New School, new lessons

My son started at a new school this year for middle school, and the transition has honestly gone about as smoothly as it possibly could, all things considered. It’s a much larger school than his last one—which is not a euphemism for something else by the way, he went from a class size of about 15 to over 200—and so he is learning how to deal with more people on a daily basis. Which is good! That’s a good skill to have.

Yesterday he finally comes unglued a little and starts to rant “why can’t some kids just do what the teacher asks?”

What do you mean?

His example was they have a chromebook cart, and they’re supposed to take the chromebook with the number on it that matches their desk, and the put it back in the same slot. And every day at the end of class someone else has put their chromebook in the slot his is supposed to go in.

And, you know, I just kinda had to shrug and say, well, there will always be people with an acute case of Main Character syndrome who are convinced the rules don’t apply to them, that someone else will come along and fix their problems, clean up after them, put their carts back for them. Learning how to deal with those sorts is one of the main things we learn in school. Best case, they grow out of it while they’re a teenager and develop empathy. Worst case, these are who grow up to be telephone sanitizers.

See you in a year, Gabriel Bell

It’s the first week of September, 2023, which as JWZ reminds us, means we’re a year away from from the Bell Riots.

For those of you not deeply immersed in Nerd Lore, the Bell Riots are a historical event from “Past Tense, a 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

DS9 was by far the best of the Next Gen/Berman-era Star Treks, and it was always at its best when it both a) had a point to make, and b) was angry about it.

[Spoilers for a nearly 30 year-old Trek episode ahoy]

Thanks to some time travel shenanigans, Captain Sisko, Dr. Bashir, and Lt. Dax end up travelling to the then-futuristic year of 2024 and discover they’re trapped on the eve of the Bell Riots, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history“. You see, to solve the homeless problem, the major cities of north america have cordoned off sections of the city to seve as “Sanctuaries”, where the unhoused are sent, nominally to receive services and help, but really to be out of sight/out of mind. When the man whom the riots are named after is killed helping them, Sicko has to step in and masquerade as Gabriel Bell to preserve the timeline, and find a way out before the riots end with Bell’s death. Meanwhile, back in the future, the crew of the Defiant realize that the changes in the past have caused the Federation to never be formed—the Bell Riots were a key step from “now” to the fully automated luxury space-communism of the Star Trek future.

At the conclusion, Sisko and his crew find a way to avoid the fate destined for Bell himself, and get the word out about whats happening inside the Sanctuaries to the rest of the world, who demand change, ensuring the Federation comes into existence.

At the time it seemed like a terribly dark, dystopian near future—what might happen if things keep going! Of course now, looking back from the real Twenties, it looks almost charmingly naïve.

Trek in general, and DS9 in particular, is always at its best when angry, and “Past Tense” is positively simmering with rage. This was a show made by people with something to say. A key detail is that the three Starfleet crew members that get sent back in time are a Black man, a Middle-eastern man, and a white woman; the woman is given help and support, the two men of color are immediately thrown in the “sanctuary” without a second thought.

But.

There was a trope in 90s socially-conscious fiction that if “people only knew!” they’d demande change, and things would get better. That the only thing standing between the world as it was and the better future was sharing “The Truth”. This is a perfect example, but you can see if all over the place in 90s fiction. Transmetropolitan is probably the definitive example, X-Files, Fight Club; even the early excitement around the Internet and the World Wide Web was centered around the dream of everyone having access to all possible Knowledge.

Looking back, of course, the dark future Sisko and company find themselves in feels positively utopian. A whole area of town where the unhoused can go without being hassled? People with criminal records are prohibited? There are services? The government pays attention to who is there?

Meanwhile, in the real Twenties, local police departments are flush with military gear, they’re pulling benches out of parks so the homeless can’t sleep there, and no city on the planet would dream of cutting off commercial real estate from even a single block, much less a whole district.

We’ve essentially been running a 20-year social experiment to find out what would happen if everyone had access to everything that was happening, and come to find out, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no one cares.

There’s been this persistant belief amongst the liberal/leftist set that “people really knew the facts” that things would be better. Three decades on from Sisko picking up Gabriel Bell’s shotgun, this is a fantasy we can’t afford, a brain-rot at best, a kink at worst.

Time for a new approach. Gabriel Bell is waiting.

Why didn’t you just use…

It’s an embarrassment of riches in big open world video games this year. I’m still fully immersed in building bizarre monster trucks in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, but Bethesda’s “Skyrim in spaaaace”-em-up Starfield is out.

I’ve not played it yet, so I’ve no opinion the the game itself. But I am very amused to see that as always with a large game release, the armchair architects are wondering why Bethesda has continued to use their in-house engine instead of something “off the shelf,” like Unreal.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to games, either! I don’t have a ton of game dev experience specifically, but I do have a lot of experience with complex multi-year software projects, and every time one of those wraps up, there’s always someone that looks and what got built and asks “well, why didn’t you just use this other thing”

And reader, every time, every single time, over the last two decades, the answer was always “because that didn’t exist yet when we started.”

Something that’s very hard to appreciate from the outside is how long these projects actually take. No matter how long you think something took, there was a document, or a powerpoint deck, or a whiteboard diagram, that had all the major decisions written down years before you thought they started.

Not only that, but time and success have a way of obscuring the risk profile from the start of a project. Any large software project, whatever the domain or genre, is a risky proposition, and the way to get it off the ground is to de-risk it as much as possible. Moving to new 3rd party technology is about as risky a choice as you can make, and you do that as carefully and rarely as possible.

I don’t have any insight into either Unreal or Betheda’s engine, but look. You’re starting a project that’s going to effectively be the company’s only game in years. Do you a) use your in-house system that everyone already knows that you know for a fact will be able to do what you need, or b) roll the dice on a stack of 3rd party technology. I mean, there are no sure things in life, but from a risk reduction perspective, that’s as close to a no-brainer as it gets.

At this point, it’s worth publishing my old guideline for when to take after-the-fact questions seriously:

• “Why didn’t you use technology X?”—serious person, has thought about the tradeoffs and is curious to know what let you to make the choices you did.
• “Why didn’t you JUST use technology X?”—fundamentally unserious person, has no concept of effort, tradeoffs, design.

Like, buddy, I if I could ”just” do that, I’d have done it. Maybe there were some considerations you aren’t aware of, and probably aren’t any of your business?

Thus what I part-jokingly call Helman’s Third Law: “no question that contains the word `just’ deserves consideration.”

Monday Linkblog, Electronic Music Edition

First, Music to ponder your ob to: Wizard Disco

Second, barcodes have never jammed harder: Barcoders Jamming

And, Labor Day is just wrapping up here in the Continental United States, and all of us here at Icecano would just like to take this opportunity to remind you that there are more workers than bosses.

Come on down, one last time

TV Legend Bob Barker passed away over the weekend at 99. As many, many people have pointed out, it’s a sweet gracenote that he made it as close as possible to 100 without going over.

There’s an old joke that the definition of Generation X is anyone who could have seen Star Wars in the theatre as a kid, and while that holds, I think a better definition is if you watched the Price is Right while home sick from elementary school. Based on the reactions over the web the last few days, I’m not the only one that thinks so.

Like most of us, I always enjoyed Barker’s style very much. It must have influenced me more than I thought; In high school I was voted “most likely to host the price is right.” My career went in a slightly different direction, obviously.

A pair of fun links from the weekend’s memorial roundup:

Bob Baker on Letterman (Via Gruber)

The Washington Post describing how that cameo in Happy Gilmore happaned (via Kafasis)

Remember to spay and neuter your pets.

The OmniRumor, 10 years on

It’s been ten years since the Doctor Who Missing Episode “Omnirumor” broke containment and made it out into the mainstream. I haven’t seen this commemorated anywhere, and as we’re currently barreling towards another anniversary year celebration in November and another set of Missing Episode Recovery rumors has flared up in the UK press, I found myself reminiscing about the last time this happened.

Let’s recap:

Huge swathes of 50s and 60s BBC television no longer exist, due to the recordings being either lost, or thrown out, or having their master video tapes recorded over. This happened for a bunch of complex interlocking reasons, but which mostly boil down to “it wasn’t anyone’s job to make sure they didn’t lose them.”

Currently, 97 of of the 253 Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1969 are missing; that’s actually quite a bit better than many of its contemporaries. Doctor Who is also in a unique position in that all of the missing episodes exist as audio-only recordings, many of them have surviving still images, and all of them were published as novels.

Classic Doctor Who has a strange structure by today’s standards; half-hour episodes making up usually 4 or 6-part stories. A strange aspect of having 100-or-so missing episodes is that some stories are only partly missing. Some stories are just missing a bit in the middle, some only have one part surviving.

This has always been a unique aspect of being a fan of the show; there’s this chunk of the early show that’s just out of reach, stories where everyone knows what happened, but no one has actually seen in fifty years.

And since the BBC got serious about preserving it’s own archive in the late 70s, and a rash of rediscoveries in the early 80s, lost shows have slowly trickled in. One of the bedrocks of being a Doctor Who fan is that there is always a rumor circulating about a recovered episode.

Whether true or not, it’s a widely held belief that there are still “lost” episodes in the hands of private collectors, and for a long time it was also widely believed that their “had to” be more film cans out there, lost, misplaced, sitting in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory. So a lot of people have been poking around in basements over the last 40 years, and doing the hard work to see if they can dig up some more lost TV.

So missing episode rumors have a strange energy around them. First, what more is there to say? Beyond “which do you hope it is?” there isn’t a lot to talk about from the perspective of a fan out of the loop of any real recovery efforts. But the other thing is that it’s a widely held belief that any chatter out on the internet or in fan circles could “spook” any private collector negotiating to return what amounts to highly valuable stolen property. So, there’s always been pressure to not actually talk about the rumors; not an Omerta, but it’s considered in poor taste to risk a potential recovery because you couldn’t stay off twitter. It’s unclear if a recovery of Who or any other BBC show has actually been scuttled due to excited fans being loose-lipped on the internet, but the fan social contract remains: just keep it at a low volume.

In early 2013, there started to be whispers out on the internet that maybe someone had found something. Now, I’m not particularly tapped in to the underground or anything, so for something it make it up to my level it has to have been churning for a while. Lots of “I can’t say anything more, but there should be some good news later this year!” trying to keep just inside the threshold of talking about it too loud.

To add some color of the time, this was also very close to when the rumors started that David Lynch might actually be doing more Twin Peaks. I have weirdly clear memories of this, since I had just changed jobs and had not yet cultivated a group of nerds to talk about these kinds of things with, so I found myself sitting on the two most interesting genre rumors in recent memory with no one to talk to, instead just poking around the deep fora on the web over lunches by myself.

But, again, there’s always a rumor circulating, and this was the start of the big 50th anniversary year, and it seemed too perfect that someone had managed to time a one-in-a-decade happenstance for when it would have the most commercial impact.

But, unlike a lot of missing episode rumors, this one kept emitting smoke, splitting into two distinct branches. The first was that someone had found a huge cache of film, encompassing nearly every missing Doctor Who episode along with a host of other 60s-era BBC shows. The second was more restrained, claiming that three stories had been recovered: The Web of Fear, The Enemy of the World, and Marco Polo). There were, of course, any number of sub-variants and weird contradictory details. The whole situation soon became nicknamed “The Omnirumor.”

Every version of this seemed too good to be true; fan fantasizing for the 50th anniversary. Especially the Web of Fear, which was always on the top of everyone’s wishlist (your’s truly included) for what would you hope is found. For various reasons, Marco Polo had the most copies made, so it always ends up in any rumor mill as it’s the one most likely to be found, despite stubbornly refusing to exist for five decades and counting. Enemy of the World was a little more idiosyncratic, but still part of the terribly under-surviving season 5.

And a cache? Seemed absurd. The last time more than one half-hour episode was found a time was Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992. Since then there had been three standalone episodes found? The idea that there were still piles of film can somewhere in the 2010s seemed like the hight of wishful thinking,

But the rumor mill kept churning, eventually breaking out of the deep nerd corners of the web. I missed the exact anniversary day due to being distracted by cyber goggles, but for my money the moment it broke out into the mainstream, or at least the mainstream of the nerd web, was when it hit the front page of Bleeding Cool. From there, it was a short jump to, if you will, “real” news.

This pretty badly violated the “don’t talk about missing episodes too loudly” rule. This made a bunch of people upset, which made a bunch of other people more upset, and proceeded to be a Internet Fan kerfuffle. But the whole thing seemed absurd, because the core claim was preposterous. There was no way there was still an undiscovered cache of multiple film cans sitting around. Fan wishful thinking gone nuclear.

Anyway, imagine our collective surprise when the BBC announced they had recovered The Enemy of the World and (most of) The Web of Fear.

(I can’t find it now, but I remember somewhere on the web someone’s initial shocked response to the news was to blurt “what happened to Marco Polo?” Which then someone else immediately responded to by posting a youtube link to Meat Loaf singing “two out of three ain’t bad.”)

The details of the find, and who and how they found it—and why it was only most of the Web of Fear are well documented elsewhere, but the upshot was someone really did find a cache of missing tv, sitting abandoned in the back of a local TV station in Nigeria. Knowing what really happened, you can look back and if you squint you can sort of see what information must have leaked out when to cause the various flavors of the Omnirumor took shape.

And what an absolute treat. I’d read the novel of Web of Fear probably a dozen times a kid, watched the reconstruction, watched the one surviving episode and tried to imagine what the rest might have looked like. Never, did I ever think I would actually get to see it.. And there it was, come October, sitting in iTunes.

Web of Fear was one of those stories that had a single part of of 6 surviving: the first. I’d seen that first episode more than once, and it was the strangest feeling to sit down to watch and have “Episode 2” appear on the screen.

There’s always a hint of hesitation when one of these stories is actually recovered. I mean, we are talking about a low budget (mostly) kids show from the mid 60s, here. Decades of imagining the best possible version of something tends to crash rather badly into the reality of what the show really was. The poster child for this is Tomb of the Cybermen, which was always hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time, and then in 1992 we finally got to see it, and the reality was that it looked cheap even by the standards of the times, the plot made next-to-no sense, and there was way more casual racism than anyone expected. Turns out, the novel had papered over a lot of shortcomings. Overnight, it went from “best of the 60s” to, “it’s fine, I guess, but let me warn you about a couple things…”

That’s not what happened with the Web of Fear, though. The premise is bonkers even by Doctor Who standards—robot Yeti with web guns have taken over London, and the Doctor teams up with an Army team hiding in the London Underground to fight them off. Across the board, it just works. Where the BBC budget struggles with other planets or space ships, it can do a fantastic Underground tunnel. And the camerawork and direction around the Yeti keeps them strange and uncanny where they could easily become silly. Theres a part abou 2/3 of the way through the story where a group of soldiers have to venture up to the Yeti-controlled city to find some parts, and get ambushed by the monsters. And even that works! It manages to find a “kid-friendly Aliens” tone where the soldiers get absolutely wrecked as more and more monsters emerge, and it manages to do this without ever descending into farce. Remarkable.

And then on top of all that, Enemy of the World, which wasn’t at the top of anyone’s wishlist, turned out to be an absolute classic that we basically had never noticed. On paper it seemed very dull and slow moving, but it turns out you really needed to see what the actors were doing to appreciate it.

The whole experience was like being a kid at christmas, being surprised and delighted by a present that you didn’t even know was possible.

But I digress. Ten years ago in August, we didn’t know what was coming. All we knew was that the rumor mill was going into overdrive, we didn’t know what was really going on, and so we all hoped.

And sometimes, crazy rumors and hopes turn out to be true.

Conspiracies Confirmed

One of my absolute favorite little unimportant conspiracy theories of the last few years was that the Trump animatronic in the Disney World Hall of Presidents was actually a Clinton animatronic that was reworked at the last second.

It was certainly a weird-looking robot, below the usual standard Disney Imagineering holds themselves to. And you could see how they might have been so confident in how the election would go that they got a jump on the new robot, only to realize they had it wrong, and then maybe weren’t too inspired to do it well the second time? And then, when they rolled out the Biden robot, the new background-player Trump looked much more accurate. So, maybe? It was one of those persistant rumors since early 2017. Over the years, it sorta faded away, one of the those strange Disney urban legends.

And then Alex Goldman goes and gets is more or less confirmed in My Favorite Conspiracy Theory Confirmed.

(Turns out, this was a lot of people’s favorite conspiracy theory.

Correct, Orcas are not our friends

Remember those Orcas? I was reminded today of early summer’s darlings, the yacht-sinking Orcas off Europe.

I partly bring this up so I can link to my favorite Atlantic article of all time: Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends.

I love this because, yes, that’s the whole point. They managed some kind of semantic integer overflow; so contrarian they wrapped around and just said the thing.

Every time the Atlantic gets all “tut tut, poor people are having Bad Opinions” I just think of the montage from the middle of the original 1984 Ghostbusters where the Atlantic cover story is “Do ghosts have civil rights?” and I’m like awww yisss, nothing has changed. “All this has happened before, etc”.

However, the other reason I bring this up is so I can link to what made me think of the Orcas, which was this absolutely unhinged list from the Financial Times: A complete guide to yacht-desking: All the gadgets you need to work on the high seas.

And, sure. The Financial Times, of course, is read by the people who own the country, rich British people who want pretend they’re richer. The premise of the article, which does seem a year or two past the point where it was fully relevant, is that if you’re going to be working from home and outfitting a home office, why not outfit your yacht and work from there instead?

It’s one of those basically harmless cosplay lists, full of things you could buy to show off, maritime clocks costing £55,000 and whatnot. Stuff you buy to show off the fact that you could afford it, mostly. I skimmed it with a sort of amused “yeah, probably” smirk at the work-from-yacht essentials, fancy satellite internet, soloar backups, clocks, yacht-compatable pool tables for “the ultimate breakout zone.”

And then, the recommended laptop is… a midlist Asus Zenbook? What? Neither ”show-off expensive” nor “actually good”, it’s just a mostly fine but overpriced Windows laptop?

I don’t know much about maritime clocks or self-stabilizing pool tables, but I do know something about laptops, and that’s a fine laptop, but not a great one. For the quoted £1,600 you can get way more computer, the industrial design is nothing to write home about, and if you’re looking to spend more on a better looking and higher performance device, Apple is right there. All an Asus Zenbook says is that the owner doesn’t know enough about the subject to not get took by a salesperson.

And so… I have to assume everthing else on the list is the same? Overpriced crap? Is this what the yacht set is filling their boats with?

I take it back. Maybe the Orcas are our friends.

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.

Happy Fourth!

“A tribute to all nations, but mostly America.”

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:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing. Yes.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD. Nope! Turns out, it runs locally!
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code. Unclear? Presumably this will work?
4. 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.
5. Spacial audio. Yes.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment. Heck yes.
7. 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:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD.
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code.
4. Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm.
5. Spacial audio.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment.
7. 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