2023’s strange box office

Weird year for the box office, huh? Back in July, we had that whole rash of articles about the “age of the flopbuster” as movie after movie face-planted. Maybe things hadn’t recovered from the pandemic like people hoped?

And then, you know, Barbenheimer made a bazillion dollars.

And really, nothing hit like it was supposed to all year. People kept throwing out theories. Elemental did badly, and it was “maybe kids are done with animation!” Ant-Man did badly, and it was “Super-Hero fatigue!” Then Spider-Verse made a ton of money disproving both. And Super Mario made a billion dollars. And then Elemental recovered on the long tail and ended up making half a billion? And Guardians 3 did just fine. But Captain Marvel flopped. Harrison Ford came back for one more Indiana Jones and no one cared.

Somewhere around the second weekend of Barbenheimer everyone seemed to throw up their hands as if to say “we don’t even know what’ll make money any more”.

Where does all that leave us? Well, we clearly have a post-pandemic audience that’s willing to show up and watch movies, but sure seems more choosy than they used to be. (Or choosy about different things?)

Here’s my take on some reasons why:

The Pandemic. I know we as a society have decided to act like COVID never happened, but it’s still out there. Folks may not admit it, but it’s still influencing decisions. Sure, it probably wont land you in the hospital, but do you really want to risk your kid missing two weeks of school just so you can see the tenth Fast and the Furious in the theatre? It may not be the key decision input anymore, but that’s enough potential friction to give you pause.

Speaking of the theatre, the actual theater experience sucks most of the time. We all like to wax poetic about the magic of the shared theatre experience, but in actual theaters, not the fancy ones down in LA, that “experience” is kids talking, the guy in front of you on his phone, the couple behind you being confused, gross floors, and half an hour of the worst commercials you’ve ever seen before the picture starts out of focus and too dim.

On the other hand, you know what everyone did while they were stuck at home for that first year of COVID? Upgrade their home theatre rig. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money, but the rig in my living room is better than every mall theatre I went to in the 90s, and I can put the volume where I want it, stop the show when the kids need to go to the bathroom, and my snacks are better, and my chairs are more comfortable.

Finally, and I think this is the key one—The value proposition has gotten out of wack in a way I don’t think the industry has reckoned with. Let me put my cards down on the table here: I think I saw just about every movie released theatrically in the US between about 1997 and maybe 2005. I’m pro–movie theatre. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but also that was absolutely the cheapest way to spend 2-3 hours. Tickets were five bucks, you could basically fund a whole day on a $20 bill if you were deliberate about it.

But now, taking a family of four to a movie is in the $60-70 range. And, thats a whole different category. That’s what a new video game costs. That’s what I paid for the new Zelda, which the whole family is still playing and enjoying six months later, hundreds of hours in. Thats Mario Kart with all the DLC, which we’ve also got about a million hours in. You’re telling me that I should pay the same amount of money that got me all that for one viewing of The Flash? Absolutely Not. I just told the kids we weren’t going to buy the new Mario before christmas, but I’m supposed to blow that on… well, literally anything that only takes up two hours?

And looking at that from the other direction, I’m paying twelve bucks a month for Paramount +, for mostly Star Trek–related reasons. But that also has the first six Mission: Impossible movies on it right now. Twelve bucks, you could cram ‘em all in a long weekend if you were serious about it. And that’s not really even a streaming thing, you could have netted six not-so-new release movies for that back in the Blockbuster days too. And like I said, I have some really nice speakers and a 4k projector, those movies look great in my living room. You’re trying to tell me that the new one is so much better that I need to pay five times what watching all the other movies cost me, just to see it now? As opposed to waiting a couple of months?

And I think that’s the key I’m driving towards here: movies in the theatre have found themselves with a premium price without offering a premium product.

So what’s premium even mean in this context? Clicking back and forth between Box Office Mojo’s domestic grosses for 2023 and 2019, this year didn’t end up being that much worse, it just wasn’t the movies people were betting on that made money.

There’s a line I can’t remember the source of that goes something to the effect of “hollywood doesn’t have a superhero movie problem, it has a ‘worse copy of movies we’ve already seen’ problem.” Which dovetails nicely with John Scalzi’s twitter quip about The Flash bombing: “…the fact is we’re in the “Paint Your Wagon” phase of the superhero film era, in which the genre is played out, the tropes are tired and everyone’s waiting for what the next economic engine of movies will be.”

Of course, when we say “Superhero”, we mostly mean Marvel Studios, since the recent DC movies have never been that good or successful. And Marvel did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, which is gave everyone an off ramp. For a decade they had everyone in a groove to go see two or three movies a year and keep up on what those Avengers and their buddies were up to. Sure, people would skip one or two here or there, a Thor, an Ant-Man, but everyone would click back in for one of the big team up movies. And then they made Endgame, and said “you’re good, story is over, you can stop now!” And so people did! The movie they did right after Endgame needed to be absolutely the best movie they had ever done, and instead it was Black Widow. Which was fine, but didn’t convince anyone they needed to keep watching.

And I’d extend all this out to not just Superheros, but also “superhero adjacent” moves, your Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones. Basically all the “big noise” action blockbusters. I mean, what’s different about this one versus the other half-dozen I’ve already seen?

(Indiana Jones is kind of funny for other reasons, because I think Disney dramatically underestimated how much the general audience knew or cared about Spielburg. His name on those movies mattered! The guy who made “The Wolverine” is fine and all, but I’m gonna watch that one at home. I’m pretty sure if Steve had directed it instead of going off to do West Side Story it would have made a zillion dollars.)

But on the other hand, the three highest grossing movies that weren’t Barbenheimer were Super Mario Bros, Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, so clearly superheros and animation are still popular, just the right superheros and animation. Dragging the superhero-movies-are-musicals metaphor to the limit, there were plenty of successful musicals after Paint your Wagon, but they were the ones that did something interesting or different. They stopped being automatically required viewing.

At this point, I feel like we gotta talk about budgets for a second, only only for a second because it is not that interesting. If you don’t care about this, I’ll meet down on the other side of the horizontal line.

Because the thing is, most of those movies that, ahem, “underperformed” cost a ton. The new M:I movie payed the salaries for everyone working on it through the whole COVID lockdown, so they get a pass. (Nice work, Tom Cruise!). Everyone else, though, what are you even doing? If you spend so much money making a movie that you need to be one of the highest grossing films of all time just to break even, maybe that’s the problem right there? Dial of Destiny cost 300 million dollars. Last Crusade cost forty eight. Adjusted for inflation, thats (checks wolfram alpha) …$116 million? Okay, that amount of inflation surprised me too, but the point stands: is Dial three times as much movie as Last Crusade? Don’t bother answering that, no it is not, and thats even before pointing out the cheap one was the one with Sean friggin’ Connery.

This where everyone brings up Sound of Freedom. Let’s just go ahead and ignore, well, literally everything else about the movie and just point out that it made just slightly more money than the new Indiana Jones movie, but also only cost, what, 14 million bucks? Less than five percent of what Indy cost?

There’s another much repeated bon mot I can’t seem to find an origin for that goes something along the lines of “They used to used to make ten movies hoping one would be successful enough to pay for the other nine, but then decided to just make the one that makes money, which worked great until it didn’t.” And look, pulpy little 14 million dollar action movies are exactly the kind of movie they’re talking about there. Sometimes they hit a chord! Next time you’re tempted to make a sequel to a Spielburg/Lucas movie without them, maybe just scrap that movie and make twenty one little movies instead.

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So, okay. What’s the point, what can we learn from this strange year in a strange decade? Well, people like movies. They like going to see movies. But they aren’t going to pay to see a worse version of something they can already watch at home on their giant surround-sound-equipped TV for “free”. Or risk getting sick for the privilege.

Looking at the movies that did well this year, it was the movies that had something to say, that had a take, movies that had ambitions beyond being “the next one.”

Hand more beloved brand names to indie film directors and let them do whatever they want. Or, make a movie based on something kids love that doesn’t already have a movie. Or make a biography about how sad it is that the guy who invented the atomic bomb lost his security clearance because iron man hated him. That one feels less applicable, but you never know. If you can build a whole social event around an inexplicable double-feature, so much the better.

And, look, basically none of this is new. The pandemic hyper-charged a whole bunch of trends, but I feel like I could have written a version of this after Thanksgiving weekend for any year in the past decade.

That’s not the point. This is:

My favorite movie of the year was Asteroid City. That was only allegedly released into theatres. It made, statistically speaking, no money. Those kinds of movies never do! They make it up on the long tail.

I like superhero/action movies movies as much as the next dork who knew who “Rocket Racoon” was before 2014, but I’m not about to pretend they’re high art or anything. They’re junk food, sometimes well made very entertaining junk food, but lets not kid ourselves about the rest of this complete breakfast.

“Actually good” movies (as opposed to “fun and loud”) don’t do well in the theatre, they do well on home video.

Go back and look at that 2019 list I linked above. On my monitor, the list cuts off at number fifteen before you have to scroll, and every one of those fifteen movies is garbage. Fun garbage, in most cases! On average, well made, popular, very enjoyable. (Well, mostly, Rise of Skywalker is the worst movie I’ve ever paid to see.)

Thats what was so weird about Barbenheimer, and Spider-Verse, and 2023’s box office. For once, objectively actually good movies made all the money.

Go watch Asteroid City at home, that’s what I’m saying.

60th Anniversary Bonuses: Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour! & An Adventure in Space and Time

While the first anniversary special proper had to wait for Doctor Who’s proper domain of Saturday night, the actual anniversary day itself—Thursday the 23rd, had a pair of bonus anniversary festivities: a “special edition” of “The Daleks”, and a re-airing of “An Adventure in Space and Time”.

Doctor Who and The Daleks—In Colour!

As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations, the BBC debuted a new version of the shows’s second story from 1963 that introduced the Daleks. Cut down by from nearly three hours to 75 minutes, and colorized, clearly the intent was clearly to made a “more modern”–style version of the story for new viewers to use as a jumping-on point.

The result was not entirely successful, but interesting.

Let’s start with what does work: the color. (Sorry, Colour). It looked much, much better than I was expecting, echoing both the surviving behind-the-scenes photos as well as the Cushing movies. It has a very 60s overly-bold look, with set coloring that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of the original Star Trek (this is a complement).

As for the length? Well…

Let’s talk about the old show’s format for a second. It was a “Series of Serials”; roughly 25 minute weekly episodes that were grouped into multi-episode stories. The show mostly settled on four or six parts as the standard, for various reasons “The Daleks” was seven parts long.

There was the usual grumping about “kids with short attention spans” when it was announced that they were going to do a version with roughly 60% of the content cut out. And look, I’m all for a round of “old men yelling at clouds”, but this isn’t the place. No one, and I mean literally no one, watched the whole thing at once when this was originally made; “The Daleks”wasn’t three hours long, it was two months long, 25 minutes of weirdness smack in the middle of Saturday evenings.

If anything, attention spans have lengthened—Who used to be 25 minutes a week, now it’s 45 or more.

And, watched all in one go, “The Daleks” is interminable. Not only is it designed to be watched one part a week, it’s designed for a world with no recording and no reruns, so something that long had to still make sense if you missed an episode or two. So, that means an awful lot of repetition, covering the same ground every week to keep everyone caught up. It’s a different format than today’s dramas, more like what we would think of as the style of a soap opera instead of a prime-time action-adventure show. And even given that, “The Daleks” specifically has very little happen over that run time.

So on the surface, yeah, you could pretty easily lose two thirds of the content. All the major plot beats are there. But the result is strange, though. It’s cut very tightly with new, very exciting music, over very languid scenes of actors walking and talking very slowly. The result is 75 minutes of a show that frantically presents nothing happening. The whole thing has the quality of a fever dream, not quite real, unfolding with its own strange logic.

It was a worthy experiment, and they made about the best possible attempt. I’m glad they did it, and I hope if they were planning on doing more that they spend that money on something else.

An Adventure in Space and Time

Meanwhile!

One of the highlights of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary ten years ago was Mark Gatiss’ An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama about the creation of Doctor Who, centered around William Hartnell, as played by David Bradley. It’s a great piece of work, nicely covering the start of the show and the challenges faced by original producer Verity Lambert, Hartnell, and the rest. One of the things it does extremely well is explore the fact that Hartnell stayed long past all the other people who started with him, and that he was finally forced to leave due to his ill health.

At the end, there’s a scene where Hartnell is getting ready to film his final scene as The Doctor, and looks up across the Tardis set and sees Matt Smith, the then-current incumbent Doctor, looking back at him. It’s a nice moment, Hartnell having a vision of how long this show of his would carry on.

At the time, Gatiss said they purposely filmed that scene so in the future they could swap in whomever was the incumbent Doctor at the time, strongly implying he was hoping that would become a standard practice for future actors in the role.

Well, they re-aired the movie for the 60th anniversary, and they actually did it, swapping in Ncuti Gatwa.

Delightfully, I think this is his first outing in character? He makes an immediate impression, and I’m even more excited about the future than I already was.

Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)

Beep the Meep on Disney+. What a time to be alive.

Spoilers Ahoy

Kicking off the 60th anniversary proper, we have first of 3 specials with Tennant back as the Tenth, excuse me Fourteenth Doctor.

It was great! Perfect execution of what it was there to do, put Tennant and Tate back on screen having a throwback adventure. It’s the big anniversary party! Let’s replay some of the greatest hits!

On paper, this is a classic Russell T Davies season opener; funny, exciting, big feelings, but mostly about setting the table for what comes next. It looks great, and Rachel Talalay directs the hell out of it, making sure every penny of that Disney money is up on the screen¹. And after the last couple of seasons (and disappointments like Loki), it was a breath of fresh air to watch something so confidently competent.

I’d love to know how this played to a new audience, which presumably the Disney+ deal brought in. The opening narration does, I think, about as good a job as you could of spinning up a new audience on what they missed. And I dearly love the juxtaposition of the gorgeous 4k shots of Tennant in space cutting back to the blatantly standard definition “previously on” clips. Let the new kids know that this is a show with more enthusiasm than budget and that’s whats so great about it right from the start.

Everyone slides back into their old roles immediately. In a lot of ways, it’s as if no time has passed at all, one could easily imagine a version of this kicking off season 5 in 2010.

But both Tennant and Tate have visibly spent some time thinking about how to play older versions of their characters, both the characters are slightly different, changed by the experiences of the last decade and a half. Tate especially does some really nice work with “Donna, but a mom now”, where all that energy now has a place to focus, and informed by her relationship with her own mom. Speaking of Donna’s mom, Jacqueline King’s Sylvia, who was the third and least interesting of RTD’s “companion’s moms as bad mother-n-laws” is a million miles better here than she ever was before; here her objections have merit rather than just being obstructionist or cruel, all that energy redirected into a woman desperately trying to keep her daughter safe. And in addition, she gets to be the voice of the audience, saying “wait a minute, you said if this happened it would be bad!”

Finally, I had some initial qualms with Tennant coming back as a new incarnation, as opposed to “just” reprising the Tenth. But a few minutes in, it becomes obvious why RTD made this choice. Both the Doctor and Donna are older now, and emotionally the same amount older; all “that” was years ago now, they’ve both moved on, done other things, lived their lives, and now both older characters have come back together to deal with unfinished business. You couldn’t make that work with a version of Tennant’s Doctor from somewhere in that gap between Ood Sigma’s warning and his arrival on the Ood Sphere. This is a version of the character who’s past River Song, who spent some time with a hole in his memory where² Clara should be, and was a woman for a while. They’re older, and like the author, has a very different take on what happened in the 2008 season finale than they had at the time.

On that point, though: More artists should get the chance to go back and revisit their previous work.6 As much as this was a big reunion special, this was also very much an older author in conversation with his younger self, and handling some unfinished business. Specifically: It’s pretty clear RTD has been thinking about Donna’s end ever since 2008.

RTD always enjoyed giving his companions tragic endings; nearly everyone who travled with the Doctor between 2005 and 2010 came away worse for the experience. Donna though—I’m not sure that was supposed to be as tragic as it landed. I suspect RTD was going for “the grownup in the room doing something unfortunate but necessary”, and then Tennant and Tate played it as the assault that it really was. It’s clear that stuck with him, and it’s also clear that the fairly stinging rebuke of the story from the end of “Hell Bent/Heaven Sent” also landed.

RTD is—obviously—a very strong, very talented writer, but in his time with Doctor Who he had a bad habit of writing very compelling characters with complex emotional journeys, and then at the climax of their story, taking all their agency away and making it a story about The Doctor’s lack of good choices. Very few characters ever got a say in what happened to them, they would get backed into a corner and then the Doctor would just choose which of their bad choices they would get.

It’s a mistake to read too much into this I think? I always suspected this was less of a statement of purpose and more a factor of the fact that they made a whole lot of Doctor Who very quickly. The production schedule didn’t leave a whole lot of room for “rethinking ideas”. “Lonely God” was a very successful note for the show to play, and it makes sense to focus a finale on the character who’ll still be around to deal with the fallout next year, so it makes sense that in a pinch they’d head towards “David Tennant crying in the rain” as fast as possible.³

With The Star Beast, RTD goes out of his way to fix both issues. The plot is carefully constructed to give Donna the choice she never got back in ’08 to either get her memories back and die or live as she has been. And then, having made the choice she would have made then, but for reasons that are new, the show lets her (and her daughter) figure out the solution themselves, reminding the Doctor that just because he can’t think of a solution, that doesn’t mean there is one. You can almost hear RTD muttering to himself “see, this was how you should have done it!”

But speaking of unfinished business, The Star Beast itself feels like one too. The comic story this special is based on was a very successful, well regarded entry from the 80s, and it’s on the obvious short-list of spin-off media that could be adapted for the Main Show. It’s impossible to believe that the RTD that was adapting or recycling Jubilee, Spare Parts, and Human Nature wasn’t thinking about Beep the Meep. Heck, _”Smith and Jones”, the opening of Series 3, has a seemingly friendly old woman being chased by alien troopers, only for it to turn out that the Judoon are really the police and the old woman a criminal. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t start as a Star Beast adaptation, just continually rounded down to something the show could afford until it was two rhino-men costumes in a hospital. But now, goosed by Disney’s investment and a decade of computer graphics advancements, we get the real article.

Anyway, I loved it. Perfect job resolving the left-over business, now on to things to come. As I write this, we still don’t know anything of substance about that second special, which they’ve kept almost totally under wraps. What are they hiding for next week? Can’t wait to find out.

— Because I couldn’t help myself, I went and checked the tops of the waves of the reactions on the ‘net. And, as you might imagine, all the folks that were hoping for the end of “Woke Dr. Who” are all losing their minds, and: good.

But, one of the other criticisms I saw was that The Star Beast wasn’t very subtle. As if subtlety automatically meant high-quality! And look, subtle is great when it’s Hemmingway dancing around what really happened to Jake in the margins of The Sun Also Rises, but not when you have something to say. Subtle isn’t always a virtue. Sometimes “Subtle” is just “Cowardice.” Whispering when you should be shouting.

When it was announced that RTD was coming back to do more Doctor Who, the obvious question was: why? He already had a tremendously successul run, he can clearly do whatever he wants, why come back? What’s the upside?

In interviews, he always says something like he’s always been a fan, and never stopped thinking up ideas, and was excited to do more when given the chance—and I think that’s true. It also seems likely that the show wasn’t doing as well as anyone wanted, and with the transition to being make by Julie Gardner and Jane Trantor’s Bad Wolf productions that there was some strong desire to get RTD back to relaunch the show the same way he did in ’05.

But I think there was something else. He’s been a busy guy the last couple of years, between Years and Years and It’s a Sin, and he’s had plenty of time to be out talking into microphones, and it’s been clear that he’s angry. The last decade or so have provided plenty to be angry about! It seemed to me the reason to come back and do a show like Who now, on top of those other things, was the size of platform. A man with nothing left to prove but plenty to say.

I was going to bury this in a link, but no: go watch this acceptance speech he gave for one of the awards won by It’s a Sin. That’s not a guy who’s coming back to Doctor Who to do a series of interchangeable Base-Under-Siege stories. He’s got things to say.

And after The Star Beast, I’m pretty sure I was right. It’s a very angry show, but focused. It’s determined to show a world where diversity is a good thing, where UNIT officers wear turbans, where wheelchairs are an advantage5, where the secret to saving the day is being Trans, where surface readings based on appearance are wrong. It’s perfect that they waited until now to use The Star Beast—at the time it was calling out the parent show for constantly using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil, and now they get to use the same story to do the same thing again.

It’s a bold, brave statement of what progressive Doctor Who should actually look like (as opposed to what we’ve been getting the last half-decade.)

There’s always a portion of the audience—any audience—that would rather “whatever this is about” be stuffed down under the covers, hidden far enough away that they don’t have to notice or think about it. The kind of people who think art should “soothe, not distract.”

But fundamentally, art is about things. If you have things to say, subtle isn’t the way to go.

We’re in an age where we don’t need “subtle”, we need people to stand up and speak clearly. And if you can use Disney’s money to do it to a wide audience on BBC One, so much the better.

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1. There were a couple of beats that seemed specifically built around the team giggling “look what we can do with this extra cash!” The holographic UI on the sonic screwdriver was one. But I thought the biggest was the opening credits, that had real “we always wanted to do it like this but couldn’t afford it” energy. Those drone shots of the battle between the Wraith Warriors and UNIT! And, of course, that new Console Room.

2. That is what happened at the end of Twice Upon a Time, right? Twelve got his memory back?

3. There’s a quote from RTD somewhere⁴ bemoaning that it’s the Doctor in balloon at the end of “The Next Doctor” instead of David Morrissey’s Jackson Lake. And he’s right, it’s Lake’s story, and Lake should be the one to resolve it. But this plays into what we’re talking about—in a pinch, go with a closeup of Tennant looking serious.

4. I could have sworn this was in The The Writer’s Tale, but a cursory exam didn’t turn it up. Maybe one of the DVD commentaries that used to be on the BBC website?

5. Ruth Madeley’s characer—the wheelchair using UNIT scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham—is a great character on their own, but represents something extra coming a week or two after RTD refused to keep Davros in a wheelchair.

6. The thing I kept thinking of while watching this was Fury Road. Very different content, obviously, but the same air of a creator looking back at his past work and disagreeing with his past self.

What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023

Twitter! What can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a huge part my life for a long time. It was so full of art, and humor, and joy, and community, and ideas, and insight. It was also deeply flawed and profoundly toxic, but many of those flaws were fundamental to what made it so great.

It’s almost all gone now, though. The thing called X that currently lives where twitter used to be is a pale, evil, corrupted shadow of what used to be there. I keep trying to explain what we lost, and I can’t, it’s just too big.¹ So let me sum up. Let me tell you why I loved it, and why I left. As the man² said, let me tell you of the days of high adventure.

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I can’t now remember when I first heard the word “twitter”. I distinctly remember a friend complaining that this “new twitter thing” had blown out the number of free SMS messages he got on his nokia flip phone, and that feels like a very 2006 conversation.

I tend to be pretty online, and have been since the dawn of the web, but I’m not usually an early adopter of social networks, so I largely ignored twitter for the first couple of years. Then, for reasons downstream of the Great Recession, I found myself unemployed for most of the summer of 2009.³ Suddenly finding myself with a surfit of free time, I worked my way down that list of “things I’ll do if I ever get time,” including signing up for “that twitter thing.” (I think that’s the same summer I lit up my now-unused Facebook account, too.) Smartphones existed by then, and it wasn’t SMS-based anymore, but had a website, and apps.⁴

It was great. This was still in it’s original “microblogging” configuration, where it was essentially an Instant Messenger status with history. You logged in, and there was the statuses of the people you followed, in chronological order, and nothing else.

It was instantly clear that this wasn’t a replacement for something that already existed—this wasn't going to do away with your LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or blog. This was something new, something extra, something yes and. The question was, what was it for? Where did it fit in?

Personally, at first I used my account as a “current baby status” feed, updating extended family about what words my kids had learned that day. The early iteration of the site was perfect for that—terse updates to and from people you knew.

Over time, it accumulated various social & conversational features, not unlike a Katamari rolling around Usenet, BBSes, forums, discussion boards, other early internet communication systems. It kept growing, and it became less useful as a micro-blogging system and more of a free-wheeling world-wide discussion forum.

It was a huge part of my life, and for a while there, everyone’s life. Most of that time, I enjoyed it an awful lot, and got a lot out of it. Everyone had their own take on what it was Twitter had that set it apart, but for me it was three main things, all of which reinforced each other:

1. It was a great way to share work. If you made things, no matter how “big” you were, it was a great way to get your work out there. And, it was a great way to re-share other people’s work. As a “discovery engine” it was unmatched.

2. Looking at that the other way, It was an amazing content aggregator. It essentially turned into “RSS, but Better”; at the time RSS feeds had pretty much shrunk to just “google reader’s website”. It turns out that sharing things from your RSS feed into the feeds of other people, plus a discussion thread, was the key missing feature. If you had work of your own to share, or wanted to talk about something someone else had done elsewhere on the internet, twitter was a great way to share a link and talk about it. But, it also worked equally well for work native to twitter itself. Critically, the joke about the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four⁵ was posted to twitter, which was absolutely the first of those five websites.

3. Most importantly, folks who weren’t anywhere else on the web were on twitter. Folks with day jobs, who didn’t consider themselves web content people were there; these people didn’t have a blog, or facebook, or instagram, but they were cracking jokes and hanging out in twitter.

There is a type of person whom twitter appealed to in a way that no other social networking did. A particular kind of weirdo that took Twitter’s limitations—all text, 140 or 280 characters max—and turned them into a playground.

And that’s the real thing—twitter was for writers. Obviously it was text based, and not a lot of text at that, so you had to be good at making language work for you. As much as the web was originally built around “hypertext”, most of the modern social web is built around photos, pictures, memes, video. Twitter was for people who didn’t want to deal with that, who could make the language sing in a few dozen words.

It had the vibe of getting to sit in on the funniest people you know’s group text, mixed with this free-wheeling chaos energy. On it’s best days, it had the vibe of the snarky kids at the back of the bus, except the bus was the internet, and most of the kids were world-class expoerts in something.

There’s a certain class of literary writer goofballs that all glommed onto twitter in a way none of us did with any other “social network.” Finally, something that rewarded what we liked and were good at!

Writers, comedians, poets, cartoonists, rabbis, just hanging out. There was a consistent informality to the place—this wasn’t the show, this was the hotel bar after the show. The big important stuff happened over in blogs, or columns, or novels, or wherever everyone’s “real job” was, this was where everyone let their hair down and cracked jokes.

But most of all, it was weird. Way, way weirder than any other social system has ever been or probably ever will be again, this was a system that ran on the same energy you use to make your friends laugh in class when you’re supposed to be paying attention.

It got at least one thing exactly right: it was no harder to sign into twitter and fire off a joke than it was to fire a message off to the group chat. Between the low bar to entry and the emphasis on words over everthing else, it managed to attract a crowd of folks that liked computers, but didn’t see them as a path to self-actualization.

But what made twitter truly great were all the little (and not so little) communities that formed. It wasn’t the feature set, or the website, or the tech, it was the people, and the groups they formed. It’s hard to start making lists, because we could be here all night and still leave things out. In no particular order, here’s the communities I think I’ll miss the most:

• Weird Twitter—Twitter was such a great vector for being strange. Micro-fiction, non-sequiturs, cats sending their mothers to jail, dispatches from the apocalypse.
• Comedians—professional and otherwise, people who could craft a whole joke in one sentence.
• Writers—A whole lot of people who write for a living ended up on twitter in a way they hadn’t anywhere else on the web.
• Jewish Twitter—Speaking as a Jew largely disconnection from the local Jewish community , it was so much fun to get to hang out with the Rabbis and other Jews.

But also! The tech crowd! Legal experts! Minorities of all possible interpretations of the word sharing their experiences.

And the thing is, other than the tech crowd,⁶ most of those people didn’t go anywhere else. They hadn’t been active on the previous sites, and many of them drifted away again the wheels started coming off twitter. There was a unique alchemy on twitter for forming communities that no other system has ever had.

And so the real tragedy of twitter’s implosion is that those people aren’t going somewhere else. That particular alchemy doesn’t exist elsewhere, and so the built up community is blowing away on the wind.

---

Because all that’s almost entirely gone now, though. I miss it a lot, but I realize I’ve been missing it for a year now. There had been a vague sense of rot and decline for a while. You can draw a pretty straight line from gamergate, to the 2016 Hugos, to the 2016 election, to everything around The Last Jedi, to now, as the site rotted out from the inside; a mounting sense that things were increasingly worse than they used to be. The Pandemic saw a resurgence of energy as everyone was stuck at home hanging out via tweets, but in retrospect that was a final gasp.⁷

Once The New Guy took over, there was a real sense of impending closure. There were plenty of accounts that made a big deal out of Formally Leaving the site and flouncing out to “greener pastures”, either to make a statement, or (more common) to let their followers know where they were. There were also plenty of accounts saying things like “you’ll all be back”, or “I was here before he got here and I’ll be here after he leaves”, but over the last year mostly people just drifted away. People just stopped posting and disappeared.

It’s like the loss of a favorite restaurant —the people who went there already know, and when people who wen’t there express disbelief, the response is to tell them how sorry you are they missed the party!

The closest comparison I can make to the decayed community is my last year of college. (Bear with me, this’ll make sense.). For a variety of reasons, mostly good, it took me 5 years to get my 4 year degree. I picked up a minor, did some other bits and bobs on the side, and it made sense to tack on an extra semester, and at that point you might as well do the whole extra year.

I went to a medium sized school in a small town.⁸ Among the many, many positive features of that school was the community. It seemed like everyone knew everyone, and you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. More than once, when I didn’t have anything better to do, I’d just hike downtown and inevitably I’d run into someone I knew and the day would vector off from there.⁹

And I’d be lying if I said this sense of community wasn’t one of the reasons I stuck around a little longer—I wasn’t ready to give all that up. Of course, what I hadn’t realized was that not everyone else was doing that. So one by one, everyone left town, and by the end, there I was in downtown surrounded by faces I didn’t know. My lease had a end-date, and I knew I was moving out of town on that day no matter what, so what, was I going to build up a whole new peer group with a short-term expiration date? That last six months or so was probably the weirdest, loneliest time of my whole lide. When the lease ended, I couldn’t move out fast enough.

The point is: twitter got to be like that. I was only there for the people, and nearly all the people I was there for had already gone. Being the one to close out the party isn’t always the right move.

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One of the things that made it so frustrating was that it had always problems, but it had the same problems that any under-moderated semi-anonymous internet system had. “How to stop assholes from screwing up your board” is a 4 decade old playbook at this point, and twitter consistently failed to actually deploy any of the solutions, or at least deploy them at a scale that made a difference. The maddening thing was always that the only unique thing about twitter’s problems was the scale.

I had a soft rule that I could only read Twitter when using my exercise bike, and a year or two ago I couldn’t get to the end of the tweets from people I followed before I collapsed from exhaustion. Recently, I’d run out of things to read before I was done with my workout. People were posting less, and less often, but mostly they were just… gone. Quietly fading away as the site got worse.

In the end, though, it was the tsunami of antisemitism that got me. “Seeing only what you wanted to see” was always a skill on twitter, but the unfolding disaster in Israel and Gaza broke that. Not only did you have the literal nazis showing up and spewing their garbage without check, but you had otherwise progressive liberal leftists (accidentally?) doing the same thing, without pushback or attempt at discussion, because all the people that would have done that are gone. So instead it’s just a nazi sludge.¹⁰

---

There was so much great stuff on there—art, ideas, people, history, jokes. Work I never would have seen, things I wouldn’t have learned, books I wouldn’t have read, people I wouldn’t know about. I keep trying to encompass what’s been lost, make lists, but it’s too big. Instead, let me tell you one story about the old twitter:

One of the people I follow(ed) was Kate Beaton, originally known for the webcomic Hark A Vagrant!, most recently the author of Ducks (the best book I read last year). One day, something like seven years ago, she started enthusing about a book called Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. I don’t think she had a connection to the book? I remember it being an unsolicited rave from someone who had read it and was stuck by it.

The cover is a striking piece of art of a superhero, head bowed, eyes closed, a tear rolling down his cheek. The premise of the book is what it says on the cover—even tough guys have feelings. The book goes through a set of sterotypical “tough guys”—pirates, ninjas, wrestlers, superheros, race car drivers, lumberjacks, and shows them having bad days, breaking their tools, crashing their cars, hurting themselves. The tough guys have to stop, and maybe shed a tear, or mourn, or comfort themselves or each other, and the text points out, if even the tough guys can have a hard time, we shouldn’t feel bad for doing the same. The art is striking and beautiful, the prose is well written, the theme clearly and well delivered.

I bought it immediately. You see, my at-the-time four-year-old son was a child of Big Feelings, but frequently had trouble handling those feelings. I thought this might help him. Overnight, this book became almost a mantra. For years after this, when he was having Big Feelings, we’d read this book, and it would help him calm down and take control of what he was feeling.

It’s not an exaggeration to say this book changed all our lives for the better. And in the years since then, I’ve often been struck that despite all the infrastructure of moden capitalism—marketing, book tours, reviews, blogs, none of those ever got that book into my hands. There’s only been one system where an unsolicited rave from a web cartoonist being excited about a book outside their normal professional wheelhouse could reach someone they’ve never met or heard of and change that person’s son’s life.

And that’s gone now.

---

1. I’ve been trying to write something about the loss of twitter for a while now. The first draft of this post has a date back in May, to give you some idea.

2. Mako.

3. As as aside, everyone should take a summer off every decade or so.

4. I tried them all, I think, but settled on the late, lamented Tweetbot.

5. Tom Eastman: I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

6. The tech crowd all headed to mastodon, but didn’t build that into a place that any of those other communities could thrive. Don’t @-me, it’s true.

7. In retrospect, getting Morbius to flop a second time was probably the high point, it was all downhill after that.

8. CSU Chico in Chico, California!

9. Yes, this is what we did back in the 90s before cellphones and texting, kids.

10. This is out of band for the rest of the post, so I’m jamming all this into a footnote:

    Obviously, criticizing the actions of the government of Israel is no more antisemitic than criticizing Hamas would be islamophobic. But objecting to the actions of Israel ’s government with “how do the Jews not know they’re the bad guys” sure as heck is, and I really didn’t need to see that kind of stuff being retweeted by the eve6 guy.

    A lot of things are true. Hamas is not Palestine is not “The Arabs”, and the Netanyahu administration is not Israel is not “The Jews.” To be clear, Hamas is a terror organization, and Israel is on the functional equivalent of Year 14 of the Trump administration.

    The whole disaster hits at a pair of weird seams in the US—the Israel-Palestine conflict maps very strangely to the American political left-right divide, and the US left has always had a deep-rooted antisemitism problem. As such, what really got me was watching all the comments criticizing “the Jews” for this conflict come from _literally_ the same people who spent four years wearing “not my president” t-shirts and absolving themselves from any responsibility for their governments actions because they voted for “the email lady”. They get the benefit of infinite nuance, but the Jews are all somehow responsible for Bibi’s incompetent choices.

Doctor Who @ 60

And, squeaking in just before midnight, the best show of all time turned 60 years old today.

There’s a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming up, very much looking forward to seeing what this next iteration of the show is going to be like. There’s probably going to be a real spike of Doctor Who related content around these parts over the next few weeks?

(And, Beep the Meep is in the “Coming Soon” section of Disney+. What a time to be alive.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thankful to be here, still getting to find out what happens next.

Email Verification

The best and worst thing about email is that anyone can send an email to anyone else without permission. The people designing email didn’t think this was a problem, of course. They were following the pattern of all the other communications technology of the time—regular mail, the phones, telegrams. Why would I need permission to send a letter? That’s crazy.

Of course, here in the Twenties, three of those systems are choked by robot-fueled marketing spam, and the fourth no longer exists. Of all the ways we ended up living in a cyberpunk dystopia, the fact that no one will answer their phone anymore because they don’t want to be harassed by a robot is the most openly absurd; less Gibson, more Vonnegut-meets-Ballard.

(I know I heard that joke somewhere, but I cannot remember where. Sorry, whoever I stole that from!)

Arguably, there are whole social networks who built outward from the basic concept of “what if you had to get permission to send a message directly to someone?”

With email though, I’m always surprised that systems don’t require you to verify your email before sending messages to it. This is actually very easy to do! Most web systems these days use the user’s email address as their identity. This is very convenient, because someone else is handling the problem of making sure your ids are unique, and you always have a way to contact your users. All you have to do is make them click a link in an email you sent them, and now you know they gave you a live address and it’s really them. Easy!

(And look, as a bonus, if you email them “magic links” you also don’t have to worry about a whole lot of password garbage. But thats a whole different topic.)

But instead a remarkable number of places just let people type some stuff that looks like an email address into a web form and then just use it.

And I don’t get it. Presumably you’re collecting user emails because you want to be able to contact them about whatever service you’re providing them, and probably also send them marketing. And if they put an email in that isn’t correct you can’t do either. I mean, if they somehow to put in a fake or misspelled address that happens to turn out to be valid, I guess you can still send that address stuff, but it’s not like the person at the other end of that is going to be receptive.

Okay great, but, ummmmmm, why do you bring this up?

I’m glad you ask! I mention this because there are at least three people out there in the world that keep misspelling their email addresses as mine. Presumably their initials are close to mine, and they have similar names, and they decomposed their names into an available gmail address in a manner similar to how I did. Or even worse—I was early to the gmail party, so I got an address with no numbers, maybe these folks got 47.

My last name is one that came into existence because someone at Ellis Island didn’t care to decipher my great-grandfather’s accent and wrote down something “pretty close.” As a side effect of this, I’ve personally met every human that’s ever had that last name—to whom I’m related. I suspect this name was a fairly common Ellis Island shortcut, however, since there a surprising number of people out there with the same last name whom I’ve never heard of and am not related to.

But so the upshot is that I keep getting email meant for other people. Never anything personal, never anything I could respond to, but spam, or newsletters, or updates about their newspaper account.

I’ve slowly built up a mental image of these people. They all seem older, two midwest or east coast, one in Texas.

One, though, has been a real spree the last year or so. I think he’s somewhere in the greater Chicago area. He signed up for news from Men’s Wearhouse, he ordered a new cable install from Spectrum Cable. Unlike previous people, since this guy started showing up, it’s been a deluge.

And what do you do? I unsubscribe when I can, but that never works. But I don’t just want to unsubscribe, I want to find a third party to whom I can respond and say “hey, can you tell that guy that he keeps spelling his email wrong?”

The Spectrum bills drive me crazy. There were weeks where he didn’t “activate his new equipment”, and I kept shaking my head thinking, yeah, no wonder, he’s not getting the emails with the link to activate in them. He finally solved this problem, but now I get a monthly notification that his bill is ready to be paid. And I know that Spectrum has his actual address, and could technically pass a message along, but there is absolutely no customer support flow to pass a message along that they typed their email wrong.

So, delete, mark as spam, unsubscribe. Just one more thing that clogs up our brief time on Earth.

And then, two weeks ago, I got a google calendar invite.

The single word “counseling” was the meeting summary. No body, just google meet link. My great regret was that I didn’t see this until after the time had passed. It had been cancelled, but there it was. Sitting in my inbox. Having been sent from what was clearly a personal email address.

Was this it? The moment?

I thought about it. A lot. I had to try, right?

After spending the day turning it over in my head, I sent this email back to the person who was trying to do “counseling”:

Hello!

This is a long shot, but on the off chance that someone gave you this address rather than it being a typo, could you please tell whomever you it from to please be more careful entering their email? I've been getting a lot of emails for someone else recently that are clearly the result of someone typing their email wrong and ending up typing mine by mistake. While I can happily ignore the extra spam, I suspect that person would rather be the one receiving the emails they signed up for? Also, their cable bill is ready.

If you typoed it, obviously, no worries! Hope you found the person you meant to send that to.

In any case, have a great weekend!

I never got a response.

But the next day I got an email telling me my free trial for some business scheduling software was ready for me to use.

“The end! No moral.”

Two things that are always true

I don’t have any particular insight into the weekend’s OpenAI shenanigans, other than to note two things I have observed to be universally true in our industry:

1. If you and your boss don’t get along, it doesn’t matter what your job is, one of you is going to have to go. CEOs frequently forget that the board is actually their boss? (I’ve personally had two different CEOs of places I worked step on this rake and end up spending more time with their families.)
2. If you have something that Microsoft wants, they will move instantly to exploit any opportunity to get their hands on it. (Doesn’t matter if they’re friendly now, and maybe an investor.)

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.