Ridiculous Fishing!
Holy smokes! Ridiculous Fishing is back in a new and updated form in Apple Arcade.
The original was a game my kids and I played constantly a decade ago. I still get the background music from the first zone stuck in my head from time to time.
One of the most irritating things about the Apple iOS app store ecosystem is the way apps will just rot, and as the platform moves forward apps that can’t or wont support regular updates will fall away and disappear. (To be clear, I understand why Apple requires developers to keep their apps up to date, I just disagree.. There’s no reason why an app from 2014 shouldn’t be able to run just fine on the same platform in 2023. Heck, with the increase in power of a modern iPhone’s processor, the OS and app store could provision an entire fully-sandboxed VM running the older version of iOS the games were designed for. But I digress.)
However, something Apple is very good at is announcing that they’ve fixed all the problems with a previous product or service, without ever actually admitting that the problems existed in the first place. In a lot of ways, Apple Arcade feels like an apology for how the app store treats games in the first place.
One of the fun things about the service is the number of primal app store games that have come back to life with a + version in Arcade—Osmos, Angry Birds, Stardew Valley, Ridiculous Fishing—it’s like someone looked at my iPad’s homescreen in 2013.
In any case, I’m glad it’s back.
Of course, its not just a “remaster”, but a full-remake, with new graphics, new game modes, more fish. Plus! The updated version replaces the original spoof social network “byrdr” with the even funner “Bik Bok”.
I’ve very much enjoyed re-exploring the old map, re-discovering the weird fishes, and having the same argument I had with my kid before about which guns are the best.
Starcruiser, coming in for a landing
On paper, Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcuiser—aka “the Star Wars Hotel”—should have been right up my alley, being that I’m a massive fan of Disney Parks, Star Wars, and role playing. Instead, I was more bemused than intrigued, intending to think about going if the price went down and the plague died back a little more. Instead, it’s shutting down after just over a year and a half in operation.
Disney’s marketing was always vague about what the actual experience was—is it a hotel with a lot of theming and meet and greets? An attraction in it’s own right? Larp summer camp? Did they really build a hotel in Florida without a pool or windows that open?
Therefore, I absolutely devoured Adrian Hon’s detailed writeup of his stay, and Jason Snell’s additional comments and links over at Six Colors.. This is by far the clearest description I’ve read of the experience; and while I wasn’t that interested in going before reading this, having read it, I’m still disinterested, but for totally different reasons.
I agree with one point in his writeup wholeheartedly: the marking on this was strange.. Disney advertised it as a deeply themed hotel connected to the Star Wars section of the park. Essentially the next level up in theming their park-connected hotels; the Grand Californian’s side door into California Adventure but without breaking character.
Instead, it’s a deeply themed 2-day full immersion live role playing experience, where you get to take a break and go on some Disney rides in the middle of the day.
It’s hard to know if this is really a “failure”, so much as an experiment that came to a conclusion.
Some thoughts!
First, and I say this with all the love in the world, if I’m going to be locked in a windowless bunker for two days, “Star Wars fans with too much money” is not the demographic I want to be locked in with.
And, look. The key word in “windowless bunker” is “windowless”. Covid is still real; in the world after March 2020, spending two days in such a place with a bunch of strangers is a whole different cost-benefit analysis.
I was going to make a crack here about how a trip for a family of four to the Starcruiser including the airfare to Florida cost more than my college education, but you know what? That’s probably about the right price. Not just because of the clearly high operating costs, but any lower than that, and the temptation to show up dressed as a Star Trek away team, or Doctor Who, or Corben Dallas, would become overwhelming. For six hundred bucks, you might be willing to mess around, but for six grand the buy-in is high enough to make sure everyone is there to actually play as intended.
And, not to go too far down the Trilogy Wars path, but, GenX-er here. The fact that it’s set at some poorly-defined point between the Sequels is fine, makes sense. It has Rey in it, that’s great! She’s a great character, my kids love Rey. But man, if instead that was two days at Echo Base on Hoth, helping Luke trap Wampas and blow up Probe Droids I’d have slapped that credit card down without a moment’s hesitation.
(But, Star Wars Land—excuse me, Galaxy’s Edge—has this same challenge throughout, though. Stars Wars is at least 4 different distinct audiences now, depending on which one was the one you saw when you were nine, and it’s only going to become more so. There’s a reason it’s “Fantasy Land” and not “Sleeping Beauty Land.” It’ll be interesting to see if the more Sequel-specific parts of the park get sanded down to a more “evergreen” median value Star Wars. Or if they retool to be more oriented towards the Disney+ shows, instead of a movie that’s now almost a decade old.)
Speaking of Corben Dallas, I’d probably also have dropped five grand to spend two nights at the Fhloston Paradise?
And maybe this is just me, but I’m deeply weirded out by the number of people who took the First Order path—are there really people who want to pay that much money for the privilege of ratting out beloved characters to space fascists? I feel the same way about the storm troopers who “occupy” sections of the park. Maybe throwing the largest marketing department in the world behind making fascists fun and cuddly isn’t the best possible move here in the Twenties?
Anyway. It sure sounds like for a specific demographic they built the perfect attraction. I usually think of myself as an Extrovert, but personally that all sounds exhausting.
I _am_ looking forward to seeing what they do with what they learned from all this. If nothing else, I really want to wander around that thing they built without the commitment. I’d happily stand in line to get “shuttled up to orbit” to do that bridge training co-op game. I hope the building ends up something like an Epcot pavilion, where you can pop in and wander around for a couple hours in the middle of the afternoon.
Achewood is back!
Pleased beyond words that Achewood has returned from what turned out to not be a permanent hiatus after all.
Achewood was one of the very best webcomics from that era between the dot com crash and the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four where you could put art on the net for free and then actually pay rent by selling t-shirts.
The Verge has a nice writeup and interview with the Chris Onstad, the creator, talking about why he stopped and what caused him to come back.
It’s on Patreon now, which from the outside seems like it might have been the missing piece to making a living putting art on the internet.
Not only is it back, but it’s as good as it ever was. Clearly talking an extended sabbatical was worth it; Onstad hit the ground running and has been turning out bangers every week with the same voice the strip always had.
But, at the same time, it’s clearly being written by an older person with a different perspective. There is this additional note, where there’s a a hint of Onstad stepping back on to stage and looking around at his early-00s contemporaries asking, “guys, what’s gonna happent to all this stuff we made in in our twenties?” I won’t spoil it, but the new Achewood provides an answer that is extremely in character, while also informed by decades of experience.
Easiest 14 bucks a month I’ve ever spent.
D-D-D-DOUBLE STRIKE!!!
Absolute solidarity with WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Hold out as long as it takes.
As someone said on twitter, "Usually if a group of writers and actors are united against you that means you are the antagonist of a Muppet movie"
The Enshittification Curve
(Been meaning to link to this for a while, mostly so I can find it again easily.)
Back in January, Cory Doctorow put a name to a thing everyone’s been feeling but can’t quite name: Enshittification.
He’s talking about TikTok specifically there, and then Mike Masnick over at TechDirt did a rundown on Twitter’s speedrun of the process.
And see also his earlier piece on how to avoid that outcome, which is excellent, but has the amusing side detail that he uses Amazon as an example of a company that did things right, while Doctorow uses Amazon as his number two example of a fully “enshittified” company.
But that’s the thing, this applies to just about everything in the tech space. The classic example has been everyone realizing how deeply strange to have lived through the era where Google was useful and now be on the other side of it, but! The entire post-dot com tech industry seems to be at the same point on the curve, and part of the bizarreness current moment is that a decade ago there was this whole array of web-based stuff that worked great, and now there... just… isn’t. The entire Tech Industry seems to have settled into being the American Car Industry circa the mid-70s. Belaboring the metaphor, I’m looking forward to see who plays the part of Toyota this time.
Edited to add: Tsai's Link Roundup.
Thirty Years of Tentacles
How can Day of the Tentacle possibly be thirty years old?
A stone cold classic, and still one of the best adventure games ever made.
I have an incredibly clear memory of standing in the games section of CompUSA as a teenager, watching the opening of DOTT loop on one of the demo machines there, and literally laughing out loud in the middle of the store. I couldn’t believe a game could actually look like that. It was actually funny! And well animated! One of those times where the future has arrived and you can’t quite believe your eyes. I wish it had been more of trendsetter in that regard, and that more games had chased “Chuck Jones Looney Tunes” as a model, instead of “photo-real direct-to-video action movie.”
As another sign of the changing times, as if CompUSA wasn’t enough early 90s nostalgia, I never would have remembered that DOTT came out in June. I got it for christmas that year, and it’s hard to believe we waited for six months. And I remember agonizing about getting the floppy disk or CD-ROM version, since we were worried the CD versions “full voice” might be “too distracting.” Too distracting! Phew, maybe it has been 30 years.
Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone
A man sits alone in an apartment. The apartment is small, and furnished with modern-looking inexpensive furniture. The furniture looks new, freshly installed. This man is far too old to be sitting in a small, freshly furnished apartment for any good or happy reason. Newly divorced? He puts on his Apple Vision Pro(tm) headset. He opens the photos app, and looks on as photos of his children fill the open space of an apartment no child has ever lived in. “Relive your happiest memories,” intones the cheerful narrator. The apartment is silent. It is one of the most quietly devastating short films I have ever seen. Apple Inc made this movie hoping it would convince you to buy their new headset. I am now hoping this man is only divorced, and not a widower. There is hope, because the fact that he has spent $3,500 on a headset strongly indicates he himself is the biggest tragedy in his own life.
The year is 2023. Apple would like to sell you a new way to be alone.
And there is is, the Apple Vision Pro. The hardware looks incredible. The software looks miraculous. The product is very, very strange.
Back when I worked in the Space Glasses racket, I used to half-joke that space glasses designers should just own how big the thing has to be and make them look like cyberpunk 80s ski goggles. Apple certainly leaned into that—not Space Glasses, but Cyber Goggles.
Let’s start with the least intersting thing: the Price. “Does Tim Apple really expect me to pay 3,500 bucks for cyber goggles?” No, he literally doesn't. More so that any other Apple product in recent memory, this is a concept car.. The giveaway is the name, this is the Apple Vision Pro.. The goal is to try things out and build up anticipation, so that in three years when they release the Apple Vision Air for 1,800 bucks they’ll sell like hotcakes.
Apple being Apple, of course, figured out a way to sell their concept car at retail.
It’s status as a concept car goes a long way towards explaining many—but not all—of the very strange things about this product.
From a broad hardware/software features & functionality, this is close to what we were expecting. AR/Mixed Reality as the default operating mode, Apps and objects appearing as if they were part of the real-life environment, hand gesture control, a focus on experiences and enhanced productivity, with games getting only a passing glance.
Of course, there were several things I did find surprising.
First, I didn’t expect it to be a standalone unit, I was really expecting a “phone accessory” like the Watch (or arguably the Apple TV was to begin with.). But no, for all intents and purposes, there’s an entire laptop jammed into a pair of goggles. That’s a hell of an impressive feat of industrial engineering.
I was certainly not expecting the “external screen showing your eyes.” That got rumored, and I dismissed it out of hand, because that’s crazy. But okay, as implemented, now I can see what they were going for.
One of the biggest social problems with space glasses—or cyber goggles—is how you as the operator can communicate to other people that you’re paying attention to cyberspace as opposed to meat space. Phones, laptops, books all solve this the same way—you point your face at them and are clearly looking at the thing, instead of the people around you.
Having the screen hide your eyes while in cyberspace certainly communicates which mode the operator is in and solves the “starting a fight by accident” problem.
Using eye tracking as a key UI interaction shouldn’t have been surprising, but was. I spent that whole part of the keynote slapping my forehead; _of course! Of course that’s how that would work!
I expected games to get short shrift, but the lack of any sort of VR gaming attention at all really surprised me. Especially given that in the very same keynote they had actual real-life KOJIMA announcing that Death Stranding was coming to the Mac! Gaming is getting more attention at Apple than it’s gotten in years, and they just… didn’t talk about that with the headset?
Also strange was the lack of new “spacial” UIs? All the first party Apple software they showed was basically the same as on the Mac or iOS, just in a window floating in space. By comparison, when the Touch Bar launched, they went out of their way to show what every app they made used it for, from the useful (Final Cut’s scrub timeline, emoji pickers, predictive text options) to the mediocre (Safari’s tabs). Or Force Touch on the iPhone, for “right click” menus in iOS. Here? None of that. This is presumably a side effect of Apple’s internal secrecy and the schedule being such that they needed to announce it at the dev conference half a year before it shipped, but that’s strange. I was expecting at least a Final Cut Pro spacial interface that looks like an oldschool moviola, given they just ported FCP X to the iPad, and therefore presumably, the Vision.
Maybe the software group learned from all the time they poured into the Toubchbar & Force Touch. Or more likely, this was the first time most of the internal app dev groups got to see the new device, and are starting their UI designs now, to be ready for release with the device next year.
And so, if I may be so crude as to grade my own specific predictions:
- Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing. Yes.
- Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD. Nope! Turns out, it runs locally!
- Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code. Unclear? Presumably this will work?
- Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm. Yes, although I missed the eye tracking. And a much stronger emphasis on voice input than I expected, although it’s obvious in retrospect.
- Spacial audio. Yes.
- Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment. Heck yes.
- Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language. Unclear at this time. Maybe?
But okay! Zooming out, they really did it—they built Tony Stark’s sunglasses. At least, as close as the bleeding edge of technology can get you here in 2023. It’s only going to get lighter and smaller from here on out.
And here’s the thing: this is clearly going to be successful. The median response from the people who got hands-on time last week has been very positive. It might not fly off the shelves, but it’ll do at least as well as the new Mac Pro, whose whole selling point is the highly advanced technology of “PCI slots”.
By the time the Apple Vision Air ships in 2027, they’ll have cut the weight and size of the goggles, and there’s going to be an ecosystem built up from developers figuring out how to build a Spacial UI for the community of early adopters.
I’m skeptical the Cyber Goggles form factor will replace the keyboard-screen laptop or iPhone as a daily driver, but this will probably end up with sales somewhere around the iPad Pro at the top of the B-tier, beloved by a significant but narrow user base.
But all that’s not even remotely the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing is the story they told.
As usual, Apple showed a batch of filmed demos and ads demonstrating “real world” use, representing their best take on what the headset is for.
Apple’s sweet spot has always been “regular, creative people who have things to do that they’d like to make easier with a computer.” Not “computers for computer’s sake”—that’s *nix, not “big enterprise capital-W Work”—that’s Windows. But, regular folks, going about their day, their lives being improved by some piece of Apple kit.
And their ads & demos always lean in the aspirational nature of this. Attractive young people dancing to fun music from their iPods! Hanging out in cool coffee shops with their MacBooks! Creative pros working on fun projects in a modern office with colorful computers! Yes! That all looks fun! I want to be those people!
Reader, let me put my cards directly out on the table: I do not want to be any of the people in the Apple Vision demos.
First, what kind of work are these people doing? Other than watching movies, they’re doing—productivity software? Reviewing presentations, reading websites, light email, checking messages. Literally Excel spreadsheets. And meetings. Reviewing presentations in a meeting. Especially for Apple, this is a strangely “corporate” vision of the product.
But more importantly, where are they? Almost always, they’re alone.
Who do we see? A man, alone, looking at photos. A woman, alone in her apartment, watching a movie. Someone else, alone in a hotel room, reviewing a work presentation with people who are physically elsewhere. Another woman alone in a hotel room using FaceTime to talk to someone—her mother? “I miss you!” she says in one of the few audible pieces of dialog. A brief scene of someone playing an Apple Arcade game, alone in a dark room. A man in a open floor-plan office, reading webpages and reading email, turns the dial to hide his eyes from his coworkers. A woman on a flight pulls her headset on to tune out the other people om the plane.
Alone, alone, alone.
Almost no one is having fun. Almost no one is happy to be where they are. They’re doing Serious Work. Serious, meaning no one is creating anything, just reviewing and responding. Or consuming. Consuming, and wishing they were somewhere, anywhere, else.
It’s a sterile, corporate vision of computing, where we use computers to do, basically, what IBM would have imagined in the 1970s. A product designed _by_ and for upper middle management at large corporations. Work means presentation, spreadsheets, messages, light email.
Sterile, and with a grim undercurrent of “we know things are bad. We know you can’t afford an apartment big enough for the TV you want, or get her take you back, or have the job you wanted. But at least you can watch Avatar while pretending to be on top of a mountain.”
And with all these apps running on the space glasses, no custom UIs. Just, your existing apps floating in a spectral window, looking mostly the same.
Effectively, no games. There was a brief shot of someone playing something with a controller in a hovering window? But nothing that used the unique capabilities platform. No VR games. No Beat Saber, No Mans Sky, Superhot, Half-Life: Alyx. Even by Apple standards, this is a poor showing.
Never two headsets in the same place. Just one, either alone, or worn by someone trying to block out their surroundings.
The less said about the custom deepfake facetime golems, the better.
And, all this takes place in a parallel world untouched by the pandemic. We know this product was already well along before anyone had heard of COVID, and it’s clear the the last three years didn’t change much about what they wanted to build. This is a product for a world where “Remote Work” means working from a hotel on a trip to the customer. The absolute best use case for the product they showed was to enable Work From Home in apartments too small to have a dedicated office space, but Apple is making everyone come back to the office, and they can’t even acknowledge that use.
There are ways to be by yourself without being alone. They could have showed a DJ prepping their next set, a musician recording music, an artist building 3d models for a game. Instead, they chose presentations in hotels and photos dark, empty apartments.
I want to end the same way they ended the keynote, with that commercial. A dad with long hair is working while making his daughter toast. This is more like it! I am this Dad! I’ve done exactly this! With close to that hair!
And by the standards they’s already set, this is much better! He’s interacting with his kids while working. He’s working on his Surf Shop! By which we mean he’s editing a presentation to add some graphics that were sent to him.
But.
That edit couldn’t wait until you made your kid toast? It’s toast, it doesn’t take that long. And he’s not designing a surfboard, he’s not even building a presentation about surfboards, he’s just adding art someone sent him to a presentation that already exists.
His kid is staring at a screen with a picture of her dad’s eyes, not the real thing. And not to put too fine a point on it, but looking at his kid without space glasses in the way is the moment Darth Vader stopped being evil. Tony Stark took his glasses off when he talked to someone.
I can already do all that with my laptop. And when I have my laptop in the kitchen, when my daughter asks what I’m working on, I can just gesture to the screen and show her. I can share.
This is a fundamentally isolating view of computing, one where we retreat into unsharable private worlds, where our work email hovers menacingly over the kitchen island.
No one ever looks back and their life and thinks, “thank goodness I worked all those extra hours instead of spending time with my kids.” No one looks back and celebrates the times they made a presentation at the same time as lunch. No one looks back and smiles when they think of all the ways work has wormed into every moment, eroding our time with our families or friends, making sure we were never present, but always thinking about the next slide, the next tab, the next task..
No one will think , “thank goodness I spent three thousand five hundred dollars so I had a new way to be alone.”
Space Glasses
Wearable Technology, for your face
Once computers got small enough that “wearable technology” was a thing we could talk about with a straight face, glasses were an obvious form factor. Eye glasses were already the world’s oldest wearable technology! But glasses are tricky. For starters, they’re small. But also, they already work great at what they do, a nearly peerless piece of accessibility technology. They last for years, work on all kinds of faces, work in essentially any environment you can think of, and can seamlessly treat any number of conditions simultaneously. It’s not immediately obvious what value there is in adding electricity and computers. My glasses already work great, why should I need to charge them, exactly? Plus, if you need glasses you need them. I can drive home if my watch crashes, I can’t go anywhere if my glasses break.
There’s a bit in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which has sort of lost it’s context now, about how goofy digital watches were, considering they didn’t do anything that clockwork watches couldn’t do except “need new batteries.” Digital Glasses have that problem, but more so.
So instead smartphones happened, and then smart watches.
But still, any number of companies have tried to sell you a computer you strap to your head and over your eyes. Mostly, these exist on an axis between 3d headsets, a form factor that mostly froze somewhere around the VirtualBoy in the early 90s, and the Google Glass, which sounded amazing if you never saw or wore one. Now it looks like Apple is ”finally” going to lift the curtain on their version of a VR/AR glasses headset.
A couple of lifetimes ago, I worked with smart glasses. Specifically, I was on the team that shipped Level Smart Glasses, along with a bunch of much more interesting stuff that was never released. For a while, I was a major insurance company’s “Lead Engineer for Smart Glasses”. (“Hey, what can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Truthfully, I don’t think about those guys that much since all that stuff went down.”)
I spent a lot of time thinking about what a computer inside your glasses could do. The terminology slid around a lot. “Smart Glasses.” “Wearable Tech.” “Digital Eyewear.” “Smart Systems.” “VR headsets.” “Reality Goggles.”
I needed a name that encompassed the whole universe of head-mounted wearable computing devices. I called them Space Glasses. Internally at least, the name stuck.
Let me tell you about Space Glasses.
Let’s Recap
Traditionally the have been two approaches to a head-mounted computer.
First, you have the VR Headset. This broke out into the mainstream in the early 90s with products like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but also all those “VR movies” (Johnny Mnemonic, Disclosure, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity,) and a whole host of game initiatives lost to time. (Who else remembers System Shock had a VR mode? Or Magic Carpet?)
On the other hand, you have the Heads Up Display, which from a pop-culture perspective goes back to mid 80s movies like Terminator or Robocop, and maybe all the way back to Razor Molly in Neuromancer. These stayed fictional while the VR goggles thrashed around. And then Google Glass happened.
Google Glass was a fantastic pitch followed up by a genuinely terrible product. I was at CES a couple years back, and there’s an entire cottage industry of people trying to ship a product that matches the original marketing for Glass.
Glass managed to be the best and worst thing that could have happened to the the industry. It demonstrated that such a thing was possible, but did it in a way that massively repulsed most of the population.
My glass story goes like this: I was at a convention somewhere in the greater Silicon Valley area, probably the late lamented O’Reilly Velocity. I’m getting coffee before the keynote. It’s the usual scrum of folks milling around a convention center lobby, up too early, making small talk with strangers. And there’s the guy. Very valley software engineer type, pasty, button down shirt. Bit big, a real husky guy. And he’s staring at me. Right at me, eyes drilling in. He’s got this look. This look.. I have no idea who he is, I look up, make eye contact. He keeps starting with that expression. And for a split second, I think, “Well, huh, I guess I’m about to get into a fistfight at a convention.” Because everything about this guy’s expression says he’s about to take a swing. Then he reaches up and taps his google glasses. And I realize that he had no idea I was there, he was reading email. And thats when I knew that product was doomed. Because pulling out your phone and starting at it serves an incredibly valuable social indicator that you’re using a device.. With a seamless heads-up display like glass, there was no way to communicate when you were reading twitter as opposed to starting down a stranger.
Which is a big part of why everyone wearing them became glassholes.
Plus, you looked like a massive, unredeemable dork. To mis-quote a former boss of mine, no produc tis going to work if it’ll make it harder for you to get laid, and Glass was the most effective form of birth control known to lifekind.
Underreported between the nuclear-level dorkiness and the massive privacy concerns was the fact that Glass was incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
Despite that, the original Glass pitch is compelling, and there’s clearly a desire to find an incarnation of the idea that doesn’t set off the social immune system.
Glass and Better-made VirtualBoy’s aren’t the only ways to go, though.
Spectrums of Possibilities
There are a lot of ways to mount a microprocessor to someone’s head. I thought of all the existing space glasses form factors operating on two main orthogonal axes, or spectrums. I’ll spare you the 2x2 consultant chart, and just describe them:
- With a screen, or without. There are plenty of other sensors or ways to share information with the wearer, but “does it have a screen or heads-up-display” is a key differentiator.
- All Day wear vs Single Task wear. Do you wear them all the time, like prescription spectacles, or do you put them on for a specific time and reason, like sunglasses?
There are also two lesser dimensions I mention for completeness:
- Headset-style design vs “normal” glasses design. This is more a factor of the current state of miniaturization than a real design choice. Big headsets are big only because they can’t fit all that in a package that looks like a Ray-bans wayfarer. Yet. You can bet the second that the PS VR can look like the Blues Brother’s sunglasses, they will.
- VR vs AR. If you have a screen, does the picture replace the real world completely, or merge with it? While this is a pretty major difference now—think VR headset vs Google glass—like the above this is clearly a quirk of an immature technology. It wont take long before any mature product can do both, and swap between them seamlessly.
What do we use them for, though?
This is all well and good, but what are the use cases, really?
On the “no screen” side of the house: not much. Those are, fundamentally, regular “dumb” non-electric glasses. Head mounted sensors are intersting, but not interesting enough to remember to charge another device on their own. People did some interesting things using sound instead of vision (Bose, for example,) but ultimately, the correct form factor for an audio augmented reality device are AirPods.
Head-mounted sensors, on their own, are interesting. You get very different, and much cleaner, data than from a watch or a phone in a pocket, mostly because you have a couple million years of biological stabilization working for you, instead of against you. Plus, they’re open to the air, they have the same “sight-lines” as the operator, and they have direct skin contact.
But not interesting enough to get someone to plug their glasses in every night.
With a screen, then, or some kind of heads-up display.
For all-day wear, it’s hard to imagine something compelling enough to be successful. Folks who need prescriptions have already hired their glasses to do something very specific, and folks who don’t need corrective eyewear will, rounding to the nearest significant digit, never wear spectacles all day if they don’t need to.
Some kind of head’s up display is, again, sort of interesting, but does anyone really want their number of unread emails hovering in their peripheral vision at all times?
I saw a very cool demo once where the goggles used the video camera, some face recognition technology, and a database to essentially overlay people’s business cards—their name & title—under their faces. “Great for people who can’t remember names!” And, like, that’s a cool demo, and great you could pull that off, but buddy, I think you might be mistaking your own social anxiety for a product market just a little bit. And man, if you think you’re awkward at social events when you can’t remember someone’s name, I hate to break it to you, but reading their name off your cyber goggles is not going to help things.
For task-based wear, the obvious use remains games. Games, and game-like “experiences”, see what this couch looks like in your own living room, and the like. There’s some interesting cases around 3d design, being able to interact with an object under design as if it was really there.
So, essentially, we’ve landed on VR goggles, which have been sputtering right on the edge of success for close to 30 years now, assuming we only start counting with the Virtual Boy.
There’s currently at least three flavors of game-focused headwear—Meta’s Quest (the artist formerly known as the Oculus,) Sony’s Playstation VR, and Valve’s index. Nearby, you have things like Microsoft’s HoloLens and MagicLeap which are the same thing but “For Business”, and another host of similar devices I can’t think of. (Google Cardboard! Nintendo Labo VR!)
But, fundamentally, these are all the same—strap some screens directly to your eyes and complete a task.
And, that’s a pretty decent model! VR googles are fun, certainly in short bursts. Superhot VR is a great game!
Let’s briefly recap the still-unsolved challenges.
First, they’re all heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive. These are the sort of problems that Moore’s Law and Efficiency of Scale will solve assuming people keep pouring money in, so can largely write those off.
Second, you look like a dork when you wear these. In addition to having half a robot face, reacting to things no one else can see looks deeply, deeply silly. There is no less-attractive person than a person playing a VR game.
Which brings us to the third, and hardest problem: VR goggles as they exist today are fundamentally isolating.
An insufficiently acknowledged truth is that at their core, computers and their derivatives are fundamentally social devices. Despite the pop-culture archetype of the lone hacker, people are constantly waving people over to look at what’s on their screen, passing their phone around, trading the controller back and forth. Consoles games might be “single player,” but they’re rarely played by one person.
VR goggles deeply break this. You can’t drop in and look over someone’s shoulder when they have the headwear, easily pass the controller back and forth, have a casual game night.
Four friends on a couch playing split screen Mario Kart is a very, very different game than four friends each with a headset strapped over their eyes.
Not an unsolvable set of problems, but space glasses that don’t solve for these will never break out past a niche market.
AR helps this a lot. The most compelling use for AR to date is still Pokemon Go, using the phone’s camera to show Pokemon out in the real world. Pokemon Go was a deeply social activity when it was a its peak, nearly sidestepping all the isolating qualities AV/VR tends to have.
Where do they fit?
At this point, it’s probably worth stepping back and looking at a slightly bigger picture. What role do space glasses fill, or fill better that the other computing technology we have?
Everyone likes to compare the introduction of new products to the the smartphone, but that isn’t a terribly useful comparison; the big breakthrough there was to realize that it was possible to demote “making phone calls” to an app instead of a whole device, and then make a computer with that app on it small enough to hold in your hand.
The watch is a better example. Wristwatches are, fundamentally, information radiators. Classic clockwork based watches radiated a small set of information all the time. The breakthrough was to take that idea and run with it, and use the smart part of smart watches to radiate more and different kinds of information. Then, as a bonus, pack some extra human-facing sensors in there. Largely, anything that tried to expand the watch past an information radiator has not gone so well, but adding new kinds of information has.
What about glasses then? Regular eye glasses, help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In the case of prescription glasses, they bring things into focus. Sunglasses help you see things in other environments. Successful smart glasses will take this and run with it, adding more and different things you can see.
Grasping towards Conclusions
Which all (conveniently) leads us to what I think is the best theoretical model for space glasses—Tony Stark’s sunglasses.
They essentially solve for all of the above problems. They look good—ostentatious but not unattractive. It’s obvious when he’s using them. While on, they offer the wearer an unobstructed view of the world with a detailed display overlayed. Voice controlled.
And, most critically, they’re presented as an interface to a “larger” computer somewhere else—in the cloud, or back at HQ. They’re a terminal. They don’t replace the computer, they replace the monitor.
And that’s where we sit today. Some expensive game hardware, and a bunch of other startups and prototypes. What’s next?
Space Glasses, Apple Style
What, then, about Apple?
From the rumor mill, it seems clear that they had multiple form factors in play over the course of their headset project, they seem to have settled on the larger VR goggles/headset style that most everyone else has also landed on.
It also seems clear that this has been in the works for a while, with various hints and seemingly imminent announcements. Personally, I was convinced that this was going to be announced in 2020, and there was a bunch of talks at WWDC that year that seemed to have an empty space where “and you can do this on the goggles!” was supposed to go.
And of course that tracks with the rumor that that Apple was all in on a VR-headset, which then got shot by Jonny Ive and they pivoted to AR. Which jives with the fact that Apple made a big developer play into AR/VR back in 2017, and then just kinda... let it sit. And now Ive is out and they seem to be back to a headset?
What will they be able to do?
Famously, Apple also never tells people what's coming... but they do often send signals out to the developer community so they can get ready ahead of time. (The definitive example was the year they rolled out the ability for iOS apps to support multiple screen sizes 6 months before they shipped a second size of phone.)
So. Some signals from over the last couple of years that seem to be hinting at what their space glasses can do. (In the parlance of our times, it's time for some Apple glasses kremlinology game theory!)
ArKit's location detection. AR Kit can now use a combination of the camera, apple maps data, and the iPad's LIDAR to get a crazy accurate physical location in real space. There's no reason to get hyper-accurate device location for an iPad. But for a head-mounted display, with a HUD...?
Not to mention some very accurate people Occlusion & Detection in AR video.
RealityKit, meanwhile, has some insane AR composition tools, which also leverage the LIDAR camera from the iPad, and can render essentially photo-real objects ito the "real world”.
Meanwhile, some really interesting features on the AirPods, like spatial audio in AirPods Pro. Spacial has been out for a while now, and seems like the sort of thing you try once and then gorfet about? A cool demo. But, it seems like a way better idea if when you turn your head, you can also see what’s making the sounds?
Opening up the AirPods API: "AirPods Pro Motion API provides developers with access to orientation, user acceleration, and rotational rates for AirPods Pro — ideal for fitness apps, games, and more." Did anyone make apps for AirPods? But as a basic API for head-tracking?
Widgets! A few versions back, Apple rolled a way to do Konfabulator-esque (or, if you rather, Android-style) widgets for the iOS home screen. There's some strong indications that these came out of the Apple watch team (codenamed chrono, built around SwiftUI,) and may have been intended as a framework for custom watch faces. But! A lightweight way to take a slice of an app and "project" a minimal UI as part of a larger screen? That's perfect for a glasses-based HUD. I can easily see allowing iOS widgets to run on the glasses with no extra modifications on top of what the develoer had to do to get them running on the home screen. Day 1 of the product and you have a whole app store full of ready-to-go HUD components.
App Clips! On the one hand, it's "QR codes, but by Apple!" On the other hand, what we have here is a way to load up an entire app experience by just looking at a picture. Seems invaluable for a HUD+camera form factor? Especially a headset with a strong AR component—looking at elements in AR space download new features?
Hand and pose tracking. Part of greater ML/Vision frameworks, they rolled out crazy-accurate hand tracking, using their on-device ML. Check out the demo at 6:40 in this developer talk
Which is pretty cool on it's own except they ALSO rolled out:
Handwriting detection. Scribble is the new-and-improved iPad+pencil handwriting detector, and there's some room for a whole bunch of Newton jokes here. But mixed with the hand tracking? That's a terribly compelling interaction paradigm for a HUD-based device. Just write in the air in front of you, the space glasses turn that into text on the fly.
And related, iOS 14 added ML detection and real time translation of sign language. (?!)
Finally, there's a strong case to be made that the visual overhaul they gave MacOS 11 and iOS14 is about making it more "AR-friendly”, which would be right about the last time the goggles were rumored to be close to shipping.
In short, this points to a device:
- Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing.
- Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD.
- Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code.
- Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm.
- Spacial audio.
- Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment.
- Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language.
From a developer story, this seems likely to operate like the watch was at first. Tethered to a phone, which drives most of the processing power and projects the UI elements on to the glasses screen.
What are they For?
What they can do is all well and good, but what’s the pitch? Those are all features, or parts of features. Speeds and Feeds, which isn’t Apple’s style.What will Apple say they’re for?
The Modern-era (Post-Next) Apple doesn’t ship anything without a story. Which is good, more companies should spend the effort to build a story about why you need this, what this new thing is for, how it fits into your life. What problems you have this solves.
The iPod was “carry all your music with you all the time”.
The iPhone was the classic “three devices” in one.
The iPod Touch struggled with “the iPhone, but without a phone!”, but landed on “the thing you buy your kids to play games before you’re willing to buy them their own phone.”
The iPad was “your phone, but bigger!”
The Watch halfheartedly tried to sell itself as an enhanced communication device (remember the heartbeat thing?) before realizing it was a fitness device.
AirPods were “how great would it be if your earbuds didn’t have wires? Also, check out this background noise reduction.”
The HomePod is “a speaker you can yell requests at.”
So, what’s will the Space Glasses be?
For anyone else, the obvious play would be games, but games just aren’t a thing Apple is willing to be good at. There’s pretty much a straight line from letting Halo, made by Mac developers, become a huge hit as an XBOX exclusive to this story from Panic’s Cabel Sasser about why Untitled Goose Game is on every platform except the Mac App Store.
This is not unlike their failures to get their pro audio/video apps out into the Hollywood ecosystem. Both require a level of coöperation with other companies that Apple has never been willing to do.
Presumably, they’ll announce some VR games to go on the Apple Glasses. The No Mans Sky team is strongly hinting they’ll be there, so, okay? That’s a great game, but a popular VR-compatible game from six years ago is table stakes. Everyone else already has that. What’s new?
They’ve never treated games as a primary feature of a new platform. Games are always a “oh yeah, them too” feature.
What, then?
I suspect they’ll center around “Experiences”. VR/AR environments. Attend a live concert like you’re really there! Music is the one media type Apple is really, really good at, so I expect them to lean heavily into that. VR combined with AirPods-style spacial audio could be compelling? (This would be easier to believe if they were announcing the goggles at their music event in September instead of WWDC.)
Presumably this will have a heavily social component as well—attend concerts with your family from out of town. Hang out in cyberspace! Explore the Pyramids with your friends!
There’s probably also going to be a remote-but-together shared workspace thing. Do your zoom meetings in VR instead of starting at the Brady Bunch credits on your laptop.
There’s probably also going to be a whole “exciting new worlds of productivity” where basic desktop use gets translated to VR/AR. Application windows floating in air around your monitor! Model 3d objects with your hands over your desk!
Like the touch bar before it, what’s really going to be interesting here is what 1st party apps gets headset support on day one. What’s the big demo from the built-in apps? Presumably, Final Cut gets a way to edit 360 video in 360, but what else? Can I spread my desktop throughout the volume of my office? Can I write an email by waving my hands in empty space?
Anyway.
The whole time I was being paid to think about Space Glasses, Apple was the Big Wave. The Oncoming Storm. We knew they were going to release something, and if anyone could make it work, it would be them. I spent hours on hours trying to guess what they would do, so we could either get out ahead or get out of the way.
I’m so looking forward to finding out what they were really building all that time.
Pluralistic vs Looters
Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic is always worth reading, but today’s is a real barn burner, tearing into the Private Equity looters who seem intent on hollowing out civilization:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/
I’m going to die mad that we all decided it was okay for Toys ‘R Us to get murdered in broad daylight. We don’t actually have to give up everything to make a couple rich people richer.
The Richmond Way
At some point towards the end of the summer of 2020, right about the time it was becoming clear that the worst summer of our lives was about to become an even worse winter, I started hearing about this show. It didn’t sound like my kind of thing. Sports comedy? Starring the guy who always played jerks on SNL? And it’s on that new Apple streaming thing? Wrote it off initially, “huh, lotta tv these days!”
But then I kept hearing about it. Hearing about it from the sort of people who normally don’t like that sort of show, both on-line and in real life, “trust me, you have to watch this.” Okay, maybe?
And then, right in the middle of that I bought a new iPhone, which came with the free trial of AppleTV+. Okay! Let’s check it out.
And then we watched the whole first season of Ted Lasso in one sitting.
It was stupendous! A fun premise—American College Football coach hired to coach a British Football team—fun characters, good writing. “Lightweight?“ Sure, it was a sitcom after all, but consistently managed to punch above its weight class thanks to universally good performances, tight writing, and an ability to constantly surprise through pushing against the standard sitcom tropes by always choosing to be kind and sincere instead of mean and sarcastic.
But also, a perfect match of a great show hitting at just the right time. Surrounded by a world that seemed intent to surrender to anger and fear, here was a show about solving problems with kindness, a show where the main character’s super power is radical empathy. This perfect bubble of hope and escapism in the middle of everything burning down. A salve, permission to imagine a better way.
It’s been interesting to want the reactions to the show change. The Disaster of the Twenties continues to roll on, but by summer of ’21 it had settled into something more akin to Gibson’s Jackpot, state of being instead of an imminent disaster, notwithstanding what the delta variant was doing to our fall plans.
The show came back, and there was a sense that its moment had passed. We had vaccines, COVID wasn’t on the same uncontrolled rampage, the election was over. We weren’t quite as desperate for something to take the edge of we had been the year before.
Popular shows always get some backlash when they come back, but the responses to Ted Lasso were vicious even by those standards.
All those people who wouldn’t normally watch a show about a kind guy being kind, those same people who kept recommending it as “normally I wouldn’t like something like this but you have to watch it,” all railed about how bad it was now, it had lost it’s way, it was predictable, the characters were boring, there was no conflict. All without any sort of self-recognition that maybe the show was exactly the same, and they had changed, or rather, changed back.
The show skipped summer ’22, and then just wrapped up it’s third and final season here at the start of summer ’23.
For the record, I though the end was perfect. The resolution wasn’t hugely surprising; the show was fundamentally about kindness being the answer, so if you stopped and asked at the start of the season “what’s the kindest thing the show could do for each character,” you’d probably be pretty close to the actual end. It was beautiful, tying up most of the character’s stories, and leaving just a few open-ended to let you wonder what happened next.
There’s a great beat in the middle of the season where recurring antagonist-turned-ally Trent Crim figures out what’s been happening this whole time, looks the camera dead in the eye and delivers the basic thesis of the show.
Ted Lasso himself always functioned more like a character in the vein of Mary Poppins than a standard sitcom hero; he arrived when the other characters needed him most, and once they had learned what they needed to, his work was done, he moved on, and the curtains closed since the story was about the other people learning from Ted. As the title character says towards the end, “it wasn’t about me, it never was.”
Even more so than last time, the criticism was… strange. A centerpiece of the blowback this year was that the show “lacked conflict”, which was a) literally wrong, but also b) tremendously missing the point. This was the resolution of three seasons of people becoming emotionally healthier and learning from Ted to also solve problems with kindness; the whole point was that now, there was still conflict, and it was still sometimes hard, but everyone was trying to be kind. It’s nearly unprecedented for an American show to resolve a conflict by having both parties realizing they’d rather be friends than rivals, it was clear that for a chunk of the audience that simply didn’t register as drama.
It’s telling, I think, that the other big show ending at the same time was HBOs’ “Mean People being Mean to each other, and then all Losing,” which was praised by all the same people that had turned on Ted Lasso’s “Kind People being Kind to each other, and all Winning.”
It’s easy to over-signify things, and I’ll avoid the easy generalizations here around the state of the world, but I’ll just say I think we’d be a lot better off if everyone who didn’t like the second and third seasons of Ted Lasso as much as the first would all take a moment and consider some reasons why that might be. Spoiler: the show didn’t get worse. Try thinking of what the kindest reason might be.
Happy Towel Day!
“Listen, it’s a tough universe! Theres all sorts of people and things trying to do you, kill you, rip you off, everything! If you’re going to survive out there, you’ve really got to know where your towel is.”
—Ford Prefect
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.