One Last Round of Dunks on the AI Pin
Ahhh, and there it is. Humane, maker of the useless and evil AI Pin, has folded the con, and sold itself for scrap to HP. Calling out the Ai Pin has been a regular feature on Icecano, and now we get to do it one last time!
The aftermath has the best line of the day with “The Humane AI pin died on the way back to its home planet” at How's That AI Future Looking?, which, heh, make sure to look at the URL slug.
Elsewhere:
Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP | The Verge
The Humane AI Pin: A $700 Brick of E-Waste
Daring Fireball: We Found the Sucker Willing to Buy Humane, and as Promised, I'm Going to Be Insufferable, Because of Course It Was HP And full points to Gruber there, for correctly calling that the final buyer was going to be HP.
There are obviously other, more important things going on than a failed startup getting parted out by the scrapyard that is the modern HP, so let’s just make a couple of fast points and never speak of it again.
First, I’ve been part of a startup that got acquired by a larger company in a fire sale. In my experience, those happen because the big company saw something the startup had internally adjacent to the actual product and thought “ohh, I’ll take that, tho.” Plus, a bunch of patents. Press Release goo aside, I wonder what it was?
The key lesson here is: this is where Humane was always going to end up. I kind of hope it was a con, rather than genuinely being this stupid. But cast your mind back to all the press they got over the last few years. Anyone who treated it as a real product with a future was either fundamentally unserious, too credulous, or in on the con. They can be safely ignored from here on.
You know the thing where someone will make a movie that fails, and then their Hollywood career will stall out? We need that for software. If Kyle McLachlan didn’t get to make another movie after Showgirls, everyone who worked on this thing should have to go do whatever the software equivalent of regional theatre is for a while. Of course, maybe that’s what working at HP to put AI in printers or whatever is?
The Doctor Who Spinoff I’d Like To See
When Russel Davies returned as show-runner for Doctor Who last year, something he was very open about was wanting to do multiple spinoffs. The vague model was clearly something along the lines of what Marvel or Star Wars have been doing on Disney+, with lots of related shows tying together, and the new co-production arrangement between the BBC, Bad Wolf, Sony, and Disney was clearly in part to support something like that.
Doctor Who seems like the kind of show that should be able to spin off multiple successful child shows, but in practice, this has not been the case. Davies tried this last time he was in charge too, to what we’ll politely call “mixed results.” Partly I think the problem problem is because of the way the show is an un-franchise, but mostly because the appeal is the main character, not the setting or the premise or the world, so you any spinoff has the central problem that the Doctor isn’t in them. (See also why Bond has never had a successful spinoff.)
Other than the one UNIT-vs-Sea Monsters spinoff coming later this year, we’re unlikely to see the explosion of “The Whoniverse” Davies was hoping for a year ago given the lukewarm reception the current iteration of the show has gotten. But, let me tell you about the spinoff I want them to do. This is something I’ve been kicking around for a while, but since I have no way to make it happen myself, I’m putting this out in the universe because I want to see it.
While past spinoffs have centered around well-liked side characters, the Tennant-Tate anniversary specials a year ago suggest an alternate approach: spinoffs with past Doctors. Who has a deep bench of former cast members, nearly all of whom seem willing to come back for a one-off under the right circumstances. In a world where seasons are getting shorter and the gaps between them longer, making “flashback” side-series could be an interesting way to stay on the air more regularly. And you could just do this straight: announce that this fall, Matt Smith or Sylvester McCoy are coming back for a 90 minute special, big press, Radio Times cover, the lot.
However, the nature of the show’s structure makes it uniquely positioned to do something almost nothing else could do: a stealth surprise spinoff.
Check this out.
The fundamental engine that Who runs on is that every week, the Tardis lands in a new somewhere and shenanigans ensue. But, these aren’t places so much as they are genres. Doctor Who doesn’t do “this week a lava planet” so much as it does “this week, an Agatha Christie mystery” or “vampire movie”, or “this week, the 60s Hammer mummy movie.”
The traditional opening of any Who story starts at the place the story is going to take place before the Tardis arrives. It’s not just establishing a location, but establishing what kind of a story it is, what the genre is, and most importantly what the narrative rules in play are. Then someone gets killed, and the Tardis arrives.
Doctor Who also always prefers it if it can spark a couple of different genres together, so maybe you’re doing a riff on a Hammer Horror Mummy movie, but the mummies are robots working for an alien that’s both Lovecraft-adjacent and an ancient astronauts in the In Search Of sense. Or your vampires are attacking a WWII codebreaking base at the same time as it’s being raided by Soviet special forces while both sides are looking for an artifact from norse mythology. Or maybe you’re doing a riff on an Agatha Christie novel where a bunch of people in a manor house are being picked off, and sure, maybe the manor house is in England in the 1920s, or maybe it’s a lighthouse and the killer is a different cthulu-esque alien, or maybe the servants in the manor house are Asimov-style robots and the manor house itself is a mining vehicle on the planet Dune. Or do something a little more idiosyncratic and do an adaptation of JG Ballard’s High Rise, but in space.
And again, the job of the opening several minutes is to lay out what kind of a story it is, and what narrative rules are in play, to let the audience get oriented with what the show is doing this week. If you’re doing a Christie mystery, everyone acts like a character in a Christie mystery, regardless of the other trappings. For this to work properly, the setting has to be close to a fully operational premises on its own, able to work as a movie in its own right. There’s usually even the character that would be the main character if this was a standalone piece. The new show with its shorter runtimes abbreviates this more than the old show did, but most stories open something like The Twilight Zone would, here’s this week’s cast, here’s the premise, here’s what narrative rules are in play. This is probably the person whose gonna crack the mystery or whatever.
(As a comparison, consider that the various Star Treks have to sketch out that week’s mystery/problem, but very few Trek episodes would function as compelling drama on their own if the Enterprise never showed up.)
But right about the point where the standalone piece would have the inciting incident leading into the first act, instead Doctor Who cannonballs a time-travelling space wizard into the mix.
The real transgressive power of the character isn’t that they’re an immortal super-smart space alien or whatever, it’s that they don’t have to follow the narrative rules of that week’s genre, they follow the rules of a Doctor Who story instead. So they get to smash across the narrative in ways that the “local” characters just can’t. (And credit where credit is due, the first place I ever saw this theory of how the Doctor Who works fully enumerated was Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum.)
To summarize: for Doctor Who to function the way it does, it has to sketch out a fairly operarational stand-alone genre show so it can crash the Doctor into it. What I want is a spinoff that puts that off as long as possible. Actually commit to the bit that it’s a stand-alone show, then only crash the Doctor in halfway through the season.
Here’s the pitch. You annouce a new, 6-episode BBC show. It’s one of those shows with a big cast all at a country manor house in the nineteen teens or twenties, Upstairs-Downstairs/Gosford Park/Downton Abbey style. You get a fading aristocracy gloss, with either a “world between the wars” or “twilight of the gilded age,” depending on which decade you choose. Maybe someone lost their fortune on the Titanic. Lots of dead husbands from The War. Lady Chatterton-Bakerfield-Montgomery has gotten really into Spiritualism! She’s trying to contact her dead husband, Colonel Chatterton-Bakerfield-Montgomery, who died under mysterious circumstances along the Belgian frontier. There’s an American financier, a Scottish Banker, a Texan, secrets and plots and wheels within wheels. Countess de Courvoisier-Aquitane has come across the channel for Lady C-B-M’s big seance. Not everyone trusts the Lady’s Spirit Medium, the strange Malcom Xerxes. Ghosts! Murder! Affairs! Secrets! “If anyone found out, I’d be ruined!” Just really melodrama it up. Did they really contact the spirit of the Colonel from the Great Beyond? With whom do the loyalties of Heinrich, the Colonel’s former valet, lay?
Our heroine is probably something along the lines of a Plucky Reporter or Aspiring Writer, youngest child of one of the minor aristocrats, recently returned from her travels, something in that batch of tropes. The sort of person you clock as “oh, it’s Ellen Ripley, but Edwardian.” She’s gonna solve the murder and/or expose the charlatan, and maybe the big twist at the end is that she turns out to be Agatha Christie. You know, the sort of thing that Masterpiece Theatre used to be full of.
You let this cook for two episodes, completely straight.
Meanwhile there’s a new member of the servant staff at the house, a footman or maid, maybe, recently arrived. This character stays out of focus, both literally and figuratively, but they’re always kind of around. They’re always the one out in the hallway near where the Whispered Conversation happened, or near where Professor Xerces keeps their Psychic Crystal they brought back from Foreign Lands. Also, this character spends a lot of time out in the barn back behind the main house where no one else ever goes.
To really tip my cards here, that Mysterious and Possibly Sinister Servant character is played by either Paul McGann or Jodie Whittaker.
Things heat up, bodies start piling up, and our Plucky Lead gets more and more suspicious of Mysterious Servant. Something weird happens at the Big Seance, they’ve summoned a real ghost? The Mysterious Servant leaps into the room, yells “Don’t look at it!”, swipes the medium’s Psychic Crystal off the table, and races out of the house. The Plucky Lead follows them out to the barn, throws open the doors, and… there’s a Police Box parked there. The Mysterious Servant is swapping their servant outfit for their regular Doctor coat, and then The Doctor turns back towards the door and says something like “this is where things get really complicated” or “I’m probably not the doctor you were expecting,” or just a “nice to meet you, I’m the Doctor,” and boom, cliffhanger scream, credits, and you’ve been watching a new Doctor Who this whole time. You hit the floor running the next week.
And, look I get it. I get why you don’t actually want to make a whole-ass TV show and tell everyone it’s a different show. On the other hand, imagine how hard the internet would freak out when they realized a secret new season of Doctor Who was not only coming, but started three weeks ago.
For the rest of time, that show is going to be on BBC iPlayer with the name “Doctor Who and The Spectre of Crimson Manor,” but there’s two weeks there where you can just pretend it’s just “The Spectre of Crimson Manor.” That might be worth doing the one time you could get away with it if for no other reason than to get the PR boost you’d get from having done something no other show could do and no one has ever done before.
You could do this with probably any of the living actors, but I feel like the two I mentioned above—McGann & Whittaker—are at the sweet spot of having been a Doctor but not having that be the thing they’re the most known for in pop culture. Someone like David Tennant would immediately get the reaction of “hey neat, Doctor Who is in this!” and using Gatwa (or whomever the incumbent was at the time) would be too obvious.
This is all brought to you by the fact that I’m currently watching a show that would have been the perfect cover for something like this. I’ll decline to mention the show because I’m genuinely enjoying it on its own, and I don’t want my internet review to be “I wish this was secretly a different show”, because I really don’t, but man. Some shows really do feel like a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor just never shows up, and I keep watching it thinking “you could slip Jodie Whittaker into this scene so easily.”
Anyway, BBC, my consulting rates are very reasonable if you want to hear more!
Aesthetics of Fascism and AI
Oh man, this is the stuff:
AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.
[...]
No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable. Even the most depraved Power Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering for its own sake. Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.
This perfectly encapsulates a whole bunch of stuff I’ve been trying ot figure out how to articulate. Namely: it’s not a coincidence that the AI tech execs all moved to the right; the one is an inextricable part of the other.
The Quick and the Dead (1995)
One of my favorite genres of movie are the ones where someone finally builds up enough capital in Hollywood that they get the freedom to make whatever movie they want. Some people come in from the indie side of the house, but most folks work their way up the studio pictures ladder. From the outside directors seem like if they can make two or three decent hits or critical successes they get a (semi)blank check. And these are always interesting, because sometimes that gets you Star Wars, and sometimes that gets you 1941. With actors it can take a little longer, and those are usually even more interesting, because beyond just what roles they chose to take, you don’t always get a great sense of what their personal taste is until they finally get a chance to pick something themselves.
With that in mind, consider Sharon Stone. She’d been working steadily since 1980, mostly by being the best part of a string of extremely mediocre movies, and also Basic Instinct. In the wake of that, she found herself with some actual career juice.
So, given the opportunity to do whatever she wants, she picks a script for a semi-satirical western, hires the guy who did Army of Darkness to direct, and casts then then-unknown Russel Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. (DiCaprio was so unknown and so unwanted by the studio that Stone paid his salary out of her own pocket.) I think it’s a really enlightening view into her actual interests that after grinding her way (pun intended) though mostly terrible “erotic thrillers”, what Stone really wanted to do was shoot a bunch of people with Sam Raimi camera work.
To which I say: she’s got great taste.
Is it a great movie? Oh my word no. I’m not sure it’s even a “good” movie, but it sure is a fun movie. Everyone really seems to be enjoying themselves, in that way where it’s clear that no one is taking it too seriously but also no one is sending it up.
Not quite a spoof, not quite a homage, it’s a whirlwind tour of everyone’s favorite western tropes. Plot-wise, it’s as if someone dumped every western of the previous 30 years out on a table and Raimi, Stone, & co picked out all their favorite bits. Or, to mix in another metaphor, it’s like watching a really tight cover band do their take on something like “80s New Wave”; it’s not at all like watching the original bands, but the carnival of new spins on old standards with an infectious enthusiasm.
From Raimi’s perspective, it’s the stylistic missing link between Army of Darkness and Spider-Man. It’s sometimes unclear how funny this is all supposed to be. The closest other movie tone-wise to this in Raimi’s backlog is probably Darkman, where once again we have a group of incredible actors taking very silly material completely seriously.
The plot, such as it is, is simple: there’s a town in the Old West ruled by the evil Gene Hackman, every year he holds a quickdraw contest, at the end of which someone wins a bunch of money, and everyone else is dead. But just redoing western standards isn’t the movie’s only trick, structurally it’s more like a martial arts tournament movie than a western; it’s basically Enter the Dragon but with guns and cowboy hats. And in keeping with that set of genre traditions, we met a set of contestants, all of whom have their own reasons for entering, there are nefarious secret reasons why the contest is happening, between gunfights the contestants scheme, make alliances, make out, re-consider their goals. The contestants are mostly western archetypes, and so there’s some immediate sparks from just putting a set of stock characters from one genre into the plot of another.
The tournament structure gives the whole movie a sense of forward momentum. Every day there’s the next quickdraw contest at noon, and the contestants draw when the clock strikes, and so in practical terms that means every ten minutes or so there’s another shootout. This also gives the movie a certain “what if we only cooked the muffin tops” quality; they identify that quickdraw scenes are the best part of any Western, so they build a movie outward from having almost nothing but.
Sam Raimi, it has to be said, directs the hell out of these. Every shootout is different, and he really makes the most out having a literal ticking clock. The sound of the clock gets louder on the soundtrack, tick, tick, zoom in on one participant, tick, Rami cam zoom on the other, tick, Raimi cam on the clock, tick, tick, tick, boom. He manages to milk the tension to absurd highs, and it’s a hoot every time.
The funniest role here is Gene Hackman, who is basically doing a send up of his own character in Unforgiven, mostly by playing him as Lex Luthor. The result is like if Shatner himself had played the captain in Galaxy Quest. He’s clearly having a ball, and hits just the right tone of “cartoon villain” the movie needs to work.
Sharon Stone, meanwhile, plays The Lady as basically Clint Eastwood. This is a savvier choice that it first appears. I’m not a professional actor, but if I had hired Sam Raimi to direct the slightly goofy western I was going to star in, I’d be inclined to do something along the lines of a Bruce Campbell impression. And there are places that the script seems to expect the lead to be, basically, Brisco County Jr. But Stone seems to have learned the main lesson from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which is a stoic, underplayed centreal performance provides a contrast with the wacky stuff going on around it, and becomes the center of gravity the rest of the movie orbits around. Stone grounds the whole enterprise by underplaying the part, and things that otherwise would have been a Saturday morning cartoon acquire real menace. She’s a million miles away from the camp succubus of Total Recall or Basic Instinct. Frankly, she knows that a character that acts like The Man With No Name but looks like early 90s Sharon Stone is already as unusual as it needs to be.
I will say, to put it politely, that there are a couple of places that Raimi should have let Stone do a couple of more takes; she doesn’t always hit quite what she’s going for, but I’m inclined to ding the director for that, rather than the actor operating way outside of her wheelhouse. She’s recently had some… extremely not nice things to say about Sam Raimi, and it’s hard not to watch this movie and think he’s letting her down, especially considering who gave who a big break here.
The other really stand out performance here is a pre-everything Russel Crowe playing a priest that used to be a gunfighter that Gene Hackman is trying to force into the contest for $REASONS. He’s great, but also basically playing the same character he would play in The Nice Guys decades later. It’s funny to go back and watch this now and realize that his Big Star period after Gladiator was the abberation, and he was always better at playing sketchy character parts.
DiCaprio looks about twelve, and is obviously a star in the making. Of all the places Stone’s instincts were right here, casting him was the biggest; in retrospect it’s baffling that the studio didn’t want him, he’s already been nominated for an Oscar for goodness sake.
And finally, a shoutout to Lance Hendrickson as “Ace”, who just Hendricksons the hell out a part one suspects was originally written for Bruce Campbell. (Campbell is in the credits but does not appear in the movie, supposedly he was in a deleted scene that they never really meant to put in the movie, but no one knows for sure except Campbell and Raimi, and neither of them have ever let the facts get in the way of a good convention story.)
The 90s were full of semi-revisionist westerns, trying to figure out how to make the genre work at the turn of the millenium. Mostly, this resulted in a string of weird failures, but also Unforgiven and Tombstone. Sam Raimi, of all people, would crack the puzzle few years after this, and realize the answer was “make super hero movies instead.” Your mileage, as the saying goes, may vary on that.
The movie bombed, and got savaged in reviews, which reading them now all seem to boil down to “I’m disappointed she kept her shirt on the whole time.” One of those movies that just a little too out of step with what people were expecting, to their loss.
We rewatched this one over the summer, looking for a tween-friendly western that didn’t have either “violence nightmare fuel” or “John Wayne”, not realizing the 30th anniversary was coming up. I hadn’t seen it since it first came out, and it holds up! It’s a fun movie. There’s a lot to be said for a well-made, well-cast B-movie.
IMDB doesn’t list another producer credit for Stone for another decade, and then not for anything I remember hearing about. It’s clear this movie didn’t do anything great for her career, and not long after this she had a string of health and personal problems, for which I have nothing but sympathy, to be clear. It’s impossible not to look at this movie and wonder what she would have been able to do if this movie had done a little bit better. I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed those movies a lot more than Sphere.
It’s strange the way this one has just slipped under the waves, seemingly forgotten, considering the caliber of the people who worked on it. But the long tail of Home Video means nothing ever really vanishes, it’s just waiting. So, looking for something to watch this weekend? Well, get a load of this! Did you know the guy who directed the Spider-men movies with Seabiscuit directed a big-budget “oops all shootouts” western with the evil girlfriend from Total Recall, Royal Tenenbaum, Gladiator, the kid from Titanic, and Bishop from Aliens? It’s pretty good! Icecano says check it out.
The Galactic Wilderness Area Ranger Service, Standing By
A strangely unexplored Star Wars question I enjoy kicking around is this: in the original movies, where does the Rebel Alliance get all of its stuff? Obviously, the logictics side of the Rebel Alliance has been under-represented in Star Wars media, because “payroll” is a lot less interesting than “pew pew lasers”. But consider, for a moment.
The Alliance has a lot of stuff, and it’s really different from the Empire’s stuff. Not just ships, but things like guns, equipment, uniforms. They have completely different rank badges! This is a civil war, but clearly not in the Blue & the Grey sense, the Alliance don’t seem like they were the parts of the Republic Security Forces that picked a different side and took their guns with them.
Clearly, the intent is that the Alliance has older stuff. The ships are clearly supposed to be older models, souped-up and hotrodded to be competitive with the top-of-the-line military hardware the Empire is building. Back during the Old Days, there was a fan assumption that the Alliance had a bunch of surplus Republic stuff, and maybe there wasn’t a clean line from Republic to Empire. There was a wholly legitimate interpretation of what was on screen that the Rebel Alliance was what was left of the Old Republic Navy, and The Empire was another entity that invaded and took over.
Then the Prequels came out and made it clear that no, the Republic became the Empire directly, and there’s a really clean design lineage from the stuff the Republic has to the hardware the Empire is using. TIEs are clearly descended from the Jedi fighters, the Star Destroyers are upgraded versions of the ships the Republic was using, even the pilots of the ship at the very start of Episode I are wearing basically the same uniforms as the crew on Vader’s Star Destroyer. The Clone Wars cartoon danced around this a little; that show has Y-Wings in their original configuration, but you still don’t see anyone with an Alliance-style uniform.
The prequels actually made things even more mysterious, because given what we learned in those movies, who are are those rebel old guys with beards? Look at the mission briefing before the trench run. If the Republic side of the clone wars was all clone soldiers working for jedi generals, where did these 60-something dudes get their experience? Maybe the implication is that the core of the Alliance are Separatists, but we sure don’t see any droids, and nothing the Alliance uses looks like CIS gear either. While Andor implies that there are former Separatists in the early Rebellion, it seems thematically inappropriate for them to be a significant portion of the Alliance.
Somewhere, an entire parallel set of stuff grew up and was 20+ years old by the time of Star Wars without ever being visible during the Prequel era.
And look, I get it, there are obviously good cinematic reasons for the good guys and bad guys to look obviously different, and different but related cinematic reasons to make it clear that the Empire and Republic are related. More than usual, the answer to this is the MST3K mantra of “It’s just a show, you really should relax.”
To be clear, I think this is a fun thought exercise: there’s a whole huge chunk of Star Wars that’s just unexplored, which is rare for a franchise that’s tried to deep dive on every possible topic. Essentially every single costume in the Cantina has a complex backstory with multiple books, but we still don’t know where the food Luke unpacks on Dagobah came from.
So, how does Alliance Logistics work? Like, does the Alliance hold territory? Is this just a guerrilla war, or are there planets in open rebellion? Does the Alliance have the equivalent of a civilian government? Factories? Space Supply Lines? Farms? Are there planets outside the Empire that are technically neutral in the conflict selling the Alliance material under the table? Are the guys running around Yavin Base refueling X-wings getting paid? Is there anywhere they can spend it?
The one that really gets me are the uniforms. Where did those come from? Did they just make up a whole different rank scheme? Are there a bunch of ex-republic clone wars vets who have to squint and remember that five dots in a domino pattern is the same as two rows of five red and five blue squares from the old days? Just using American history as an example, both the Revolution and the Civil War both sides used basically the same stuff; same uniform design, same rank indicators, same equipment, same guys, so on and so forth. Nobody changes their rank pins in a civil war, do they?
Logically, all that Alliance stuff had to come from somewhere, and it had to make sense to keep using instead of using parallel versions of the Republic/Empire stuff. They must not be using captured TIE Interceptors for a reason. Maybe the rebels are former “security forces,” but it seems more likely that the cops would sign on to the new fascist government? (Again, see Andor.) Maybe they’re local planetary armed forces, rather than Republic? The guys on Leia’s blockade runner have very similar uniforms to the other rebels, but it seems like if the Alliance was also “the Alderaan Navy” that would have kind of given the game away.
Here’s my pitch: I think the backbone of the Alliance are the former Republic Park Rangers.
Long-standing, independent service, with a rank structure similar too, but separate from, the Republic Army/Navy. Unique, and more functional, uniforms. Not directly involved with the Clone Wars, no clone personnel. Not as susceptible to being ideologically captured by the new regime. Likely to object to any misuse of Republic territory. And they already have all their own stuff.
This is how they knew about the ruins on Yavin: it’s a nature preserve! This is how they had the gear to set up a base on a nearly inhospitable ice planet: they camp out in places like that all the time! Send some guys with guns down to the literal redwoods to make friends with the demi-yetis? Sure, no problem, business as usual.
Park rangers aren’t driving around in humvees or tanks, they’ve got jeeps and pickup trucks and ATVs. That’s what the X-Wings and landspeeders are, they’re suped-up crop dusters and fire spotters. Assume the Republic Park Rangers also have to do things like interdict burl poachers, and the gun mounts on the X-Wings make sense. They got hand-me-down Y-Wings after the Clone Wars ended to use for security; this is why their Y-Wings have ion cannon turrets, to disable smugglers or what have you!
This also gives you a cool way to light the fuse for the Rebellion proper. It’s pretty clear that in some corners of the galaxy, the conflict never really stopped between the Clone Wars and the Civil War, it just went from a boil to a simmer; lots of stochastic violence here are there over the two decades between them, but for most of the Galaxy nothing much is happening during the interregnum. Then something happens and snap: “It is a period of Civil War.” Rogue One wants to suggest that’s the Death Star, but, they already have a secret base full of people and gear. Rebels has a bunch of semi-independent groups coming together, but where all those other groups come from is undiscussed.
Maybe that something is the Park Rangers deciding enough is enough and revoting en masse? Would the Imperial Navy even know where all the Park Ranger Stations are? Why would they? I’m pretty sure the US Army doesn’t keep their own list of all the US Forest Service backwoods camps. Did the Rebels do the equivalent of fortifying Yellowstone park and then start fighting back? And, thematically, this really lines up cleanly with the “nature vs technology” subtext of the original movies.
This is where I mention that I do know that both the old and new EU have answers to these questions, and let me personally guarantee you that they’re extremely bland, various flavors of “defected from the Imperial Academy/INCOM corp”. There’s something much more fun about imagining those old guys in Red/Gold squadrons as grouchy park rangers than as disgruntled TIE Fighter pilots, you know?
Anyway, Disney, I’m around if you want to hear more.
Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part IV
Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays arrives at the grand finale!
Up first: I need you to click through and see the header image Wookiepedia has for Princess Kneesaa from the ‘80s Ewoks Cartoon: Kneesaa a Jari Kintaka | Wookieepedia. Hang on, I’m worried you misheard me. I didn’t say I want you to click, I said I need you to click this. Trust me.
That goes double for this, which is almost certainly I’ll link to the wreckage where twitter used to be: Chuck Buriedtreasure on X: "The law and order SVU clip where Kyle MacLachlan does a Big Boss judo throw on a cop, steals another cop’s gun, and blows away a kid in a courthouse was apparently scrubbed from YouTube so I spent $3 to buy the episode digitally https://t.co/BGWWple6nj"
Where is culture headed?: ruminations on what the various website apocalypses mean for culture at large.
Millar Time #22 | Joe Quesada : Mark Millar interviews Joe Quesada; really interesting to hear about Marvel comics’ turn of the century turnaround from the inside, sources notwithstanding.
@reading-comp-posting on Tumblr: This person has an incredible bit on Tumblr; after a joke or series of jokes they post “reading comprehension” questions like it was a high school english test; this should be a service you can subscribe to for your own posts.
From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction: relevant to my interests, as they say.
Are there examples of actual 80s music that sound like modern retrowave? : r/outrun: like it says on the tin; I found this to be a valuable source of “oh yeah, THOSE guys!”
Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?: great interview with Cory Doctorow about enshittification, and the ways that seeps into everything now. The focus is on clean energy tech, but since software really did eat the world, well…
Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books : NPR: something I stumbled across literally as I was wrapping this post up, a 2011 NPR list of the “best” SF & Fantasy books as voted on by the internet. It’s like a transmission from another planet, it’s hard to believe now that anyone would publish a list this white and this male and claim they’d done a good job of curation. I feel like I know exactly what part of Old Twitter found this poll, even if the people working at NPR at the time didn’t. This is a rare example of something that really has gotten better over the last fifteen years, at the time the response seems to have been “welp, guess the fans only like old white guys!” whereas now someone running that poll would look at the results and realize that it got cooked. I mean, heh, as much as I like it, having HHGG land at the number 2 slot is a huge red sign that you got votes from “guys who still read slashdot” and no one else. See also their editorial decision to “exclude YA books”, which somehow only seemed to exclude books by women, but didn’t exclude Heinlein juveniles? Make sure to click through to the blog entry about the list where the guy almost figures out what happened, but can’t quite get there, because, using the original sense of the term, he wasn’t quite woke enough. Things are getting better.
The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2025
Sterling is a guy I have a lot of time for even (especially?) when I disagree with him. It’s been intereresting to watch his progression; he started as cyberpunk author, became a semi-journalist, helped cause the EFF to form, started an artistic movement to fight climate change, spent a bunch of time as a futurist warning people what was going to happen with things like “the internet” and “the climate”, then went on about a ten year I Told You So World Tour and now seems to have settled into the strange calm of a man whose seen all of his worst case predictions come to pass and knows he won’t live to see any of them fixed. The air of a man whose picked out the best deck chair on the Titanic and is describing each part of the ship as it slips below the water. The state of the world convo has a real weird vibe this year, the least optimistic I can ever remember. And it wrapped up in mid-January.
Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?;
Fascinating, but also, click through for this chart:
And:
Like, this fits in with the rest of the manosphere garbage of recent decades so I get it, but also, I do not get it at all. The college I went to in the mid-to-late 90s was something like 60:40 women to men, on account of traditionally being a nursing and teaching school amongst other things, and look, 30 years ago, all the right-wing-leaning “men” I knew were all “hell yeah, college is where the easy chicks are!” And, on a personal note, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, a bunch of dudes with pooka-shell necklaces who purposely went to a school with a lot of girls was extremely easy to counter-program, if you take my meaning. Amongst all the other things, it’s nearly incomprehensible to me that the Young Republican subculture found itself in a place where they’re telling each other “more girls around is bad, actually.” What?
Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - from CreativeMornings: A classic that came up again this year.
Almost finally: oh snap new BOBBY FINGERS: Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama
Finally Finally, I cannot believe I let this tab sit open for a year without sharing: jwz: Jungle. Trust me! This’ll make your day.
Taxation Of Trade Routes To Outlying Star Systems, you say?
My hottest Star Wars take remains that if The Phantom Menace had only been about 6% better than it was, everyone would have thought it was brilliant that the spark that set off two major galactic conflicts was a pointless & performative trade dispute to a planet no one had ever heard of that got out of hand. Instead, everyone used that as shorthand for how boring the movie was. Even at the time, I was like, no, that’s one of the actually good ideas in here, especially when it turns out the crisis was entirely manufactured for someone’s political gain without anyone realizing it until it was too late.
There’s something really darkly amusing that as much as everyone claimed to hate the idea at the time, everyone sure remembered that so they could make a joke about it this past weekend.
Of course, it turns out the most prescient part of that movie was the senate kicking the problem to a committee, rather than—you know—sending someone to go look.
If you can believe it, It’s Friday
You wanna see something funny? I want to see something funny.
I cann’t tell you how hard I laughed watching this.
Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part III
Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays return!
I was kicking around doing another AI Roundup piece towards the end of the year; there was a pretty thread of people realizing that, no, GenAI really doesn’t actually work for anything useful, and people really, really hate it. I wasn’t gathering links, exactly, more like accreting them. I ended up not, because I realized I didn’t have much to say beyond pointing back at the eight thousand words worth of Why Is This Happening I’d already written and going “yeah!” If you squint at the pile of tabs, though, you can probably imagine what the shape of that would have been:
- OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further – Pivot to AI
- The thought doesn't count - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
- Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO
- Pinocchio director Guillermo del Toro on the joy of hand-crafted animation | BFI in Conversation - YouTube: Includes a great zing on AI halfway through, but fascinating on it’s own right
- David Slack: "The reason AI grifters push their product so hard in creative fields is that untrained eyes can’t tell how badly the output sucks. For anything with an objective standard of success, their climate-destroying plagiarism machine just straight up doesn’t fucking work. www.cio.com/article/3540..." — Bluesky
- Dan Johnson: "Can it code as well as a human? Well, no. But can it increase implementation speed? Also no. But does it reduce overtime? Not as much as NOT using it does. But does it write less buggy code? Quite the opposite, actually! But does it save money? In the long run, almost certainly not. But is it more e" — Bluesky
That said, don’t miss Ed Zitron’s piece from this morning on the “recent developments”: Deep Impact
An Interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth About Orion and Reality Labs – Stratechery by Ben Thompson: I’m on record as being “skeptical” about Space Glasses as the form factor of the future, but this was an interesting view, pun intended.
Word of the week: Tonic masculinity - by Nancy Friedman: I meant to link to this back in August and never got around to it; now if feels like a transmission from another dimension, a perfect time capsule of “August, 2024,” and everything that implied.
www.wetasphalt.com/content/how-write-book-three-days-lessons-michael-moorcock: the website loads strangely on desktop, but this is a great list.
Why you should care if movie theaters survive: ruminations on what the future of “movies” might even be.
The Perils of Pauline | Renata Adler | The New York Review of Books: And related, in retrospect, the fact that the most powerful movie critic of the 20th had really weird taste (derogatory) might not have been a great idea?
Suicide Mission - The American Prospect: “What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane”; I could have sworn I posed this but instead I think I just dropped this link in every group chat I was in back in march
The story of VaccinateCA - Works in Progress: Again, I think I must have just slacked this to a bunch of people, great read.
Returning to Monkey Island - Noclip Documentary - YouTube: Fantastic documentary on Ron Gilbert’s return to Monkey Island.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen
Everyone quit what you’re doing and go watch this mix Questlove did covering 50 years of SNL music performances:
Astounding. Just outstanding work.
(via kottke, who also has some great links to how this happened.)
Special Effects Jamboree Ending
It’s still sometimes amazing what you can dig up on the Internet.
There’s this phrase I’ve been using for ages to describe movies where maybe their reach exceeds their grasp in the visuals department: “Special Effects Jamboree.” This especially applies to a Special Effects Jamboree Ending. A Jamboree is a “know it when you see it” thing, but I always use it to mean that not only does the movie maybe not entirely achieve its goals, but has maybe slightly more swagger about it than they ought to. To make a comparison appropriate for this week, Dune (1984) has a Special Effects Jamboree Ending, Return of the Jedi does not.
My memory was that I got this from the late 90s Job Bob Briggs show on TNT, where he used it to describe the finale of Conan the Destroyer.
Joe Bob Briggs was a character that went through a couple of different incarnations, but the through-line was he was a “redneck Texan” who loved drive in movies, mostly of the low-budget horror persuasion. He had a syndicated newspaper review column for a while that was great. He’d do these summaries of the “high points” that were always like: Fifteen dead bodies, four breasts, three car crashes, chainsaw-fu, wrench-fu. Four stars, check it out. Everything always got four stars. Any kind of hand-to-hand combat was always something-fu. The writing was always really funny in a “you gotta be really smart to be this dumb” way. He had a late night show on one of the cable movie channels where he’d do the summary and intro live, and then show the actual movie. I liked it a lot, but these were not the kinds of movies anyone had ever heard of or that I actually wanted to watch? So I never really watched the show, I’d just stick around for the intro and see what else was on.
But then, TNT got him to do a show called MonsterVision, which was basically the same schtick, but in the afternoon on basic cable. This meant two things: he would do an intro after each commercial break talking about next segment of the movie, and they’d show real movies. It was kind of like an alternate universe MST3K, where you’d be watching a movie in the afternoon, and your funniest friend would do a bunch of jokes during the commercial break about what you were going to see next, but then zip it during the real movie.
I watched this show religiously, because look, Planet of the Apes is fine and all, but watching it with jokes about it every commercial break is phenomenal.
So to get back on topic, my memory was that the lead-in to the final segment of Conan the Destroyer on MonsterVision was to introduce it as the Special Effects Jamboree ending, which yes, yes it is.
I found myself telling this story the other night, and I got curious to see if I could prove that’s really where I got the term from. MonsterVision never got any kind of formal release of any kind, but as with all semi-lost media there are clips floating around on youtube and such. So I went digging to see if I could find what I remembered.
And, I actually found it!
Joe Bob Briggs presents "Conan the Destroyer" on "Joe Bob's Summer School"
Someone uploaded all the interstitials for the movie in one block; the whole thing is great but the part I remembered starts at about 17:10. And yeah, he calls it the “Special Effects Jamboree Conclusion”, not ending, which I have to agree is a way funnier word to use there.
This is also such a great example of why I enjoyed the show so much; he’s got jokes about Arnold’s pecs, sure, but then also does a whole series of deep cuts on both Carlo Rambaldi (the guy who made the monster puppet/costume) and then Wilt Chamberlain’s career, on and off the court. I didn’t know what demographic this was supposed to appeal to, just that I was dead center in it.
I guess Job Bob has a new show on Shudder which is back to showing movies I don’t personally, care for, but I’m glad he’s keeping the dream alive.
Fix Their Hearts or Die
Let’s do one more day of Lynch stuff. Regular Icecano programming returns Friday.
Everyone quotes “fix their hearts or die”, and rightly so, but I think “those clown comics” is heavily underrated as a dismissal.
Kyle MacLachlan’s remembrance on Instagram is really something: Kyle MacLachlan | Forty-two years ago, for reasons beyond my comprehension, David Lynch plucked me out of obscurity to star in his first and last big budget... | Instagram, as is his piece in the NYT: How David Lynch Invented Me . Live your life in such a way that your longest running coworker writes something like that after you pass.
Laura Dern's letter to David Lynch: You wove L.A. into our dreams - Los Angeles Times: ditto for Laura Dern’s.
Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer's Theme: I cannot tell you how many times I have said “don’t change a single note!” in a David Lynch voice.
David Lynch: The Film is the Thing: There’s a documentary called Great Directors that had an amazing interview with Lynch talking about why he doesn’t talk about his films. That clip seems to have gone off line, but this interview is pretty much a restatement of the same worldview.
A lot of people wrote a lot of stuff about Lynch over the last few days, my bluesky feed has been basically non-stop Lynch material, which has been just great. Here’s some of the ones I particularly enjoyed, which you might too:
Nothing Will Die, Especially Not David Lynch
David Lynch Forces Your Brain to Work Differently
The Best Show on TV Is Twin Peaks: The Return
David Lynch's top five sandwiches - by Raquel Laneri
“Fix Your Hearts or Die”: David Lynch’s Work Has Always Been Deeply, Powerfully Queer | Them
In Heaven (Everything is Fine) - by Marya E. Gates
A Tribute to David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks'
RIP David Lynch (and links to help LA)
And Rusty Foster sums it up in Today Service Tabs
Beautiful Blue Skies and Golden Sunshine
It would have been David Lynch’s 79th birthday today. Gonna have some black coffee and donuts in tribute.
It’s been really heartwarming to see all the tributes and remembrances from around the web the last few days, clearly I’m not alone in having been deeply touched by the man.
Some clips of or about the man that I’ve enjoyed over the years:
David Lynch on Where Great Ideas Come From : A few jobs ago I used to quote this incessantly.
David Lynch Meets George Lucas : I get it, I really do, but man, the Lynch Return of the Jedi would have been amazing.
David Lynch on iPhone: I think it’s very funny that Lynch only says “telephone” in this, and the kind of nerd who would edit this together had to, just had to make it about the iPhone, specifically.
David Lynch Teaches Creativity and Film (Masterclass): an abbreviated version, and cough check the description.
Naomi Watts, Laura Dern & Patricia Arquette Tell David Lynch Stories | W magazine: I cannot think of another famous person who everyone does an imitation of, but the imitation is always positive.
John Ford Scene | THE FABELMANS (2022) Movie CLIP HD: Spoilers, I guess? Lynch as John Ford at the end of The Fabelmans
David Lynch: The Art Life - The Films - The Criterion Channel: The Criterion Channel has made The Art Life free though the end of January!
Mulholland Drive - Original TV pilot: Oh snap! I havn’t watched it yet, but the original TV pilot configuration of Mullholland Drive is up on the internet archive.
His book is out of print, but the audiobook version is still available, and considering he read it himself that’s probably the better way to go: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
As the man always said: Have a Great Day!
A Place Both Wonderful And Strange
I first encountered the works of David Lynch with Twin Peaks. In what I suspect is a common experience for the Gen-X cohort, I was just slightly too young to be ready for it, which probably means I was exactly the right age. It was different, it was funny, it was scary, it was exciting; it felt dangerous in a way that is still hard to describe.
A lot of people have that story about that piece of art that changed everything for them; their first punk rock album, or seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or finding a book of Bosch paintings, or watching the Star Destroyer go overhead in Star Wars, or hearing Bowie for the first time. For me, it was watching Dale Cooper drive in to Twin Peaks. That was my “you’re going to grow up to be a different person now” art moment.
I’m clearly not alone, Peaks was a lot of people’s first contact with Lynch. It was a huge hit, mostly what I remember was that my entire family was obsessed; both my parents and every single aunt and uncle. Peaks was pretty much all anyone talked about at family get-togethers, as the oldest child in my generation on both sides of the family, and at the age where I had, metaphorically at least, moved from the “kids table” to the “grownup table”, I was looped in on all of that.
(My other abiding memory of that original broadcast is an Aunt who was absolutely livid that they didn’t solve the Laura Palmer case by the end of the first episode. Just gobsmaked that such a thing was even possible; it had never occurred to her that a TV show might not tie everything up in a bow at the end and then start over next week.)
I was initially hostile for a reason that’s extremely 1990 and now feels like a transmission from another place: that second season of Peaks aired on Saturday nights. My parents were not and are not night owls, they preferred to tape it and watch it later, which had the benefit of being able to watch it more than once. The problem was that also airing late on Saturday nights on PBS was my favorite show, Doctor Who, which they would also tape so we could watch it the next day. Two shows on different channels at different times was beyond the ability of the 1980s VCR technology at hand, so the year Peaks was on became a Who-free desert.
(Ironically, Who had been cancelled by that point, but I don’t think we knew it yet. I don’t think the last season had made it across the pond yet, and any delays around more were still using phrases like “hiatus”. It has not escaped my notice that my two favorite TV shows of all time’s original broadcasts were separated by only four months, that has always felt like sloppy writing in my backstory.)
In any case, that initial hostility was short-lived, I was transfixed by it. I could not have articulated this at the time, but both shows attracted me for the same reason—they were about people who solved problems by being smarter, braver, and kinder than everyone else, not because they were stronger or better armed. Dale Cooper is one of the all-time great protagonists, solving problems by being willing to think about them differently. Whatever the opposite of “toxic masculinity” is, that’s what Agent Cooper was.
So, you know, that ending was a little bit of a bummer.
I didn’t see Fire Walk With Me until much later; my parents hated, hated, hated it. There was a real sense of betrayal there: you ended the show on a cliffhanger, then got to do a movie, and the movie is a prequel? Screw you too, etc.
For a long time, my line about FWWM was that it was pretty good if you could take it on its own, but it was a terrible conclusion to Peaks as a whole; now that it’s finally free from having to serve as the capstone, it’s much easier to see it for what it is. Personally, I think it has my favorite Lynch movie, which is a big change from how I felt about it circa 1996 or so.
I used to say that I had spent my entire adult life wondering about Cooper and the Red Room; other things got sequels or reboots or rumors thereof, for me Peaks was always the one I wanted more of the most. How does he get out?
Flash forward 25 years, and then it actually happened. It’s hard to even know how to set expectations for something like that. The 2017 Twin Peaks: The Return was the one truly great revival of the Legacy Sequel era. Things I wanted to happen didn’t, things I was afraid would happen did, but mostly what I wanted was to be surprised, and boy was I.
Sidebar: I was solidly in the “Diane isn’t real” camp until the 2017 show came out; but when they started announcing the cast, and Laura Dern was in it in an “undisclosed role”, I said out loud, at work “oh, she must be Diane.” Heh.
Watching The Return was and will probably remain my all-time peak media-consumption experience of any flavor; I was way more excited about that than anything else, and found it endlessly enjoyable.
It was on the same night as Game of Thrones, and so we’d stream the pair, Thrones first, then Peaks. The difference was fascinating; this was Thrones at the height of its powers, the peak of “peak tv”, and with a rep for being shocking and surprising, built on the back of killing off a character played by Sean Bean, aka the guy whose character always dies.
And every week, because we’d seen more than one TV show, Thrones would do basically what you expected. Every storyline would move forward a little in a generally expected way, and it was fully entertaining.
Meanwhile, I literally never had any idea what was going to happen that week on Twin Peaks. Always surprising, never even remotely what you expected. An hour both wondrous and strange.
Personally, I found the end incredibly satisfying. And if nothing else, I will treasure “Deputy Bobby Briggs” until my dying day.
The words people usually reached for to describe Lynch was “weird” or “odd” or “incomprehensible” or “confusing”, but it wasn’t really any of those things, what it was was “unique.” A very specific viewpoint of a singular artist. It clearly wasn’t an affectation, he wasn’t doing it to “Be Weird”, he was just being himself, and refused to stop.
Plot-wise, at the 10,000 foot view Twin Peaks is incredibly straightforward: it’s a show about FBI agents fighting evil ghosts. But it’s the details where it sings. A lot of people have made art about “the dark underbelly of small towns”, but no one else made art about a small town where everyone accepted The Log Lady. Where a former coworker shows up with a new gender and the reaction is “OK!” and a handshake.
What made Lynch’s work so compelling weren’t the monsters—Killer BOB or Frank Booth or whomever—it was everyone else around them. Everyone in the town of Twin Peaks were fun to spend time with, they liked each other, they were compelling without being awful. Even certified Nasty TeenTM Bobby Briggs was someone you rooted for to get his act together. What made that “dark underbelly of small town America” so frightening was that you really wanted everyone else in that “small town America” to be okay. They weren’t just cannon fodder for some serial killer.
I could talk about Twin Peaks all day, but the movie I want to pause on for a second here is The Straight Story, because that’s the one, I think, that proves it wasn’t an act. It’s unquestionably a Lynch movie in every frame, except it’s also a G-rated Disney movie about a guy who goes on a road trip on his riding mower. There aren’t any ghosts or killers or gangsters; the “dark underbelly” there is just age, creeping up on all of us.
The secret to Lynch’s work, as strange or off-kilter as it often was, was that it was all sincere. It was never a joke or a satire, the characters were never an object of fun. No matter how silly the situation or plot, Lynch treated all of his characters with profound respect. It was all emotionally true.
The dominant form of TV-style media is the mystery-puzzle-procedural, stories structured as a puzzle that the characters, and maybe the viewer, solves by the end. He was the killler! Here’s how he did it! Here’s how he figured it out! Even stuff that isn’t explicitly a murder mystery is structured as a series of questions-to-find-answers-leading-to-more-questions way. Stuff with an explicit, “here’s the solution, here’s what it means.”
Lynch wasn’t ever interested in answers because he knew the questions were more interesting.
People sometimes act like Lynch’s work is utterly incomprehensible, and that’s only the case if you’re treating it as a puzzle to solve. It floats along on emotional logic, instead of clicking down a path of “plot.” You couldn’t “beat” a Lynch movie, there wasn’t anything to “solve.” You had to engage with the emotions and the visuals, and let it take you somewhere.
(It’s sort of a delightful piece of metacommentary that the one work of his explicitly framed around a question: “Who killed Laura Palmer?” imploded the second it was answered. It was a “question”, but a question designed never to be answered.)
They’re not questions, they’re not puzzles, they’re prompts.
It’s easy to overindex on the fact that Lynch was a painter, but in this case I think it’s revelatory to his approach to art. Paintings don’t have explainer videos or wikis of easter eggs (usually.) It’s understood that between the art and the audience something happens, and it’s that something that’s “the thing”, the part that matterss is the viewer’s reaction to the art.
The reason his enigmatic but good natured refusal to explain or talk about his work became such a meme was that Lynch understood that maybe better than anyone else in our lifetimes. The point isn’t to figure out what it meant to him, the point is to figure out what it means to you. Him refusing to elaborate had the same energy as a really good teacher with a twinkle in their eye asking “well, what do you think?” You have to bring yourself to it. You gotta let it in, let it rearrange you brain a little. Works that demand your full attention.
Whether or not this approach works for you was a real “your mileage may vary” situation, and not just for his work as a whole but per-project. Every Lynch fan I know seems to have one movie of his they can’t stand. The one most people seem to give themselves permission to dislike is Inland Empire; personally I loved it—the one I bounced off of was Lost Highway.
But it was all unquestionably his. The most unique, vital artist of our lifetimes. No one’s ever had an oeuvre like that, and no one ever will again. It was a privilege to have been alive at the same time.
It seemed like it was probably coming soon, but it was still a shock. He’d stopped doing his weather reports, he had a project evaporate at the last second for what seemed like they might be health issues, he’d been isolating in his house to avoid COVID exposure the last few years, he recently revealed that he had emphysema. And then it seems he died from complications due to being forced from his house because of the fires.
The closest comparison I can make is to when Bowie died in ’16, but Bowie didn’t die as a downstream result of a massive metaphor for the current omni-crisis. With everything, this really has the quality of the last Elf sailing from middle earth.
But, dispair was never a theme of his work, even in the darkest of times there are Donuts to eat, mugs of Damn Fine Black coffee to drink. Cooper did make it back out of the Red Room, even if it took him a while. So, I’ll leave you with my favorite obscure Lynch work, this delightfully unhinged TV Commercial for the Playstation 2:
Thank you, Mister Jackpots.
Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part II
Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays continue!
The cleanest copy I’ve ever seen of Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants [1996] was uploaded to the Internet Archive as an RF rip sourced from an internal HBO tape. Over on blusky, Chris Person describes some details, and then goes into more detail over at The Aftermath: The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You. Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants is one of those weirdly lost pieces of media; I saw this on cable back in, I guess, college, and then it’s vanished except for terrible VHS rips on youtube.
Which also provides an excellent excuse to link to Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets | The New Yorker.
All that said, my all-time favorite Ricky Jay trick is the thing he does in the first five minutes of: Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters and Ricky Jay - YouTube. (Which is another semi-lost Ricky Jay documentary.)
The folks behind the “George Lucas Talk Show” got a group of commedians together to do a live read of the script of Episode I: THE NABOO MOVIE - A 25th Anniversary All Star Live Reading of Star Wars Ep 1: The Phantom Menace - YouTube. Tony Hale (Buster Bluth) as Qui-Gon! Tawny Newsome (Mariner from Lower Decks) and Haley Joel Osment (yes, from Sixth Sense) as Padme and Anakin! Episode I is a deeply weird movie, but if nothing else this reveals that the script wasn’t the biggest problem. There actually was a way to say those lines and make it work.
There’s this elevated, enclosed passageway in Venice called the Vasari Corridor, which I am embarrassed to admit I only found out about via this CNN travel article I clicked on as a form of fully-inflamed procrastination: The Vasari Corridor is a secret passageway through central Florence — now it’s open to the public. Fascinating!
State of Play: Wolfgang Baur crunches some numbers - Kobold Press: Baur outlines the state of the business over at Kobold Press; wild to be how large a percentage kickstarter revenue is. I think these kinds of small-to-medium businesses are where kickstarter really shines.
Fully playable Star Wars: Battlefront 3 Wii build leaks online: it was always rumored that it was close to done, but wow!
Willem Dafoe on His Acting Career, ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Nosferatu’: yes.
Mary Tyler Moore accidentally nailed a perfect trick shot in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1962): If you’ve never seen it, you have to watch this; this real amazing parts are the looks of shock that play across the faces of both Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke who can’t believe they saw what they saw, but then get it together to finish the scene. Stone cold pros, the both of them.
Patricia Lockwood · Diary: Encounters with Aliens: Patricia Lockwood is watching The X-Files! “So then the show becomes about something else, something deep and dark as water, it is carried rapidly past all other unsolved mysteries to ask: what if a woman were irreplaceable?”
Satellite Photos of Middle Earth: nicely done.
Interview: Demolition Man Writer Daniel Waters: A couple of amazing tidbits in here, including an incredible semi-pitch for the sequel.
Late Doorbells
Story Time:
Two days after christmas, just before 11:00 pm, the doorbell rings.
Reader, I cannot stress enough how unusual this. In the fifteen years we’ve lived here, I think I can count on one hand many times the doorbell has rung after dark, and never closing in on midnight.
My particular middle-class suburb is not a part of town where people are “out and about”. We don’t get a lot of solicitors of any variety, this particular suburb isn’t on the way to anywhere, it’s not between things, the demographics skew older. People out on the street at all is unusual. This day in particular seemed to have a lot of people around; family around for the holiday, presumably? There had been lots of “teen voices” all evening, with a a real “home on break and bored” quality. Not a problem, but like I said, unusual.
(By comparison, back when I lived in the party central portion of a college town, an evening without teen voices sounding like they were mid-prank would have been the unusual one.)
But: the doorbell. Unusual. Unnerving. There is absolutely no good reason for someone to have rung that bell.
We don’t open the door, but through the window, there’s a kid standing there, somewhere in the 18–20 range, hoody over his head, holding some kind of a box or something. Can we help you? He says something we can’t quite hear about a charity or a church and an iPad giveaway? The thing he’s holding could be an iPad box. This has a real door-to-door scam vibe, but, at 11 at night? Strange on it’s own merits, and again, really out of character for this neighborhood. We yell “no thank you honey, have a nice night” through the window, he moves on. Strange!
My house is at the top of a T-junction, and between that and with where my house is on the lot, there’s a window upstairs where I’ve got a really clean view up and down the street in all three directions. I’m curious, so I stroll upstairs and watch to see where the kid goes. He’s across the street. The neighbors there don’t open the door either, he moves on. Meets up with four other kids that are also out and about in the streets, have a conversation I can’t hear in the middle of the intersection. Stranger.
As a group, they all move on to the next house. The same kid that came to our door goes up to that door. The other kids in in the group hides behind bushes and around corners. What? At this point I start weighing my options pretty fast. Should I go yell at them? Call the police? What the hell are these kids doing?
Then they all pull out their phones and turn the cameras on, and it hits me: they’re fucking prank youtubers!
C’mon kids, not cool. Long irritated sigh. I want to go out and pull the kids aside and say something like “look, we all moved out to the ‘burbs specifically to avoid shit like this.” Like, I’m not going to call the cops on these kids, but someone will. And, to put it politely, I can think of at least two people down the street the direction they’re moving who are likely to unload a shotgun through the door if a strange teenager rings the doorbell close to midnight.
Our HOA has retained the services of a “private security company,” whose whole job seems to be to orbit the neighborhood and frown at people. I poke around to see if we have the number to for them; this is pretty much exactly what those twerps are supposed to be for, roll up in their official-looking car and yell “what are you doing” out of the window. Can’t find it.
At this point I’m stomping around the living room flapping my arms in irritation. I feel like the neighborly thing to do is to help find a way to stop these kids from waking up any more retired people without them getting shot by the cops, but no real ideas are coming to me. There’s this deeply irritating sense of, really? On top of everything else, we have to deal with this too? Do we need bouncers for neighborhoods now?
Right at this point a police cruiser roars by the house with its lights going in the direction the kids were walking. Couldn’t see what happened after that.
Stray Notes on Unsettled Times
About 20 years we all spent a lot of time talking about The Singularity. Remember, the thing where we were all going to upload our minds into a computer in just a few years and live forever? Oh, but also the AIs were going to become supersmart and take over?
The whole thing was deeply silly, but for some reason we spent several years with all the Serious People pretending it was something to just around the corner, despite the fact that it was blatantly just “the rapture,” but with computer words.
That whole discourse was always a weird jumbled mixture of the plot of Terminator, Christian Apocalyptic theology, and unexamined anxiety about capitalism; in the parlance of today “A man will invent the singularly instead of going to therapy.”
(And I note that in today’s LLM/AGI discourse, we kept the bit about the robots being about to take over, but somehow lost the part where we all get to go to cyber-heaven. Huh.)
The bit that stuck with me from that era was the concept of “a” singularity, in the broder sense. A historical moment where there’s so much change so fast for whatever technological or historical or other reason, that it’s impossible to see beyond, the future is clouded until you get past the inflection point.
“The Singularity is coming!” they kept saying.
Well, it came all right. Just not the one they were rooting for.
At about the same time, I was living next door to a couple who had left New Orleans after Katrina. I was never entirely clear how they ended up in my corner of Northern California, which they strongly disliked in a way that I, as someone who grew up in and actually does like California, was extremely sympathetic to.
This was the era where we started using the phrase “grim meathook future,” but weren’t yet sure how ironic we were being. I remember someone in the broader post-cyberpunk author world—knowning who I was reading a lot of at the time, it was probably either Bruce Sterling or Warren Ellis—said something like “maybe that’s just how it is now, every couple of years a once in a thousand year weather event will show up and wreck a major city.” The sort of comment where your initial reaction was to think “that’s a little pessimistic, gosh” before realizing that no, that was obviously true.
Maybe that’s just how it is now.
Like most people in my age group, all my grandparents were involved with the WWII war effort in one way or another. The War came up a lot, as you might imagine, mostly as this crazy shared experience they all had.
One time, us kids were asking my grandmother questions about something related to the whole effort, why something had been the way it was.
“You have to remember,” she said, “we didn’t know we were going to win.”
That’s not a huge insight, but I was young enough that it was the first time I’d really engaged with the idea. As far as school was concerned, that was the war where America Saved Everybody, the idea that the people involved didn’t know the end of the story yet hadn’t ever occurred to me.
Obviously, that stuck with me, but what really stuck with me was the look on her face; a woman in her 70s remembering how scary her early 20s were.
Looking forward to telling our grandkids, “you have to remember, we didn’t know how this was all going to turn out.”
Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part I
Free to a good home: My Open Tabs!
It’s that time again, where I perform an Open Tab Balance Transfer from my Browser to Yours! Wednesdays in January, we work our way through all the tabs I wanted to do something with this year, but never quite figured out what. In roughly reverse-chronological order, as I work my way from right to left in Safari:
New Year, New You, New Tabs: Oh hell yes Today in Tabs is back, ish? Like Rusty says, New Year, New Tabs. If you didn’t already have these open, they’re New to You.
Never Forgive Them: Ed Zitron sums up his central thesis of the Rot Economy, and how it intersects with Doctorow’s “Enshittification Theory”, as well as explaining both “where AI came from” and “why are there so many updates.” Just phenomenal work, if you only click one link here, make it this one,
Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n+1 | Will Tavlin: Will Tavlin answers the question “why does Netflix look like that?”
'A Complete Unknown': The Ballad of TOSHI: Merrill Markoe, who is the source of everything anyone liked about David Letterman’s show, asks the question “why is there this lady hanging around A Complete Unknown but never saying anything?” The answer will made you so mad!!
Cats can get bird flu from raw food. Here's how to protect them | AP News
The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI: The “AI” part is a little facetious, but maybe we’re gonna have Cetacean Ops after all. Seems like every 9–18 months we get another “we can almost talk to whales!” piece. I assume they know exactly what they’re doing and have been messing with us the whole time.
Porphyrios (whale) - Wikipedia: Speaking of whales, there was a whale that terrorized shipping outside of Byzantium for sixty years?! Excellent.
Every Game Has The Community It Deserves: how video game design shapes the community that builds up around it.
https://www.codingfont.com: yeah, here we go, it’s a bracket to determine your favorite monospaced font, basically my catnip.
Next Wednesday: more tabs!
Icecano Style Guide: Megacommas
Like toy cartoons from the early 80s, we try to maintain a certain amount of educational content here on Icecano to make sure the FCC doesn’t pull our broadcast license. As such, we offer this excerpt from the Icecano Style Guide!
Everyone knows the simple “comma” punctuation mark. English also has a variety of what experts call “megacommas”, punctuation marks that are like commas, but “more so”. Like many parts of English, the rules for using these bizarre symbols are inscrutable, complex, and originally stolen from another language.
Commas, of course, are the easy one: Officially, they’re used to “separate clauses in a sentence”, whatever that means, but most people know the shortcut is to use them in a sentence whenever you’d stop to breathe.
Are there similar advices for the other megacommas? As my high schooler found out earlier today by accidentally asking me a question, and as you are about to find out now: yes! There are simple “what you’d do while talking” guidelines for using these that “big grammar” doesn’t want you to know! They are as follows:
Em Dashes: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d point a Harrison Ford finger at the other person as you were saying the part between the dashes.
Parentheses: if you were saying this out loud, the stuff in the parentheses is what you’d turn your head and say to the person next to you to get them caught up.
Semi-Colon: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you lose your train of thought and start talking about something else.
En Dash: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you say “ummm” before continuing.
Hypen: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d forget to pause between words and mash them together like one of those German compound words.
Square Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this is the part you’d mutter to yourself.
Curly Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would denote a scope, and variables defined here would not be accessable to the rest of what you were saying.
Angle Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would be the part translated from Russian.
We hope this has been of assistance.