Q1 2023 Links Clearinghouse
Wherein I go through the tabs I’ve left open on my iPhone over the last couple of months.
After Dark Sky shut down, I kicked myself for not taking more screenshots of the App’s gorgeous and thoughtful UI and data visualizations. Fortunatly, someone else thought ahead beter than I did:
https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Why yes, is IS a dating sim that does your Taxes! “Suitable for singles without dependents”. Incredible.
“The stupidity of AI.” Finally starting to see some blowback on all the VC-fueled AI hype.
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.” Came for the Metaverse shade, stayed for the subtle implications that American suburban life is probably worse.
The thing i am struck by the most from the current “tech stuff”; zuck’s metaverse, everything out of open ai, musk’s twitter, “ai” “art”, etc, etc, is how _artless_ it all is. Just devoid of any sort of taste or creativity, overcooked fast food pretending to be a meal. Plus for that kind of money any of them could have improved the world so much they’d get a holiday named after them, but no.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html
Back in the runup to Star Trek Beyond, Darrich Franich wrote a series at Entertainment Weekly covering all the Trek movies. Probably the best writing on those movies I’ve ever read, the best one might the piece on Insurrection, a very, very silly movie that doesn’t know it:
https://ew.com/article/2016/06/24/star-trek-insurrection-age-hollywood/
Recently discovered this clip of two icons of my childhood colliding: Isaac Asimov on the original (daytime) Letterman show?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=365kJOsFd3w
Finally, XKCD’s Randal Munroe’s grandfathers series of “Disfrustrating Puzzles”:
Break; considered confusing
Currently filled with joy and a deep sense of fellowship about this toot from James Thompson:
To be clear: Thompson is a long-time mac indy mac developer, author of Pcalc and the much-missed DragThing. He is, without a doubt, a Good Programmer.
I love this toot because it’s such a great example of how we all actually learn things in this craft—we aren’t taught so much as we accrete bit of lore over time. Everthing I took an actual class in was obsolete by the turn of the century, so instead I have a head full of bits of techniques, cool facts, “things that worked that one tine”—lore. We can’t always remember where we picked this stuff up, and often it’s half-remembered, context-free. It’s not funny that he was wrong, it’s amusing that he knew something that didn’t exist. How many cool tricks do I know that don’t exist, I wonder?
Mainly this caught my eye, though, because `break` is a statement I try to avoid as much as possible. Not that break isn’t valid—is is!—but I’ve learned the hard way that if I find myself saying “and now I’ll break out of the loop” (or, lord help me, continue,) I am absolutely about to write a horrible bug. I actually made a bad decision about five decisions back, my flow control is all messed up, and instead of breaking I need to take a deep breath and go for a walk while I think about what the right way to approach the problem was.
This is the flip side to lore—I think we all have areas where we havn’t collected enough lore, and for whatever reason we avoid instinctually so we don’t get ourselves into trouble.
Wild Things at 25
Wild Things turns 25 this week! Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.
My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things. “It’s our generation’s Fatal Attraction!” she said. I did not want to go see this movie. Everything about it looked mediocre.
From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie you’d rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.
There was also kind of a mid 90s “we just found about about Carl Hiassen” bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida. (See also: Striptease.)
And, who was in it? Matt Dillon, who was mostly “no, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders. No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,” four months out from Something About Mary. Neve Campbell, who was still mostly “the girl from Party of Five.” Denise Richards, who was still mostly “the girl from Starship Troopers.” Kevin Bacon? Not a great 90s track record, but sure. Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the “funny cameo in Ed Wood” phase.
A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie. Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between “real” projects. Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida. Sure! No judgement! Everyone has bills to pay.
I made this argument. We went to go see the movie opening weekend.
[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]
And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect. Two high school girls, one “rich/hot”, one “poor/goth”. Dorky guidance counselor. Maybe something happens? Maybe consensual, maybe not? Rape accusation. The movie is running the standard playbook. You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.
Except.
The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be. The camera work is intertesting. The music by George Clinton is way better than you’d expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe. Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why he’s months out from a whole second act of his career. All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be. The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldn’t have.
And then it turns into a totally different movie.
With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that it’s seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.
I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasn’t what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.
This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers what’s still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light. It’s phenomenal.
Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations. So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.
It doesn’t seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory. An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s. Happy Birthday!
The Prequels, slouching towards respectability
From Polygon today: “The MCU keeps copying the Star Wars prequels”
It’s been interesting to watch recently as the years have started to treat The Phantom Menace well. I’ve seen several pieces now over the last year or two with a favorable view of the prequels—did folks rewatch them for the first time in a decade over lockdown and realize they wern’t as bad as they remembered?
I’d submit George Lucas does the Big Special Effects Jamboree Action Scene better than anyone working today. Even Phantom Menace, probably the worst-received work of his career on release, has a meticulously crafted final three-part action sequence that puts most movies to shame. Always exciting, never confusing; the cuts from place to place are clear, you can tell where people are relative to each other, and every character in the movie gets at least one highlight moment to shine.
After dozens of movies with the same confusing all-computer graphics smash-em-up third act—Marvel and otherwise—it’s worth going back and looking at what the master of the form did, even in his lesser works.
Still Driving, Still Surviving
Drive to Survive is back! Which is great, but I find myself wishing the season started with a longer “previously on” recap. Something on the scale of what they used to do on SOAP.
License failure
There are plenty of examples out there of a large company not understanding the community around an open license, but I’m almost impressed that Hasbro’s OGL shenanigans have managed to basically speedrun the SCO vs Linux case, the creation of the GNU project, and Tivo inspiring the GPLv3, all in, what, 2 weeks?
Windows layer cake
Really enjoyed this rundown of “old” (vestigial) UI elements hiding in back rooms of Windows 11.
Windows is frequently a deeply irritating system to use, but no one else has ever tried to do what they do—support backwards compatability across a family of operating systems effectively forever.
I’d read 10,000 words easy on all of the UI throwbacks listed in that article; I’d love to know how much “old code” is still running in Windows 11 under the covers. Sometimes backwards-compatable “just” means not taking the old stuff out!
I suspect that a lot of “other operating systems” ability to move forward and cut backwards compatibility comes from know that Microsoft is providing air cover for long term support. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty incredible that software written in the mid 80s for DOS can run basically fine on the new PC I bought in 2019. Unlike, say, the museum of older macs and iPhones keep around.
Mostly, though, i’m just deeply, deeply charmed that moreicons.dll is still shipping on new computers 30 years later.
Wood is a strategy
Fascinating article on trees, plants, and categories. Plants are weird:
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
Happy Trails, Dark Sky
Dark Sky has been my default go-to weather app on my phone for just about a decade now. I loved it.
The genius behind it was the realization that weather forecasting is actually very accurate as long as you don’t go too far into the future or cover too large an area. “What’s the temperature going to be next week?” is a hard question and the answer is going to be wrong. “Will it rain at my house in the next hour?” is still a hard question, but you can get the answer dead on.
Dark Sky started as pretty much just answering “do I need to take a rain jacket with me?”. When it worked, it was like sorcery, frequently correctly predicting the time rain would start down to the minute.
They branched out into longer term “traditional” forecasts first as a separate web app at forecast.io, and then folded that into the main Dark Sky App. They also has a spectacular API for getting weather data that I used on a project a couple lifetimes ago.
But, as these things go, Apple bought them out back in 2020, rolled the fundamental functionality into the new-for-iOS 16 weather app, and then today turned off the backend for the Dark Sky App itself.
So, okay. I know nothing about the financial or personal situations of anyone at Dark Sky, but I have no doubts of any kind that accepting a buy out from Apple in the dark days of mid-2020 was the right call. And separate from the back end tech, the new iOS 16 weather app was a triumphant story for other reasons. Happy endings all around!
But.
The new weather app is fine, its FINE, but it’s very Apple-built-in-app-y. The Dark Sky app hd this fantastic unique design. Cool layout, distinctive symbols, subtle animations, a holdover from the days when iOS apps had a little more zip to them than they do now. I’ll miss it.
And, you know, there’s something sad any time a small company that makes one really nicely made valuable thing that people love decide that the right thing to do is take the buy out. I’m sure I’d make the same call in their place, and it’s easy to over-signify one company deciding to cash out, but— I’m still going to miss that app I used every day.,
End of Year Link Clearance
"Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things"
I’m about the same age as Catherynne M. Valente, and while my specific examples are different, I’ve had a similar journey through The Internet over the last few decades. She nicely articulates some things I’ve been feeling but couldn’t get into words.
Branson Reese’s accidentally viral review of Star Trek Into Darkness perfectly sums up both that movie, and so much of, well, everything.
Books I read in 2022, part 2
Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Lifetheft by David Micheline, mark Bagley, and others
This is what I think of as my “default” spider-man; recently married, vaguely 30ish, big eyes on the costume, and no clones in sight. This closes out David Micheline’s run on Amazing Spider-man, which kind of winds down with a wimper. I enjoyed it very much, but I’m not sure how this would play to someone who wasn’t there when it was new.
The Interdependency Series: The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
Fun, fast paced, pulpy space opera from start to finish. This is Scalzi with the dial set to “Full Scalzi”, and it’s tremendous. You can sort of tell that it was going to be two books originally since the second book just kind of… stops, but I enjoyed every page of it.
Back when I had delusions about being an author, there was a kind of zippy adventure science fiction I wanted to write, but could never make work—or, in the circles I moved in, find good examples of. Scalzi in general, and these books specifically, are exactly the kind of books I wanted to write. I don’t record this out of envy or jealousy—far from it!—it’s something of a relief to see that what I was groping towards al those years ago actually can work.
Dungeons & Dragons: Fizban's treasury of dragons
A surprisingly dull and lifeless collection of material, considering the subject matter. Books all about one kind of monster have always been a mixed bag, and this does not break the streak. The best part of the book was that it didn’t include stats for Dragonlances or Draconians, which essentially confirmed that a full DragonLance book was coming.
Dungeons & Dragons: Mordenkain’s Monsters of the Multiverse
The sort of book you get when an edition is wrapping itself up. Somewhere between a “greatest hits” album and massive errata update, this is a collection of all the non-core books playable species from the 5th Edition line to date, along with the greatest hits of the non-core books monsters. In a lot of ways, this and last year’s Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything are an understated “5th and a half” edition, but even more so this feels like getting the house in order before moving on to “One D&D” next year.
This finishes the job started in Tasha changing “Races” from fixed physical and moral points to, essentially, different cool aliens you can play. Long overdue, very well done. If this in an indicator of how the next version/revision is going to go, I’m looking forward to it.
And, we finally have the Genasi rules somewhere I can find them.
Books I read in 2022, Part 1
A philosophy of software design by John Osterhout
I was in a (semi) mentoring position at the start of the year, and I was looking for something that I could hand a junior level software developer about the craft of well written code. All the books I had read on the subject were 20 years old at this point, and while the basic points were still true, there had to be something new in the last couple of decades, right?
This is a really solid intro to software design philosophy and how to approach putting a medium to large system together.
Managing Humans by Michael Lopp aka Rands
Great stories, well told. I’m not sure it was helpful with the problems I was facing at the time, other than confirming that yeah, sometimes you do just have to walk away from the dumpster fire.
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
There’s something really great about watching a really talented writer lean back and say “we’re just gonna have fun with this one, okay?” Entertaining, fast moving, a blast from end to end. And then, while you’re not looking, Scalzi does one of the slickest writing moves I’ve ever seen and makes it look effortless.
Moon Knight Epic Collection 2: Shadows of the moon by Doug Moench et all
Marvel’s epic collections are fun—20-ish issues collected in one softcover, slowly realeasing the entire 20th century back catalog. This is a chunk of Moon Knight’s first solo book from the early 80s. The issues of this I read as a kid seemed very adult and grown up; now they’re very obviously early 80s marvel trying too hard to seem that way to a 10 year old. It was fun to read for the nostalgia, but hard to hand to someone who didn’t read them at the time and explain why you liked Moon Knight as a kid.
Moon Knight by Lumire/Smallwood/Bellaire
This is the stuff! The central gimmick here is an idea so good I can’t believe it took 40 years for someone to do it. Moon Knight has four distinct personalities (or more, depending on how you count.) For this, they change the art style based on which personality is in charge, and the results are spectacular. In addition, each persona has their own stories which run in what seems to be parallel, not immediately connecting. Great use of the concept, moving Moon Knight far past “super hero with more than one secret identity.”
New year, new calendar!
Somewhere along the line I started using calendars with 6 week printed to the page. This started by playing with the early generation of desktop publishing apps in the late 80s, but really gelled up when I was in college a decade later.
At 6 weeks to a page I could fit a whole 16 week semester, plus a week of vacation on either side, on three pages of regular printer paper with no gaps. Months didn’t really matter, really, it was way easier to have the whole semester just flow from week to week and then indicate the month next to the day in the corner of each box.
At 6 weeks to a page, that fits a whole year in nine pages, which I hang up as a 3 by 3 grid. The whole year laid out all visible at once.
This week between christmas and the new years is always a strange liminal space; the old year is effectively over, but the new hasn’t started yet. Perfect time to print out 9 pages and think about whats next.
There’s a trip in august we already planned. Scout meetings. School end, school start.
New year. Blank space.
Potential.
Heading back out of the silos
With the tech world in one of its periodic contractions, and especially with twitter settings itself on fire, it’s time to retrench out in our own personal spaces again.
So. Hello there.