Now living with multiple sclerosis, Six rants about the masturbation film distributors won’t touch and the money mystery behind his horror hit
Fifteen years ago, Dutch film-maker Tom Six succeeded where almost everybody fails – particularly in the world of horror. He actually shocked people. No self-respecting sophisticate admits to being shocked, of course, and no horror connoisseur will admit to being really and truly horrified. But Six really did freak audiences out with his extreme exploitation nightmare The Human Centipede, the first of a trilogy. It was a grenade in the faces of prim conformists, and also those badass horror fans who thought they’d seen it all.
The “human centipede” of the title is created by a sadistic surgeon who imprisons three young people in a basement and sews them together mouth-to-anus as a vivisectional experiment. Six himself had been a director on the original Dutch TV show Big Brother that started the global franchise, and it was easy to see how his movie masterwork was intended as a satire on consumerist voyeurism and cruelty. Or maybe it just sprang from the same dark creative place that gave birth to the TV phenomenon of the age.
Continue reading... --- ## [‘I feel like I’m at war’: are we losing the battle against machine-made music?](https://www.theguardian.com/music/ng-interactive/2026/aug/13/ai-music) *The Guardian (Culture)* | 13/08/2026 | Score: 0.76 Tags: music_gen >Despite outcry from musicians, AI slop is creeping into the charts as record labels scramble to adapt to a new normal where hits can be made at the click of a button
This year, the battle for song of the summer has been eclipsed by a much more complicated – some would even say disturbing – debate. That’s because we find ourselves asking not “What’s the song of the summer?” but rather “Is the song of the summer even real?”
Among the top contenders for the title is Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz, a single released in June that has ascended to No 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up more than 35m Spotify streams. It’s not the sort of fare Fenix usually cooks up. The artist is known for his trap music as part of the rap duo Shoreline Mafia, but Rubberz is a mildly noirish, 80s-inspired synth-pop track featuring a voice nothing like his. The song has drawn comparisons to Morrissey, but it more closely resembles Men at Work’s Down Under, or a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Men at Work. It’s pretty awful. But more importantly, it has an uncanny quality to it. It sounds off.
Continue reading... --- ## [Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney](https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/writer-says-its-new-palmyra-x6-model-cuts-ai-agent-costs-by-52-as-token-spending-surges) *VentureBeat AI* | Score: 0.54 Tags: image_gen ---