#Iac

[samreich]

me buying collegehumor from IAC

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[theyoungtwos]

GCSE LIT PAPER 2 HERE WE GOOOO

[quicklyandrogynousfox-blog]

stick together - iac 2024 day twelve

[mcflysohigh]

Now I need a photo of Gi, Dougie, Matt and Danny with their crowns and scepters please 😂👑

[sonofcoulson]

1970 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series 3

Episode 2

"Destiny":

Open on Azazel running, bamfing all over the place. Special forces are armed and in pursuit. It doesn't seem to matter where he bampfs to, someone is always there, or nearby, to intercept.

We cut to the S.H.I.E.L.D. team in their headquarters, tracking Azazel's movements and trying to coordinate teams. It seems like they are the ones pursuing him. But then on the third intercept, in Kazakhstan, they are almost beaten to it by another special forces team. They get in each other's way and Azazel is gone again. The two teams argue.

We cut to Val, who is livid. She wants to know how S.H.I.E.L.D. is one step ahead, how they are everywhere her teams are supposed to be. She is very suspicious of Irene as she is directing the manhunt with her (secretly) precognitive powers. She denies it but Val knows that Gyrich will have serious questions.

Azazel bampfs to location near his and Mystique's old apartment. Under his breath he wonders what made him come back here. He tries to clear his head for his next move when he spies…across the street…could it be? It's Mystique, gesturing for him to come over to a closed down store. He does and follows her inside without being spotted.

Mystique: Are you okay? Are you being chased?...Who's chasing you?...Azazel…

Listen, I know we're not together anymore but of course I'll help you…

Azazel: You can't. They keep showing up everywhere I go. I don't know how they know where I was going to. I don’t even know where I'm going to…

Wait, how did you know where I'd be?

M: …

A: Mystique? 

M: …I have…a friend who can see into the future.

A: Does your friend work with a SWAT team? Because that would explain a lot.

M (not answering the question): I can get you out of here, but you're going to have to trust me.

A: And why should I do that?

M: I trusted you to take the baby somewhere safe, didn't I?

A: …Yes

M: …Where did you take it…?

A: Those armed goons could be here any minute…please.

M: …Okay. See that truck across the street?

A: Yeah.

M: Take us to the trailer.

*bampf*

A: Wow. There is a lot of gear in here. Is Magneto helping you out?

M: No. I don't work for him anymore.

A: Who do you work for?

M: Myself…

I can tell you who's chasing you…

A: Who?

M: If you tell me where you took the baby.

A: Your foresight friend can't tell you that?

M: If I knew where we were going before and I got caught then…

A: They might get it out of you.

M: Where did you take the baby?

A: You mean our baby? Jeez.

M: Answer the damn question Azazel.

A (hesitantly): …Germany.

M (overlapping dialogue): Germany!?/

A: Shit!/ I knew if you found out you'd be angry…but…

M: Why Germany? I mean Canada or maybe even Mexico, but…damn right/ I'm angry about that!

A: I/ just wanted to…

M: Germany is nearly 4000/ miles away! By air!

A: I just wanted/ to…

M: You think/ it will be easy to get on an aeroplane?

A: Good God! Let me finish…I wanted to make sure the he was someplace safe.

A: Where the sapiens wouldn't find him.

A: With people I could trust.

M: …It…

A: Mystique.

M: Not ‘him', it.

M: Unless I'm holding that baby in my arms I don't want to think of it as a person. No connection. It is an it.

A: Then why do you care where ‘it' is?

A: Irene?

M: Because I still want it in my arms!

…Irene says there's a 43% chance that we leave here and go to find the baby, you and me.

M: My…foresight friend.

A: Your friend…is a girl? Just when you had me thinking I had competition.

M: Oh grow up.

A: There are less complicated ways to ask a guy out you know.

M: Don't flatter yourself. This is not about us. This is about freedom and finding our child.

This dialogue is cut here with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Val's troops continuing the search, maps being looked at, the rival teams in Kazakhstan arguing etc. Towards the end of the sequence we see Val realise she hasn't seen Raven for a while. She approaches Irene, leans in and whispers in her ear, “Where is Raven Darkhölme?”.

Mystique leaves Azazel in the back as he is ‘too conspicuous’ in the front. She genuinely thinks about making a run for it, but Val has discovered the double cross and contacts her on a secure frequency, convincing her to come back for Irene. She says Irene is not strong like Mystique and the finger of suspicion is already pointing at her and she can't protect her from Gyrich.

Mystique reluctantly agrees to bring him in to protect Irene. Azazel gets the jitters and wants out but realises he can't bampf away, he just materialises in the same spot, he is trapped in the van. Mystique hedged her bets and brought a van designed by Forge to neutralise his power. He bangs on the truck for her to let him out.

Good girl says Val in her ear. She yanks out the earpiece but goes back to hq anyway, for Irene.

Meanwhile, Peggy is having a somewhat heated exchange with the President. Peggy is adamant that she must speak to the team that is targeting mutants as she believes there is a more humane way to deal with the issue. Nixon is adamant that there is no such team. That he has never approved any agency to carry out these actions. But he does recognise the rise of these ‘mutants’ as a threat.

Peggy is not fooled by any of this and reiterates her concern and reminds him that S.H.I.E.L.D. has a deal with the American government where they don't keep secrets from each other.

After she hangs up she asks Howard if he is ready to trace the President's next call. Howard and the others are worried what will happen if the President finds out his call was traced. Peggy just says, “Then make sure he never finds out”.

Nixon is rattled and calls Henry Peter Gyrich to tell him that S.H.I.E.L.D. are on to them.

Gyrich believes the team's next target could be useful in this situation. Sean Cassidy has been seen/heard approaching New Jersey. He believes Cassidy is making his way to Camp Lehigh. Gyrich actually sees this as an opportunity to solve three problems:

1. Confirm and expose Raven Darkhölme as a traitor 

2. Capture Sean Cassidy and reduce the threat posed by him and Moira McTaggart. 

3. Destroy S.H.I.E.L.D.

He prepares to tell the team their next target.

We cut to Peggy on the phone to Moira McTaggart the next day. Moira warns them Sean is coming. Their source has told them Freedom Force's next target was Angel Salvadore and he wanted to be involved with the counter operation (Angel was once his friend).

The team start to wonder what that noise is. Moira says, that'll be Sean, you hear him before you see him.

Sean Cassidy comes in and introduces himself. He says the information only came in last night and he got there as quick as he could. The team are impressed with his powers.

He tells them where Angel is expected to be and when Cooper's team are expected to strike. They prepare to head out.

Cut to Val's small team. A couple of undercover agents are reporting on Salvadore's movements.

As they are preparing to go Jacqui melts together the doors of the store Freedom Force was hiding in, forcing them to find another exit and buying time.

Meanwhile Sean has intercepted Angel and is trying to convince her to come with him. She is caught off guard and torn between flying off and listening to him. She stays and he tries to convince her a government agency is after her. She reminds him that is nothing new for her. He tells her they have Magneto and Azazel, that they are coming for any and all mutants. This gives her pause.

As they are talking the Freedom Force (FF) agents have found an alternative route and swarm to their location.

Cassidy takes out the first with a sonic scream. Angel takes out another with her hardening goo spit thing (that is totally stolen from Toad in the 2000 movie). The agents keep on coming. Brian appears, bends the barrel of an agent's gun and then uses that agent to take out a bunch of others.

Jacqui arrives and puts a protective ring of fire around the group, with the threat of expanding it if they are threatened further.

Above, two snipers are taking aim at Jacqui. They ask for confirmation on the shot.

Howard pulls up with Hank. Asks him if he's sure his contraption will work. ‘Oh it'll work’ says Hank, testily.

He exits the car, puts on the mk I helmet, jumps and shrinks. This propels him way up the fire escape. He reaches the top of the building in two leaps. ‘Well I'll be…’ admires Howard.

The first sniper goes to check the noise from the fire escape. As his partner receives the go ahead for the shot, the first sniper is seemingly beaten up by an invisible assailant. As the 2nd sniper radios through an incomprehensible message about an attack by the invisible man, Hank's suit fails and he appears, full size. Dumbfounded for a second, the sniper is just recovering his wits (and his weapon) when Hank just charges him, knocking them both off the roof. They battle on the way down.

Hank's suit finally releases the Pym Particles and he leaps safely from the falling sniper and lands within Jacqui's flame barrier and returns to full size. Everyone is surprised as Hank had kept his project secret from everyone.

The sniper lands on his Freedom Force Colleagues and they are given permission to shoot through the flames.

As they open fire, James Braddock pulls up in an unmarked S.H.I.E.L.D. van. They bundle in, Angel Salvadore and all, and speed away.

After evading the agents at the scene,  they realise they are being followed by a black sedan on the highway. A window rolls down on the sedan and an FF agent fires.

Hank: Brian, open the doors.

Angel: Are you crazy? They're shooting at us!

H: I'm gonna stop them shooting.

James (Calling from the front): There's no need. Stark bullet-proofed it.

H: But what if they follow us to Camp Lehigh? What if they shoot out the tyres?

Jacqui: Dr. Pym, please! You'll be killed…

H (to Brian): Just…open the doors Falsworth! I know what I'm doing. 

Brian obliges and Hank leaps out of the back of the van, shrinking as he does so.

The process fails halfway through and he smashes, full size, into the windscreen of the Sedan. His speed relative to theirs and his super secret Pym Tech suit protect him from serious injury.

Hank and the FF agents are dazed. They recover first and the shooter readies their pistol. Fortunately the suit tech works this time and he shrinks and enters the vehicle through the open window. While the agents wonder where he went, he operates the hood release causing it to catch the wind and flap up, obstructing their view. He catches sight of Howard speeding behind them to catch up and radios for him to pull up alongside.

As the FF Sedan crashes into a barrier, Pym leaps into the cabriolet. Howard swerves to avoid the crashing vehicle and the S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicles speed off to Camp Lehigh. 

When the rescue team return to base,  they start to celebrate and Sean is catching up with Angel.

Peggy upbraids them and tells them not to celebrate as she knows there will be consequences for what they have just done.

Back at FF headquarters, Val Cooper brings the ‘bad news’ of Salvadore’s escape to Gyrich. He is not upset, he simply smiles, points out that S.H.I.E.L.D. have ‘crossed the line’ and adds…

“Release the hounds…”

We flashback to Irene's psychology evaluation from a few weeks before.

Dr Darkhölme gets her to state her name and job title for her recording. They go through some details of her past, but not too deep yet.

Raven circles back to Irene's job.

Raven: You are in their foresight division.

Irene: Yes.

R: It's your job to predict what is going to happen before it happens.

I: Yes.

R: And you're usually correct. Is that right?

(*Irene nods*)

That's quite a skill.

I (after a pause): May we stop the recording for a moment.

R: Agent Cooper prefers that we get this all on tape.

I: I would like it to be private.

R: …

I: After you have heard it you may decide whether to put it on tape.

R: …Interview paused at 4:45pm.

(*stop the tape*)

What did you have to say that couldn't be on the recording Irene?

I: My predictions are not a skill.

R: No? What are they then?

I: …A gift…Like yours.

R (somewhat rattled): …What do you mean?...A gift from who?

I: I am a mutant. Like you.

R: …Did Cooper put you up to this?

I: No. Frau Cooper does not want us to know each other's secret.

That we are not the only one.

That we are both mutants, both being held here against our will.

R: How do I know Cooper's not listening right now?

I: She is not. No one is. The others trust you. Cooper trusts you.

R: Why should I trust you?

I: You will come to trust me because my precognitions are accurate…

My probabilities are accurate…

They will save lives…

Mutant lives…

I believe we will do this work together. I believe that it is our destiny.

R: Irene…I…I'm just trying to survive here.

I: Well…you have been tasked with capturing the other Brotherhood members, yes?

R: …Yes.

I: There is a 43% chance that when you find Azazel you will leave with him to find your child. I can give you the time to get away.

R: …You can do that? You can get me out of this. And get me to the baby.

I: Yes. The chance is only based on the path you choose. If you decide to leave with Azael then you will be successful.

R: And if I do leave? What happens to you and the others?

I: …Nothing is for certain. It all depends on the choices we make.

R: What about working together? Our ‘destiny’?

I: That is your decision to make.

*There is a loud knock on the door*

Guard (from the other side): Dr Darkhölme! Cooper says to wrap it up. You're needed in the command centre. 

*A moment's silence…aaaaand scene.*

[iiamcrys]

#iamcrys #crysbelle #thephotobae

[hrishitasblog]

Unemployment Among Indian Graduates Industry-Academia Community a Solution

Introduction

Unemployment among Indian graduates has reached alarming levels, with many unable to secure jobs that match their qualifications. This issue is exacerbated by a disconnect between academic curricula and industry requirements.

The Problem

A significant number of graduates lack the practical skills demanded by employers. According to various reports, nearly 80% of engineering graduates are considered unemployable due to outdated educational frameworks and insufficient hands-on training.

Industry-Academia Community

To address this gap, fostering collaboration between industries and academic institutions is essential. By integrating real-world projects into the curriculum, students can gain relevant experience. Internships and co-op programs can also bridge the skill gap, making graduates more attractive to employers.

Conclusion

Strengthening ties between academia and industry will not only enhance employability but also drive innovation in education, ultimately reducing unemployment rates among Indian graduates.

[msclaritea]

"Biopics of massively famous musicians are rarely very good, often because they stumble at the question of whom exactly they’re being made for. Are you making a movie for the already initiated die-hard fans yearning to see the life and times of their hero reflected back at them in exacting detail? Or is your movie a welcome mat for novices, a breezy jukebox of greatest hits aimed at cultivating new generations of fans, goosing streaming tallies and catalog sales in the process? Most musician biopics never manage to resolve this tension, in part because they’re usually also serving a third master, namely the musician’s estate, which tends to hold its own, very specific ideas about on-screen depiction.

Bob Marley: One Love, the new movie about the late reggae superstar that’s produced by Marley’s widow, Rita, along with some of his children, is a biopic that does seem to know whom it’s for, which isn’t a point in its favor. The film is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard) and stars Kingsley Ben-Adir as Marley, who does his best with the role despite not really looking or sounding much like the real Marley. (Within the past four years Ben-Adir has played Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and Bob Marley, quite the triptych of historical figures.) Lashana Lynch plays Rita and steals the film in every scene she’s in, even if the movie’s script fails to elevate her character past the archetypical suffering-yet-supportive wife of a genius.

Rather than taking a cradle-to-grave approach to Marley’s life, One Love instead focuses on a single period of Marley’s career, his self-imposed exile to England in the aftermath of the 1976 attempt on his life at his home in Kingston, during which time he recorded Exodus, the 1977 LP that marked his full breakthrough into global superstardom. The film opens with the assassination attempt, after which we’re quickly whisked to London, where the film depicts Marley writing most of Exodus’ songs in a cloying series of “eureka!” moments that tend to populate movies of this kind. Snippets of Marley’s classic “Redemption Song” surface as a recurring musical motif in the film, and in one of the last scenes, we see Marley performing the song for his awestruck family in a sappy flourish that’s also anachronistic. (By most accounts, Marley didn’t write “Redemption Song” until 1979.) Periodically we’re treated to a series of flashbacks of the singer’s earlier life, a clichéd device that this movie could have used more of: Brief forays into Marley’s conversion to Rastafarianism are surprisingly well done, and a scene of a teenage Marley and the Wailing Wailers performing “Simmer Down” at Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One is the best moment in the film.

One Love is an inspirational tale about a Great Man who used music to unite the world, one that reduces one of the most consequential and complicated artists of the 20th century to a walking fount of genial aphorisms, the guy who suggested we all get together and feel all right. As such, the film indulges a decadeslong public appetite for a particular imagining of Marley that his estate now seems depressingly eager to feed. It’s been 42 years since Marley died of a rare form of melanoma at age 36, and I’m not sure there’s a musician who’s more literally iconic: Go to any commercial district in any part of the world and within minutes you’ll find an opportunity to buy something bearing Marley’s likeness. In the United States, Marley has been a staple of dorm-room walls for generations: The casual and underinformed co-optation of Marley by American bro culture has even inspired a recurring meme in which Marley’s name is erroneously affixed to an image of Jimi Hendrix.

To a certain brand of musical cynic, Marley has become the embodiment of a musician whom people own posters and T-shirts of but don’t actually listen to, which isn’t totally fair to most of the owners of those posters and T-shirts. Some of Marley’s music is still enormously popular: His 1984 greatest hits compilation Legend is currently enjoying its 820th week on the Billboard 200, a position it will likely maintain for the foreseeable future given One Love’s early, strikingly robust box-office projections. The only album that’s spent longer on the chart is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

But in the pop-cultural imagination, Legend has completely eclipsed everything else Marley ever released. The album has sold more than 15 million copies in the United States alone, while no other Marley LP has sold even 1 million stateside. From a purely mathematical standpoint, this would indicate that for many fans, Legend is the first and only Marley album they’ll ever listen to. I’m not sure there’s another greatest hits compilation that has played such an outsize role in the public definition of an artist.

Legend is a fine little collection, but the idea that it’s some sort of one-stop synopsis of Marley’s career is absurd. For starters, 10 of its 14 tracks date from the period of 1977–80, a four-year time frame that represents the height of Marley’s global popularity but is a relatively minuscule cross section of a staggeringly prolific, nearly two-decade-long recording career. (Five of Exodus’ 10 tracks are included on Legend, which I suspect is one reason that One Love is so invested in the album’s significance.)

This period also coincides with a time when Marley’s music seemed to take a step back from revolutionary politics, a tack that may have been driven at least in part by the aforementioned assassination attempt. The Marley canonized on Legend is not the Marley who sang “I feel like bombin’ a church/ Now that you know that the preacher is lyin’ ” or who called for “burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight … burnin’ all illusion tonight” or declared that “Rasta don’t work for no CIA.” The dominance of Legend in the U.S. is particularly striking when one considers that Marley’s highest-selling album in this country during his lifetime was 1976’s Rastaman Vibration, which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 and includes such overtly political tracks as “Crazy Baldhead,” “Rat Race,” and “War.” Legend doesn’t include a single track from Rastaman Vibration, instead opting for romantic fare like “Is This Love” and “Waiting in Vain” and feel-good anthems like “One Love/People Get Ready” and “Jamming.” (For an excellent deep dive into the history and legacy of Legend, I recommend this article from the Ringer earlier this week.)

One Day’s Director Has No Regrets About the Movie’s Controversial Ending

Legend’s preeminence has helped turn Marley into the musical equivalent of a tourist destination, at which One Love is just one more cozy attraction. This is worse than a shame, because the real Bob Marley was one of the most remarkable musical talents of the 20th century. As a songwriter, he was so prolific that music seemed to pour out of him, a quality that has sometimes led to a naturalization of his gifts that veers into exoticizing primitivism. (One Love certainly partakes in this.) But rather than being some carefree savant, Marley was a fiercely disciplined and ambitious artist from the very beginning. He wrote and recorded his first single, “Judge Not,” in 1962 at the age of 16, and it remains an astonishing debut, an effortlessly catchy melody sung by a voice that sounds both nervous and supremely confident in a way that only a teenager can manage.

By the time he signed to Island Records in 1972 and began his ascent to international superstardom, Marley had already written a lifetime’s worth of great songs. He had a preternatural ear for hooks and crafted songs that were ready-made hit records, three-minute gems of perfectly crystalized musical ideas. As a singer, his indelible tenor rasp and thrillingly improvisational style were the byproducts of an extraordinarily well-honed sense of intonation and time. And during the 1970s, he fronted what might have been the best band on the face of the earth, grounded in the peerless rhythm section of drummer Carlton Barrett and bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, the latter of whom died earlier this month at age 77. (Aston’s son and namesake, an accomplished musician in his own right, plays his father in the film.)

One Love doesn’t know how to begin exploring this artist and his art in any way that even begins to be interesting. Instead it just feeds back the same sanitized and saccharine idea of Bob Marley to the same audience who has been eating that up for generations. It’s a movie about a poster. Over the end credits of One Love, archival performance clips of Marley flash onto the screen, and for a few moments we’re treated to sounds and images that are infinitely more magnetic and thrillingly alive than anything we’ve seen over the preceding 100-ish minutes. That Bob Marley, and the extraordinary body of music he left behind, is still out there for those who go listening for it, but this movie isn’t where you’ll find him."

[ddwcaph-game]

Vampire anon, was thinking about like being into blood, liking it and so forth. I know we won't actually be vampires, it's not IAC :)

Ah, I don't think I'll add any choices like that because it'd be too weird, but there's definitely going to be some vampire talk with a certain character in IAC. 😉

The funny thing is, the MC choices in IAC was what actually made me change the heritage traits to work like this in DDWCaPH!, hehe.

[quicklyandrogynousfox-blog]

our commute - iac 2024 day sixteen

[challenge-ant]

what happens in australia stays in australia 😏

[robbiesblogdotcom]

The Sale of CalorieCount.com: A Digital Health Acquisition

In 2009, the digital health landscape saw a notable transaction when About.com, a platform owned by The New York Times Company, acquired CalorieCount.com. This acquisition, though not publicly disclosed until 2012 via DNJournal.com, marked a strategic move by About.com to expand its presence in the health and wellness sector. The Acquisition CalorieCount.com, a platform previously owned by…

[mcflysohigh]

Votes are now OPEN to use 5 free votes to crown Danny KING OF THE JUNGLE 👑👑👑♥️