Friday Linkblog, 90s-syndicated-action-tv edition

Back in the late 90s, there was a show called She Spies. I think it was on network TV originally, but it seemed to exist in the weird liminal time slots for syndicated shows on local channels—2 in the morning, late-afternoon on weekends.

The premise was a straightforward Charlier’s Angels ripoff. The three “She Spies” were former criminals who agreed to do missions for “the government” to work off their sentence, or something, most of which involved wearing tight shirts. The lead was Natasha Henstridge—yes from Species—surrounded by a cast of people you’ve never seen anywhere else.

What made She Spies stick in the memory two and a half decades later is that they immediately realized they didn’t have the budget to do an action show, so they pivoted to comedy. And while the actresses were not that great at fights, they were very, very funny.

It was not successful, and seems to have vanished from the collective memory. About every eighteen months I have to go look at the wikipedia page to prove to myself I didn’t dream it. No one I talk to has ever even heard of it.

I absolutely loved it.

It was lo- budget goofy cheese, but more importantly, everyone was in on the joke. Everyone knew exactly what show they were making, and leaned all the way in.

There’s a scene that’s stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it, back in my apartment in the late 90s. The She Spies are chasing the villain of the week—a tech millionaire, maybe? They run after him out of a… building? But he gets into his van and drives off. For… reasons? The She Spies don’t have a car so they can’t chase him.

Seconds later, the bad guy’s van screeches back into the parking lot where the She Spies are standing nonplussed. He gets out, slams the sliding door open, and out pours a swarm of Ninjas.

“Where did you get these guys!?” one of the She Spies asks.

There’s a flashback, and it shows the bad guy driving up to a hardware store where a crowd of migrant workers are waiting for work. Half of them are sterotypical Mexican day-laborers, the other half are are… literally ninjas, in full cartoon ninja garb, drinking coffee.

We snap back to the present, where the big action scene for the week commences.

At the time, I thought this was one of the funniest things I had ever seen. Ninjas as migrant day-laborers seems like an idea someone must have had before, but it was the first time I had ever seen it.

But! Time passed, and no one I ever met had ever seen this. Or even heard of it.

Every so often, I’d spend an afternoon on the google trying to prove this really existed. But no such luck. I started to wonder if maybe I had dreamed it—like that beer with the Skittles in it, you know, Skittlebräu.

Reader.

I finally found it.

All the episodes of the show somehow have ended up on youtube, and it turns out I didn’t dream it after all!

The action starts at about 38:32.

I had totally forgotten Biff/Maniac was in this! Even better than I remembered.

Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)

What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?

Or to look at it the other way, what makes a bad one?

Books and movies are very different mediums and therefore—obviously—are good at very different things. Maybe the most obvious difference is that books are significantly more information-dense than movies are, so any adaptation has to pick and choose what material to keep.

The best adaptations, though, are the ones that keep the the themes and characters—what the book is about— and move around, eliminate, or combine the incidents of the plot to support them. The most successful, like Jaws or Jurassic Park for example, are arguably better than their source material, jettisoning extraneous sideplots to focus on the main concepts.

Conversely, the worst adaptations are the ones that drop the themes and change the point of the story. Stephen King somewhat famously hates the movie version of The Shining because he wrote a very personal book about his struggle with alcoholism disguised as a haunted hotel story, and Kubrick kept the ghosts but not the rest. The movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was made by people who thought the details of the plot were more important than the jokes, rather than the other way around, and didn’t understand why the Nutrimat was bad.

And really, it’s the themes, the concepts, the characters, that make stories appeal to us. It’s not the incidents of the plot we connect to, it’s what the story is about. That’s what we make the emotional connection with.

And this is part of what makes a bad adaptation so frustrating.

While the existence of a movie doesn’t erase the book it was based on, it’s a fact that movies have higher profiles, reach bigger audiences. So it’s terribly disheartening to have someone tell you they watched a movie based on that book you like that they didn’t read, when you know all the things that mattered to you didn’t make it into the movie.

And so we come to The Lord of the Rings! The third movie, Return of the King turned 20 this week, and those movies are unique in that you’ll think they’re either a fantastic or a terrible adaptation based on which character was your favorite.

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Broadly speaking, Lord of the Rings tells two stories in parallel. The first, is a big epic fantasy, with Dark Lords, and Rings of Power, and Wizards, and Kings in Exile. Strider is the main character of this story, with a supporting cast of Elves, Dwarves, and Horse Vikings. The second is a story about some regular guys who are drawn into a terrifying and overwhelming adventure, and return home, changed by the experience. Sam is the main character of the second story, supported by the other Hobbits.

(Frodo is an interestingly transgressive character, because he floats between the two stories, never committing to either. But that’s a whole different topic.)

And so the book switches modes based on which characters are around. The biggest difference between the modes is the treatment of the Ring. When Strider or Gandalf or any other character from the first story are around, the Ring is the most evil thing in existence—it has to be. So Gandalf refuses to take it, Galadriel recoils, it’s a source of unstoppable corruption.

But when it’s just the Hobbits, things are different. That second story is both smaller and larger at the the same time—constantly cutting the threat of the Ring off at the knees by showing that there are larger and older things than the Ring, and pointing out thats it’s the small things really matter. So Tom Bombadil is unaffected, Faramir gives it back without temptation, Sam sees the stars through the clouds in Mordor. There are greater beauties and greater powers than some artifact could ever be.

This is, to be clear, not a unique structure. To pull an obvious example, Star Wars does the same thing, paralleling Luke’s kid from the sticks leaving home and growing into his own person with the epic struggle for the future of the entire galaxy between the Evil Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. In keeping with that movie’s clockwork structure, Lucas manages to have the climax of both stories be literally the exact same moment—Luke firing the torpedoes into the exhaust port.

Tolkien is up to something different however, and climaxes his two stories fifty pages apart. The Big Fantasy Epic winds down, and then the cast reduces to the Hobbits again and they go home, where they have to use everything they’ve learned to solve their own problems instead of helping solve somebody else’s.

In my experience, everyone connects more strongly with one of the two stories. The tends to boil down to who your favorite character is—Strider or Sam. Just about everyone picks one of those two as their favorite. It’s like Elvis vs. The Beatles; most people like both, but everyone has a preference.

(And yeah, there’s always some wag that says Boromir/The Who.)

Just to put all my cards on the table, my favorite character is Sam. (And I prefer The Beatles.)

Based on how the beginning and end of the books work, it seems clear that Tolkien thought of that story—the regular guys being changed by the wide world story—as the “main one”, and the Big Epic was there to provide a backdrop.

There’s an entire cottage industry of people explaining what “Tolkien really meant” in the books, and so there’s not a lot of new ground to cover there, so I’ll just mention that the “regular dudes” story is clearly the one influenced—not “based on”, but influenced—by his own WWI experiences and move on.

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Which brings us back to the movies.

Even with three very long movies, there’s a lot more material in the books than could possibly fit. And, there’s an awful lot of things that are basically internal or delivered through narration that need dramatizing in a physical way to work as a film.

So the filmmakers made the decision to adapt only that first story, and jettison basically everything from the second.

This is somewhat understandable? That first story has all the battles and orcs and wargs and wizards and things. That second story, if you’re coming at it from the perspective of trying to make an action movie, is mostly Sam missing his garden? From a commercial point of view, it’s hard to fault the approach. And the box office clearly agreed.

And this perfectly explains all the otherwise bizarre changes. First, anything that undercuts the Ring has to go. So, we cut Bombadil and everything around him for time, yes, but also we can’t have a happy guy with a funny hat shake off the Ring in the first hour before Elrond has even had a chance to say any of the spooky lines from the trailer. Faramir has to be a completely different character with a different role. Sam and Frodo’s journey across the plains of Mordor has to play different, becase the whole movie has to align on how terrible the Ring is, and no stars can peek through the clouds to give hope, no pots can clatter into a crevasse to remind Sam of home. Most maddeningly, Frodo has to turn on Sam, because the Ring is all-powerful, and we can’t have an undercurrent showing that there are some things even the Ring can’t touch.

In the book, Sam is the “hero’s journey” characer. But, since that whole story is gone, he gets demoted to comedy sidekick, and Aragorn is reimagined into that role, and as such needs all the trappings of the Hero with a Thousand Faces retrofitted on to him. Far from the confident, legendary superhero of the books, he’s now full of doubt, and has to Refuse the Call, have a mentor, cross A Guarded Threshold, suffer ordeals, because he’s now got to shoulder a big chunk of the emotional storytelling, instead of being an inspirational icon for the real main characters.

While efficient, this all has the effect of pulling out the center of the story—what it’s about.

It’s also mostly crap, because the grafted-on hero’s journey stuff doesn’t fit well. Meanwhile, one of the definitive Campbell-style narratives is lying on the cutting room floor.

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One of the things that makes Sam such a great character is his stealth. He’s there from the very beginning, present at every major moment, an absolutely key element in every success, but the book keeps him just out of focus—not “off stage”, but mostly out of the spotlight.

It’s not until the last scene—the literal last line—of the book that you realize that he was actually the main character the whole time, you just didn’t notice.

The hero wasn’t the guy who became King, it was the guy who became mayor.

He’s why my laptop bag always has a coil of rope in the side pocket—because you’ll want if if you don’t have it.

(I also keep a towel in it, because it’s a rough universe.)

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And all this is what makes those movies so terribly frustrating—because they are an absolutely incredible adaptation of the Epic Fantasy parts. Everything looks great! The design is unbelievable! The acting, the costumes, the camera work. The battles are amazing. Helm’s Deep is one of those truly great cinematic achievements. My favorite shot in all three movies—and this is not a joke—is the shot of the orc with the torch running towards the piled up explsoves to breach the Deeping Wall like he’s about to light the olympic torch. And, in the department of good changes, the cut down speech Theoden gives in the movie as they ride out to meet the invaders—“Ride for ruin, Ride for Rohan!”—is an absolutely incredible piece of filmmaking. The Balrog! And, credit where credit is due, everything with Boromir is arguably better than in the book, mostly because Sean Bean makes the character into an actual character instead of a walking skepticism machine.

So if those parts were your jam, great! Best fantasy movies of all time! However, if the other half was your jam, all the parts that you connected to just weren’t there.

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I’m softer on the “breakdancing wizards” fight from the first movie than a lot of fellow book purists, but my goodness do I prefer Gandalf’s understated “I liked white better,” over Magneto yelling about trading reason for madness. I understand wanting to goose the emotion, but I think McKellen could have made that one sing.

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There’s a common complaint about the movie that it “has too many endings.” And yeah, the end of the movie version of Return of the King is very strange, playing out a whole series of what amount to head-fake endings and then continuing to play for another half an hour.

And the reason is obvious—the movie leaves the actual ending out! The actual ending is the Hobbits returning home and using everything they’ve learned to save the Shire; the movie cuts all that, and tries to cobble a resolution of out the intentionally anti-climactic falling action that’s supposed to lead into that.

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Lord of the Rings: the Movie, is a story about a D&D party who go on an exciting grueling journey to destroy an evil ring, and then one of them becomes the King. Lord of the Rings: the Book, is a story about four regular people who learn a bunch of skills they don’t want to learn while doing things they don’t want to do, and then come home and use those skills to save their family and friends.

I know which one I prefer.

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What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?

Does it matter if the filmmaker’s are on the same page as the author?

What happens when they’re only on the same page with half of the audience?

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The movies are phenomenally well made, incredibly successful films that took one of the great heros of fiction and sandblasted him down to the point where there’s a whole set of kids under thirty who think his signature moment was yelling “po-TAY-toes” at some computer animation.

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For the record: yes, I am gonna die mad about it.

A Long, Slow U-turn

Last week Halley’s comet was at its furthest point from the sun and started heading back in.

Halley’s comet was the biggest thing ever when I was in elementary school. The actual event turned out to be something of a damp squib; we never actually manged to see it, and not for lack of truing. To faint, to close to the horizon.

It’ll be back in 2061; I hope I get to take a second swing at it.

Covering the Exits

So! Adobe has quietly canceled their plans to acquire Figma. For everyone playing the home game, Figma is a startup that makes web-based design tools, and was one of the first companies to make some actual headway into Adobe’s domination of the market. (At least, since Adobe acquired Macromedia, anyway.). Much ink has been spilled on Figma “disrupting” Adobe.

Adobe cited regulatory concerns as the main reason to cancel the acquisition, which tracks with the broader story of the antitrust and regulatory apparatus slowly awakening from its long slumber.

On the one hand, this was blatantly a large company buying up their only outside competition in a decade. On the other hand, it’s not clear Figma had any long-term business plan other than “sell out to Adobe?”

Respones to this have been muted, but there’s a distinct set of “temporarily embarrassed” tech billionaries saying things like “well, tut tut, regulations are good in theory, but I can still sell my startup, right?”

There’s an entire business model thats emerged over the last few decades, fueled by venture capital and low interest rates, where the company itself is the product. Grow fast, build up a huge user-base, then sell out to someone. Don’t worry about the long term, take “the exit.”

This is usually described in short-hand as “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not totally right either. There’s one product: the company itself. The founders are making one thing, then they’re going to sell it to someone else.

And sure, because if that’s the plan, things get so easy. Who cares what the long-term vacation accural schedule is, or the promotional tracks, or how we’re going to turn a profit? In five years, that’ll be Microsoft/Adobe/Facebook/Google’s problem, and we’ll be on a beach earning twenty percent.

Anf there’s a real thread of fear out there now that the “sell the company” exit might not be as easy as deal as it used to be?

There’s nothing I can think of would have a more positive effect on the whole tech industry than taking “…and then sell the company” off the table as a startup exit. Imagine if that just… wasn’t an option? If startups had to start with “how are we going to become self-funding”, if VCs knew they weren’t going to walk away with a couple billion dollars of cash from Redmond?

I was going to put a longer rant here, but there must be something in the water today because Ed Zitron covered all the same ground but in more detail and angrier today—Software Is Beating The World:

Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it started with a blog.

While I’m here, though, I’m going to throw one elbow that Ed didn’t: I’m not sure any book has had more toxic, unintended consequences than The Innovator’s Dilemma. While “Disruption Theory” remains an intellectually attractive description of how new products enter the market, it turns out it only had useful explanatory power once: when the iPhone shipped. Here in the twenties, if anyone is still using the term “Disruption” with a straight face they’re almost certainly full of crap, and are probably about to tell you about their “cool business hack” which actually ends up being “ignore labor laws until we get acquired.”

It’s time to stop talking about disruption, and start talking about construction. Stop eying the exits. What what it look like if people started building tech companies they expected their kids to take over?

Doctor Who and the Canon… Of Death

I’ve very much been enjoying the commentary around the last couple of Doctor Whos, especially “The Giggle”. There’s a lot of intersting things to talk about! But there’s a strand of fans, primarily ones used to American Sci-fi, that really struggle with the way Doctor Who works, and especially with how Doctor Who relates to itself. It fundamentally operates on a different set of rules for a long-running show than most American shows.

You see—Doctor Who doesn’t have a canon. It has a continuity, but that’s not the same thing.

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Lets step back and talk about “canon” for a second.

“Canon” in the sense of organizing a body of fiction, originates with the Sherlock Holmes fandom. There, they were making a distinction between Doyle’s work and what we’d now call “fan fiction”. Using the biblical term was one of those jokes that was “ha ha only serious”, it’s clearly over the top, but makes a clear point—some things exist at a higher level of importance than other things.

But it also sets the stage nicely for all future uses of the term; it draws a box neatly around the core works, and the social contact from that point on is that any new work needs to treat the material in “the canon” as having happened, but can pick and choose from the material outside—the apocrypha, to continue the metaphor.

So, any future Sherlock Holmes work is expected to include the fact that he faked his death at the top of a waterfall, but isn’t expected to necessarily include the fact once he was treated by Freud.

Again, here the term mostly draws a line between what today we’d call “Official” and not. It’s a fancier way of putting the work of the original author at a higher level importance than any other continuation, formally published or not.

But then a funny thing happened. As large, multi-author franchises became the norm in the late 20th century, we started getting Official works that still “didn’t count”.

As usual for things like this, Patient Zero is Star Trek. When The Next Generation got going, the people making that show found there was an awful lot of material out there they didn’t want to have to deal with. Not fan-fiction, the official vs fan device was clear by the mid-80s, but works that were formally produced by the same people, had all the rights to do so, but “didn’t really happen.” Specifically, the Animated Series, but also every single spin-off novel. So, Roddenberry & co. declared that the “Star Trek Canon” was the original show and the then four movies, and everything else was not. Apocrypha. Official, but “didn’t count.”

(Pushing the biblical metaphor to the breaking point, this also introduced the first “deuterocanonical” work in the form of the Animated Star Trek, where nearly everything in it has been taken to have “happened” except the actual plots of the episodes themselves. And those force-field belts.)

(And, it’s absolutely insane to live in a world where we act like the Voyager episode “Threshold” happened and Diane Duane’s Rihannsu didn’t, but at least the rules are clear.)

And this became the standard for most big sprawling multi-media franchies: sooner or later nearly all of them made some kind of formal statement about which bits were “The Canon.” And the key detail, always, was that the only reason to formally declare something like this was to leave things out. This isn’t always a bad thing! As I said before a lot of this was around establishing a social contract between the authors and the audience—“these are the things we’ll adjust future work to fit, and these are the things we’re giving ourselves permission to ignore.”

The most extreme version of this was Star Wars, twice over. First, you have the overly complex 4-tired canon of the late 90s and early 00s, which not only established the Canon, but also provided a borderline-talmudic conflict resolution system to determine which of two pieces of canon that disagreed with each other was “right”.

Then, after Disney bought LucasFilm, they rescoped the canon, shrinking it down to pretty much just live action movies and the Clone Wars cartoon, banishing all the previous novels and such into the Deuterocanonical wilderness of “Legends”, which is sort of like if Martin Luther had also been the CEO of the company that bought the Catholic Church.

But, the point remains. Canon is way to exclude works, largely as an attention-conservation device, a way for a franchise to say “this is what what we commit to pay attention to, and the rest of this is fun but we’re going to ignore it.”

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Which is where we get back to Doctor Who.

Because Doctor Who is unique in that no one in a position to do so has ever made a formal declaration about “Canon”. And this makes a certain kind of fan go absolutely bananas.

There’s no point in having a canon if you’re not excluding something; the whole point is to draw a box around part, rather than the whole thing. And that just isn’t Doctor Who’s style.

There’s a quote from 70s script editor Terrance Dicks that I can’t find at the moment, that goes somesthing like “Doctor Who’s continuity is whatever the general public can remember,” and that’s really the animating principle. It’s a more free-wheeling, “it’s all true”, don’t sweat the details kind of attitude. This is how you end up with three completely different and utterly incompatible destructions of Atlantis. It’s not really a show that gets wrapped up in the tiny details? It’s a big picture, big concepts, moving forward kind of show.

And this completely violates the social contract of something like Star Trek or Star Wars, where the implied promise of having a Canon is that everything inside it will fit together like clockwork, and that any “violations” are opportunities for deep navel-gazing stories explaining the reasons. This leads to those franchises worst impulses, for example both to aggressively change how the Klingons look in an attempt to prove that “this isn’t your Dad’s Star Trek”, and then also spend three episodes with the guy from Quantum Leap explaining why they look different.

Doctor Who on the other hand, just kind of says “hey! Look how cool the Cybermen look now!” and keeps moving.

The point is, if you’ve bought into the clockwork canon worldview, Who looks incredibly sloppy, like a bunch of careless bunglers just keep doing things without any consideration of what came before.

(Which is really funny, because I absolutely guarantee you that the people who have been running Who the last two decades are much bigger fans of the old show than anyone who’s worked on Star Trek over the same period.)

So when the show got big in the US, the American fans kept trying to apply the Star Trek rules and kept getting terribly upset. This has spawned a fair amount of, shall we say, internet discussion over the years. The definitive statement on Doctor Who’s lack of canon is probably Paul Cornell’s Canonicity in Doctor Who. But there’s those Trek fans that remain unconvinced. Whenever the show tosses out something new that doesn’t really fit with the existing material—bigeneration, say—there’s the fan cohort that goes completely mental. Because if you treat decades old stuff as having higher precedence that new ideas, the whole thing looks sloppy and careless.

But it’s not carelessness, it’s just a different world view to how this kind of storytelling works. Thematically, it all works together. The details? Not the point.

I tend to think of Who working more like Greek Myths than a documentary about fictional people. Do all the stories about Hercules fit together? No, not really. Is he always the same guy in those stories? Yes, yes he is.

Same rules apply to the madman in a box. And if someone has a better idea for a new story, they should go ahead and tell it. Atlantis can always drown one more time.

Sunday Linkblog, Nightmare before Christmas edition

Noted science fiction author and unrepentant Burrito Criminal John Scalzi has spent every day of December reviewing various “Comfort Watches”, movies you can, as he says, enjoy every time and watch with your brain turned off.

So far, every movie on this list has caused me to ho “heck yes! Love that movie!” when the title pops up in me feed reader. I’ve been meaning to link to this series for a while, so let me gesture towards two fo them for you.

Today’s was The December Comfort Watches, Day Seventeen: The Nightmare Before Christmas. I fully endorse everything he has to say about it, but especially that Danny Elfman’s work was and continues to be the main attraction.

He’s about a decade older than I am so I didn’t come on board with Oingo Boingo like he did; my entry point was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which was just about the greatest movie my then 7-year old mind could imagine. (Well, greatest movie with Luke Skywalker in it, obviously.). Even then, the music was incredible. I spent hours designing breakfast-making Rube Goldberg machines on paper, and that wasn’t just because Abe Lincoln’s expression was funny.

I can’t now recall when I saw Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice, so instead flash forward with me to Batman ’89. Recall how the movie opens: the camera is moving though some kind of strange.. Tunnels? Canyons? It’s not clear. Meanwhile, what’s immediately one of the greatest movie themes of all time is playing over the credits. It’s perfect music for Batman, a little spooky, a little exciting, has a kind of haunted church organ thing happening. The music kicks up a gear, and the camera pulls out of the whatever-the-ares, and it turns out we’ve been flying along inside the Batman logo; and as the logo fills the frame and the music starts going “BUM BUM BUM BUM BUMMM”, 11-year old me thought that was the single coolest thing he had ever seen. Even today, when I occasionally rewatch the movie, that shot sends me right back to being 11 and thinking “holy smokes, they really made a Batman movie!”

Anyway, after that, I was on-board for whatever those guys did.

When Nightmare came out— checks notes huh, also thirty years ago, would you look at that, what the heck was in the water in ’93—I was pumped for it.

It did not disappoint. All three of the major creatives—Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman—have done great work since, but nothing better than this. The absolute peak for everyone involved, and considering their other work, that’s saying something.

However! As long as I have you here, I wish to also call your attention to the Special Edition re-release of the soundtrack from some years ago. This had Patrick Stewart re-record the opening narration, which is as you would expect excellent, but also record the original unused closing narration.

Reader, Nightmare is an almost perfect movie, but I think that ending would have been even better.

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As an addendum, let me also direct you to: The December Comfort Watches, Day Six: Down With Love. Down With Love isn’t so much under-rated as under-acknowledged, there are days I think maybe I dreamed it since no one else ever seems to remember this movie exists. It’s phenomenally good, a movie where absolutely everyone is doing career-best work and knows exactly what the job is. Other than general relief that someone else has seen it, I also mention this because my kids are both at an arts-heavy school, and they’re talking about what pieces from movies they could use as an audition piece. And there a… thing? Towards the end of the movie? Which even obliquely mentioning is too much of a spoiler, but 1) after they shot that they should have directly handed Rene Zellweger the Oscar for that year, and 2) would be an incredible audition monologue. So I’m trying to figure out how to trick my teenagers into watching a 20-year old spoof of a 50-year old movie series.

Doom @ 30

I feel like there have been a surprising number of “30th anniversaries” this year, I hadn’t realized what a nerd-culture nexus 1993 was!

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So, Doom! Rather than belabor points covered better elsewhere, I’ll direct your attention to Rock Paper Shotgun’s excellent series on Doom At 30.

I had a little trouble with experienced journalists talking about Doom as a game that came out before they were born, I’m not going to lie. A very “roll me back into my mummy case” moment.

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Doom came out halfway though my second year of high school, if I’m doing my math right. My friends and I had all played Wolfenstein, had been reading about it in PC Gamer, we knew it was coming, we were looking forward to it.

At the time, every nerd group had “the guy that could get stuff.” Which usually meant the one with well-off lax parents. Maybe going through a divorce? This was the early 90s, so we were a little past the “do you know where your kids are” era, but by today’s standards we were still pretty… under-supervised. Our guy showed up at school with a stack of 3.5-inch floppies one day. He’d got the shareware version of Doom from somewhere.

I can’t now remember if we fired it up at the school or if we took it to somebody’s house; but I _do_ remember that this was one of maybe three or four times where I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was seeing.¹

Our 386 PC couldn’t really handle it, but Doom had a mode where you could shrink the window down in the center of the monitor, so the computer had fewer pixels to worry about. I played Doom shrunk down nearly all the way, with as much border as image, crouched next to the monitor like I was staring into a porthole to another world.

I think it holds up surprisingly well. The stripped-down, high-speed, arcade-like mechanics, the level design that perfectly matches what the engine can and can’t do, the music, the just whole vibe of the thing. Are later games more sophisticated? Sure, no question. Are they better? Well… Not at shooting demons on a Mars base while early 90s synth-rock plays, no.

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Reading about Doom’s anniversary this last week, I discovered that the current term of art for newly made Doom-like retro-style shooters is “Boomer Shooter.” I know everyone forgets Gen-X exists, that’s part of our thing, but this will not stand. The Boomers can’t have this one—there is no more quintessentially, universal “Gen-X” experience than playing Doom.

Other than everyone forgetting we exist and giving the Boomers credit, that is.

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1. The others, off the top of my head, were probably the original Kings Quest, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto III, and Breath of the Wild.

Friday Linkblog, don’t-be-evil edition

I’ve been meaning to link to these for a while, but keeping some thematic unity with this week, the Verge has has a whole series of articles on Google at 25. My favorites were: The end of the Googleverse and The people who ruined the internet.

(Also, that second article links to Ed Zitron’s excellent The Internet is Already Broken, which I also recommend)

As someone who was both a legal adult and college graduate before Google happened, it’s deeply strange to realize that I lived through the entire era where Google “worked”; before it choked out on SEO content-farm garbage, advertising conflicts of interest, and general enshittification.

And then, Google lost the antitrust case against Epic; see: The Verge, Ars.

(As an aside a certain class of nerd are losing their damn minds that Google lost but Apple didn’t. The Ars comment thread in particular is a showcase of Dunning-Kruger hallucinations of what they wish the law was instead of what it really is.)

I bring this all up so I can tell this story:

Back in the early 2000s, probably 2003 or 4 based on where I was and who I was talking to, I remember a conversation I had about the then-new “don’t be evil” Google. The persons I was talking to were very enthusiastic about them. Recall, there was still the mood in the room that “we” had finally beat Microsoft, they’d lost the antritrust case, the web was going to defeat Windows, and so on.

And I distinctly remember saying something like “Microsoft just operated like an old railroad monopoly, so we already knew how to be afraid of them. We haven’t learned how to be afraid of companies like google yet.”

And, reader: “LOL”. “LMAO”, even. Because, go back and read the stuff in Epic’s lawsuit against Google—Google was doing the exact same stuff that Microsoft got nailed for twenty years ago. To call myself out here on main, we already DID know how to be afraid of google, we just bought their marketing hook, line, and sinker.

We were all so eager to get past Microsoft’s stranglehold on computers that we just conned ourselves into handing even more control to an even worse company. Unable to imagine computers not being dominated by a company, so hey, at least this one isn’t Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T!

(This is the same fallacy that bugs me about Satanists—they want to rebel, but buy into all the same fundamental assumptions about the universe, but they just root for the other team. Those people never actually go outside the box they started in, and become, say, Buddhists.)

A decade ago this is where I would have 800 words endorsing FOSS as the solution, but I think at this point, deep down, we all know that isn’t the answer either.

Maybe this time, lets try regulating the hell out of all of this, and then try hard to pay attention and not get scammed by the next big company that comes along and flirts with us? Let's put some energy into getting out of the box instead of just finding one with nicer branding.

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.

---

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.

⁂

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.

⁂

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?

⁂

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.)

⁂

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.

⁂

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.

⁂

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.

⁂

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

⁂

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.

⁂

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.

⁂

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?

⁂

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?

⁂

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

⁂

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.