Layoff Season(s)

Well, it’s layoff season again, which pretty much never stopped this year? I was going to bury a link or two to an article in that last sentence, but you know what? There’s too many. Especially in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, it’s been an absolute bloodbath this year.

So, why? What gives?

I’ve got a little personal experience here: I’ve been through three layoffs now, lost my job once, shoulder-rolled out of the way for the other two. I’ve also spent the last couple decades in and around “the tech industry”, which here we use as shorthand for companies that are either actually a Silicon Valley software company, or a company run by folks that used to/want to be from one, with a strong software development wing and at least one venture capital–type on the board.

In my experience, Tech companies are really bad at people. I mean this holistically: they’re bad at finding people, bad at hiring, and then when they do finally hire someone, they’re bad at supporting those people—training, “career development”, mentoring, making sure they’re in the right spot, making sure they’re successful. They’re also bad any kind of actual feedback cycle, either to reward the excellent or terminate underperformers. As such, they’re also bad at keeping people. This results in the vicious cycle that puts the average time in a tech job at about 18 months—why train them if they’re gonna leave? Why stay if they won’t support me?

There are pockets where this isn’t true, of course; individual managers, or departments, or groups, or even glue-type individuals holding the scene together that handle this well. I think this is all a classic “don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence” situtation. I say this with all the love in the world, but people who are good at tech-type jobs tend to be low-empathy lone wolf types? And then you spend a couple decades promoting the people from that pool, and “ask your employees what they need” stops being common sense and is suddenly some deep management koan.

The upshot of all this is that most companies with more than a dozen or two employees have somewhere between 10–20% of the workforce that isn’t really helping out. Again—this isn’t their fault! The vast majority of those people would be great employees in a situation that’s probably only a tiny bit different than the one you’re in. But instead you have the one developer who never seems to get anything done, the other developer who’s work always fails QA and needs a huge amount of rework, the person who only seems to check hockey scores, the person whos always in meetings, the other person whose always in “meetings.” That one guy who always works on projects that never seem to ship.¹ The extra managers that don’t seem to manage anyone. And, to be clear, I’m talking about full-time salaried people. People with a 401(k) match. People with a vesting schedule.

No one doing badly enough to get fired, but not actually helping row the boat.

As such, at basically any point any large company—and by large I mean over about 50—can probably do a 10% layoff and actually move faster afterwards, and do a 20% layoff without any significant damage to the annual goals—as long as you don’t have any goals about employee morale or well-being. Or want to retain the people left.

The interesting part—and this is the bad interesting, to be clear—is if you can fire 20% of your employees at any time, when do you do that?

In my experience, there’s two reasons.

First, you drop them like a submarine blowing the ballast tanks. Salaries are the biggest expense center, and in a situation where the line isn’t going up right, dropping 20% of the cost is the financial equivalent of the USS Dallas doing an emergency surface.

Second, you do it to discipline labor. Is the workforce getting a little restless? Unhappy about the stagnat raises? Grumpy about benefits costing more? Is someone waving around a copy of Peopleware?² Did the word “union” float across the courtyard? That all shuts down real fast if all those people are suddenly sitting between two empty cubicles. “Let’s see how bad they score the engagement survey if the unemployment rate goes up a little!” Etc.

Again—this is all bad! This is very bad! Why do any this?

The current wave feels like a combo plate of both reasons. On the one hand, we have a whole generation of executive leaders that have never seen interest rates go up, so they’re hitting the one easy panic button they have. But mostly this feels like a tantrum by the c-suite class reacting to “hot labor summer” becoming “eternal labor september.”

Of course, this is where I throw up my hands and have nothing to offer except sympathy. This all feels so deeply baked in to the world we live in that it seems unsolvable short of a solution that ends with us all wearing leather jackets with only one sleve.

So, all my thoughts with everyone unexpectedly jobless as the weather gets cold. Hang on to each other, we’ll all get through this.

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1. At one point in my “career”, the wags in the cubes next to mine made me a new nameplate that listed my job as “senior shelf-ware engineer.” I left it up for months, because it was only a little bit funny, but it was a whole lot true.

2. That one was probably me, sorrryyyyyy (not sorry)

Wednesday linkblog, Twitter reminisces edition

The reminisces are starting to flow now, as is really starts to settle in that the thing we used to call twitter is gone and won’t be back.. As such, I’d like to call your attention to The Verge’s truly excellent The Year Twitter Died. This is probably the best “what it was, and what we lost, for both good and ill” piece I’ve read. Especially don’t miss The Great Scrollback of Alexandria. I’m glad someone is putting the work into saving some part of what used to be there.

Also, this week in folks talking about twitter, I enjoyed John Scalzi’s check-in a month after finally walking away: Abandoning the Former Twitter: A Four-Week Check-In. Scalzi was one of the strongest “I was here before he got here, and I’ll be here after he leaves” voices I saw a year ago, and the last year beat him like the rest of us.

There’s, of couse, the usual blowback to stuff like this, with at least one article I saw in response to that verge piece claiming that no, twitter always sucked, here’s all the problems it had, I always had a bad time there, so on and so on. I won’t link to it because why give them the attention, but I spent the whole time reading it thinking of this quote from former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”

“Oh Bubbles, there’s always something wrong with you”

There’s a whole bunch of genuinely interesting stuff going on with smartphone text-based messaging lately. You’ve got stuff about interop, product design, protocols, encryption, “platform ecosystems”, vendor lock-in (good), vendor lock-in (derogatory), standards design, standards maintenance, features vs security tradeoffs, it’s quite the nexus of 21st century tech product design concerns.

However, there is also a doorbuster sale going on at the Hot Takes Outlet^tm.

So, I thought I would share my foolproof heuristic technique for deciding if an article is worth reading. Here is is:

If the article mentions the color of the bubbles on the iPhone in either the title or the first paragraph, it’s hot garbage.

Something about those bubbles cause otherwise sane people to become absolutely deranged.

“We want to have blue bubbles!”

“Well, sure, the good news is all you gotta do is buy an iPhone.”

“We don’t want to do that! Iphones suck!”

The sheer entitlement of folks to want someone to sell them something, but only on their terms. Like, no? You need to find something valuable to fill your life with.

There’s some really interesting points about encryption and security? But those people don’t lead with the bubble color.

Doctor Who and the Giggle

Spoilers Ahoy

An older man embraces his younger self. The younger man is filled with guilt, and rage, and dispair. The older man is calm, almost serene.

“It’s okay,” the older man says. “I got you.” He kisses his younger self on the forehead.

Sometimes the subtext gets to just be the text, you know? Or, to slightly misquote Garth Marenghi, sometimes writers who use subtext really are cowards.

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It turns out we got a multi-Doctor story after all!

It’s maybe the most obvious idea that the show has never used—what if a Doctor’s last episode was also a teamup with the next Doctor? You can easily imagine how that might work—some time travel shenanigans, they team up, defeat the bad guy, then some more time travel shenanigans as the loop closes and the one regenerates into the other. Imagine if the Watcher in Logopolis had been played by Peter Davison!

On the other hand, it’s also perfectly obvious why no one has ever done it.

First, this is a hard character to play, and most Doctors have fairly rough starts. Having to share your first story with your predecessor is beyond having to hit the ground running, you have to be all the way there.

Second, it’s disrespectful to the last actor. A villain the current Doctor can’t beat, but that the next one can? Seems like a bad story beat to go out on. But more than that, making this show is an actual job—people come in, they go to work, they know each other. Imagine spending your last couple of days at work sharing your job with the next guy. That sucks. You don’t get a going-away party finale about you, instead you have to share with the new kid.

But this finds a solution to both of those.

There’s a long history in the show of easing the new lead in by keeping the old supporting cast and letting them do the heavy lifting while the new Doctor finds their feet. Look at “Robot”, Tom Baker’s first episode as an example—that’s essentially a baseline Jon Pertwee episode that just happens to have Tom in it instead. This story realizes that you can extend the concept to include the old Doctor as well, treating them as part of the existing cast to help get the new Doctor going.

But more critically, in this case, the old Doctor has already left once! Tennant got his big showpiece exit back in 2010. This is bonus time for him, and can’t diminish his big exit in any way.

Instead, after two and a half hours of a greatest hits reunion, he steps to the side and pours all his energy into getting the new guy off the ground. It’s hard to imagine any other actor who’s played the part being willing to put this much work in to making their replacement look this good.

And good he does look. Ncuti Gatwa bursts onto the screen and immediately shows why he got the part. He’s funny, he’s exciting, he’s apparently made out of raw, uncut charisma. Tennant is still there, but once Gatwa arrives, he’s the only one you’re watching.

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The whole thing is just tremendously fun, an absolute delight from beginning to end. Presumably it’s title refers to what the author was doing the whole time they wrote it. It’s a big goofy, exciting, joyous, ridiculous adventure where the Doctors win by being brave, and clever, and charismatic, and kind, and what more could you possibly want from this show?

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The Toymaker is an interesting choice of returning classic villain. For everyone not steeped in the Deep Lore, “The Celestial Toymaker” is a mostly-missing story from late in the original show’s 3rd season where the Doctor gets pulled into the realm of the Toymaker, a siniser, seemingly immortal being living in a domain of play. The Doctor has to defeat him at a very boring game while his companions have a whole set of largely filler encounters with evil clowns and whatnot.

Oh, and the Toymaker himself (played by Batman’s Best Butler, Michael Gogh) is a deeply racist Chinese caricature, a white man dressed in full Mandarin robes and all. “Celestial”, get it? He’s from space, and also Chinese! It’s a racist pun.

This is strangely controversial take in some corners of Who fandom, where the arguments that the Toymaker isn’t racist seems to boil down to the suggestion that the show correctly used a racial slur for their yellow peril character during an uncharacteristically racist period of the show to perfectly craft a racist pun… by accident?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

That said, it’s easy to imagine that if you were ten in 1966 this was probably the coolest thing you’d ever seen—and then no one ever got to watch it again. For ages, that impression of the original viewers held sway in fan circles—the Discontinutity guide, formal record of mid-90s fan consensus, calls it an “unqualified success”.

Reader, it is not. It’s slow, the bad kind of talky, and feels like a show made entirely out of deleted scenes from another, better show.

Once we could watch reconstructions, the consensus started to shift a little.

Credit where credit is due, what it does have going for it is one of the show’s first swings at surrealism, and also one of the first versions of a powerful evil space entity; the adjective “lovecraftian” didn’t really exist in ’66, but this is one of the show’s first takes on “spooky elder god”. Also, it was strongly implied that the Toymaker and the Doctor already knew each other, and that was definitely the first time the show had hit that note.

So why bring him back?

Well, The Toymaker has the “mythic heft” to be the returning villain for the big anniversary show, while also not having anyone who would care that he got dispatched early, and in a way where he probably won’t be back again.

I thought the reworking of the character from a racist caricature to a character who likes to perform racist caricatures was very savvy, a solid way to rehab the character for a one-off return.

Plus, Neal Patrick Harris clearly understands the assignment, and absolutely delivers “evil camp” like no one else can. (More on that in a bit.)

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Let’s talk about Mel for a second. Mel wasn’t anyone’s favorite companion, barely a sketch of a character during a weird time on the old show, despite Bonnie Langford being probably the highest profile actor to be cast as a regular on the original show’s run.

A much-told anecdote is that for the cliffhanger of her first episode, the producer asked if she could scream in the same key as the first note of the closing credits, so that the one would slide into the other.

The bit of that story everyone always leaves out is that 1) yes she could, and 2) she nailed it in one take. There was a whole lot of talent there that the show just left on the floor. She was there for a year and a half, and then got out of the way so Ace could anchor the final mini-renaissance of the show before it finally succumbed to its wounds. Consigned to that list of characters where you go, “oh right, them” when you remember.

But then a funny thing happened.

Classic Doctor Who has been embarrassingly well-supported on home video. The entire show was released on DVD, and they’re now about half-way through re-releasing the whole show on blu-ray as well. As result of their decision to release each story separately on DVD, every single story has a wealth of bonus material—interviews, archive clips, making-of documentaries. The bulk of the DVDs came out during the tail-end of the “wilderness years” before the show came back, and the special features tend to split their time between “settling old grudges” and “this wasn’t that bad, actually.” There’s a real quality that “this is for the permanent record”, and so everyone tries to put the best face forward, to explain why things were the way they were, and that it was better than you remembered.

The Blu-rays, on the other hand, have a very different tone. Released long after the new show has become a monster hit, the new sets repackage all the old material while adding new things to fill in the gaps. While the DVDs tended to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of the productions, the new material is much more about the people involved. And they are all much more relaxed. We’re long past the point where the shows needs apologizing or explaining, and everyone left just finally says what they really thought about that weird job they had for a year or two decades ago.

A consequence of all this material has been that several figures have had their reputations change quite a bit. And perhaps none more so than Bonnie Langford. Far from being “that lady that played Peter Pan who kept yelling about carrot juice”, in every interview she comes across as a formidably talented consummate professional who walked into an absurd situation, did the best job anyone could possibly do, and then walked back out again.

Faced with a character with no background, no personality other than “80s perky”, and not even a real first story, and in a situation where she got no direction on a show where the major creative figures were actively feuding with each other, she makes the decision to, basically, lean into “spunky”, hit her marks, and go home. From my American perspective, she basically settles on “Human on Sesame Street interacting with the Doctor as a muppet” as a character concept, which in retrospect, is a really solid approach to Doctor Who in 1986.

The character, as on screen from “Terror of the Vervoids” to “Dragonfire” still doesn’t, in any meaningful way, work, but the general consensus floated away from “terrible idea” to “actually fairly interesting idea executed terribly.”

So, here in 2023, Bonnie Langford can show up on BBC One and credibly represent the whole original show for the big 60th anniversary.

And, this version of the character basically does work, which it accomplishes by just giving her something to do. For example, she gets to deliver exposition through song, a mid-bogglingly obvious idea that the old show just never thought of.

And look, if Lis Sladen were still alive that probably would have been Sarah Jane, but that wasn’t an option, so RTD went for something interesting that hadn’t been tried yet.

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What’s this story for?

Like we talked about before, it’s hard not to read these three specials as an artist in conversation with their previous work. If “The Star Beast” was about resolving Donna, and “The Wild Blue Yonder” was about turning out a great episode of Doctor Who, what’s “The Giggle” here to do?

On a purely mechanical basis, this is here to give Tennant a big send off and clear the decks for Gatwa and the new, new show can get a clean start.

But also, you get the feeling there were a couple things RTD wanted a do-over on before he relaunched the show for real.

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One of the things thats so great about Doctor Who is that it’s camp, but not just any camp. Doctor Who is AAA, extra-virgin, weapons-grade camp, and most people can’t hit that.

A lot of the time, when someone complains about someone coming on Who and being “camp” what they really mean is that they weren’t camp enough.

For example: John Simm’s take on the Master back in 2007. Like most of Series 3, it almost worked. There’s a scene towards the end where he’s dancing around the helicarrier dancing to a Scissor Sisters song, and it’s supposed to be sinister and instead it’s just kind of goofy? Simm can’t quite throttle up the camp required to pull that off, and in all their scenes together you can see Tennant easing off on the throttle. None of it quote worked, it just never hit the “evil camp” that RTD was clearly looking for.

Harris dancing to the Spice Girls while the UNIT soliders fired rose petals at him was clearly what RTD had in mind a decade and a half ago, and it was glorious.

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And the reprise of the Flash Gordon hand retrieving the Master is just delicious.

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I think my favorite moment of the whole show was “But she was killed by a bird!”

The toymaker’s puppet show was glorious. It served (at least) two purposes.

First, this was clearly some gentle ribbing of one show runner to the other. While “The Star Beast” directly engaged with Moffat’s criticism of Donna’s mind-wipe, this was RTD responding in kind about Moffat’s fetish for killing-but-not-really his companions. And then, RTD locking in on The Flux as a source of more Doctor Angst^TM.

Second, it grounded the whole point of the episode. The Doctor has been through a lot. Trauma has been a core feature of the show since the 2005 revival, but this was moment to pause and underscore, mostly for Donna’s benefit, how many terrible things have happened since she was on the show.

Like the Doctor casually mentioning that he was “a Billion years old”, things have happened, over the last fifteen years.

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There’s been some suggestion that the puppet show was RTD throwing shade on in successors, and no. The shade was “I made a jigsaw of your history.”

This set of specials had a very relaxed attitude towards “the rules”, whatever those might be. The sharpest example of this is keeping the emotional reverberations of The Flux, but muddying all the water around The Timeless Child, and the general “aww screw it” anything-goes attitude towards regeneration.

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One of the big, maybe the biggest, innovations of the 2005 re-imagining of Doctor Who was to expand the emotional palette. While the original show tended to operate in a very narrow band of—frankly—safe emotions, the revival opened the throttle wide open. Mostly this was used for angst, and doubt, and unrequited love.

Now, here at the start of the 2023 revival, we add healing to the show’s vocabulary.

These specials summon up all the unresolved trauma of the revival show to date, and exorcise it.

Who in 2005 was about pain, and loss, and grief, and living with trauma. Who in 2023 is about healing.

For once, both the Doctor and the companion get a happy ending, and dine off into the sunset.

The new Doctor is a man healed, finally free of the weight of the revival show.

It’s hard not to read that as at least partly autobiographical?

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Having the Doctor talking about past challenges, and then list The Time War, The Pandorica, and Mavic Chen as equals is hilarious. It’s nice to remember RTD is one of us, you know?

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Bringing back Trinity Wells, but she’s become an Alex Jones/Sean Hannity–type is even funner.

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Formally, the upcoming season of the show is Series 1 of Doctor Who (2023). Much hay has been made in some quarters that “Disney has reset the show”, and there’s some gnashing teeth that it’s “really” Series 14 of Doctor Who (2005) (or even Season 40 of Doctor Who (1963)).

From a production standpoint, it clearly is a new show; it’s being made at a new facility under the auspices of a new co-production company. From the view of the BBC’s internal paperwork, the 2023 show is as different an entity from the 2005–2022 show as that was from the 1963–1989 one. There’s still some churn, but the community seems to be coalescing on “Original era”, “Revival era”, and “Disney+ era” as the names you use in lists to organize the three iterations.

And it’s clear that from a branding perspective, Disney+—which is distributing the show outside of the UK and putting up a chunk of the budget for the privilege—would rather have the show page start with “Season 1” instead of the inexplicable-to-newcomers “Season 14.” And the contracts that cover the three interactions are clearly different too, with BritBox, Max (formerly HBO Max), and now Disney+ each having the rights to one of them. At worst, this seems like one of those moments where Amazing Spider-Man will declare a “bold new beginning!” and reset the issue numbering to #1. Sooner or later the original numbering sneaks back in to the inside cover, and then eventually it resets and issue 27 is followed by issue five hundred-something. It’s silly, but a decent branding exercise, a way to signal to new people “hey, here’s a safe place to jump on!” And, with the old business mostly concluded here, the Christmas episode seems like it’ll be a solid place to on-board.

But again, the subtext pulls up into the text.

By all reasonable measure, David Tennant is the revival show. He was by far the most popular, and Series 4 with him and Catherine Tate was the all-time ratings high.

So here, the two of them stand in for the entire revival era of the show. Bonnie Langford gets to represent the Original. This episode ends with the revival show and the new embracing, while the original show watches and approves. The revival show hands the keys to the new show, and then the revival and original shows retire to country, while the new show heads off to new adventures.

Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Re-Capturing the Commons

The year’s winding down, which means it’s time to clear out the drafts folder. Let me tell you about a trend I was watching this year.

Over the last couple of decades, a business model has emerged that looks something like this:

1. A company creates a product with a clear sales model, but doesn’t have value without a strong community
2. The company then fosters such a community, which then steps in and shoulders a fair amount of the work of running said community
3. The community starts creating new things on top of what that original work of the parent company—and this is important—belong to those community members, not the company
4. This works well enough that the community starts selling additional things to each other—critically, these aren’t competing with that parent company, instead we have a whole “third party ecosystem”.

(Hang on, I’ll list some examples in a second.)

These aren’t necessarily “open source” from a formal OSI “Free & Open Source Software” perspective, but they’re certainly open source–adjacent, if you will. Following the sprit, if not the strict legal definition.

Then, this year especially, a whole bunch of those types of companies decided that they wouldn’t suffer anyone else makining things they don’t own in their own backyard, and tried to reassert control over the broader community efforts.

Some specific examples of what I mean:

• The website formerly known as Twitter eliminating 3rd party apps, restricting the API to nothing, and blocking most open web access.
• Reddit does something similar, effectively eliminates 3rd party clients and gets into an extended conflict with the volunteer community moderators.
• StackOverflow and the rest of the StackExchange network also gets into an extended set of conflicts with its community moderators, tries to stop releasing the community-generated data for public use, revises license terms, and descends into—if you’ll forgive the technical term—a shitshow.
• Hasbro tries to not only massively restrict the open license for future versions of Dungeons and Dragons, but also makes a move to retroactively invalidate the Open Game License that covered material created for the 3rd and 5th editions of the game over the last 20 years.

And broadly, this is all part of the Enshittification Curve story. And each of these examples have a whole set of unique details. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of words have been written on each of these, and we don’t need to re-litigate those here.

But there’s a specific sub-trend here that I think is worth highlighting. Let’s look at what those four have in common:

• Each had, by all accounts, a successful business model. After-the-fact grandstanding non-withstanding, none of those four companies was in financial trouble, and had a clear story about how they got paid. (Book sales, ads, etc.)
• They all had a product that was absolutely worthless without an active community. (The D&D player’s handbook is a pretty poor read if you don’t have people to play with, reddit with no comments is just an ugly website, and so on)
• Community members were doing significant heavy lifting that the parent company was literally unable to do. (Dungeon Mastering, community moderating. Twitter seems like the outlier here at first glance, but recall that hashtags, threads, the word “tweet” and literally using a bird as a logo all came from people not on twitter’s payroll.)
• There were community members that made a living from their work in and around the community, either directly or indirectly. (3rd party clients, actual play streams, turning a twitter account about things your dad says into a network sitcom. StackOverflow seems like the outlier on this one, until you remember that many, many people use their profiles there as a kind of auxiliary outboard resume.)
• They’ve all had recent management changes; more to the point, the people who designed the open source–adjacent business model are no longer there.
• These all resulted in huge community pushback

So we end up in a place where a set of companies that no one but them can make money in their domains, and set their communities on fire. There was a lot of handwaving about AI as an excuse, but mostly that’s just “we don’t want other people to make money” with extra steps.

To me, the most enlightening one here is Hasbro, because it’s not a tech company and D&D is not a tech product, so the usual tech excuses for this kind of behavior don’t fly. So let’s poke at that one for an extra paragraph or two:

When the whole OGL controversy blew up back at the start of the year, certain quarters made a fair amount of noise about how this was a good thing, because actually, most of what mattered about D&D wasn’t restrict-able, or was in the public domain, and good old fair use was a better deal than the overly-restrictive OGL, and that the community should never have taken the deal in the first place. And this is technically true, but only in the ways that don’t matter.

Because, yes. The OGL, as written, is more restrictive that fair use, and strict adherence to the OGL prevents someone from doing things that should otherwise be legal. But that misses the point.

Because what we’re actually talking about is an industry with one multi-billion dollar company—the only company on earth that has literal Monopoly money to spend—and a whole bunch of little tiny companies with less than a dozen people. So the OGL wasn’t a crummy deal offered between equals, it was the entity with all the power in the room declaring a safe harbor.

Could your two-person outfit selling PDFs online use stuff from Hasbro’s book without permission legally? Sure. Could you win the court case when they sue you before you lose your house? I mean, maybe? But not probably.

And that’s what was great about it. For two decades, it was the deal, accept these slightly more restrictive terms, and you can operate with the confidence that your business, and your house, is safe. And an entire industry formed inside that safe harbor.

Then some mid-level suit at Hasbro decided they wanted a cut?

And I’m using this as the example partly because it’s the most egregious. But 3rd party clients for twitter and reddit were a good business to be in, until they suddenly were not.

And I also like using Hasbro’s Bogus Journey with D&D as the example because that’s the only one where the community won. With the other three here, the various owners basically leaned back in their chairs and said “yeah, okay, where ya gonna go?” and after much rending of cloth, the respective communities of twitter, and reddit, and StackOverflow basically had to admit there wasn’t an alternative., they were stuck on that website.

Meanwhile, Hasbro asked the same question, and the D&D community responded with, basically, “well, that’s a really long list, how do you want that organized?”

So Hasbro surrendered utterly, to the extent that more of D&D is now under a more irrevocable and open license that it was before. It feels like there’s a lesson in competition being healthy here? But that would be crass to say.

Honestly, I’m not sure what all this means; I don’t have a strong conclusion here. Part of why this has been stuck in my drafts folder since June is that I was hoping one of these would pop in a way that would illuminate the situation.

And maybe this isn’t anything more than just what corporate support for open source looks like when interest rates start going up.

But this feels like a thing. This feels like it comes from the same place as movie studios making record profits while saying their negotiation strategy is to wait for underpaid writers to lose their houses?

Something is released into the commons, a community forms, and then someone decides they need to re-capture the commons because if they aren’t making the money, no one can. And I think that’s what stuck with me. The pettiness.

You have a company that’s making enough money, bills are paid, profits are landing, employees are taken care of. But other people are also making money. And the parent company stops being a steward and burns the world down rather than suffer someone else make a dollar they were never going to see. Because there’s no universe where a dollar spent on Tweetbot was going to go to twitter, or one spent on Apollo was going to go to reddit, or one spent on any “3rd party” adventure was going to go to Hasbro.

What can we learn from all this? Probably not a lot we didn’t already know, but: solidarity works, community matters, and we might not have anywhere else to go, but at the same time, they don’t have any other users. There’s no version where they win without us.

The Casablanca Threshold

A thought experiment.

How many purely fictional universes are complex enough to support something like the movie Casablanca?

Casablanca does very little of its own exposition, because the school system handles most of the heavy lifting in history class. But think about the number of things the audience needs to know to understand whats going on. France, Germany, the Vichy regime, the situation in ’41, that the US is still neutral, why both sides can sit next to each other in North Africa.

Specifically, think about the scene with the competing national anthems! The movie has to do very little to explain why that woman is crying to "La Marseillaise”, and part of what’s so great about it is that everyone already knows, no one has to narrate to the audience what’s going on. How many fictional settings could pull off a scene with that much subtext and moving parts without needing somebody like Spock to explain everything right before it happened?

Lord of the Rings could do it. Star Trek could probably do it in some cases. Game of Thrones?

This idea spun out of a conversation about Star Wars, and how “Rick’s” is mood it often tries to hit, despite the “vibes-over-lore” worldbuilding meaning that it has no way to do anything like the national anthems scene. (Which is not even remotely a criticism, just a different approach to that kind of fiction. And, to be clear, Star Wars is mostly successful at it.)

It’s an interesting threshold to think about for fictional world-building. Is the world built out enough, and has it already delivered enough exposition, that it could pull off something like Rick’s?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Okay, I finally saw Dial of Destiny. It was… “fine”, I guess? But I don’t understand why you would go to all the trouble of making “one more” Indy movie in 2023 if the best you could muster was “fine”.

Spoilers Ahoy for Dial of Destiny

Let’s start with what works: The best part of the movie was its enthusiastic endorsement of punching Nazis. It’s strangely rare to see that stated so clearly and without hedging these days, so that almost makes up for everything else.

Also, the cast is uniformly excellent. This is the first Indiana Jones movie since Radiers where there’s no weak link, everyone does a great job with what they have to do, and frankly, everyone looks like they’re having a good time doing it. Even Harrison Ford looks awake and engaged, which isn’t always a given post-somewhere around Air Force One.

Other than that, it’s well made, looks good, solid production design, the punches all sound great. The plot cooks along at a steady clip, the action works. And the strange thing about this movie is that while it doesn’t really do anything badly, it just also doesn’t do anything particularly well. It’s fine.

So what doesn’t work so well?

The funniest thing is that Harrison Ford doesn’t even try to make his voice sound younger in the prologue. Just a fifty-year old face with an eighty-year old voice. What a legend!

But the first thing I noticed was how still the camera was. I appreciate not wanting to make a pastiche, but scene after scene of actors looking at something in a locked-off camera shot, I’d think to myself, “man, Spielburg would have put a really cool camera move here.”

It’s way too long. There’s a reason all the others are a tight 2 hours, there’s no excuse for a two-and-a-half hour Indy movie. Halfway through the WW2 prologue I caught myself thinking “wow, this is still going, huh?” Also, look, the third time you write “and then Indy is captured and bundled into the back of a van” in the script, your movie is too long. So it’s not just Spielburg that’s missed, but also Michael Kahn.

Similarly, there is no universe where you should spend 200+ million dollars on an Indiana Jones movie.

And then it works its way through the other greatest hits of all the bad habits that “legacy sequels” have picked up over the last decade or so:

• Overly enamored with mediocre computer de-aging
• The Hero has suffered terrible personal setbacks since we saw them last, and are now living in failure, all past successes forgotten
• Full of new, younger characters, but they’re not super like-able, and are there more than makes sense, but not enough to tee them up as the new leads, as if they wanted to set up a spin-off but then got cold feet halfway through the movie.
• Way, way too much greenscreen instead of practical effects

Strangely, it seems like they used Crystal Skull as their main source of inspiration, fixing the cosmetic mistakes but not the fundamental ones. For example, replacing Shia with Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a huge upgrade, but at no point did anyone seem to stop and ask why they needed a Junior Varsity Indy to begin with. I like Phoebe Waller-Bridge a lot so she was fun; but giving one the big big hero moments to… the new kid sidekick? Why? Personally, instead of another one-off sidekick I would have much preferred Indy & Marion on one last ride bickering the whole time. If you’re doing a one-last-ride nostalgia piece, why add so many new people?

And look, Crystal Skull was bad, but at least it had Cate Blanchett vamping it up as an evil Russian psychic? This one had… the guy from Casino Royale playing Great Value Brand Red Skull?

And why break up Indy and Marion only to get them back together again at the end?

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Frustratingly, It’s not like this movie was short on ideas. There’s at least a dozen really good ideas for an Indiana Jones movie:

• What if Werner von Braun was still a Nazi?
• Related: Nazis are sneaking back, time to get punching!
• The Moon Landing!
• Closely related: Astronauts! (Imagine a fistfight between Indy and some NASA guys)
• The Antikythera mechanism as a macguffin. Great choice, brings in a whole set of Mediterranean iconography you can play with that the Indy movies haven’t done yet
• Bonus macguffin: the Spear of Destiny, as used in every single Indy spinoff in the 90s, and for good reason
• CIA agents working with neo-nazis but not being happy about it
• Indy as a retired “old guy”, living an a world that’s passed him by, yet is still historical for the audience. Credit where credit is due, the cut to old Indy being awoken by “Magical Mystery Tour” was absolutely worth whatever it cost to get that song. (Plus, Indy in an anti-Vietnam demonstration? YES PLEASE!)
• A plot that ties unfinished business from whatever he was doing during the war with what’s going on now
• And more broadly from the above, what does a retired action hero do with his day?
• Confronting the past choices of the other movies: hey, wait a sec, was he a grave robber? There’s a whole confronting the past angle that the movie dips it’s toes into and then cowards out from. Remarkably, this is the only Indiana Jones to contain the words “grave robber”, and the only movie where Indy actually destroys a historical artifact.
• But the absolute best idea this movie has is Indy trying to recover historical artifacts stolen by the Nazi as part of the end-of-war plunder. It’s inconceivable to me that they wasted this on just the opening: Just gonna throw this out there, but “Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Amber Room” set in the mid-70s would have been absolutely incredible.

And you can squint and make just about any of those work as a spine for a whole movie. Instead, this movie throws them all into the blender and they’re all just… there? They don’t line up in any sort of thematic way, the movie just flirts with one and then moves to the next. But also, there’s four credited screenwriters, so it really feels like they took every pitch from the last 15 years and jammed them all in there. Considering the director, it also feels like they started with “Logan, but Indy” and then kept rounding down.

As a point of comparison, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has just as many plates spinning: the Nazis, Donnovan’s ambitions, Indy’s dad, whatever Dr. Elsa Schneider is playing at, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword. But, all of those characters are oriented around the Grail, their actions center around their motivations regarding it. Plus, that movie has maybe the best action scene Spielburg has ever put together with the tank chase. In Dial, none of these elements go together, and there are some car chases.

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This is a movie that knows “emotions” are a thing other movies have, but isn’t sure where they go? So we get Indy being—correctly—very upset that his friend Armand the Vampire was murdered but only for about seven seconds. Or the scene where Indy talks about his son’s death, which Ford acts the hell out of, but then descends to pure bathos the second you realize that yes, they really did pull a Poochy on Shia’s character and that Mutt died on the way back to his home planet.

The defining moment of the movie for me came about half-way through. The good guys are in trouble, and Indy says “hang on, I have an old friend that’ll help us,” right after a long conversation about the kid that Fleabag has picked up, and then the movie cuts to… ANTIONO BANDERAS, of all people, playing his character from the SpongeBob Squarepants movie? Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Ke Huy Quan is turning in an oscar-winning performance in another movie. Short Round is never mentioned.

Actually, though, the worst part of the movie is that John Williams took one look at it and decided not to even try. Less than ten minutes into the prologue, and he’s recycling the music from the Last Crusade tank chase. Say what you will about Crystal Skull, but at least the Skulls got their own leitmotif.

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Dial of Destiny cost a lot of money, and didn’t do very well at the box office. It’s once of the central exhibits in both 2023’s weird box office specifically and Disney’s post-2019 slump generally. This is the point where people on twitter start blaming it’s failure on someone “having an agenda” or “repackaging nostalgia”. And what’s funny is this is the movie that proves all those people wrong, because if that was the problem, fucking Short Round would be in the movie.

Instead, I think the problem is both deeper and simpler. This is a movie made by people with no taste, no ambition beyond “making another one”, “whose main creative vision is they love to have meetings.” People who are here to make “content”.

I’d love to ask the people behind this movie to describe, in their own words, to explain what makes Indiana Jones a unique character, and to do that without using the words “brand” or “franchise.” Because I’m not sure they could?

Indy is a character who is always in over his head, but gets through because he’s got more guts and never quits. And that’s just… not in this movie.

And that’s where it starts to get a little insulting: Radiers of the Lost Ark is as close to a perfect movie as anyone has ever made, Indiana Jones himself was a truly unique creation. Here, he’s been sandblasted down to just another superhero-adjacent character, the hat and jacket more of a signature costume than something someone would really wear than ever. On the most superficial level, he doesn’t even really use his whip, it’s just hanging from his belt because “Indiana Jones”. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be in some other action movie. More than anything, this movie feels like a late-period Roger Moore Bond movie: perfectly competent, but utterly lacking in any ambition beyond the release date. That and the fact that the lead moves like an 80-year old when you can see their face, and like 30-year old when their back is turned to the camera.

Critically, the other Indy movies all have a moment where Indy realizes that the macguffin isn’t what he cares about, and that he’s really here to save a person—Marion, the village, his father, his son. Artifacts, supernatural or otherwise, can take care of themselves, he’s here to protect something else. And that turn never comes here, instead Indy’s real mission is—what, exactly?

This movie is made by people who really think that Indy didn’t do anything in Raiders, and he really doesn’t get anything done here.

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Everyone in tis movie had better things to be doing with their time, and I don’t understand why they bothered to go ahead if this was the best they could do.

It was fine.

Tuesday linkblog, video-game-trailer-edition

After some shenanigans the trailer for GTA 6 is out. Looks like GTA all right. Tome Petty song! Like those gators!

My first reaction, though, was “man, I feel like I’ve already played this game about, oh, five times”.

On the other hand, I guess it has been a decade since the last one? I supposed doing a sequel/redo every decade or so to see what the next generation of game hardware can do is a fair way to go? I wish we could get a PS5 version of Rock Band.

On the gripping hand, I also don’t think I’m in the target audience for this anymore? The GTA game I always wanted finally came out: Spider-man.

This is not a joke. I distinctly remember the first time I saw GTA 3 running on a friend’s computer. It was one of those moments, like Doom before it, where you sat there going “wow, they can do this now?” And then you sat there imagining all the other games that just became possible. I turned to my friend and the first thing I said was “I can’t wait for them to make this game, but you’re Spider-man.”

Anyway, I hope they mix the gameplay up more than it looks like. Like by adding Spider-man.

Doctor Who and the Wild Blue Yonder

My favorite moment was a little beat about a third of the way through the story. While working to reboot the spaceship they're trapped on, the Doctor quietly speculates to himself where the TARDIS has gone. The show always works better when it remembers to treat the TARDIS as a character instead of “just” the Doctor's car. It’s a perfect Doctor Who moment; simultaneously both explicitly mythic, with an undying space god invoking the image of an immortal, indestructible alien Time Machine outlasting whole civilizations, and quietly personal as the main character ruminates on where their oldest friend goes on vacation.

The TARDIS’s agency, and unique personality, have been intriguingly foregrounded; last week she dropped the Doctor right on top of Donna seemingly intentionally, and this week the ship delivers a warning via a the subtext of a song, runs off to repair herself, and then pops in to save everyone just at the nick of time. The return of the TARDIS’s personality from “The Edge of Destruction” was nowhere near my bingo card for this anniversary run, and I am here for it.

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Ahhh, the mysterious, all-secret, all-filmed-inside second one! The rumor mill was all over the place, the marketing for these specials went out of their way to avoid it, and by the last few days the internet had gone positively feral trying to guess what was going on.

So it starts, and the question is, what kind of story is this? All we knew for sure was that it was “scary”, except then it starts with a very self-contained comedy skit. There’s an unjustified tension to the first few minutes, as The Doctor and Donna open spaceship doors; is one going to reveal Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi or Carole Ann Ford or Ncuti Gatwa or someone? (Depending on which batch of rumors you believed.)

And then, about 15 minutes in, no—this is none of those things, this is RTD calling a do-over on “Midnight”.

RTD always liked having a sort of meta-structure to his Who seasons: start with the mostly-comedy opener, with a present-past-future triplet at the start, do the “funny” two-parter for kids, throw in a celebrity historical, the scary two-parter, a weird spiky and cheap one towards the end, and then a big blowout finale. And then a weirdly dark christmas episode as an epilogue.

The non-season of the 2009 specials was a stripped-down version of this—the fun opener of “Planet of the Dead”, the spooky two-parter of “Waters of Mars”, and then the grand finale of “The End of Time.”

And so now, it’s obvious we’re using the same basic format, except this middle is closer to “Midnight” or “Blink” or “Boom Town” than “The Empty Child” or “Impossible Planet” or “Silence in the Library.” I think that’s a good move! Those weird ones were always some of the best, and It’s fun to see him slip back into the “small and scary” mold this early in the return. And not only that, but one explicitly in the mold of a “let me prove I can still write” story.

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What made Tennant and Tate such a great pair of leads for Doctor Who? Their one year in 2008 remains the new show’s all-time ratings peak), and has the all-time highest AI scores for the entire 60-year run of the show. Not that it isn’t deserved, but why?

Partly, much like Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen, they had the good fortune to be on a show that was firing on all cylinders, operating at an absolute creative peak of the people behind the cameras.

You have one of the very few times where both leads are 1) at the same acting skill level, and 2) that level is very, very high. So you get this effect where not only are they both good, but they make each other better, if nothing else by virtue of that fact that neither one has to slow down to let the other one keep up. Here, they can go as hard as they can, and the other will stay right with them. I mean, Tennant was significantly better than his other co-leads, and on the other side, Karen Gillan was visibly dialing it back so Matt Smith could stay the lead. The only time you both leads pushing each other upwards like Tennant and Tate do was Capaldi and Coleman, and that was the other creative peak of the new show.

So here, Tate and Tennant put on an absolute clinic in how making tiny choices slightly different can flag “wrongness” without actually foregrounding anything as obviously wrong. And then, when they go full Evil Doppleganger Vampires, they manage to keep it as “the same characters, but scary”, and while still only nibbling the edges of the scenery rather than devouring it all-you-can—eat buffet–style.

(One almost gets the impression that Tennant especially is thinking back to John Sim’s moderately succesful take on the Master and thinking, “look, let me show you the right way to do Evil Doctor.”)

This is extra impressive considering neither of these two have played these characters in a decade and a half, and that this is only their second swing back at it.

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We havn’t talked much about the episode itself yet, and thats because it’s hard to know what to say. It’s utterly delightful that we’ve got an episode that looks and moves like “a cheap one”, but is blatantly incredibly expensive.

The core concept is incredibly solid; joking aside, this really does feel like “Midnight, but Donna comes along.” Take just the two main characters, strip away everything extraneous—no sonic, no guest cast, not even Tennant’s coat, and build the tension around how well these two actually know each other.

And then, fabulously, take two characters (and two actors) known for moving and talking fast, and put them in a situation where to win they have to be slow. Beautiful!

It might be a perfect example of Doctor Who running in “small and scary” mode.

And, the Doctor changing the subject away from Gallifrey with “well, then all that got complicated” is one of the best pieces of writing for telling a part of the audience “we’re not going to retcon anything, but we’re going to keep moving forward not looking back” that I’ve ever seen.

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Overall, it’s an interesting approach to an anniversary. We had a big messy “lots of past cast members show up” carnival last year with “Power of the Doctor”, and semi-wishful thinking aside it was unlikely that RTD was going to do something similar again.

Instead, the old gang got back back together and are effectively slotting a missing half-season between 2009 and 2010. Because despite what I said in the last paragraph, here we’ve got nothing but past cast members. Instead of a big cameo museum, we pick one specific point of the show and do a litte more of that. It’s an approach that I’d like to see more of, frankly. I’ve love a Cartmel-McCoy-Aldred special, or a Moffat-Capaldi-Coleman. And as fun as “The Two Doctors” was, they really should have just let Troughton and Hines have an episode to themselves.

There’s a faint hint in some corners of “is this all they’re doing?” But yes! Look at all they’re doing! Getting three extra episodes from one of the all-time great casts is a gift. Even better, they’re spending a whole third of their limited time making “real” Doctor Who, not just reunion grandstanding. Incredible.

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Finally, there’s a real glee in the way that between this week’s “hot Newton” and last week’s scream for Trans rights RTD is making “Doctor Who is woke now” old news long before Ncuti Gatwa has to absorb the brunt of it. It’s both delightful trolling of a group that deserves it, as well as an act of real kindness towards the new lead.

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And then it turns out the big surprise return of a past cast member was Bernard Cribbins. Perfect.

A Story About Beep the Meep

Up until last weekend, Doctor Who’s “Beep the Meep” was an extremely deep cut. Especially for American fans who didn’t have access to Doctor Who Monthly back in the 80s, you had to be a vary particular kind of invested to know who The Meep was. And, you know, guilty as charged.

We bought our first car with a lock remote maybe fifteen years ago? And when we get home, I’ll frequently ask something like “did you beep the car?” And I always want to make the joke “did you beep the meep”. And I always stop myself, because look, my family already knows more about Doctor Who then they ever, ever wanted to, but the seminar required to explain that joke? “So, the meep is a cute little fuzzy guy, but he’s actually the galaxy’s most wanted war criminal, and so the Doctor gets it wrong at first, and the art is done by the watchmen guy before he teamed up with The Magus, and it’s a commentary on the show using ugly as a signifier of evil, and actually it came before ET and gremlins, and…”

And just, no. Nope, no deal. That’s beyond the pale. I could explain the joke, but not in a way where it would ever be close to funny. So instead, about once a month, I stop myself from asking if the meep got beeped.

Flash forward to this week.

We all piled out of the car after something or other. Bundling into the house. Like normal, the joke flashed through my mind and I was about to dismis it. But then it suddenly came to me: this was it. They all know who the Meep is now! Through the strangest of happenstances, a dumb joke I thought of in 2008 and haven’t been able to use finally, finally, became usable. This was my moment! A profound sense of satisfaction filled my body, the deep sense of fulfillment of checking off a box long un-checked.

“Hey!” I said, “Did you Beep the Meep?”

...

Turns out, even with context, still not that funny.

Friday linkblog, war-criminal-obituary-roundup edition

Why yes, I am going to open with that Anthony Bourdain quote everyone else is using, because it’s perfect:

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.

The best headline goes to Rolling Stone: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies. This, via jwz’s Now that is how you write a headline, from which I also obtained the header image, there.

Josh Marshall over at TPM asks an interesting question, though: Why Did So Many People Hate Henry Kissinger So Much?.

Why did Kissinger collect all the animus while the other guys that should have been in shackles in the Hague next to him—Nixon, McNamara, Ford, etc—didn’t so much.

I don’t think it’s that complicated: It’s because he took the credit! Kissenger made sure everyone knew he was the guy. All the other architects of the Vietnam catastrophe had the good sense to keep quiet or express remorse; Kissenger went to his grave acting like the Christmas Bombing was the greatest act of foreign policy of all time.

Look, it’s not like Nixon spent decades bitching that later presidents didn’t call for advice on how to win elections, you know?

Pre-Friday Linkblog, not-that-kind-of-doctor edition

The always-fascinating Going Medieval has an enlightening article today on the history of the use of “Doctor” as a honorific: Doctor does actually mean someone with a PhD, sorry.

The short, short version is that “Doctor” started off as a way to mean someone who had done all the school to acquire a PhD, and then slowly spread to other professionals, like Physicians. As Dr. Janega says towards the end:

The point of all this is that it is a historical fact that the term “doctor” is supposed to refer to people who have a PhD and teach, and we let medical practitioners start using it cuz we are not weirdo gate keepers.

That’s the most interesting thing for me is that historically, “doctor” really signified someone qualified to teach. The whole thing is worth reading, especially the origins of the other formal terms for various medical professionals, and they way all those terms got flattened out into just “doctor.”

Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects, that’s right, Doctor Who.

The old show, the 1963–1989 one, made it very clear that the main character was not a medical doctor, but the “other kind.” It’s never stated this bluntly, but the implication that means he’s a “real doctor”. The new show (2005–present), on the other hand, had much more leaned into the later definition; the healer, the fixer-of-things.

This is not a complaint, to be sure, but I think it’s funny that the was the use of the term has evolved over the course of the show has mirrored the way the term has evolved in real life.

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.

—

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.

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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

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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.

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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.)