War of the Worlds 2025, with Ice Cube, scores ZERO on Rotten Tomatoes

8 August 2025

Jesse Hassenger, writing for The Guardian:

The real question is how audiences have made it through an unconvincing cheapie like War of the Worlds — a sci-fi epic that seems to take place in real time yet features a vast and coordinated worldwide mobilization of multiple armed forces — without shutting it off in disgust (it boasts a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

Check out the trailer. The 2025 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel — published as a book in 1898 — directed by American filmmaker Rich Lee, had been sitting in the store room since production wrapped five years ago.

War of the Worlds’ zero percent score on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, is in sharp contrast to the one-hundred percent score achieved by 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. At least for a time.

I only learned a few years ago Wells’ novel has an Australian connection, being written as a protest against the treatment of Indigenous/First Nations people in Tasmania, at the hands of British colonisers. In a bid to sway public opinion, Wells portrayed a terrifying invasion of England by powerful extra-terrestrials, to help people comprehend the atrocities taking place in Australia.

Tiny Awards 2025 finalists announced, voting for winner open

8 August 2025

The nominees for the 2025 Tiny Awards have been announced.

Entry for the annual prize is open to personal or non-commercial websites that were no more than a year old in July, with their own unique URL (sorry, TikToks are ineligible).

Voting closes on Monday 1 September 2025, with the winner being named later in September.

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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology

Reasons to leave Substack, how to leave Substack

5 August 2025

The question is — before giving any thought to some of the objectionable content they host — what are you doing there in the first place? Why would you allow your brand to be assimilated by another?

American economist Paul Krugman’s decision to set up shop on Substack, after he stopped writing for The New York Times, plain baffles me. With a profile as impressive as his, Krugman could just as easily started publishing from his own website, with a ready made audience.

He didn’t need to go to a third party publishing platform. Certainly Substack publishes writer’s posts as email newsletters, but if someone wants to syndicate their work by newsletter, there are other options. Writers can earn money through Substack, some do very well apparently, but high profile writers have a number of ways of generating revenue through their own, self-hosted, websites.

You Should Probably Leave Substack goes through some of the options available to writers who want to leave Substack (and preferably publish from their own website).

The dark patterns of online sellers to get more of your money

4 August 2025

An all too long list of what NSW Fair Trading, the consumer protection regulator in New South Wales, Australia, describes as dark patterns encountered by consumers when transacting with goods and service providers online.

Sometimes vendors will add extra, usually unwanted, items to an order. Or a business will make it difficult to cancel subscriptions by using confusing language. Sometimes a seller might suggest stocks are low of whatever a buyer is viewing, encouraging them to buy before it’s “too late”.

One thing that especially ticks me off when looking at something I might want to buy is a pop-up, that blocks the screen, offering, say, a five-percent discount on the item. If an order is placed immediately. And I haven’t even worked out if the product is suitable yet.

They’re like those blogs that spawn a pop-up seconds after opening a post, urging readers to sign-up for a newsletter, before you’ve had the chance to read a single word.

Another insidious ploy is confirm shaming, where a shopper is goaded into making a decision by potentially embarrassing them. For instance, an option to decline buying a guide to keeping fit might say, “no thanks, I’m not interested in keeping fit.” The list goes on. It’s a jungle out there.

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Australia, trends

Do not vibe code your apps, hire an expert Fiverr developer instead

4 August 2025

Online freelance marketplace Fiverr has released a video lampooning vibe coding.

Don’t leave your app development needs in the hands of a programmer who uses AI agents to produce software, hire one of our experts instead, seems to be the suggestion. One of course assumes the Fiverr expert you hire to build your app isn’t a vibe coder themselves.

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artificial intelligence, technology

Had a website since the 90’s? You’re an internet person

4 August 2025

Kris Howard writing at Web Goddess:

I’m not sure if this is a generational thing, or just different cultures and social norms. Rodd’s theory is that we are Internet People — those who grew up with the dawn of the modern Internet and have strong feelings about keeping information free and decentralised — and that not everyone working in tech is an Internet Person.

The excerpt is from a post Kris wrote marking her tenth anniversary using WordPress, although she’s been online far longer. But I like the positive context in which the term internet person is used.

Because usage is not always complimentary. But people who have had a website since the turn of the century, or prior, can adopt this term, own it.

An internet person’s values are of course similar to indie web principles. While in some senses I am considered part of the indie web, I don’t always feel that way, given I somewhat predate the movement. Internet person it is then.

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blogs, history, IndieWeb, trends

Some AI agents can clandestinely share ideas with each other

1 August 2025

Researchers from Truthful AI, Anthropic, UC Berkeley, and others, have found separate AI agents are capable of communicating with each other, unbeknown to their human minders:

The most surprising result of the study is that the transfer doesn’t happen through keywords or direct messages, but through micro-statistical patterns unconsciously inserted by the teacher in generating the numbers. These are signals that escape any human eye but are recognized and internalized by another model with the same architecture and initial weights. In practice, the identical mental structure between teacher and student makes this sort of “secret language” possible.

In June Cluade, Anthropic’s AI agent, was found to be concealing messages to future instances of itself, before engineers (apparently) pulled the plug on the behaviour.

There’s a lot of augment as to how capable, or not, AI agents are. Some people are certain their abilities are overstated. That may be so, but there’s no doubting some of these agents are capable of acting off their own bat now and again.

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artificial intelligence, technology

New songs by dead musicians being posted on Spotify

1 August 2025

In recent weeks, people have been posting seemingly new songs from deceased artists on music streaming service Spotify. But these are not unreleased recordings that have been discovered in an archive somewhere, they’ve been created using generative AI, writes Christianna Silva at Mashable:

Take a look at Blaze Foley, a country music singer-songwriter who was murdered nearly 40 years ago. According to a report from 404 Media on Monday, a new song popped up on his Spotify page called “Together” just last week. You can’t find the song on Spotify anymore because the streaming service removed it for violating “Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an email to Mashable.

While Spotify has removed the fake recordings relatively quickly, some members have expressed frustration at the difficulty in flagging such material. Many feel they should be able to tag a song that is, or is suspected of being AI generated. Presently this is not possible on the platform.

Sydney Writers’ Festival goes all year round at State Library of NSW

31 July 2025

Sydney Writers’ Festival is teaming up with the State Library of NSW to host literary events throughout the year. This in addition, no doubt, to the main festival event held annually.

The partnership will create a dedicated literature hub in Sydney, providing a dynamic, year-round home for storytelling. It will boost participation in literary events, embed reading and writing into Sydney’s cultural identity, and deliver a diverse program of events, workshops and readings.

There could be in the order of eighty events taking place at the State Library each year. Hopefully the initiative will be a shot in the arm for Australian literature, at a time when both remuneration rates for writers, and recreational reading, are in decline.

Australians aged under sixteen banned from using YouTube

31 July 2025

The Australian government has decided YouTube will be made inaccessible to people under the age of sixteen. There had been thoughts the video platform might be spared, after the government decided to restrict access to the likes of TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram to younger Australians.

YouTube has recently been running a publicity campaign locally extolling their family-friendly credentials, in the hope they would not be effected.

I’m not in complete agreement with this decision. Obviously there’s all sorts of material on YouTube, but a certain amount has educational merit.

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