Last Week In Good Sentences
It’s been a little while since I did an open tab balance transfer, so I’d like to tell you about some good sentences I read last week.
Up first, old-school blogger Jason Kottke links to a podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Nilay Patel in The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production. Kottke quotes a couple of lines that I’m going to re-quote here because I like them so much:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
“Building traffic instead of an audience” sums up the last decade and change of the web perfectly. I don’t even have anything to add there, just a little wave and “there you go.”
Kottke ends by linking out to The Revenge of the Home Page in the The New Yorker, talking about the web starting to climb back towards a pre-social media form. And that’s a thought thats clearly in the air these days, because other old school blogger Andy Baio linked to We can have a different web.
I have this theory that we’re slowly reckoning with the amount of cognitive space that was absorbed by twitter. Not “social media”, but twitter, specifically. As someone who still mostly consumes the web via his RSS reader, and has been the whole time, I’ve had to spend a lot of time re-working my feeds the last several months because I didn’t realize how many feeds had rotted away but I hadn’t noticed because those sites were posting update as tweets.
Twitter absorbed so much oxygen, and there was so much stuff that migrated from “other places” onto twitter in a way that didn’t happen with other social media systems. And now that twitter is mostly gone, and all that creativity and energy is out there looking for new places to land.
If you’ll allow me a strained metaphor, last summer felt like last call before the party at twitter fully shut down; this summer really feels like that next morning, where we’ve all shook off the hangover and now everyone is looking at each other over breakfast asking “okay, what do you want to go do now?”
Jumping back up the stack to Patel talking about AI for a moment, a couple of extra sentences:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas. […] The human creativity is reduced to a prompt, and I think that’s the message of A.I. that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It’s actually easy to get to this thing that’s a pastiche of the thing that was hard, you just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path to get there. Then I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard.
(The whole interview is great, you should go read it.)
But that bit about ideas and reducing creativity to a prompt brings me to my last good sentences, in this depressing-but-enlightening article over on 404 media: Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
A small publisher for speculative fiction and roleplaying games is shuttering after 22 years, and the “final straw,” its founder said, is an influx of AI-generated submissions. […] “The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” [founder Julie Ann] Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”
And this really gets to one of the things that bothers me so much about The Plagiarism Machine—the sheer, raw entitlement. Why shouldn’t they get to just have an easy copy of something someone else worked hard on? Why can’t they just have the respect of being an artist, while bypassing the work it takes to earn it?
My usual metaphor for AI is that it’s asbestos, but it’s also the art equivalent of steroids in pro sports. Sure, you hit all those home runs or won all those races, but we don’t care, we choose to live in a civilization where those don’t count, where those are cheating.
I know several people who have become enamored with the Plagiarism Machines over the last year—as I imagine all of us do now—and I’m always struck by a couple of things whenever they accidentally show me their latest works:
First, they’re always crap, just absolute dogshit garbage. And I think to myself, how did you make it to adulthood without being able to tell what’s good or not? There’s a basic artistic media literacy that’s just missing.
Second, how did we get to the point where you’ve got the nerve to be proud that you were cheating?
Hundreds of Beavers
Your weekend movie recommendation: Hundreds of Beavers. An indie movie that did the festival circuit over the last year or so, just came out on iTunes this week. It’s a comedy about an applejack salesman becoming north America’s greatest fur trapper. I had a chance to see this one early. All I’ll say is that it’s kid-friendly, and it’s funny.
I’m gonna need to you to trust me on this. Part of the joy of this movie is the discovery. Don’t read anything about it, don’t watch the trailer. Just watch it.
“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”
For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.
Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”
One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?
I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:
and a key postscript:
Listening To My Stories With Nuance
…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.
Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.
Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.
And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”
I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.
Morale was low, is what I’m saying.
But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?
It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.
And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”
Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.
I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.
But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?
Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?
The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?
There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.
Electronics Does What, Now?
A couple months back, jwz dug up this great interview of Bill Gates conducted by Terry Pratchett in 1996 which includes this absolute gem: jwz: "Electronics gives us a way of classifying things"
TP: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.
BG: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.
“Electronics gives us a way of classifying things,” you say?
One of the most maddening aspects of this timeline we live in was that all our troubles were not only “forseeable”, but actually actively “forseen”.
But we already knew that; that’s not why this has been, as they say, living rent-free in my head. I keep thinking about this because it’s so funny.
First, you just have the basic absurdity of Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in the same room, that’s just funny. What was that even like?
Then, you have the slightly sharper absurdity of PTerry saying “so, let me exactly describe 2024 for you” and then BillG waves his hands and is all “someone will handle it, don’t worry.” There’s just something so darkly funny to BillG patronizing Terry Pratchet of all people, whose entire career was built around imagining ways people could misuse systems for their own benefit. Just a perfect example of the people who understood people doing a better job predicting the future than the people who understood computers. It’s extra funny that it wasn’t thaaat long after this he wrote his book satirizing the news?
Then, PTerry fails to ask the really obvious follow-up question, namely “okay great, whose gonna build all that?”
Because, let’s pause and engage with the proposal on it’s own merits for a second. Thats a huge system Bill is proposing that “someone” is gonna build. Whose gonna build all that, Bill? Staff it? You? What’s the business model? Is it going to be grassroots? That’s probably not what he means, since this is the mid-90s and MSFT still thinks that open source is a cancer. Instead: magical thinking.
Like the plagiarism thing with AI, there’s just no engagement with the fact that publishing and journalism have been around for literally centuries and have already worked out most of the solutions to these problems. Instead, we had guys in business casual telling us not to worry about bad things happening, because someone in charge will solve the problem, all while actively setting fire to the systems that were already doing it.
And it’s clear there’s been no thought to “what if someone uses it in bad faith”. You can tell that even in ’96, Terry is getting more email chain letters than Bill was.
But also, it’s 1996, baby, the ship has sailed. The fuse is lit, and all the things that are making our lives hard now are locked in.
But mostly, what I think is so funny about this is that Terry is talking to the wrong guy. Bill Gates is still “Mister Computer” to the general population, but “the internet” happened in spite of his company, not due to any work they actually did. Instead, very shortly after this interview, Bill’s company is going to get shanked by the DOJ for trying to throttle the web in its crib.
None of this “internet stuff” is going to center around what Bill thinks is going to happen, so even if he was able to see the problem, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The internet was going well before MICROS~1 noticed, and routed around it and kept going. There were some Stanford grad students Terry needed to get to instead.
But I’m sure Microsoft’s Electronic System for classifying reputation will ship any day now.
I don’t have a big conclusion here other than “Terry Pratchett was always right,” and we knew that already.
We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!
Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:
Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.
(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)
Book Lists Wednesday
Speaking of best of lists, doing the rounds this week we have:
We give the Atlantic a hard time in these parts, and usually for good reasons, but it’s a pretty good list! I think there’s some things missing, and there’s a certain set of obvious biases in play, but it’s hard to begrudge a “best american fiction” list that remembers Blume, LeGuin, and Jemisin, you know? Also, Miette’s mother is on there!
I think I’ve read 20 of these? I say think, because there are a few I own a copy of but don’t remember a single thing about (I’m looking at YOU, Absalom, Absalom!)
And, as long as we’re posting links to lists of books, I’ve had this open in a tab for the last month:
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - Wikipedia
I forget now why I ended up there, but I thought this was a pretty funny list, because I considers myself a pretty literate, well-read person, and I hadn’t even heard of most of these, must less read them. That said, the four on there I actually have read—Guns of August, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, Soul of a New Machine, and Into Thin Air—are four of the best books I’ve ever read, so maybe I should read a couple more of these?
Since the start of the Disaster of the Twenties I’ve pretty exclusively read trash, because I needed the distraction, and I didn’t have the spare mental bandwidth for anything complicated or thought provoking. I can tell the disaster is an a low ebb at the moment, because I found myself looking at both of these lists thinking, maybe I’m in the mood for something a little chunkier.
The Dam
Real blockbuster from David Roth on the Defector this morning, which you should go read: The Coffee Machine That Explained Vice Media
In a large and growing tranche of wildly varied lines of work, this is just what working is like—a series of discrete tasks of various social function that can be done well or less well, with more dignity or less, alongside people you care about or don't, all unfolding in the shadow of a poorly maintained dam.
It goes on like that until such time as the ominous weather upstairs finally breaks or one of the people working at the dam dynamites it out of boredom or curiosity or spite, at which point everyone and everything below is carried off in a cleansing flood.
[…]
That money grew the company in a way that naturally never enriched or empowered the people making the stuff the company sold, but also never went toward making the broader endeavor more likely to succeed in the long term.
Depending on how you count, I’ve had that dam detonated on me a couple of times now. He’s talking about media companies, but everything he describes applies to a lot more than just that. More than once I’ve watched a functional, successful, potentially sustainable outfit get dynamited because someone was afraid they weren’t going to cash out hard enough. And sure, once you realize that to a particular class of ghoul “business” is a synonym for “high-stakes gambling” a lot of the decisions more sense, at least on their own terms.
But what always got me, though, was this:
These are not nurturing types, but they are also not interested in anything—not creating things or even being entertained, and increasingly not even in commerce.
What drove me crazy was that these people didn’t use the money for anything. They all dressed badly, drove expensive but mediocre cars—mid-list Acuras or Ford F-250s—and didn’t seem to care about their families, didn’t seem to have any recognizable interests or hobbies. This wasn’t a case of “they had bad taste in music”, it was “they don’t listen to music at all.” What occasional flickers of interest there were—fancy bicycles or or golf clubs or something—was always more about proving they could spend the money, not that they wanted whatever it was.
It’s one thing if the boss cashes out and drives up to lay everyone off in a Lamborghini, but it’s somehow more insulting when they drive up in the second-best Acura, you know?
I used to look at this people and wonder, what did you dream about when you were young? And now that you could be doing whatever that was, why aren’t you?
Cyber-Curriculum
I very much enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s riff today on why people keep building torment nexii: Pluralistic: The Coprophagic AI crisis (14 Mar 2024).
He hits on an interesting point, namely that for a long time the fact that people couldn’t tell the difference between “science fiction thought experiments” and “futuristic predictions” didn’t matter. But now we have a bunch of aging gen-X tech billionaires waving dog-eared copies of Neuromancer or Moon is a Harsh Mistress or something, and, well…
I was about to make a crack that it sorta feels like high school should spend some time asking students “so, what’s do you think is going on with those robots in Blade Runner?” or the like, but you couldn’t actually show Blade Runner in a high school. Too much topless murder. (Whether or not that should be the case is besides the point.)
I do think we should spend some of that literary analysis time in high school english talking about how science fiction with computers works, but what book do you go with? Is there a cyberpunk novel without weird sex stuff in it? I mean, weird by high school curriculum standards. Off the top of my head, thinking about books and movies, Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days all have content that wouldn’t get passed the school board. The Matrix is probably borderline, but that’s got a whole different set of philosophical and technological concerns.
Goes and looks at his shelves for a minute
You could make Hitchhiker work. Something from later Gibson? I’m sure there’s a Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker novel I’m not thinking of. There’s a whole stack or Ursula LeGuin everyone should read in their teens, but I’m not sure those cover the same things I’m talking about here. I’m starting to see why this hasn’t happened.
(Also, Happy π day to everyone who uses American-style dates!)
Jim Martini
I need everyone to quit what you’re doing and go read Jim Martini.
When she got to Jim Martini, he said, I don’t want a party.
What do you mean you don’t want a party, Leeanne said. Everyone wants a party.
Unexpected, This Is
This blew up over the last week, but as user @heyitswindy says on the website formerly known as twitter:
The source article has more clips, but I’ll go ahead and embed them here as well:
I’m absolutely in love with the idea that old Ben has a cooler of crispy ones at the ready, but the one with the Emperor really takes the cake.
This went completely nuclear on the webs, and why wouldn’t it? How often does someone discover something new about Star Wars? According to the original thread, they also did this for other movies, including Gladiator and American Beauty(??!!) Hope we get to see those!
What really impresses me, though, is how much work they put into these? They built props! Costumes! Filmed these inserts! That would have been such a fun project to work on.
Implosions
Despite the fact that basically everyone likes movies, video games, and reading things on websites, every company that does one of those seems to continue to go out of business at an alarming rate?
For the sake of future readers, today I’m subtweeting Vice and Engaget both getting killed by private equity vampires in the same week, but also Coyote vs Acme, and all the video game layoffs, and Sports Illustrated becoming an AI slop shop and… I know “late state capitalism” has been a meme for years now, and the unsustainable has been wrecking out for a while, but this really does feel like we’re coming to the end of the whole neoliberal project.
It seems like we’ve spent the whole last two decades hearing about something valuable or well-liked went under because “their business model wasn’t viable”, but on the other hand, it sure doesn’t seem like anyone was trying to find a viable one?
Rusty Foster asks What Are We Dune 2 Journalism? while Josh Marshall asks over at TPM: Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business?. Definitely click through for the graph on TPM’s ad revenue.
What I find really wild is that all these big implosions are happening at the same time as folks are figuring out how to make smaller, subscription based coöps work.
Heck, just looking in my RSS reader alone, you have:
Defector,
404 Media,
Aftermath,
Rascal News,
1900HOTDOG,
a dozen other substacks or former substacks,
Achewood has a Patreon!
It’s more possible than ever to actually build a (semi?) sustainable business out there on the web if you want to. Of course, all those sites combined employ less people that Sports Illustrated ever did. Because we’re talking less about “scrappy startups”, and more “survivors of the disaster.”
I think those Defector-style coöps, and substacks, and patreons are less about people finding viable business models then they are the kind of organisms that survive a major plague or extinction event, and have evolved specifically around increasing their resistance to that threat. The only thing left as the private equity vultures turn everything else and each other into financial gray goo.
It’s tempting to see some deeper, sinister purpose in all this, but Instapot wasn’t threatening the global order, Sports Illustrated really wasn’t speaking truth to power, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand didn’t shutter everyone’s favorite toy store. Batgirl wasn’t going to start a socialist revolution.
But I don’t think the ghouls enervating everything we care about have any sort of viewpoint beyond “I bet we could loot that”. If they were creative enough to have some kind of super-villian plan, they’d be doing something else for a living.
I’ve increasingly taken to viewing private equity as the economy equivalent of Covid; a mindless disease ravaging the unfortunate, or the unlucky, or the insufficiently supported, one that we’ve failed as a society to put sufficient public health protections against.
Even Further Behind The Velvet Curtain Than We Thought
Kate Wagner, mostly known around these parts for McMansion Hell, but who also does sports journalism, wrote an absolutely incredible piece for Road & Track on F1, which was published and then unpublished nearly instantly. Why yes, the Internet Archive does have a copy: Behind F1's Velvet Curtain. It’s the sort of thing where if you start quoting it, you end up reading the whole thing out loud, so I’ll just block quote the subhead:
If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.
It’s outstanding, and you should go read it.
But, so, how exactly does a piece like this get all the way to being published out on Al Gore’s Internet, and then spiked? The Last Good Website tries to get to the bottom of it: Road & Track EIC Tries To Explain Why He Deleted An Article About Formula 1 Power Dynamics.
Road & Track’s editor’s response to the Defector is one of the most brazen “there was no pressure because I never would have gotten this job if I waited until they called me to censor things they didn’t like” responses since, well, the Hugos, I guess?
Edited to add: Today in Tabs—The Road & Track Formula One Scandal Makes No Sense
Friday Linkblog, best-in-what-way-edition
Back in January, Rolling Stone posted The 150 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time. And I almost dropped a link to it back then, with a sort of “look at these jokers” comment, but ehhh, why. But I keep remembering it and laughing, because this list is deranged.
All “best of” lists have the same core structural problem, which is they never say what they mean by “best”. Most likely to want to watch again? Cultural impact? Most financially successful? None of your business. It’s just “best”. So you get to infer what the grading criteria is, an exercise left to the reader.
And then this list has an extra problem, in that it also doesn’t define what they mean by “science fiction”. This could be an entire media studies thesis, but briefly and as far as movies are concerned, “science fiction” means roughly two things: first, “fiction” about “science”, usually in the future and concerned about the effects some possible technology has on society, lots of riffing on and manipulating big ideas, and second, movies that use science fiction props and iconography to tell a different story, usually as a subset of action-adventure movies. Or, to put all that another way, movies like 2001 and movies like Star Wars.
This list goes with “Option C: all of the above, but no super heroes” and throws everything into the mix. That’s not all that uncommon, and gives a solid way to handicap what approach the list is taking by comparing the relative placements of those two exemplars. Spoiler: 2001 is at №1, and Star Wars is at №9, which, okay, thats a pretty wide spread, so this is going to be a good one.
And this loops back to “what do you mean by best”? From a recommendation perspective, I’m not sure what value a list has that includes Star Wars and doesn’t include Radiers of the Lost Ark, and ditto 2001 and, say, The Seventh Seal. But, okay, we’re doing a big-tent, anything possibly science fiction, in addition to pulling from much deeper into the back catalog than you usually see in a list like this. Theres a bunch of really weird movies on here that you don’t usually see on best-of lists, but I was glad to see them! There’s no bad movies on there, but there are certainly some spicy ones you need to be in the right headspace for.
These are all good things, to be clear! But the result is a deeply strange list.
The top 20 or so are the movies you expect, and the order feels almost custom designed to get the most links on twitter. But it’s the bottom half of the list that’s funny.
Is Repo Man better than Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Is Colossus: The Forbin Project better than Time Bandits? Are both of those better than The Fifth Element? Is Them better than Tron? Is Zardoz better than David Lynch’s Dune? I don’t know! (Especially that last one.) I think the answer to all of those is “no”, but I can imagine a guy who doesn’t think so? I’ve been cracking up at the mental image of a group of friends wanting to watch Jurassic Park, and theres the one guy who says “you want to watch the good Crichton movie? Check this out!” and drops Westworld on them.
You can randomly scroll to almost anywhere and compare two movies, and go “yeah, that sounds about right”, and then go about ten places in either direction and compare that movie to those first two and go “wait, what?”
And look, we know how these kinds of lists get written: you get a group of people together, and they bring with them movies they actually like, movies they want people to think they like, and how hipster contrarian they’re feeling, and that all gets mashed up into something that’ll drive “engagement”, and maybe generate some value for the shareholders.
But what I think is funny about these kinds of lists in general, and this list specifically, is imagining the implied author. Imagine this really was one guy’s personal ranking of science fiction movies. The list is still deranged, but in a delightful way, sort of a “hell yeah, man, you keep being you!”
It’s less of a list of best movies, and more your weirdest friend’s Id out on display. I kind of love it! The more I scrolled, I kept thinking “I don’t think I agree with this guy about anything, but I’m pretty sure we’d be friends.”
Time Zones Are Hard
In honor of leap day, my favorite story about working with computerized dates and times.
A few lifetimes ago, I was working on a team that was developing a wearable. It tracked various telemetry about the wearer, including steps. As you might imagine, there was an option to set a Step Goal for the day, and there was a reward the user got for hitting the goal.
Skipping a lot of details, we put together a prototype to do a limited alpha test, a couple hundred folks out in the real world walking around. For reasons that aren’t worth going into, and are probably still under NDA, we had to do this very quickly; on the software side we basically had to start from scratch and have a fully working stack in 2 or 3 months, for a feature set that was probably at minimum 6-9 months worth of work.
There were a couple of ways to slice what we meant by “day”, but we went with the most obvious one, midnight to midnight. Meaning that the user had until midnight to hit your goal, and then at 12:00 your steps for the day resets to 0.
Dates and Times are notoriously difficult for computers. Partly, this is because Dates and Times are legitimately complex. Look at the a full date: “February 29th 2024, 11:00:00 am”. Every value there has a different base, a different set of legal values. Month lengths, 24 vs 12 hour times, leap years, leap seconds. It’s a big tangle of arbitrary rules. If you take a date and time, and want to add 1000 minutes to it, the value of the result is “it depends”. This gets even worse when you add time zones, and the time zone’s angry sibling, daylight saving time. Now, the result of adding two times together also depends on where you were when it happened. It’s gross!
But the other reason it’s hard to use dates and times in computers is that they look easy. Everyone does this every day! How hard can it be?? So developers, especially developers working on platforms or frameworks, tend to write new time handling systems from scratch. This is where I link to this internet classic: Falsehoods programmers believe about time.
The upshot of all that is that there’s no good standard way to represent or transmit time data between systems, the way there is with, say, floating point numbers, or even unicode multi-language strings. It’s a stubbornly unsolved problem. Java, for example, has three different separate systems for representing dates and times built in to the language, none of which solve the whole problem. They’re all terrible, but in different ways.
Which brings me back to my story. This was a prototype, built fast. We aggressively cut features, anything that wasn’t absolutely critical went by the wayside. One of the things we cut out was Time Zone Support, and chose to run the whole thing in Pacific Time. We were talking about a test that was going to run about three months, which didn’t cross a DST boundary, and 95% of the testers were on the west coast. There were a handful of folks on the east cost, but, okay, they could handle their “day” starting and ending at 3am. Not perfect, but made things a whole lot simpler. They can handle a reset-to-zero at 3 am, sure.
We get ready to ship, to light to test run up.
“Great news!” someone says. “The CEO is really excited about this, he wants to be in the test cohort!”
Yeah, that’s great! There’s “executive sponsorship”, and then there’s “the CEO is wearing the device in meetings”. Have him come on down, we’ll get him set up with a unit.
“Just one thing,” gets causally mentioned days later, “this probably isn’t an issue, but he’s going to be taking them on his big publicized walking trip to Spain.”
Spain? Yeah, Spain. Turns out he’s doing this big charity walk thing with a whole bunch of other exec types across Spain, wants to use our gizmo, and at the end of the day show off that he’s hit his step count.
Midnight in California is 9am in Spain. This guy gets up early. Starts walking early. His steps are going to reset to zero every day somewhere around second breakfast.
Oh Shit.
I’m not sure we even said anything else in that meeting, we all just stood without a word, acquired a concerning amount of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to spend the next week and change hacking in time zone support to the whole stack: various servers, database, both iOS and Android mobile apps.
It was the worst code I have ever written, and of course it was so much harder to hack in after the fact in a sidecar instead of building it in from day one. But the big boss got hit step count reward at the end of the day every day, instead of just after breakfast.
From that point on, whenever something was described as hard, the immediate question was “well, is this just hard, or is it ’time zone’ hard?”
Today in Star Wars Links
Time marches on, and it turns out Episode I is turning 25 this year. As previously mentioned, the prequels have aged interestingly, and Episode I the most. It’s not any better than it used to be, but the landscape around it has changed enough that they don’t look quite like they used to. They’re bad in a way that no other movies were before or have been since, and it’s easier to see that now than it was at the time. As such, I very much enjoyed Matt Zoller Seitz’s I Used to Hate The Phantom Menace, but I Didn’t Know How Good I Had It :
Watching “The Phantom Menace,” you knew you were watching a movie made by somebody in complete command of their craft, operating with absolute confidence, as well as the ability to make precisely the movie they wanted to make and overrule anyone who objected. […] But despite the absolute freedom with which it was devised, “The Phantom Menace” seemed lifeless somehow. A bricked phone. See it from across the room, you’d think that it was functional. Up close, a paperweight.
[…]
Like everything else that has ever been created, films are products of the age in which they were made, a factor that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluating quality or importance. But I do think the prequels have a density and exactness that becomes more impressive the deeper we get into the current era of Hollywood, wherein it is not the director or producer or movie star who controls the production of a movie, or even an individual studio, but a global megacorporation, one that is increasingly concerned with branding than art.
My drafts folder is full of still-brewing star wars content, but for the moment I’ll say I largely vibe with this? Episode I was not a good movie, but whatever else you can say about it, it was the exact movie one guy wanted to make, and that’s an increasingly rare thing. There have been plenty of dramatically worse movies and shows in the years sense, and they don’t even have the virtue of being one artist’s insane vision. I mean, jeeze, I’ll happily watch TPM without complaint before I watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or Iron Fist or Thor 2 again.
And, loosely related, I also very much enjoyed this interview with prequel-star Natalie Portman:
Natalie Portman on Striking the Balance Between Public and Private Lives | Vanity Fair
Especially this part:
The striking thing has been the decline of film as a primary form of entertainment. It feels much more niche now. If you ask someone my kids’ age about movie stars, they don’t know anyone compared to YouTube stars, or whatever.
There’s a liberation to it, in having your art not be a popular art. You can really explore what’s interesting to you. It becomes much more about passion than about commerce. And interesting, too, to beware of it becoming something elitist. I think all of these art forms, when they become less popularized, you have to start being like, okay, who are we making this for anymore? And then amazing, too, because there’s also been this democratization of creativity, where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things and incredible talents come up. And the accessibility is incredible. If you lived in a small town, you might not have been able to access great art cinema when I was growing up. Now it feels like if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get access to anything. It’s pretty wild that you also feel like at the same time, more people than ever might see your weird art film because of his extraordinary access. So it’s this two-sided coin.
I think this is the first time that I’ve seen someone admit that not only is 2019 is never going to happen again, but that’s a thing to embrace, not fear.
Zoozve
This is great. Radiolab cohost Latif Nasser notices that the solar system poster in his kid’s room has a moon for Venus—which doesn’t have a moon—and starts digging. It’s an extremely NPR (complimentary) slow burn solving of the simple mystery of what this thing on the poster was, with a surprisingly fun ending! Plus: “Quasi-moons!”
Space.com has a recap of the whole thing with links: Zoozve — the strange 'moon' of Venus that earned its name by accident. (See also: 524522 Zoozve - Wikipedia.)
One of the major recurring themes on Icecano are STEM people who need to take more humanties classes, but this is a case where the opposite is true?
Kirk Drift
I read this years ago, but didn’t save a bookmark or anything, and never managed to turn it up again—until this weekend, when I stumbled across it while procrastinating as hard as I could from doing something else:
Strange Horizons - Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková:
There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.
I’m going to walk through this because it’s important for ST:TOS’s reception, but more importantly because I believe people often rewatch the text or even watch it afresh and cannot see what they are watching through the haze of bullshit that is the received idea of what they’re seeing. You “know” Star Trek before you ever see Star Trek: a ‘naive’ encounter with such a culturally cathected text is almost impossible, and even if you manage it you probably also have strong ideas about that period of history, era of SF, style of television, etc to contend with. The text is always already interpolated by forces which would derange a genuine reading, dragging such an effort into an ideological cul de sac which neither the text itself nor the viewer necessarily have any vested interest in. These forces work on the memory, extracting unpaid labour without consent. They interpose themselves between the viewer and the material, and they hardly stop at Star Trek.
It’s excellent, and well worth your time.
(Off topic, I posted this to my then-work Slack, and this was the article that caused a coworker to wish that Slack’s link previews came with an estimated reading time. So, ah, get a fresh coffee and go to the bathroom before reading this.)
This is from 2017, and real life has been “yes, and”-ing it ever since. This provides a nice framework to help understand such other modern bafflements as “who are these people saying Star Trek is woke now” and “wait, do they not know that Section 31 are villains?”
And this is different from general cultural context drift, or “reimaginaings”, this is a cultural mis-remembering played back against the source material. And it’s… interesting which way the mis-remembering always goes.
Monday Snarkblog
I spent the weekend at home with a back injury letting articles about AI irritate me, and I’m slowly realizing how useful Satan is as a societal construct. (Hang on, this isn’t just the painkillers talking). Because, my goodness, I’m already sick of talking about why AI is bad, and we’re barely at the start of this thing. I cannot tell you how badly I want to just point at ChatGPT and say “look, Satan made that. It's evil! Don't touch it!”
Here’s some more open tabs that are irritating me, and I’ve given myself a maximum budget of “three tweets” each to snark on them:
Wherein Cory does a great job laying out the problems with common core and how we got here, and then blows a fuse and goes Full Galaxy Brain, freestyling a solution where computers spit out new tests via some kind of standards-based electronic mad libs. Ha ha, fuck you man, did you hear what you just said? That’s the exact opposite of a solution, and I’m only pointing it out because this is the exact crap he’s usually railing against. Computers don’t need to be all “hammer lfg new nails” about every problem. Turn the robots off and let the experts do their jobs.
I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx | Ars Technica
So wait, this guy had a fully working stack, and then was all “lol yolo” and replaced everything with no metrics or testing—twice??
I don’t know what the opposite of tech debt is called, but this is it. There’s a difference between “continuous improvement” and “the winchester mystery house” and boy oh boy are were on the wrong side of the looking glass.
The part of this one that got me wasn’t where he sat on his laptop in the hotel on his 21st wedding anniversary trip fixing things, it was the thing where he had already decided to bring his laptop on the trip before anything broke.
Things can just be done, guys. Quit tinkering to tinker and spend time with your family away from screens. Professionalism means making the exact opposite choices as this guy.
X-Wing Linkblog Friday
The Aftermath continues to be one of the few bright spots in the cursed wasteland of the digital media. And yes, I realize Icecano is slowly devolving into just a set of links to the aftermath that I gesture enthusiastically towards.
Today’s case in point: X-Wing Is Video Gaming's Greek Fire
And, oh man, Yes, And.
This gist here is that not only were the X-Wing games the peak of the genre in terms of mechanics, and not only has no one been able to reproduce them, no one has really even tried. It’s wild to me that space fighter “sims” were a big deal for the whole of the nineties, and then… nope, we don’t do that anymore. Like he says, it’s remarkable that in the current era of “let’s clone a game from the old days with a new name”, no one has touched the X-Wings. Even Star Wars: Squadrons, which was a much better Wing Commander than it was an X-Wing, didn’t quite get there.
And yeah! You boot up TIE Fighter today, and it still genuinely plays better than anything newer in the genre. It’s insane to me that the whole genre just… doesn’t exist any more? It feels like the indy scene should be full of X-Wing-alikes. Instead we got Strike Suit Zero, the two Rebel Galaxys and thats it? Yes I know, you want to at-me and say No Man’s Sky or Elite and buddy, those could not be less what I’m talking about. That goes double for whatever the heck is going on down at Star Citizen.
(Although, speaking of recapturing old gameplay mechanics, I am going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Descent 4 came out, it was just called Overload.)
A while back my kid asked me what video game I’d turn onto a movie, and without missing a beat and not as a joke, I answered “TIE Fighter.”
“Dad!!” he yelled. “That already has a movie!”
And, obviously, but the Star War I keep wishing someone would make is the X-Wing pilot show; Top Gun or Flight of the Intruder, but with R2 units. I don’t understand why you spend a quarter billion dollars to set some kid up to fail with his bad Harrison Ford impression before you do this.
So, he said as an artful segue, in other X-Wing news, remember Star Wars fan films?
There was a whole fan film bubble around the turn of the century, during the iMac DV era. The bubble didn’t pop exactly, but now that energy mostly gets channeled into 3 hour Lore Breakdown Videos on youtube that explain how the next 200 million dollar blockbuster is going to fail because it isn’t consistent with the worst book you read 20 years ago. ( *Puts finger to earpiece* I’m sorry, I’ve just been informed that The Crystal Star was, in fact, thirty years ago. We regret the error.)
But! People are still out there making their indie Star Wars epics, and so I’d like to call to your attention to: Wingman - An X-Wing Story | Star Wars Fan Film | 2023 - YouTube
(Attention conservation notice: it’s nearly an hour long, but all the really good ideas are in the first 15 minutes, and in classic fan film fashion it just kinda keeps… going…)
It’s the fan-filmsiest possible version of the X-Wing movie idea. It’s about 20 guys filming an X-Wing movie in their basement for something like 4 grand. They only have one set: the cockpit, and some really nice replica helmets. They use the sound effects from the cockpit controls in the X-Wing games! The group that this this are all in Germany, so the squadron looks like it’s made up entirely of the backup keyboard players from Kraftwork. It’s an interesting limit case in “how can we tell a story when the characters can’t even stand up or be on screen at the same time.”
I was going to put some more snark here, but you know what? It’s a hell of an impressive thing, considering. I’d never show this to someone who wasn’t already completely bought in at “surprisingly good X-Wing fan film”, but I think it demonstrates that the basic premise is sound?
This feels like the ceiling for how good a fan film should get. Could it be better? Sure. But if you put any more effort into an indie movie than this, you need to pivot and go make Clerks or El Mariachi or A Fistful of Fingers or something. The only person who got a ticket into Hollywood from a fan film was the guy who made Troops, and even he never got to direct a big-boy movie.
So, okay, what have we learned from today’s program:
- Someone needs to make an X-Wing-alike.
- If you’re about to spend a second thousand dollars on your X-Wing cockpit, maybe try and make an indie festival film instead?
Now that Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron movie is cancelled, someone pitch a fighter pilot show to Disney+.
I should probably have another paragraph here where I tie things up? But it’s Friday, don’t worry about it.
Friday Linkblog, Poets-and-Whales Edition
And these are ones I found this week while I was clearing out the open tabs
To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
As a fellow interdisciplinarian, Paul Ford’s views on “the humanities vs technology” are essentially identical to my own, but better written. This is the sort of essay where once you start quoting it, you end up copying the whole thing, so I’ll just stick to my favorite line:
At least art goes for the long game, you know? Poems are many things, and often lousy, but they are not meant to be disposable, nor do they require a particular operating system to work.
Scientists had a 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
This is very, very cool; an actual sort-of almost conversation with a whale. Clearly communication happened, even if neither side really understood it! The attitude was a little weird to me, though: all the amazing breakthroughs in communicating with whales were entirely processes through the lens of “this is valuable because it might help us talk to theoretical aliens”. Whatever it took to get the grant money, I guess, but: Whales! We’re talking to them! That is (or at least should be) way cooler and more valuable than maybe being able to talk to klingons later. Maybe they can tell us about that weird probe thing early.