Stray Notes on Unsettled Times

About 20 years we all spent a lot of time talking about The Singularity. Remember, the thing where we were all going to upload our minds into a computer in just a few years and live forever? Oh, but also the AIs were going to become supersmart and take over?

The whole thing was deeply silly, but for some reason we spent several years with all the Serious People pretending it was something to just around the corner, despite the fact that it was blatantly just “the rapture,” but with computer words.

That whole discourse was always a weird jumbled mixture of the plot of Terminator, Christian Apocalyptic theology, and unexamined anxiety about capitalism; in the parlance of today “A man will invent the singularly instead of going to therapy.”

(And I note that in today’s LLM/AGI discourse, we kept the bit about the robots being about to take over, but somehow lost the part where we all get to go to cyber-heaven. Huh.)

The bit that stuck with me from that era was the concept of “a” singularity, in the broder sense. A historical moment where there’s so much change so fast for whatever technological or historical or other reason, that it’s impossible to see beyond, the future is clouded until you get past the inflection point.

“The Singularity is coming!” they kept saying.

Well, it came all right. Just not the one they were rooting for.

🧊🌋

At about the same time, I was living next door to a couple who had left New Orleans after Katrina. I was never entirely clear how they ended up in my corner of Northern California, which they strongly disliked in a way that I, as someone who grew up in and actually does like California, was extremely sympathetic to.

This was the era where we started using the phrase “grim meathook future,” but weren’t yet sure how ironic we were being. I remember someone in the broader post-cyberpunk author world—knowning who I was reading a lot of at the time, it was probably either Bruce Sterling or Warren Ellis—said something like “maybe that’s just how it is now, every couple of years a once in a thousand year weather event will show up and wreck a major city.” The sort of comment where your initial reaction was to think “that’s a little pessimistic, gosh” before realizing that no, that was obviously true.

Maybe that’s just how it is now.

🧊🌋

Like most people in my age group, all my grandparents were involved with the WWII war effort in one way or another. The War came up a lot, as you might imagine, mostly as this crazy shared experience they all had.

One time, us kids were asking my grandmother questions about something related to the whole effort, why something had been the way it was.

“You have to remember,” she said, “we didn’t know we were going to win.”

That’s not a huge insight, but I was young enough that it was the first time I’d really engaged with the idea. As far as school was concerned, that was the war where America Saved Everybody, the idea that the people involved didn’t know the end of the story yet hadn’t ever occurred to me.

Obviously, that stuck with me, but what really stuck with me was the look on her face; a woman in her 70s remembering how scary her early 20s were.

🧊🌋

Looking forward to telling our grandkids, “you have to remember, we didn’t know how this was all going to turn out.”

Stray Music

On a pretty regular basis I get a stray piece of music stuck in my head, some tune I can’t immediately recognize. You know, that thing where you kind of hum along with it, thinking “Is this from something? Are there words? What is this?” And then you finally get far enough in to it that you recognize it.

For me, it always, 100% of the time, turns out to be one of the pieces of background music from Sim City 2000.

Strange New Worlds Season 3 Preview

I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about Strange New Worlds here on the ‘cano, since the last season went off the air just before I got this place firing on all thrusters.

I absolutely love it, it really might have ended up as my favorite live action Trek. Between SNW and Lower Decks, it’s hard to believe maybe the two best Trek shows of all time are airing at the same time.

Over the weekend, Paramount posted a preview of the next season, which is presumably the opening of the first episode, directly following on from last year’s cliffhanger. Here, watch this, and I’ll meet you below the embed with some assorted thoughts:

• Hey, that’s the music from “Balance of Terror!”
• I know this makes me sound old, but I can’t believe that’s how good “TV Star Trek” looks now.
• Closely related: I really love this iteration of the Enterprise design. I can’t believe how good the old girl looks in this show. Inside too!
• I saw someone griping about Pike being disoriented at the start of this, but I though that was a pretty clever piece of filmmaking to have Pike need a beat to get his bearings in order to give the audience a little space to get their bearings as they get dropped into the middle of a cliffhanger from a year and a half ago.
• Star Trek has always been a show about people working together to solve problems, but I’m always impressed at how good a job SNW does at genuinely letting every member of the cast contribute to a solution under pressure, and do it in a way that the audience can follow along with.
• It’s been fun watching the LED screen tech from The Volume expanding out from The Mandalorian and into the industry at large. Case in point: the Enterprise Main Screen really is a screen now. There’s a camera move about halfway through that clip where the camera tracks sideways towards Uhura’s station (while the Balance of Terror music is going) and the parallax and focus on the screen stays correct, because it’s really a screen. Every cinematographer that’s ever worked on Trek over the last 50 years would have killed for that shot, and they can just do it now. Go look at that again—can you imagine what Nick Myer would have done to have been able to to that in Wrath of Khan? Or Robert Wise?
• I’m a simple man, with simple tastes, and someone on the bridge going on the shipwide intercom with a warning always works for me.
• And big fan of the pulsing movie-era “alert condition red” logo.
• This also gives me an opportunity to introduce my invention of The Mitchell Index. It goes like this: the quality of a given episode of SNW is directly proportional to a) if Jenna Mitchell is in the show and b) how many lines she has. So far, it’s been remarkably accurate, and this clip is close to to highest score yet recorded. She even gets the big idea!
• Speaking of Mitchell, love the way she tags the Gorn with a real torpedo too; sure, you gotta make the dud look good, but also: their shields are down and screw those guys.
• Heh, “Let’s hit it.” Hell yeah.
• Man, I love this show.

Doctor Who And Some Stray Thoughts About Bigeneration

I didn’t put this together immediately, but on the commentary track for “The Giggle”, RTD moots the theory that every regeneration to date was actually a bigeneration. It isn’t totally clear if he means that this rippled back retroactively, or that this always happened off screen in a parallel timeline or something. I guess this does a better job explaining “The Two Doctors” than Season 6B ever did? Or even better, the way Troughton and Pertwee play their Doctors as having come out of retirement for “The Five Doctors”.

But this also illuminates the intent behind what’s going on in Tales from the Tardis, the previous Doctors really are out there running around as older versions of themselves.

But to what end? There were much simpler ways to justify the multi-Doctor teamup in “The Giggle” or old actors returning for “Tales from the Tardis”. This feels like table-setting, but table setting for what, I wonder?

On the one hand, I believe them when they say they don’t have any plans to bring Tennant back again, but on the other hand, that’s a hell of an artillery piece to load and ostentatiously hang on the mantlepiece if you’re not planning to fire it.