Is Laufey jazz?
— Adam Neely’s fascinating breakdown of her musical influences, appeal to young audiences, and the modern state of jazz #Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival
— open until Halloween, explore a spooky multiplayer world where a thousand ghosts have shared their pumpkin designs #The Great Zelle Pool Scam
— yet another Zelle horror story, this time with scammers hacking contractors’ email accounts to solicit payments from their customers #Control Panel for Twitter
— browser add-on that reverses many of the most annoying changes under Musk, including yesterday’s removal of link titles #31 Days of Halloween
— for the ninth year, Laura E. Hall’s popup daily newsletter of spooky stuff is posting every day of October #Rolling Stone’s oral history of School of Rock
— charming inside story of making the movie from the cast and crew #The Curse of Dialup World
— inside story of a wildly mismanaged dialup ISP in the late ’90s , the billing process alone made me scream via Hacker News #Songs That Stop on the Word “Stop”
— Todd in the Shadows made a perfect supercut, over 30 minutes long! via @peterme #Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning
In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by anybody, ever.”
Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody, “Beat It.”
This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.
This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.