SCTV’s “Death of a Salesman”
One of the things I loved about SCTV was their willingness to take a weird premise and just let it play out. There might be other sketch shows that would have thought of “Death of a Salesman” starring Ricardo Montalban and DeForest Kelly, but none of them would let it spool out, getting stranger and stranger, for over 7 minutes:
When I was in college there was a local channel that would play the full 90 minute SCTV episodes at 1 in the morning, which was the perfect environment for the bizarre dreamlogic fueling that show. Absolutly brilliant.
And as a chaser, here’s Spock and McCoy in “Check Please:
Strike Season
All of us here at Icecano are, of course, in full support of the Writer’s Guild strike, and now it’s starting to look like there’s a good chance the Actors are going join them. Good! Shut the whole industry down until you all get what you deserve.
From the outside, this strike certainly seems to have an existential, “final duel on the lava planet” vibe to it that the last writer’s strike didn’t.
As a member of an industry that is not organized—and really needs to be—I’m watching this situation with a mixture of admiration and envy. It’s a joy to see what mature labor power looks like. We could all have this, if we wanted!
Here’s hoping the WGA—and the rest of “hollywood”— manages to hold out for as long as they need to get everything they deserve, keep the financialization gig-economy wolves out, and perserve their art form as a viable career.
And maybe their success will help convince the rest of us to organize our industries too.
Drobo Ragnarök
As per Ars Technica, Drobo is making it official:
I was a very happy customer of one Drobo, and a very grouchy customer of a second.
To recap, Drobo was a “storage robot”, a device that had all the advantages of a RAID array without needing much in the way of management. The headline feature was that you could mix-and-match drive sizes and types. It took the form of a box of hard drives plugged into the back of your computer, and it handled the rest. It was perfect if you wanted expandable storage with a RAID-like defense against individual drives failing, but also didn’t want to tinker with configuring things yourself.
I bought my first one in 2014, and it was exactly what I needed at the time. I was digitizing a bunch of old VHS video, and needed some expandable storage that wasn’t susceptible to individual spinning drives going bad on me. The fact that I could mix-and-match drive sizes was a nice bonus, but the best feature was that I didn’t have to configure anything; it would “just work.” I was in that prosumer mid-point where I could have figured all that out, but was willing to pay more so that I could spend that time with my kids instead.
The usual complaints about Drobo were that there were expensive—true, and slow. The model I bought connected over thunderbolt and supported an SSD cache, so generally I didn’t notice a speed difference between the Drobo and the internal “fusion drive” of the iMac it was connected to. The fan was surprisingly loud, but not distractingly so.
The big disadvantage was that it wasn’t actually RAID, it was something proprietary they called “BeyondRAID.” The upshot being that the only thing that could read a drive from a Drobo array was another Drobo.
This worried me before buying the first one, and we started joking about the coming “Drobo Ragnarök” where all Drobos would die and no new ones would be available, and our data would be lost.
“Ragnarök! RAID is not a backup!” we laughed.
April of 2019, I got a partial Ragnarök. My Drobo died hard. Of course, I had almost everything on it backed up, except the project I was in the middle of. I then proceeded to have the worst customer service experience of my entire life, which ended up with me buying a new Drobo at full price in what was essentially a hostage ransom and swearing to never spend money with them again.
There was an amazing moment where I realized that not only were they not going to help me troubleshoot—I remain convinced it was the power supply—nor were they going to repair or replace my dead unit, they weren’t even going to offer me the “store manager discount” on a new model. Overnight, I went from the guy who would enthusiastically recommend Drobos to looking people dead in the eye and saying “do not buy one under any circumstances.”
The replacement arrived and fortunately loaded the old disk array fine. The first thing I did once it woke all the way up was to set up two different complete backups of the data. Never again!
That second Drobo is humming behind me as I write this. The new one is definitely louder. I’ve glaring at it almost daily the last 4 years thinking I needed to replace it, but on the other hand, I spent a lot of money on that sucker and as long as it’s backed up I might as well get some use out of it…
I may have bought the last Drobo in the country; somewhere around the start of the twenties they stopped being available, and the company limped along promising that any day now they’d come back into stock.
The supply chain disruption from the Disaster of the Twenties was an easy excuse to cover the fact that the niche they’d carved out no longer existed. Most people were using cloud storage for everything, and anyone who actually needed a big pile of local files needed them in a form that wasn’t held hostage by one company’s increasingly flaky hardware.
It’s too bad—a hassle-free, flexible, “it just works” RAID-like solution has a market. Drobo found it, but couldn’t keep it.
Drobo Ragnarök.
No Contact Non Tracing
Woke up on Friday to a notification that California had quietly shut down their participation in the Apple-Google smartphone-based contact tracing system.
Had to imagine a better microcosm of the fractal nature of the Disaster of the Twenties: faced with a massive epistemological, social, and political catastrophe, Silicon Valley declares that they have a technological solution! Which is then rendered inert by a different subset of epistemological, social, and political issues.
Other than consuming battery in the background, I never got any exposure warnings from that system. Did anyone? Based on tne near-total lack of coverage of the shutdown over the weekend, I’m guessing the oly value this thing provided was some self-congratulatory press releases a few years ago. What a waste.
It’s Not Just Computer Magazines Ending
Bruce Sterling has a line, which I now can’t find the source for, that goes something like “the frontier of the 21st century is the wreckage of the unsustainable.”
I’ve been meaning to link to Harry McCracken’s The End of Computer Magazines in America, like the rest of the tech blogosphere (see also Gruber, Snell, Tsai). Like everyone else, maybe note that this is part of the larger trend of advertising-supported magazines going extinct—magazines, remember them?—and then maybe do a wistful Gen-X anecdote about how The Kids These Days™️ just aren’t into computers for their own sake anymore.
(And McCracken’s piece is worth reading if for no reason than for his description of what a “real magazine” was like at their peak—there are things that look and act like magazines, but none of them have those kinds of resources.)
But then Buzzfeed laid off the news arm, Vice looks like it’s about to implode and the WGA went on strike. And suddenly it’s less about “oh man, I miss Dr. Dobbs journal too” and instead the entire post-dot-com media landscape is running aground at once.
And these events, like Toy ‘R Us going under, or newspapers withering away, tend to produce a lot of sad looks and thinkpieces about how that’s too bad, but times have moved on, and Adan’s Smith’s Invisible Hand has just smothered Bed Bath and Beyond with a decorative pillow, and there’s no stopping progress!
But there’s a key point that I think often gets hand-waved away that John Rogers perfectly highlights in this tweet chain, which I’ll quote here:
2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!
3) Bullshit. Economies, markets, are products of human thought. They are shaped by the rules we place upon them and distorted by the will of those who operate within them.
And that’s the point. This didn’t all happen because of the weather; we don’t have magazines anymore and TV writers are broke because of choices people made.
People chose to use the disruption of the web, and craigslist, and google adwords to pivot away from sustainability and towards a growth-at-al-costs model, hoping the slurry of cheap, low-quality content would somehow convert a sea of distracted eyeballs into a viable business model.
People chose to gut whole industries to make rich people richer.
People chose to try to turn TV writers into gig workers.
For decades now, the financialization vultures have been hollowing out our whole civilization, chasing “growth” and sucking the wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This didn’t happen by accident, or just because “progress”, people chose to do this, and the rest of us chose to let it happen.
The web and everything that came with it is usually described in terms of Disruption—throwing existing, stogy, companies into disarray, and letting new, nimble replacements an opportunity to slide in and serve those customers better. And that’s true! But also true, and something we’ve not done a good job recognizing, is that any wide scale disruption allows the scam artists and the vampires in to get their clutches into a new set of enterprises.
Looking over the wreckage of the 21st century, we all have to start doing a better job telling the difference between “disruptors” and “parasites”.
Theres another line I can’t source that goes something like “the internet turns everyone into musicians.” But—it didn’t have to!
There’s the usual chorus of “Get a real job!” anytime someone asks for a bigger slice of the existing pie. More often than not, this seems to come from the deep antipathy in American culture towards any job that’s in any way creative; any job that someone might actually enjoy. But always left unsaid is what jobs count as real?
But here’s the thing—we get to choose which jobs are real. What if we chose the jobs we wanted to do?
The unsustainable is wrecking out. We can chose what comes next.
“Deserve Better” how, exactly?
Humane, the secretive tech startup full of interesting ex-Apple people has started pulling the curtain back on whatever it is they’ve been building. The rumor mill has always swirled around them, they’re supposedly building some flavor of “AI-powered” wearable that’s intended as the next jump after smartphones. Gruber at DaringFireball has a nice writeup on the latest reveals at https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/if_you_come_at_the_king.
And good luck to them! The tech industry can always use more big swings instead of another VC-funded arbitrage/gig-economy middle-man app, and they’re certainly staffed with folks that would have a take on “here’s what I’d do next time.”
Gruber also links to this tweet from Chaudhri, Humane’s co-founder: https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1624041258778763265. To save you a click, Chaudhri retweets another tweet that has side-by-side pictures of the NBA game where LeBron James broke the scoring record and the 1998 game-winning shot by Michael Jordan. The key difference being, of course, that in the newer shot everyone in the stands has their phone out taking a picture, and in the older shot there are no cameras of any kind. And Chaudhri captions this with “we all deserve better.”.
And this is just the strangest possible take. There are plenty of critiques of both smart phones and the way society has reorganized around then, but “everyone always has a professional grade camera on them” is as close to an unambiguous net positive as has emerged from the post–iPhone world.
Deserve better, in what way, exactly?
If everyone was checking work email and missing the shot, that’d be one thing. But we all deserve better than… democratizing pro-grade photography? What?
As techno-cultural critiques go, “People shouldn’t take photos of places they go,” is somewhere between Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds and just flatly declaring smart phones to be a moral evil, with a vague whiff of “leave the art of photography to your betters.”
Normally, this is the kind of shitposting on twitter you’re roll your eyes and ignore, but this is they guy who founded a company to take a swing at smartphones, so his thoughts on how they fit into the world presumably heavily influence what they’re building?
And weirdly, all this has made me more interested in what they’re building? Because any attempt to build “the thing that comes after the iPhone” would by definition need to start with a critique of what the iPhone and other smartphones do and do not do well. A list of problems to solve, things to get right this time. And never in a million years would it have occurred to me that “people like to take pictures of where they are” is a problem that needed solving.
Is it the same Titan?
I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling? That is, the completely unique set of constraints and opportunities you get when you’re trying to tell a story as part of a continuity thats been going for nearly 60 years. The third season of Picard has a fantastic example of building on top of what came before while using it to make your story better, despite some sharp edges.
Picard 3 is effectively a new show—and unlike the previous seasons is much more Star Fleet–focused. (And is acting like it might be a backdoor pilot for a follow-up.) Most of the action takes place out in space on a star ship. Given all that, it realy needs its own signature Hero ship.
What ship do you use? For starters, it can’t really be the Enterprise, partly because that’ll swamp the storytelling, partly because the story works better if the ship isn’t from the Star Fleet major leagues, but mostly because I’m convinced they’re saving the Enterprise for the grand finale. (As I write this, there are still two episodes to go, so we’ll find out if I’m correctly interpreting the guns they hung over the mantlepiece.)
But, even thought it can’t be the Enterprise specifically, it should be something “like” the Enterprise. That is, the classic Star Trek look: round saucer, secondary hull, glowing dish on the front, warp drives up above. Like SNW before, this season has a real back-to-the-classics approach, and the ship design should reflect that.
But emotionally, the ship should reinforce the state we find the TNG characters in at the start of the show: retired, out to pasture, star fleet has moved on. Picard and Riker are both well past the point where they have a ship or can get one easily. The ship should reinforce their sense of displacement at the start of the story.
If it can’t be the Big E, is there something else lying around in the toybox we can use? Fortunately, there is! The USS Titan.
For those of you just joining us, Riker was promoted to command of the Titan in 2002’s aggressively mediocre Star Trek Nemesis. In keeping with that movie’s lack of basic competence, Riker finally gets a ship of his own, and the audience never gets to see it, the movie keeping it off screen the entire time.
The ship did get a design later, however, with a design sourced from a a fan contest. The winning design was a Reliant-style “light cruiser” reconfiguration of the Enterprise-E’s parts, same saucer, engines below, rollbar with torpedos above. (As an aside, I always thought the design was fine, but thought it was slightly insulting that Riker didn’t deserve a “real” Enterprise-style “heavy cruiser”.)
This design got used in various spin-off material for 2 decades—novel covers, calendars, and so on—until it made the jump to the screen at the end of the first season of Lower Decks.
Emotionally, an upgraded Tian is perfect. Riker has just enough pull as the former captain with this one specific ship to get on board, and let him and Picard try to pull off a heist through sheer charisma. But! The new captain, Riker’s replacement, doesn’t like them, and the ship is remodeled and different. It’s barely the ship Riker knew, and a thing that he thought was his one connection back to the old days ends up highlighting his disassociation even further. It’s Kirk unable to find the turbolift in TMP, but better written.
And from the dialog in the show it’s clearly supposed to be the same ship. Riker’s music was still in the library, and Shaw, the new captain, knows how to pull off some tricks with the 20-year old warp engines.
The problem, however, is that the new Titan and the old one look absolutely nothing alike, and there’s no sane theory that could explain how the one could be rebuilt into the other and have anything orignal left.
So: creatively and emotionally, it’s the right thing to do, but derailed by a 2 decade old design that was never in live action. So, what can you do? Well…
Decide to stay consistant with the old look and launch your new show with a ship that won a contest for paperback covers. Clearly not going to happen. Regardless of the pros or cons of the design, this is a new show and calls for a new ship.
Hope no one notices, and retcon the old design and pretend the Titan always looked like this. That’s just rude.
Sigh deeply and use a different ship. Sure, but… What? Make a up a new one? There’s suddenly a lot of time you have to spend rebuilding the emotional beats to a ship no one in the audience has ever heard of. Worf’s old Bird of Prey from DS9? Even worse. The Defiant? Talk about extra baggage we don’t want to spend time on!
Invoke the Mystery Science Theature mantra of “It’s just a show, you should really just relax,” and then split the difference between being a refit and new build by calling it a refit in dialog and then slapping a -A on the registry number, and hand-waving past the details.
Given the options, number Four is clearly the right choice, here.
Personally, I think it’s a pretty elegant way to use the existing material to deepen the new stuff without letting it drag the new show down. I mean, it’s pretty silly to imagine what it would take to rebuild the old shape into the new one and have it be worth the effort, but where else can you juice an emotional beat by dropping a reference to a movie from 20 years ago, which was itself a follow-up to a show that went off the air nearly a decade before that?
Not everything should be a sprawling multi-decade multi-format multi-media franchise, but I’m enjoying the way people are finding new ways to tell stories using them.
(And, as a final note here, I’ll add that Picard 3 also has what I think is the single best use of “hey, you know we have footage of these same people playing these same characters from 36 years ago, can we use that somehow?”)
Wilhem!
Audio preservationist Craig Smith has restored and uploaded a whole host of classic sound effect recordings to freesound.org: Preserving the Sunset Editorial Sound Effects Library from the USC Archive
Some very cool stuff in here, but the signature item is the complete original ADR session that produced the “Wilhelm Scream”! https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/675810/
I expect “not an ow!” to land in a couple dozen dance tracks by the end of the summer.
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.”