)
  • I ate lots and lots of food and saw lots of movies and shows

Thanks for taking a look at my life through this unique lens.

And now our watch is ended

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This week, Joanna Robinson and I released what will likely be the very last episode of “A Cast of Kings,” the Game of Thrones recap podcast we’ve been publishing since April 2012. You can listen to it above. It got emotional.

When I first started podcasting, I was living my post-college years in Boston with my parents, financially supporting them with the money I made from an academic research job. This left me with a lot of spare time, so I started recording podcasts because I enjoyed talking about pop culture and building online communities around films and television. It was how I first encountered the work of Joanna Robinson, who at the time worked for a website called Pajiba.

Joanna’s work was insightful and trenchant, and I soon invited her to guest on the Slashfilmcast. I was impressed by her wit, humor, and perspective. We started collaborating together on a podcast about the FX original series Justified.

One day, she pitched me on the idea of a Game of Thrones podcast where she would take on the role of a book reader and help explain the show to me, a non-reading heathen. The idea for “A Cast of Kings” was born.

I don’t think we quite understood that we were tapping into three phenomena that would dramatically grow in importance in the years that followed: podcasting, explainer culture, and Game of Thrones. “A Cast of Kings” combined them all into one neat package. At the time, The Ringer wasn’t even glimmer in Bill Simmons’ eye, Vox Media had barely just started, and Game of Thrones was still being compared unfavorably to Boardwalk Empire in the ratings.

There are times when your can feel the tectonic plates in your life shift underneath your feet, when something grows beyond what you could’ve possibly imagined. As “A Cast of Kings” continued, it reconfigured my notions of what was possible with a podcast.

I don’t remember the first time that I realized “A Cast of Kings” was bigger than any other show I’d ever done. It was more of a steady accumulation of little moments: an unknown friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend mentioning the show at a social outing, getting featured on numerous “Best of” podcast lists, appearing on NPR’s “All Things Considered” to discuss the show, hosting a panel at Con of Thrones to chat with some of the great actors from the show. I learned that people who I respected and admired — people whose work I read online, who I regularly watched on television or whose podcasts I enjoyed — listened to “A Cast of Kings.”

These moments filled me with many emotions but the overriding feeling was one of gratitude. It is an extremely rare and beautiful thing to be able to create something that is meaningful to so many people. When something that significant comes along in your life, the best you can do is try to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

I went through many life changes during my time hosting “A Cast of Kings.” I uprooted the only life I ever knew and moved to Seattle on, hoping it would change things for the better (it did). I got my first ever taste of life in the corporate world, which has enabled me to experience many incredible opportunities. I got married to a lovely woman who I met because she was a “Cast of Kings” listener.

Through it all, the podcast soldiered on. And there was Joanna, whose profile rose along with the popularity of the show. She went from a writer whose work was read by thousands to someone who was read by millions — one of this country’s most trusted experts on one of the most popular cultural properties ever.

It’s rare to find a person whose personality clicks with yours. It’s even rarer to be able to capture that magic, package it up, and put it out into the world in a way that other people can appreciate it too. But, that’s how I felt about my time working with Joanna.

I looked forward to our podcasts because I would always leave with something new — some bit of knowledge or insight that I never would’ve come up with myself. Her diligence, particularly in the first few seasons when I depended on her to illuminate the show and protect me from spoilers, was admirable. It’s that work ethic that has propelled her into becoming an online star in her own right. I was fortunate to be along for the ride.

And that’s where we are today. At the end of a long and crazy journey that has irrevocably altered both of our lives.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s a miracle any good podcast survives. People’s lives change. People change. Few things stay constant.

Consider your own life: are you still talking to the same people you were 5-10 years ago? Is the state of your day-to-day existence the same? Throw into the mix strong personalities that are the ingredients of any good podcast and you have a recipe for an enterprise that is genetically engineered for a brief lifespan.

Joanna and I both have strong opinions, not just about pop culture but about ways of doing things. We sparred verbally on occasion, both on and off the show. But in the end, I think we understood how blessed we were to be involved in something that was helping to shape how so many people watched and enjoyed this beloved pop cultural artifact. For a brief moment in our lives we shared a partnership and an audience that became more than the sum of its parts. That’s part of what helped get us to the finish line. It’s also ultimately what Game of Thrones tried to do: to transcend its medium and become something more memorable and meaningful than we could’ve possibly predicted.

Note: If you are a fan of my audio work, I’ll be launching a new podcast this month called Culturally Relevant, which will feature many of the conversations I have with interesting people around the internet. Subscribe now to make sure you get the first episode when it goes live.

So many billionaire regrets

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Facebook co-f0under Chris Hughes, calling for a break up of Facebook in The New York Times opinion section:

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech. There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people. Facebook engineers write algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees themselves don’t understand them […]

If the government were to use this moment to resurrect an effective competition standard that takes a broader view of the full cost of “free” products, it could affect a whole host of industries. The alternative is bleak. If we do not take action, Facebook’s monopoly will become even more entrenched. With much of the world’s personal communications in hand, it can mine that data for patterns and trends, giving it an advantage over competitors for decades to come.

In writing this piece, Hughes joins a litany of former Facebook execs who have come out against the company, including Dustin Muskovitz, Sean Parker, and Brian Acton (Casey Newton has a good rundown here).

In a striking coincidence, pretty much all of them rebuked Facebook after becoming immeasurably enriched by the company. So weird how they found the courage to voice their convictions not during their time there, but way afterwards, when they’d all become billionaires. (To be fair, Hughes acknowledges this and takes responsibility for it in his piece).

Putting that aside though, we should evaluate whether Hughes’ recommendations have merit on their own. And on that measure, his primary suggestions don’t really stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Ezra Klein breaks it down over at Vox:

This is the core contradiction of Hughes’s essay. Every time he names the decisions that competition led Facebook to make, he describes the platform’s moral devolution. But every time he imagines the alternatives that more competition would create, he muses about kinder, gentler platforms — platforms with fewer ads, more privacy, less attention hacking.

But look around. Twitter assessed the competition and went algorithmic, creating a space so toxic the company is now trying to understand how “healthy conversations” work. YouTube ran the numbers and built an algorithm that’s become a powerful force for radicalization. Instagram became attractive to Facebook precisely because it’s so good at being addictive. Tumblr turned out to be so reliant on porn that Pornhub is considering a bid to buy the flailing business. Pinterest, well, Pinterest seems okay. For now.

Perhaps more competition in the social media space would lead to better alternatives. But perhaps it would do what it’s done so far: lead to yet fiercer wars for our attention and data, which would incentivize yet more unethical modes of capturing it.

Klein’s piece nails it. Facebook is the way it is not because of the lack of competition but because of the competition. Regulation could probably help but letting a thousand social network flowers bloom is what’s gotten us into this mess in the first place.

A few more links from the week:

Cinema is dead. Long live content.

Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for RogerEbert.com about the recent release of Endgame and “The Long Night” episode of Game of Thrones: 

Art house cinemas (which have a business built around stand-alone, non-tentpole features) are struggling to stay open, and their proprietors face increasingly old crowds that aren’t being replaced by younger viewers. Theaters generally are on what an exhibitor friend of mine bitterly referred to as “Disney life support.” Forty percent of domestic box office receipts come from that one studio, most of its business is based around serialized, mega-expensive, dopamine-hit franchises. […]

It gives me no pleasure to write any of this, having come up in what retrospectively seems like the death throes of an older culture, only to enter a spectacular and in some ways unnerving new one. Sometimes it feels as if I’m chronicling the things I love as they take their sweet time fading to black.

But I can also honestly say that, at this point, I’m more curious than apprehensive about what the future will bring. This is the kind of cultural moment that people tell their grandkids and great-nephews and nieces about. Whether the tone of the remembrance is sad or wondrous depends on who’s telling it, but tell it they will, because it’s happening, right now, to all of us. It’s not often that you get to watch the complete transformation and eventual fusion of two art forms, the transformation of art and entertainment itself, and the technology that supplies and defines it.

It’s still staggering to me that Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones are both ending major chapters of pop culture lore in the span of a few weeks. Both achieved the nearly impossible. In the case of Endgame, the MCU sustained 22 films’ worth of storytelling and somehow managed to tie them together in a satisfying way in Endgame. In the case of Game of Thrones, it may well end up being one of the last instances of mass-appointment viewing in America. Millions of people watch together every Sunday, and by the time the episode is over, the memes have already begun.

It’s possible we may never see anything like them again. And it is exhilarating to be able to witness it all as it happens.

In the meantime, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to speak in-depth about Endgame and Game of Thrones with some interesting, intelligent people:

Here are some of my reactions to this week’s Game of Thrones, “The Long Night”:

Some other recent links I’ve found interesting: