Fractals

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Part 1: DFW

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

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

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

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

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

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Part 4: Endnotes

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

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

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

    “I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25

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

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

    *** You have died ***

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

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

    Left: Footnote a

    Right: Footnote 29

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

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

    Oh. You see it,

    *** You Have Ascended ***

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

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

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

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

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Part 5: No Moral.

Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

⁂

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

Let me provide a personal anecdote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

⁂

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

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

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

Don’t respect or value creativity.

Don’t respect actual expertise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now generative AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

⁂

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

Thats… not quite how the year went?

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

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

But, we've never done that for software.

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

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

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

Maybe we need to start making some.

⁂

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

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

The human mind is not a computer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’ll Be Worth It

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

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

NOBODY CARES WORK HARDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work Harder.

Everyone Cares.

I’ll Be Worth It.

Books I read in 2022, part 3

(That I have mostly nice things to say about)

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

Previously , Previously .

Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted by Colleen Duran

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

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

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

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

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

Some other MoonKnights not worth typing the whole titles of

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

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others

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

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

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

Death, the Deluxe Edition

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

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

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

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

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

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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

Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

Oh, what a disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She-Hulk omnibus 1 by Dan Slot et al

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

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

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

Valuable Humans in Transit and other stories by qntm

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

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

What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Which brings us back to the movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know which one I prefer.

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What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?

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

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

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

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

Layoff Season(s)

Well, it’s layoff season again, which pretty much never stopped this year? I was going to bury a link or two to an article in that last sentence, but you know what? There’s too many. Especially in tech, or tech-adjacent fields, it’s been an absolute bloodbath this year.

So, why? What gives?

I’ve got a little personal experience here: I’ve been through three layoffs now, lost my job once, shoulder-rolled out of the way for the other two. I’ve also spent the last couple decades in and around “the tech industry”, which here we use as shorthand for companies that are either actually a Silicon Valley software company, or a company run by folks that used to/want to be from one, with a strong software development wing and at least one venture capital–type on the board.

In my experience, Tech companies are really bad at people. I mean this holistically: they’re bad at finding people, bad at hiring, and then when they do finally hire someone, they’re bad at supporting those people—training, “career development”, mentoring, making sure they’re in the right spot, making sure they’re successful. They’re also bad any kind of actual feedback cycle, either to reward the excellent or terminate underperformers. As such, they’re also bad at keeping people. This results in the vicious cycle that puts the average time in a tech job at about 18 months—why train them if they’re gonna leave? Why stay if they won’t support me?

There are pockets where this isn’t true, of course; individual managers, or departments, or groups, or even glue-type individuals holding the scene together that handle this well. I think this is all a classic “don’t attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence” situtation. I say this with all the love in the world, but people who are good at tech-type jobs tend to be low-empathy lone wolf types? And then you spend a couple decades promoting the people from that pool, and “ask your employees what they need” stops being common sense and is suddenly some deep management koan.

The upshot of all this is that most companies with more than a dozen or two employees have somewhere between 10–20% of the workforce that isn’t really helping out. Again—this isn’t their fault! The vast majority of those people would be great employees in a situation that’s probably only a tiny bit different than the one you’re in. But instead you have the one developer who never seems to get anything done, the other developer who’s work always fails QA and needs a huge amount of rework, the person who only seems to check hockey scores, the person whos always in meetings, the other person whose always in “meetings.” That one guy who always works on projects that never seem to ship.¹ The extra managers that don’t seem to manage anyone. And, to be clear, I’m talking about full-time salaried people. People with a 401(k) match. People with a vesting schedule.

No one doing badly enough to get fired, but not actually helping row the boat.

As such, at basically any point any large company—and by large I mean over about 50—can probably do a 10% layoff and actually move faster afterwards, and do a 20% layoff without any significant damage to the annual goals—as long as you don’t have any goals about employee morale or well-being. Or want to retain the people left.

The interesting part—and this is the bad interesting, to be clear—is if you can fire 20% of your employees at any time, when do you do that?

In my experience, there’s two reasons.

First, you drop them like a submarine blowing the ballast tanks. Salaries are the biggest expense center, and in a situation where the line isn’t going up right, dropping 20% of the cost is the financial equivalent of the USS Dallas doing an emergency surface.

Second, you do it to discipline labor. Is the workforce getting a little restless? Unhappy about the stagnat raises? Grumpy about benefits costing more? Is someone waving around a copy of Peopleware?² Did the word “union” float across the courtyard? That all shuts down real fast if all those people are suddenly sitting between two empty cubicles. “Let’s see how bad they score the engagement survey if the unemployment rate goes up a little!” Etc.

Again—this is all bad! This is very bad! Why do any this?

The current wave feels like a combo plate of both reasons. On the one hand, we have a whole generation of executive leaders that have never seen interest rates go up, so they’re hitting the one easy panic button they have. But mostly this feels like a tantrum by the c-suite class reacting to “hot labor summer” becoming “eternal labor september.”

Of course, this is where I throw up my hands and have nothing to offer except sympathy. This all feels so deeply baked in to the world we live in that it seems unsolvable short of a solution that ends with us all wearing leather jackets with only one sleve.

So, all my thoughts with everyone unexpectedly jobless as the weather gets cold. Hang on to each other, we’ll all get through this.

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1. At one point in my “career”, the wags in the cubes next to mine made me a new nameplate that listed my job as “senior shelf-ware engineer.” I left it up for months, because it was only a little bit funny, but it was a whole lot true.

2. That one was probably me, sorrryyyyyy (not sorry)

Re-Capturing the Commons

The year’s winding down, which means it’s time to clear out the drafts folder. Let me tell you about a trend I was watching this year.

Over the last couple of decades, a business model has emerged that looks something like this:

1. A company creates a product with a clear sales model, but doesn’t have value without a strong community
2. The company then fosters such a community, which then steps in and shoulders a fair amount of the work of running said community
3. The community starts creating new things on top of what that original work of the parent company—and this is important—belong to those community members, not the company
4. This works well enough that the community starts selling additional things to each other—critically, these aren’t competing with that parent company, instead we have a whole “third party ecosystem”.

(Hang on, I’ll list some examples in a second.)

These aren’t necessarily “open source” from a formal OSI “Free & Open Source Software” perspective, but they’re certainly open source–adjacent, if you will. Following the sprit, if not the strict legal definition.

Then, this year especially, a whole bunch of those types of companies decided that they wouldn’t suffer anyone else makining things they don’t own in their own backyard, and tried to reassert control over the broader community efforts.

Some specific examples of what I mean:

• The website formerly known as Twitter eliminating 3rd party apps, restricting the API to nothing, and blocking most open web access.
• Reddit does something similar, effectively eliminates 3rd party clients and gets into an extended conflict with the volunteer community moderators.
• StackOverflow and the rest of the StackExchange network also gets into an extended set of conflicts with its community moderators, tries to stop releasing the community-generated data for public use, revises license terms, and descends into—if you’ll forgive the technical term—a shitshow.
• Hasbro tries to not only massively restrict the open license for future versions of Dungeons and Dragons, but also makes a move to retroactively invalidate the Open Game License that covered material created for the 3rd and 5th editions of the game over the last 20 years.

And broadly, this is all part of the Enshittification Curve story. And each of these examples have a whole set of unique details. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of words have been written on each of these, and we don’t need to re-litigate those here.

But there’s a specific sub-trend here that I think is worth highlighting. Let’s look at what those four have in common:

• Each had, by all accounts, a successful business model. After-the-fact grandstanding non-withstanding, none of those four companies was in financial trouble, and had a clear story about how they got paid. (Book sales, ads, etc.)
• They all had a product that was absolutely worthless without an active community. (The D&D player’s handbook is a pretty poor read if you don’t have people to play with, reddit with no comments is just an ugly website, and so on)
• Community members were doing significant heavy lifting that the parent company was literally unable to do. (Dungeon Mastering, community moderating. Twitter seems like the outlier here at first glance, but recall that hashtags, threads, the word “tweet” and literally using a bird as a logo all came from people not on twitter’s payroll.)
• There were community members that made a living from their work in and around the community, either directly or indirectly. (3rd party clients, actual play streams, turning a twitter account about things your dad says into a network sitcom. StackOverflow seems like the outlier on this one, until you remember that many, many people use their profiles there as a kind of auxiliary outboard resume.)
• They’ve all had recent management changes; more to the point, the people who designed the open source–adjacent business model are no longer there.
• These all resulted in huge community pushback

So we end up in a place where a set of companies that no one but them can make money in their domains, and set their communities on fire. There was a lot of handwaving about AI as an excuse, but mostly that’s just “we don’t want other people to make money” with extra steps.

To me, the most enlightening one here is Hasbro, because it’s not a tech company and D&D is not a tech product, so the usual tech excuses for this kind of behavior don’t fly. So let’s poke at that one for an extra paragraph or two:

When the whole OGL controversy blew up back at the start of the year, certain quarters made a fair amount of noise about how this was a good thing, because actually, most of what mattered about D&D wasn’t restrict-able, or was in the public domain, and good old fair use was a better deal than the overly-restrictive OGL, and that the community should never have taken the deal in the first place. And this is technically true, but only in the ways that don’t matter.

Because, yes. The OGL, as written, is more restrictive that fair use, and strict adherence to the OGL prevents someone from doing things that should otherwise be legal. But that misses the point.

Because what we’re actually talking about is an industry with one multi-billion dollar company—the only company on earth that has literal Monopoly money to spend—and a whole bunch of little tiny companies with less than a dozen people. So the OGL wasn’t a crummy deal offered between equals, it was the entity with all the power in the room declaring a safe harbor.

Could your two-person outfit selling PDFs online use stuff from Hasbro’s book without permission legally? Sure. Could you win the court case when they sue you before you lose your house? I mean, maybe? But not probably.

And that’s what was great about it. For two decades, it was the deal, accept these slightly more restrictive terms, and you can operate with the confidence that your business, and your house, is safe. And an entire industry formed inside that safe harbor.

Then some mid-level suit at Hasbro decided they wanted a cut?

And I’m using this as the example partly because it’s the most egregious. But 3rd party clients for twitter and reddit were a good business to be in, until they suddenly were not.

And I also like using Hasbro’s Bogus Journey with D&D as the example because that’s the only one where the community won. With the other three here, the various owners basically leaned back in their chairs and said “yeah, okay, where ya gonna go?” and after much rending of cloth, the respective communities of twitter, and reddit, and StackOverflow basically had to admit there wasn’t an alternative., they were stuck on that website.

Meanwhile, Hasbro asked the same question, and the D&D community responded with, basically, “well, that’s a really long list, how do you want that organized?”

So Hasbro surrendered utterly, to the extent that more of D&D is now under a more irrevocable and open license that it was before. It feels like there’s a lesson in competition being healthy here? But that would be crass to say.

Honestly, I’m not sure what all this means; I don’t have a strong conclusion here. Part of why this has been stuck in my drafts folder since June is that I was hoping one of these would pop in a way that would illuminate the situation.

And maybe this isn’t anything more than just what corporate support for open source looks like when interest rates start going up.

But this feels like a thing. This feels like it comes from the same place as movie studios making record profits while saying their negotiation strategy is to wait for underpaid writers to lose their houses?

Something is released into the commons, a community forms, and then someone decides they need to re-capture the commons because if they aren’t making the money, no one can. And I think that’s what stuck with me. The pettiness.

You have a company that’s making enough money, bills are paid, profits are landing, employees are taken care of. But other people are also making money. And the parent company stops being a steward and burns the world down rather than suffer someone else make a dollar they were never going to see. Because there’s no universe where a dollar spent on Tweetbot was going to go to twitter, or one spent on Apollo was going to go to reddit, or one spent on any “3rd party” adventure was going to go to Hasbro.

What can we learn from all this? Probably not a lot we didn’t already know, but: solidarity works, community matters, and we might not have anywhere else to go, but at the same time, they don’t have any other users. There’s no version where they win without us.

2023’s strange box office

Weird year for the box office, huh? Back in July, we had that whole rash of articles about the “age of the flopbuster” as movie after movie face-planted. Maybe things hadn’t recovered from the pandemic like people hoped?

And then, you know, Barbenheimer made a bazillion dollars.

And really, nothing hit like it was supposed to all year. People kept throwing out theories. Elemental did badly, and it was “maybe kids are done with animation!” Ant-Man did badly, and it was “Super-Hero fatigue!” Then Spider-Verse made a ton of money disproving both. And Super Mario made a billion dollars. And then Elemental recovered on the long tail and ended up making half a billion? And Guardians 3 did just fine. But Captain Marvel flopped. Harrison Ford came back for one more Indiana Jones and no one cared.

Somewhere around the second weekend of Barbenheimer everyone seemed to throw up their hands as if to say “we don’t even know what’ll make money any more”.

Where does all that leave us? Well, we clearly have a post-pandemic audience that’s willing to show up and watch movies, but sure seems more choosy than they used to be. (Or choosy about different things?)

Here’s my take on some reasons why:

The Pandemic. I know we as a society have decided to act like COVID never happened, but it’s still out there. Folks may not admit it, but it’s still influencing decisions. Sure, it probably wont land you in the hospital, but do you really want to risk your kid missing two weeks of school just so you can see the tenth Fast and the Furious in the theatre? It may not be the key decision input anymore, but that’s enough potential friction to give you pause.

Speaking of the theatre, the actual theater experience sucks most of the time. We all like to wax poetic about the magic of the shared theatre experience, but in actual theaters, not the fancy ones down in LA, that “experience” is kids talking, the guy in front of you on his phone, the couple behind you being confused, gross floors, and half an hour of the worst commercials you’ve ever seen before the picture starts out of focus and too dim.

On the other hand, you know what everyone did while they were stuck at home for that first year of COVID? Upgrade their home theatre rig. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money, but the rig in my living room is better than every mall theatre I went to in the 90s, and I can put the volume where I want it, stop the show when the kids need to go to the bathroom, and my snacks are better, and my chairs are more comfortable.

Finally, and I think this is the key one—The value proposition has gotten out of wack in a way I don’t think the industry has reckoned with. Let me put my cards down on the table here: I think I saw just about every movie released theatrically in the US between about 1997 and maybe 2005. I’m pro–movie theatre. It was fun and I enjoyed it, but also that was absolutely the cheapest way to spend 2-3 hours. Tickets were five bucks, you could basically fund a whole day on a $20 bill if you were deliberate about it.

But now, taking a family of four to a movie is in the $60-70 range. And, thats a whole different category. That’s what a new video game costs. That’s what I paid for the new Zelda, which the whole family is still playing and enjoying six months later, hundreds of hours in. Thats Mario Kart with all the DLC, which we’ve also got about a million hours in. You’re telling me that I should pay the same amount of money that got me all that for one viewing of The Flash? Absolutely Not. I just told the kids we weren’t going to buy the new Mario before christmas, but I’m supposed to blow that on… well, literally anything that only takes up two hours?

And looking at that from the other direction, I’m paying twelve bucks a month for Paramount +, for mostly Star Trek–related reasons. But that also has the first six Mission: Impossible movies on it right now. Twelve bucks, you could cram ‘em all in a long weekend if you were serious about it. And that’s not really even a streaming thing, you could have netted six not-so-new release movies for that back in the Blockbuster days too. And like I said, I have some really nice speakers and a 4k projector, those movies look great in my living room. You’re trying to tell me that the new one is so much better that I need to pay five times what watching all the other movies cost me, just to see it now? As opposed to waiting a couple of months?

And I think that’s the key I’m driving towards here: movies in the theatre have found themselves with a premium price without offering a premium product.

So what’s premium even mean in this context? Clicking back and forth between Box Office Mojo’s domestic grosses for 2023 and 2019, this year didn’t end up being that much worse, it just wasn’t the movies people were betting on that made money.

There’s a line I can’t remember the source of that goes something to the effect of “hollywood doesn’t have a superhero movie problem, it has a ‘worse copy of movies we’ve already seen’ problem.” Which dovetails nicely with John Scalzi’s twitter quip about The Flash bombing: “…the fact is we’re in the “Paint Your Wagon” phase of the superhero film era, in which the genre is played out, the tropes are tired and everyone’s waiting for what the next economic engine of movies will be.”

Of course, when we say “Superhero”, we mostly mean Marvel Studios, since the recent DC movies have never been that good or successful. And Marvel did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, which is gave everyone an off ramp. For a decade they had everyone in a groove to go see two or three movies a year and keep up on what those Avengers and their buddies were up to. Sure, people would skip one or two here or there, a Thor, an Ant-Man, but everyone would click back in for one of the big team up movies. And then they made Endgame, and said “you’re good, story is over, you can stop now!” And so people did! The movie they did right after Endgame needed to be absolutely the best movie they had ever done, and instead it was Black Widow. Which was fine, but didn’t convince anyone they needed to keep watching.

And I’d extend all this out to not just Superheros, but also “superhero adjacent” moves, your Fast and Furious, Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones. Basically all the “big noise” action blockbusters. I mean, what’s different about this one versus the other half-dozen I’ve already seen?

(Indiana Jones is kind of funny for other reasons, because I think Disney dramatically underestimated how much the general audience knew or cared about Spielburg. His name on those movies mattered! The guy who made “The Wolverine” is fine and all, but I’m gonna watch that one at home. I’m pretty sure if Steve had directed it instead of going off to do West Side Story it would have made a zillion dollars.)

But on the other hand, the three highest grossing movies that weren’t Barbenheimer were Super Mario Bros, Spider-Verse, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, so clearly superheros and animation are still popular, just the right superheros and animation. Dragging the superhero-movies-are-musicals metaphor to the limit, there were plenty of successful musicals after Paint your Wagon, but they were the ones that did something interesting or different. They stopped being automatically required viewing.

At this point, I feel like we gotta talk about budgets for a second, only only for a second because it is not that interesting. If you don’t care about this, I’ll meet down on the other side of the horizontal line.

Because the thing is, most of those movies that, ahem, “underperformed” cost a ton. The new M:I movie payed the salaries for everyone working on it through the whole COVID lockdown, so they get a pass. (Nice work, Tom Cruise!). Everyone else, though, what are you even doing? If you spend so much money making a movie that you need to be one of the highest grossing films of all time just to break even, maybe that’s the problem right there? Dial of Destiny cost 300 million dollars. Last Crusade cost forty eight. Adjusted for inflation, thats (checks wolfram alpha) …$116 million? Okay, that amount of inflation surprised me too, but the point stands: is Dial three times as much movie as Last Crusade? Don’t bother answering that, no it is not, and thats even before pointing out the cheap one was the one with Sean friggin’ Connery.

This where everyone brings up Sound of Freedom. Let’s just go ahead and ignore, well, literally everything else about the movie and just point out that it made just slightly more money than the new Indiana Jones movie, but also only cost, what, 14 million bucks? Less than five percent of what Indy cost?

There’s another much repeated bon mot I can’t seem to find an origin for that goes something along the lines of “They used to used to make ten movies hoping one would be successful enough to pay for the other nine, but then decided to just make the one that makes money, which worked great until it didn’t.” And look, pulpy little 14 million dollar action movies are exactly the kind of movie they’re talking about there. Sometimes they hit a chord! Next time you’re tempted to make a sequel to a Spielburg/Lucas movie without them, maybe just scrap that movie and make twenty one little movies instead.

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So, okay. What’s the point, what can we learn from this strange year in a strange decade? Well, people like movies. They like going to see movies. But they aren’t going to pay to see a worse version of something they can already watch at home on their giant surround-sound-equipped TV for “free”. Or risk getting sick for the privilege.

Looking at the movies that did well this year, it was the movies that had something to say, that had a take, movies that had ambitions beyond being “the next one.”

Hand more beloved brand names to indie film directors and let them do whatever they want. Or, make a movie based on something kids love that doesn’t already have a movie. Or make a biography about how sad it is that the guy who invented the atomic bomb lost his security clearance because iron man hated him. That one feels less applicable, but you never know. If you can build a whole social event around an inexplicable double-feature, so much the better.

And, look, basically none of this is new. The pandemic hyper-charged a whole bunch of trends, but I feel like I could have written a version of this after Thanksgiving weekend for any year in the past decade.

That’s not the point. This is:

My favorite movie of the year was Asteroid City. That was only allegedly released into theatres. It made, statistically speaking, no money. Those kinds of movies never do! They make it up on the long tail.

I like superhero/action movies movies as much as the next dork who knew who “Rocket Racoon” was before 2014, but I’m not about to pretend they’re high art or anything. They’re junk food, sometimes well made very entertaining junk food, but lets not kid ourselves about the rest of this complete breakfast.

“Actually good” movies (as opposed to “fun and loud”) don’t do well in the theatre, they do well on home video.

Go back and look at that 2019 list I linked above. On my monitor, the list cuts off at number fifteen before you have to scroll, and every one of those fifteen movies is garbage. Fun garbage, in most cases! On average, well made, popular, very enjoyable. (Well, mostly, Rise of Skywalker is the worst movie I’ve ever paid to see.)

Thats what was so weird about Barbenheimer, and Spider-Verse, and 2023’s box office. For once, objectively actually good movies made all the money.

Go watch Asteroid City at home, that’s what I’m saying.

What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023

Twitter! What can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a huge part my life for a long time. It was so full of art, and humor, and joy, and community, and ideas, and insight. It was also deeply flawed and profoundly toxic, but many of those flaws were fundamental to what made it so great.

It’s almost all gone now, though. The thing called X that currently lives where twitter used to be is a pale, evil, corrupted shadow of what used to be there. I keep trying to explain what we lost, and I can’t, it’s just too big.¹ So let me sum up. Let me tell you why I loved it, and why I left. As the man² said, let me tell you of the days of high adventure.

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I can’t now remember when I first heard the word “twitter”. I distinctly remember a friend complaining that this “new twitter thing” had blown out the number of free SMS messages he got on his nokia flip phone, and that feels like a very 2006 conversation.

I tend to be pretty online, and have been since the dawn of the web, but I’m not usually an early adopter of social networks, so I largely ignored twitter for the first couple of years. Then, for reasons downstream of the Great Recession, I found myself unemployed for most of the summer of 2009.³ Suddenly finding myself with a surfit of free time, I worked my way down that list of “things I’ll do if I ever get time,” including signing up for “that twitter thing.” (I think that’s the same summer I lit up my now-unused Facebook account, too.) Smartphones existed by then, and it wasn’t SMS-based anymore, but had a website, and apps.⁴

It was great. This was still in it’s original “microblogging” configuration, where it was essentially an Instant Messenger status with history. You logged in, and there was the statuses of the people you followed, in chronological order, and nothing else.

It was instantly clear that this wasn’t a replacement for something that already existed—this wasn't going to do away with your LiveJournal, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or blog. This was something new, something extra, something yes and. The question was, what was it for? Where did it fit in?

Personally, at first I used my account as a “current baby status” feed, updating extended family about what words my kids had learned that day. The early iteration of the site was perfect for that—terse updates to and from people you knew.

Over time, it accumulated various social & conversational features, not unlike a Katamari rolling around Usenet, BBSes, forums, discussion boards, other early internet communication systems. It kept growing, and it became less useful as a micro-blogging system and more of a free-wheeling world-wide discussion forum.

It was a huge part of my life, and for a while there, everyone’s life. Most of that time, I enjoyed it an awful lot, and got a lot out of it. Everyone had their own take on what it was Twitter had that set it apart, but for me it was three main things, all of which reinforced each other:

1. It was a great way to share work. If you made things, no matter how “big” you were, it was a great way to get your work out there. And, it was a great way to re-share other people’s work. As a “discovery engine” it was unmatched.

2. Looking at that the other way, It was an amazing content aggregator. It essentially turned into “RSS, but Better”; at the time RSS feeds had pretty much shrunk to just “google reader’s website”. It turns out that sharing things from your RSS feed into the feeds of other people, plus a discussion thread, was the key missing feature. If you had work of your own to share, or wanted to talk about something someone else had done elsewhere on the internet, twitter was a great way to share a link and talk about it. But, it also worked equally well for work native to twitter itself. Critically, the joke about the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four⁵ was posted to twitter, which was absolutely the first of those five websites.

3. Most importantly, folks who weren’t anywhere else on the web were on twitter. Folks with day jobs, who didn’t consider themselves web content people were there; these people didn’t have a blog, or facebook, or instagram, but they were cracking jokes and hanging out in twitter.

There is a type of person whom twitter appealed to in a way that no other social networking did. A particular kind of weirdo that took Twitter’s limitations—all text, 140 or 280 characters max—and turned them into a playground.

And that’s the real thing—twitter was for writers. Obviously it was text based, and not a lot of text at that, so you had to be good at making language work for you. As much as the web was originally built around “hypertext”, most of the modern social web is built around photos, pictures, memes, video. Twitter was for people who didn’t want to deal with that, who could make the language sing in a few dozen words.

It had the vibe of getting to sit in on the funniest people you know’s group text, mixed with this free-wheeling chaos energy. On it’s best days, it had the vibe of the snarky kids at the back of the bus, except the bus was the internet, and most of the kids were world-class expoerts in something.

There’s a certain class of literary writer goofballs that all glommed onto twitter in a way none of us did with any other “social network.” Finally, something that rewarded what we liked and were good at!

Writers, comedians, poets, cartoonists, rabbis, just hanging out. There was a consistent informality to the place—this wasn’t the show, this was the hotel bar after the show. The big important stuff happened over in blogs, or columns, or novels, or wherever everyone’s “real job” was, this was where everyone let their hair down and cracked jokes.

But most of all, it was weird. Way, way weirder than any other social system has ever been or probably ever will be again, this was a system that ran on the same energy you use to make your friends laugh in class when you’re supposed to be paying attention.

It got at least one thing exactly right: it was no harder to sign into twitter and fire off a joke than it was to fire a message off to the group chat. Between the low bar to entry and the emphasis on words over everthing else, it managed to attract a crowd of folks that liked computers, but didn’t see them as a path to self-actualization.

But what made twitter truly great were all the little (and not so little) communities that formed. It wasn’t the feature set, or the website, or the tech, it was the people, and the groups they formed. It’s hard to start making lists, because we could be here all night and still leave things out. In no particular order, here’s the communities I think I’ll miss the most:

• Weird Twitter—Twitter was such a great vector for being strange. Micro-fiction, non-sequiturs, cats sending their mothers to jail, dispatches from the apocalypse.
• Comedians—professional and otherwise, people who could craft a whole joke in one sentence.
• Writers—A whole lot of people who write for a living ended up on twitter in a way they hadn’t anywhere else on the web.
• Jewish Twitter—Speaking as a Jew largely disconnection from the local Jewish community , it was so much fun to get to hang out with the Rabbis and other Jews.

But also! The tech crowd! Legal experts! Minorities of all possible interpretations of the word sharing their experiences.

And the thing is, other than the tech crowd,⁶ most of those people didn’t go anywhere else. They hadn’t been active on the previous sites, and many of them drifted away again the wheels started coming off twitter. There was a unique alchemy on twitter for forming communities that no other system has ever had.

And so the real tragedy of twitter’s implosion is that those people aren’t going somewhere else. That particular alchemy doesn’t exist elsewhere, and so the built up community is blowing away on the wind.

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Because all that’s almost entirely gone now, though. I miss it a lot, but I realize I’ve been missing it for a year now. There had been a vague sense of rot and decline for a while. You can draw a pretty straight line from gamergate, to the 2016 Hugos, to the 2016 election, to everything around The Last Jedi, to now, as the site rotted out from the inside; a mounting sense that things were increasingly worse than they used to be. The Pandemic saw a resurgence of energy as everyone was stuck at home hanging out via tweets, but in retrospect that was a final gasp.⁷

Once The New Guy took over, there was a real sense of impending closure. There were plenty of accounts that made a big deal out of Formally Leaving the site and flouncing out to “greener pastures”, either to make a statement, or (more common) to let their followers know where they were. There were also plenty of accounts saying things like “you’ll all be back”, or “I was here before he got here and I’ll be here after he leaves”, but over the last year mostly people just drifted away. People just stopped posting and disappeared.

It’s like the loss of a favorite restaurant —the people who went there already know, and when people who wen’t there express disbelief, the response is to tell them how sorry you are they missed the party!

The closest comparison I can make to the decayed community is my last year of college. (Bear with me, this’ll make sense.). For a variety of reasons, mostly good, it took me 5 years to get my 4 year degree. I picked up a minor, did some other bits and bobs on the side, and it made sense to tack on an extra semester, and at that point you might as well do the whole extra year.

I went to a medium sized school in a small town.⁸ Among the many, many positive features of that school was the community. It seemed like everyone knew everyone, and you couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone you knew. More than once, when I didn’t have anything better to do, I’d just hike downtown and inevitably I’d run into someone I knew and the day would vector off from there.⁹

And I’d be lying if I said this sense of community wasn’t one of the reasons I stuck around a little longer—I wasn’t ready to give all that up. Of course, what I hadn’t realized was that not everyone else was doing that. So one by one, everyone left town, and by the end, there I was in downtown surrounded by faces I didn’t know. My lease had a end-date, and I knew I was moving out of town on that day no matter what, so what, was I going to build up a whole new peer group with a short-term expiration date? That last six months or so was probably the weirdest, loneliest time of my whole lide. When the lease ended, I couldn’t move out fast enough.

The point is: twitter got to be like that. I was only there for the people, and nearly all the people I was there for had already gone. Being the one to close out the party isn’t always the right move.

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One of the things that made it so frustrating was that it had always problems, but it had the same problems that any under-moderated semi-anonymous internet system had. “How to stop assholes from screwing up your board” is a 4 decade old playbook at this point, and twitter consistently failed to actually deploy any of the solutions, or at least deploy them at a scale that made a difference. The maddening thing was always that the only unique thing about twitter’s problems was the scale.

I had a soft rule that I could only read Twitter when using my exercise bike, and a year or two ago I couldn’t get to the end of the tweets from people I followed before I collapsed from exhaustion. Recently, I’d run out of things to read before I was done with my workout. People were posting less, and less often, but mostly they were just… gone. Quietly fading away as the site got worse.

In the end, though, it was the tsunami of antisemitism that got me. “Seeing only what you wanted to see” was always a skill on twitter, but the unfolding disaster in Israel and Gaza broke that. Not only did you have the literal nazis showing up and spewing their garbage without check, but you had otherwise progressive liberal leftists (accidentally?) doing the same thing, without pushback or attempt at discussion, because all the people that would have done that are gone. So instead it’s just a nazi sludge.¹⁰

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There was so much great stuff on there—art, ideas, people, history, jokes. Work I never would have seen, things I wouldn’t have learned, books I wouldn’t have read, people I wouldn’t know about. I keep trying to encompass what’s been lost, make lists, but it’s too big. Instead, let me tell you one story about the old twitter:

One of the people I follow(ed) was Kate Beaton, originally known for the webcomic Hark A Vagrant!, most recently the author of Ducks (the best book I read last year). One day, something like seven years ago, she started enthusing about a book called Tough Guys Have Feelings Too. I don’t think she had a connection to the book? I remember it being an unsolicited rave from someone who had read it and was stuck by it.

The cover is a striking piece of art of a superhero, head bowed, eyes closed, a tear rolling down his cheek. The premise of the book is what it says on the cover—even tough guys have feelings. The book goes through a set of sterotypical “tough guys”—pirates, ninjas, wrestlers, superheros, race car drivers, lumberjacks, and shows them having bad days, breaking their tools, crashing their cars, hurting themselves. The tough guys have to stop, and maybe shed a tear, or mourn, or comfort themselves or each other, and the text points out, if even the tough guys can have a hard time, we shouldn’t feel bad for doing the same. The art is striking and beautiful, the prose is well written, the theme clearly and well delivered.

I bought it immediately. You see, my at-the-time four-year-old son was a child of Big Feelings, but frequently had trouble handling those feelings. I thought this might help him. Overnight, this book became almost a mantra. For years after this, when he was having Big Feelings, we’d read this book, and it would help him calm down and take control of what he was feeling.

It’s not an exaggeration to say this book changed all our lives for the better. And in the years since then, I’ve often been struck that despite all the infrastructure of moden capitalism—marketing, book tours, reviews, blogs, none of those ever got that book into my hands. There’s only been one system where an unsolicited rave from a web cartoonist being excited about a book outside their normal professional wheelhouse could reach someone they’ve never met or heard of and change that person’s son’s life.

And that’s gone now.

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1. I’ve been trying to write something about the loss of twitter for a while now. The first draft of this post has a date back in May, to give you some idea.

2. Mako.

3. As as aside, everyone should take a summer off every decade or so.

4. I tried them all, I think, but settled on the late, lamented Tweetbot.

5. Tom Eastman: I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

6. The tech crowd all headed to mastodon, but didn’t build that into a place that any of those other communities could thrive. Don’t @-me, it’s true.

7. In retrospect, getting Morbius to flop a second time was probably the high point, it was all downhill after that.

8. CSU Chico in Chico, California!

9. Yes, this is what we did back in the 90s before cellphones and texting, kids.

10. This is out of band for the rest of the post, so I’m jamming all this into a footnote:

    Obviously, criticizing the actions of the government of Israel is no more antisemitic than criticizing Hamas would be islamophobic. But objecting to the actions of Israel ’s government with “how do the Jews not know they’re the bad guys” sure as heck is, and I really didn’t need to see that kind of stuff being retweeted by the eve6 guy.

    A lot of things are true. Hamas is not Palestine is not “The Arabs”, and the Netanyahu administration is not Israel is not “The Jews.” To be clear, Hamas is a terror organization, and Israel is on the functional equivalent of Year 14 of the Trump administration.

    The whole disaster hits at a pair of weird seams in the US—the Israel-Palestine conflict maps very strangely to the American political left-right divide, and the US left has always had a deep-rooted antisemitism problem. As such, what really got me was watching all the comments criticizing “the Jews” for this conflict come from _literally_ the same people who spent four years wearing “not my president” t-shirts and absolving themselves from any responsibility for their governments actions because they voted for “the email lady”. They get the benefit of infinite nuance, but the Jews are all somehow responsible for Bibi’s incompetent choices.

Email Verification

The best and worst thing about email is that anyone can send an email to anyone else without permission. The people designing email didn’t think this was a problem, of course. They were following the pattern of all the other communications technology of the time—regular mail, the phones, telegrams. Why would I need permission to send a letter? That’s crazy.

Of course, here in the Twenties, three of those systems are choked by robot-fueled marketing spam, and the fourth no longer exists. Of all the ways we ended up living in a cyberpunk dystopia, the fact that no one will answer their phone anymore because they don’t want to be harassed by a robot is the most openly absurd; less Gibson, more Vonnegut-meets-Ballard.

(I know I heard that joke somewhere, but I cannot remember where. Sorry, whoever I stole that from!)

Arguably, there are whole social networks who built outward from the basic concept of “what if you had to get permission to send a message directly to someone?”

With email though, I’m always surprised that systems don’t require you to verify your email before sending messages to it. This is actually very easy to do! Most web systems these days use the user’s email address as their identity. This is very convenient, because someone else is handling the problem of making sure your ids are unique, and you always have a way to contact your users. All you have to do is make them click a link in an email you sent them, and now you know they gave you a live address and it’s really them. Easy!

(And look, as a bonus, if you email them “magic links” you also don’t have to worry about a whole lot of password garbage. But thats a whole different topic.)

But instead a remarkable number of places just let people type some stuff that looks like an email address into a web form and then just use it.

And I don’t get it. Presumably you’re collecting user emails because you want to be able to contact them about whatever service you’re providing them, and probably also send them marketing. And if they put an email in that isn’t correct you can’t do either. I mean, if they somehow to put in a fake or misspelled address that happens to turn out to be valid, I guess you can still send that address stuff, but it’s not like the person at the other end of that is going to be receptive.

Okay great, but, ummmmmm, why do you bring this up?

I’m glad you ask! I mention this because there are at least three people out there in the world that keep misspelling their email addresses as mine. Presumably their initials are close to mine, and they have similar names, and they decomposed their names into an available gmail address in a manner similar to how I did. Or even worse—I was early to the gmail party, so I got an address with no numbers, maybe these folks got 47.

My last name is one that came into existence because someone at Ellis Island didn’t care to decipher my great-grandfather’s accent and wrote down something “pretty close.” As a side effect of this, I’ve personally met every human that’s ever had that last name—to whom I’m related. I suspect this name was a fairly common Ellis Island shortcut, however, since there a surprising number of people out there with the same last name whom I’ve never heard of and am not related to.

But so the upshot is that I keep getting email meant for other people. Never anything personal, never anything I could respond to, but spam, or newsletters, or updates about their newspaper account.

I’ve slowly built up a mental image of these people. They all seem older, two midwest or east coast, one in Texas.

One, though, has been a real spree the last year or so. I think he’s somewhere in the greater Chicago area. He signed up for news from Men’s Wearhouse, he ordered a new cable install from Spectrum Cable. Unlike previous people, since this guy started showing up, it’s been a deluge.

And what do you do? I unsubscribe when I can, but that never works. But I don’t just want to unsubscribe, I want to find a third party to whom I can respond and say “hey, can you tell that guy that he keeps spelling his email wrong?”

The Spectrum bills drive me crazy. There were weeks where he didn’t “activate his new equipment”, and I kept shaking my head thinking, yeah, no wonder, he’s not getting the emails with the link to activate in them. He finally solved this problem, but now I get a monthly notification that his bill is ready to be paid. And I know that Spectrum has his actual address, and could technically pass a message along, but there is absolutely no customer support flow to pass a message along that they typed their email wrong.

So, delete, mark as spam, unsubscribe. Just one more thing that clogs up our brief time on Earth.

And then, two weeks ago, I got a google calendar invite.

The single word “counseling” was the meeting summary. No body, just google meet link. My great regret was that I didn’t see this until after the time had passed. It had been cancelled, but there it was. Sitting in my inbox. Having been sent from what was clearly a personal email address.

Was this it? The moment?

I thought about it. A lot. I had to try, right?

After spending the day turning it over in my head, I sent this email back to the person who was trying to do “counseling”:

Hello!

This is a long shot, but on the off chance that someone gave you this address rather than it being a typo, could you please tell whomever you it from to please be more careful entering their email? I've been getting a lot of emails for someone else recently that are clearly the result of someone typing their email wrong and ending up typing mine by mistake. While I can happily ignore the extra spam, I suspect that person would rather be the one receiving the emails they signed up for? Also, their cable bill is ready.

If you typoed it, obviously, no worries! Hope you found the person you meant to send that to.

In any case, have a great weekend!

I never got a response.

But the next day I got an email telling me my free trial for some business scheduling software was ready for me to use.

“The end! No moral.”

Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”

For a moment there, we had a real embarrassment of riches: three of the best genre shows of the year so far—Loki, Lower Decks, and Our Flag Means Death—were not only all on in October, but they all posted the same night: Thursdays. While none of the people making those three shows thought of themselves as part of a triple-feature, that’s where they ended up, and they contrasted and complimented each other in interesting ways. It’s been a week or two now, let’s get into the weeds.

Heavy Spoilers Ahoy for Loki S2, Lower Decks S4, and Our Flag Means Death S2

Loki season 2

The first season of Loki was a unexpected delight. Fun, exciting, and different, it took Tom Hiddleston’s Loki and put him, basically, in a minor league ball version of Doctor Who.

(The minor league Who comparison was exacerbated later when the press release announcing that Loki S1 director Kate Herron was writing an episode of Who had real “we were so impressed with their work we called them up to the majors” energy.)

Everything about the show worked. The production design was uniformly outstanding, from the TVA’s “fifties-punk” aesthetic , to the cyberpunk city and luxury train on the doomed planet of Lamentis-1, to Alabama of the near future, to casually tossing off Pompei at the moment the volcano exploded.

The core engine of the show was genius—stick Loki in what amounted to a buddy time cop show with Owen Wilson’s Mobius and let things cook. But it wasn’t content to stop there; it took all the character development Loki had picked up since the first Avengers, and worked outwards from “what would you do if you found out your whole life was a waste, and then got a second chance?” What does the norse god of chaos do when he gets a second chance, but also starts working with The Man? The answer is, he turned into Doctor Who.

And, like the Doctor, Loki himself had a catalytic effect on the world around him; not the god of “mischief”, necessarily, but certainly a force for chaos; every other character who interacted with him was changed by the encounter, learning things they’d have rather not learned and having to change in one way or another having learned it.

While not the showiest, or most publicized, the standout for me was Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15, who went from a true believer soldier to standing in the rain outside a futuristic Wal-Mart asking someone she’d been trying to kill (sorry, “prune”) to show her the truth of what had been done to her.

The first season also got as close as I ever want to get to a Doctor Who origin—not from Loki, but in the form of Mobius. He also starts as a dedicated company man, unorthodox maybe, but a true believer in the greater mission. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the TVA were the bad guys all along, and ends up in full revolt against his former colleagues; by the end I was half expecting him to steal a time machine and run off with his granddaughter.

But look, Loki as a Marvel character never would have shown up again after the first Thor and the Avengers if Tom Hiddleston hadn’t hit it out of the park as hard as he did. Here, he finally gets a chance to be the lead, and he makes the most of the opportunity. He should have had a starring vehicle long before this, and it manages to make killing Loki off in the opening scene of Infinity War even stupider in retrospect than it was at the time.

All in all, a huge success (I’m making a note here) and a full-throated endorsement of Marvel’s plan for Disney+ (Especially coming right after the nigh-unwatchable Falcon and the Winter Soldier).

Season 2, then, was a crushing disappointment.

So slow, so boring. All the actors who are not Tom Hiddleston are visibly checked out; thinking about what’s next. The characters, so vibrant in the first season , are hollowed-out shells of themselves.

As jwz quips, there isn’t anything left of this show other than the leftover production design.

As an example of the slide, I was obsessed with Loki’s season 1 look where he had, essentially, a Miami Vice under-shoulder holster for his sword under his FBI-agent style jacket, with that square tie. Just a great look, a perfect encapsulation of the shows mashup of influences and genres. And this year, they took that away and he wore a kinda boring Doctor Who cosplay coat. The same basic idea, but worse in every conceivable way.

And the whole season was like that, the same ideas but worse.

Such a smaller scope this year, nothing on the order of the first season’s “city on a doomed planet.” The show seemed trapped inside the TVA, sets we had seen time and time before. Even the excursion to the World’s Fair seemed claustrophobic. And wasted, those events could have happened anywhere. Whereas the first season was centered around what Loki would do with a second chance armed with the knowledge that his life came to nothing, here things just happened. Why were any of these people doing any of these things? Who knows? Motivations are non-existant, characters have been flattened out to, basically, the individual actor’s charisma and not much else. Every episode I wanted to sit the writer down and dare them to explain why any character did why they did.

The most painful was probably poor B-15 who was long way from heartbreaking revelations in the rain in front of futuristic WalMarts; this year the character has shrunk to a sub-Riker level of showing up once a week to bark exposition at the audience. She’s basically Sigourney Weaver’s character from Galaxy Quest, but meant seriously, repeating what we can already see on the computer screen.

And Ke Huy Quan, fresh from winning an Oscar for his stunning performance in Everything Everywhere all at Once, is maybe even more wasted, as he also has to recite plot-mechanic dialogue, but he doesn’t even have a well-written version of his character to remember.

And all the female characters were constantly in conflict with each other, mostly over men? What was that even about?

Actually, I take that back, the most disappointing was Tara Strong’s Miss Minutes, a whimsical and mysterious character who became steadily more menacing over the course of the first season, here reduced to less than nothing, practically absent from the show, suddenly pining for Johnathan Majors, and then casually murdered (?) by the main characters in an aside while the show’s attention was somewhere else.

There was a gesture towards an actually interesting idea in the form of “the god of chaos wants to re-fund the police”, but the show didn’t even seem to notice that it had that at hand.

The second to last episode was where I finally lost patience. The TVA has seemingly been destroyed, and Loki has snapped backwards in time. Meeting each of the other characters as who they were before they were absorbed into the TVA, Loki spends the episode trying to get them to remember him and to get back to the “present” to save the TVA. Slowly, painfully, the show arrived at a conclusion where Hiddleston looked the camera in the eye and delivered the punchline that “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”.

And, what? Stepping past the deeply banal moral, I flatly refuse to believe that these characters, whom Loki has known for, what, a couple of days? Are such great friends of his that he manages to learn how to time travel from sheer will to rescue them. These people? More so than his brother, more so than anyone else from Asgard? (This is where the shared universe fails the show, we know too much about the character to buy what this show is selling.)

The last episode was actually pretty good—this was the kind of streaming show that was really a movie idea with 4 hours of foreplay before getting to the real meat. Loki choosing to shoulder the responsibility for the multiverse and get his throne at the center of the world tree as the god of time (?) is a cool visual, but utterly squanders the potential of the show, Loki and Morbius having cool timecop adventures.

(That said, the Avengers finding out that Loki is sitting at the center of all realities is a hell of a potential scene, and I hope that happens. But even more, I really want a movie with Time Agent Loki and Single Dad Thor. But that seems to have been squandered with everything else.)

Lower Decks season 4

Loki probably wouldn’t have been quite so maddening if he hadn’t very slowly arrived at his cliché epiphany on the same night as the Lower Decks season finale, which started at “The real Star Fleet was the friends we made along the way” and then used that as a launching off point. LD managed to juggle storylines for nearly every recurring character, action that flowed entirely from character’s personalities, a few of the deepest lore cuts I’ve ever seen, and an entire series of space battle action sequences—and all in half the time!

I mean, they did Wrath of Khan in 30 minutes, except Khan was Nick Lorcarno. And it worked! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bigger flex.

Plus: “black market Ferengi Genesis Device” is my new band name.

Lower Decks was originally positioned as a kind of “PG-rated Rick & Morty but Star Trek,” which was clearly what they needed to say to get the show greenlit, but then immediately did something different and more interesting.

We’ve been living through a period of “legacy sequels”, reboots, and followups to long-running franchises, and the vast majority of them have trouble figuring out how keep the massive weight of the existing material from being an anchor.

But Lower Decks is one of the few shows that actually figured out how to use the history entirely as value-add. (The other winner in this category is Andor.) Its key advantage is that it’s very, very well written, but it does two brilliant moves: first, the characters are all the in-universe equivalent of Star Trek fans themselves, so they know as much as we do. Second, the show consistently takes a well-worn Star Trek trope and then asks, basically, how would a regular person react to this emotionally?

And, it does this while mining the whole run of the franchise, but especially TNG, for material to be revisited. Frequently the show will take a plot of a TNG episode that was originally played straight over 45 minutes, and then re-stage it as a comedy set-piece for the pre-credits teaser, and they’re all brilliant. It’s a show made by people who love Star Trek as much as anyone, but who are not about to pretend that it’s not mostly ridiculous.

Every Lower Decks episode has at least one joke/deep cut where I laugh like crazy and the kids have no idea what the deal is, and then I have to put on a seminar afterwards. The last two episodes of this season were both the hardest I laughed and the longest it took me to explain everything.

As an example: that Black Market Ferengi Genesis Device, which needs the operator to pay to shut it down. That’s the kind of joke that needs a lot of background to work, the kind of background you only get with decades of material, and the show just rips past it without trying to explain it, reasoning correctly that anyone who will laugh at that doesn’t need the help, and for everyone else there’s no amount of explanation they could fit in 30 minutes that would work. It’s the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 approach, applied to fiction.

They also titled an episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place,” which is such a multi-dimensional deep cut I don’t even know what to say about it besides applaud.

And that’s the thing! You don’t need to get any of these jokes for the show to make sense, and the deep cuts that you do need to understand—like the fact that the main villain is a one-off character from a single TNG episode 30 years ago—the show does stop and explain, and recontextualize in the milieu of Lower Decks. It’s finally a show that manages to use the half-century of “canon” as a sail, not an anchor, using it to deepen the show, rather than get into doctrinal arguments about, say, what the Klingons “really” look like.

But that’s all sauce, bonus points. The real joy of this show are the characters and their friendships. And this is where Lower Decks snapped Loki into sharp relief.

LD took its rule-breaking chaos-agent main character with a group of close friends she had a complex relationships with, and contrasted that with a different rule-breaking chaos-agent with a group of followers, but who broke rules for different reasons, and then made her choose which group to stay with, and she came out on top because she kept operating as a chaos agent, but now realizing why she was doing it, and for the right reasons. And all this while exploring and evolving her relationships with all the other main characters, and giving most of them a beat to change as characters as well.

And this is why it was such a contrast to Loki. Loki’s plotlines resolved by him giving up his chaotic ways and accepting responsibility for the multiverse; Mariner’s plot resolved by her continuing to be chaotic but pointed in the right direction. Lower Decks evolved its characters by making them more themselves instead of giving up their signature features for plot reasons; imagine what Loki would have looked like if the resolution had flowed from who the characters were instead of where the plot needed them to be.

And on top of all that, the ship Mariner steals from the Nova Fleet is my favorite minor starship design, which felt like it was written for me exclusively.

I have not felt this solidly in the center of the target audience for something since Taco Bell announced they were making a custom flavor of Mountain Dew. This is the Star Trek show I’ve always wanted.

Our Flag Means Death season 2

One of my favorite rare genres is the Stealth Movie. A movie that starts looking like something else entirely, a RomCom or period drama and then at about the 20 minute mark the ninjas show up and it turns into a different thing entirely. A movie that changes genres part way through, the bigger the change the better, especially if it can do it by surprise.

This of course, basically never happens in real life, and for good reason! Cranking from one genre to a different midway is a great way to frustrate your audience, especially if you’re trying to keep the shift a surprise. For every person that would leap up in delight when the gears change, there’d be another ten who’d feel ripped off they didn’t get to see the movie in the trailer.

For a long time, Wild Things was my go-to example of a movie that really did this, and it’s about as as good as you could do—the genres are compatible, the shift happens pretty organically, and it does a great job at both the “sleazy sex crimes like Basic Instinct” half and “double-doublecross caper like Usual Suspects” half.

And you know, that’s okay. The audience for media that jumps genre tracks is pretty small, and I understand my desire to be surprised in that manner is a niche, niche intersect.

And then, Our Flag Means Death came out.

Murry from Flight of the Conchords and the main vampire from the movie version of What we do in the Shadows? Doing a pirate comedy loosely based on the real life friendship of “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard? Sounds like their previous stuff mixed with a little Inspector Clouseau. I’m in!

And for the first couple of episodes, I wasn’t that into it. It was fine, but the comedy didn’t really work for me? I kept expecting it to be goofier, for Stede Bonnet to accidentally succeed more often. I mean, it was very well written, well made, well acted, a whole cast of fun characters in the crew of the Revenge, it just wasn’t working for me. And you know, okay, thats disappointing, but not everything is for everybody. A couple episodes in, I was accepting that this just wasn’t my jam afer all.

And then they pulled the switcheroo, and revealed it was actually a gay pirate rom com. And holy smokes, suddenly all the decisions I didn’t understand worked in this new context, and the whole show snapped into place. And it went from a show I was lukewarm on to one of my favorite shows of all time.

The first season ended one one of the great cliffhangers. The best cliffhangers are the not the ones where the characters are in danger—you know they’re going to escape whatever contrived danger they’re in—but ones where the characters and the audience learn a new fact that change your understanding about what show you’re watching, and what options the show has going forward.

Stede and Blackbeard had split up after escaping from prison. Stede had tried to go home to his old life and realized that he really had changed, and really did want to go be a pirate. Blackbeard, meanwhile, had taken back their old ship and marooned most of the worthless-to-him crew on a deserted island. This batch of characters who we’d come to care for very much were basically doomed, and were waiting for the inevitable. Then! A boat on the horizon. Through a spyglass, they spot—Stede! He’s immediately different then we’ve seen him before, different clothes, different body language. An air of confidence, and more importantly, competence. He raises a hand over his head in a single sign of greeting, like a reverse Grail Knight. Six episodes earlier, Stede arriving to rescue the crew would mean they were even more doomed than they already were, now the message is clear—they’re going to be okay. Roll Credits. See you in a year.

Whereas the first season had a slightly hesitant quality, not quite sure how how the show would be received, the second season was clearly made by people that knew they had a fanbase that was absolutely feral for the show, and was absolutely buying what they were selling. Recognizing that the relationship was the core of the show and not dragging things out, Stede and Blackbeard were back together by the end of the first night (the second episode, but they released two a week.)

Everything the first season did well, the second season did better. It’s a hard show to talk about, because it was just so good. Rather than formatting a list of things I love I’ll just mention my favorite revision from the first year: whereas the first season played Izzy Hands, Blackbeard, and Stede as a love triangle, the second played it as the “new girlfriend” and “old best friend” coming to terms with the fact that the other was never going to go away, and learning both get along and to see what their mutual saw in the other.

While a very different genre and style, Our Flag Means Death had a lot in common with Lower Decks: a crew of maybe not A-players doing their best doing action-comedy deeply rooted in characters, their relationships with each other, and their feeling about all of it. And throwing one last elbow Loki’s way, OFMD also demonstrated what a group of people becoming friends, having adventures, and growing into the best versions of themselves, and the central character shouldering responsibility for the others looks like when well done.

It’s unclear if OFMD is going to get a third season. This was clearly uncertain to the people making the show too, as the last episode works both as a conclusion, or to set up a final season.

Great, just great TV.

Found Family and Genre Fiction in the Twenties

Back in the mid-naughties, the pre-scandal Warren Ellis had a line that people in the future were going to look back at turn of the century genre fiction and wonder why everyone was crying all the time (looking at you both, BSG and Doctor Who,) and then he would note that they’d probably nod and say something like “well, they had a lot to cry about.”

I’ve been having a similar feeling the last few years about the current state of genre fiction and “found family.” That’s always been a theme in science fiction and fantasy literature, probably due to the fans of such fiction tending to be on the “social outcasts who find their people” end of the social spectrum, but there’s a different vibe lately. Loki realizing he’s actually working to get his friends back and therefore can time travel, or the Lower Deckers doing anything, or the crew of the Revenge’s Calypso Party, have a distinctly different feel from, say, the other Hobbits refusing to let Frodo sneak out of Hobbiton on his own, or Han realizing he isn’t going to leave his friend in the lurch and giving Luke the cover he needs to blow up the Death Star. This seems like the sort of social moment that’s impossible to really seem from inside, but years from now will be as obvious as the post 9/11-weirdness of BSG.

All three of these shows had a strong central theme of leaving your birth family or where you were “from”, shedding your metaphorical skin and built-up masks, and finding the people you want to spend time with, who make you the best version of the person you’re becoming. (And then, in Lower Deck’s case, because it’s the best of the three, using this growth to forge a new and better relationship with your mom.)

Here, thick into the Disaster of the Twenties, that’s probably a really good message to be sending. Your people: they’re out there. And if we stick together, we’re gonna be okay.

Still out there: The X-Files at 30

The actual anniversary date whipped past me before I noticed, but apparently The X-Files is thirty years old? Let me settle back into my mummy case and enthuse about it.

I’m also late to this party, but it turns out they did a whole remaster/cleanup on the show a few years back, presumably for Blu-Ray, and those copies are whats streaming now. They went back and rescanned the original film and rebuilt the edits from there, and he show looks amazing! Haircuts non-withstanding, it genuinely looks like it could have been filmed this year, unlike a lot of it’s contemporaries. We’ve been watching them on and off, and man, what a fun show that was! There are very, very few shows where you can almost just pick episodes at random and know you’ll enjoy them quite the way you can with The X-Files.

I actually didn’t come in on the show until halfway through the second year; but I was immediately hooked. My initial reaction was that this was as close as we were ever going to get to an “American Doctor Who” (or really any new Who at all there in the wilderness years of early 90s). A pair of FBI agents solving supernatural/monster/alien problems on a weekly basis? And mostly solving those problems by not just, you know, shooting them? Yes Please!

That said, I’m pretty sure I was the one one that saw a Doctor Who connection. While the cited inspiration is always Kolchak, and UFOs and conspiracy theories were hot in the 90s, The X-Files always struck me as a show designed outward from trying to figure out how to make Twin Peaks viable as an ongoing show.

It took the core premise, “Eccentric FBI agents investigate possibly supernatural crimes in small town America” and then made several very savvy changes.

First, everywhere Twin Peaks satirized nighttime soap operas, X-Files swapped that out with the shape of a standard police procedural. Gone was the sprawling ensamble cast, replaced with a core regular pair and a one-off guest cast, in the mold of something like Law & Order. Instead of a single small town, it was a new semi-rural location every week, freeing up the guest cast to meet the needs of the mood of the week instead of servicing their own stories. The relationship between Mulder and Scully was similar to that between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, but both main characters were FBI, freeing the core cast from being stuck in any one location. And as many, many people have observed, making the “believer” character the man and the skeptical scientist the woman went against the grain of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the time, adding a unique flavor to the show almost “for free,” alongside a light dose of Moonlighting-style sparks. (Not to mention The X-Files even stars one of the best guest-stars from Twin Peaks.)

And both the main characters were really fun to spend time with. They were interesting, and complicated, and had a unique relationship, and were both actually really good at their jobs. Personally, I always wanted to be Scully when I grew up (not a gender thing, I just wanted to be really good at my hard job, be well respected by my peers, have cool banter with coworkers, and then once or twice a season haul a pistol out and shoot a monster without missing. Mulder tended to miss a lot for drama reasons, but if Scully pulled her gun out, someone was getting shot.)

But most critically, it learned the most important lesson of Twin Peaks: that Laura Palmer was too central, and revealing her murderer effectively ended the show. The X-Files’ equivalent, Mulder’s sister’s disappearance and the alien conspiracy, would be an ongoing concern, but was never as omnipresent as Laura Palmer, and was never fully explained or revealed. Of course, X-Files ended up overcorrecting too far, and allowed the alien mythology to sprawl out far beyond any reasonable attempt to make sense.

Personally, I always much preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes, and those were still fun long past where the “mythology” imploded into incoherence. And that was the thing: the show was always fun. And we can just ignore those last couple of years where they squandered the built-up goodwill and the alien plot fizzled out.

Thirty years on, though, that’s what fascinates me about The X-Files. There are plenty of examples of shows that were initially very popular that blew the landing. Lost, the”new” Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, even something like Quantum Leap. Mostly, those shows have slipped out of the conversation, and when they do come up, it’s always with a groan about the end first, and usually that’s all. No one talks about BSG’s stupendous first season, they talk about the robot dance party it ended with.

But not with the X-Files! When that comes up, the topic is always the relationship between Multer and Scully, or the best monsters, or the vibe of the thing, and the last years get treated as an afterthought. Most people won’t even remember that it started Terminator Two for a while unless reminded. For a while The X-Files looked like it was going to be the definitive example of how not to do a long-running plot, why you should work things out ahead of time, and for running out clock too long, but no, Lost took that seat.

Why? Why does X-Files get a pass on the ending, which was just as much a fumble as those others?

I think there’s two big reasons.

First, the show’s pleasures extended beyond the “big plot.” Even at its peak, there were plenty of fans who preferred the non-mythology episodes. The big story failing to cohere didn’t intersect with the joy of watching Scully and Mulder deal with monsters, or vampires, or Peter Boyle.

But more importantly, is something a friend of mine said while talking about this: “Everyone quit watching it when it was still good.” And I think that’s it. Those other shows everyone stuck around to the bitter end. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I don’t know anyone other than myself that stuck it out to the last episode of the X-Files. There were plenty of off-ramps: the moves from Friday to Sunday, the movie, Duchovny leaving. It stayed pretty good for a long time past its peak, and most everyone drifted away before it got actually bad.

I mean, Friday Night X-Files was appointment viewing when I was in college, but everyone had something better to do on Sunday nights. (Except that brief window where it was Simpsons-Futurama-X-Files, that was pretty good.)

As such, most people’s last memory of the show is something like Multer being trapped in the past in the bermuda triangle, rather than, say, Bran having the best story, or Sam just not going home, or whatever the hell Lost tried to sell us.

And so I think all that’s the real lesson The X-Files has for us, all these years later. Long-form serialized TV is great, and as a form is here to stay, but if you only have the one big plot, all you actually have is the ending. If your show works week-to-week without that, and it’s full of characters that are fun to spend time with, people are still going to be rewatching it three decades later.

Feature Request: Sick Mode for Apple Fitness

As previously mentioned I got pretty sick in October. I’m also a daily Apple Watch wearer, which means there were two solid weeks there where I didn’t close my rings.

As such, I have a feature request: you should be able to tell Apple Fitness you’re sick.

To be clear, this isn’t because I want a way to cheat my streak back into existence. I mean, I had a pretty good streak going, and it’s irritating to reset that count, but that’s not the point.

While I was sick, it was deeply irritating to get those passive agressive “motivating” messages in the morning about “You closed one ring yesterday, bet you can get them all today, go get ‘em!” No man, leave me alone, I’m dying here. There’s a way to delve into the settings and turn off the “coach notifications”, but I was not up to that. I needed one button I could mash; I’m sick, I’ll let you know when I’m better.

Then, once I got better, all my stats and graphs and whatnot have these huge gaps in them. I don’t want to skip those or leave those out, but I would love to have a way to annotate those with a note: “this is when you had covid, ignore this”. Maybe a different color? Yellow for sick, instead of the usual red, green, blue.

But what really frustrates me is whats going on now. Apple Fitness does this genuinely cool and useful thing where it’ll compute long-term trends and averages, and tell you about it when they change significantly. And so for the last week I keep getting updates about “you have a new trend!” and then it shows me how many more steps I’ve taken this week versus the average over October.

And no shit, Apple Fitness! I basically didn’t stand up for ten days there, I sure hope I’m taking more steps now. What would be valuable is to know what my current scores are versus before I got sick. Am I back to where I was? I should be back to where I was in september, am I?

And there’s no way to ask that question. There’s no way to tell it what it needs to know to figure that out itself.

We’re living in the Plague Years, Apple. Let us tell the computers about it.

The OmniRumor, 10 years on

It’s been ten years since the Doctor Who Missing Episode “Omnirumor” broke containment and made it out into the mainstream. I haven’t seen this commemorated anywhere, and as we’re currently barreling towards another anniversary year celebration in November and another set of Missing Episode Recovery rumors has flared up in the UK press, I found myself reminiscing about the last time this happened.

Let’s recap:

Huge swathes of 50s and 60s BBC television no longer exist, due to the recordings being either lost, or thrown out, or having their master video tapes recorded over. This happened for a bunch of complex interlocking reasons, but which mostly boil down to “it wasn’t anyone’s job to make sure they didn’t lose them.”

Currently, 97 of of the 253 Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1969 are missing; that’s actually quite a bit better than many of its contemporaries. Doctor Who is also in a unique position in that all of the missing episodes exist as audio-only recordings, many of them have surviving still images, and all of them were published as novels.

Classic Doctor Who has a strange structure by today’s standards; half-hour episodes making up usually 4 or 6-part stories. A strange aspect of having 100-or-so missing episodes is that some stories are only partly missing. Some stories are just missing a bit in the middle, some only have one part surviving.

This has always been a unique aspect of being a fan of the show; there’s this chunk of the early show that’s just out of reach, stories where everyone knows what happened, but no one has actually seen in fifty years.

And since the BBC got serious about preserving it’s own archive in the late 70s, and a rash of rediscoveries in the early 80s, lost shows have slowly trickled in. One of the bedrocks of being a Doctor Who fan is that there is always a rumor circulating about a recovered episode.

Whether true or not, it’s a widely held belief that there are still “lost” episodes in the hands of private collectors, and for a long time it was also widely believed that their “had to” be more film cans out there, lost, misplaced, sitting in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory. So a lot of people have been poking around in basements over the last 40 years, and doing the hard work to see if they can dig up some more lost TV.

So missing episode rumors have a strange energy around them. First, what more is there to say? Beyond “which do you hope it is?” there isn’t a lot to talk about from the perspective of a fan out of the loop of any real recovery efforts. But the other thing is that it’s a widely held belief that any chatter out on the internet or in fan circles could “spook” any private collector negotiating to return what amounts to highly valuable stolen property. So, there’s always been pressure to not actually talk about the rumors; not an Omerta, but it’s considered in poor taste to risk a potential recovery because you couldn’t stay off twitter. It’s unclear if a recovery of Who or any other BBC show has actually been scuttled due to excited fans being loose-lipped on the internet, but the fan social contract remains: just keep it at a low volume.

In early 2013, there started to be whispers out on the internet that maybe someone had found something. Now, I’m not particularly tapped in to the underground or anything, so for something it make it up to my level it has to have been churning for a while. Lots of “I can’t say anything more, but there should be some good news later this year!” trying to keep just inside the threshold of talking about it too loud.

To add some color of the time, this was also very close to when the rumors started that David Lynch might actually be doing more Twin Peaks. I have weirdly clear memories of this, since I had just changed jobs and had not yet cultivated a group of nerds to talk about these kinds of things with, so I found myself sitting on the two most interesting genre rumors in recent memory with no one to talk to, instead just poking around the deep fora on the web over lunches by myself.

But, again, there’s always a rumor circulating, and this was the start of the big 50th anniversary year, and it seemed too perfect that someone had managed to time a one-in-a-decade happenstance for when it would have the most commercial impact.

But, unlike a lot of missing episode rumors, this one kept emitting smoke, splitting into two distinct branches. The first was that someone had found a huge cache of film, encompassing nearly every missing Doctor Who episode along with a host of other 60s-era BBC shows. The second was more restrained, claiming that three stories had been recovered: The Web of Fear, The Enemy of the World, and Marco Polo). There were, of course, any number of sub-variants and weird contradictory details. The whole situation soon became nicknamed “The Omnirumor.”

Every version of this seemed too good to be true; fan fantasizing for the 50th anniversary. Especially the Web of Fear, which was always on the top of everyone’s wishlist (your’s truly included) for what would you hope is found. For various reasons, Marco Polo had the most copies made, so it always ends up in any rumor mill as it’s the one most likely to be found, despite stubbornly refusing to exist for five decades and counting. Enemy of the World was a little more idiosyncratic, but still part of the terribly under-surviving season 5.

And a cache? Seemed absurd. The last time more than one half-hour episode was found a time was Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992. Since then there had been three standalone episodes found? The idea that there were still piles of film can somewhere in the 2010s seemed like the hight of wishful thinking,

But the rumor mill kept churning, eventually breaking out of the deep nerd corners of the web. I missed the exact anniversary day due to being distracted by cyber goggles, but for my money the moment it broke out into the mainstream, or at least the mainstream of the nerd web, was when it hit the front page of Bleeding Cool. From there, it was a short jump to, if you will, “real” news.

This pretty badly violated the “don’t talk about missing episodes too loudly” rule. This made a bunch of people upset, which made a bunch of other people more upset, and proceeded to be a Internet Fan kerfuffle. But the whole thing seemed absurd, because the core claim was preposterous. There was no way there was still an undiscovered cache of multiple film cans sitting around. Fan wishful thinking gone nuclear.

Anyway, imagine our collective surprise when the BBC announced they had recovered The Enemy of the World and (most of) The Web of Fear.

(I can’t find it now, but I remember somewhere on the web someone’s initial shocked response to the news was to blurt “what happened to Marco Polo?” Which then someone else immediately responded to by posting a youtube link to Meat Loaf singing “two out of three ain’t bad.”)

The details of the find, and who and how they found it—and why it was only most of the Web of Fear are well documented elsewhere, but the upshot was someone really did find a cache of missing tv, sitting abandoned in the back of a local TV station in Nigeria. Knowing what really happened, you can look back and if you squint you can sort of see what information must have leaked out when to cause the various flavors of the Omnirumor took shape.

And what an absolute treat. I’d read the novel of Web of Fear probably a dozen times a kid, watched the reconstruction, watched the one surviving episode and tried to imagine what the rest might have looked like. Never, did I ever think I would actually get to see it.. And there it was, come October, sitting in iTunes.

Web of Fear was one of those stories that had a single part of of 6 surviving: the first. I’d seen that first episode more than once, and it was the strangest feeling to sit down to watch and have “Episode 2” appear on the screen.

There’s always a hint of hesitation when one of these stories is actually recovered. I mean, we are talking about a low budget (mostly) kids show from the mid 60s, here. Decades of imagining the best possible version of something tends to crash rather badly into the reality of what the show really was. The poster child for this is Tomb of the Cybermen, which was always hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time, and then in 1992 we finally got to see it, and the reality was that it looked cheap even by the standards of the times, the plot made next-to-no sense, and there was way more casual racism than anyone expected. Turns out, the novel had papered over a lot of shortcomings. Overnight, it went from “best of the 60s” to, “it’s fine, I guess, but let me warn you about a couple things…”

That’s not what happened with the Web of Fear, though. The premise is bonkers even by Doctor Who standards—robot Yeti with web guns have taken over London, and the Doctor teams up with an Army team hiding in the London Underground to fight them off. Across the board, it just works. Where the BBC budget struggles with other planets or space ships, it can do a fantastic Underground tunnel. And the camerawork and direction around the Yeti keeps them strange and uncanny where they could easily become silly. Theres a part abou 2/3 of the way through the story where a group of soldiers have to venture up to the Yeti-controlled city to find some parts, and get ambushed by the monsters. And even that works! It manages to find a “kid-friendly Aliens” tone where the soldiers get absolutely wrecked as more and more monsters emerge, and it manages to do this without ever descending into farce. Remarkable.

And then on top of all that, Enemy of the World, which wasn’t at the top of anyone’s wishlist, turned out to be an absolute classic that we basically had never noticed. On paper it seemed very dull and slow moving, but it turns out you really needed to see what the actors were doing to appreciate it.

The whole experience was like being a kid at christmas, being surprised and delighted by a present that you didn’t even know was possible.

But I digress. Ten years ago in August, we didn’t know what was coming. All we knew was that the rumor mill was going into overdrive, we didn’t know what was really going on, and so we all hoped.

And sometimes, crazy rumors and hopes turn out to be true.

Achewood is back!

Pleased beyond words that Achewood has returned from what turned out to not be a permanent hiatus after all.

Achewood was one of the very best webcomics from that era between the dot com crash and the web shrinking to five websites full of screenshots of the other four where you could put art on the net for free and then actually pay rent by selling t-shirts.

The Verge has a nice writeup and interview with the Chris Onstad, the creator, talking about why he stopped and what caused him to come back.

It’s on Patreon now, which from the outside seems like it might have been the missing piece to making a living putting art on the internet.

Not only is it back, but it’s as good as it ever was. Clearly talking an extended sabbatical was worth it; Onstad hit the ground running and has been turning out bangers every week with the same voice the strip always had.

But, at the same time, it’s clearly being written by an older person with a different perspective. There is this additional note, where there’s a a hint of Onstad stepping back on to stage and looking around at his early-00s contemporaries asking, “guys, what’s gonna happent to all this stuff we made in in our twenties?” I won’t spoil it, but the new Achewood provides an answer that is extremely in character, while also informed by decades of experience.

Easiest 14 bucks a month I’ve ever spent.

Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone

A man sits alone in an apartment. The apartment is small, and furnished with modern-looking inexpensive furniture. The furniture looks new, freshly installed. This man is far too old to be sitting in a small, freshly furnished apartment for any good or happy reason. Newly divorced? He puts on his Apple Vision Pro(tm) headset. He opens the photos app, and looks on as photos of his children fill the open space of an apartment no child has ever lived in. “Relive your happiest memories,” intones the cheerful narrator. The apartment is silent. It is one of the most quietly devastating short films I have ever seen. Apple Inc made this movie hoping it would convince you to buy their new headset. I am now hoping this man is only divorced, and not a widower. There is hope, because the fact that he has spent $3,500 on a headset strongly indicates he himself is the biggest tragedy in his own life.

The year is 2023. Apple would like to sell you a new way to be alone.

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And there is is, the Apple Vision Pro. The hardware looks incredible. The software looks miraculous. The product is very, very strange.

Back when I worked in the Space Glasses racket, I used to half-joke that space glasses designers should just own how big the thing has to be and make them look like cyberpunk 80s ski goggles. Apple certainly leaned into that—not Space Glasses, but Cyber Goggles.

Let’s start with the least intersting thing: the Price. “Does Tim Apple really expect me to pay 3,500 bucks for cyber goggles?” No, he literally doesn't. More so that any other Apple product in recent memory, this is a concept car.. The giveaway is the name, this is the Apple Vision Pro.. The goal is to try things out and build up anticipation, so that in three years when they release the Apple Vision Air for 1,800 bucks they’ll sell like hotcakes.

Apple being Apple, of course, figured out a way to sell their concept car at retail.

It’s status as a concept car goes a long way towards explaining many—but not all—of the very strange things about this product.

From a broad hardware/software features & functionality, this is close to what we were expecting. AR/Mixed Reality as the default operating mode, Apps and objects appearing as if they were part of the real-life environment, hand gesture control, a focus on experiences and enhanced productivity, with games getting only a passing glance.

Of course, there were several things I did find surprising.

First, I didn’t expect it to be a standalone unit, I was really expecting a “phone accessory” like the Watch (or arguably the Apple TV was to begin with.). But no, for all intents and purposes, there’s an entire laptop jammed into a pair of goggles. That’s a hell of an impressive feat of industrial engineering.

I was certainly not expecting the “external screen showing your eyes.” That got rumored, and I dismissed it out of hand, because that’s crazy. But okay, as implemented, now I can see what they were going for.

One of the biggest social problems with space glasses—or cyber goggles—is how you as the operator can communicate to other people that you’re paying attention to cyberspace as opposed to meat space. Phones, laptops, books all solve this the same way—you point your face at them and are clearly looking at the thing, instead of the people around you.

Having the screen hide your eyes while in cyberspace certainly communicates which mode the operator is in and solves the “starting a fight by accident” problem.

Using eye tracking as a key UI interaction shouldn’t have been surprising, but was. I spent that whole part of the keynote slapping my forehead; _of course! Of course that’s how that would work!

I expected games to get short shrift, but the lack of any sort of VR gaming attention at all really surprised me. Especially given that in the very same keynote they had actual real-life KOJIMA announcing that Death Stranding was coming to the Mac! Gaming is getting more attention at Apple than it’s gotten in years, and they just… didn’t talk about that with the headset?

Also strange was the lack of new “spacial” UIs? All the first party Apple software they showed was basically the same as on the Mac or iOS, just in a window floating in space. By comparison, when the Touch Bar launched, they went out of their way to show what every app they made used it for, from the useful (Final Cut’s scrub timeline, emoji pickers, predictive text options) to the mediocre (Safari’s tabs). Or Force Touch on the iPhone, for “right click” menus in iOS. Here? None of that. This is presumably a side effect of Apple’s internal secrecy and the schedule being such that they needed to announce it at the dev conference half a year before it shipped, but that’s strange. I was expecting at least a Final Cut Pro spacial interface that looks like an oldschool moviola, given they just ported FCP X to the iPad, and therefore presumably, the Vision.

Maybe the software group learned from all the time they poured into the Toubchbar & Force Touch. Or more likely, this was the first time most of the internal app dev groups got to see the new device, and are starting their UI designs now, to be ready for release with the device next year.

And so, if I may be so crude as to grade my own specific predictions:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing. Yes.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD. Nope! Turns out, it runs locally!
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code. Unclear? Presumably this will work?
4. Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm. Yes, although I missed the eye tracking. And a much stronger emphasis on voice input than I expected, although it’s obvious in retrospect.
5. Spacial audio. Yes.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment. Heck yes.
7. Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language. Unclear at this time. Maybe?

But okay! Zooming out, they really did it—they built Tony Stark’s sunglasses. At least, as close as the bleeding edge of technology can get you here in 2023. It’s only going to get lighter and smaller from here on out.

And here’s the thing: this is clearly going to be successful. The median response from the people who got hands-on time last week has been very positive. It might not fly off the shelves, but it’ll do at least as well as the new Mac Pro, whose whole selling point is the highly advanced technology of “PCI slots”.

By the time the Apple Vision Air ships in 2027, they’ll have cut the weight and size of the goggles, and there’s going to be an ecosystem built up from developers figuring out how to build a Spacial UI for the community of early adopters.

I’m skeptical the Cyber Goggles form factor will replace the keyboard-screen laptop or iPhone as a daily driver, but this will probably end up with sales somewhere around the iPad Pro at the top of the B-tier, beloved by a significant but narrow user base.

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But all that’s not even remotely the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing is the story they told.

As usual, Apple showed a batch of filmed demos and ads demonstrating “real world” use, representing their best take on what the headset is for.

Apple’s sweet spot has always been “regular, creative people who have things to do that they’d like to make easier with a computer.” Not “computers for computer’s sake”—that’s *nix, not “big enterprise capital-W Work”—that’s Windows. But, regular folks, going about their day, their lives being improved by some piece of Apple kit.

And their ads & demos always lean in the aspirational nature of this. Attractive young people dancing to fun music from their iPods! Hanging out in cool coffee shops with their MacBooks! Creative pros working on fun projects in a modern office with colorful computers! Yes! That all looks fun! I want to be those people!

Reader, let me put my cards directly out on the table: I do not want to be any of the people in the Apple Vision demos.

First, what kind of work are these people doing? Other than watching movies, they’re doing—productivity software? Reviewing presentations, reading websites, light email, checking messages. Literally Excel spreadsheets. And meetings. Reviewing presentations in a meeting. Especially for Apple, this is a strangely “corporate” vision of the product.

But more importantly, where are they? Almost always, they’re alone.

Who do we see? A man, alone, looking at photos. A woman, alone in her apartment, watching a movie. Someone else, alone in a hotel room, reviewing a work presentation with people who are physically elsewhere. Another woman alone in a hotel room using FaceTime to talk to someone—her mother? “I miss you!” she says in one of the few audible pieces of dialog. A brief scene of someone playing an Apple Arcade game, alone in a dark room. A man in a open floor-plan office, reading webpages and reading email, turns the dial to hide his eyes from his coworkers. A woman on a flight pulls her headset on to tune out the other people om the plane.

Alone, alone, alone.

Almost no one is having fun. Almost no one is happy to be where they are. They’re doing Serious Work. Serious, meaning no one is creating anything, just reviewing and responding. Or consuming. Consuming, and wishing they were somewhere, anywhere, else.

It’s a sterile, corporate vision of computing, where we use computers to do, basically, what IBM would have imagined in the 1970s. A product designed _by_ and for upper middle management at large corporations. Work means presentation, spreadsheets, messages, light email.

Sterile, and with a grim undercurrent of “we know things are bad. We know you can’t afford an apartment big enough for the TV you want, or get her take you back, or have the job you wanted. But at least you can watch Avatar while pretending to be on top of a mountain.”

And with all these apps running on the space glasses, no custom UIs. Just, your existing apps floating in a spectral window, looking mostly the same.

Effectively, no games. There was a brief shot of someone playing something with a controller in a hovering window? But nothing that used the unique capabilities platform. No VR games. No Beat Saber, No Mans Sky, Superhot, Half-Life: Alyx. Even by Apple standards, this is a poor showing.

Never two headsets in the same place. Just one, either alone, or worn by someone trying to block out their surroundings.

The less said about the custom deepfake facetime golems, the better.

And, all this takes place in a parallel world untouched by the pandemic. We know this product was already well along before anyone had heard of COVID, and it’s clear the the last three years didn’t change much about what they wanted to build. This is a product for a world where “Remote Work” means working from a hotel on a trip to the customer. The absolute best use case for the product they showed was to enable Work From Home in apartments too small to have a dedicated office space, but Apple is making everyone come back to the office, and they can’t even acknowledge that use.

There are ways to be by yourself without being alone. They could have showed a DJ prepping their next set, a musician recording music, an artist building 3d models for a game. Instead, they chose presentations in hotels and photos dark, empty apartments.

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I want to end the same way they ended the keynote, with that commercial. A dad with long hair is working while making his daughter toast. This is more like it! I am this Dad! I’ve done exactly this! With close to that hair!

And by the standards they’s already set, this is much better! He’s interacting with his kids while working. He’s working on his Surf Shop! By which we mean he’s editing a presentation to add some graphics that were sent to him.

But.

That edit couldn’t wait until you made your kid toast? It’s toast, it doesn’t take that long. And he’s not designing a surfboard, he’s not even building a presentation about surfboards, he’s just adding art someone sent him to a presentation that already exists.

His kid is staring at a screen with a picture of her dad’s eyes, not the real thing. And not to put too fine a point on it, but looking at his kid without space glasses in the way is the moment Darth Vader stopped being evil. Tony Stark took his glasses off when he talked to someone.

I can already do all that with my laptop. And when I have my laptop in the kitchen, when my daughter asks what I’m working on, I can just gesture to the screen and show her. I can share.

This is a fundamentally isolating view of computing, one where we retreat into unsharable private worlds, where our work email hovers menacingly over the kitchen island.

No one ever looks back and their life and thinks, “thank goodness I worked all those extra hours instead of spending time with my kids.” No one looks back and celebrates the times they made a presentation at the same time as lunch. No one looks back and smiles when they think of all the ways work has wormed into every moment, eroding our time with our families or friends, making sure we were never present, but always thinking about the next slide, the next tab, the next task..

No one will think , “thank goodness I spent three thousand five hundred dollars so I had a new way to be alone.”

Space Glasses

Wearable Technology, for your face

Once computers got small enough that “wearable technology” was a thing we could talk about with a straight face, glasses were an obvious form factor. Eye glasses were already the world’s oldest wearable technology! But glasses are tricky. For starters, they’re small. But also, they already work great at what they do, a nearly peerless piece of accessibility technology. They last for years, work on all kinds of faces, work in essentially any environment you can think of, and can seamlessly treat any number of conditions simultaneously. It’s not immediately obvious what value there is in adding electricity and computers. My glasses already work great, why should I need to charge them, exactly? Plus, if you need glasses you need them. I can drive home if my watch crashes, I can’t go anywhere if my glasses break.

There’s a bit in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which has sort of lost it’s context now, about how goofy digital watches were, considering they didn’t do anything that clockwork watches couldn’t do except “need new batteries.” Digital Glasses have that problem, but more so.

So instead smartphones happened, and then smart watches.

But still, any number of companies have tried to sell you a computer you strap to your head and over your eyes. Mostly, these exist on an axis between 3d headsets, a form factor that mostly froze somewhere around the VirtualBoy in the early 90s, and the Google Glass, which sounded amazing if you never saw or wore one. Now it looks like Apple is ”finally” going to lift the curtain on their version of a VR/AR glasses headset.

A couple of lifetimes ago, I worked with smart glasses. Specifically, I was on the team that shipped Level Smart Glasses, along with a bunch of much more interesting stuff that was never released. For a while, I was a major insurance company’s “Lead Engineer for Smart Glasses”. (“Hey, what can I tell ya? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Truthfully, I don’t think about those guys that much since all that stuff went down.”)

I spent a lot of time thinking about what a computer inside your glasses could do. The terminology slid around a lot. “Smart Glasses.” “Wearable Tech.” “Digital Eyewear.” “Smart Systems.” “VR headsets.” “Reality Goggles.”

I needed a name that encompassed the whole universe of head-mounted wearable computing devices. I called them Space Glasses. Internally at least, the name stuck.

Let me tell you about Space Glasses.

Let’s Recap

Traditionally the have been two approaches to a head-mounted computer.

First, you have the VR Headset. This broke out into the mainstream in the early 90s with products like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, but also all those “VR movies” (Johnny Mnemonic, Disclosure, Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity,) and a whole host of game initiatives lost to time. (Who else remembers System Shock had a VR mode? Or Magic Carpet?)

On the other hand, you have the Heads Up Display, which from a pop-culture perspective goes back to mid 80s movies like Terminator or Robocop, and maybe all the way back to Razor Molly in Neuromancer. These stayed fictional while the VR goggles thrashed around. And then Google Glass happened.

Google Glass was a fantastic pitch followed up by a genuinely terrible product. I was at CES a couple years back, and there’s an entire cottage industry of people trying to ship a product that matches the original marketing for Glass.

Glass managed to be the best and worst thing that could have happened to the the industry. It demonstrated that such a thing was possible, but did it in a way that massively repulsed most of the population.

My glass story goes like this: I was at a convention somewhere in the greater Silicon Valley area, probably the late lamented O’Reilly Velocity. I’m getting coffee before the keynote. It’s the usual scrum of folks milling around a convention center lobby, up too early, making small talk with strangers. And there’s the guy. Very valley software engineer type, pasty, button down shirt. Bit big, a real husky guy. And he’s staring at me. Right at me, eyes drilling in. He’s got this look. This look.. I have no idea who he is, I look up, make eye contact. He keeps starting with that expression. And for a split second, I think, “Well, huh, I guess I’m about to get into a fistfight at a convention.” Because everything about this guy’s expression says he’s about to take a swing. Then he reaches up and taps his google glasses. And I realize that he had no idea I was there, he was reading email. And thats when I knew that product was doomed. Because pulling out your phone and starting at it serves an incredibly valuable social indicator that you’re using a device.. With a seamless heads-up display like glass, there was no way to communicate when you were reading twitter as opposed to starting down a stranger.

Which is a big part of why everyone wearing them became glassholes.

Plus, you looked like a massive, unredeemable dork. To mis-quote a former boss of mine, no produc tis going to work if it’ll make it harder for you to get laid, and Glass was the most effective form of birth control known to lifekind.

Underreported between the nuclear-level dorkiness and the massive privacy concerns was the fact that Glass was incredibly uncomfortable to wear for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

Despite that, the original Glass pitch is compelling, and there’s clearly a desire to find an incarnation of the idea that doesn’t set off the social immune system.

Glass and Better-made VirtualBoy’s aren’t the only ways to go, though.

Spectrums of Possibilities

There are a lot of ways to mount a microprocessor to someone’s head. I thought of all the existing space glasses form factors operating on two main orthogonal axes, or spectrums. I’ll spare you the 2x2 consultant chart, and just describe them:

• With a screen, or without. There are plenty of other sensors or ways to share information with the wearer, but “does it have a screen or heads-up-display” is a key differentiator.
• All Day wear vs Single Task wear. Do you wear them all the time, like prescription spectacles, or do you put them on for a specific time and reason, like sunglasses?

There are also two lesser dimensions I mention for completeness:

• Headset-style design vs “normal” glasses design. This is more a factor of the current state of miniaturization than a real design choice. Big headsets are big only because they can’t fit all that in a package that looks like a Ray-bans wayfarer. Yet. You can bet the second that the PS VR can look like the Blues Brother’s sunglasses, they will.
• VR vs AR. If you have a screen, does the picture replace the real world completely, or merge with it? While this is a pretty major difference now—think VR headset vs Google glass—like the above this is clearly a quirk of an immature technology. It wont take long before any mature product can do both, and swap between them seamlessly.

What do we use them for, though?

This is all well and good, but what are the use cases, really?

On the “no screen” side of the house: not much. Those are, fundamentally, regular “dumb” non-electric glasses. Head mounted sensors are intersting, but not interesting enough to remember to charge another device on their own. People did some interesting things using sound instead of vision (Bose, for example,) but ultimately, the correct form factor for an audio augmented reality device are AirPods.

Head-mounted sensors, on their own, are interesting. You get very different, and much cleaner, data than from a watch or a phone in a pocket, mostly because you have a couple million years of biological stabilization working for you, instead of against you. Plus, they’re open to the air, they have the same “sight-lines” as the operator, and they have direct skin contact.

But not interesting enough to get someone to plug their glasses in every night.

With a screen, then, or some kind of heads-up display.

For all-day wear, it’s hard to imagine something compelling enough to be successful. Folks who need prescriptions have already hired their glasses to do something very specific, and folks who don’t need corrective eyewear will, rounding to the nearest significant digit, never wear spectacles all day if they don’t need to.

Some kind of head’s up display is, again, sort of interesting, but does anyone really want their number of unread emails hovering in their peripheral vision at all times?

I saw a very cool demo once where the goggles used the video camera, some face recognition technology, and a database to essentially overlay people’s business cards—their name & title—under their faces. “Great for people who can’t remember names!” And, like, that’s a cool demo, and great you could pull that off, but buddy, I think you might be mistaking your own social anxiety for a product market just a little bit. And man, if you think you’re awkward at social events when you can’t remember someone’s name, I hate to break it to you, but reading their name off your cyber goggles is not going to help things.

For task-based wear, the obvious use remains games. Games, and game-like “experiences”, see what this couch looks like in your own living room, and the like. There’s some interesting cases around 3d design, being able to interact with an object under design as if it was really there.

So, essentially, we’ve landed on VR goggles, which have been sputtering right on the edge of success for close to 30 years now, assuming we only start counting with the Virtual Boy.

There’s currently at least three flavors of game-focused headwear—Meta’s Quest (the artist formerly known as the Oculus,) Sony’s Playstation VR, and Valve’s index. Nearby, you have things like Microsoft’s HoloLens and MagicLeap which are the same thing but “For Business”, and another host of similar devices I can’t think of. (Google Cardboard! Nintendo Labo VR!)

But, fundamentally, these are all the same—strap some screens directly to your eyes and complete a task.

And, that’s a pretty decent model! VR googles are fun, certainly in short bursts. Superhot VR is a great game!

Let’s briefly recap the still-unsolved challenges.

First, they’re all heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive. These are the sort of problems that Moore’s Law and Efficiency of Scale will solve assuming people keep pouring money in, so can largely write those off.

Second, you look like a dork when you wear these. In addition to having half a robot face, reacting to things no one else can see looks deeply, deeply silly. There is no less-attractive person than a person playing a VR game.

Which brings us to the third, and hardest problem: VR goggles as they exist today are fundamentally isolating.

An insufficiently acknowledged truth is that at their core, computers and their derivatives are fundamentally social devices. Despite the pop-culture archetype of the lone hacker, people are constantly waving people over to look at what’s on their screen, passing their phone around, trading the controller back and forth. Consoles games might be “single player,” but they’re rarely played by one person.

VR goggles deeply break this. You can’t drop in and look over someone’s shoulder when they have the headwear, easily pass the controller back and forth, have a casual game night.

Four friends on a couch playing split screen Mario Kart is a very, very different game than four friends each with a headset strapped over their eyes.

Not an unsolvable set of problems, but space glasses that don’t solve for these will never break out past a niche market.

AR helps this a lot. The most compelling use for AR to date is still Pokemon Go, using the phone’s camera to show Pokemon out in the real world. Pokemon Go was a deeply social activity when it was a its peak, nearly sidestepping all the isolating qualities AV/VR tends to have.

Where do they fit?

At this point, it’s probably worth stepping back and looking at a slightly bigger picture. What role do space glasses fill, or fill better that the other computing technology we have?

Everyone likes to compare the introduction of new products to the the smartphone, but that isn’t a terribly useful comparison; the big breakthrough there was to realize that it was possible to demote “making phone calls” to an app instead of a whole device, and then make a computer with that app on it small enough to hold in your hand.

The watch is a better example. Wristwatches are, fundamentally, information radiators. Classic clockwork based watches radiated a small set of information all the time. The breakthrough was to take that idea and run with it, and use the smart part of smart watches to radiate more and different kinds of information. Then, as a bonus, pack some extra human-facing sensors in there. Largely, anything that tried to expand the watch past an information radiator has not gone so well, but adding new kinds of information has.

What about glasses then? Regular eye glasses, help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see. In the case of prescription glasses, they bring things into focus. Sunglasses help you see things in other environments. Successful smart glasses will take this and run with it, adding more and different things you can see.

Grasping towards Conclusions

Which all (conveniently) leads us to what I think is the best theoretical model for space glasses—Tony Stark’s sunglasses.

They essentially solve for all of the above problems. They look good—ostentatious but not unattractive. It’s obvious when he’s using them. While on, they offer the wearer an unobstructed view of the world with a detailed display overlayed. Voice controlled.

And, most critically, they’re presented as an interface to a “larger” computer somewhere else—in the cloud, or back at HQ. They’re a terminal. They don’t replace the computer, they replace the monitor.

And that’s where we sit today. Some expensive game hardware, and a bunch of other startups and prototypes. What’s next?

Space Glasses, Apple Style

What, then, about Apple?

From the rumor mill, it seems clear that they had multiple form factors in play over the course of their headset project, they seem to have settled on the larger VR goggles/headset style that most everyone else has also landed on.

It also seems clear that this has been in the works for a while, with various hints and seemingly imminent announcements. Personally, I was convinced that this was going to be announced in 2020, and there was a bunch of talks at WWDC that year that seemed to have an empty space where “and you can do this on the goggles!” was supposed to go.

And of course that tracks with the rumor that that Apple was all in on a VR-headset, which then got shot by Jonny Ive and they pivoted to AR. Which jives with the fact that Apple made a big developer play into AR/VR back in 2017, and then just kinda... let it sit. And now Ive is out and they seem to be back to a headset?

What will they be able to do?

Famously, Apple also never tells people what's coming... but they do often send signals out to the developer community so they can get ready ahead of time. (The definitive example was the year they rolled out the ability for iOS apps to support multiple screen sizes 6 months before they shipped a second size of phone.)

So. Some signals from over the last couple of years that seem to be hinting at what their space glasses can do. (In the parlance of our times, it's time for some Apple glasses kremlinology game theory!)

ArKit's location detection. AR Kit can now use a combination of the camera, apple maps data, and the iPad's LIDAR to get a crazy accurate physical location in real space. There's no reason to get hyper-accurate device location for an iPad. But for a head-mounted display, with a HUD...?

Not to mention some very accurate people Occlusion & Detection in AR video.

RealityKit, meanwhile, has some insane AR composition tools, which also leverage the LIDAR camera from the iPad, and can render essentially photo-real objects ito the "real world”.

Meanwhile, some really interesting features on the AirPods, like spatial audio in AirPods Pro. Spacial has been out for a while now, and seems like the sort of thing you try once and then gorfet about? A cool demo. But, it seems like a way better idea if when you turn your head, you can also see what’s making the sounds?

Opening up the AirPods API: "AirPods Pro Motion API provides developers with access to orientation, user acceleration, and rotational rates for AirPods Pro — ideal for fitness apps, games, and more." Did anyone make apps for AirPods? But as a basic API for head-tracking?

Widgets! A few versions back, Apple rolled a way to do Konfabulator-esque (or, if you rather, Android-style) widgets for the iOS home screen. There's some strong indications that these came out of the Apple watch team (codenamed chrono, built around SwiftUI,) and may have been intended as a framework for custom watch faces. But! A lightweight way to take a slice of an app and "project" a minimal UI as part of a larger screen? That's perfect for a glasses-based HUD. I can easily see allowing iOS widgets to run on the glasses with no extra modifications on top of what the develoer had to do to get them running on the home screen. Day 1 of the product and you have a whole app store full of ready-to-go HUD components.

App Clips! On the one hand, it's "QR codes, but by Apple!" On the other hand, what we have here is a way to load up an entire app experience by just looking at a picture. Seems invaluable for a HUD+camera form factor? Especially a headset with a strong AR component—looking at elements in AR space download new features?

Hand and pose tracking. Part of greater ML/Vision frameworks, they rolled out crazy-accurate hand tracking, using their on-device ML. Check out the demo at 6:40 in this developer talk

Which is pretty cool on it's own except they ALSO rolled out:

Handwriting detection. Scribble is the new-and-improved iPad+pencil handwriting detector, and there's some room for a whole bunch of Newton jokes here. But mixed with the hand tracking? That's a terribly compelling interaction paradigm for a HUD-based device. Just write in the air in front of you, the space glasses turn that into text on the fly.

And related, iOS 14 added ML detection and real time translation of sign language. (?!)

Finally, there's a strong case to be made that the visual overhaul they gave MacOS 11 and iOS14 is about making it more "AR-friendly”, which would be right about the last time the goggles were rumored to be close to shipping.

In short, this points to a device:

1. Extremely aware of it's location in physical space, more so than just GPS, via both LIDAR and vision processing.
2. Able to project UI from phone apps onto a HUD.
3. Able to download new apps by looking at a visual code.
4. Hand tracking and handwriting recognition as a primary input paradigm.
5. Spacial audio.
6. Able to render near-photoreal "things" onto a HUD blended with their environment.
7. Able to do real-time translation of languages, including sign language.

From a developer story, this seems likely to operate like the watch was at first. Tethered to a phone, which drives most of the processing power and projects the UI elements on to the glasses screen.

What are they For?

What they can do is all well and good, but what’s the pitch? Those are all features, or parts of features. Speeds and Feeds, which isn’t Apple’s style.What will Apple say they’re for?

The Modern-era (Post-Next) Apple doesn’t ship anything without a story. Which is good, more companies should spend the effort to build a story about why you need this, what this new thing is for, how it fits into your life. What problems you have this solves.

The iPod was “carry all your music with you all the time”.

The iPhone was the classic “three devices” in one.

The iPod Touch struggled with “the iPhone, but without a phone!”, but landed on “the thing you buy your kids to play games before you’re willing to buy them their own phone.”

The iPad was “your phone, but bigger!”

The Watch halfheartedly tried to sell itself as an enhanced communication device (remember the heartbeat thing?) before realizing it was a fitness device.

AirPods were “how great would it be if your earbuds didn’t have wires? Also, check out this background noise reduction.”

The HomePod is “a speaker you can yell requests at.”

So, what’s will the Space Glasses be?

For anyone else, the obvious play would be games, but games just aren’t a thing Apple is willing to be good at. There’s pretty much a straight line from letting Halo, made by Mac developers, become a huge hit as an XBOX exclusive to this story from Panic’s Cabel Sasser about why Untitled Goose Game is on every platform except the Mac App Store.

This is not unlike their failures to get their pro audio/video apps out into the Hollywood ecosystem. Both require a level of coöperation with other companies that Apple has never been willing to do.

Presumably, they’ll announce some VR games to go on the Apple Glasses. The No Mans Sky team is strongly hinting they’ll be there, so, okay? That’s a great game, but a popular VR-compatible game from six years ago is table stakes. Everyone else already has that. What’s new?

They’ve never treated games as a primary feature of a new platform. Games are always a “oh yeah, them too” feature.

What, then?

I suspect they’ll center around “Experiences”. VR/AR environments. Attend a live concert like you’re really there! Music is the one media type Apple is really, really good at, so I expect them to lean heavily into that. VR combined with AirPods-style spacial audio could be compelling? (This would be easier to believe if they were announcing the goggles at their music event in September instead of WWDC.)

Presumably this will have a heavily social component as well—attend concerts with your family from out of town. Hang out in cyberspace! Explore the Pyramids with your friends!

There’s probably also going to be a remote-but-together shared workspace thing. Do your zoom meetings in VR instead of starting at the Brady Bunch credits on your laptop.

There’s probably also going to be a whole “exciting new worlds of productivity” where basic desktop use gets translated to VR/AR. Application windows floating in air around your monitor! Model 3d objects with your hands over your desk!

Like the touch bar before it, what’s really going to be interesting here is what 1st party apps gets headset support on day one. What’s the big demo from the built-in apps? Presumably, Final Cut gets a way to edit 360 video in 360, but what else? Can I spread my desktop throughout the volume of my office? Can I write an email by waving my hands in empty space?

Anyway.

The whole time I was being paid to think about Space Glasses, Apple was the Big Wave. The Oncoming Storm. We knew they were going to release something, and if anyone could make it work, it would be them. I spent hours on hours trying to guess what they would do, so we could either get out ahead or get out of the way.

I’m so looking forward to finding out what they were really building all that time.

Is it the same Titan?

I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling?  That is, the completely unique set of constraints and opportunities you get when you’re trying to tell a story as part of a continuity thats been going for nearly 60 years.  The third season of Picard has a fantastic example of building on top of what came before while using it to make your story better, despite some sharp edges.

Picard 3 is effectively a new show—and unlike the previous seasons is much more Star Fleet–focused. (And is acting like it might be a backdoor pilot for a follow-up.)  Most of the action takes place out in space on a star ship.  Given all that, it realy needs its own signature Hero ship.

What ship do you use?  For starters, it can’t really be the Enterprise, partly because that’ll swamp the storytelling, partly because the story works better if the ship isn’t from the Star Fleet major leagues, but mostly because I’m convinced they’re saving the Enterprise for the grand finale.  (As I write this, there are still two episodes to go, so we’ll find out if I’m correctly interpreting the guns they hung over the mantlepiece.)

But, even thought it can’t be the Enterprise specifically, it should be something “like” the Enterprise.  That is, the classic Star Trek look: round saucer, secondary hull, glowing dish on the front, warp drives up above.  Like SNW before, this season has a real back-to-the-classics approach, and the ship design should reflect that.

But emotionally, the ship should reinforce the state we find the TNG characters in at the start of the show: retired, out to pasture, star fleet has moved on.  Picard and Riker are both well past the point where they have a ship or can get one easily.  The ship should reinforce their sense of displacement at the start of the story.

If it can’t be the Big E, is there something else lying around in the toybox we can use?  Fortunately, there is!  The USS Titan.

For those of you just joining us, Riker was promoted to command of the Titan in 2002’s aggressively mediocre Star Trek Nemesis.  In keeping with that movie’s lack of basic competence, Riker finally gets a ship of his own, and the audience never gets to see it, the movie keeping it off screen the entire time.

The ship did get a design later, however, with a design sourced from a a fan contest.  The winning design was a Reliant-style “light cruiser” reconfiguration of the Enterprise-E’s parts, same saucer, engines below, rollbar with torpedos above.  (As an aside, I always thought the design was fine, but thought it was slightly insulting that Riker didn’t deserve a “real” Enterprise-style “heavy cruiser”.)

This design got used in various spin-off material for 2 decades—novel covers, calendars, and so on—until it made the jump to the screen at the end of the first season of Lower Decks.

Emotionally, an upgraded Tian is perfect.  Riker has just enough pull as the former captain with this one specific ship to get on board, and let him and Picard try to pull off a heist through sheer charisma.  But!  The new captain, Riker’s replacement, doesn’t like them, and the ship is remodeled and different.  It’s barely the ship Riker knew, and a thing that he thought was his one connection back to the old days ends up highlighting his disassociation even further.  It’s Kirk unable to find the turbolift in TMP, but better written.

And from the dialog in the show it’s clearly supposed to be the same ship.  Riker’s music was still in the library, and Shaw, the new captain, knows how to pull off some tricks with the 20-year old warp engines.

The problem, however, is that the new Titan and the old one look absolutely nothing alike, and there’s no sane theory that could explain how the one could be rebuilt into the other and have anything orignal left.

So: creatively and emotionally, it’s the right thing to do, but derailed by a 2 decade old design that was never in live action.  So, what can you do?  Well…

1. Decide to stay consistant with the old look and launch your new show with a ship that won a contest for paperback covers.  Clearly not going to happen.  Regardless of the pros or cons of the design, this is a new show and calls for a new ship.

2. Hope no one notices, and retcon the old design and pretend the Titan always looked like this.  That’s just rude.

3. Sigh deeply and use a different ship.  Sure, but… What?  Make a up a new one?  There’s suddenly a lot of time you have to spend rebuilding the emotional beats to a ship no one in the audience has ever heard of.  Worf’s old Bird of Prey from DS9? Even worse.  The Defiant?  Talk about extra baggage we don’t want to spend time on!

4. Invoke the Mystery Science Theature mantra of “It’s just a show, you should really just relax,” and then split the difference between being a refit and new build by calling it a refit in dialog and then slapping a -A on the registry number, and hand-waving past the details.

Given the options, number Four is clearly the right choice, here.

Personally, I think it’s a pretty elegant way to use the existing material to deepen the new stuff without letting it drag the new show down.  I mean, it’s pretty silly to imagine what it would take to rebuild the old shape into the new one and have it be worth the effort, but where else can you juice an emotional beat by dropping a reference to a movie from 20 years ago, which was itself a follow-up to a show that went off the air nearly a decade before that?

Not everything should be a sprawling multi-decade multi-format multi-media franchise, but I’m enjoying the way people are finding new ways to tell stories using them.

(And, as a final note here, I’ll add that Picard 3 also has what I think is the single best use of “hey, you know we have footage of these same people playing these same characters from 36 years ago, can we use that somehow?”)