A quick, commentary-lite version…

Joseph Conrad wrote a science-fiction novel.

“Young and Restless Never Gets Old” — Dennis Lim in the Times on Gregg Araki.

Big tech news this week: Google announces that it won’t support the H.264 codec and the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in favor of its own WebM codec. It’s all very complicated and tech-y, but Google’s argument is that they’re supporting “open standards” by backing a codec without royalty issues. Problem is, Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE both use the H.264 format and the short-term victor is likely to be Adobe, whose Flash will be required to convert video encoded in H.264. (But not on iOS devices.) More from people who can explain it better than me. (I’m waiting for Koo to weigh in on what this means for web videomakers.)

Good Hollywood Reporter article on Netflix, it’s business model, and the status of its studio content deals.

Cindy Sherman profiled in The Guardian.

In the London Review of Books, Slavoj Zizek on Wikileaks.

Long Rick Moody interview in Used Furniture Review.

Finally, there was a revolution in Tunisia… and Twitter and Wikileaks had something to do with it. And, following this week’s referendum, a new country is likely being formed out of South Sudan. The Satellite Sentinel Project, a partnership between various NGO’s, including the George Clooney-founded Not On Our Watch, used commercial satellites to monitor the election. (Said Clooney: “”You can go on Google Earth and Google my house. I thought, if that’s the way it is and they’re gonna be able to Google my house, then people who are committing war crimes, specifically the government of Sudan, should be able to enjoy the same level of celebrity that I do. These people are public figures, and we’re gonna take their pictures.”) And, according to the New York Times, the Stuxnet virus is likely a U.S./Israeli-designed cyberwar project designed to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program.