Wait, Which Hundred?
The Disney Corp turned 100, and as a company thats never willing to let a good “limited time” logo go to waste, we’re fully in the thick of “Disney 100” merch. To wit: this week’s announcement of a 100-film “Legacy Animation” box set for fifteen hudred bucks. That is a lot of money, but in that way where you stop and go, “well, fifteen bucks a movie isn’t that bad, really,” but still never consider buying the thing.
That said, in a world where Disney seemed to be moving away from physical media over the last few years, between this containing several titles that hadn’t previously gotten a widely-available blu-ray, and the new remaster of Cinderella, we might finally be moving past the “streaming only” era.
The contents are pretty great, though. Because: which 100 movies? There’s only sixty-one “Disney Animated Movies” in the way most people mean it. Okay, throw in the Pixar movies, thats another 27. Add Henry Selick’s Nightmare before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and we’re up to…. 90?
Imagine the meeting! “The box says 100, we need ten more!”
You can’t just add all the DisneyToon direct-to-video sequels, because then we’d be up near to 150. The remit is “fully animated,” so you really can’t throw in Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks , or Roger Rabbit.
So which ten do you pick?
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall the day they gritted their teeth and picked the last ten:
“Goody Movie!”
Yes!”
“DuckTales Movie!”
“No!”
“First TinkerBell movie!”
“Yes!”
“Tinkerbell sequels?”
“No!”
“Beauty and the beast mid-quel?”
“No!”
“That piglet movie?”
“Yes!”
You can almost smell the flop sweat from here.
—
And, two asides:
First, as always when Disney releases something from the Deep Vault, the usual suspects show up and demand to know where Song of the South is, like it’s some kind of gotcha. These people always tell on themselves because it’s Song they bring up, instead of Victory Through Airpower, or So Dear to my Heart, or any other movie that’s slipped into the freezer section of the Vault. And look, if you can read the web, you can scare up a copy of Song, it’s not that hard to find. But let me save you the time: not only is it crazy racist, it’s also just a a bad movie. It’s not good. If you really need to watch some vintage Disney racism, this box set does include Saludos Amigos, so go nuts.
Second, there was a weird tone in a lot of the coverage along the lines of “physical media? How quaint!”. And, man, that would have been a great take in 2021, but unless you can show me where to watch the episodes I missed of Jeff Goldblum’s show, maybe that’s not the best angle anymore?
Exciting Consulting Opportunities
I’m going to start a consulting company. I will offer one product: companies making movies or tv shows show me the finished version of their “digitally de-aged” actor zombies, and I will say “no, just use the real guy instead, it’ll be fine.”
Main Character Syndrome
I had completely forgotten that “The Shopping Cart Theory” had done in a round in the meme discourse a few years back. I rediscovered this when I went looking for that video for yesterday’s blog post where the guy pushes his cart over the mountains in the style of a BBC nature documentary. This means I had also forgotten the small but very loud crowd that pushed back on it, and how hard they worked to justify not doing something that they didn’t want to do.
I’m not going to link to any, because they don’t deserve attention, but the web is positively littered with terrible takes from a few years ago building giant edifices of faux-philosophy to explain why having the moral sense of a toddler is Good, Actually.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised—I’ve been Extremely Online for about as long as that was possible to be, and there’s always some low-empathy dork using the biggest words they can find to justify being a jerk to everyone around them.
Because there are always too many people out there with a scorching case of Main Character Syndrome.
You know Main Character Syndrome: this isn’t garden variety selfishness, or thoughtlessness, this is the deep-seated belief that they’re the main protagonist of reality, and that everyone else exists only to support their journey. I’m only going to do the cool stuff I want to do, and someone else, who is not the main character, will handle all the stuff that keeps things working.
These are the same people that think if the missiles fly they’re going to shoulder-roll out of the way, cut the sleeve of their leather jacket, and then drive around having adventures, not realizing that no, we’d all end up in the mob of people in the background.
And I know I shouldn’t be surprised that people work really hard to justify not doing something they don’t want to do, because we’re watching a global pandemic roll on into its fourth year because too many people weren’t willing to wear a mask for another couple of weeks back in spring 2020.
And this is all way older than the Web—there’s reliably been enough Main Characters that Any Rand, the American Liberal Party, and the post-Regan/Thatcher neoliberal establishment have all run a tidy grift reassuring tteenage boys they don’t have to be nice to people.
But somehow arguing against returning shopping carts got me. And not just saying “nah, I don’t bother,” but genuinely attempting to construct an argument where it’s ethically wrong to ever ask someone to return their carts.
There’s something deeply American about wanting not only to be a jerk to strangers, but to also be immune from criticism for doing so. Just own it, dorks. Don’t waste our time justifying it.
There’s a joke that libertarians are like house cats—fiercely convinced of their own independence while completely dependent on a system they neither see nor unserstand.
This feels like the final evolved form of that: Someone sitting at home, using the vast infrastructure our civilization they don’t understand which is maintained by people they don’t value, typing out long justifications why they should get to act like a jerk without being criticized.
This is not an original sentiment, but this feels like the end result of 4 decades of the neoliberal project: People sitting utterly alone, convinced that any personal inconvenience is tyranny, unable to even imagine what solidarity looks like, all while the planet burns and the rich get richer and sell another toy store for scrap.
So, on the record, let’s be real clear here: the meme is correct. Returning the shopping cart is the objectively correct thing to do, and it is the perfect test of how someone will behave in a situation where there are no consequences for not having empathy.
If you’re capable of using the cart, you can put it back where it goes. We’re trying to have a civilization here. We’re only going to get through this together.
Friday night linkblog, classic talk show edition
I found this while looking for the Hitchhiker clip I linked in this morning’s piece: Douglas Adams on Letterman, 1985..
He’s promoting So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, and tells the story about the biscuits.
Adams is… not a great talk show guest, actually? And Letterman clearly doesn’t get it, for several values of ”it”, but is game to play along.
It’s pretty great! My whole adolescence, rolled into one clip.
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.
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.”