Retweeting Feeds
There’s a feature I miss from the old twitter, or rather, there’s a use case that twitter filled better than anything else.
The use case is this: RSS feeds are a great way to publish content, but that’s where it stops—there’s no intrinsic way to (re)share an item from a feed you’re subscribed to with anyone else, to retweet it, if you will. I’d love to have an easy way to reshare content from feeds I’m subscribed to.
I think one of the reasons that twitter sucked the air out of the RSS ecosystem was that not only was it trivial to set up a twitter account that worked just like an RSS feed, with links to your blog or podcast or whatever, but everyone who followed your feed could re-share it with their followers with a single action, optionally adding a comment. I cannot tell you how much great stuff I found out about because someone I followed on twitter quote-tweeted it.
Here in the post-twitter afterscape, I keep wishing NetNewsWire had a retweet button. I’ve spent enough time in product design and development to know why that doesn’t exist; something that could re-share an item from an RSS feed out into a new feed with a connection back to the original feed requires about 80% of twitter, if you’re going to build all that, add the ability to post your own content as well and go all the way to a social network/microblogging system/twitter clone. And I guess the solution is either bluesky or mastodon.
But I keep thinking there has to be something between turn of the century–style RSS feeds and a full-blown social network. And I am putting this out in the universe because I absolutely do not want to build or work on this myself, I want to use it. (All my actual startup ideas are going to be buried with me.)
Somebody go figure this out!
Edited to add: I am reminded by an Alert Reader that Google Reader (RIP) had a similar feature, you could “share” things from your feed. But google’s gonna google and the share list was basically your gmail contacts list? Which would lead to some really bizarre results like suddenly seeing a thing in your feed that got there because a friend of a friend shared it, because you were both on the same party invite a couple of years ago. Cool idea, but again, something twitter improved on by making those connections obvious.
Anyone Else Remember This Giant Maze Thing?
I have this vague memory that floats up into my mind every couple of years. There was this amusement park that was just a giant, human-scale maze. I remember the walls being basically plywood fencing? I think it was in the Bay Area, or at least “in that direction” from the central valley. This would have been 1990-ish?
I never went, but I think we drove by it a few times? There were a bunch of TV commercials, which I was sort of fascinated by. What I mostly remember is that they had a mascot that I thought looked exactly like The Noid from Domino’s Pizza, and in the low-information environment of the world before the web, I was confused about if this place was now both a bad pizza place and a maze?
Anyone else remember any of this?
…
Anyway, this bubbled back up again this week, and I decided to finally figure out what the heck I was remembering. I’m gonna put some space so you can see if you can remember any of this before you scroll down.
.
..
…
….
It was a real thing!
It was called The Wooz.
Opened in 1988, closed in ’92, it was in Vacaville, basically across the freeway from where the Nut Tree used to be, adjacent to that whole outlet store cluster that was going to be the future of retail back before the Roseville Gallaria opened up. Apparently mazes were a fad in Japan in the late 80s, sort of the Escape Rooms of theirtime, and so someone tried to expand that out to North America.
The idea isn’t great on it’s own, but why Vacaville? I guess they picked it because of that outlet mall thing, but let’s talk about your competition. Ignoring that you’re only a couple hours away from Disneyland, at the time you’re less than an hour away from the pre-Six Flags Marine World, Great America, and even the old Waterworld USA at Cal Expo. Hell, there’s even two Scandias in range. A big maze with no shade made out of redwood fencing is a hard sell, even without that many rides nearby?
Some links for you!
The history of the hottest, most ill-advised theme park ever made: The Wooz
The Wooz - Vacaville - LocalWiki
Do not sleep on the embedded video in that first link, an episode of the That’s Incredible Show on the park which includes a race through the maze, one of the participants of which was Steve Wozniak, who is introduced only as “a computer whiz”. I love, love, love that there was about a 5-year window where “co-founder of Apple Computer” was not something to be proud of, of which 1989 was the absolute peak. He’s basically here because he was a minor local celebrity. Presumably he got the call after Cal Worthington (and his dog spot) turned them down?
And the mascot did look an awful lot like the Noid.
Pretty Weird
Absolutely loving this new Gen-X energy the Dems have suddenly discovered by just pointing out that the Repubs are super weird.
And they are! The republican party has been an absolute freakshow since at least the Gingrich era, and certainly since those tea party assholes. I distinctly remember wishing that Gore had run on a platform of “look how weird these guys are” and W looks positively sane next to the current freak farm. Normal people don’t actually care what goes on in other people’s bathrooms, houses, or pants?
This has completely thrown the repubs for a loop. I see they’re basically trying a Pee-Wee Herman “I know you are but what am I” move by trial-balooning various flavors of “we’re not weird, you the ones with ____” with various totally normal things in that blank spot, with a side-order of “weird is what all the bullies called me, who then is the real bully” crap.
The past couple of decades have tought the repubs that saying things like “ahh, who is the real villan” or “but you participate in society, interesting” or “then you are no better than they” is the equivalent of the roadrunner painting a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain, and that the dems will reliably run right into it, Wile E. Coyote–style.
So it is incredibly refreshing to see that the dems have finally discovered the correct response, which is “shut the fuck up, you freaky weirdo!”
Because everyone who has actually lived a life knows there is a difference between weird (kid plays too much D&D) and weird (do not, under any circumstances, leave your drink uncovered near him).
This election, more than usual, is everyone in that first group vs everyone in the second.
Cognitive Surplus
I finally dug up a piece I that has been living rent-free in my head for sixteen years:
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing--there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
...
This was a talk Clay Shirky gave in 2008, and the transcript lived on his website for a long time but eventually rotted away. I stumbled across an old bookmark the other day, and realized I could use that to dig it out of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so here we are!
A couple years later, Shirky turned this talk into a full book called Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, which is presumably why the prototype vanished off his website. The book is okay, but it’s a classic example of an idea that really only needs about 20 pages at the most getting blown out to 200 because there’s a market for “books”, but not “long blog posts.” The original talk is much better, and I’m glad to find it again.
The core idea has suck with me all this time: that social and technological advances free up people’s time and create a surplus of cognitive and social energy, and then new “products” emerge to soak that surplus up so that people don’t actually use it for anything dangerous or disruptive. Shirky’s two examples are Gin and TV Sitcoms; this has been in my mind more than usual of late as people argue about superhero movies and talk about movies as “escapism” in the exact same terms you’d use to talk about drinking yourself into a stupor.
Something I talk about a lot in my actual day job is “cognitive bandwidth,” largely inspired by this talk; what are we filling our bandwidth with, and how can we use less, how can we create a surplus.
And, in all aspects of our lives, how can we be mindful about what we spend that surplus on.
Tales of the Valiant
In order for this game to make sense, you have to remember why it exists at all. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ “lawyer-proof” variant of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created as a response to the absolute trash fire Hasbro caused around the Open Game License and the 5th Edition System Reference Document early last year.
Recall that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, started making some extremely hinky moves around the future of the OGL—the license under which 3rd party companies can make content compatible with D&D. Coupled with the rumors about the changes being planned for the 2024 update to the game, there was suddenly a strong interest in a version of 5th Edition D&D that was unencumbered by either the OGL or the legal team of the company that makes Monopoly. As such, Kobold Press stepped up to the plate.
Because history happens twice, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, this is actually our second runaround with D&D licensing term shenanigans spawning a new game.
For some context, when 3rd Edition D&D came out back in 2000, in addition to the actual physical books, the core rules were also published in a web document called the System Reference Document, or SRD, which was released under an open source–inspired license called the Open Gaming License, OGL. This was for a couple of reasons, but mostly to provide some legal clarity—and a promise of safe harbor—around the rules and terms and things, many of which were either taken from mythology or had become sort of “common property” of the TTRPG industry as a whole. The upshot was if you followed the license terms, you could use any material from the rules as you saw fit without needing to ask permission or pay anybody, and a whole industry sprung up around making material compatible with or built on top of the game.
When the 4th Edition came out in 2008, the licensing changed such that 3rd party publishers essentially had to choose whether to support 3 or 4, and the rules around 4 were significantly more restrictive. The economy that had grown up under the shade of 3rd edition and the OGL started, rightly, to panic a little bit. Finally, Paizo, who had been the company publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Hasbro until just about the same time, stepped up, and essentially republished the 3.5 edition of D&D under the name “Pathfinder.”
There’s a probably apocryphal line from Paizo’s Erik Mona that they chose to create Pathfinder instead of just reprinting 3.5 because “if we’re going to go to the trouble of reprinting the core books we’re going to fix the problems”. (Which has always stuck in my mind because my initial reaction to flipping through the core Pathfinder book the first time was to mutter “wow, we had really different ideas about what the problems were”.) Because Pathfinder wasn’t just a reprint, it was also a collected of tweaks, cleanups, and revisions based on the collected experience of playing the game. There was a joke at the time that it was version “3.75”, but really is was more like “3rd Edition, 2.0”.
When 5th edition came out in 2014, it came with a return to more congenial 3rd edition–style licensing, which reinvigorated the 3rd party publisher world, and also led to an explosion of twitch stream–fueled popularity, and unexpectedly resulted in the most successful period of the game’s history, and now a decade later here we are again, with a different 3rd party publisher producing a new incarnation of a Hasbro game so that the existing ecosystem can continue to operate without lawyers fueled by Monopoly Money coming after them (and yes, pun intended.)
(This isn’t the only project spawned by last January’s OGL mess either; Paizo’s Pathfinder 2 “remaster” was explicitly started to remove any remaining OGL-ed text from the books, it’s not a coincidence that this is when Tweet & Heinsoo chose to kickstart a second edition of 13th Age, the A5E folks are doing their own version of a “lawyer-proof 5th edition.”)
However, Tales of the Valiant had to deal with a couple of challenge that Pathfinder didn’t—primarily, vast chunks of 5E just aren’t in the SRD.
The 3rd Edition SRD had, essentially, the entire game, minus a few minor details and trademarked names, including quite a bit a material published after the core books. For Pathfinder, Paizo could have taken the SRD, bound it as-is, and had a ready-to-play game.
The 5E SRD, on the other hand, has significantly less. Looking at that SRD, vast sections of the game are missing—every Class only has a single Subclass, there’s only a single example Background, there’s only a single Feat, the 5E rules for personality traits & roleplaying hooks—ideals, bonds, flaws, and so on—aren’t present, various monsters aren’t present, the Alchemist class isn’t there, nothing from any book other than the three original core books is there, only the “core” races are there and the races with subraces only have a single example, and so on and so on. All of these gaps needed filling with new material on top of the other mechanical tweaks and cleanup.
The result is that Tales of the Valiant ends up in a sort of “neither fish nor fowl” situation; it’s not just a cleaned up 5E because it literally can’t be, but on the other hand it’s not different enough to give it a clear hook or independent identity.
But with that out of the way, it’s pretty great.
The initial release for ToV is two books—a Players Guide and Monster Vault. (Supposedly, Hasbro has also been getting stropy about other companies using the name “Player’s Handbook” which is why both Kobold and Paizo have moved to other titles.)
The writing in both books is outstanding. This is all, broadly speaking, the same material as the 5E Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, but every section is better written, clearer, generally shorter and more concise. It reads like someone took the original 5E books and ran them past a really, really good editor. All of the language has been made much clearer—for example, spell “levels” are now “circles” to avoid confusion with character levels.
Most of the changes are excellent. The whole thing reads like a set of well-presented house rules by a group of really good DMs who have been running this game for a decade, which I’m pretty sure is what it is.
However, for better or worse, it’s still 5E. All the weird edges of that game are still here—the strange economy around bonus actions, there’s still too many weird custom per-class mechanics around pools of dice, Bards are still mostly just junior wizards, the “other two” arcane spellcasters are still underbaked, there still isn’t a caster that just uses spellpoints.
There’s still just too much—too much complexity without getting anything for it. The core book is 370+ pages, which seems increasingly absurd.
It’s not a secret that 5E was game made by a small team on a short deadline, the game was barely finished, and as a result on a pretty regular basis the rules throw up their hands and depend on the DM to sort things out. As such, many of the changes feel like the result of a decade of people having figured things out— for example, the rules around tools vs skills are clearer, the list of tools is shorter, there are actual rules for hiding, the rules are all reorganized.
Other changes are more structural, but still in the “obvious fixes” category—every class gets subclasses starting at level 3 now, and at the same levels thereafter, although the many of the new subclasses have a certain “golden arcs” to 5E’s “golden arches” quality. For example, Mage Blades are now Spell Blades, and can mix cantrips with physical attacks when using multiattack, which is… pretty great, actually? And a couple of the classes, like Warlock, have been pretty extensively overhauled, with just regular-ass spell slots.
The big ticket changes are all improvements:
“Race” has been replaced with a dual system of “Lineage” and “Heritage”. Lineage is, essentially, your species, and Heritage is where you grew up. This immediately lets you easily cook up some unusual combo—urban Orcs, nomadic Halflings. Backgrounds work similarly to 5E, but the list is new and grant some actually useful bonuses. “Inspiration” has been replaced with the much more flexible and interesting “Luck”. Spell lists have been reorganized around 4E-style “power sources” instead of being unique per class. 5E’s optional Feats have been replaced with Talents, which are, effectively, 3E’s Feats. Like 3E, those Talents are everywhere; your background gives you one, you can pick them on a pretty regular basis as an upgrade option. This is one of several changes that brings back something from 3E. As another, magic items—and magic item upgrades— have prices again. And the revised text around using attributes and skills make them feel a lot more like how the 3E skills worked. I’ve often said my personal ideal version of D&D would be a 3E-5E hybrid, and ToV very much has that feeling.
And, thank goodness, alignment is gone.
(For the full list of changes, see: Tales of the Valiant: Conversion Guide )
The books themselves, like all of Kobold’s books, are very nice. For a small press, they’re outstanding. The usual full-size hardcovers, full color, nice layout, good art. As a nice touch, the covers of the two books represent the same scene, but a few minutes apart.
Uncharacteristically, my favorite of the two volumes was the Monster Vault. This is where the aspect of “collected house rules from a good DM” really shines. The layout is not that different from the 5E Monster Manual, but very cleverly rethought to be useful during play. Each monster gets at least a one whole page, with a nice piece of art and a really thoughtful layout of stats. For example, the book doesn’t waste space with the monster’s stats, it just lists their stat modifiers, which are also their saving throw modifiers. The monster name is always—and only—the first thing in the top left corner of the page, which makes the book so much easier to navigate than either 3rd or 5th edition’s “YOLO!” approach to page layouts.
Every creature gets at least half a column of description, and this is where removing alignment becomes an asset to design. Without alignment as a shorthand, they give each monster an actual personality. To wit: Red Dragons are still bad guys, but instead of just being “chaotic evil”, now they’re assholes. Continuing with the dragons as the example, the metallic ones are still mostly “good”, and the chromatic ones are “bad”, but each kind gets a distinct set of ticks and behaviors. Green dragons are now something like Nazi scientists, Copper dragons are friendly but love a fight, and so on. It’s a really solid set of role-play hooks and ways to deploy them in a game.
This also really shines as a way to distinguish things like oozes or creatures acting on instinct from monsters you’re going to fight because they thought about it and want to take your stuff.
And then there’s the section on encounter design. Encounter design in 5E is notoriously tricky, mainly because the “challenge rating” system in the core rules is blatantly untested and unfinished. The 5E books barely cover it, one more subsystem that ends with a shrug and “you can figure it out?” The ToV Monster Vault has pages and pages on how to design encounters, how to use the existing challenge ratings to compare opponents to the party’s level, notes on adjusting difficulty, you name it. It’s clearly the work of a group that’s played this game a lot, and have really figured out how to make this part sing.
It’s probably the best D&D-style “monster book” I’ve ever read.
The Player’s Guide is a little more of a mixed bag. Again, the layout is clear and well-thought, each class has an icon representing it when it comes up in the rules. Character creation is presented in a different order, which isn’t really better or worse, so much as it shows there just isn’t a best way to present 5E’s overly-complex material.
It also pulls in a bunch of material that 5E leaves in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Magic items, for example. It really is the only book you need to play the game, which makes me intensely curious about the ToV Gamemaster’s Guide which is coming out later this year.
But while the organization is different from the 5E Player’s Handbook, I’s be hard pressed to say it was better.
It’s also remarkable what isn’t here.
The section on “what is an RPG” is perfunctory to the point of being vestigial. There’s actually less material on role-playing and the like here than in the 5E books. There’s essentially nothing on how to actually play; there’s nothing here on how the authors intend this game to work in practice, I guess that’s left up to youtube?
There’s fewer mechanics for role play hooks than even 5E had. The thin-but-workable Ideals/Bonds/Flaws system wasn’t in the SRD, but hasn’t been replaced with anything. The section on using Charisma skills is basically the same content as the 5E book, and that was thin at time. (Meanwhile the 4E non-combat skill challenge system is just sitting there, waiting for someone to rediscover it.) (Edited to add: I went back and checked, and in fairness skill challenges were a DMG item in 4e, not in the PHB.)
There’s a section on Safety Tools, but it’s less than a page. The phrase “session zero” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, which seems insane for a 300+ page RPG book published in the 2020s.
All of that would be acceptable in a small game, but this this book is 60 pages longer than the 5E book, which was already too big. And this isn’t the early teens anymore, where we were having serious conversations about if the TTRPG industry was going to keep existing. This is the twenties, and whatever else that means, TTRPGs are a huge business now, and narrative and character–focused play is in. It’s a strange set of oversights for an otherwise well-designed game.
Finally, Tales of the Valiant is… not a great name? It’s not terrible, but it’s a surprisingly hard name to use in a sentence. And that’s a lot of syllables. And something I’ve learned about myself over the last couple thousand words is that I can’t spell “Valiant” right the first time. (You know what’s a great RPG name? Mörk Borg. That’s the new bar, guys.)
But in case this hasn’t come through clearly, I like it. A lot. As it stands, it’s the best version of 5E out there. Well, at least for the moment, because the shadow of the incoming 5th edition update is looming on the horizon.
It’s not clear to me where this game sits in the broader hobby. Is there room for another D&D-alike? I’m not sure this makes a compelling case why you should play this instead of Pathfinder or 13th Age or the new 5E itself. I don’t understand who the target audience is supposed to be.
The folks that want to play Dungeons & Dragons are going to play that. The whole OGL trashfire/5th edition update ended up going a different direction than any of us expected a year ago; I think the ’24 update is going to be a lot better than we expected, the license terms actually got better, not worse, and I’m sure sure what the sales pitch is for “it’s like D&D, except slightly different.” There’s no hook, no “here’s why this is cooler.”
My overall response is that I wish Kobold had used Hasbro’s total surrender over the licensing to pivot, and to build up a more-different game. Pathfinder succeeded because 3rd edition went away and 4th edition, whatever its strengths, was a very different game. That not what happened this time, and a flavor of 5E is going to stick around for a while yet.
To be fair, I’m not really in the center of this particular crosshairs anymore either. I mean, the game I’m running now is a “cozy witchcore” modern fantasy game using the Cypher system, where we’ve never even bothered to fill in the player character’s attack bonuses on their character sheets. (Off topic but: it’s really fun to see what Modern Fantasy looks like once it has both “Lovecraft” and “90s goth vampires” washed completely out of its hair.) Thats miles away from D&D’s home turf of “fantasy-flavored superheros”. That said, we’ve got a D&D game we’re talking about kicking off, and if we do I’ll advocate heavily for using this instead.
And that’s the review in a nutshell: next time I want to run a game with Magic Missle in it, this is the one I’m going to run.
It’s a cool game by a cool company, making something good out of a stupid situation. Check it out.
Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)
There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.
After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.
Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.
As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)
Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:
First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.
Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.
This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.
The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.
It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.
But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.
In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.
(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)
After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”
Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”
Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)
Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.
Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)
Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.
The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.
The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.
(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)
The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.
Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.
There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.
Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.
In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.
After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.
And then he died in the gym at 49.
One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.
And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.
As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.
What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.
(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)
And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.
Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.
This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.
There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.
The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.
I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.
It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:
AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?
DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.
One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”
And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.
If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”
In other words: Don't Panic.
On the Other Hand…
…based on the amount of panicked flop sweat coming off of the republicans, this crazy gamble might pay off.
Is this where Gen X—the ignored generation—slides in, saves the country from a wannabe strongman, and then gets no credit? Because that would be pretty great.
C’mon, man
Well, there’s Undecided Voters NOW.
But not, I suspect, the kinds they have in mind. Good work, morons. This is what’s going to motivate the base, huh? Backstabbing the guy who won the last election for us?
That queasy feeling of knowing you’re watching a Historical Event that’s gonna be talked about in your grandkid’s history classes, but you don’t yet know what the end of that conversation is going to be.
My inclination is that this is one of those catastrophic miscalculations, a game-threatening bad play call. The premise is that that “america” has gotten “less sexist” since 2016? As they say, we’re about to run an experiment to see if Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton or if it was because she was a woman.
I think the case against Biden was badly overblown, a case of a panic spiral getting out of control. Letting that debate happen was clearly an act of breathtaking political malpractice, but the what polling there was still showed the difference between the candidates as being within the margin for error? And, wildly under-discussed is how bad polling has gotten the last decade or so. All the polls are just cooked now, we’re a long, long way away from Nate Silver calling all the races correctly ahead of time. And to paraphrase a tweet I saw and now can’t find, “Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel” is the sort of sentence that would have been shocking in 2016, but now the response is like the people in Clue finding another body, just a shrug and then walking back to the other room.
I think this is a huge unforced error, but one after a year of own-goals and stepping on rakes. This should have been one of the easiest cruise-to-reelection second terms of all time, but instead—here we are. There’s a just-so-story–style lesson here about not flaring off your goodwill a year out from the election.
I still don’t believe there are any actual undecided voters. And I simply don’t believe that there was anyone who was unwilling to vote for Biden who is willing to vote for Harris. Who are we even talking about here? What’s this mythical demographic the Dems can now access?
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in my orbit, the only people who actually brought up Biden’s age or ”mental state” were people who were always going to find a reason not to vote for him. Because, of course, none of those people ever bought up the other guy’s mental state. Get ready for that same crowd to start saying things like “well, of course I support a Black woman as president, but Harris…”
There’s three options in this election: “Harm Reduction”, “Fascism”, and “Fuck it, I don’t have enough empathy to tell the difference between the first two.” Anyone who is actually still describing themselves as an “Independent” “Undecided” voter here in the middle of the Disaster of the Twenties is, at best, an Asshole. And is probably actually a Trump voter, but needs the pageantry so they can blame “the libs” for “making them do it”. But this is the solution? Harris is going to unlock the middle-aged white guy asshole vote? Really?
Deep Breath
On the other hand, if you’ve bought in that Biden had to go, this is about as good as solution as exists. And dropping the news after the whole RNC news cycle has burned out makes it clear that they made the decision longer ago than it looks. “White women in the suburbs” is going to be one of the deciding demographics of this one, and Trump does the worst there when he’s being an unhinged racist bully and wanna-be gangster, and Harris is going to be drawing that foul constantly.
Credit where credit is due, there’s no more narrative about how everyone is too old. We’ve got a real sharp contrast between the parties now, let’s see if they can leverage it. Here’s hoping I’m wrong and this’ll move the needle with both of “the youths” and the “mad about Gaza” demographics. And, for once, the Dems have an actual move to respond to the GOP claiming to be “the law and order party”—“convicted felon” vs “former prosecutor” is a hell of a hand to be able to play.
This was winnable in January, it was winnable a month ago, and it’s winnable now. But god damn let’s stop giving up points.
All that said, the ticket is still the same as it has been: Warm Body/Warm Body vs Fascism. President Harris, let’s go.
More Musings on the Starcruiser
Over the various overlapping illnesses and convalescences of the last two months I finally caught up with the rest of the western hemisphere and made my way though Jenny Nicholson’s remarkable four-hour review/port-mortem of Disney’s “Galactic Starcruiser”—The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.
It’s a outstanding piece of work, not only reviewing her own trip, but also providing context and some attempted root-cause analysis for the whole misbegotten project. Go carve out some time to watch it if you haven’t already. It’s the definitive work on the subject.
We’ve covered the Star Wars Hotel on Icecano before, but that was based on a trip report from someone whose trip went well. Nicholson’s trip didn’t go so well, and the ways systems fail often shed a lot more light on how they really function then when they work as intended.
The thing that has always stuck me about the Starcruiser is that it was so clearly three different attractions:
- A heavily-themed hotel with a direct “side-door” connection to the park
- A collection of low-barrier-to-entry interactive “games” somewhere between an arcade and an escape room
- A 2-day LARP summer camp with a stage show at the end
Those are all pretty good ideas, but why did they do them as one thing? All those ideas would have been so much cooler as an actual fancy hotel connected to the park, and then separately an EPCOT-style “Star Wars Pavillion”, in the style of the current space restaurant or the old The Living Seas “submarine base” you got into via the “Hydrolater”.
I thought Nicholson’s sharpest insight about the whole debacle was that all the “features” of the hotel were things originally promoted as being part of the main Star Wars Land, but the hotel allowed them to put them behind an extra paywall.
I maintain my belief I alluded to last summer that I don’t think the hotel was ever meant to last very long, it really does feel like a short-term experiment to try out a bunch of ideas and tech in a way where they can charge through the nose for access to the “beta”. So many strange decisions make more sense if you assume it was never meant to last for more than about 2 years. (But still! Why build it way out there instead of something you could turn into a more-permanent fixture?)
But that’s all old news; that was stuff we were speculating on before the thing even opened. No, what I’ve been stewing on since I watched this video was the LARP aspect. Nicholson’s video was the first thing I’d seen or read that really dug into what the “role play” aspect of the experience was like and how that worked—or didn’t. And I can’t believe how amateur-hour it was.
Credit where credit was due, Disney was going for something interesting: an open-to-the-public Diet LARP that still had actual NPC characters played by paid actors with storylines and semi-scripted events. Complexity-wise, not all the way up to a “real” LARP, but certainly up above an escape room or a murder mystery party or a ren faire or something of those ilk. Plus, you have to assume basically everyone who will every play it is doing so for the first time, no veteran players. And at a premium price.
One would think this would come with a fairly straightforward set of rules or guidelines; I imagined an email with a title along the lines of “To ensure you have the best possible experience…” And instead, they just… didn’t?
For example, the marketing made a big deal about “starring in your own story” and guests were strongly encouraged to dress up. But they really didn’t want guests to use character names. That seems mostly logistical, with guest profiles and whatnot tied to their real names. That’s the sort of obvious-in-retrospect but not-so-much ahead of time detail that is the reason Session Zero exists! This isn’t Paranoia, it’s not cheating to tell the players how to play the game, just tell them! For $6000, I’d expect to be told ahead of time “please wear costumes but please don’t use a fake name.”
But it’s the lack of any sort of GameMaster/StoryTeller that stunned me. The just-shy of 40-year DM in me kept watching those video clips going “no, no, no, someone put your thumb on the scale there.” The interaction that really got me is the part of the video where she’s trying and failing to get pulled into the First Order story, and is attempting to have a conversation with the Officer actor to make this happen, and they are just talking past each other. And this made my skin crawl, because this is perfect example of a moment where you need to be able to make the “out of game” hand sign and just tell someone what’s happening. I can’t believe there wasn’t a way to break out of kayfabe and ask for help. Again, this is basic session zero safety tools shit. This is shit my 12 year old figured out on his own with his friends. Metaphorically, and maybe literally, there should always be a giant handle you can pull that means “this isn’t working for me”.
Look, this is not an original view, but for 6 grand, you should be able to do everything wrong and still get a killer experience. You shouldn’t be begging an underpaid SoCal improv actor to let you play the game you paid for halfway though your trip.
I get that they were trying to do something new for Disney, but The Mind's Eye Theatre for Vampire came out in 1993. Running a safe and fun LARP is a solved problem.
I get wanting to make something that’s as mainstream and rookie-friendly as possible, and that you don’t want to just appeal to the sort of folks that can tell you who the seven founding clans of the Camarilla were. But something we talk about a lot in tabletop RPGs is “calling for buy-in”, and holy shit clicking CONFIRM ORDER on a screen with a juicy four digit number of dollars on it is the most extreme RPG buy-in I’ve ever heard of.
I know I keep coming back to the price, and that’s partly because for a price that premium you should get an equivalently premium experience, but more importantly: there was no-one casual at this thing. No one “impulse-bought” a trip on the Starcruiser. Everyone there was as bought-in as anyone ever has been, and they couldn’t figure out how to deliver an experience as good as any random night in the park with the other vampires in the sleepy NorCal farming town I went to college in.
It’s tempting to attribute all that to general Disney arrogance, but I don’t think so. It all feels so much stupider than that. Arrogance would be ignoring the prior art, this feels more like no-one could be bothered to find out if there was any? The most expensive piece of half-ass work I have ever seen. This all could have worked? Beyond the obvious budget cuts and trying to scale down, this could have worked. It’s wild to me that they’d spend that much money, and energy, and marketing mindshare, and then not make sure it did. I mean, really, no one employed by Imagineering used to be the Prince of Glendale or something? Unlikely. I don’t think anyone intentionally sandbagged this project, but it sure doesn’t look like anyone involved cared if it was successful.
Weird.
Bad Art is Still Art
It’s “Spicy Takes Week” over at Polygon, and one of the bits they’re kicking off with is: Roger Ebert saying video games are not art is still haunting games.
For everyone that made better choices about how to spend the early 00s than I did, almost two decades ago film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games were not and could not be art, which was an opinion that the video game–playing denizens of the web took in good humor and weren’t weird about at all. HAHA, of course I am kidding, and instead it turned into a whole thing which still has occasional outbreaks, and the vitrol of the response was in retrospect was an early-warning sign of the forces that would congeal into gamergate and then keep going.
At the time, I thought it was terribly funny, mostly because of the irony of a critic of a new-ish artform that was only recently regarded as art kicking down the ladder behind him, but also because the movie that inspired him to share this view was the 2005 adaptation of DOOM, and look, if that movie was my only data point I’d deny that games were art too.
Whenever the videogames-as-art topic pops back up, I’m always briefly hopeful, because there are actually a lot of interesting topics here—what does it mean for authorship and art if the audience is also invited to be part of that authorship? If video games are art, are tabletop games? Can collaborative art made exclusively for the participants be art? (For the record, yes, yes, and yes.) There’s also fun potential side-order of “games may not be art but can contain art, and even better can be used to create art,” which is where the real juice is.
But no, that’s never what anyone wants to talk about, instead it’s always, as polygon says, about people wanting to sit at what they see as the big kids table without having to think through the implications, with a side-order of the most tedious “is it still art it you make money” arguments you’ve ever seen, surrounded by the toxic sheen of teenagers who don’t think they’re being taken seriously enough.
I think one of the reason’s that the “Ebert thing” specifically has stuck around long past his death is that of all the mainstream critics, he seemed the most likely to be “one of us.” He was always more sympathetic to genre stuff than most of his colleagues. He loved Star Wars! He called out Pauline Kael by name to argue that no, Raiders of the Lost Ark is great, actually. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for heavensakes. It sure seems like he’s be the kind of guy that would be all “heck yeah, I love video games!” and instead he said that not only they weren’t at the adults table, but that they could never get there.
Kind of a surprise, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And look, whatever argument that there might have existed to change Ebert’s mind, a bunch of 16-year olds telling him that Halo of all things was the greatest piece of art ever created was the exact opposite.
Mostly, I’m “yes, and-ing” polygon’s article so I finally have an excise link to this interview with George Lucas at Cannes from a few months ago, which apparently only exists on the wreckage formerly known as twitter?.
The whole interview is great, a classic sharp-and-cranky Lucas interview. It’s all worth watching, but the bit I’m quoting here starts at about 7:40. The interviewer asks him about Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, and Lucas manages to look even grouchier and with a sort of sigh says "Look. Cinema is the art of a moving image. So if the image moves, then it’s… cinema.” (Seriously, the look on his face, a sort of patronizing exhaustion, is great.)
And I think that really cuts to the core of these weird semantic gatekeeping debates: Cinema you don’t enjoy is still Cinema. Bad Art is Still Art.
There’s so much to enjoy here. It’s not clear from the way he asks the question if the interviewer knows how much backstory there is to that question. Does he know that George and Marty have been friends for half a century? Does he know that Marcia Lucas edited a bunch of Marty’s movies. Does he know Marty has been talking shit about Star Wars since before it was released, in exactly the same way he talks about Marvel movies? Lucas’ demeanor in this is as if that Franco “First Time?” meme came to life, an air that he’s been having this exact conversation since before the guy asking the question was born, and is resigned to continuing to do so for the rest of his life.
But it’s the same set of arguments. It’s not art because it’s fun, or made money, or has spaceships, or because I just didn’t like it very much. I have a list of qualities I associate with art, and I can’t or wont recognize their presence here.
All these arguments, with video games, or superhero movies, or Star Wars or whatever, always centers around the animus of the word “art”, and the desire to make that word into a synonym for “quality”, or more importantly “quality that I, personally, value.”
It always seems to boil down to “I have a lot of emotional investment in this word meaning this exact list of things and I find it threatening whenever someone suggests the tent should be wider,” which semantically is just “TRUKK NOT MUNKY” with extra steps.
Anyway, if people make something for other people to enjoy, it’s art. Even if it’s bad.
Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases, Updated
Previously: Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases
…And they’ve announced the next release: Season 25. I’m pretty pleased with myself, since that was one of the ones I predicted for release this year. Also delightfully, this make my boy Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor the first classic series Doctor to have a complete run on blu-ray. This should be a great one, extended cuts on all four stories, new sound mixes, and they really did get the rights to that PBS documentary I was thinking about. Mark Ayres, who did the music for several Seventh Doctor stories, was the last employee of the Radiophonic Workshop when it closed down, and has been a key member of the restoration team for the home video releases has been working hard to make sure the McCoy episodes got the absolute gold-star treatment, and this looks like a fitting conclusion.
On the other hand, I get docked some points since I guessed this would be a three-release year, and it sure looks like they’re only going to do two. Looking at the pattern now, it sure looks like two a year is going to be the standard? That implies they won’t be done until 2030, which is in keeping with this show to finish a set of releases long after the format has been surpassed. I was hoping they’d be done before the kids all moved out of the house, but what can you do? This also means the Jodie Whittaker logo is now the “Classic Who” logo, and is going to stick around probably long past the end of the RTD2 run? That’s funny.
This also means that for the rest of the run, we’re now even between color and black&white seasons left to do, with five of each—1 & 3-6 for B&W, and 7,11,13,16,21 in color (plus the hypothetical but almost certain “Wilderness Years” set.)
Looking back at my predictions from January, I think my reasoning is still sound, but assuming only two a year changes things a little. I genuinely can’t believe they’d have a year with only B&W releases, so that implies a color and B&W every year from here on.
So, re-dealing them out, my revised predictions look like:
2024:
- 15—done.
- 25—and done.
2025:
- 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if the rumors are true and they are replacing those dinosaurs.
- 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?
2026:
- 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”
- Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.
2027
- 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
- 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.
2028
- 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
- 5—The last missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually.
2029
- 21—one last Davison set.
- 1—the checks should have cleared by this point.
2030
- 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.
Not the Time For Trick Plays
For as long as I can remember, the Democrats—both the party and the pundit-and-commentary class—have had an unfortunate fascination, a weakness really, for magical-thinking schemes. Magic Bullets, somewhere between a Captain Kirk plan and playing to a theoretical referee. There’s always some “thing” thats going to happen and solve The Problem, so we don’t have to do anything. The Mueller report, the state criminal charges, hell, the Supreme Court is gonna decide in favor of Gore. Anything to avoid doing the actual work. And this usually comes as a late-in-the-day last-ditch effort to make up for not having done the work.
But this thing about swapping out Biden as the candiate really takes the cake.
This seems insane to me. I understand that I like Biden more than most people as far to the left as I am, but that’s not the point. This is a single-issue election: beat Trump. Everything else is commentary. The incumbent in American Presidential elections has a huge structural advantage, and Biden is literally the only guy whose ever beat Trump in an election. Seems like a slam dunk to me, no matter how many bad debates we have.
(Also, buried in the background noise is that neither of them did well in the debate. And the other guy has a pretty hard ceiling of support.)
And look, I get it, there’s stuff he’s doing you hate, there’s issues you disagree on. Me too! But I guarantee whatever issue those are, the game show host will be worse.
I heard a lot the last week that the Dems have this deep bench full of people who could take over as candiate. Great! The 2028 primaries start now. Get them out on the trail today stumping for the sleepy grandpa. Let ‘em show us how great a campaigner they’d be. Whoever makes this happen gets the next nomination. While we’re at it, let’s make sure to tell folks about what this administration has actually pulled off the last couple of years? Take the credit. The fact that there is anyone over the age of 3 who can grump with a straight face that Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime” is a catastrophic PR miss. That’s the work they skipped, and all the hypothetical candidates in the world aren’t going to counteract forgetting to tell anyone what you did.
I love a good trick play as much as the next person who knows what an “onside kick” is, but there’s no crazy stunt where we pull Zaphod Beeblebrox out of a hat and he wins the election for us. The next president is gonna be one of those two guys. Let’s focus on making sure, at the very least, the wrong one doesn’t get there, not daydreaming about fucking unicorns.
Programming Note: Icecano will be off next week. Regular service resumes on July 15th.
Happy Fourth
“This is not a time to be dismayed, this is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for. It is now time to go. You’re a good person. That means more now than ever.” —Henry Rollins
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
I’ve been Extremely Online pretty much since that was a thing you could be. Being Online is a condition that’s not well described or represented Offline. Most books or movies about scenes I was a part of, either directly or tangentially, tend not to be very accurate, not get the vibe right. I read books about computer games, say, and tend to leave with a sense of “huh, that’s not how it was for me at all.” Online is even worse; this is probably because Online is always describing itself to itself, and there’s no room for a slow, non-networked, Offline description.
Patricia Lockwood, who apparently dodged a thousand years of jail, used to be fairly active on the outer edges of what used to be called “weird twitter.” It turns out, poets were really good at twitter’s strange limitations, go figure. She wrote a book a few years ago called No One is Talking About This, which I had been looking forward to very much, but only just now finally had a chance to sit down and read.
This book is the single best description I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be Extremely Online. Specifically, it’s simply the best description of what it was like to read twitter too much in the late twenty-teens. The timing is accidentally perfect, it’s the perfect eulogy for that phase of the internet that existed between the recession and the pandemic; the five websites full of screenshots of the other four era, before the Disaster of the Twenties really got rolling.
But more generally, it perfectly encapsulates the Online Condition. The way The Online expands and consumes all your mental and emotional bandwidth, and the way Real Life sort of falls away, unable to match the dopamine flow. The way your head is full of all this stuff that no one else around you knows, or recognizes, or cares about. The Online doesn’t become more real than The Real, exactly, just more present, and faster, and louder.
But this book isn’t about any of that. This book is about what it’s like to be Online when Real Life suddenly becomes Extremely Real. And the result isn’t that suddenly Real Life becomes real again, it’s that neither seems real, and you float in this twilight realm between the two spaces, unable to engage with or believe either of them.
The way neither space can act as an escape valve for the other, and the realities continue to diverge past the point where you can hold both in your head, and you find yourself in both places, gasping out, for different reasons, No One is Talking About This.
I’m generally a fast reader. I don’t intend to humblebrag here, despite leaving this sentence in—I’ve always read fast, I tend to gulp books down. (I also walk fast and talk fast, and should probably do something about my caffeine intake.) This is a short book, but it took me a long time to read, because I couldn’t make it very far before I had to put it down and just sort of process the last couple of pages. It was very, very funny, but it got much further under my skin than I was expecting.
I enjoyed it very much. Strongly recommended.
Post-Debate Hot Takes & Hand-Wringing
I see after last week’s debate the Hot-Takes-and-Hand-Wringing-Industrial Complex has throttled up to maximum capacity. To be sure, it wasn’t exactly a high-point in American Presidential politics, and in a “normal” election year, this would have been a profound unforced error on the part of Biden and the Democrats. But it’s not a normal election, and so here’s my hot take: I actually don’t think it’s going to matter one bit.
Here’s my even hotter take: I don’t believe there’s actually a single undecided voter in the country.
American National Politics is built around the semi-mythical character of the “Undecided Voter”. Conventional wisdom says that in a given cycle, each party has an about even 40-something percent of the electorate that will vote for them no matter what, and then you have something between 10 and 20 percent who can be persuaded to one candiate or the other on “the merits”. I’ve never really believed that there were as many undecideds as we like to think. I think there are a lot of people who are performatively undecided, but they’re like the people who claim they tip servers “based on performance” but somehow only ever find reasons to make the tip smaller—they knew when they walked in that they were only going to tip the poor kid 10%, but they needed to make a production out of how it was the server’s fault, not them being an ass. And those people always seem to end up deciding the same way every cycle. (This applies to 3rd party “spoiler” candidates too—I don’t think they matter as much as we sometimes like to pretend. Literally no-one who voted for Jill Stein was ever going to vote for Clinton; Stein was the excuse, not the cause.) But the upshot is that many of the rituals of an American presidential election are built around the idea that there’s this pool of voters who are equally open to voting to either candidate, depending on who makes the better sales pitch.
This time, we’ve got something that hasn’t happened in living memory: both people running have already done the job. This is literally a redo of the election we had four years ago. Despite various outbreaks of magical thinking, everyone knew who was going to be running in this election as of thanksgiving 2020: It’s the sleepy-but-surprisingly-competent corporatist-centrist grandpa vs the racist tv game show host turned convicted felon and aspiring fascist, with the only third choice being a smörgåsbord of excuses providing air-cover for “fuck it, I’ve convinced myself that I have enough privilege that I can sit this one out.”
Nearly everyone already had to decide which of these two guys to vote for. The sales pitch this time isn’t the campaign, it’s their respective terms as president. I don’t believe that anyone is going to change their vote from last time, and I certainly don’t believe that anything this year is going to change anyone’s mind. Instead, the Dems need to realize that the opponent isn’t Trump or the Republicans, the opponent is apathy. Assume the number of “deplorable” votes is fixed. This isn’t a change hearts and minds election, this isn’t even really a competing policy election. This is a harm reduction election. This is a fight apathy and get-out-the-vote election. And you don’t fight apathy by putting a likable old guy with or without a cold and a stutter on stage next to the living manifestation of every mistake ever made by the American Experiment. Nobody changed their vote based on that tire fire that was on CNN, but nobody was ever going to.
And look, please don’t mistake any of the above for “optimism.” It’s not that we’re not in trouble. We’re in bad trouble, we’ve in terrible trouble. We’ve got problems the likes of which we can barely comprehend, but “a good debate performance” was the solution to none of them.
“Look at this Asshole”
There’s a class of post I’ve come to think of as “Look at this Asshole”. You know the form: a picture or a video of a Known Asshole doing Asshole Things, with a sentence or two with no semantic content other than to point. The emptiest of content calories, a brief source of low-quality dopamine, depending on the asshole. They’ve become like background radiation, part of the low-content noise the web is swimming in.
Don’t get me wrong, we live in an age absolutely drowning in assholes to look at. Our economy has been hollowed out into various grifts, scams, MLM schemes with extra steps, fascists walk the streets, people are losing their jobs so their bosses can replace them with sparkling autocomplete plagiarism machines, our entire civilization is in a permanent state of existential crisis.
But my response to these kinds of posts is always, “yeah, I know! They’re doing it for the attention, don’t give it to them!” Talking about the assholes might be of value, why did they get this way, what are they doing, what are the consequences and how can we stop them. Just Looking at the Assholes does nothing but encourage them. It’s like one of those cartoons where shooting lasers at the monster makes it get bigger.
But something I had not appreciated before I got into a regular groove here—or rather, what I had known but not truly understood—was how easy those posts are to write.
I know this because I keep catching myself; I’ll be thinking “lemme just toss that up real fast, it’ll be funny”, and no, I almost Looked at an Asshole. It takes some real discipline to force yourself to notice, and then start over.
Forget the whole economics around attracting eyeballs with “clickbait.” Are you behind? Need a post real fast? You could go Look at an Asshole! It’s one of the stupider results of this strange death-spiral the entire media apparatus has been in the last few decades, not enough people, economics encouraging short attention spans, not enough time or interest to write anything insightful, all ending in an endless feedback loop of Assholes and Looking At them, because it’s too much work to do anything else.
Man, just look at those assholes.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2006)
This book has been on my list for ages, at least since it won the Hugo. Thanks to the dual prompting of the new show and some light peer pressure, I finally read it. Let’s get this out of the way up front: I liked it a lot. Great book! You should read it.
But my goodness, this is a book I wish I could have read in the original language. There’s a very distinctive style and rhythm to the language, especially the dialogue, that I can only describe as “artfully clunky”, lots of people shouting declarative statements past each other. I’d love to know what percentages of that are a) the author’s style b) an artifact of the translation c) that’s how Mandarain sounds. I suspect it’s 30:70 a and c, but I’d love to know.
For a 400+ page book, there are surprisingly few characters with major “speaking parts”.
My favorite was Shi Qiang, the grizzled police detective. Speaking of cultural and stylistic differences, that character is clearly supposed to be the hard-charging pragmatist, and as such, he felt the most in-line with the baseline of the way American technothriller/science fiction characters act. And so it kept making me laugh how constantly he would say or suggest something that seemed pretty straightforward to me, and then all the other characters would fall all over themselves about how rude and inhuman the detective was. I really enjoyed the cultural differences embedded in the fact that the other characters can barely comprehend how rude that guy is, and meanwhile I’m reading it thinking “the other guys in Miami Vice would make so much fun of this guy for being too polite”.
On the other hand, Wang Miao, the character we spend the most time with, has a certain blank “video game protagonist” quality. Mostly he’s there to be shocked at the detective, solve puzzles, and deliver exposition, in that order.
In a lesser book, the third character with the most time on page, Ye Wenjie, would be the antagonist, and while her actions are opposed to those of the first two characters, the book refuses to be that straightforward. She’s really the book’s main protagonist, as her actions are what cause the plot to start moving, in many ways she manages to have the most agency of anyone in the story, despite her not realizing it.
I really, really enjoyed how hard the author worked not to editorialize on the characters. There’s the group that in an American novel would absolutely be the “bad guys”, and here the author just describes them with a tone of “well, what do you think?” Maybe the best deployment f the “villain has a point” trope I have ever seen.
The overall structure of the book was a lot of fun. Roughly speaking, it was: 100 pages of warmup laps, making sure the reader knew who everyone was and where they were, 200 pages of post-cyberpunk techno-thriller modern-day science fiction, then 100 pages of absolute unchained insanity. A++.
It’s the sort of book where the author has had some fun ideas about how physics could work, and what that would mean, and would like to tell you about it. (The all time grand-champion for “let me tell you my ideas about physics” is Masamune Shirow’s Orion which is less of a graphic novel than it is an illustrated physics textbook for a cosmology worked outwards from “how can we power spaceships with spells?” It’s incredible, and I can’t believe they keep remaking Ghost in the Shell but still haven’t done Orion even once.)
There’s plot point that hinges on a common pop culture misunderstanding of “quantum entangling”, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does jump out if you read those kinds of ars technica articles. Which isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to have an exchange along the lines of a human saying “but the no messaging theorem!” and the aliens saying “haha, your puny earth science has much to unlearn!!” But this is mostly there to enable the real fun crazy ideas around computers, and higher dimensions, and particle physics, and ways civilizations can (or can’t) cope with their surroundings. One of the things I genuinely like about the book is that is spends ~300 pages being a real-world hard science fiction book, and then in the last 100 or so starts doing things that would make Star Trek blush, but since you’re bought in it all works, and the end can get away with a lot.
“Hard science fiction” in the classic mid-century sense of “square-jawed Science Men think through a math word problem for 8000 words” has fallen out of vogue, and this book isn’t a throwback so much as it is a revival. Rehabilitating the (sub)genre while keeping the post-seventies innovations of the broader science fiction literary community. From the discussions on the web, I notice this seems to be a lot of younger people’s first “hard” SF, and to be clear, I think that’s great. I’m kind of a reverse-hipster on this one; I have a strong “if you like that, buckle up, there’s a whole section of the library you are going to flip over” reaction. (Wait’ll these kids discover that Clarke book that’s essentially a set of full engineering plans for a space elevator in novel form.)
The key factor in making all that work is grounding the story in the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having the story take place in the shadow of the real-world horrors, and the plot spin out as a serious of consequences of that disaster give it a sense of social realism that glues together all the VR games and nanomaterials and sophons.
Finally, it doesn’t technically end on a cliffhanger, but I adore the double-punchline the book ends on. Incredible last scene.
Doctor Who and the Empire of Death
And there we go! Thats a wrap on first season of New New Who.
Before we go any further, let’s check in with the target audience. Traditionally, and I think this is still the case, the BBC had separate departments for “Childrens’s shows” and “Adult Drama”, as you would expect. One of the reasons that Doctor Who has always been a bit of an odd duck content-wise is that it was, and is, a children’s show, but one made by the Drama department, not the Children’s department. This can spawn a lot of Tedious DiscourseTM about whether it’s “for kids” and if so what we can use that as an excuse for (see also: Star Wars), but the practical upshot is that the target audience has always been, essentially, Smart Tweens and their Parents. That 12-14 range has always been the show’s sweet spot in terms of how scary it is, the content, the kinds of complexity it has. And like all good children’s TV, it talks up to them rather than down, and as such tends to hang on to its audience as they age out of the tween sweet spot.
Well, as it happens, I have both a 12 and a 14-year old, and they absolutely loved it. My 14-year old was practically hovering the entire show as she vibrated from excitement, and as the credits rolled she declared this episode to be the “greatest Doctor Who ever!”
And you know what? That’s the review. Whatever us middle-aged former tweens thought about it, the core audience loved it. Mission accomplished.
Before we get to the finale proper, the folks in the UK got an appetizer—an amuse-bouche, if you will. BBC4 aired a surprise bonus episode of Tales of the Tardis featuring “Pyramids of Mars”. Recall that Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor was the surprisingly unrepresented Doctor when the other TotT episodes dropped back in November, now we know why.
The biggest disappointment is that Tom didn’t come back. But, he’s 90 now, and I think we’ve seen the last of his Doctor in live action. Instead we get Gatwa and Gibson in the Memory Tardis, with the Doctor telling the story of the first time he met Sutek.
“Pyramids of Mars” is, of course, a stone cold classic, one of best stories from one of the old show’s best periods with probably the best pair of leads the show ever had. For a long time, “Pyramids” was my pick for what to show someone whose never seen the show before; it may not be objectively The BestTM, but if you don’t like this one, Classic Doctor Who may not be the show for you.
There was some consternation in the usual parts when an unnamed TotT episode popped up on the schedule, because the time slot was 75 minutes, but any classic 4-parter clocks in at 96 or so. And look, I genuinely love that old show, but there isn’t a single 4-part story that couldn’t lose 20 minutes to its benefit. (Off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure I know what I’d chop out.)
The end result is a win all around. The trims were what you’d hope—the padding and explicit racism, in that order. Gatwa sets the tone from the get-go by describing the archeologists at the start as looters, his disgust palpable. (“I’m a time traveler. I point and laugh at archeologists.”) There’s some tastefully upgraded special effects, in keeping with the style of the blu-ray releases.
As aired, it’s placement was slightly puzzling; Ruby clearly knows who Sutek is, and they discuss how impossible he is to defeat, despite the fact that they’ve clearly escaped from the cliffhanger at the end of “Legend of Ruby Sunday”, implying this is all taking place during “Empire of Death?” Once EoD aired, it wasn’t explicit, but there was clearly a place where it was supposed to go, I suspect you could edit them together basically seamlessly.
As a teaser it works remarkably well: a rerun of a story from the old show, introduced and contextualized by the current cast, acting as an extended “previously on” flashback/table-setting for the finale? That’s a great idea. They should do this more often.
The show itself: it was a classic Davies season finale. As soon as the store-brand Thanos disintegration effects started, it was clear that this was going to be one of those stories where everything was undone at the end; it was going to be 30-ish minutes of moping, followed by 5 minutes of hand-waving. Or as I put it last week, some bullshit. As such, there’s no real stakes, it’s clear this is all going to un-happen as soon as the “minutes remaining” counter gets low enough. As such, it’s mostly sort of Diet Drama, empty calories and fake sweetener. Given Davies’ track record, it’s slightly disappointing, but not surprising.
That said, it wasn’t terrible. Gatwa and Gibson have enough raw charisma to make much worse TV than this work, Langford continues to prove how terribly misused she was in the 80s, and Redgrave lands the hell out of her two or three scenes, aware that she’s not playing a character in this one so much as a plot accelerant.
Davies likes to power these kinds of big stories on emotional connections and big feelings rather than police procedural–style plot logic; we’re in a space much closer to David Lynch’s dream worlds than we are to something like Columbo. This particular speed of maximalist-melodrama isn’t the my favorite speed for Doctor Who. I mean, bring death to death? Did the Doctor really use the Uno reverse card? Fine, sure. The only part I genuinely disliked was the “now I become a monster” bit, which is staggeringly unearned and also incredibly played out. This is the kind of plot structure that tends to get dismissed as “bad writing”, and it isn’t—this is very good writing making some very specific choices that I just don’t care for myself. But people like me are why they also made “Boom” and “Dot and Bubble.”
Why is Rose Noble in this? Not that it isn’t fun to have her there, and that “how’s your uncle” isn’t a fun zing, but… she just stands around and then gets dusted? Or really, most any of the guest cast? There’s a lot of actors who got paid to watch the episode from on set, and good for them, I guess?
I really, really liked the resolution to the mystery of Ruby’s parents. The basic resolution to the “mystery”, that people and things are important if we believe them to be, not because someone else declares them to be, I thought was a great basic statement of principles for the show. Apparently, on the commentary track, Davies says that her mom turning out to be just a regular person was at least partly inspired by Rise of Skywaker reconning that out of Rey’s backstory. I thought it was great— Doctor Who has always been a show where “what you do” is more important than “where you came from”, and this made that very literal in the text. Just some regular people caught up in something bigger than themselves: sounds like Doctor Who to me.
I have to admit to not having much else to say about it? It was fine. But, seeing as we’re at the end of the season, rather than picking at the threads of this one in particular, let’s pull out and see how we’re doing overall. What shape is this show in versus where it was back in May?
Let’s start with the Doctor themself. Gatwa has a really interesting take on the character, which I really like. We’ve talked about how he’s more scared than his predecessors, and that his emotions are always up at 120%, but the thing I think is the most interesting is that he plays the 15th Doctor as much more of just a regular guy. In this case, the comparison to “Pyramids of Mars” is fascinating, as it also invokes a comparison with Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor, who is many things, none of which are “regular guy.”
As one specific example: I’ve talked a lot about how scared this incarnation gets, and “Pyramids” is probably the most visibly scared Tom’s Doctor ever was. But Tom played “scared” by getting grimmer and grouchier, and without letting his opponent see it, a real “never let them see you bleed” approach. Gatwa is very visible about it. Both “Pyramids” and “Legend/Empire” have a scene where one of the humans snaps at the Doctor for their behavior, but in “Pyramids” it was Sarah reminding the Doctor that these are real people dying and don’t be so callus about it even if there’s a bigger picture, here it was Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together and do something. A very different take on what a masculine hero looks like, and frankly, I’m enjoying the change.
A fun distinction you make make with the actors who have played the part is that a small but vocal subset of them grew up as fans of the show before they became actors—Davison, Colin Baker, Tennant, and Capaldi have all been very open about growing up as fans. And it’s not that the “fan Doctors” are better, but they do have an extra trick they can pull out of their back pocket when they need to; Davison would pretty obviously channel Troughton when he was stuck, and both Tennant and Capaldi would clearly start doing a Tom Baker impression when the script let them down. (The exception was Colin Baker, who I think correctly realized that the only way his version of the character was every going to work was if he started at 110% and kept going.) And look, “what would Tom Baker do here?” is a pretty solid backup plan for a script that isn’t firing on all cylinders.
But now we have a new category: Doctors who grew up as fans of the Revival show. Gatwa has been pretty clear about watching the Tennant years as a kid, and so I was curious to see if we were going to be able to spot any Tennant impressions. And I can’t actually say that I did, or rather, I can’t spot the different between Gatwa channeling his childhood versus the fact that Tennant’s portrayal is the new baseline for the character, replacing Troughton. It’s not an impression so much as “like David Tennant” is how the character acts now. So I suspect that it’s not that he falls back on an impression as that Gatwa really gets how that baseline works, so that leaves him a little more cognitive space to build things on top of that.
It’s a performance I really like, and kept being surprised by, and what else can you ask for with this show?
What about Ruby? The “companion” role in Doctor Who is a strange one; more than a sidekick, but not really a full co-lead. Mostly, the role exists so that the Doctor can deliver the exposition the audience needs via dialoge. This is why the show has settled on companions from the modern day, that way the companion needs the exact same set of exposition as the audience does.
(As the story goes, Clara was originally going to be the victorian version from “The Snowmen,” but then they realized that if, for example, you had an episode set on an 80s-era cold war submarine, if the character is from the modern day all you have to say is “cold war submarine!”, whereas if the character is from somewhere else you still have to tell the audience “cold war submarine!”, but then you also have to explain to the character what a submarine and a cold war is, and then explain to the audience why you’re explaining that, and when you have a fast-moving 45-minute show, that eats up a lot of time thats better spent on literally anything else. Back when you had 96 minutes to fill in the form of four 25-minute parts, that sort of thing gave you a free scene per episode to organically fill time with.)
But you also need a character that can step in and credibly take charge of the b-plot, so not someone helpless or just there to ask questions. My general belief is that the really successful companions are the ones that you can imagine starring in their own show. Even better, ones where you have a pretty good idea of what that show would be like, and then then upgraded to the better show. As some examples from the classic show, it’s really easy to imagine what a UNIT show held down by the Brigadier, or a freelance journalist show held down by Sarah Jane would look like (even before that one happened,) or a 90s teen angst show with Ace. For the new show, both Rose and Donna explicitly sketch in their respective shows before the Doctor crashes into them.
(And this is getting away from me a little, but what makes Amy fun is that she seems like she’s that kind of character, except her “home show” doesn’t make any sense. And Clara—the best modern companion—is the reverse, in that she does have her own show she makes sense in, but doesn’t get there until she leaves. But I digres.)
Ruby immediately presents as a character in the Rose/Donna mold, a quick sketch of her home show with her adoptive family and her band, and then the Doctor crashes in. Except it’s a little more generic than her predecessors, the show she actually starts in is a different show altogether, and then the bits around her, while effective, kind of float into the background behind The Mystery. However, as much as Ruby is a little generic, she held down an entire episode of “The Ruby Sunday Show”, so by that metric, she’s a big success. Like I said back in December, Ruby dones’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those,” complete with a mystery where the resolution is that the Doctor was seeing secrets where there are none.
I’ve had a note here reading “science ‘fiction’ vs ‘fantasy’?” since the show started, assuming this season would give me an excuse to dig into that, but this is another case where the contrast with “Pyramids” is enlightening. Sure, that story had mummies that were really robots, but it also had a rocket that was able to fly because “it transposes with its projection. Pyramid power.” I can’t with a straight face say that there’s anything significantly different due to this “pivot”; in practice most of the differences here seem to be stylistic ones due to Von Däniken–esque Chariots of the Gods–style ancient aliens aren’t the hottest thing in pop culture anymore. And the Doctor spitting “cultural appropriation” was a more interesting take on the material than the old show ever managed. (or, for that matter, the entirety of Stargate.)
I’m kinda fascinated that they spent all that money on that new Tardis console room, and made a big deal out of the jukebox, and then just didn’t use either? They had to build a new one, since Whittaker’s salt lamp set didn’t exist anymore, but maybe you didn’t need to build all that if you weren’t really going to use it? The Tardis set that got the most time ended up being the Memory Tardis. That’s funny.
By any objective measure, this is the best shape the show has been in for a decade. Good reviews, solid cast, more chatter online than I’ve seen in years. It’s got a big spot on that top carousel on Disney+! It starts one of the Kens from Barbie!
There’s always a certain amount of hand-wringing from the more phlegmatic corners of the the fan base who are convinced that the show is doomed and about to be cancelled, again. Which is funny, since I’m not sure there’s any other media property that’s gotten the number of “second chances” or “new leases on life” that Doctor Who has. And inevitably, if you ask these people what the solution is, the answer is always to make the show exactly like it was when they we’re twelve, and, yeah. Between that and summoning the internet version of soccer hooligans—that is, Star Wars fans—by invoking TLJ, and the internet is in full froth this weekend. I read maybe six of the worst takes on any piece of media ever over the weekend. One guy I saw actually openly wished the show was more like Farscape, and I don’t know how to tell you this, fella, but you’re not nostalgic for that show, you’re nostalgic for being fifteen.
There’s also a lot of free-floating fan anxiety about whether it was a “good starting point”, which forms a feedback loop with the incredibly tedious is it season 1, 14, or 40 “discussion.” (It’s season one, deal with it.) People with a straight face telling newcomers that they can’t watch this season yet, they need to go watch a 20-year old show from 2005 first. There’s lots of “I enjoyed it but my wife who doesn’t really like the show and hasn’t seen the old show didn’t” and like, buddy, the show isn’t the problem there. You ever watch a show with her that she picked?
The right answer to “where do I start” is “what’s on now”. Go watch that episode Disney+ says is Season One, Episode One. “Shows with lore” is a thing that exists now, in a way it didn’t in 2005; plus, as much as this is a soft reboot, there is a reason why wikipedia refuses to call this anything other than season 14. There’s this charming but weird pathology amongst a certain set of terminally online fans that while THEY will read wikis non-stop, “regular people” need to have everything explained to them or they’re be lost and confused.
But it’s the other way around; normal people don’t watch every single episode of things, they’re used to using context clues to keep up—big evil death god dog, got it. It’s only that class of fan that needs absolutely everything explained or they go off the deep end about “canon violations” or “plot holes.” These aren’t documentaties about fake people, they’re stories. Grow some media literacy like those “regular people” you talk down about. These, of course, are the people who went absolutely berserk at the reveal of Ruby’s parents, because they can’t believe that all their paying attention to detail didn’t pay off. Like we said up at the top,Doctor Who is unique in that it’s a mostly sci-fi show where the “male, 18-25” demographic isn’t the core demographic, and that leads to some funny responses.
Anyway, the show’s back, it’s in good hands, it’s doing great, it’s really fun, and the core audience loves it. Glad you’re back, Doctor. Looking forward to Christmas.
Sauce, for the Goose
There’s a lot of interesting things to talk about with the current resurgence of regulators squaring off with “Big Tech”. The most spicy one currently is the EU’s DMA law telling Apple that they have to allow alternate app stores and the like, and Apple trying their best not to hear that.
Anyway, I see today that there’s a whole host of new iOS features that Apple has announced that they will not be shipping to customers in Europe due to “regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act.”
As someone who once worked on a project that got shelved, in part, because the company I was working for wasn’t willing to accept the risk of doing all this work and then having Apple tell us it was a no go, my reaction is: “lol; lmao, even.”
I cannot tell you how profoundly satisfying it is to watch one of the largest companies in the world squirm and whine because they’re finally getting the same treatment they’ve been giving everyone else this entire time.
Nature is healing.
Outage
Because it never rains but it pours, we just recovered from a nearly 2-day internet outage here at Icecano headquarters. Apparently the upstream fiber backbone got damaged, and this may or may not have had something to do with the wildfires outside of town. (There’s a reasonably well-sourced rumor that one of the reasons this took so long to recover was that the replacement parts spent most of yesterday stuck in traffic, which is just perfect.)
This next bit isn’t exactly news, but it was remarkable how much stuff just assumes a live, high-speed internet connection now, regardless of whether that makes any sense or needs it or not. Everything I was doing for work yesterday was entirely local to my work machine, and everthing took forever, because nearly every user action still tripped off a background network call that had to time out before it would go on and do the local action I had asked it to do. I know we all got really excited about “the network is the compter,” but maybe profesional tools should keep working right when there’s no connection, you know?
Anyway, the upside is this gives me an excuse to link to brr.fyi, which I have been meaning to link to now for ages. it’s a blog from someone at McMurdo station in Antarctica describing their experiences; they're home now, but still writing some “wrapping it up” reflection-style posts. I had this all on my mind because the author just wrote a post titled: Engineering for Slow Internet.