End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 3 : Pop Culture & General Potpourri

I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 3: Pop Culture and other random items. Let’s see if I can avoid accidentally fuging out into a rant today!

An Oral History of Tim Curry’s Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism. To paraphrase something I read once, Tim Curry was in a lot of 1-star movies, but he was the reason for that one star. Come for the amazing behind-the-scenes stories, and stay for people who actually work in space being humorless jerks.

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge Why is there an unused pedestrian bridge over the interstate from a taco bell to a warehouse? Great setup, and then a whole set of incredible punchlines & reveals. Mini-Spoiler: there is an answer, and it has a whole lot of things to unpack.

How We Turned the Tide in the Roach Wars Something I had absolutely no idea about.

The coloured stripes that explain climate change & #ShowYourStripes. Very snazzy data visualization project to do simple diagrams of the average temperature over time. The image for where I live was, depressingly, exactly was I was expecting.

Hilchos (Laws) of Xmas. What if Christmas was a Jewish holiday? (Subtitled for the humor impaired: this is satire)

‘Tetris’ Review: Taron Egerton In Thrilling Video Game Origin Story – Deadline This is a positive review of the Tetris movie, but Pete Hammond casually mentions at the outset that he’d never even heard of Tetris before seeing the movie. How is that possible? I have so many follow-up questions.

Mattel didn’t want their executive to get shot in ‘Barbie’ beach scene Before Barbie came out, there was a story going around that there was a scene Mattel didn’t want in the movie, and the CEO flew out to the set to try and talk Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig out of it. Allegedly, they performed it for him live, whereupon he withdrew all objections. The specific scene it was went unmentioned. After watching the movie, I tried to guess which one, and it turns out I was right.

FXRant: The Most Egregious Example of "We Didn't Use CGI" Mythology (So Far)

The ocean grave for 264 spacecraft. Point Nemo! POINT NEMO!! My next tabletop RPG campaign is going to include a heist of spaceship parts from Point Nemo.

The defector tracked down the person in wikipedia’s photo for “shrug”: In Search Of Wikipedia's Shrug Guy | Defector

Also don’t miss: The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s 'high five' photos

History | AMEDD Center of History & Heritage: COMBAT INTERVIEWS: BATTLE OF HURTGEN FOREST. Finally, my Grandfather (with a slightly misspelled last name) makes an unexpected cameo halfway through this fairly dry description of the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest!

End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 2: AI & Other Tech

I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 2: AI and Other Various Tech Topics

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | The New Yorker

At one point, I had a draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself with a whole bunch of empty space about 2/3 down with “coding craft guy?” written in the middle. I didn’t end up using it because, frankly, I didn’t have anything nice to say, and, whatever. Then I had two different family members ask me about this over the holidays in a concerned tone of voice, so okay, lets do this.

This guy. This freakin’ guy. Let’s set this up. We have New Yorker article where a programmer talks about how he used to think programming was super-important, but now with the emergence of “the AIs”, maybe his craft is coming to an end. It’s got all the things that usually bother me about AI articles: bouncing back and forth between “look at this neat toy!” and “this is utterly inevitable and will replace all of us”, a preemptively elegiac tone, a total failure to engage with any of the social, moral, or political issues around “AI”, that these “inevitable changes” are the direct result of decisions being made on purpose by real people with an ideology and an agenda. All that goes unacknowledged! That’s what should bother me.

But no, what actually bothered me was that. I spent the whole time reading this thinking “I’d bounce this guy in an interview so fast.” Because he’s incredibly bad at his chosen profession. His examples of what he used GPT for are insane. Let’s go to the tape!

At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway. It’s not real programming.

Wait, what? What? WHAT! He’s right, that’s not real programming, but a real programmer can knock that out faster than they can write. No one who writes code for a living should have to think about this for any length of time. This is like a carpenter saying that putting nails in straight isn’t real carpentry. “Tried Googling?” Tried? But then he follows up with:

A few days later, Ben talked about how it would be nice to have an iPhone app to rate words from the dictionary. But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app. I’d tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked. I found Apple’s programming environment forbidding. You had to learn not just a new language but a new program for editing and running code; you had to learn a zoo of “U.I. components” and all the complicated ways of stitching them together; and, finally, you had to figure out how to package the app. The mountain of new things to learn never seemed worth it.

There are just under 2 million iOS apps, all of them written by someone, usually many someones, who could “figure it out”. But this guy looked into it “ a few times”, and the fact that it was too hard for him was somehow… not his fault? No self-reflection, there? “You had to learn not just a new language but a new program…”? Any reasonably senior programmer is fluent in at least half of the TIOBE top 20, uses half-a dozen IDEs or tools at once.

But that last line in the quote there. That last line is what haunts me. “The mountain of new things to learn never seemed worth it.” Every team I’ve ever worked on has had one of these guys—and they are always men—half-ass, self-taught dabblers, bush league, un-professional. Guys who steadfastly refuse to learn anything new after they made it into the field. Later, after all the talk about school, it turns out his degree is in economics; he couldn’t even be bothered not to half-ass it while he was literally paying people to teach him this stuff. The sheer nerve of someone who couldn’t even be bothered to learn what he needed to know to get a degree to speak for the rest of us.

I’ve been baffled by the emergence of GPT-powered coding assistants—why would someone want a tool that hallucinates possible-but-untested solutions? That are usually wrong? And that by defintion you don’t know how to check? And I finally understand, it turns out it’s the economists that decided to go be shitty programmers instead. Who uses GPT? People who’ve been looking for shortcuts their whole life, and found a new one. Got it.

And look, I know—I know— this is bothering me way more than it should. But this attitude—learning new things is too hard, why should I care about the basics—is endemic in this industry. And that’s the job. Thats why we got into this in the first place. Instead, we’re getting dragged into a an industry-wide moral hazard because Xcode’s big ass Play Button is too confusing?

I’ll tell you what this sharpened up, though. I have a new lead-off question for technical interviews: “Tell me the last thing you learned.”

looonnng exhale

Look! More links!

Defective Accelerationism a concise and very funny summary of what a loser Sam Altman is; I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw the link to this?

Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real | Scientific American; over in SciAm, Charlie Stross writes a cleaned up version of his talk I linked to back in You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”.

Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism

Pluralistic: The moral injury of having your work enshittified (25 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Finally, we have an amusing dustup over in the open source world: Michael Tsai - Blog - GitHub Code Search Now Requires Logging In.

The change github made is fine, but the open source dorks are acting like github declared war on civilization itself. Click through to the github issue if you want to watch the most self-important un-self-aware dinguses ruin their own position, by basically freaking out that someone giving them something for free might have conditions. WHICH IS PRETTY RICH coming from the folks that INVENTED “free with conditions.” I accidentally spent half an hour reading it muttering “this is why we always lose” under my breath.

End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 1: Mastodon

I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 1: The Twitter to Mastodon migration, or lack thereof.

I was going do to a whole piece on mastodon last summer. At first, the second half of what became What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023 was going to be a roundup of alternatives and why none of them were replacements for what I missed, then that got demoted to a bunch of footnotes, then it’s own thing, but I just can’t be bothered because the moment was lost.

The short, short version is that from the end of ’21 and through the first half of ’22 there was an really intersting moment where we could have built an open alternative to twitter. Instead, they built another space space for white male nerds, and the internet didn’t need one more of those.

Mastodon somehow manges to embody every flaw of open source projects: they brought a protocol to a product fight, no one’s even thinking about it as a product, misfeatures dressed up as virtue, and a weirdly hostile userbase that’s too busy patting each other on the back to noice who’s been left out. A whole bunch of gatekeeping bullshit dressed up as faux-libertarian morality. Mixed with this very irritating evangelistic true-believer vibe where Mastodon is the “morally correct” one to use, so there’s no reason to listen to reasons why people don’t use it, because axiomatically, they must be wrong.

And look, this is coming from a guy with an active subscription to Ivory. But the communities on twitter I cared about just aren’t there. They went elsewhere, or just dispersed into the web. I understand that there are people who found what they had on twitter on mastodon, and as before I can only quote former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”

One of the key works of our time is that episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon realizes that actually, she was the bully in high school. Mastodon was built entirely by people that never had that realization.

Michael Tsai - Blog - Why Has Mastodon Adoption Stalled?

Blue Skies Over Mastodon

jwz: Mastodon stampede Pretty great comment thread on this one, including this amazing line, re the mastodon developers:

And for this it’s a general Stallman problem. “I don’t understand this. Therefore you are wrong.”

jwz: Mastodon's Mastodon'ts

The nerd rage respones to jwz’s entirely reasonable (and positive!) critique is everything you need to know. I’ve got enough weird HOA scolds in my real life without going on Al Gore’s internet and seeking them out.

Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon | Scientific Reports

(I could have sworn I had more open tabs here, but I think I’m remembering frustrated twitter threads instead)

Station Ident: 2024

This is Icecano. The name comes from a mis-remembered line in a mid-70s Doctor Who story.

My name is Gabriel Helman. I’ve been making computers do things since the late nineteen-hundreds. I also write things on the web.

Welcome to 2024. Let’s see what happens.

Year in review, self-linkblog-edition

A long time ago (longer now than it seems,) I used to write a lot. Flash forward a few lifetimes, I sat down at the end of last year to try and do something a little more complex than normal, and realized that I’d basically forgotten how to write everything other than technical specs or slack messages.

I needed to get back into shape, and to do that I needed some practice. A lot of practice.

So, I triggered the Genesis Device on this URL and relit the blog as an explicit project to re-teach myself how to write. I had a vague goal of doing about two pieces a week, focused on covering tech and pop culture; maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively?

Well, it’s been a year. How’d it go?

Including this one, I ended up with 117 pieces, which is just over two a week, but a cursory glance at the archives reveals very very few times I ever hit exactly two a week, and certainly never Tech Tuesday / Pop Culture Thursday.

The schedule wasn’t the actual goal though, the goal was to just keep playing the scales and see where the wind took me. I ended up just north of 110,000 words for the year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the blog.

It really look a while to get going. I’m a much slower writer than I used to be (or at least, remember being,) so one of the hardest parts has been finding the time to actually do the writing, and then building a habit around it. The other big thing I had to re-learn was how to actually finish things.

By the end of the summer I was posting little things on a fairly regular basis, but a deep backlog of half-finished drafts. As a piece of self-deprecating humor, the tag for “the big ones” was for pieces that stayed stuck in draft form for more than a month. For example, the first draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself had a file date in February, and the first draft of Fractals was at the start of July, and 2023’s strange box office was half-done before Barbenheimer even came out. (They all turned out pretty well, I think?)

But! The rust finally started to come off for real as I was recovering from COVID in October, I refocused on actually finishing things in the backlog at the start of November, and as of this post, the drafts folder is empty.

(And I’m not going to say there’s a direct correlation with the blog output hitting a groove and twitter imploding, but that’s not a total coincidence either, you know?)

My biggest surprise has been that I was expecting to do a lot more tech & software engineering writing, and that didn’t end up being where the inspiration flowed. Eyeing my tag stats, I have 66 pieces for pop culture, and 42 for tech, and so hey, thats a fun number to hit, but I was expecting the ratio to go the other way.

In roughly chronological order, here’s some of my favorite pieces I did this year.

On the tech side of the house:

• Space Glasses and Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone works as a solid pair, and was me washing a half-decade of work out of my hair, as it were
• Drobo Ragnarök
• Why didn’t you just use…
• What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023
• Don't Guess When You Can Ask
• I spent most of the year steaming about AI, and finally wrangled a whole pile of drafts into Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself and its prologue, You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which ended up with a bunch of material that was originally going to go in the main piece, but worked better there.
• Layoff Season(s), which I originally wrote in March, didn’t publish because I thought it was too grumpy, and then by December I realized it wasn’t grumpy enough.

And on the pop culture side:

• Wild Things at 25
• Correct, Orcas are not our friends
• Wait, Which Hundred?
• What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
• Apple Music vs(?) The Beatles
• Still out there: The X-Files at 30
• Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”
• Email Verification
• My four Doctor Who reviews:
  • Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)
  • Doctor Who and the Wild Blue Yonder
  • Doctor Who and the Giggle
  • Doctor Who and The Church on Ruby Road
• 2023’s strange box office
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
• Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)
• It’ll Be Worth It
• “It’s accurate, Captain”; I’d been meaning to write something about Strange New Worlds all year, and finally found an excuse right at the end. It was also a nice example of why I was doing this blog in the first place; at the start of the year, that piece would have taken me weeks to put together, languishing through draft after partial draft; by the end of December I was able to go from “hey, that might be a funny post” to “scheduled for publication” in about 90 minutes. Practice really does pay off, y’all!

All that said, I don’t know if it was the best, but my absolutely favorite piece I did this year was Fractals.

⁂

A few other stray observations.

You can really spot the period in late summer/fall where I wasn’t getting enough sleep and the blog got extremely grouchy. Favorite Programming Language Features: Swift’s Exception handling with Optionals was the result me realizing I had written way too may grouchy posts in a row and telling myself, “go write about something you like! Anything!” I’m not sure it’s obvious that the blog has gotten less grouchy since then, but that’s the point where I started paying attention.

Meanwhile, my posts with the most traffic were:

• The Enshittification Curve
• What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
• What the heck happened to Boing Boing?

All of which popped off on one search engine or another; I was Google’s number 2 hit for “enshittification curve” for a bit over the summer, so that was exciting.

Like many, many podcast listeners, I’ve been a (mostly?) happy Squarespace customer for many years. This project has really stretched what their platform is good at, though; it’s great for infrequently updated sites—restaurants, small businesses, portfolios, and the like—but daily blogs with complex formatting is outside their wheelhouse, to say the least. I spent the year slowly realizing I was trying to recreate wordpress inside squarespace’s editor, and “hmmmm”.

⁂

I have a few loose piecs queued up for the start of the year, but then I think I’m gonna pump the brakes a little. I’ve got a few longer-form things I want to try and do next year, so I’m going to see if I can redirect this habit I’ve built in a slightly different way.

So Happy New Year, everyone! This year was pretty good, all things considered. Let’s make the next one ever better.

Fractals

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Part 1: DFW

1. Let me tell you a story about something that happens to me. Maybe it happens to you?
2. This same thing has happened probably a dozen times, if not more, over the last couple of decades. I’ll be in a group some kind, where the membership is not entirely optional—classmates, coworkers, other parents at the kid’s school—and the most irritating, obnoxious member of the group, the one I have the least in common with and would be the least likely to spend time with outside of whatever it is we’re doing, will turn to me, face brightening, and say “Hey! I bet you’re a huge fan of David Foster Wallace.”
3. I’ve learned that the correct answer to this is a succinct “you know, he didn’t invent footnotes.”^A
4. Because reader, they do not bet correctly. To be very clear: I have never¹ read any of his work. I’m aware he exists, and there was that stretch in the late 90s where an unread copy of Infinite Jest seemed to spontaneously materialize on everyone’s shelves. But I don’t have an opinion on the guy?²
5. I have to admit another reaction, in that in addition to this behavior, most of the people⁴¹ you run in to that actually recommend his work are deeply obnoxious.^α
6. So, I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this is somehow meant as an insult. There’s a vague “attempted othering” about it; it's never presented as “I liked this and I bet you will too,” or “Aha, I finally found a thing we have in common!” it’s more of “Oh, I bet you’re one of those people”. It’s the snap of satisfaction that gets to me. The smug air of “oh, I’ve figured you out.”
7. And look, I’m a late-era Gen-X computer nerd programmer—there are plenty of stereotypes I’ll own up to happily. Star Wars fan? Absolutely. The other 80s nerd signifiers? Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Monty Python? Sure, yep, yep. Doctor Who used to be the outlier, but not so much anymore.³ William Gibson, Hemmingway, Asimov? For sure.
8. But this one I don’t understand. Because it cant just be footnotes, right?
9. I bring all this up because Patricia Lockwood⁴ has written a truly excellent piece on DFW: [Where be your jibes now?].⁷ It’s phenomenal, go read it!
10. But, I suspect I read it with a unique viewpoint. I devoured it with one question: “am I right to keep being vaguely insulted?”
11. And, he nervously laughed, I still don’t know!
12. She certainly seems to respect him, but not actually like him very much? I can’t tell! It’s evocative, but ambiguous? It’s nominally a review of his last, unfinished, posthumously published book, but then works its way though his strange and, shall we say, “complicated” reputation, and then his an overview of the rest of his work.
13. And I have the same reaction I did every time I hear about his stuff, which is some combination of “that guy sounds like he has problems” (he did) and “that book sounds awful” (they do).
14. “I bet you’re a fan”
15. Why? Why do you bet that?
16. I’m self-aware enough to know that the correct response to all this is probably just to [link to this onion article] And I guess there’s one way to know.
17. But look. I’m just not going to read a million pages to find out.

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

1. Inevitably, this is after I’ve written something full of footnotes.^B
2. Well, to expand on that, this usually happens right after I write something with a joke buried in a footnote. I think footnotes are funny! Or rather, I think they’re incredibly not funny by default, a signifier of a particular flavor of dull academic writing, which means any joke you stash in one becomes automatically funnier by virtue of surprise.^C
3. I do like footnotes, but what I really like is hypertext. I like the way hypertext can spider-web out, spreading in all directions. Any text always has asides, backstory, details, extending fractally out. There’s always more to say about everything. Real life, even the simple parts, doesn’t fit into neat linear narratives. Side characters have full lives, things got where they are somehow, everything has an explanation, a backstory, more details, context. So, generally writing is as much the art of figuring out what to leave out as anything. But hypertext gives you a way to fit all those pieces together, to write in a way that’s multidimensional.^D
4. Fractals. There’s always more detail. Another story. “On that subject…”^E
5. Before we could [link] to things, the way to express that was footnotes. Even here, on the system literally called “the web”, footnotes still work as a coherent technique for wrangling hypertext into something easier to get your arms around.^F
6. But the traditional hypertext [link] is focused on detail—to find out more, click here! The endless cans of rabbit holes of wikipedia’s links to other articles. A world where every noun has a blue underline leading to another article, and another, and so on.^G
7. Footnotes can do that, but they have another use that links don’t—they can provide commentary.¹³ A well deployed footnote isn’t just “click here to read more”, it’s a commentary, annotations, a Gemara.^H
8. I come by my fascination with footnotes honestly: The first place I ever saw footnotes deployed in an interesting way was, of all things, a paper in a best-of collection of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.⁹ Someone submitted a paper that was only a half-sentence long and then had several pages of footnotes that contained the whole paper, nested in on itself.¹² I loved this. It was like a whole new structure opened up that had been right under my nose the whole time.^J
9. Although, if I’m honest, the actual origin of my love of footnotes is probably reading too many choose your own adventure books.¹⁷
10. I am also a huge fan of overly-formalist structural bullshit, obviously.^α

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

1. What do you do with art that’s recommended by obnoxious people?⁴⁰
2. In some ways, this is not totally unlike how to deal with art made by “problematic” artists; where if we entirely restricted our intake to art made exclusively by good people, we’d have Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and not much else. But maintaining an increasingly difficult cognitive dissonance while watching Annie Hall is one thing, but when someone you don’t like recommends something?³⁸
3. To be fair, or as fair as possible, most of this has very, very little to do with the art itself. Why has a movie about space wizards overthrowing space fascists become the favorite movie of actual earth fascists? Who knows? The universe is strange. It’s usually not healthy to judge art by its worst fans.³⁶
4. Usually.
5. In my experience, art recommended by obnoxious people takes roughly three forms:³²
6. There’s art where normal people enjoy it, and it’s broadly popular, and then there’s a deeply irritating toxic substrate of people who maybe like it just a little too much to be healthy. ³⁰
7. Star Trek is sort of the classic example here, or Star Wars, or Monty Python, or, you know, all of sports. Things that are popular enough where there’s a group of people who have tried to paper over a lack personality by memorizing lines from a 70s BBC sketch comedy show, or batter’s statistics from before they were born. ²⁸
8. Then there’s the sort of art that unlocks a puzzle, where, say, you have a coworker who is deeply annoying for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, and then you find out their favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. A weight lifts, aha, you say, got it. It all makes sense now. ²⁶
24. And then, there’s art²⁴ that exclusively comes into your life from complete dipshits.
23. The trick is figuring out which one you're dealing with.^q

---

Part 4: Endnotes

1. What never? Well, hardly ever!
2. I think I read the thing where he was rude about cruises?
3. And boy, as an aside, “I bet you’re a Doctor Who fan” has meant at least four distinct things since I started watching Tom Baker on PBS in the early 80s.
4. Who⁵ presumably got early parole from her thousand years of jail.⁶
5. In the rough draft of this I wrote “Patricia Highsmith,” and boy would that be a whole different thing!
6. Jail for mother!
7. In the spirit of full disclosure, she wrote it back in July, whereupon I saved it to Instapaper and didn’t read it until this week. I may not be totally on top of my list of things to read?³⁵
8. "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967)
9. The JoIR is a forum for papers that look and move like scientific papers, but are also a joke.
10. The bartender is a die-hard Radiers fan; he happily launches into a diatribe about what a disaster the Las Vegas move has been, but that F1 race was pretty great. A few drinks in, he wants to tell you about his “radical” art installation in the back room? To go look, turn to footnote ω To excuse yourself, turn to footnote 20
11. I knew a girl in college whose ex-boyfriend described Basic Instinct as his favorite movie, and let me tell you, every assumption you just made about that guy is true.
12. Although, in fairness, that JoIR paper was probably directly inspired by that one J. G. Ballard story.⁸
13. This was absurdly hard²¹ to put together.³⁹
14. The elf pulls his hood back and asks: “Well met, traveller! What was your opinion of the book I loaned you?” He slides a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men across the table. To have no opinion, turn to footnote d. To endorse it enthusiastically, turn to footnote α
15. Or is it five?
16. You’re right, that bar was sus. Good call, adventurer! To head further into town, turn to footnote 20. To head back out into the spooky woods, go to footnote 22.
17. You stand in the doorway of a dark and mysterious tavern. Miscreants and desperadoes of all description fill the smoky, shadowed room. You’re looking for work. Your sword seems heavier than normal at your side as you step into the room. If you... Talk to the bartender, turn to footnote 10. Talk to the hooded Elf in the back corner, turn to footnote 14. To see what’s going on back outside, turn to footnote 16.
18. "Glass Onion” from The Beatles, aka The White Album
19. Superscript and anchor tags for the link out, then an ordered list where each List Item has to have a unique id so that those anchor tags can link back to them.²³
20. You head into town. You find a decent desk job; you only mean to work there for a bit, but it’s comfortable and not that hard, so you stay. Years pass, and your sword grows dusty in the back room. You buy a minivan! You get promoted to Director of Internal Operations, which you can never describe correctly to anyone. Then, the market takes a downturn, and you’re one of the people who get “right sized”. They offer you a generous early retirement. To take it, turn to footnote 25. To decline, turn to footnote 22.
21. But did you know that HTML doesn’t have actual support³³ for footnotes?²³

22. You journey into the woods. You travel far, journeying across the blasted plains of Hawksroost, the isles of Ka’ah’wan-ah, you climb the spires of the Howling Mountains, you delve far below the labyrinth of the Obsidian Citadel; you finally arrive at the domain of the Clockwork Lord, oldest of all things. Its ancient faces turns towards you, you may ask a boon.

    “Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”: Footnote 27

    “I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25

23. I have no idea how this will look in most browsers.³¹
24. This usually still isn’t a direct comment on the art itself, but on the other hand, healthy people don’t breathlessly rave about Basic Instinct,¹¹ you know?

25. Good call! You settle into a comfortable retirement in the suburbs. Your kids grow up, move out, grow old themselves. The years tick by. One day, when the grandkids are over, one of them finds your old sword in the garage. You gingerly pick it up, dislodging generations of cobwebs. You look down, and see old hands holding it, as if for the first time. You don’t answer when one of them asks what it is; you just look out the window. You can’t see the forest anymore, not since that last development went in. You stand there a long time.

    *** You have died ***

26. And turnabout is fair play: I’ve watched people have this a-ha moment with me and Doctor Who.

27. The Clockwork Lord has no expression you can understand, but you know it is smiling. “There is always more,” it says, in infinite kindness. “The door to the left leads to the details you are seeking. The door to the right has the answer you are lacking. You may choose.”

    Left: Footnote a

    Right: Footnote 29

28. Other examples of this category off the top of my head: Catcher in the rye, MASH, all of Shakespeare.

29. You step through the doorway, and find yourself in an unfamiliar house. There are people there, people you do not know. With a flash of insight, you realize the adult is your grandchild, far past the time you knew them, the children are your great-grandchildren, whom you have never met. You realize that you are dead, and have been for many years. All your works have been forgotten, adventures, jobs, struggles, lost as one more grain of sand on the shore of time. Your grandchild, now old themselves, is telling their child a story—a story about you. A minor thing, a trifle, something silly you did at a birthday party once. You had totally forgotten, but the old face of the 6-year old who’s party it was didn’t. They’re telling a story.

    Oh. You see it,

    *** You Have Ascended ***

30. Fanatics, to coin a phrase?
31. This feels like it should have one of those old “works best in Netscape Navigator”, except Netscape would choke on all this CSS.³⁷

32. Björk: (over the phone) I have to say I'm a great fan of triangles.

    Space Ghost: Well, I have to say that I am a great fan of Chuck Norris, and he was in the Delta Force, and the delta was a triangle.

33. Instead you have to code¹⁹ them by hand.
34. Yeah, I see what you did there.
35. Okay, that's also a lie; I've actually been working on this on-and-off since July.¹³
36. Cases in point: I, II, III , IIII
37. Certified: “It works on my machine!”^α
38. Especially when they themselves don’t seem to like it?
39. I mean, the writing itself was tricky enough, with three¹⁵ interleaving essays.
40. Not annoying people, not assholes: obnoxious. Hard to define, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.
41. On the other hand, back in the 90s these people were asking about Robert Anton Wilson or saying “fnord” at me, so some things have gotten better, I guess.
42. That's not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

---

Part 5: No Moral.

Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself

In 20 years time, we’re going to be talking about “generative AI”, in the same tone of voice we currently use to talk about asbestos. A bad idea that initially seemed promising which ultimately caused far more harm than good, and that left a swathe of deeply embedded pollution across the landscape that we’re still cleaning up.

It’s the final apotheosis of three decades of valuing STEM over the Humanities, in parallel with the broader tech industry being gutted and replaced by a string of venture-backed pyramid schemes, casinos, and outright cons.

The entire technology is utterly without value and needs to be scrapped, legislated out of existence, and the people involved need to be forcibly invited to find something better to send their time on. We’ve spent decades operating under the unspoken assumption that just because we can build something, that means it’s inevitable and we have to build it first before someone else does. It’s time to knock that off, and start asking better questions.

⁂

AI is the ultimate form of the joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible and also the portions are too small. The technology has two core problems, both of which are intractable:

1. The output is terrible
2. It’s deeply, fundamentally unethical

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Probably the definite article on generative AI’s quality, or profound lack thereof, is Ted Chiang’s ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; that’s almost a year old now, and everything that’s happened in 2023 has only underscored his points. Fundamentally, we’re not talking about vast cyber-intelligences, we’re talking Sparkling Autocorrect.

Let me provide a personal anecdote.

Earlier this year, a coworker of mine was working on some documentation, and had worked up a fairly detailed outline of what needed to be covered. As an experiment, he fed that outline into ChatGPT, intended to publish the output, and I offered to look over the result.

At first glance it was fine. Digging in, thought, it wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible either—nothing in it was technically incorrect, but it had the quality of a high school book report written by someone who had only read the back cover. Or like documentation written by a tech writer who had a detailed outline they didn’t understand and a word count to hit? It repeated itself, it used far too many words to cover very little ground. It was, for lack of a better word, just kind of a “glurge”. Just room-temperature tepidarium generic garbage.

I started to jot down some editing notes, as you do, and found that I would stare at a sentence, then the whole paragraph, before crossing the paragraph out and writing “rephrase” in the margin. To try and be actually productive, I took a section and started to rewrite in what I thought was better, more concise manner—removing duplicates, omitting needless words. De-glurgifying.

Of course, I discovered I had essentially reconstituted the outline.

I called my friend back and found the most professional possible way to tell him he needed to scrap the whole thing start over.

It left me with a strange feeling, that we had this tool that could instantly generate a couple thousand words of worthless text that at first glance seemed to pass muster. Which is so, so much worse than something written by a junior tech writer who doesn’t understand the subject, because this was produced by something that you can’t talk to, you can’t coach, that will never learn.

On a pretty regular basis this year, someone would pop up and say something along the lines of “I didn’t know the answer, and the docs were bad, so I asked the robot and it wrote the code for me!” and then they would post some screenshots of ChatGPTs output full of a terribly wrong answer. Human’s AI pin demo was full of wrong answers, for heaven’s sake. And so we get this trend where ChatGPT manages to be an expert in things you know nothing about, but a moron about things you’re an expert in. I’m baffled by the responses to the GPT-n “search” “results”; they’re universally terrible and wrong.

And this is all baked in to the technology! It’s a very, very fancy set of pattern recognition based on a huge corpus of (mostly stolen?) text, computing the most probable next word, but not in any way considering if the answer might be correct. Because it has no way to, thats totally outside the bounds of what the system can achieve.

A year and a bit later, and the web is absolutely drowning in AI glurge. Clarkesworld had to suspend submissions for a while to get a handle on blocking the tide of AI garbage. Page after page of fake content with fake images, content no one ever wrote and only meant for other robots to read. Fake articles. Lists of things that don’t exist, recipes no one has ever cooked.

And we were already drowning in “AI” “machine learning” gludge, and it all sucks. The autocorrect on my phone got so bad when they went from the hard-coded list to the ML one that I had to turn it off. Google’s search results are terrible. The “we found this answer for you” thing at the top of the search results are terrible.

It’s bad, and bad by design, it can’t ever be more than a thoughtless mashup of material it pulled in. Or even worse, it’s not wrong so much as it’s all bullshit. Not outright lies, but vaguely truthy-shaped “content”, freely mixing copied facts with pure fiction, speech intended to persuade without regard for truth: Bullshit.

Every generated image would have been better and funnier if you gave the prompt to a real artist. But that would cost money—and that’s not even the problem, the problem is that would take time. Can’t we just have the computer kick something out now? Something that looks good enough from a distance? If I don’t count the fingers?

My question, though, is this: what future do these people want to live in? Is it really this? Swimming a sea of glurge? Just endless mechanized bullshit flooding every corner of the Web?Who looked at the state of the world here in the Twenties and thought “what the world needs right now is a way to generate Infinite Bullshit”?

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Of course, the fact that the results are terrible-but-occasionally-fascinating obscure the deeper issue: It’s a massive plagiarism machine.

Thanks to copyleft and free & open source, the tech industry has a pretty comprehensive—if idiosyncratic—understanding of copyright, fair use, and licensing. But that’s the wrong model. This isn’t about “fair use” or “transformative works”, this is about Plagiarism.

This is a real “humanities and the liberal arts vs technology” moment, because STEM really has no concept of plagiarism. Copying and pasting from the web is a legit way to do your job.

(I mean, stop and think about that for a second. There’s no other industry on earth where copying other people’s work verbatim into your own is a widely accepted technique. We had a sign up a few jobs back that read “Expert level copy and paste from stack overflow” and people would point at it when other people had questions about how to solve a problem!)

We have this massive cultural disconnect that would be interesting or funny if it wasn’t causing so much ruin. This feels like nothing so much as the end result of valuing STEM over the Humanities and Liberal Arts in education for the last few decades. Maybe we should have made sure all those kids we told to “learn to code” also had some, you know, ethics? Maybe had read a couple of books written since they turned fourteen?

So we land in a place where a bunch of people convinced they’re the princes of the universe have sucked up everything written on the internet and built a giant machine for laundering plagiarism; regurgitating and shuffling the content they didn’t ask permission to use. There’s a whole end-state libertarian angle here too; just because it’s not explicitly illegal, that means it’s okay to do it, ethics or morals be damned.

“It’s fair use!” Then the hell with fair use. I’d hate to lose the wayback machine, but even that respects robots.txt.

I used to be a hard core open source, public domain, fair use guy, but then the worst people alive taught a bunch of if-statements to make unreadable counterfit Calvin & Hobbes comics, and now I’m ready to join the Butlerian Jihad.

⁂

Why should I bother reading something that no one bothered to write?

Why should I bother looking at a picure that no one could be bothered to draw?

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Generative AI and it’s ilk are the final apotheosis of the people who started calling art “content”, and meant it.

These are people who think art or creativity are fundamentally a trick, a confidence game. They don’t believe or understand that art can be about something. They reject utter the concept of “about-ness”, the basic concept of “theme” is utterly beyond comprehension. The idea that art might contain anything other than its most surface qualities never crosses their mind. The sort of people who would say “Art should soothe, not distract”. Entirely about the surface aesthetic over anything.

(To put that another way, these are the same kind people who vote Republican but listen to Rage Against the Machine.)

Don’t respect or value creativity.

Don’t respect actual expertise.

Don’t understand why they can’t just have what someone else worked for. It’s even worse than wanting to pay for it, these creatures actually think they’re entitled to it for free because they know how to parse a JSON file. It feels like the final end-point of a certain flavor of free software thought: no one deserves to be paid for anything. A key cultual and conceptual point past “information wants to be free” and “everything is a remix”. Just a machine that endlessly spits out bad copies of other work.

They don’y understand that these are skills you can learn, you have to work at, become an expert in. Not one of these people who spend hours upon hours training models or crafting prompts ever considered using that time to learn how to draw. Because if someone else can do it, they should get access to that skill for free, with no compensation or even credit.

This is why those machine generated Calvin & Hobbes comics were such a shock last summer; anyone who had understood a single thing about Bill Watterson’s work would have understood that he’d be utterly opposed to something like that. It’s difficult to fathom someone who liked the strip enough to do the work to train up a model to generate new ones while still not understanding what it was about.

“Consent” doesn’t even come up. These are not people you should leave your drink uncovered around.

But then you combine all that with the fact that we have a whole industry of neo-philes, desperate to work on something New and Important, terrified their work might have no value.

(See also: the number of abandoned javascript frameworks that re-solve all the problems that have already been solved.)

As a result, tech has an ongoing issue with cool technology that’s a solution in search of a problem, but ultimately is only good for some kind of grift. The classical examples here are the blockchain, bitcoin, NFTs. But the list is endless: so-called “4th generation languages”, “rational rose”, the CueCat, basically anything that ever got put on the cover of Wired.

My go-to example is usually bittorrent, which seemed really exciting at first, but turned out to only be good at acquiring TV shows that hadn’t aired in the US yet. (As they say, “If you want to know how to use bittorrent, ask a Doctor Who fan.”)

And now generative AI.

There’s that scene at the end of Fargo, where Frances McDormand is scolding The Shoveler for “all this for such a tiny amount of money”, and thats how I keep thinking about the AI grift carnival. So much stupid collateral damage we’re gonna be cleaning up for years, and it’s not like any of them are going to get Fuck You(tm) rich. No one is buying an island or founding a university here, this is all so some tech bros can buy the deluxe package on their next SUV. At least crypto got some people rich, and was just those dorks milking each other; here we all gotta deal with the pollution.

But this feels weirdly personal in a way the dunning-krugerrands were not. How on earth did we end up in a place where we automated art, but not making fast food, or some other minimum wage, minimum respect job?

For a while I thought this was something along one of the asides in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, where people with meaningless jobs hate it when other people have meaningful ones. The phenomenon of “If we have to work crappy jobs, we want to pull everyone down to our level, not pull everyone up”. See also: “waffle house workers shouldn’t make 25 bucks an hour”, “state workers should have to work like a dog for that pension”, etc.

But no, these are not people with “bullshit jobs”, these are upper-middle class, incredibly comfortable tech bros pulling down a half a million dollars a year. They just don’t believe creativity is real.

But because all that apparently isn’t fulfilling enough, they make up ghost stories about how their stochastic parrots are going to come alive and conquer the world, how we have to build good ones to fight the bad ones, but they can’t be stopped because it’s inevitable. Breathless article after article about whistleblowers worried about how dangerous it all is.

Just the self-declared best minds of our generation failing the mirror test over and over again.

This is usually where someone says something about how this isn’t a problem and we can all learn to be “prompt engineers”, or “advisors”. The people trying to become a prompt advisor are the same sort who would be proud they convinced Immortan Joe to strap them to the back of the car instead of the front.

This isn’t about computers, or technology, or “the future”, or the inevitability of change, or the march or progress. This is about what we value as a culture. What do we want?

⁂

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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At the start of the year, the dominant narrative was that AI was inevitable, this was how things are going, get on board or get left behind.

Thats… not quite how the year went?

AI was a centerpiece in both Hollywood strikes, and both the Writers and Actors basically ran the table, getting everything they asked for, and enshrining a set of protections from AI into a contract for the first time. Excuse me, not protection from AI, but protection from the sort of empty suits that would use it to undercut working writers and performers.

Publisher after publisher has been updating their guidelines to forbid AI art. A remarkable number of other places that support artists instituted guidlines to ban or curtail AI. Even Kickstarter, which plunged into the blockchain with both feet, seemed to have learned their lesson and rolled out some pretty stringent rules.

Oh! And there’s some actual high-powered lawsuits bearing down on the industry, not to mention investigations of, shall we say, “unsavory” material in the training sets?

The initial shine seems to be off, where last year was all about sharing goofy AI-generated garbage, there’s been a real shift in the air as everyone gets tired of it and starts pointing out that it sucks, actually. And that the people still boosting it all seem to have some kind of scam going. Oh, and in a lot of cases, it’s literally the same people who were hyping blockchain a year or two ago, and who seem to have found a new use for their warehouses full of GPUs.

One of the more heartening and interesting developments this year was the (long overdue) start of a re-evaluation of the Luddites. Despite the popular stereotype, they weren’t anti-technology, but anti-technology-being-used-to-disenfrancise-workers. This seems to be the year a lot of people sat up and said “hey, me too!”

AI isn’t the only reason “hot labor summer” rolled into “eternal labor september”, but it’s pretty high on the list.

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Theres an argument thats sometimes made that we don’t have any way as a society to throw away a technology that already exists, but that’s not true. You can’t buy gasoline with lead in it, or hairspray with CFCs, and my late lamented McDLT vanished along with the Styrofoam that kept the hot side hot and the cold side cold.

And yes, asbestos made a bunch of people a lot of money and was very good at being children’s pyjamas that didn’t catch fire, as long as that child didn’t need to breathe as an adult.

But, we've never done that for software.

Back around the turn of the century, there was some argument around if cryptography software should be classified as a munition. The Feds wanted stronger export controls, and there was a contingent of technologists who thought, basically, “Hey, it might be neat if our compiler had first and second amendment protection”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. “You can’t regulate math! It’s free expression!”

I don’t have a fully developed argument on this, but I’ve never been able to shake the feeling like that was a mistake, that we all got conned while we thought we were winning.

Maybe some precedent for heavily “regulating math” would be really useful right about now.

Maybe we need to start making some.

⁂

There’s a persistant belief in computer science since computers were invented that brains are a really fancy powerful computer and if we can just figure out how to program them, intelligent robots are right around the corner.

Theres an analogy that floats around that says if the human mind is a bird, then AI will be a plane, flying, but very different application of the same principals.

The human mind is not a computer.

At best, AI is a paper airplane. Sometimes a very fancy one! With nice paper and stickers and tricky folds! Byt the key is that a hand has to throw it.

The act of a person looking at bunch of art and trying to build their own skills is fundamentally different than a software pattern recognition algorithm drawing a picture from pieces of other ones.

Anyone who claims otherwise has no concept of creativity other than as an abstract concept. The creative impulse is fundamental to the human condition. Everyone has it. In some people it’s repressed, or withered, or undeveloped, but it’s always there.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, people posted all these stories about the “crazy stuff they were making!” It wasn’t crazy, that was just the urge to create, it’s always there, and capitalism finally got quiet enough that you could hear it.

“Making Art” is what humans do. The rest of society is there so we stay alive long enough to do so. It’s not the part we need to automate away so we can spend more time delivering value to the shareholders.

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AI isn’t going to turn into skynet and take over the world. There won’t be killer robots coming for your life, or your job, or your kids.

However, the sort of soulless goons who thought it was a good idea to computer automate “writing poetry” before “fixing plumbing” are absolutely coming to take away your job, turn you into a gig worker, replace whoever they can with a chatbot, keep all the money for themselves.

I can’t think of anything more profoundly evil than trying to automate creativity and leaving humans to do the grunt manual labor.

Fuck those people. And fuck everyone who ever enabled them.

Doctor Who and The Church on Ruby Road

When the first trailer for “The Church on Ruby Road” aired, opening as it did with a shot of the new Doctor dancing in a nightclub, I saw someone online react something along the lines of “why would a thousand year old Time Lord go dancing?”

To this, I had a very strong two-part reaction, namely:

1. I think you mean “billion”, not “thousand”
2. My nightclub days are long, long behind me, but if I woke up looking like Ncuti Gatwa, you couldn’t drag me out of them

But this grouchy internet person made an interesting point, albeit accidentally: there’s a solid sub-genre of Doctor Who where the story opens with the Doctor already in the middle of something, and I can’t remember there ever being one where that “something” was “having fun”.

⁂

Taken entirely on its own, “The Church on Ruby Road” is an absolute delight. Just fun from beginning to end. The stakes are never that high, and the plot is a slender thing, but that’s the point; we’re here to launch the two new leads and set up the show going forward. And be as Christmasy as possible while doing it.

From the moment he pops onto screen, here in his first real episode, Ncuti Gatwa makes it clear why he got the part; playing a character that’s unquestioningly the Doctor, but a different model than we’ve ever seen before.

The script does a lot of heavy lifting for him, giving him a series of, if you will, “median value” Doctor Who moments, and letting him show off his spin on them. He gets two scenes—where tells the police officer that his girlfriend is going to say yes, and then later when he compares “real time travellers” to whatever the goblins are doing—that are practically Doctor Who audition pieces (and I’d be surprised if at least one of them wasn’t literally one). You can close your eyes and hear how any of his predecessors would have done either of those scenes. Gatwa manages to land a take on both that’s both utterly unlike how any of the other actors would have done it, but also unmistakably the Doctor.

And, mind you, this is after being introduced in a scene doing something no other Doctor would do—that seems custom designed to stroke out anyone left watching who’s been complaining about “woke doctor who”—and then immediately snaps into frame and Doctors the hell out of his first scene with Millie Gibson.

Mille Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, on the other hand, is a little harder to get a read on, mostly landing on “high energy” and being unflappable. Frankly, introducing the character by having her recite her life story in a literal TV interview feels a little—not lazy, exactly, but impatient? Mostly, she’s there to have stuff happen to, which is a little unfortunate. Her big moment comes at the end of the big song set-piece—the Goblin Song was heavily promoted ahead of time, but of course that turned out to be a headfake to cover the fact that we’ve got a Doctor that can sing now too, and then that turned into the reveal that we’ve also got a companion that can.

“Can ad-lib lyrics to a goblin song while trapped in a sky ship” isn’t the strongest character premise, but it’s a pretty solid start.

The goblins themselves, meanwhile, feel like exactly the kind of move you do when you have a new potential audience and you want to make sure they know “hey, this isn’t star wars.” Doctor Who has always worked better when it knows it’s science fantasy instead of science fiction, and musical steampunk goblins feels like a real statement of purpose. Plus, a solid use of that extra Disney+ money.

The ending is a little clunky? The brief riff on It’s a Wonderful Life and closing the time travel loop both feel a beat too short and easy, and the look on Gatwa’s face as he watches the figure that dropped off the baby walk away is “I could find out now, but I guess I’ll save it for the season finale.”

And then, Ruby runs down stairs and boards the Tardis because… the episode is over? Even the bigger-on-the-inside scene is swallowed so that the Mysterious Neighbor can break the fourth wall.

It’s clunky, but what’s funny is that it’s clunky in exactly the same way “Rose” was.

⁂

Russell Davies is now in the unique position of having written the introductions for three Doctors and four companions, which puts him in solidly in the forefront versus anyone else that’s worked on the show.

(Okay, anorak time: Prior to this, RTD and Moffat had both done two Doctors. Terrance Dicks was involved with two—3rd and 4th—but script-edited one and wrote the other. JNT was the producer for three new Doctors—5th, 6th, and 7th—but had a different script editor and writer each time. Moffat did four companions if we include Rory, which we do. If I’m counting off the top of my head right, JNT hired seven companions, but again with different creative staff nearly every time.)

So how does this compare to his other two?

The first time—“Rose”—was a full reset of the show, assuming that the vast majority of the audience had never seen the old show. That episode spent a lot of time setting up the “Rose Tyler Show” so that the Doctor could crash into it.

The second time—“The Christmas Invasion”—was mostly a character piece about existing main character Rose Tyler reacting to her friend changing, and then David Tennant swaggers in with ten minutes to go and takes over the show.

This doesn’t resemble either of those so much as it does “The Eleventh Hour” in that it has to introduce a whole new cast and serve as a jumping-on point, but assumes that most of the audience already knows the score.

Besides, the “swagger in and steal the show” scene came two weeks ago, this is more worried about getting on with it and showing what the show is going to be like going forward.

RTD has an interesting tic where the Tardis is sidelined for a companion’s first story, and then the story ends with “all that and also a time machine!” “Rose” gets the Tardis involved earlier, but doesn’t time travel, but both “Smith and Jones” and “Partners in Crime” leaves it to the end. (“The Runaway Bride” has a lot of Tardis, but, like “Rose”, obscures it’s more unique features.)

Compare that to “The Eleventh Hour” or “The Pilot”, where the fact that it’s a time machine factors heavily into Amy/Bill’s first encounter.

“Rose” was pretty deliberately designed as part of a triptych with “The End of the World” and “The Unquiet Dead”; that first part ends with her running towards the Police Box, and most of the “Tardis Stuff” gets handled at the start of the second; that is, other than the big “bigger on the inside” beat halfway though “Rose”.

“The Church on Ruby Road” kind of awkwardly straddles the middle The perfunctory ending would play a lot better if the next episode was next week instead of in 4 months. And the show spends a lot more time setting up the mystery about Ruby’s birth than exploring what her life is like now, and why she’s willing to run off with the Doctor at the end other than a vague sense of “waiting for her life to start” malaise.

But, having typed all that out now, I actually think that’s pretty savvy. “Rose” was about pulling in a whole new audience. “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Eleventh Hour” were about telling that existing audience not to worry, it’s still the same show.

“The Church on Ruby Road” is doing something new, it’s trying to get the old audience back. It’s no secret that the ratings, however you measure them, have been in a slow but steady decline since the 50th anniversary. These four 2023 specials aren’t really about attracting new people, their job is to reel back in all those people who were watching in 2008 and saying “that show you like is back in style”.

Much like how “The Eleventh Hour” accidentally became the jumping-on point for everyone in the US who discovered the show on BBC America, this might be that for a next generation of Disney+ first time viewers, but: no. Those people all clicked “Special 1” instead of “Special 4” and discovered the show with “The Star Beast.”

Historically, the closest analogue to what the show is doing here is “Remembrance of the Daleks”, but in a parallel universe where they had bothered to tell anyone that the show was about to be better than it had maybe ever been.

So, this can get away with having Millie Gibson pop onto screen, deliver her character brief directly to the camera, and the audience goes “got it, new companion. So about those goblins from the trailer?”

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Something that does come through clearly is that RTD has been watching the show since he left. Ruby Sunday doesn’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those, please”. And the casual use of time travel in way the Doctor goes back in time to make sure the baby gets where it needs to be isn’t something that really entered the show’s vocabulary until Moffat took over.

And, after having Neal Patrick Harris look the fanbase directly in the eye and say, essentially, “you can’t trust anything the Master said about the Doctor’s origins”, he picks out the most interesting nugget—that the Doctor might be adopted—and runs with it.

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Love that “mavity” is going to be running thing.

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There’s a long running fan “tradition” of breathlessly claiming any mysterious character is the return of the Rani/Romana/Drax/Susan, etc. That last shot seems to be there specifically to wind those people up, but okay, I’ll play along. I think Mrs. Flood is going to turn out to be… K'anpo.

⁂

What would you do if you woke up, and you were young, and beautiful, and all the pain was gone? You still had your memories, you’re still the same person, but healed?

How great would that be?

⁂

One of the big innovations when the show came back into 2005 was to massively expand the emotional palette. Now, this is as much a ding on the old show as its a compliment to the new one; the old show went off the air less than four months before Twin Peaks started, which is a remarkable demonstration of how behind-the-times the show had gotten. Expanding the emotional palette was less an innovation and more admitting that there are other shows on TV.

But, the upshot was the main character was suddenly allowed to have actual feelings for the first time, which tremendously widened the scope of what kinds of stories the show could tell.

The last time RTD rebooted the show, the character and the show had both been though some stuff. The Time War was pretty explicitly a metaphor for the show’s cancellation; and both the character and the show were pretty angsty about everything that had happened since we saw them last.

Now, almost two decades later he’s rebooting it again, and both the show and the character have been though even more stuff. It’s been a weird time! But now, the characer and the show’s reaction is to just be glad to be here, thrilled to be alive. That feels like an older and wiser reaction.

Here in 2023, having an angst-filled tortured main character feels positively old-fashioned. Instead, now we’ve got one that seems motivated more by joy and raw enthusiasm.

Good to see you, Doctor. Glad you’re back. Roll on the future.

“It’s accurate, Captain”

Over the holidays one of the kids meant to compliment someone’s cooking, and misfired the wrong word—as you do—and as a result enthusiastically described the dish as “Accurate.”

Big laugh! Everyone thought it was funny, moved on.

Driving home, it struck me that this was a perfect Star Trek joke, and even more so, a perfect way to demonstrate the different approaches the various shows have taken over the years. All the shows have their designated outsider / “weirdo” whose job it is to do things “wrong” so the regular humans can be smug or condescending at them depending on the decade. I mean, you can almost hear how the Original Star Trek would have done it:

McCoy: Well Spock? How do you like it?

Spock: The Captain’s attempt at Vulcan cooking is accurate, Doctor.

McCoy: Accurate? After all that work that’s the best you can say?

Spock: You’re right, my apologies Captain. It’s extremely accurate.

McCoy: You green blooded etc, etc

And they keep acting superior and antagonizing at each other for however long that week’s episode was under-running by.

The Next Generation on the other hand, would have gone the other way, where Data would describe something as accurate, and then Troi and/or Whoopi Goldberg would fire off a whole speech about how accuracy isn’t the most important thing for humans and how instead what matters is the interplay of smells and textures that create an entire experience; and basically neg him for not being able to experience things the same way they do, again for as long as that week’s show was under-running.

Deep Space 9 would have built an extended joke about how grouchy Odo was, and that the most he was willing to compliment Sisko’s cooking was “accurate”. (As an extended aside, I love DS9, but a real a-ha moment was when I realized that Odo was the exact same character as Oscar the Grouch.)

I won’t belabor the point, but Voyager, Enterprise, and Disco all would have done something similar; some combination of antagonism, mutual superiority, pity, and condescension, where the basic point of the scene was that the “weirdo” was having the wrong reaction, and that’s funny and/or sad.

And then we get to Strange News Worlds, where again, you can also almost hear it:

Pike: What do yo think, Mister Spock?

Spock (enthusiastically): It’s accurate, Captain.

Chapel (amused): Really? Accurate?

Spock (mouth full): Mmmm! Extremely accurate!

Pike (sincerely): Thanks, Spock!

Because SNW also does those exact same “outsider” scenes, but the punchline is always “our neuroatypical buddy is pretty great!” instead of “wow, glad I’m not him.” SNW, unlike its predecessors, has a real, genuine love for people who act different, instead of using them as a way to illustrate how great normal people are. To be clear, I love Star Trek! But the older shows weren’t always the paragon of inclusiveness and understanding that the Paramount marketing department described them to be.

This is one of the reasons Anson Mount’s Pike is my favorite Star Trek captain; it’s impossible to imagine him taking “it’s accurate” as anything other than the genuine compliment it would have been meant as.

Anyway, I hope you’re all having an accurate holiday season.

“And a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!”

Whatever your default holidays, or where you are in the world, I hope you’re all having a safe and happy end of the year.

It’ll Be Worth It

An early version of this got worked out in a sprawling Slack thread with some friends. Thanks helping me work out why my perfectly nice neighbor’s garage banner bugs me, fellas

There’s this house about a dozen doors down from mine. Friendly people, I don’t really know them, but my son went to school with their youngest kid, so we kinda know each other in passing. They frequently have the door to the garage open, and they have some home gym equipment, some tools, and a huge banner that reads in big block capital letters:

NOBODY CARES WORK HARDER

My reaction is always to recoil slightly. Really, nobody? Even at your own home, nobody? And I think “you need better friends, man. Maybe not everyone cares, but someone should.” I keep wanting to say “hey man, I care. Good job, keep it up!” It feels so toxic in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

And, look, I get it. It’s a shorthand to communicate that we’re in a space where the goal is what matters, and the work is assumed. It’s very sports-oriented worldview, where the message is that the complaints don’t matter, only the results matter. But my reaction to things like that from coaches in a sports context was always kinda “well, if no one cares, can I go home?”

(Well, that, and I would always think “I’d love to see you come on over to my world and slam into a compiler error for 2 hours and then have me tell you ‘nobody cares, do better’ when you ask for help and see how you handle that. Because you would lose your mind”)

Because that’s the thing: if nobody cared, we woudn’t be here. We’re hever because we think everyone cares.

The actual message isn’t “nobody cares,” but:

“All this will be worth it in the end, you’ll see”

Now, that’s a banner I could get behind.

To come at it another way, there’s the goal and there’s the work. Depending on the context, people care about one or the other. I used to work with some people who would always put the number of hours spent on a project as the first slide of their final read-outs, and the rest of us used to make terrible fun of them. (As did the execs they were presenting to.)

And it’s not that the “seventeen million hours” wasn’t worth celebrating, or that we didn’t care about it, but that the slide touting it was in the wrong venue. Here, we’re in an environment where only care about the end goal. High fives for working hard go in a different meeting, you know?

But what really, really bugs me about that banner specifically, and things like it, that that they’re so fake. If you really didn’t think anyone cares, you wouldn’t hang a banner up where all your neighbors could see it over your weight set. If you really thought no one cared, you wouldn’t even own the exercise gear, you’d be inside doing something you want to do! Because no one has to hang a “WORK HARDER” banner over a Magic: The Gathering tournament, or a plant nursery, or a book club. But no, it’s there because you think everyone cares, and you want them to think you’re cool because you don’t have feelings. A banner like that is just performative; you hang something like that because you want others to care about you not caring.

There’s a thing where people try and hold up their lack of emotional support as a kind of badge of honor, and like, if you’re at home and really nobody cares, you gotta rethink your life. And if people do care, why do you find pretending they don’t motivating? What’s missing from your life such that pretending you’re on your own is better than embracing your support?

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for people who think empathy is some kind of weakness, that emotional isolation is some kind of strength. The only way any of us are going to get through any of this is together.

Work Harder.

Everyone Cares.

I’ll Be Worth It.

Books I read in 2022, part 3

(That I have mostly nice things to say about)

Programming note: while clearning out the drafts folder as I wind the year down, I discovered that much to my amusement and surprise I wrote most of the third post on the books I read last year, but somehow never posted it? One editing & expansion pass later, and here it is.

Previously , Previously .

Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted by Colleen Duran

A perfect jewel of a book. The story is slight, but sweet. Duran’s art, however, is gorgeous, perfectly sliding between the style of an illuminated manuscript and watercolor paintings. A minor work by two very capable artists, but clearly a labor of love, and tremendous fun.

The Murderbot Diaries 1&2: All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

As twitter started trending towards it’s final end last summer, I decided I’b better stary buying some of the books I’d been seeing people enthuse about. There was a stretch there where it seemed like my entire timeline was praise for Murderbot.

For reasons due entirely to my apparent failures of reading comprehension, I was expecting a book starring, basically, HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic. A robot clanking around, calling people meatbags, wanting to be left along, and so on.

The actual books are so much better than that. Instead, it’s a story about your new neurodivergent best friend, trying to figure themselves out and be left alone while they do it. It’s one of the very best uses of robots as a metaphor for something else I’ve ever seen, and probably the first new take on “what do we use robots for besides an Asimov riff” since Blade Runner. It was not what I expected at all, or really in the mood for at the time, and I still immediately bought the next book.

Some other MoonKnights not worth typing the whole titles of

All pumped after the Lumire/Smallwood stuff, I picked up a few other more recent MoonKnights. I just went downstairs and flipped through them again, and I don’t remember a single thing about them. They were fine, I guess?

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others

Inspired by the Netflix show (capsule review: great casting, visually as dull as dishwater, got better the more it did it’s own thing and diverged from the books) I went back and read the original comic run for the first time since the turn of the century. When I was in college, there was a cohort of mostly gay, mostly goth kids for whom Sandman was everything. I was neither of those things, but hung out in the subcultures next door, as you will. I liked it fine, and probably liked it more that I would normally have because of how many good friends loved it.

Nearly three decades later, I had a very similar reaction. It always worked best when it moved towards more of an light-horror anthology, where a rotating batch of artists would illustrate stories where deeply weird things happened and then Morpheus would show up at the end and go “wow, that’s messed up.” There’s a couple of things that—woof—haven’t aged super well? Overall, though, still pretty good.

Mostly, though, it made me nostalgic for those people I used to know who loved it so much. I hope they’re all doing well!

Death, the Deluxe Edition

Everything I had to say about Sandman goes double for Death.

Sandman Overture by Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III

I never read this when it came out, but I figured as long as I was doing a clean sweep of the Sandman, it was time to finally read it. A lot of fun, but I don’t believe for a hot second this is what Gaiman had in mind when he wrote the opening scene of the first issue back in the late 80s.

The art, though! The art on the original series operated on a spread from “pretty good” to “great for the early 90s”. No insult to the artists, but what the DC production pipeline and tooling could do at the time was never quite up to what Sandman really seemed to call for. And, this is still well before “what if every issue had good art, tho” was the standard for American comics.

The art here is astounding. Page after page of amazing spreads. You can feel Gaiman nodding to himself, thinking “finally! This was how this was always supposed to look.”

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Oh heck yes, this is the stuff. A (very) loose retelling of the story of Wu Zeitan, the first and only female Chinese emperor, in a futuristic setting where animal-themed mechs have Dragonball Z fights. It’s the sort of book where you know exactly how it’s going to end, but the fun is seeing how the main character pulls it off. I read it in one sitting.

Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

Oh, what a disappointment.

Let’s back up for a sec. Spelljammer was an early-90s 2nd Edition D&D setting, which boiled down to essentially “magical sailing ships in space, using a Ptolemaic-style cosmology. It was a soft replacement for the Manual of the Planes, as a way to link campaign worlds together and provide “otherworldly“ adventures without having to get near the demons and other supernatural elements that had become a problem during the 80s “satanic panic.” (It would ultimately be replaced by Planescape, which brought all that back and then some.)

Tone-wise, Spelljammer was basically “70s van art”. It was never terribly successful, and thirty years on it was mostly a trivia answer, although fondly remembered by a small cadre of aging geeks. As should be entirely predictable, I loved it.

Initially, 5th edition wasn’t interested in past settings others that the deeply boring Forgotten Realms. But as the line continued, and other settings started popping back up, Spelljammer started coming up. What if? And then, there it was.

For the first time in the game’s history, 5th edition found a viable product strategy: 3 roughly 225 to 250-page hardcovers a year, two adventures, one some kind of rules expansion. The adventures occasionally contained a new setting, but the setting was always there to support the story, rather than the other way around.

Spelljammer was going to be different: a deluxe boxed set with a DM screen and three 64-page hardcovers, a setting and rules book, a monster book, and an adventure. (Roughly mirroring the PHB, DMG, MM core books.)

The immediate problem will be obvious to anyone good at mental arithmetic, which is that as a whole the product was 30 to 60 pages shorter than normal, and it felt like it. Worse, the structure of the three hardbacks meant that the monster book and adventure got way more space than they needed, crushing the actual setting material down even further.

As a result, there’s so much that just isn’t there. The setting is boiled down to the barest summary; all the chunky details are gone. As the most egregious example, in the original version The Spelljammer is a legendary ship akin to the flying dutchman, that ship makes up the background of the original logo. The Spelljammer herself isn’t even mentioned in the new version.

Even more frustrating, what is here is pretty good. They made some very savvy changes to better fit with everything else (Spelljammers now travel through the “regular” astral plane instead of “the phogiston” for example). But overall it feels like a sketch for what a 5E spelljammer could look line instead of a finished product.

This is exacerbated by the fact that this release also contains most of a 5E Dark Sun. One of the worst-kept secrets in the industry was that Hasbro had a 5E Dark Sun book under development that was scrapped before release. The races and creatures from that effort ended up here. Dark Sun also gets an amazing cameo: the adventure includes a stop in “Doomspace”, a solar system where the star has become a black hole, and the inhabited planet is just on the cusp of being sucked in. While the names are all slightly changed, this is blatantly supposed to be the final days of Athas. While I would have been first in line to pick up a 5E Dark Sun, having the setting finally collapse in on itself in another product entirely is a perfect end to the setting. I kind of loved it.

Finally, Spelljammer had some extremely racist garbage in it. To the extent that it’s hard to believe that these book had any editorial oversight at all. For a product that had the physical trappings (and price) of a premium product, the whole package came across as extremely half-assed. Nowhere more so that in the fact that they let some white supremacist shit sail through unnoticed.

Spelljammer, even more so than the OGL shitshow, caused me fundamentally reassess my relationship with the company that owns D&D. I still love the game, but I’m going to need to prove it to me before I buy anything else from them. Our support should be going elsewhere.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Back during the mid-00s webcomics boom, there were a lot of webcomics that were good for webcomics, but a much smaller set that were good for comics, full stop. Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant! stood head and shoulders above that second group.

Most of the people who made webcomics back then have moved on, using their webcomic to open doors to other—presumably better paying—work. Most of them have moved on from the styles from their web work. To use one obvious and slightly cheap example, Ryan North’s Squirrel Girl has different panels on each page, you know?

One of the many, many remarkable things about Ducks is that is’s recognizably the same style as Hark a Vagrant!, just deployed for different purpose. All her skills as a storyteller and and cartoonist are on display here, her ability to capture expressions with only a few lines, the sharp wit, the impeccable timing, but this book is not even remotely funny.

It chronicles the years she spent working on the Oil Sands in Alberta. A strange, remote place, full of people, mostly men, trying to make enough money to leave.

Other than a brief introduction, the book has no intrusions from the future, there’s no narration contextualizing the events. Instead, it plays out as a series of vignettes of her life there, and she trusts that the reader is smart enough to understand why she’s telling these stories in this order.

It’s not a spoiler, or much of one anyway, to say that a story about a young woman in a remote nearly all-male environment goes the way you hope it doesn’t. There’s an incredible tension to the first half of the book where you know something terrible is going to happen, it’s a horrible relief when it finally does.

As someone closer in age to her parents than her when this all happened, I found myself in a terrible rage at them as I read it—how could you let her do this? How could you let this happen? But they didn’t know. And there was nothing they could do.

It was, by far, the best book I read last year. It haunts my memory.

Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority by a bunch of hacks

I loved the original run on The Authority 20 years ago, and Jenny Sparks is one of my all-time favorite comic book characters, but I had never read Millar’s prequel miniseries about her. I picked up a copy in a used bookstore. I wish I hadn’t. It was awful.

She-Hulk omnibus 1 by Dan Slot et al

Inspired by the Disney+ show (which I loved) I picked up the first collection of the early-00s reboot of She-Hulk. I had never read these, but I remember what a great reception they got at the time. But… this wasn’t very good? It was far too precious, the 4th wall breaking way too self-conscious. A super-hero law firm with a basement full of every marvel comic as a caselaw library is a great one-off joke, but a terrible ongoing premise. The art was pretty good, though.

She-Hulk Epic Collection: Breaking the Fourth Wall by John Byrne, Steve Gerber, and Others

On the other hand, this is the stuff. Byrne makes the 4th wall breaks look easy, and there’s at joy and flow to the series that the later reboots lack. She-Hulk tearing out of the page and screaming in rage at the author is an absolutes delight. And then, when Byrne leaves, he’s replaced by Steve “Howard the Duck” Gerber, and it got even better,

Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories by qntm

This short story collection inclues the most upsetting horror story I’ve ever read, Lena, and the sequel, which manages to be even worse. Great writing, strongly recommended.

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.