Tales of the Tardis
Now that we’re getting close to the actual event, it’s been fun watching the BBC reveal what they’re doing as part of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. (Other than bringing back David Tennant and Catherine Tate, doing an adaptation of an 80s comic book and bringing back a mid-60s villain, I mean.)
As part of this, they’ve wrangled nearly the entire run of the old show onto the BBC iPlayer for the first time, and as part of that, they’ve made something called Tales of the Tardis. On paper, it’s a pretty straightforward “greatest hits” collection—a selection of stories from six of the first eight doctors with new wraparounds starring the classic casts. This is a totally sane thing to do during a big anniversary to onboard new viewers to the back catalog. They’re very charming, and exactly the sort of schmaltz you can get away with during a self-congratulatory party year. The choices of stories are all entirely reasonable for the purpose, and as anAamerican who grew up on PBS airings of the omnibus edits of the show, editing them into a single movie doesn’t bother me.
The Doctor Who difference is that the new wrapper scenes are done with the old cast members in character. It’s not Peter Davison and Janet Fielding talking about how much fun Earthshock was to film, this is an older 5th Doctor and older Tegan talking about old times and mourning the death of Adric in the Memory Tardis, and explicitly acknowledging that this takes place after last year’s Power of the Doctor.
They’re a lot of fun! Everyone slips back into their parts easily, but then again most of them have been reprising these roles in audio for the better part of two decades now, and some, like Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, have basically never stopped playing those parts since they were on the show originally in the late 80s. Everyone seems to be having a good time, and genuinely enjoying getting to do the old parts “for real” instead of one more DVD interview or convention panel.
And that’s the the thing that’s weird about the Tales from the Tardis, though, is they all feel like exactly the wrong level of effort. The one set is clearly small and inexpensive, but it’s a whole lot more expensive and complex than putting the actors in chairs in front of a green screen. They actually designed costumes for everyone. They even designed Colin Baker’s 6th Doctor a new costume. That’s not his street clothes, someone put some actual thought into “what would a non-clown 6th Doctor outfit look like?”
By comparison, if Star Trek did something similar in a few years for its 60th anniversary, you can easily imagine Paramount+ having a “Tales from the Federation” greatest hits collection with a single episode from each show, and there would be, say, Frakes and Stewart introducing Best of Both Worlds in front of a green-screened Enterprise D bridge. Actually, I take that back, they’d use the Ready Room set, and there would be Wil Wheaton interviewing them about it, and then the next show he’s talking to Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman about tricking the Romulans into the dominion war. I can’t imagine a world where they’d build a new set, put those actors back in costume and makeup, and then have them reminisce in character about past adventures. I mean, it would be pretty great if they did, and the holodeck even gives them a better built-in excuse than the “memory Tardis”. But Trek certainly wouldn’t use the opportunity to resolve 30-year old character lose ends, or semi-officialize a 41-year old fan ship.
“Canon” isn’t a concept with Who the same way it is with something like Star Trek, but there’s still a continuity, and these land in the same liminal space as the increasingly elaborate Blu-Ray trailers. This isn’t Tom Baker hamming it up in a museum on the VHS for Shada, or even the low-energy 30th anniversary gruel of “Dimensions in Time”; these have a more “intended-to-be-legitimate” quality. You’re left with a strange sense of “wait, is this supposed to fit in somewhere? Did this ‘really’ happen? Are Tegan and Nyssa really a thing now?”
It has the feel that this is teeing something up for later, like maybe part of the plans for “the Whoniverse” include rolling out new stories with old Doctors, with some multiverse-flavored explanations papering over why the actors are all 30 years older.
Its also worth noting who isn’t represented: the 8th and 4th Doctors.
Eight makes sense in the context of the mission here: Paul McGann has only a single mediocre TV movie and a web minisode in live action, and neither of those would be on anyone’s list of greatest hits to introduce a new viewer to pre-2005 Doctor Who.
The absense of Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor is a little harder to swallow. Arguably the most iconic run of the old show is just skipped over for the greatest hits compilation? But—who else would you get for those scenes? The pattern for all of the new material are old friends reuniting after years apart and reminiscing about old adventures, but of Tom’s costars who are still living, I can’t imagine either Luise Jamison or Lalla Ward being willing to act happy to see him, or vise-vera for that matter. They’re all too old and none of them need the money enough to fake their way through something like that. If Lis Sladen were still alive you can bet we’d have gotten a killer scene with the two of them working out that he didn’t drop her off in the right place, and then remembering Mummies or Zygons or some such. You could have Tom ham it up on his own, or maybe sitting next to a powered-down K9 prop, but there’s also the quality that at his age he was only up for a little bit of filming, and this wasn’t what they wanted to spend that time on. (Here’s hoping he makes a final appearance in a couple of weeks, say, in that second of three specials we still don’t know anything about.)
The new credits for “Tales of the Tardis” have a slice of all 8 doctor’s opening credits running side-by-side. Maybe that was easier and less potentially controversial than leaving out two of them, or building a different credit sequence for each based on the titles for that particular doctor. But—seeing the Tom Baker time tunnel, and the 90s TV movie titles sitting there next to the others sure does seem to imply there’s going to be more.
Look, I’ve been hoping they’d bring back back Paul McGann for the occasional one-off side story for years, and if we can finally get that I’ll accept whatever multi-timeline explanation you need to get that out the door.
What the heck happened to Boing Boing?
Back during the Heroic Age of the indie web—between the dot com crash and before the web shrunk to a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four, Boing Boing felt absolutely essential. Nerd culture! The beginning of the maker movement! The EFFs battles against big tech! Counterculture! “Wonderful things!”
Now it’s like a failed downtown mall—choked with sales for low-quality grift-y products, and lower-quality writing. Far from being at the front of internet culture, the whole site seems increasingly out of touch; not just stale, but from a worldview completely decoupled from the world we live in now.
(And, it’s absolutely none of our business why Cory Doctorow or Xeni Jardin left the site, but I’ll just casually mention that Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic continues to be the same sort of essential reading boing boing used to be. I’m sure boing boing becoming a seedy sales channel and Doctorow starting his own site are completely unrelated phenomena.)
What finally pushed me over the edge, though, was the endless videos of “look how stupid these redhats are!” This isn’t even the usual brain rot that “if we show them the truth they’ll change their minds”, instead it’s just post after post drenched in their own smug superiority that some old white dude in a red hat is being “hypocritical”.
It’s not the summer of 2016 anymore, guys. They’re not hypocrites, they’re white supremacist fascists. They know exactly what they’re saying, quit acting like you don’t so you can, what, score points, with… someone? Making fun of them on a website and nothing else was how we lost that election. Everyone else has figured this out, but no, boing boing is still stuck in the middle of the last decade.
Usually this is the point where someone counters by talking about the value of humor speaking truth to power or some other such self-aggrandizing justification. When that happens I always pull out this quote from a Norm McDonald Interview:
They say humor is the ray of light that illuminates the evil or whatever, but I was reading that in Germany and Adolf Hitler times, everybody was making fun of Hitler. Every cartoon was against Hitler, there were comedy troupes doing sketches about Hitler being an idiot with a stupid mustache and what a stupid little idiot he was. So anyway, there goes that theory about the power of comedy. It doesn’t work at all.
Ron Gilbert thinks boing boing are all sellouts, but that’s not quite it somehow. Like a lot of turn-of-the-century Gen-X vaguely-edgelordy (mostly white) counterculture, it’s has a borderline-nihilistic attitude that nothing really matters, the worst thing you can do be be caught caring about something, and the only morally correct thing to do is snark at anyone who does.
And, just, that was a crappy attitude in 2010, but then we elected a racist gameshow host as president, wikileaks turned out to be an op by the Russians, literal nazis started marching in the streets, and a million people and counting died of the plague. The world has changed since the early teens, or rather, things that were already there became impossible to ignore.
It’s not so much that they got old, it’s that they failed to grow.
Doctor Who and the Francise Tag… Of Death
Ahhh, I see the BBC has rolled out their Franchise Tag for “The Whoniverse”. I guess every big franchise needs some kind og meta branding at the start now; but I’m deeply amused that Doctor Who just sidled up to the Marvel Studios and said “that’s nice, we’ll have one of those, then.” Of course, this is extremely in keeping with the show’s whole ethos of rummaging around the rest of genre fiction pocketing anything that looked fun.
So, sure, we’ve got an animated logo for “The Whoniverse”.
But why on earth did they write new music? Or repurpose some old bit of Murray Gold music I can’t place? Doctor Who has maybe the most recognizable theme song in existence, and they just… didn’t use it?
(If possible, this is even dumber than the Disney+ Star Wars not using the 20th Century Fox Fanfare. Or, you know, the STAR WARS THEME.)
What should they have used? Look, that whoniverse tag should have been scored to the opening sting from Ambassadors of Death. That would have been amazing.
The last “new” “Beatles” song
It was pretty good! Better than I expected!
It’s solidly a “late, later period” Beatles song; It sounds like one of those tracks you didn’t remember was on Let it Be or Magical Mystery Tour. But on the other hand, it’s been stuck in my head all evening, so that puts it well ahead of half a dozen other Beatles songs I could mention?
There’s been plenty of commentary around if that’s really John Lennon or if they used “the AI” to clone his voice; and guys—it’s clearly his voice lifted off the 70s-era tape, because if it was clone they’d have done a better song.
More than anyone, though, I can really hear George Harrison’s style in the composition, which hit me harder than I was expecting. I guess they really did take a swing at it in the 90s!
And I’ll just note that there’s some… subtext to Lennon making a demo with those lyrics for McCartney, and move on. All that said, my reaction to this is to be terribly wistful for how close we were to living in a world where The Beatles were the biggest band of the 80s.
Happy Halloween everybody!
Stay safe out there. Go be the crazy people that are out there.
Three and a half years
Well, it took three and a half years, but COVID finally caught us. We’re all fully vaxed and boosted, and by all accounts we had a pretty mild time of it, but my goodness, that’s by far the sickest I’ve ever been. It’s a hard disease to complain too much about, because while sure, I was as sick as I’ve ever been, this thing has killed something like 27 million people worldwide, and mostly all I did was sleep for a week?
I only seem to have two lasting effects, and I’m not totally sure either one is directly COVID’s fault. Weeks later, I’ve still got this lingering cough, but it’s the sort of cough where I’m coughing because my lungs are irritated, and they’re irritated because I’ve been coughing so much, and that’s gone full recursive. As as result, I’ve been living on Ricola cough drops. My second lingering symptom is that my stomach is constantly upset, but I’m not sure that’s the virus as the fact that its been permanently full of the contents of a Swiss apothecary.
One positive lasting effect of the pandemic, if you’re willing to work to turn the frown upside down, is that it is way easier to be sick than it used to be. The home grocery delivery infrastructure is still in place, and you can still genuinely stay inside, not interact with anyone, and get everything you need delivered. (As long as you don’t look at the bill.). The kids’ school has a well-tuned system for reporting that the kids had COVID and would be out for a while, and even work was an easy conversation to the extent of “sure, take the time, let us know when you’re better.” This was not the experience we had when we all got the flu in ’18!
But.
The reason we got it in the first place was that the schools have been stripped of any meaningful way to prevent the spread, and so in a period where cases are spiking they had a gum full of teenagers without masks in close quarters. The only thing worse than shivering through a multi-day fever is knowning you only have it because people you never met don’t care enough to keep it from spreading.
All through the main pandemic, and the “cold pandemic” we’re in now, I’ve been pretty determined not to catch it. And hey, anecdotally, three and a half years is the best run of anyone I know. But now that I have had it, I’m even more determined not to catch it again. I don’t understand anyone who could go through this and then not think “wow, I’m doing whatever I can to keep that from happening again.” If it weren’t for the fact that the school is the vector, I might never go outside again!
So. People. It doesn’t have to be like this. It still not too late to choose a different future.
Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition
A couple of newsletters I devoured over the last few years have book versions out. Let me recommend them to you!
50 Years of Text Games
Over 2021, Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games covered the history of text computer games every week, covering 1971 to 2020, one game per year. The central conceit of only covering one game per year let him slide past some of the more well known titles and concentrate on the most interesting or notable. It was great—well written, deeply researched. (If I’m totally honest, it was the kind of project a version of me from a past life would have liked to have written, but I never would have done this good a job, and now I get to enjoy it without the work). I thought I was pretty well educated about text games, but there were a startling number of titles that I had never heard of.
After the newsletter ended, they did a kickstarter to print a deluxe book version, which I backed instantly. The resulting print edition turned out better than I ever expected, an absolutely gorgeous book with all the content from the web version with additional content, illustrations, amazing layout. Despite having already read most of it in email form, I drank my copy the book down as soon as it arrived.
I clearly wasn’t the only one that thought so, because the kickstarter-funded print run sold out essentially instantly. As such, I’ve been hesitant to enthuse about it to people since there wasn’t a way to, you know, actually get the book.
However! There’s now a new print-on-demand version of the book in both paperback and hardback. Now that it’s permanently back in print, I can say without hesitation that if the subject if even remotely interesting to you, go get yourself a copy. It’s spectacular.
Dracula Daily
Then, one of the delights of 2022 was Dracula Daily. The premise here was delightfully simple: reformat the content of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into an email newsletter. The novel’s epistolary format meant that it was already composed of letters and diary entries with dates, so the newsletter sent out the entries for a given day from the novel on the day they “happened”, from May to November. The resulting newsletter recontextualized the novel in a fun new way; now we were all getting emails from our internet buddy Johnathan Harker as he got deeper into trouble in eastern europe.
This really popped over the course of the summer of ’22, and a whole chunk of the internet turned into a free-wheeling book club. The slow burn created by getting updates “as they happened” gave the internet plenty of space for reactions, art, commentary of all kinds.
As someone who had read the book years before, it was so much fun watching people who only knew about Dracula via various movie adaptations, or just through cultural osmosis, discover how fun and weird and textured the actual book is compared to the things it inspired. There are almost too many examples to list, but particular highlights for me were watching—Tumblr especially—discover the full-bodied love story between Johnathan Harker and Mina Murray (who, as one person put it, are borderline feral for each other,) as well as getting to watch everyone meet “the cowboy who kills Dracula”.
Those two especially were fun considering there’s an entire generation who learned about Dracula from the Gary Oldman version, which is mostly a great movie, but is interested in very different things than the book is. The cowboy is there, but not nearly as critical a role. I mean, the movie keeps the assortment of “handsome suitors”, and casting “the Dread Pirate Roberts”, “Withnail”, and “the Rocketeer” to play them is genius, but they mostly take a back seat to Silence of the Lambs, which is too bad.
My least favorite part of the movie, though, is that it drains all the color out John & Mina’s romance so that there’s room for Gary Oldman to hiss “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,” which is a great line, but Harker should have been the one to say it.
As an aside, neither Winona Rider or Keanu Reeves do the best work of their careers in that movie, to say the least, which is funny, because if you made a Dracula movie starring them today, that would be the greatest movie ever made.
Continuing into the weeds here, there’s an entire media studies thesis to be written about movie adaptations using Dracula as the case study. My favorite personally is the original Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing version, because it takes a long an involved novel, and strips it down to an incredibly tight 80 minute thriller where Saruman and Grand Moff Tarkin spark off each other in the cheapest sets Hammer Films could build. It jettisons almost everything other than “professor vs vampire” and comes out aces. But it’s the complete opposite of a movie where Dracula is stabbed by a cowboy.
(And as long as I’m ranting about Dracula-inspired media with reduced cowboy content, because Quincy Morris is clearly my favorite character in the book, this was also my big problem with D&D’s Ravenloft. It kept the gothic horror props (and the racism,) but stripped out everything fun: the love story, the cowboy, the insane asylum, the boat trip. The last quarter of the book is one of the best “D&D Party goes on a rampage” books ever written, and Ravenloft doesn’t seem to have noticed, because it wanted to plop the castle down in the vaguely medieval default D&D setting, with some generic Victorian-esque angst, and Strahd is less Dracula than Lestat wearing a Dracula costume, because the nineties. I always wanted to run a version of that campaign where the vampire was the evil wanna-be supervillan of the book, and the player characters had revolvers, since it’s set during–and I’m using a technical historian term here—cowboy times. My take was more “PCs stealing candlesticks to melt them down and coat their bullets with silver”, and less “oh, isn’t the vampire handsome”.)
But! I digress. Getting back out of the ditch and on topic: It turns out that Dracula Daily has now also become a book! Snark about how it was already a book before Dracula Daily happened, the book edition keeps the strictly chronological order of the newsletter (as opposed to the novel’s slightly out-of-order structure), and includes some of the greatest hits from the internet as commentary in the margins.
The book is good, but not great. I was delighted to see many of the comments I remember from last summer in the book, but there just aren’t enough. The format of the book has extra wide pages, with the text of Dracula on the inner-most 2/3s of the page, and then an outer column of text and art from the internet commenting on that page. (A very Edward Tufte layout, which also appealed to me.)
But page after page is just empty, and then at the start of a new day there will be a single tweet, and then another several pages of nothing. he selections that made it in are all great, but Twitter and Tumblr were both brimming with Dracula content last summer, and it’s incredibly disappointing there isn’t more of it preserved here, especially as Twitter rots away.
So this is a partial recommendation. If nothing else I was happy to throw the price of the book at the people who did the work to make it happen for free last summer. (And it includes the joke describing Harker in Dracula’s castle as “taking a tour of the red flag factory”, which I’ve been quoting constantly for a year now.)
The Mysteries
As anticipated by literally no one on earth, Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes has made a surprise return from retirement with a new book: The Mysteries.
Its a small, strange, delightful little book about which you can say almost nothing without spoiling something beyond quoting the marketing copy:
From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.
Most of the press about the book has centered on the partnership between Watterson and Kascht to create the unique and striking art, presumably because of this fact where the actual contents are nearly impossible to talk about without giving something away. (The summary on amazon covers, roughly, the first page and a half only.)
An aside about the art: it is very cool, and very strange. It’s hard to tell exactly how it was made; some pages look like carefully photographed clay models using that “opening credits of Sherlock” filter to make them look smaller than they are, some look like detailed charcoal drawings. It’s the kind of book where the art does easily 2/3s of the storytelling, and the relationship between the words on the left side and the picture on the right are not always obvious at first glance. I feel like you could teach a high school literary analysis class using this book by asking “what does it mean that these two things were put together” and have every class come up with a different answer. It’s not so much that it defies an easy explanation as that an easy interpretation is besides the point. But now I’m getting to close to spoiling things so I’ll shift gears.
At first glance, it has very little in common with the comic strip about the boy and his tiger. The sense of humor is nearly absent, and the art is about as different as art can be.
But.
It shares something of the same outlook as Calvin & Hobbes did. The strip always had a slightly grouchy outlook—not pessimistic, or negative, but grouchy—where one of the major themes was “why can’t people just quit being jerks and enjoy all this?” That same sensibility is behind this new work.
Early on in Calvin & Hobbes’ run, there was a lot of speculation about which, if any, of the characters were autobiographical. Was Watterson like the active and hyper-imaginative Calvin as a kid, or more like the laid-back thoughtful Hobbes? Of course, as the reclusive Watterson gave more interviews, it seemed clear that the closest to an “author insert” character was actually Calvin’s Dad, which I have always found delightful.
With that context in mind, The Mysteries almost reads like a bedtime story Calvin’s Dad read Calvin to try and teach him a lesson that Calvin didn’t absorb. I almost expected the last page to snap out to Calvin in bed looking disgruntled.
To be clear, that is not how it ends. It ends with three words you have seen many times, but absolutely never deployed in this context. But again—argh—we dance up to the line of giving too much away.
Anyway. One of the major comic artists of the last century popped back up and delivered a new work. It’s excellent. Strongly recommended! Everyone needs to go read it so we can talk about it.
Saturday Linkblog, tiny papers edition
Look at this great collection of very short scientific papers!
I love it when a paper can boil the whole result down to a one or two word abstract, but my favorite is the one about failing to cure writer’s block. Next time I write something with a bibliography, I’m going to find an excuse to cite that one.
Friday linkblog, video game music piano covers edition
Check out this great piano cover of "Erana's Peace” from the first Quest for Glory!
There are maybe a dozen pieces of video game music from the 90s that I’ve had stuck in my head for thirty years now. Mostly bits from LucasArts games: The first two Monkey Islands, TIE Fighter, Sam & max Hit the Road, Full Throttle. But man, that first Quest for Glory was full of music I’m still humming years later, and this was absolutely one of those tracks. Great version!
(Via Laughing Squid)
Premature Quote Sourcing
“Premature Optimization is the Root of all Evil.” — Donald Knuth
That’s a famous phrase! You’ve probably seen that quoted a whole bunch of times. I’ve said it a whole bunch myself. I went down a rabbit hole recently when I started noticing constructions like “usually attributed to Donald Knuth” instead of crediting the professor directly. And, what? I mean, the man said it, right? He’s still alive, this isn’t some bon mot from centuries ago. So I started digging around, and found a whole bunch of places where it was instead attributed to C. A. R. Hoare! (Hoare, of course, is famous for many things but mostly for inventing the null pointer.) What’s the deal?
Digging into the interwebs further, that’s one of those quotes that’s taken on a life of it’s own, and just kinda floats around as a free radical. The kind of line that shows up on inspirational quote lists or tacked on the start of documents, but divorced from their context, like that time Abraham Lincoln said “The problem with internet quotes is that you cannot always depend on their accuracy.”
But, this seems very knowable! Again, we’re talking about literally living history. Digging even further, if people give a source it’s usually Knuth’s 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements.”
“Structured Programming with go to Statements” is one of those papers that gets referenced a lot but not a lot of people have read, which is too bad, because it’s a great piece of work. It’s shaped like an academic paper, but as “the kids say today”, it’s really an extended shitpost, taking the piss out of both the then-new approach of “Structured Programming”, specifically as discussed in Dijkstra’s “Go to Statement Considered Harmful”, as well as the traditionalist spaghetti-code enthusiasts. It’s several thousand words worth of “everyone needs to calm down and realize you can write good or bad code in any technique” and it’s glorious.
Knuth is fastidious about citations, sometimes to the point of parody, so it seems like we can just check that paper and see if he cites a source?
Fortunately for us, I have a copy! It’s the second entry in Knuth’s essay collection about Literate Programming, which is apparently the sort of thing I keep lying around.
In my copy, the magic phrase appears on page 28. There isn’t a citation anywhere near the line, and considering that chapter has 103 total references that take up 8 pages of endnotes, we can assume he didn’t think he was quoting anyone.
Looking at the line in context makes it clear that it’s an original line. I’ll quote the whole paragraph and the following, with apologies to Professor Knuth:
There is no doubt that the “grail” of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Good programmers will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, they will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail.
Clearly, it’s a zinger tossed off in the middle of his thought about putting effort in the right place. Seems obviously original to the paper in question. So, why the confused attributions? Seems simple.
With some more digging, it seems that Hoare liked to quote the line a lot, and at some point Knuth forgot it was his own lone and attributed it himself to Hoare. I can’t find a specific case of that on the web, so it may have been in a talk, but that seems to be the root cause of the tangled sourcing.
Thats kind of delightful; imagine having tossed off so many lines like that you don’t even remember which ones were yours!
This sort of feels like the kind of story where you can wrap it up by linking to Lie Bot saying “The end! No moral.”
Except. As a final thought, that warning takes a very different tone when shown in context. It seems like to gets trotted out a lot as an excuse to not do any optimization “right now”; an appeal to authority to follow the “make it work, then make it fast” approach. I’ve used it that way myself, I’m must admit, it’s always easy to argue that it’s still “premature”. But that’s not the meaning. Knuth is saying to focus your efforts, not to waste time with clever hacks that don’t do anything but make maintenance harder, to measure and really know where the problems are before you go fixing them.
What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
Sometimes, the best movies are the ones that you find by accident. Demolition Man was one of those.
I distinctly remember there was a mostly-playful rivalry between Demolition Man and Last Action Hero over the course of ’93. Both were the new “big movies” from Schwarzenegger and Stallone—the two biggest action stars of the time—and both were pivoting into the “action comedy” space of the early 90s. (As opposed to the absurdly straight-faced camp the two had been dealing with throughout the 80s.). This had some additional overtones with Arnold operating at a career peak thanks to T2, whereas it had been “a while” since Stalone had a hit.
Last Action Hero, of course, bombed. (To be clear, it’s a bad movie, but the whole middle third in the movie world is better than most people remember, and the joke with Arnold cleaning himself off after he climbs out of the tar pit with only a single paper towel deserves a better movie around it.)
My memory is that Demolition Man didn’t do that well either. The attitude I recall was “well, better than Last Action Hero, anyway”, but not terribly positive. If there was a winner between the two movies, Demolition Man was it, but more by default than anything? (Skimming old reviews, it clearly got some blowback for being “trying to be funny”, action and comedy still not being a common pairing, which considering how the next 30 years went is hilarious. In that respect, at least, the movie doesn’t feel three decades old.)
I didn’t see it in theatres, but it stuck in the back of my mind as “hey, maybe check that out sometime.”
Months later, it found itself, like so many other middlingly successful movies, on constant rotation on cable. (HBO, presumably, but I refuse to go look it up). For some reason, my sister and I found ourselves at home some evening on our own with nothing better to do, and stumbled across it just as it was starting. Sure, let’s give this a whirl for a bit, see if it’s better than the reviews made it sound.
And, of course, it turned out to be great.
It’s an almost perfect early-90s action movie—violent without being too violent, sweary without being too sweary, big explosions, fun action set pieces, jokes that are funny, and a cast that looks like they’re having a great time.
To briefly recap: Sylvester Stallone plays John Spartan, a police officer in the then-near-future of 1996 nicknamed “the demolition man” for the amount of property damage he causes while fighting crime. Westly Snipes is Simon Pheonix, crime lord of near-future LA. Phoenix frames Spartan for the deaths of a building full of civilians during a raid, and the pair of them are sentenced to CryoPrison, where they’re frozen in giant ice tanks to wait out their sentences. (In one of the movie’s many literary references, the CryoCells are frozen instantly something isn't named but is clearly supposed to be ice-nine from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.)
Thirty six years in the future, Phoenix escapes from a parole hearing, whereupon Spartan is thawed out to earn an early release by catching his old foe.
The future, meanwhile, is not what either expected, as they find themselves in “San Angeles”, a seemingly utopian combined LA, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, where there’s no real cime, the police don’t enforce anything, swearing is a ticket-able offense, the radio only plays vintage commercials, Otho from Beetlejuice is wearing a mumu, and all restaurants are Taco Bell since the end of the Francise Wars. Because, of course, we’re in one of those “friendly on the surface” dystopias of the THX-1138 / Brave New World mold, where everyone is either trapped in the authoritarian regine with a smile, or eking out a living in the sewers. (Actually, the closest other example I can think of is Doctor Who’s anti-Thatcher scream, “The Happiness Patrol.”)
Spartan is partnered up with a pre-Speed Sandra Bullock’s rookie cop Lenina Huxley (speaking of literary references,) and the two of them track down the mystery of how Phoenix was able to escape and who’s really behind it all.
The action is pretty standard early 90s stuff, mostly real guns with with vaguely science-fictional bits glued on the end, that kind of thing. The centerpiece of the movie is watching both Stalone and Snipes react to the future starting with morbid fascination and ending with open horror than anyone would live like this.
Stalone is always better when he gets to be a little funny, and he does some of his best work in years as John Spartan is constantly wrong-footed by the future while just tying to be an action hero. Sandra Bullock nails both “comic sidekick” and “rookie cop” while hitting the very specific tone of the movie’s jokes (“you can take this job and shovel it”). And Westly Snipes turns in one of the definitive comic book villain performances as Simon Phoenix. The rest of the cast seem to be having a great time, even Denis Leary shows up to be extremely early-90s Denis Leary.
The movies milks a lot of mileage out of Stalone as a fish out of water the “evil utopia” future. The “three seashells” in the bathroom has proven to be the joke with the most pop culture staying power, but for my money the better joke are the ticket printers constantly clattering in the background whenever someone swears. Which feels like a subtle comment on the style of movies at the time?
It’s one of the few movies to try and do future dialect in a convincing way; “enhance you calm,” “what seems to be your boggle?” and the like all elicit a surprised “what did you just say?” reaction while feeling like something that could evolve in the passive agressive dystopia of San Angeles.
Plus, all restaurants are Taco Bell!
It’s aged better than many of its contemporaries , but it’s hard to imagine a plot more wrapped up in the illusory anxieties of the early 90s than the twin pillars of “Gang violence has turned LA into a literal war zone,” and “the worst possible future is if the Politically Correct crowd oppresses the poor libertarians.”
Daniel Waters, who wrote the final script, claims he didn’t have a political angle, but considering we’re talking about the guy who wrote Heathers, you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical that all that stuff ended up in there by accident.
But, while it still has Dennis Leary show up and deliver the Big Speech About Freedom, it’s a movie with a far more nuanced and ambiguous take on the subject than, say, John Carpenter’s Libertarian Manifesto disguised as Escape from LA. (Although even that movie gets way more interesting when you remember to pair it with They Live, the definitive anti-Reagan movie; but I digress.)
Westly Snipes’ Simon Pheonix has the future’s architect figured out when he calls him an “evil Mister Rogers”; this is a movie that knows that there are worse things out there than wearing mumus and having too many rules. The future’s villains are displaced with comical ease by Phoenix and his gang, and even more critically, the future libertarian resistance proves utterly useless against a real threat. Even the 90s machismo is quietly undercut by Stalone’s knitting.
Instead, the movie ends on a final note of “you dorks all need to relax,” which is probably a moral we could use more of.
But! That all value add; the joy of this movie is in its impish sense of humor as it works through the various action standards.
A favorite example: Towards the end of the movie, Stalone is standing with the now allied rebels and police, all on their way to stop Snipes from waking up the denizens of the CryoPrison.
“Loan me a gun,” he says to Denis Leary’s character, who immediately slaps a revolver in his hand faster than he expects. Without missing a beat, Stalone immediately follows up with “Loan me two guns.”
It didn’t do terribly well in the fall of ’93, but it seems to have been one of those movies that got a real second life on home video. Many, many people seemed to have the same experience I did—stumbling across it, going in with low expectations, and then being delighted to discover something brilliant.
I’m not sure where it lies in the greater Action Movie Canon these days, but I note that everyone I’ve ever talked to about it have fallen cleanly into two camps—folks who don’t remember it at all, and people who love it, a movie that quietly found its people over the years.
It’s a good one.
(And my sister and I still say “Illuminate” whenever we turn on the lights to a room.)
Microsoft buys Activision, gets Zork and Space Quest as a bonus
Well, Microsoft finally got permission to assimilate Activision/Blizzard. Most of the attention has centered around the really big ticket items, Microsoft hanging Candy Crush, WoW, and CoD on the wall next to Minecraft.
But Activision owned and acquired a lot of stuff of the years. Specifically to my interests, they now find themselves the owner of the complete Infocom and Sierra On-Line back catalogs. Andrew Plotkin does a good job laying out the history of how that happened, along with outlining some ways this could go. (Although note that in his history there, the entity called Vivendi had already consumed what was left of Sierra after its misadventures with various french insurance companies.)
I know they’re mostly just looking for hits for the XBox, but Microsoft have found themselves the owners of a huge percentage of 80s and 90s PC gaming. Here’s hoping they do something cool with it all. There has to be some group of Gen-X mid-level managers who want to run with that, right?
Disaster
All of us here at (((Icecano))) have spent the last week horrified by the escalating fractal disaster unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
I don’t have much personally thats useful to contribute, so instead I’ll link to this, from Rabbi Ruttenberg: a lot of things are true.
All our thoughts with everyone in harms way, and hoping they can all find a way out of the storm.
Tuesday Tech Tip: Substack and RSS feeds
TL;DR: every substack has an RSS feed automatically, just put the root of the substack into your feed reader and it works!
With twitter in the final throws of having drunk from the wrong grail, I’ve been retooling my RSS feeds and such. Two years ago my main feeds were my RSS reader and twitter; I hadn’t realized how many RSS feeds had changed location or rotted away since I last did any weeding as most of those folks I also followed on twitter.
Substack seems to be the preferred location for folks looking to stand up a new web presence, and email newsletters are in. And that’s all fine, but my email client is just not where I want to read what we used to call blog posts.
I kept wishing there was an (easy) way to route newsletters to my feed reader, but there’s no obvious UI on substacks around feed locations or RSS subscriptions or anything.
And, I may be the last person on the web to learn this fact, but it turns out all substacks have an RSS feed built right in at /feed. Sane RSS readers will take the root URL of the substack and find it automatically. I guess this is one of those cases where RSS is such a foundational base layer to web tech that it’s one of the “batteries included” and it’s not worth advertising.
# Monday Tech Tip: BBEdit and using Enter as Return
Like many Mac-weilding software engineers, I edit a lot of text in BBEdit. My main rig has a full width keyboard with the numeric keypad. I tend to use the keypad a lot, since the reality of the day job is that I type a lot of numbers. Something that’s always bugged me about BBEdit specifically is that pressing the Enter key on the keypad doesn’t go to the next line.
Now, on paper—that’s the correct behavior. Return and Enter are, in fact, semantically different, and they’re labeled as such. But, as much fun as “Technically Correct is the best kind of correct” can be, I am not actually entering data into Lotus-1-2-3 in 1986, and as such I don’t really need an Enter key, at least not nearly as much as I need a second Return key over on the far right of the keyboard.
And I don’t know why this took me so long to figure out, because of course BBEdit has a setting for this.
Preferences -> Keyboard -> “Enter key generates Return”
And there you go, perfect, exactly what I wanted.
(And as a bonus, it turns out there’s also an option to make Home and End move to the start and end of the current line instead of the document. Which is absolutely my Windows accent coming through, but I don’t care, that’s how I prefer it.)
With enough money, you don’t have to be good at anything
Following up on our previous coverage, I’ve been enjoying watching the reactions to Isaacson’s book on twitter’s new owner.
My favorite so far has been Dave Karpf’s mastodon live-toot turned substack post. Credit where credit is due, I saw this via a link on One Foot Tsunami, and I’m about to jump on the same quote that both Dave Karpf and Paul Kafasis did:
[Max] Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ‘Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.
That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86)
And, man, that’s just “Masterful gambit, sir”, but meant sincerely.
But this quote is it.. Here’s a guy who found the closest thing to the infinite money cheat in Sim City as exists in real life, and he’s got a fleet of people who think that’s same as being smart. And then finds himself a biographer possessed of such infinite credulity that he can’t tell the difference between being actually good at poker and being someone who found the poker equivalent of typing IDDQD before playing.
With enough money, you don’t have to be good at anything. With infinite lives, you’ll eventually win.
My other favorite piece of recent days is How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson by Elizabeth Lopatto. The subhead sums it up nicely: ” One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out.”
There’s too much good stuff to pull out a single quote, but it does a great job outlining not only the book’s reflexive responses of “Masterful gambit”, but also the way Isaacson breezes past the labor issues, racism, sexism, transphobia, right-wing turn, or anything vaguely “political”, seeming to treat those things as besides the story. They’re not! That IS the story!
To throw one more elbow at the Steve Jobs book, something that was really funny about it was that Isaacson clearly knew that Jobs had a “reality distortion field” that let him talk people into things, so when Jobs told Isaacson something, Isaacson would go find someone else to corroborate or refute that thing. The problem was, Isaacson would take whatever that other person said as the unvarnished truth, never seeming to notice that he was talking to heavily biased people, like, say, Bill Gates.
With this book, he doesn’t even go that far, just writing down whatever Elno Mork tells him without checking it out, totally looking past the fact that he’s talking to a guy who absolutely loves to just make stuff up all the time.
Like Lopatto points out, this is maddening for many reasons, but not the least of which being that Isaacson has been handed a great story: it turns out the vaunted business techical genius spaceships & cars guy is a jerk whose been dining out on infinite money, a compliant press, and other people’s work for his whole life. “How in the heck did he get this far?” would have been a hell of a book. Unfortunately, the guy with access failed to live up to the moment
The tech/silicon valley-focused press has always had a problem with an enthusiasm for new tech and charismatic tech leaders that trends towards the gullible. Why check things out if this new startup it claiming something you really want to be true? (This isn’t a new problem, I still have the Cue Cat Wired sent me.)
But even more than recent reporting failures like Theranos or the Crypto collapse, Musk’s last year in the wreckage of twitter really seems to be forcing some questions around “Why did you all elevate someone like this for so long? Any why are people still carrying water for him?”
Competing with Patreon
Back in the early ‘00s we spent a lot of time talking about “microtransactions”. This was during the same era we started using phrases like “the long tail.” There was obviously a missing business model somewhere between “selling books” and “subscribing to a newspaper” where people would spend small amounts of money for small things; the example I used to use was we were trying to find the web equivalent of putting 50 cents into a vending machine.
But no one could ever quite figure out how to make it work. Too much friction of too many kinds, and the web fell back on default capitalism model—“free” with ads. And then we know how that turned out, as more VC showed up, we started hearing about growth over everything else, and the business models in the tech world got stranger and stranger.
I don’t personally make money being creative on the web, but I know people who do, or at least used to, and from the outside, Patreon seems like it’s a solid swing at that missing piece we were looking for 20 years ago, a reasonably frictionless way to spend small amounts of money directly to the person making something. But from the outside, it’s notable that two things seem true: 1) everyone uses Patreon because it’s the only game in town for that set of features, and 2) everyone who uses Patreon seems to hate it.
I was therefore absolutely fascinated by Sibylla Bostoniensis’ How to Compete with Patreon. (Via jwz.)
It’s a through description of everything Patreon does and does not do well, written from the perspective of how to build a better system.
The whole thing was eye-opening, but three things really jumped out at me:
First, Credit card fees. I had no idea that Patreon had found a way to essentially round transaction fees to zero, and then… stopped? Like everyone else, I’d love to know what happened there. I’ve worked on more than one project where a features were scrapped once we realized the processor fees would make it unviable, and it’s crazy that someone figured it out and then gave it up. From my position of no inside knowlede, that sure sounds like there was a pile of VC subsidizing the effort that got used up. (How much of the economy of the last two decades was fueled by VC giving away free money rather than any actual coherent economics?)
Second, The techstack. I feel this one in my bones. Modern web frontend javascript frameworks are incredibly heavy, and have a huge list of tradeoffs that need to be carefully considered before you make the plunge into thick client Single Page Apps or the like. Which many many people fail to do, and go with “how it’s done now.” And that would be okay, but so much of “how things are done” come from either Google or Facebook, and just, no one else operates at that scale—nor are they willing to staff at that level.
I’ve had this argument more than one—Sure, Google does it “that way,” but they have a team of 15, and we have 2. Plus, they can pull the plug on any of those features at any moment, because they get all of their revenue from ads, and I guarantee the ad server doesn’t run angular.
And the angle that heavy client-side websites are inherently limiting to your potential audience is a great point that should be made more often.
Third, the cultural mismatch. Not everything is a store! There are business models other than selling a widget at a price (or free with ads.). So many tech bro types don’t have any experience with the worlds where those exist, and want everything to be a neat tidy transition. The description of the conflict over having, essentially, a “pay me now” button is fascinating; if people actually try to defraud their patrons via patreon, that’ll work itself out real, real fast without needing a built in system to guarantee that a package was delivered.
I hope someone takes this description and runs with it. Much like BackerKit realized they were already doing all the hard parts for Kickstarter, so they might as well do the rest of it, I hope someone leans into the space and builds a patreon competitor.
Kirby’s 2001
I need everyone to stop what you’re doing and look at the back cover art from Jack Kirby’s adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I like that movie a lot (although I think it’s much more flawed than its fans like to admit,) but I think I would have preferred this version.
Only Victory Laps in the Building
I’m behind in my TV watching, so I’m only just now catching up with the new season of Only Murders in the Building. What an absolute delight of a show; what a joy to watch a cast full of old pros turning out the best work of their careers.
There are a lot of pleasures to this show, not the least of which is finding out that Selena Gomez is the real third Amigo.
But in many ways, it’s a career victory lap for a whole group of comic actors, More creative people should get to do a victory lap like this—not a greatest hits tour, but a final showcase of everything they’ve learned how to do over their careers, a best possible version of everthing they’ve ever done.
(As an aside, the all-time best victory lap is still David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, which spends 18 episodes moving through a riff on just about every movie he’s ever made with long stops at both Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, an experimental movie about the atomic bomb, all full of actors he’s worked with before or wanted to ork with and never had a chance to, before turning out a surprisingly satisfying Twin Peaks movie. More people should get one of these.)
While the cast is stuffed full of old pros (Andrea Martin! Nathan Lane! Jane Lynch! Tina Fay!) the centerpiece of course is the pair of Steve Martin and Martin Short.
Both Steve Martin and Martin Short have their respective personas they’ve mostly stuck with over the last 40 years—Steve Martin as a self-important blowhard who’s not nearly as important as he thinks he is, and Martin Short swinging from frantic/neurotic to unhinged. Here, though, they play mostly in the same space, but let their age add some extra notes. Steve Martin plays this particular blowhard with a deep sadness in his eyes, as if he can’t quite muster the energy to keep up the act, but doesn’t have anything else to fall back on.
Martin Short is the absolute standout, though. He does his array of wacky antics and neuroses, but adds a weight to all of it. On the surface, “Oliver Putnam” is a Martin Short character, but weighed down by decades of failure, a character who is just self-aware enough to be unhappy, but not self-aware enough to be able to do anything about it. It’s everything he’s ever done before, but better than you’ve ever seen it, refined to absolute diamond purity. It’s an absolute masterclass in comic acting and character work.
And this year, he manages to take it up even further, more than holding his own against Meryl Streep of all people, conclusively proving how good he’s been all along.
So, hypothetically speaking of course, if a big web outlet whose name rhymed with Plate asked me for a 1500 word hit piece on my choice of the cast of OMITB, for most of them I can kind of see what shape such a hit piece would take. I wouldn’t agree with any of this, mind you, but I can see how you would do it. Steve Martin—“been doing the same schtick for 40 years!” Selena Gomez—“Disney Channel go home!” Nathan Lane—“should have stayed in animation!” Paul Rudd—“go back to ant man!” Even with Meryl Streep you could do something like “let someone else have a turn!” But Martin Short? I wouldn’t even know where to start with that one. He’s always been good in everything. The bad movies he’s been in, and he’s been in quite a few, he’s always the best part. Even Clifford, which might legitimately be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, is the kind of bad that required an actual genius to just completely take the governor off. The thing he does with his face when Charles Groden shouts “look at me like a real human boy!” is pure art.
Anyway. The good news is that everyone has been sharing their favorite Martin Short bits, which mostly means a whole bunch of Jiminy Glick I hadn’t seen. A perfect Martin Short character, deeply weird, very silly, willing to make himself look very stupid, and a masterclass in improv… combat, basically?
The best part about the Glick bits was the way Martin Short was blatantly trying to crack up the people he was interviewing, and he’d just continue escalating until they broke. And I’d love to know what the behind-the-scenes of filming these was like, because when they start the guest always has this stunned look on their face that seems to say “I was just talking to Marty, and then he just turned this on.”
So I’ll take this opportunity to leave you with a couple of my favorites:
Nathan Lane, who tries hard at first to roll with whats happening and then gets completely sideswiped.
Stephen Spielburg, who also does pretty well, until Short hits him with something that cracks up the crew and then just gives up and surrenders to the flow.
Alec Baldwin, who is one of the very few people to manage to wrestle away control and then do his own material for a minute or two, to Short’s obvious delight. A couple big laughs from the crew in this one.
Also, go watch Innerspace.