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joncrawford · 4 years

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Best of COVID-2019: (Late) 2019 End of Year Wrap-up

Even though we’re well into 2020, most of us would probably swallow a pill that makes us forget the year so far. With a new job, I got too busy to do an end-of-year wrap-up of my picks for the best albums, movies and shows of 2019, so assuming you’ve swallowed your Hindsight Pill™ (get it?, cause hindsight is 20..ok, fair if you stop reading now) here’s my take on the best music, movies and shows of 2019. Maybe you’ll find something to make the rest of quarantine a little better.

ALBUMS

Remind Me Tomorrow by Sharon Van Etten on Spotify

It’s hard to find a better album this year. It’s heartfelt, gentle in places / wild in others, it pushes her sound forward from her more folky records of the past and gives us the opportunity to gaze into this sensitive she-hulk of an artist’s soul.

Favorite Track: Jupiter 4 - Jupiter 4, a song by Sharon Van Etten on Spotify

Lux Prima by Karen O on Spotify

This concept album by Karen O (“Yeah Yeah Yeahs”) and Danger Mouse (“Broken Bells”, “Gnarls Barkley”) can best be described as a record composed by badass feminine superhero from the future who has a nostalgic fascination with soundtracks from 70s European love story films. It’s phenomenal. The chord progressions are unusual and interesting. The vibe is consistent throughout. It’s a great record to listen to intentionally or a perfect soundtrack to a day outside with friends.

Favorite Track: Nox Lumina - Nox Lumina, a song by Karen O, Danger Mouse on Spotify

Lana Del Rey - “Norman F*ing Rockwell“ (censored for my mom)

I get it. You stopped following Lana after “Summertime Sadness”. She’s not your jam. She’s vapid. There’s something about her appearance that you don’t like (Didn’t she get her lips done?). She doesn’t make serious music. Here’s the thing though: You’re f*cking wrong (censored for mom). LDR is one of the most prolific songwriters and performers we’ve got. This artist has evolved with each album and the songwriting keeps improving. This is her best album to date. The lyrics take on deeper themes than her prior records and any ego on previous submissions seems to have been replaced by a general comfort in herself and the discomfort of her experiences and relationships (fictional or not). This is also her release with the lightest touch. She’s not pushing the LDR persona anymore, she’s being herself — take it or leave it. It’s her, your little Venice B!tch (censored for mom). Hi, mom!

Favorite song: Venice Bitch, a song by Lana Del Rey on Spotify

Phoenix by Pedro The Lion on Spotify

This is my favorite artist’s first studio album in 15 years. (!!!) It’s not technically fair to say that because he released several color records in the interim. As a largely one-man show, the DNA was very much the same. But this is a true return to form for the the man known as David Bazan that I’ve been following carefully for 20 years and have seen live too many times to count.

This is a concept album (most of them are) about his experience growing up in Phoenix, AZ. But it’s more about growing up than about Arizona. I got goosebumps and watery eyes the first time I listened carefully to the lyrics of “Yellow Bike” which tells about the experience of getting your first bicycle as a little boy around 1990. For me, this was the apex of my childhood. Absolute freedom and the ability to easily join any pack of desperado bike kids.

The album hits hard with the catchy hooks, introspective lyrics, challenging topics and excellent production & instrumental performances only using standard rock staples like guitar, bass and drums (with a couple quick appearances of an organy synth).

Lyrics, melody & a great beat. This is a fantastic rock album.

Favorite song: Yellow Bike, a song by Pedro The Lion on Spotify

WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? by Billie Eilish on Spotify

Much has been written about this wunderkind. You know her. It’s a great album. She has a promising career ahead of her.

Favorite song: when the party’s over, a song by Billie Eilish on Spotify

SOUND & FURY by Sturgill Simpson on Spotify

This album slays. It’s a badass rock album. If you don’t know Sturgill Simpson, he’s technically a country act… BUT! He’s entirely rejected the conventions of modern country with its shallow lyrical content, right-wing dog whistling and computer-assisted faux harmonies. He sings about psychedelics, his problems with religion and also covers 80s synth-pop in country ballad fashion. Well, forget all that for this record. It’s a banger. This record sounds like Waylon Jennings was cloned 100 years in the future and brought back just to record a ZZ Top album. Major leap for this artist. One of the best of the year.

Favorite song: Make Art Not Friends, a song by Sturgill Simpson on Spotify

ANIMA by Thom Yorke on Spotify

We’ve had a complicated relationship with Thom Yorke’s solo work. As the lead singer of Radiohead, we’ve had to give deference to literally anything with his name on it. But his prior solo works have waded into the avant-garde and we’re entirely listenable in a casual way throughout. This has changed. This record is a masterwork. In fact, it demanded a beautiful short film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (“The Master”, “There Will Be Blood”) released on Netflix earlier in the year featuring no dialogue and Thom and his wife is choreographed love affair starting during a mundane commute. My favorite track is the most peaceful and introspective on the album.

Favorite song: Dawn Chorus, a song by Thom Yorke on Spotify

Fear Inoculum by TOOL on Spotify

It’s TOOL’s first album in 13 years. WHAT. It’s fantastic. Worth the wait? Hell no because that’s too long to wait for almost anything. There are people with Snapchat accounts that weren’t alive when “10,000 Days” came out (2006). 728,000,000 people (presumably, all TOOL fans) died since their last album. I can’t, in good conscience, condone the deprivation of 3/4 of a billion people like that. But it’s SO good. This is metal for people that don’t like metal (I don’t really like metal).

Favorite song: Pneuma, a song by TOOL on Spotify

Screamer by Third Eye Blind on Spotify

I may be literally this bands only fan still paying attention, but I don’t care. They’re still writing fantastic tracks. This was one of my heavy-hitter bands in high school. I learned every song from their first two albums on the guitar. Then I stopped paying attention for like 13 years. In 2016, I ran across a new single by the band and went in with a lot of trepidation. Most bands from your high school years should probably leave it there. There's nothing worse than a band desperately trying to stay relevant with weak ass releases well beyond their shelf life (cough Goo Goo Dolls –– They've put out 4 albums in the last 10 years. 🤦‍♂️) But then I heard Third Eye Blind's pro-Black Lives Matter track “Cop vs. Phone Girl, a song by Third Eye Blind on Spotify” released in 2016. Go back and listen to that one. It's not only catchy as hell, but it's got a gut punch of a message about how shitty is it to be a well-meaning black student in a white-dominated power structure that's supposed to be a safe place like school.

Well 2019’s “Screamer” doesn’t disappoint either. It’s all the same energy and hooks of the band’s early sound with an updated feel and sensibility that still feels like a relevant rock album. All the same things you came to Third Eye for in the past is right here waiting for you on “Screamer”. I know I’m gonna get some flack for this one, but…shut up.

Favorite song: Ways, a song by Third Eye Blind on Spotify Bonus points if you catch the “Outside Lands” ref.

i,i by Bon Iver on Spotify

Short review for people who know how to pronounce the name correctly: It’s a Bon Iver record. Listen to it.

Longer review: It’s pronounced “Bone ee-VAIR” based on the French bon hiver, meaning “good winter”. If this is news to you, here’s a nugget from an interview where the main figure in the band explains it:

When I was living up north I wrote a letter. I’d come across a story about this Alaskan town that the people, the first snow of every year, they come out of their houses and gather in town square. They hug and kiss each other and they say “Bon Iver.” I was like, “whatever that is, that’s cool!” … Then I found out how it’s spelled and it was sort of disappointing. I didn’t like how it looked. It didn’t have any emotion. Looking at it didn’t make any sense. I wanted to look at it and feel something. It was sort of a compromise. I sorta wanted it to be like “Bon Iverre,” sort of like how I saw it, but that didn’t look good either, so I just decided to chop off the “h.” Bon Iver | Pitchfork

OK, now that you’re caught up. I guess you haven’t been paying attention, but Justin Vernon or Bon Iver (DBA) is one of the luminaries of the music industry. This grammy-winning dude-band has collaborated with Kanye, Jay-Z, James Blake, Travis $cott, Poliça, Ani DiFranco, Vince Staples, Eminem, Bruce Hornsby and more. But if you need me to explain any of this to you, do yourself a favor and go back and listen to his other 3 studio albums. Every one of them is treasure.

Favorite Song: Hey, Ma, a song by Bon Iver on Spotify This song makes the top 5 of all the tracks he’s released.

MUSIC - Honorable Mentions

Amyl and The Sniffers by Amyl and The Sniffers on Spotify

Two Hands by Big Thief on Spotify

I vs I by Alex Ebert on Spotify

Face Stabber by Thee Oh Sees on Spotify

Infest The Rats’ Nest by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard on Spotify

MOVIES

Hail Satan? (Hulu)

JustWatch

Hilarious look at a group trying to make Free Speech really free.

youtube

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Duh. Also I got low-key obsessed with cults after I watched this.

MONOS

Incredible Spanish language drama about child soldiers in South America. Great acting by unknowns.

youtube

Green Book -Duh

Duh. Won an Best Picture.

Parasite

Duh. Won Best Picture.

Joker

Duh. Won life.

Greener Grass

JustWatch

The weirdest movie I saw all year. Bizarre and hilarious. Written by the two actresses who star.

Apollo 11

INCREDIBLE documentary about the first moon landing mission featuring a ton of footage I’d never seen and assembled into such a magnificent narrative. You feel like it’s happening in real-time today. The last time mankind was united around one hope.

youtube

SHOWS

The OA - Season 2 (Netflix)

This was one of the most beautiful creations I’ve seen. Epic followup to the first season which seemed like an impossible act to follow. Netflix canned the show, but there’s still hope it will get a resurrection through another venue.

Watchmen (HBO)

This is a sequel to the critically acclaimed graphic novel from the late 80s. You should read the novel first. As stated two sentences ago, this is a sequel set 34 years after the events of the novel.

The Boys (Amazon)

This is the first realistic superhero story. Why have we always assumed that those with superior or supernatural powers would be intrinsically good and seek to served mankind? Regular humans don’t even act like that toward each other. In this world the soops are like paid athletes and are secretly total pricks. Well made and begging for a second season.

Chernobyl (HBO)

Haven’t seen this? What is wrong with you? It’s in the top 5 highest rated shows of all time on IMDB. One thing I’ll note is that it did a good job separating the characterization of the soviet people from the soviet government. The everyday soviet people in the story came out looking like heroes while the government lived up to its reputation. It made me a lot more curious about soviet history which has led me to other movies, books and Wikipedia rabbit holes. Watch this for the historical value, at a minimum. It’s not as gory as you might be afraid it is.

Love Death + Robots (Netflix)

I love sci-fi and I love weird animation so this just brought it home for me. The episodes are often short and sort of feel like Twilight Zone episodes, each with their own mini narrative or moral lesson. Each episode is made by a different creator or team, so the variety is part of the curb appeal. Great binge material.

#lateMusicReviews musicReviews

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reneeacaseyfl · 5 years

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Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

It’s hard to believe that the computer graphics conference Siggraph is celebrating its 46th birthday this year, but the annual event certainly doesn’t show any signs of middle age. Held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Siggraph 2019 is all about the future of 2D and 3D digital worlds, attracting everyone from luminaries in pre-rendered CG to budding AR developers and VR artists.

Siggraph’s exhibition area opens today, adding to educational sessions that have been in progress since this weekend, and an “experiences” area that opened yesterday. I had the opportunity to attend the show’s official media preview and go hands-on with a bunch of this year’s most exciting innovations; here’s a photo tour of some of the best things I saw and tried.

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

There’s no shortage of sophisticated mixed reality hardware at Siggraph, but I was most impressed by a piece of software that really demonstrated VR’s educational and experiential potential. Christopher Evans, Paul Huston, Wes Bunn, and Elijah Dixson exhibited Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR, an app that recreates the world-famous Sistine Chapel within the Unreal Engine, then lets you experience all of its artwork in ways that are impossible for tourists at the real site.

The app begins with a modestly impressive ground-level recreation of the Chapel. Epic’s Unreal Engine lets you see realistic marble barriers and ceramic floor tiles if you look closely, and you’ll have no trouble making out the individual paintings as you approach them, though you won’t confuse the faux wall curtains or other elements with reality. Even so, Il Divino’s developers provide an impressive audio and lightly visual guided tour through the space, making the most of an interface that’s largely about teleporting from place to place within a large box, and looking at art.

But everything changes when the app opens up access to a mechanical lifter and wooden scaffolding that elevate you to the Chapel’s ceiling. All of the sudden, you can control your up-close views of the paintings, and experience Michelangelo’s masterpiece Creation of Adam from the same perspective as the painter himself. The developers use VR — including your own fatigue after a comparatively brief session — to suggest how difficult the act of painting for hours (and months) on end must have been, while offering insights into the pacing and order of the works.

There are thousands of eye-melting VR experiences out there, and an equal number of dull “educational” ones. Il Divino succeeds because it’s hyper-realistic in a different way, using virtual reality to both simulate and go past the original experience, enabling a form of education that feels more open to personal exploration. It will be available for free later this year from SistineVR.com.

Cinema, group and individual

It wouldn’t be Siggraph without an exhibition of computer-generated movies, and the VR Theater at this year’s show is worth seeing. Fifty guests at a time are welcomed into the venue to see a collection of five different realtime CG shorts developed by separate studios, most notably including Disney’s happy cartoon A Kite’s Tale, Faber Courtial’s impressively realistic space odyssey 2nd Step, and Baobab’s charming interactive Bonfire. Below, Disney’s Bruce Wright welcomes early visitors to the VR Theater.

Once inside, viewers are seated in chairs with individual VR headsets, headphones, and two controllers, collectively experiencing the five shorts over a roughly one-hour session. A bank of high-end PCs sits in the center of the room, powering and synchronizing the experiences, though there’s little ongoing sense of collaboration between participants. Instead, it’s a VR theater where everyone’s watching pretty much the same thing, albeit from whatever angle a specific head is on, and — in some cases — with differences attributable to the shorts’ interactive elements.

In a smaller room elsewhere at Siggraph, New York-based Parallux is offering a more clearly shared experience. The company has developed a short story for group viewing that’s akin to watching a Broadway show with friends, but you could be watching it from anywhere.

Here, Parallux CEO Sebastian Herscher gestures towards a table surrounded by Magic Leap AR headsets, which seated viewers use to watch Mary and the Monster, a unique spin on Mary Shelley’s creation of the Frankenstein story. Strong voice acting and solid motion capture bring the animated experience to life within a diorama-like stage setting. Magic Leap wearers can use their controllers as magnifiers to zoom in on the individual actors, akin to opera glasses.

Each viewer sees the play-like performance appearing on the same table, and it’s synchronized across all of the headsets at once; it can also be watched using VR headsets, and can be scaled to fairly large local or remote audiences. This is a glimpse into what could be the future of plays, experienced holographically and from any seat in the house you prefer.

Apart from the examples above, most of the VR displays I saw at Siggraph were focused on individual experiences. One interesting exhibit, MIT Media Lab’s Deep Reality, used live heart rate, electrodermal, and brain activity monitoring to create an intensely personal relaxation and reflection experience. After someone lays down and dons a VR headset, Deep Reality uses “almost imperceptible light flickering, sound pulsations, and slow movements of underwater 3D creatures [to] reflect the internal state of the viewer.” Who wouldn’t love to kick back and relax to something so personally attenuated at home?

Next-generation AR eyewear

Two of Siggraph’s most notable hardware exhibits were Nvidia’s new prescription AR eyewear and foveated AR headset — both still in research stages, but available to test with prototypes. The prescription AR glasses offered a vision-corrected, see-through AR display solution, including a demo of how the lenses let viewers see optically sharp projections that appear to float within the real world.

In the prototype form, the glasses had small, clear ribbons that displayed projected virtual images such as colored bottles or an Nvidia logo in front of the lenses. They didn’t require cables, and were as lightweight as modern, inexpensive plastic glasses are today.

A separate demo showed off Nvidia’s work on a Foveated AR Display, which the company suggests will use gaze tracking to enable multi-layer depth in AR images. In the image below, you can see how a specific small gaze area tracked by the headset becomes sharper to your eye as the background becomes softer and less detailed.

Nvidia is touting the Foveated AR Display as a “dynamic fusion of foveal and peripheral display,” and releasing a research paper to accompany the project. It’s unclear when the technology will actually appear in a shipping product, but interesting to see Nvidia diving deeper into the AR world at this stage.

Next-generation haptics and immersion

Some of the other innovations at Siggraph are wild, if not crazy. For instance, Taipei Tech is showing off LiquidMask, a briefcase-sized face haptic solution that lets your face feel hot and cold liquid sensations in VR.

LiquidMask can deliver feedback and temperatures between 68 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, potentially useful for underwater VR experiences — assuming, of course, that you’re willing to hook yourself up to something as large as this to experience those sensations.

Another company was taking steps towards a very different type of future with a gigantic prosthetic tail — something that one wouldn’t have expected to find at Siggraph. The tail can be used to augment someone’s existing sense of balance with a third stabilizing limb, or disrupt their balance for exercise or other purposes.

The prototype tail uses pneumatics, relying on a separate cabled air tank for motion, so there’s no need to worry about an imminent attack by The Lizard or Doctor Octopus. If it can be made portable (and quiet), it might wind up being useful for people with physical disabilities or motor limitations.

More small steps for Magic Leap

Magic Leap is offering two main demos at Siggraph’s “experience” area. Long lines were forming to try Mica, a demo of the company’s AI assistant, which presently can’t do much. Mica looks like a pixie-haired human woman, and at some point, will supposedly be able to speak with and guide headset wearers.

In the demo, you can look at her as she looks back at you, then silently follow her gestures to make an artistic collage together. It’s not particularly exciting stuff at this stage, but in a world where digital assistants such as Siri can spend years delivering hit-and-miss experiences, Magic Leap may well beat Apple to delivering a more compelling, fully-formed alternative.

Magic Leap’s other new demo, Undersea, lets users interact with a nearly photorealistic coral reef that appears within any room you choose, and a picture-sized portal window into the ocean on the wall. In addition to letting you walk around and view a piece of coral and small collection of fish, the demo lets you hold out your hand to generate bubbles and hold a fish in your palm, albeit with so-so tracking.

While the Siggraph demo is designed for a two-minute experience (and isn’t especially compelling), a full version of Undersea with more settings and depth has just been released for Magic Leap users. Regardless of how many or few of the $2,300 Magic Leap headsets have been sold, it’s clear at Siggraph that the company is working to actively push the platform forward.

Best of the rest

One of Siggraph’s greatest strengths is the diversity of computer-generated art it brings into focus for attendees. You mightn’t love all of it, but even some of the most basic concepts are thought-provoking.

John Wong’s RuShi interactive art exhibit above uses your birthdate and birth hour to generate, through some unspecified mechanism, a moving and colorful AI-based data flow that is presented on the central screen while prior users’ data appears on adjacent screens. It’s supposed to make you consider the amount of data about you that’s already being processed by AI in the real world, and whether that processing has any value.

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

Last but not least, David Shorey’s booth demonstrated the use of 3D printers to create real-world physical clothes that looked like they were straight out of video games and fantasy settings, including dragon scale-like fabrics that could be used for cosplay. His techniques yielded an incredible collection of different textures, surface treatments, and end products that look set to merge the worlds of CG and real-world fashion.

The future’s already here

My biggest takeaway from Siggraph 2019 is that the CG future some of us were expecting a decade or more ago is already here — if you know where to look. VR and AR aren’t ubiquitous at this point, but it’s obvious from this show that there are lots of smart people working to evolve CG from its early 2D roots into genuinely immersive, interactive 3D.

Attendees could spend nearly a week at Siggraph without fully grasping everything that’s underway with huge companies such as Disney and tiny groups of researchers across the world. Scenes like the one below, where a group of people are all sharing a computer-generated entertainment experience in VR, have become table stakes for VR as of 2019.

The question is “where does it go from here,” and there’s not just one good answer. If anything, Siggraph shows how many directions CG is heading in, and the reason is simple: hugely talented and creative people are now heavily invested in the futures of these technologies. At this point, the challenge is to polish and spread their ideas to as many people as possible, bringing what’s currently in the Los Angeles Convention Center out to everyone’s homes and public spaces.

Credit: Source link

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velmaemyers88 · 5 years

Text

Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

Cinema, group and individual

Next-generation AR eyewear

Next-generation haptics and immersion

More small steps for Magic Leap

Best of the rest

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

The future’s already here

Credit: Source link

The post Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

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weeklyreviewer · 5 years

Text

Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG

Biggest wow moment: Il Divino – Sistine VR

Cinema, group and individual

Next-generation AR eyewear

Next-generation haptics and immersion

More small steps for Magic Leap

Best of the rest

A Siggraph-wide new focus on Adaptive Technology includes multiple Microsoft adaptive controllers, a touchscreen presentation of different adaptive technologies, and 11 sessions/talks on the subject.

The future’s already here

Credit: Source link

The post Siggraph 2019 offers a sneak peek into what’s next for AR, VR, and CG appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

0 notes