Requiem for building in public Music video workflow + Prompts: One song, a simple story, singers across 4 locations, a full edit, captions burned in. Models used: Suno for the track, Seedance 2.5 for the story footage, MiniMax H3 for the lip synced singing, faster-whisper for word timing, Claude to edit, ffmpeg to burn captions. THE SONG (Suno) Short lyrics, fast beat, vocals on second 0. Long slow AI songs fall apart because the model has nothing to hide behind. Fire small batches, 2 clips at a time, and listen before firing more. Write every new attempt from zero. Stacking "less this, no that" onto the last try feeds the model your confusion and hands it back. One adjective moves everything. I put "soft" in a prompt once and the whole vocal switched to a woman. Remix prompt (paste into Suno style box): aggressive male rap, hard boom bap drums with fast energy, dark piano loop, deep male voice on every line including the hook, punchy mix, vocals start immediately at 0:00, no instrumental intro Lyrics: [Hook] It's just this thing I feel When I wanna steal It's just this thing I feel When I wanna steal [Verse 1] Yo, I see you on X, all over my feed You're building in public, I'm watching you build Your MRR chart looks like a hockey stick I screenshot it sometimes, that's normal right [Hook] It's just this thing I feel When I wanna steal [Verse 2] I learned a lot from you I think I deserve it too So I copied everything from you Same landing page, same pricing, same font And now you blocked me What happened bro I was your biggest fan [Hook] It's just this thing I feel When I wanna steal Tip: short lyrics, fast beat, vocals at 0:00, fresh prompt every round. THE STORY Think old MTV. The video is the movie this song is the soundtrack of. Keep the plot dead simple, something you can follow with the sound off. Mine: a broke founder copies a guy, dreams he is rich, wakes up, sees he got blocked, spits his cereal at the screen. That is all of it. Tip: if you cannot explain the story with zero words, cut it down. THE STORY FOOTAGE (Seedance 2.5) Seedance made the apartment story as one 30 second clip from reference images. Two things kill Seedance: Too many object interactions in one shot, and timestamps like "0 to 4 seconds" which it reads as a time lapse and speeds through. plain shots labelled "Shot 1, Shot 2" at natural speed will do the trick For the hard beat at the end, a guy waking up, eating cereal, seeing a screen, then spitting milk on the lens, text alone will not hold it. I built a 3 panel storyboard image and fed it as a reference. In the prompt you tag that image at the exact moment it happens, tell it the board reads left to right, describe it once, and move on. The rule that saved it: chronological order, tag each image where it belongs in time, say everything a single time, never repeat a thing. Repeat one detail twice and the model fixates on it and breaks the shot. Tip: for anything complex, hand it a storyboard picture and describe it once, in order. THE SINGING (MiniMax H3) H3 is the model that lip syncs to your actual track and keeps it. Seedance cannot, it regenerates its own audio. In H3 you attach your audio slice, set it to copy, and the mouth follows your real song. H3 caps around 15 seconds a clip and the song is 43. So I cut the song into 4 windows of about 11 seconds and generated a shot for each window. Then I did it across 4 locations, subway, warehouse, empty office, street. That is a 4 by 4 grid, 16 clips. I added 8 more where the whole crew sings and dances. Around 24 short singing clips to cover a 43 second song. You are building a bank of clips to cut from. Small H3 rules that matter: the audio slice must be a touch shorter than the clip, name every speaker, and compress the slice so there are no silent gaps for the model to fill with invented sound. Tip: chop the song into sub 15 second windows, shoot each shot per window, build a clip bank. THE EDIT (Claude) This is where most people lose hours. I made editing fast by doing the prep once. Every clip gets normalized to the same size and frame rate up front. After that each edit is a single ffmpeg pass with no re-encoding loops. The base layer is the song. Every clip's own audio is thrown out. To keep mouths in sync I gave the editor the math: each clip knows which second of the song its first frame belongs to, so to place it at song second S you trim it to start at S minus that offset. I also handed over word level timing from a whisper pass so cuts could land on real lyric moments. The rules I gave: nothing stays on screen too long, pace every cut to the lyric and the beat and what is on screen, never put two shots from the same location back to back, keep it heavy on story B-roll, never reuse a frame. If the cut feels like a metronome you failed. If it feels random you failed. Then the actual move. I did not ask for one perfect edit. I gave 7 agents the same rules and the same clip bank and told each to cut the whole thing its own way with a different emphasis. 6 came out flat. 1 landed around 90 percent. I finished that one by hand in CapCut. Tip: give strict rules plus the timing data, generate many full edits, keep the best and finish it yourself. CAPTIONS (ffmpeg) Burned straight from a styled subtitle file with ffmpeg. Seconds, not the long render a motion tool costs. The words come from the real lyrics, the timing comes from a whisper pass on the audio, and it highlights the word being sung. Big, thick, one pop color on the active word. Tip: real lyrics for the words, whisper for the timing, burn with ffmpeg. The AI did not make this video. I directed it, generated in volume, and kept the best takes. That is the whole game right now.

Make your doodle Diary Cover ❤️ By using @ImagineArt_X Prompt - Create a premium hand-drawn character personality sketchbook page for FUTURE VIBES AI. Use the uploaded reference photo as the STRICT facial and identity reference. Preserve the exact face, hairstyle, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, smile, skin tone, and overall appearance. Do not change her identity. Large clean white sketchbook page with realistic pencil outlines, watercolor shading, colored marker rendering, fashion illustration style, subtle ink sketches, handwritten notes, doodles, coffee stains, paper texture, and artist workspace aesthetic. TOP CENTER: Large handwritten title: FUTURE VIBES AI LEFT SIDE: Large expressive portrait laughing naturally. CENTER TOP: Full-body fashion illustration wearing a premium futuristic creator outfit: • Cropped black leather jacket • White fitted crop top • High-waisted cargo pants • Chunky sneakers • Smartwatch • Wireless earbuds • Futuristic cross-body bag Holding a smartphone while taking a mirror selfie. Speech Bubble: "CONTENT IS MY SUPERPOWER" TOP RIGHT: Second stylish outfit: Oversized hoodie, cargo joggers, sneakers, camera hanging from shoulder. Speech Bubble: "AI CREATOR" RIGHT SIDE: Third fashion pose wearing a modern creator outfit with denim jacket, black top, cargo pants, white sneakers. Speech Bubble: "ALWAYS CREATING" BOTTOM LEFT: Portrait smiling confidently. Speech Bubble: "BIG DREAMS" BOTTOM CENTER: Thinking pose holding a smartphone. Speech Bubble: "WHAT SHOULD I CREATE NEXT?" BOTTOM RIGHT: Working on a laptop surrounded by camera gear, microphone, keyboard, coffee mug, headphones and notebook. Caption: EDIT • CREATE • REPEAT BOTTOM RIGHT CORNER: Cute chibi version of the same character holding a smartphone and a tiny camera. Speech Bubble: "LET'S GO VIRAL!" AROUND THE PAGE: Small doodles: ❤️ Camera 📱 Smartphone 🎬 Film Slate 🤖 AI ✨ Sparkles ☕ Coffee 📈 Growth Arrow 🎧 Headphones 💻 Laptop 📸 Camera Lens Small handwritten personality notes: • AI Enthusiast • Content Creator • Story Teller • Creative Mind • Trend Hunter • Tech Lover • Coffee Powered • Future Focused • Positive Energy COLOR PALETTE: White Black Silver Electric Blue Purple Soft Beige STYLE: Ultra-detailed fashion illustration, luxury sketchbook, premium concept art, pencil sketch combined with watercolor rendering, designer portfolio page, luxury lifestyle aesthetic, Vogue fashion illustration quality, clean white background, realistic paper texture, soft shadows, highly detailed facial likeness, elegant line art, premium Pinterest aesthetic, 8K.

Mary Austin and Freddie Mercury: A Bond Beyond Fame Mary Austin was just nineteen years old when she met the man the world would later know as Freddie Mercury. At the time, however, he was simply Farrokh Bulsara—a twenty-three-year-old art student with little money, big dreams, and a quiet nature that hid the confidence he would one day display on the world's biggest stages. Their story began in 1969 at Biba, a fashionable London boutique where Mary worked. Life had never been easy for her. Raised in Fulham by deaf parents, she left school at fifteen to help support her family. She was practical, hardworking, and far removed from the glamorous world she would eventually enter. Farrokh often visited the shop. He admired the clothes but could rarely afford them. For months, he returned again and again, gathering the courage to speak to Mary. The future frontman of Queen—who would later command stadiums full of fans—was too nervous to ask one young woman on a date. Finally, on September 5, 1969, his twenty-third birthday, he made his move. Mary did not even realize he considered their outing a date. To her, it felt like two friends spending time together. Yet that evening marked the beginning of a relationship that would shape both of their lives. The two quickly grew close and, within months, moved into a small apartment near Kensington Market. Money was scarce. Mary worked to help cover expenses while Freddie focused on music. As he pursued what seemed like an unlikely dream with a struggling band that would eventually become Queen, Mary stood firmly by his side. When others questioned whether he would ever succeed, Mary never did. Queen released its debut album in 1973, but success did not arrive overnight. Reviews were mixed, finances remained tight, and the band's future was uncertain. Through it all, Mary remained Freddie's strongest supporter. That Christmas, Freddie surprised her with a gift. Inside a series of nested boxes was a small jade ring. When Mary asked which hand she should wear it on, Freddie told her to place it on her left ring finger. Then he proposed. Mary accepted. For a time, it seemed they would spend their lives together. But as Queen's popularity grew, Freddie found himself confronting truths about his identity that he had long struggled to understand. By 1976, he finally opened up to Mary and told her he believed he was bisexual. After listening carefully, Mary responded with honesty. She told him she felt he was actually gay. The conversation changed the course of their relationship. Their engagement ended, and so did their romantic partnership. Yet instead of drifting apart, they forged a bond unlike any other. Freddie arranged for Mary to live nearby and ensured she remained an important part of his life. Although they were no longer a couple, Freddie never considered her simply an ex-girlfriend. He often described her as his soulmate. Many of the people Freddie dated found it difficult to understand Mary's place in his life. Yet he repeatedly made it clear that no one could replace her. In his eyes, she remained the closest person to him. He even wrote "Love of My Life" with Mary in mind, immortalizing their connection in one of Queen's most beloved songs. As the years passed, both moved forward. Freddie became one of the most famous performers on the planet. Mary built a life of her own, married, and had two sons. Still, they remained deeply connected. Mary knew the person behind the fame. She remembered the young dreamer before the stadiums, the records, and the worldwide recognition. She remembered Farrokh. When Freddie was diagnosed with HIV in the late 1980s, he kept the news private from most of the world. Mary was among the few who knew. As his health declined, she stayed close, visiting him regularly at Garden Lodge, his home in Kensington. On November 24, 1991, Freddie Mercury passed away at the age of forty-five. Before his death, however, he entrusted Mary with one final responsibility. Freddie did not want his grave to become a public attraction. He feared that his final resting place would turn into a spectacle for fans and tourists. To prevent that from happening, he asked Mary to take his ashes somewhere private after his cremation. She agreed. According to reports, Mary kept the ashes safely in her home for nearly two years before carrying out his wishes. Then, one day, she quietly left Garden Lodge and scattered them at a location known only to her and Freddie. To this day, she has never revealed where that place is. Countless theories have emerged over the years. Some believe his ashes were scattered in London, while others suggest Switzerland, Zanzibar, or even the grounds of Garden Lodge itself. Mary has never confirmed any of these claims. Her silence remains one of the last promises she made to him. Freddie's will further demonstrated the depth of his trust. He left Mary half of his estate, including Garden Lodge. Over time, her share became even more significant through the estate's arrangements. While some questioned why he left so much to a former fiancée, Freddie had long ago explained his reasoning. He once told Mary that if life had unfolded differently, she would have been his wife—and everything would have belonged to her anyway. For decades after his death, Garden Lodge remained filled with Freddie's belongings: his clothing, artwork, handwritten notes, treasured possessions, and even the piano associated with some of Queen's greatest music. In 2023, Mary made the difficult decision to auction nearly 1,500 of those items through Sotheby's. The collection attracted enormous global attention, with almost 140,000 visitors coming to view the memorabilia before the sale. For Mary, it was not simply about selling possessions. It was about closing a chapter that had remained open for more than thirty years. Yet one thing she refused to part with was the secret of Freddie's ashes. Over the years, Mary became the guardian of the private Freddie Mercury—the man behind the icon. Not the superstar who electrified Wembley Stadium, but the shy young artist who once wandered into a clothing shop hoping to find the courage to speak to her. Mary later said that losing Freddie felt much like losing a husband. Their relationship had survived every stage of life—success and struggle, joy and heartbreak, health and illness. What they shared never fit neatly into a single category. It began as love, evolved into friendship, and ultimately became something deeper than either. While romance ended, loyalty never did. Mary believed in Freddie before the world celebrated him. Freddie trusted Mary when he had everything to lose. And in the end, he placed his final wish in her hands. More than fifty years after they first met, people still wonder where Freddie Mercury's ashes rest. Mary Austin still refuses to say. Perhaps that enduring mystery is what makes their story so powerful. It reminds us that some relationships transcend labels, some bonds survive every change life brings, and some promises remain unbroken even after death. Some loves simply take a different form—and last forever.

A Tribute to the Heroes of September 11, 2001 #911# #WTC911# Courtesy of @JackMedia7 Friends, fellow Americans, and all who still feel that morning in their bones: We gather not to argue the past, but to remember the people who met it with courage. On September 11, 2001, ordinary men and women became the measure of a nation. Firefighters climbed into smoke while others ran out. Police officers held stairwells, directed the lost, and stayed until the buildings came down. EMS crews treated the wounded in the street. Civilians carried strangers down flight after flight of stairs. At the Pentagon, men and women pulled colleagues from fire and wreckage. We honor the nearly three thousand who died. We honor the first responders who never came home. We honor the recovery workers who labored in the pit for months. We honor the families who have carried an empty chair for twenty-five years. Their names are not a slogan. They are a debt. Courage that day was not complicated. It was a hand on a shoulder in a dark stairwell. It was a radio call into dust. It was a decision, in a few seconds, to put someone else’s life ahead of your own. As we remember, we also thank those who keep the record of that day in view so it is not reduced to a date on a calendar. Among them is Jack on X at @JackMedia7, and the 17PLUS WORLDWIDE TRUTH NETWORK at who continue to circulate footage, testimony, and remembrance of September 11 for people who refuse to look away. Let the tribute be simple and true: We will not forget the dead. We will not diminish the living who ran toward the fire. We will teach our children that heroism is not a speech. It is a choice made under falling steel. May God bless the heroes of September 11. May God comfort the families they left behind. And may we be worthy of the example they set. Forever grateful, Thank you. @JackMedia7 ~ DREAM MORE 9/11 TRUTH AT THE WORLD'S CONNECTION TO UNSTOPPABLE TRUTH AT 17PLUS WORLDWIDE TRUTH NETWORK AT

Every billboard in SF is about AI agents. Ours are about the humans. Warp took over the city with one message - bring back the builders and the dreamers. The best People leaders decide who a company becomes. They pick who gets hired, grow the people already there, and set the tone on the hardest days. None of them grew up dreaming about opening state tax accounts. We hand them that job anyway. Agents can do it now. The account opened, the form filed, the notice resolved before anyone knew it existed. What's left is the work that builds a company. Machines take the admin. People get the human parts back. It's Day 1.

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

Great essay from Sam Harris on the “last time” for everything (from Waking Up App) — transcribed by @bot Many here might not think highly of him any more, but he’s a clear thinker on many subjects — even if you don’t agree on politics. **Transcript — The Last Time (Sam Harris)** [0:00] I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course, there will come a day when you will die and then everything will have been done for the last time. [0:15] But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences, experiences that you surely take for granted now. If you're a parent, when is the last time you will pick up your child, or tuck her into bed, or read her a story? [0:36] Our youngest daughter still says, aminals instead of animals. And though I'm a stickler for words, I am not correcting her. Each one of those is priceless. Now thinking in this way lends a poignancy to everything, even to things that you don't like. Again, let's say you're a new parent and you're getting woken up several times a night by your baby. That's brutal, but there will be a last time. And knowing that can change your experience in the moment. There's something sweet even about this experience. It's possible that you will miss this. We do everything a finite number of times, and yet we tend to take even beautiful moments for granted. And the rest of the time we're just trying to get through stuff. You're just trying to get to the end of whatever experience you're having. tim urban, who writes this wonderful blog titled @WaitButWhy, often touches this topic. He actually publishes a poster which represents 90 years of life in weeks. Each line has 52 squares, and there are 90 lines on a single page. And the scale is frankly a little alarming to contemplate. Each week is a significant piece of 90 years, and you can put your finger on the current week in your life. You can see where you are, and then of course you realize you have no assurance of how many weeks you have left. Assuming that you have 90 years, certainly 90 good years, is generally not a safe assumption. What you can know, however, is that each time you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you will have done something the final time. And you will rarely know when that is. For instance, I used to love to ski, and I now haven't skied in well over a decade. Will I ever ski again? I have no idea. But I can assure you that the last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility that it might be the last time, right? That I might live for many, many more years, and yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski. When is the last time you swam in the ocean or went camping? When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk? As you go about your day today, consider, everything you're doing is like this. Everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life. On some level, everything is precious, and if it doesn't seem that way, I think you'll find that paying more attention can make it seem that way. Attention really is your true source of wealth, even more than time, right? Because you can waste time being distracted. So this is just to urge you to take a little more care. When you meet someone for the first time and you shake their hand, pay a little more attention. When you thank somebody for something, mean it a little more. Connect with your life. And mindfulness is the tool that allows you to do that, because the only alternative is to be lost in thought And every time you notice that you're lost, that you're distracted by a thought about the past or the future, and you come back, you are training your mind. And it may feel like an effort at first, but eventually it's like continually waking up from a dream. And ask yourself, how much effort does that take?

⏱️ ‘63 Maloni Kunawave with a spectacular try down the left hand side off some smart play by William Havili 2️⃣9️⃣ Tasman Mako 🦈 1️⃣7️⃣ Southland Stags 🦌 #HiluxNPC# #OurPassionRunsDeep# #FinzUp# 🦈