Monday Mini-linkblog, under pressure edition

Pressure! Under Pressure!

Somehow, I have failed to post this before. It’s techno, without computers: Pressure Washer vs Techno

These guys need to open for the barcode guys.

Apparently the Last Veridian Note was fifteen years ago?

Wow! Turns out today is the 15th anniversary of the Last Viridian Note. The Viridian Design Movement was one of those fun early web things where Bruce Sterling & company dressed up climate change activism as a design movement. It was a very late-90s “ha ha only serious” thing. It all seems a little bit precious now, in retrospect, but mostly that’s because it was a movement populated entirely by people who hadn’t lived through the first decades of the 21st century yet.

But also this was 6 years before the phrase “grim meathook future” emerged; everyone could sense that the future was coming in fast and would be very different that anyone could predict¹. The veridians, at least, saw it coming and tried to redirect some of the energy in a positive direction, rather than lie back and accept it, or figure out how to use it to get rich. The positive side to all that stuff I was griping about WIRED yesterday².

Anyway, I was super into it. It was always out on the fringe of the fringe, and so after Sterling wrapped up the party in ’08 it seems to have vanished from the discussion. I myself never would have remembered if it hadn’t been referenced in the “this day in history” section of today’s pluralistic.

The Last Note was really Sterling wrapping up everything he’s learned about how to live in current era. While the rest of the “Viridian thing” has floated back into the mists of the “Old Internet”, this essay is something I find myself coming back to every few years.

You should go read the whole thing! But a few pull quotes;

This tends to be the bit people quote if they do:

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else.

“Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

But my favorite bit is this, which I quoted almost word-for-word when I handed my teenager her first Swiss Army Knife at her birthday:

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

And that’s really the whole thing wrapped up: be someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.

---

1. As a total aside, I first saw the phrase in something Warren Ellis wrote, probably whichever of his newsletters was running in ’05. I had forgotten, or just mashed up in my head, that the phrase was coined by Joshua Ellis, no relation. But I digress.

2. Of course, it was more important to keep an ironic distance than let anything think you were sincere or earnest, so….

(late) Friday Linkblog, cool-projects-by-cool-people edition

Doctor Who is back!. Absolutely delightful amuse-bouche to Davies & Tennant’s return. It’s perfect that the new run is starting with a Children in Need sketch, which is both very silly and is done with way more effort & care than required. You’ve got Tennant in his sweet spot of doing very silly things with complete seriousness. You’ve got a perfect example of Who’s whimsical attitude to it’s on continuity (“Did this really happen?” “Well, would it be more fun if it did? Then yes.”) And you have a gorgeous shot at the start of the Tardis approaching Skaro with bombs going off in the atmosphere, which is far too cool (and expensive) a visual to “waste” on a comedy sketch for a charity telethon, and yet there it is.

A great sign of things to come.

James Burke’s Connections is back!. The original was a core formative experience for me as a kid, still one of my favorite documentaries of all time, of any kind. There was a stretch in my approximation of a “career” where I was giving a lot of talks and presentations; doing one in the style of an episode of Connections was the White Whale I never caught.

I’m pleased as punch to report that Shirt.woot apparently still exists?!!? And, at some point they switched to print-on-demand, so the entire back catalog is available? I vaguely feel like I must have known this, but it was a pleasant surprise to discover. Shirt.woot was a regular destination in the late 00s, and I still wear this shirt on a pretty regular basis. Even better, the raven shirt is still the all-time bestseller, all these years later. Guess I should finally buy one? It feels like there so little of the Heroic Age of the web left, rediscovering part that still exists is such a delight.

I haven’t had a chance to watch the movie yet, but I very much enjoyed Max Read’s piece David Fincher's new movie 'The Killer' is sigma cinema. The pull quote is “…throughout his career Fincher has been in dialogue with the concerns of 4chan and the rest of Loser Internet…” I have a lot of time for Fincher’s non-website movies, but never once did I think any of his main characters were supposed to be asperational. Fincher’s whole oeuvre is pointing at a deeply damaged person and going “look at this sad weirdo.”

Holy crap, Aliens and the Abyss are (finally) coming out on 4k. For the Abyss, this is also the first release on Blu-Ray. I guess Jim Cameron finally had the time to lock down the 4k masters; True Lies and the two Avatar movies are coming too. Thats gonna be a hell of a movie marathon weekend.

And finally, Bobby fingers has a new video. I don’t know how to set this up beyond saying he turned Jeff Bezos into a rowboat. And previously, he made a diorama out of the time Steven Segal got choked out, and the time Michael Jackson caught on fire. It’s 20-something minutes, trust me, click it. (See also Andy Baio’s piece from back in May The Unhinged Miniature World of Bobby Fingers, which I apparently completely failed to link to at the time.)

You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”

There’s a class of nerd who, when looking at a potential concept, can’t tell the difference between “actually cool” and “only seemed cool because it was in something I read/saw when I was 14.”

Fundamentally, this is where the Torment Nexus joke comes from. This is why Zuckerberg burned zillions of dollars trying to build “The Metaverse” from Snow Crash, having never noticed that 1) the main character of the book is one of the architects of the metaverse and it left him broke, and 2) the metaverse gets hijacked to deliver a deadly mind virus to everyone in in, both of which are just a little too close to home here.

Normally, this is where I would say this is what you git after two or three decades of emphasizing STEM education over the humanites, but it’s not just that. When you’re fourteen, you're supposed to only engage on the surfaces aesthetic level. The problem is when those teenagers grow up and never think about why those things seemed cool. Not just about what the authors were trying to say, but a failure to consider that maybe consider that it seemed so cool because it was a narrative accelerant, a shortcut to get the story to the next dramatic point.

Anyway, Humane announced their AI Pin.

And, look, it’s the TNG com-badge + the Enterprise computer. And that’s cool, I guess, but totally fails to engage (pun intended) with the reason that the com-badge seems so cool is that it’s a storytelling device, a piece of narrative accelerant.

My initial reaction, giving the number of former Apple employees at the company, is that this whole product is blatantly something that Tim Apple rejected, so they took their pitch deck and started their own damn company, you’ll be sorry, etc.

I don’t understand who this product is for. And it’s not that I don’t get it, it’s just that it seems to start from a premise I don’t buy. There’s a core worldview here that isn’t totally expressed, but that seems to extend from a position that people like to talk more than they like to look at things, and I disagree. Sure, there’s a privacy angle to needing to talk out loud to get things done, but I think that’s a sideshow. Like the Apple Cyber Goggles, it’s a new way to be alone. As far as I’m concerned, any device that you can’t use to look at menu together , or show other people memes, or pictures of your kids is a non-starter. There’s a weird moral angle to the design, where Humane seems to think that all the things I just listed are things we shouldn’t be doing, that they’re here to rescue us from our terrible fate of being able to read articles saved for later while in the hospital waiting room. The marketing got right up to the line of saying that reading text messages from your kids on the go was going to give you hairy palms, and I don’t think thats going to go over as well as they think. More than anything, it reminded me of those weird Reagan-era anti-drug campaigns that totally failed to engage or notice why people were doing drugs? Just Say No to… sending pictures of the kids to my mom?

It also suffers the guessing when you can ask fallacy. It has a camera, and can take pictures of things you ask it to, but doesn’t have a viewfinder? Instead of letting you take the picture, it tries to figure it out on its own? Again, the reason that the images they look at in Star Trek are so nice to look at is they were built by an entire professional art department, and not by a stack of if-statements running in the com-badge.

And speaking of that “AI” “agent”, we’re at a weird phase of the current AI grift carnival, where the people who are bought in to the concept have rebuilt their personality around being a true believer, and are still so taken with the fact that “my com-badge talked to me!” that they ship a marketing video full of AI hallucinations & errors and don’t notice. This has been a constant thing since LLMs burst into the scene last year; why do the people showing them off ask questions they don’t know the answers to, and then don’t fact-check? Because they’re AI True Believers, and getting Any Answer from the robot is more important than whether it’s true.

I don’t know if voice agents and “VUIs” are going to emerge as a significant new interaction paradigm or not, but I know a successful one won’t come from a company that builds their marketing around an incorrect series of AI answers they don’t bother to fact check. You can’t build a successful anything if you’re too blinded by what you want to build to see what you actually built.

I’d keep going, but Charlie Stross already made all these points better than I did, about why using science fiction as a source of ideas is a bad idea, and why tech bros keep doing it anyway: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it.

It’s really good! You should go read it, I’ll meet you under the horizontal line:

—

And this is something of a topic shift, but in a stray zing Stross manges to nail why I can’t stand WIRED magazine:

American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future. (Tommasso Marinetti and Nick Land are separated by a century and a paradigm shift in the definition of technological progress they're obsessed with, but hold the existing world in a similar degree of contempt.)

And yeah, that’s what always turned me off from WIRED, the attitude that any technology was axiomatically a Good Thing, and any “short term” social disruption, injustice, climate disasters, or general inequality were uncouth to mention because the future where the sorts of people who read WIRED were all going to become fabulously wealthy and go to space was so inevitable that they were absolved of any responsibility for the consequences of their creations. Anyone asking questions, or objecting to being laid off, or suggesting regulations, or bringing up social obligations, or even just asking for benefits as a gig worker, were all just standing in the way of Progress! Progress towards the glorious future on the Martian colonies! Where they’ll get to leave “those people” behind.

While wearing “AI Pins”.

Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”

For a moment there, we had a real embarrassment of riches: three of the best genre shows of the year so far—Loki, Lower Decks, and Our Flag Means Death—were not only all on in October, but they all posted the same night: Thursdays. While none of the people making those three shows thought of themselves as part of a triple-feature, that’s where they ended up, and they contrasted and complimented each other in interesting ways. It’s been a week or two now, let’s get into the weeds.

Heavy Spoilers Ahoy for Loki S2, Lower Decks S4, and Our Flag Means Death S2

Loki season 2

The first season of Loki was a unexpected delight. Fun, exciting, and different, it took Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and put him, basically, in a minor league ball version of Doctor Who.

(The minor league Who comparison was exacerbated later when the press release announcing that Loki S1 director Kate Herron was writing an episode of Who had real “we were so impressed with their work we called them up to the majors” energy.)

Everything about the show worked. The production design was uniformly outstanding, from the TVA’s “fifties-punk” aesthetic , to the cyberpunk city and luxury train on the doomed planet of Lamentis-1, to Alabama of the near future, to casually tossing off Pompei at the moment the volcano exploded.

The core engine of the show was genius—stick Loki in what amounted to a buddy time cop show with Owen Wilson’s Mobius and let things cook. But it wasn’t content to stop there; it took all the character development Loki had picked up since the first Avengers, and worked outwards from “what would you do if you found out your whole life was a waste, and then got a second chance?” What does the norse god of chaos do when he gets a second chance, but also starts working with The Man? The answer is, he turned into Doctor Who.

And, like the Doctor, Loki himself had a catalytic effect on the world around him; not the god of “mischief”, necessarily, but certainly a force for chaos; every other character who interacted with him was changed by the encounter, learning things they’d have rather not learned and having to change in one way or another having learned it.

While not the showiest, or most publicized, the standout for me was Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15, who went from a true believer soldier to standing in the rain outside a futuristic Wal-Mart asking someone she’d been trying to kill (sorry, “prune”) to show her the truth of what had been done to her.

The first season also got as close as I ever want to get to a Doctor Who origin—not from Loki, but in the form of Mobius. He also starts as a dedicated company man, unorthodox maybe, but a true believer in the greater mission. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the TVA were the bad guys all along, and ends up in full revolt against his former colleagues; by the end I was half expecting him to steal a time machine and run off with his granddaughter.

But look, Loki as a Marvel character never would have shown up again after the first Thor and the Avengers if Tom Hiddleston hadn’t hit it out of the park as hard as he did. Here, he finally gets a chance to be the lead, and he makes the most of the opportunity. He should have had a starring vehicle long before this, and it manages to make killing Loki off in the opening scene of Infinity War even stupider in retrospect than it was at the time.

All in all, a huge success (I’m making a note here) and a full-throated endorsement of Marvel’s plan for Disney+ (Especially coming right after the nigh-unwatchable Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

Season 2, then, was a crushing disappointment.

So slow, so boring. All the actors who are not Tom Hiddleston are visibly checked out; thinking about what’s next. The characters, so vibrant in the first season , are hollowed-out shells of themselves.

As jwz quips, there isn’t anything left of this show other than the leftover production design.

As an example of the slide, I was obsessed with Loki’s season 1 look where he had, essentially, a Miami Vice under-shoulder holster for his sword under his FBI-agent style jacket, with that square tie. Just a great look, a perfect encapsulation of the shows mashup of influences and genres. And this year, they took that away and he wore a kinda boring Doctor Who cosplay coat. The same basic idea, but worse in every conceivable way.

And the whole season was like that, the same ideas but worse.

Such a smaller scope this year, nothing on the order of the first season’s “city on a doomed planet.” The show seemed trapped inside the TVA, sets we had seen time and time before. Even the excursion to the World’s Fair seemed claustrophobic. And wasted, those events could have happened anywhere. Whereas the first season was centered around what Loki would do with a second chance armed with the knowledge that his life came to nothing, here things just happened. Why were any of these people doing any of these things? Who knows? Motivations are non-existant, characters have been flattened out to, basically, the individual actor’s charisma and not much else. Every episode I wanted to sit the writer down and dare them to explain why any character did why they did.

The most painful was probably poor B-15 who was long way from heartbreaking revelations in the rain in front of futuristic WalMarts; this year the character has shrunk to a sub-Riker level of showing up once a week to bark exposition at the audience. She’s basically Sigourney Weaver’s character from Galaxy Quest, but meant seriously, repeating what we can already see on the computer screen.

And Ke Huy Quan, fresh from winning an Oscar for his stunning performance in Everything Everywhere all at Once, is maybe even more wasted, as he also has to recite plot-mechanic dialogue, but he doesn’t even have a well-written version of his character to remember.

And all the female characters were constantly in conflict with each other, mostly over men? What was that even about?

Actually, I take that back, the most disappointing was Tara Strong’s Miss Minutes, a whimsical and mysterious character who became steadily more menacing over the course of the first season, here reduced to less than nothing, practically absent from the show, suddenly pining for Johnathan Majors, and then casually murdered (?) by the main characters in an aside while the show’s attention was somewhere else.

There was a gesture towards an actually interesting idea in the form of “the god of chaos wants to re-fund the police”, but the show didn’t even seem to notice that it had that at hand.

The second to last episode was where I finally lost patience. The TVA has seemingly been destroyed, and Loki has snapped backwards in time. Meeting each of the other characters as who they were before they were absorbed into the TVA, Loki spends the episode trying to get them to remember him and to get back to the “present” to save the TVA. Slowly, painfully, the show arrived at a conclusion where Hiddleston looked the camera in the eye and delivered the punchline that “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”.

And, what? Stepping past the deeply banal moral, I flatly refuse to believe that these characters, whom Loki has known for, what, a couple of days? Are such great friends of his that he manages to learn how to time travel from sheer will to rescue them. These people? More so than his brother, more so than anyone else from Asgard? (This is where the shared universe fails the show, we know too much about the character to buy what this show is selling.)

The last episode was actually pretty good—this was the kind of streaming show that was really a movie idea with 4 hours of foreplay before getting to the real meat. Loki choosing to shoulder the responsibility for the multiverse and get his throne at the center of the world tree as the god of time (?) is a cool visual, but utterly squanders the potential of the show, Loki and Morbius having cool timecop adventures.

(That said, the Avengers finding out that Loki is sitting at the center of all realities is a hell of a potential scene, and I hope that happens. But even more, I really want a movie with Time Agent Loki and Single Dad Thor. But that seems to have been squandered with everything else.)

Lower Decks season 4

Loki probably wouldn’t have been quite so maddening if he hadn’t very slowly arrived at his cliché epiphany on the same night as the Lower Decks season finale, which started at “The real Star Fleet was the friends we made along the way” and then used that as a launching off point. LD managed to juggle storylines for nearly every recurring character, action that flowed entirely from character’s personalities, a few of the deepest lore cuts I’ve ever seen, and an entire series of space battle action sequences—and all in half the time!

I mean, they did Wrath of Khan in 30 minutes, except Khan was Nick Lorcarno. And it worked! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bigger flex.

Plus: “black market Ferengi Genesis Device” is my new band name.

Lower Decks was originally positioned as a kind of “PG-rated Rick & Morty but Star Trek,” which was clearly what they needed to say to get the show greenlit, but then immediately did something different and more interesting.

We’ve been living through a period of “legacy sequels”, reboots, and followups to long-running franchises, and the vast majority of them have trouble figuring out how keep the massive weight of the existing material from being an anchor.

But Lower Decks is one of the few shows that actually figured out how to use the history entirely as value-add. (The other winner in this category is Andor.) Its key advantage is that it’s very, very well written, but it does two brilliant moves: first, the characters are all the in-universe equivalent of Star Trek fans themselves, so they know as much as we do. Second, the show consistently takes a well-worn Star Trek trope and then asks, basically, how would a regular person react to this emotionally?

And, it does this while mining the whole run of the franchise, but especially TNG, for material to be revisited. Frequently the show will take a plot of a TNG episode that was originally played straight over 45 minutes, and then re-stage it as a comedy set-piece for the pre-credits teaser, and they’re all brilliant. It’s a show made by people who love Star Trek as much as anyone, but who are not about to pretend that it’s not mostly ridiculous.

Every Lower Decks episode has at least one joke/deep cut where I laugh like crazy and the kids have no idea what the deal is, and then I have to put on a seminar afterwards. The last two episodes of this season were both the hardest I laughed and the longest it took me to explain everything.

As an example: that Black Market Ferengi Genesis Device, which needs the operator to pay to shut it down. That’s the kind of joke that needs a lot of background to work, the kind of background you only get with decades of material, and the show just rips past it without trying to explain it, reasoning correctly that anyone who will laugh at that doesn’t need the help, and for everyone else there’s no amount of explanation they could fit in 30 minutes that would work. It’s the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 approach, applied to fiction.

They also titled an episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place,” which is such a multi-dimensional deep cut I don’t even know what to say about it besides applaud.

And that’s the thing! You don’t need to get any of these jokes for the show to make sense, and the deep cuts that you do need to understand—like the fact that the main villain is a one-off character from a single TNG episode 30 years ago—the show does stop and explain, and recontextualize in the milieu of Lower Decks. It’s finally a show that manages to use the half-century of “canon” as a sail, not an anchor, using it to deepen the show, rather than get into doctrinal arguments about, say, what the Klingons “really” look like.

But that’s all sauce, bonus points. The real joy of this show are the characters and their friendships. And this is where Lower Decks snapped Loki into sharp relief.

LD took its rule-breaking chaos-agent main character with a group of close friends she had a complex relationships with, and contrasted that with a different rule-breaking chaos-agent with a group of followers, but who broke rules for different reasons, and then made her choose which group to stay with, and she came out on top because she kept operating as a chaos agent, but now realizing why she was doing it, and for the right reasons. And all this while exploring and evolving her relationships with all the other main characters, and giving most of them a beat to change as characters as well.

And this is why it was such a contrast to Loki. Loki’s plotlines resolved by him giving up his chaotic ways and accepting responsibility for the multiverse; Mariner’s plot resolved by her continuing to be chaotic but pointed in the right direction. Lower Decks evolved its characters by making them more themselves instead of giving up their signature features for plot reasons; imagine what Loki would have looked like if the resolution had flowed from who the characters were instead of where the plot needed them to be.

And on top of all that, the ship Mariner steals from the Nova Fleet is my favorite minor starship design, which felt like it was written for me exclusively.

I have not felt this solidly in the center of the target audience for something since Taco Bell announced they were making a custom flavor of Mountain Dew. This is the Star Trek show I’ve always wanted.

Our Flag Means Death season 2

One of my favorite rare genres is the Stealth Movie. A movie that starts looking like something else entirely, a RomCom or period drama and then at about the 20 minute mark the ninjas show up and it turns into a different thing entirely. A movie that changes genres part way through, the bigger the change the better, especially if it can do it by surprise.

This of course, basically never happens in real life, and for good reason! Cranking from one genre to a different midway is a great way to frustrate your audience, especially if you’re trying to keep the shift a surprise. For every person that would leap up in delight when the gears change, there’d be another ten who’d feel ripped off they didn’t get to see the movie in the trailer.

For a long time, Wild Things was my go-to example of a movie that really did this, and it’s about as as good as you could do—the genres are compatible, the shift happens pretty organically, and it does a great job at both the “sleazy sex crimes like Basic Instinct” half and “double-doublecross caper like Usual Suspects” half.

And you know, that’s okay. The audience for media that jumps genre tracks is pretty small, and I understand my desire to be surprised in that manner is a niche, niche intersect.

And then, Our Flag Means Death came out.

Murry from Flight of the Conchords and the main vampire from the movie version of What we do in the Shadows? Doing a pirate comedy loosely based on the real life friendship of “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard? Sounds like their previous stuff mixed with a little Inspector Clouseau. I’m in!

And for the first couple of episodes, I wasn’t that into it. It was fine, but the comedy didn’t really work for me? I kept expecting it to be goofier, for Stede Bonnet to accidentally succeed more often. I mean, it was very well written, well made, well acted, a whole cast of fun characters in the crew of the Revenge, it just wasn’t working for me. And you know, okay, thats disappointing, but not everything is for everybody. A couple episodes in, I was accepting that this just wasn’t my jam afer all.

And then they pulled the switcheroo, and revealed it was actually a gay pirate rom com. And holy smokes, suddenly all the decisions I didn’t understand worked in this new context, and the whole show snapped into place. And it went from a show I was lukewarm on to one of my favorite shows of all time.

The first season ended one one of the great cliffhangers. The best cliffhangers are the not the ones where the characters are in danger—you know they’re going to escape whatever contrived danger they’re in—but ones where the characters and the audience learn a new fact that change your understanding about what show you’re watching, and what options the show has going forward.

Stede and Blackbeard had split up after escaping from prison. Stede had tried to go home to his old life and realized that he really had changed, and really did want to go be a pirate. Blackbeard, meanwhile, had taken back their old ship and marooned most of the worthless-to-him crew on a deserted island. This batch of characters who we’d come to care for very much were basically doomed, and were waiting for the inevitable. Then! A boat on the horizon. Through a spyglass, they spot—Stede! He’s immediately different then we’ve seen him before, different clothes, different body language. An air of confidence, and more importantly, competence. He raises a hand over his head in a single sign of greeting, like a reverse Grail Knight. Six episodes earlier, Stede arriving to rescue the crew would mean they were even more doomed than they already were, now the message is clear—they’re going to be okay. Roll Credits. See you in a year.

Whereas the first season had a slightly hesitant quality, not quite sure how how the show would be received, the second season was clearly made by people that knew they had a fanbase that was absolutely feral for the show, and was absolutely buying what they were selling. Recognizing that the relationship was the core of the show and not dragging things out, Stede and Blackbeard were back together by the end of the first night (the second episode, but they released two a week.)

Everything the first season did well, the second season did better. It’s a hard show to talk about, because it was just so good. Rather than formatting a list of things I love I’ll just mention my favorite revision from the first year: whereas the first season played Izzy Hands, Blackbeard, and Stede as a love triangle, the second played it as the “new girlfriend” and “old best friend” coming to terms with the fact that the other was never going to go away, and learning both get along and to see what their mutual saw in the other.

While a very different genre and style, Our Flag Means Death had a lot in common with Lower Decks: a crew of maybe not A-players doing their best doing action-comedy deeply rooted in characters, their relationships with each other, and their feeling about all of it. And throwing one last elbow Loki’s way, OFMD also demonstrated what a group of people becoming friends, having adventures, and growing into the best versions of themselves, and the central character shouldering responsibility for the others looks like when well done.

It’s unclear if OFMD is going to get a third season. This was clearly uncertain to the people making the show too, as the last episode works both as a conclusion, or to set up a final season.

Great, just great TV.

Found Family and Genre Fiction in the Twenties

Back in the mid-naughties, the pre-scandal Warren Ellis had a line that people in the future were going to look back at turn of the century genre fiction and wonder why everyone was crying all the time (looking at you both, BSG and Doctor Who,) and then he would note that they’d probably nod and say something like “well, they had a lot to cry about.”

I’ve been having a similar feeling the last few years about the current state of genre fiction and “found family.” That’s always been a theme in science fiction and fantasy literature, probably due to the fans of such fiction tending to be on the “social outcasts who find their people” end of the social spectrum, but there’s a different vibe lately. Loki realizing he’s actually working to get his friends back and therefore can time travel, or the Lower Deckers doing anything, or the crew of the Revenge’s Calypso Party, have a distinctly different feel from, say, the other Hobbits refusing to let Frodo sneak out of Hobbiton on his own, or Han realizing he isn’t going to leave his friend in the lurch and giving Luke the cover he needs to blow up the Death Star. This seems like the sort of social moment that’s impossible to really seem from inside, but years from now will be as obvious as the post 9/11-weirdness of BSG.

All three of these shows had a strong central theme of leaving your birth family or where you were “from”, shedding your metaphorical skin and built-up masks, and finding the people you want to spend time with, who make you the best version of the person you’re becoming. (And then, in Lower Deck’s case, because it’s the best of the three, using this growth to forge a new and better relationship with your mom.)

Here, thick into the Disaster of the Twenties, that’s probably a really good message to be sending. Your people: they’re out there. And if we stick together, we’re gonna be okay.

Still out there: The X-Files at 30

The actual anniversary date whipped past me before I noticed, but apparently The X-Files is thirty years old? Let me settle back into my mummy case and enthuse about it.

I’m also late to this party, but it turns out they did a whole remaster/cleanup on the show a few years back, presumably for Blu-Ray, and those copies are whats streaming now. They went back and rescanned the original film and rebuilt the edits from there, and he show looks amazing! Haircuts non-withstanding, it genuinely looks like it could have been filmed this year, unlike a lot of it’s contemporaries. We’ve been watching them on and off, and man, what a fun show that was! There are very, very few shows where you can almost just pick episodes at random and know you’ll enjoy them quite the way you can with The X-Files.

I actually didn’t come in on the show until halfway through the second year; but I was immediately hooked. My initial reaction was that this was as close as we were ever going to get to an “American Doctor Who” (or really any new Who at all there in the wilderness years of early 90s). A pair of FBI agents solving supernatural/monster/alien problems on a weekly basis? And mostly solving those problems by not just, you know, shooting them? Yes Please!

That said, I’m pretty sure I was the one one that saw a Doctor Who connection. While the cited inspiration is always Kolchak, and UFOs and conspiracy theories were hot in the 90s, The X-Files always struck me as a show designed outward from trying to figure out how to make Twin Peaks viable as an ongoing show.

It took the core premise, “Eccentric FBI agents investigate possibly supernatural crimes in small town America” and then made several very savvy changes.

First, everywhere Twin Peaks satirized nighttime soap operas, X-Files swapped that out with the shape of a standard police procedural. Gone was the sprawling ensamble cast, replaced with a core regular pair and a one-off guest cast, in the mold of something like Law & Order. Instead of a single small town, it was a new semi-rural location every week, freeing up the guest cast to meet the needs of the mood of the week instead of servicing their own stories. The relationship between Mulder and Scully was similar to that between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, but both main characters were FBI, freeing the core cast from being stuck in any one location. And as many, many people have observed, making the “believer” character the man and the skeptical scientist the woman went against the grain of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the time, adding a unique flavor to the show almost “for free,” alongside a light dose of Moonlighting-style sparks. (Not to mention The X-Files even stars one of the best guest-stars from Twin Peaks.)

And both the main characters were really fun to spend time with. They were interesting, and complicated, and had a unique relationship, and were both actually really good at their jobs. Personally, I always wanted to be Scully when I grew up (not a gender thing, I just wanted to be really good at my hard job, be well respected by my peers, have cool banter with coworkers, and then once or twice a season haul a pistol out and shoot a monster without missing. Mulder tended to miss a lot for drama reasons, but if Scully pulled her gun out, someone was getting shot.)

But most critically, it learned the most important lesson of Twin Peaks: that Laura Palmer was too central, and revealing her murderer effectively ended the show. The X-Files’ equivalent, Mulder’s sister’s disappearance and the alien conspiracy, would be an ongoing concern, but was never as omnipresent as Laura Palmer, and was never fully explained or revealed. Of course, X-Files ended up overcorrecting too far, and allowed the alien mythology to sprawl out far beyond any reasonable attempt to make sense.

Personally, I always much preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes, and those were still fun long past where the “mythology” imploded into incoherence. And that was the thing: the show was always fun. And we can just ignore those last couple of years where they squandered the built-up goodwill and the alien plot fizzled out.

Thirty years on, though, that’s what fascinates me about The X-Files. There are plenty of examples of shows that were initially very popular that blew the landing. Lost, the”new” Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, even something like Quantum Leap. Mostly, those shows have slipped out of the conversation, and when they do come up, it’s always with a groan about the end first, and usually that’s all. No one talks about BSG’s stupendous first season, they talk about the robot dance party it ended with.

But not with the X-Files! When that comes up, the topic is always the relationship between Multer and Scully, or the best monsters, or the vibe of the thing, and the last years get treated as an afterthought. Most people won’t even remember that it started Terminator Two for a while unless reminded. For a while The X-Files looked like it was going to be the definitive example of how not to do a long-running plot, why you should work things out ahead of time, and for running out clock too long, but no, Lost took that seat.

Why? Why does X-Files get a pass on the ending, which was just as much a fumble as those others?

I think there’s two big reasons.

First, the show’s pleasures extended beyond the “big plot.” Even at its peak, there were plenty of fans who preferred the non-mythology episodes. The big story failing to cohere didn’t intersect with the joy of watching Scully and Mulder deal with monsters, or vampires, or Peter Boyle.

But more importantly, is something a friend of mine said while talking about this: “Everyone quit watching it when it was still good.” And I think that’s it. Those other shows everyone stuck around to the bitter end. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I don’t know anyone other than myself that stuck it out to the last episode of the X-Files. There were plenty of off-ramps: the moves from Friday to Sunday, the movie, Duchovny leaving. It stayed pretty good for a long time past its peak, and most everyone drifted away before it got actually bad.

I mean, Friday Night X-Files was appointment viewing when I was in college, but everyone had something better to do on Sunday nights. (Except that brief window where it was Simpsons-Futurama-X-Files, that was pretty good.)

As such, most people’s last memory of the show is something like Multer being trapped in the past in the bermuda triangle, rather than, say, Bran having the best story, or Sam just not going home, or whatever the hell Lost tried to sell us.

And so I think all that’s the real lesson The X-Files has for us, all these years later. Long-form serialized TV is great, and as a form is here to stay, but if you only have the one big plot, all you actually have is the ending. If your show works week-to-week without that, and it’s full of characters that are fun to spend time with, people are still going to be rewatching it three decades later.

Don’t guess when you can ask

I upgraded my iPhone recently, which always means a settling in period of figuring out how best to customize this combination of hardware and operating system.

The iPhone has this theoretically-cool feature where it will charge the phone to “almost full” overnight, and then at the last possible second, charge it all the way to 100%. Supposedly, this keeps the battery healthy longer, as sitting on power at full charge is stressful on the battery. And sure, I’ll buy that.

But the problem is that there’s no way to tell it when you need the phone to be full! Instead, it does a bunch of computer super-science to figure out your schedule and do all this automatically and in the background. When it works, you never notice.

When it works.

The problem, which should be obvious, is what happens when you don’t get up at the same time every day? And here, I’m using “get up” as a shorthand for “need the phone at full.” My schedule isn’t totally consistant; on a regular but hard-to-predict basis I need to be fully operational an hour or two earlier than “normal”. And then, I’ve recently had a change in schedule where “normal” has rolled back by an hour. (On top of DST ending, etc.)

And so my phone is never full when I pull it off the nightstand. The proposed solution is to hit the button to tell it to charge to full. But that takes time, time I don’t have because I’m on an early day. Plus, I just had it plugged in for eight hours! Why do I need to wait another half of one?

But most maddeningly, I knew I had to get moving earlier the night before! And there was no way to tell the phone this! I mean, I’ll even ignore the fact that there should be an API that my sleep tracker app can use to tell the battery charger what time the alarm is set for. All I want is a thing where I can say “gotta be ready by 7 tomorrow, chief.” Or even, “always be ready by 7, and most days that’ll mean an extra hour or two of full battery burn, that’s okay, no worries.”

But instead of that one UI element, we have an entire house of algorithmic cards trying to guess what I already know. And this is such a common failure mode for software product design—so fearful of asking the user for something that we build a Rube Goldberg machine that makes the whole thing useless.

My last phone (or two) I finally had to turn it off completely and just let it charge “normally” overnight. But I think every phone upgrade I’ve ever done has been precipitated by the battery giving out. If you tell me a feature gets me more battery life, I’m in! I’m motivated to make that work. But here I am, having to charge up my phone over lunch because it didn’t start full, about to do that again.

All because someone decided they could get a computer to guess something the user already knew. Apps are not slight of hand magicians, trying to guess my card. It’s okay! You can just ask.

Don’t guess when you can ask.

Apple Music vs(?) The Beatles

Thanks to the “new” song, the Beatles have made there way back into regular rotation around Icecano Headquarters. Back during iTunes’ “Rip. Mix. Burn.” period I had a carefully curated set of MP3s I ripped from CD and painfully filled in all the ID3 tags. (For context, this was just after the last elf had sailed over the sea).

I used to use this as a way to describe both my first iPod and first iPhone—“Look! You can fit every Beatles song on here!!” Somewhere along the line, those MP3s got replaced with the iTunes Match upgraded versions.

But that was all few iPhones back; these days I’m mostly an Apple Music user (while those old MP3s sit on my post-Ragnarok Drobo.)

Overall, I like Apple Music a lot. Sure, vendor ecosystem lock-in and all, but the music sounds great, doesn’t cost too much for the family plan, and it works with all of my gear.

As I recall, it was kind of a big deal when the Beatles finally made it into Apple Music—they were one of the last holdouts, and Apple made quite a splash when it finally happened. And you can tell! All albums have slightly animated cover art—the lines on Magical Mystery Tour alternate colors, the line art caricatures of the four of them on Revolver blink and look side to side. Apple also has the new(er) remixes and remasters in addition to the original flavors, the new edits, especially Abbey Road, sound great; sounds like it could have been recorded last week instead of 50-plus years ago. (There’s a few songs here and there that don’t sound quite like I remember them, but sure.)

Which all brings me to the point: one of the other things I like Apple Apple Music the editorial stuff: curated playlists, recommendations, editorial notes. (I think in general the music editorial stuff is better than its counterparts in say, the app stores.). So, having not really poked around in the Beatles catalog in Apple Music, I was curious about what the anonymous apple music editors would have to say about the Beatles’ albums. What even new was there to say that hadn’t already been said? But, given how much attention they drew to the Beatles arriving on the service, they must have made the effort to do something.

Faced with this challenge, Apple found an absolutely innovative, if deranged, solution: hire someone who doesn’t really like the Beatles, but loves Bob Dylan.

I know, you think I am exaggerating. So, for example, check out the start of the description of Revolver, which might be their best album:

That’s… an absolutely insane way to start. Why is Bob Dylan’s probably-apocryphal backhanded compliment the lede of the description of Revolver?

(For the record, these are only excerpts, the full descriptions go on and on and on. Apple Music subscribers can verify read the rest as an exercise for the reader, for everyone else, you aren not missing much.)

Okay, maybe that’s a weird outlier, trying to start with a joke and landing badly. Let’s check in on their next album, Sgt. Pepper, one of the greatest albums of all time. Whole books have been written about this, where does that start?

Okay, so, that’s a not a paragraph written by someone that likes this album, or even recognizes it has any value. That sounds like Martin Scorcese slagging off on another Marvel movie. But most importantly, why is Bob Dylan here again? By my count, that two sentences of non-praise for the album under discussion, and then unreserved praise for Blonde on Blonde , which the author wants to make sure we all know came first. What is happening?

We stagger backwards through the catalog, and find that Bob Dyan makes another cameo appearance in Beatles for Sale:

Are we really claiming that one of the most interesting things about their 4th album (and 4th in two years) is that… Bob Dylan… smoked them out in New York City?

But the most amazing appearance by Bob is on A Hard Days Night. Recall: huge hit, came hand-in-hand with the hugely innovative and successful movie. There’s so much to talk about here! Richard Lester, the birth of the music video, continued success and innovation. That chord! But, no, what’s really important is Bob Dylan:

What in the literal hell is this? Three whole paragraphs centered around the fact that Bob Dylan once heard the Beatles on the radio?

Is… is the author of these really trying to claim that the source of the Beatles’ legitimacy is that Bob Dylan knew who they were? Look, Bob Dylan is great and all, but there is no reality where Bob Dylan’s option has any bearing on the legitimacy of a Beatles album. (The other way around, maybe.)

That’s four out of thirteen albums that have an unexpected cameo appearance by Bob. That’s absolutely bonkers. How did this make it out of the door?

While Bob doesn’t make any more appearances, the other album descriptions are equally pathological. Check out their first album, which hit the top of the charts, stayed their for six months, and then was only knocked down by their second album:

Let’s recap, shall we? Apple Music, which is owned by Apple Inc, founded by such a massive Beatles fan that he named his company after the Beatles’ own Apple Corps company; that Apple Music wants you to know that the Beatles were basically idiots who got lucky and whom Bob Dylan smoked out and was rude about.

What? What?

I assume I’m late to this party, but how did this happen? I get that there is literally no one on earth who needs “more praise” less than the Beatles, but why on earth is this what they went with?

How does this person’s editor not stop and say, “look, maybe dial back the Bob Dylan references a tad.” Even worse, maybe they did, and that’s why Bob only get mentions on four instead of all thirteen.

But then I got curious. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde gets mentioned by name twice—how does Apple Music describe that album?

Unlike the endless editorials on the Beatles Albums, Blonde on Blonde has a single crisp paragraph:

Delicious.

The person who wrote the Beatles album liners was jealous they didn’t get to do Dylan, got it.

So Long, Apple Trailers, and thanks for all the fish

Well, they finally pulled the plug on iTunes Movie Trailers. Starting life as a website to showcase the then-new Quicktime video format, it evolved into an iOS ecosystem app, and quietly spent two decades as the best way to see trailers for new movies. It made it a long time; my first memory of it was using the original web version to slowly load the first teaser for Episode I over dialup.

I’ve seen some speculation that this was all part of a rebranding exercise to redirect traffic to the Apple TV app (not to be confused with the Apple TV streaming service, or the Apple TV hardware product,) I suspect it’s more likely that whomever had been keeping it running since the late 90s had finally retired? Or maybe it really just didn’t fit in with Apple’s expanding streaming/services future.

So a moment, then, to note the passing of a small, single-purpose service that did one thing, and did it perfectly. Becase that’s all it did—had a library of trailers for upcoming and recent movies. Search, sort, organize by release date. High quality video, no muss, no fuss, no other advertising glop. It was remarkably up to date, had a trailer for basically every new movie, and frequently had any other EPK-type promo video as well.

It was a constant on my Apple TV (the hardware). “Hey’ let’s see if there’s any new trailers!” was a common request in the house. It was fun, it was simple, we liked it. So yeah, they shut it down. Two months or so past the shutdown, it’s left a surprisingly big hole! What are the alternatives we’re left with?

It goes without saying that the Trailers section of the Apple TV app, like all other sections of that app, is unmitigated hot garbage. Not only is it hard to find, but it doesn’t even have all the trailers from the old app! Bad sorting, no release dates, and it doesn’t seem to be nearly as complete or updated near as often.

YouTube seems to be the standard answer, but that’s also such a step back. Sure, all the trailers are there, somewhere. But, search on the Apple TV’s (the hardware) Youtube app is terrible, and every trailer has dozens of crappy copies, re-uploaded with somebody else’s watermarks, or other ads tacked on the front, or some guy “reacting” to it, or worst of all, it’s not the real thing at all, just some fan edit. And sure, that’s YouTube, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I just want the damn trailer. YouTube’s biggest problem is the amount of noise to signal; which is great if you’re looking for the noise, but sometimes you want to go watch the actual signal, you know?

And like so many things from the early web, we used to have a thing just for that which perfectly, but now it’s just gone, with no real replacement. The world doesn’t get smaller, but it sure keeps getting emptier.

Let me rephrase what I said up at the start: I hope they shut it down because someone retired. It would be beyond depressing if they killed off a perfect single-use (and probably cheap) service that we all liked that did one thing really well because it wasn’t making a 300% return on investment for some streaming sub-division.

Congrats, SAG-AFTRA!

Good work, everyone! Solidarity always wins.

(As of this writing the terms aren’t public for those of us on the outside looking in, but I’m very curious to see what form the AI protections take, among other things.)

Favorite Programming Language Features: Swift’s Exception handling with Optionals

I spent the early 20-teens writing mostly Java (or at least JVM-ecosystem code) backend code, and then spent the back half of the teens writing mostly Swift on iOS. (Before that? .NET, mostly.) I seem to be on a cycle of changing ecosystems every half decade, because I don’t write a tremendous amount of code these days, but when I do, I’m mostly back writing Java. It’s been a strange experience being back. While Java has moved forward somewhat in recent times, it’s still fundamentally the same language it’s been since the late 90s, and so going from Swift back has meant suddenly losing two decades of programming language development.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about, and at the same time, let me tell you about maybe my favorite language design feature of all time.

Let’s talk about Exceptions.

For everyone playing the home game, Exceptions are a programming language feature whereby if a section of code—a function or method or whatnot—gets into trouble, it can throw an exception, which then travels up the call stack, until an Exception Handler catches it and deals with the problem.

The idea is that instead of having to return error codes, or magic numbers, or take a pointer to an error construct, or something along those lines, instead throw an exception, and then you can put all your error handling code in one place where it makes sense, without having to tangle up the main flow of the program with error condition checking.

They’re pretty great! There was a lot of grumbling I remember from around the turn of the century about if exceptions were just GoTos wearing groucho marx glasses, but in practice they turned out to be a deeply useful construct.

Like many great ideas, exceptions came out of the LISP world , and then knocked around the fringes of the computer science world for a few decades. I remember them being talked about in C++ in the mid-90s, but I don’t ever recall actually seeing one in live code.

The first mainstream place I saw them was in Java, when that burst into the scene in the late 90s.

(I could do that exact same setup for garbage collection, too, come to think of it. I’m deeply jealous of the folks who got to actually use LISPs or Smalltalk or the like instead of grinding through fixing another null pointer error in bare C code.)

And Java introduced a whole new concept: Checked Exceptions. Checked exceptions were part of Java’s overall very strong typing attitude: if a method was going to throw an exception, it had to declare that as part of the method signature, and then any place that method was called had to either explicitly catch that exception or explicitly pass it on up the stack.

Like a lot of things in early Java, this sounded great on paper, but in practice was hugely annoying. Because the problem is, a lof of the time, you just didn’t know! So you had to either catch and hope you dealt with it right, or clog up your whole stack with references to possible errors from something way down lower, which kinda defeated the whole purpose? This got extra hairy if things threw more than one kind of exception, because you had to deal with each one separately, and so you end up with a lot of copy-and-pasted handlers, and the scopes around the try-catch system are always in the way. And, even if you did carefully check and catch each possible exception, Java also includes RuntimeExceptions, which are not checked, so any method in a library you depend on can throw one without you knowing about it.

So in practice, a lot of programmers ended up just using Runtime Exceptions, and then that lead to a lot more other programmers handling exceptions “Pokeman Style” (“Gotta catch ‘em all!) and just catching everything without much in the way of handling.

It’s a perfect example of a safety feature being annoying enough that it actually makes the whole thing less safe because of the work people do to avoid it instead of use it.

So when Microsoft hired “the Delphi Guy” to do a legally distinct do-over of Java in the form of C#, the result was a langage with only un-checked exceptions. You could catch them if you wanted to, and if you knew what to do? Otherwise it would run on up the call stack and end up in some global error logger. This is model most other languages from the era used.

And this also kinda sucked, becase even if you didn’t really care what the error was, you still wanted to know something happened! So you ended up writing a lot of code where in tesiting you discovered some exception being thrown from some library and messing up the whole stack you didn’t even know could happen.

Because here’s the thing—most of the time you don’t care what the details of the error were, you just want to know if the whatever it was worked. Call to a web service, number format conversion, whatever, we don’t care why it failed, necessarily, but we sure like to know about it if it did.

And so we come to Swift. Swift is one of those languages that was seemingly built by looking at how every other language handled something and then combining all the best answers. (Personally, I enjoyed tremendously that the people making decisions clearly had all the same taste I did.)

This caused quite a stir when it happened, but Swift reintroduced checked exceptions, but with a twist. No longer did you have to say which exceptions you were throwing, a method either declared it threw exceptions or it didn’t. A method that did not declare that it threw couldn’t throw any sort of exception, runtime or otherwise.

Swift has a lot of features that are designed to make the code easier to read and think about, and but not necessarily easier to write; not syntactic suger, syntactic taco sauce, maybe? One of these is that you have to type the keyword try in front of any method call that says it can throw an exception. This really doesn’t have any purpose other than reminding the programmer “hey, you have to do something here.”

And this is great, because you get some very cool options. Since individual exceptions are not checked, you can opt-in to handling individual exception types or just the fact there was an exception at all. This dovetails great with the fact that in Swift, exceptions are enumerated types instead of classes, which is a whole article on its own about why that’s also brilliant, but for our current purposes it makes it very simple to go from handling “an error” to handling the specific error type.

But! There’s an even better option for most cases, because Swift also has excellent handling for Optionals. Optionals are “just” a reference that can be null, with some excellent extra syntactic support. Now, in Java, any referece can be null, but there really isn’t much in the way of specific support for dealing with null values, so Java code gets filled with line after line of checking to see if something has a value or not.

Swift does a couple great things here. For starters, any reference that isn’t explicitly defined as an optional can never be null, so you don’t have to worry about it. But there’s also a bunch of really easy syntax to look at an Optional, and either get the “real” value and move on, or deal with the null case. My favorite detail here is that the syntax for an optional in Swift is to put a “?” after the name of the variable, as deltaPercent?, so even glancing over a screen of code it reads like “maybe this is here?” Building on that, Swift has a guard construct that you can use to check an incoming Optional, handle the null case and exit the method, or get the real value and move on. So it’s a pretty common idiom in Swift code to see a pile of null handling at the start of a method, and then the “normal” flow after that.

Combining Optionals and the new approach to exceptions, Swift provides a syntax where you can call a method that throws and instead of explicitly handling any exceptions, just get the potential result back as an optional. If an exception case happens, you don’t need to do anything, it sets the optional to null and returns. Which is fantastic, because like we said earlier, most of the time all we really care about is “did it work?” So, the optional becomes a way to signal that, and you can use the robust Optional handling system to handle the “didn’t work” case without needing to catch an exception at all.

This also encourages what I think is a very solid design approach, which is to treat a method as having two possible kinds of return values—either the successful value or an error, and you have your choice of receiving the error as a specific exception type, or just a as null value. (And subtly underscoring a method with no return value but that can throw an exception is probably a mistake.)

Brilliant!

It’s so great, because you can swap out all the error-case handling for the no-value case, and just get on with it. Systems that enforce strict error handling do it with an almost moral tone, like you’re a bad person if you don’t explicitly handle all possible cases. It’s so nice to use a system that understands there are only so many hours in the day, and you have things to get done before the kids get home.

Exceptions-to-Optional really might be my favorite language feature. I’m missing it a lot these days.

Feature Request: Sick Mode for Apple Fitness

As previously mentioned I got pretty sick in October. I’m also a daily Apple Watch wearer, which means there were two solid weeks there where I didn’t close my rings.

As such, I have a feature request: you should be able to tell Apple Fitness you’re sick.

To be clear, this isn’t because I want a way to cheat my streak back into existence. I mean, I had a pretty good streak going, and it’s irritating to reset that count, but that’s not the point.

While I was sick, it was deeply irritating to get those passive agressive “motivating” messages in the morning about “You closed one ring yesterday, bet you can get them all today, go get ‘em!” No man, leave me alone, I’m dying here. There’s a way to delve into the settings and turn off the “coach notifications”, but I was not up to that. I needed one button I could mash; I’m sick, I’ll let you know when I’m better.

Then, once I got better, all my stats and graphs and whatnot have these huge gaps in them. I don’t want to skip those or leave those out, but I would love to have a way to annotate those with a note: “this is when you had covid, ignore this”. Maybe a different color? Yellow for sick, instead of the usual red, green, blue.

But what really frustrates me is whats going on now. Apple Fitness does this genuinely cool and useful thing where it’ll compute long-term trends and averages, and tell you about it when they change significantly. And so for the last week I keep getting updates about “you have a new trend!” and then it shows me how many more steps I’ve taken this week versus the average over October.

And no shit, Apple Fitness! I basically didn’t stand up for ten days there, I sure hope I’m taking more steps now. What would be valuable is to know what my current scores are versus before I got sick. Am I back to where I was? I should be back to where I was in september, am I?

And there’s no way to ask that question. There’s no way to tell it what it needs to know to figure that out itself.

We’re living in the Plague Years, Apple. Let us tell the computers about it.

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.