So long, tiny dancer
We’ll miss you iPhone mini, come back soon
As widely rumored, Apple discontinued the mini-sized iPhone last week. It was my favorite.
I’ve been a (mostly) happy iPhone customer since I saw the original in person over the summer ’07. I’ve never been an “upgrade every year” guy, or even every-other-year; but I’ve ended up with a new one every three or four years as batteries run down and the software baseline outstrips the aging hardware.
My least favorite thing about them is that they’ve gotten so big.
My all-time favorite form factor was the 5s. Bigger than the original, but still easily used in one hand. (And still had the headphone jack!) I loved the flat sides and all-glass front—in my mind, that’s the classic look. The iPhone’s version of the ’67 corvette.
My least favorite, by comparison, was my next phone, the iPhone 8. Too big, too clunky, I deeply disliked the overly thin body and rounded edges. Of course, that design, originally from the 6, ended up as their longest-running design, becoming the soft of default iPhone look for most people.
And they just kept getting bigger. Pros, Maxes. I’ve got decently large male hands, and I found the new ones uncomfortable to use. I like using my phone in one hand, I like keeping it in my pants pocket all day. The larger phones got, the less I could use them like I wanted.
Then, they announced the 12 mini—not only a return to the classic design language, but back to the smaller size! Finally. I pre-ordered it on the day of the announcement, something I had never done before.
The weird thing about it was that this came along with Apple solidifying the iPhones into two sub lines—“regular” and “pro”, with some significant differences between the two around the camera and other features. Each subline got two phones, the standard model, and then the Pros got the frankly obnoxiously large Pro Max, and the non-Pro got the smaller mini. Other than the size the two sizes of each subline were identical—except for the size of the battery, which expanded or contracted to fit the volume available.
And this seemed to trip the whole thing up. There seemed to be a lot of pent-up demand for a smaller phone, but the reality wasn’t quite what anyone expected. I knew more than a few people that that wanted a smaller phone, but weren’t willing to give up the “good” camera. On top of that, the 12 mini had shockingly poor battery life compared to it’s immediate predecessors, and I think it was real easy to sigh and buy the bigger one.
In addition, and uncharacteristically for Apple, the marketing on the mini seemed almost non-existant; it seemed like the original release of the 12 mini flopped, and then they threw up their hands and grudgingly went through with the plans they already had for a 13 mini but no more.
And in a lot of ways, “Mini” was the tell. In Apple-speak, the small-but-good models end with “Air”. Mini was the term they used for the smaller, cheaper iPods; no one thought those were as good as the “regular” iPods, those were the ones you bought because you needed something cheap or needed something really, really small. Everyone I knew with an iPod mini had one as their “other” iPod, they one they jogged with, not the one they ran the party playlist with. But that doesn’t apply to iPhones, you don’t have your “other” iPhone you take jogging.
So, for the 14 models, they replaced the “other non-pro phone” with the 14 Plus, which was a 14 but a little bigger, a phone even less people wanted. Rumor has it that it’s not just the mini, but the all the non-pro phones that have lower-than-expected sales, with the 14 plus having even worse sales than the 13 mini. Apple likes their 2 or 3 year production cycles, it’ll be interesting to see what iPhones 17 look like. Personally, I think a Pro Mini would sell like gangbusters—that’s something you could sell as an iPhone Air, and charge extra for. But I don’t manage a major consumer electronics company.
Faced with the rumors that the mini form factor wasn’t long for this world, I upgraded to a 13 mini earlier this year, the first time I’ve ever done a year-over-year upgrade, and the first time I upgraded to “last year’s” model.
And that’s gonna be it for a while. It’s my absolute favorite size the phone has ever had, and I’ll upgrade to a bigger device over my dead body.
Here’s hoping they bring a small size back before the battery in this one quits working.
Tuesday linkblog, absurd hardware edition
I have just learned about the Mind Killer Dual Distortion pedal from Acorn Amplifiers; let me quote you the copy in full:
Seemingly crafted by the hands of the Kwisatz Haderach, the Mind Killer by Acorn Amplifiers is a dual distortion device that guarantees to deliver total obliteration in the form of huge gain tones to any rig. Featuring two separately stomp-able distortion circuits in series, each with their own bass boost and clipper diode toggle switches, the Mind Killer offers a mélange of stackable crunch tones in a single stompbox.
The two knobs are labeled SPICE and LIFE!! Incredible. They also have a TMA-1 Fuzz which has a truly excellent red light in the center.
Is this the thing that finally pushes me to learn guitar? No, but it’s close.
And, in case you missed it, a Marine was in a training flight in an F-35 over South Carolina this weekend, got into trouble, ejected. The pilot was okay, but the jet was in stealth mode and on autopilot, so now they don’t know where the plane is?
This is the funniest possible way for the 21st century american military to screw up. I am in love with the mental image of a bunch of FBI guys standing around the pilot’s bed in the hospital asking, “So, son, did the plane give you any idea where it was headed next?”
(They have found some debris now, but they had to ask for help looking for it, which is even funnier. Guess those cloaking devices really do work!)
Saturday Night Linkblog, “This has all happened before” edition
There was a phrase I was grasping for while I was being rude about Mitt Romney yesterday, something half remembered from something I’d read over the last few years.
It was this From “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, from the August 1941 issue of Harpers Magazine:
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
…
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.
Haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t.
Friday Linkblog
To quote jwz, “absolute table-flip badassery”: Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain. Cory Doctorow has some nice analysis over at pluralistic.. You love to see it.
Via Kottke, What if our entire national character is a trauma response? We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized.. “Before you say “bullshit,” remember: Cynicism is a trauma response.” It’s starting to feel like maybe we’re starting to talk about the effect of ongoing disasters of the last few years, and of the 21st century in general? The weirdest part of living though William Gibson’s Jackpot has been that we collectively pretend it isn’t happening.
Ethical Uncanny Valley
I have never been a fan of Mitt Romney. If you’re looking for a reason, you’re spoiled for choice: beyond his odious-but-generic center-right politics, you have his fortune made by gutting other people’s work, the “binders full of women”, the dog carrier on top of his car, the fact that he was so gutless that his campaign against Obama centered around opposing his own healthcare plan. An empty suit, devoid of an actual point-of-view, whose sales pitch to be president boiled down to “okay America, wouldn’t you rather have a rich white guy again?”
But mostly he seemed to exist in a kind of ethical uncanny valley—too principled to actually go corrupt and join the grift, but not principaled enough to actually work to make things better. Instead, he settled into the role of an ineffectual centrist scold. Not cowardly, exactly, but possessing the demeanor of the kid in elementary school who always reminded the teacher they forgot to assign homework, attempting to score points with a higher authority, without seeming to realize that there isn’t one. Just, jeeze dude, pick a side and get to work.
That said, I absolutely devoured the Atlantic’s except from McKay Coppins’ new book: What Mitt Romney Saw In The Senate.
Sure, It’s clearly trying for reputation laundering, mixed with a final attempt to get some points with whomever he thinks is keeping score, but what struck me the most—if you’ll forgive the technical term—what a giant fucking loser he is.
A man with that much money, who got that close to being president, sitting alone in a apartment he didn’t want, surrounded by art he didn’t chose, eating salmon he doesn’t like slathered in ketchup.
The most revelatory moment for me was a beat where Mitt is struggling over how to vote on the Impeachment, and after expressing this to McConnell, the Senate leader basically says, paraphrasing, “what are you talking about, nerd? He’s obviously guilty, and we’re gonna let him off because we have elections to run.”
A portrait of a suit even emptier than we thought, fundamentally unable to get off the stands and get into the game, so convinced of his superiority that he doesn’t believe in anything at all.
Actually, I take back what I said earlier—he is a coward. He wants points for standing up against Trump and the rest of the party but still won’t, you know, endorse the other guy, or campaign, or take action of any kind besides bitching to the guy writing the book he couldn’t even be bothered to write himself.
What a wasted life. All those people lost their jobs, all those women-in-binders went unhired, all that needless churn, all so one rich, empty white guy could sit alone and watch Ted Lasso, having accomplished nothing. He doesn’t even have the courtesy to want power or influence for its own sake, or to be reaching for self-enrichment—to say nothing of not wanting to make things better—all that sound and fury so he could fill the long, empty, lonely hours feeling smug. All that wealth at the command of a man with no character, no blood, no animus, no soul.
I’d curse his name, but I can’t imagine a worse fate than having to wake up and remember I was Mitt Romney.
Insight-free Doorstop
The Guardian’s Gary Shteyngart calls Walter Isaacson’s new book on Elon Musk an “Insight-free Doorstop”; this is disappointing but not surprising, seeing as that’s how I would have described his book on Steve Jobs.
Isaacson seems to have carved out a niche for himself writing overly-credulous hagiographies of troubling yet successful men. The Jobs book was deeply strange. It was technically clueless, credulous to the point of gullibility, and the good bits were all cribbed directly from Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org. Scene after scene he’d describe something Jobs had done, for pretty obvious reasons, and then Isaacson would throw up his hands as if to say “who can say why anyone does anything?” The second half is even worse, because once he doesn’t have Hertzfeld’s behind-the-scenes material to work from, he just fails to ask any follow up questions, and will either take Job’s word for it, or go get an alternate view from someone like Bill Gates, who is hardly an impartial bystander.
Theres a beat in the middle that’s stuck with me for years. Jobs has just returned to Apple as part of the NEXT acquisition, and is negotiating his return to the CEO role. The board wants to hand him a big pile of stock. Jobs doesn’t want any pay, salary or stock, because he says he doesn’t want to look like he’s just doing it for the money. But the board really wants to give him the stock, because they want him to look like he has some skin in the game. This goes back and forth for a few times, until Jobs says okay, but demands twice as much as they offered him. It’s a classic power move of the kind he makes constantly throughout the book, only doing something if he gets the last word. It’s not that complicated? But Isaacson seems stunned, doesn’t understand why such a thing would happen—and then moves on without even asking about it. This happens again and again. The book walks right up to having an actual insight, gets close enough you can almost do it yourself, but then fails to ask any obvious follow-up questions and then wanders away with a confused head-shake.
He had unprecedented access to a guy who went from being fired by his own company to being the guy who came back and turned it into the most successful company of all time, but doesn’t seem to care to dig in. The book’s analysis of Jobs ends up somewhere around that Dril tweet about drunk driving, effectively saying “well, he was an asshole to everyone, but he also made a lot of money, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,”
The definitive takedown of the Jobs book is John Siracusa’s old Hypercritical podcast where he practically walks the book line by line correcting errors.
In short, it was the kind of book where it looks like he’s being really hard on his subject by writing down things that really happened, all while failing to do any digging or provide any insights that might cause the subject to withdraw their participation. A kind of reputational money-laundering, trying to take credit for being very open and growing, while doing nothing of the sort.
Still, walking back the claims in his own book is a new low.
Newsletter Recommendation: Where’s Your Ed At
I still think it’s weird that in the migration out and away from the Five Websites we seem to have landed on newsletters as the solution?
But! I’ve been meaning to link to Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At for a while, but today’s is an absolute barn burner: Elon Musk Is Dangerous To Society.
I’ve been struggling to write something that captures my feelings about the loss of Twitter That Was, but this does a great job summarizing the guy who finished it off.
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.