Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wait a minute, they fucking fridged Rebecca Ferguson’s character? Absolutely not.

“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”

For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.

Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”

One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?

I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:

Fallout Was A B-Tier Project

Why I Left Fallout 2

and a key postscript:

Listening To My Stories With Nuance

…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.

Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.

Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.

And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”

I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.

Morale was low, is what I’m saying.

But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?

It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.

And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”

Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.

I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.

But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?

Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?

The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?

There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.

Getting Less out of People

Like a lot of us, I find myself subscribed to a whole lot of substack-style newsletter/blogs¹ written by people I used to follow on twitter. One of these is The Beautiful Mess by John Cutler, which is about (mostly software) product management. I was doing a lot of this kind of work a couple of lifetimes back, but this one of the resources that has stayed in my feeds, because even when I disagree it’s at least usually thoughtful and interesting. For example, these two links I’ve had sitting in open tabs for a month (They’re a short read, but I’ll meet you on the other side of these links with a summary):

TBM 271: The Biggest Untapped Opportunity - by John Cutler

TBM 272: The Biggest Opportunity (Part 2) - by John Cutler

He makes a really interesting point that I completely disagree with. His thesis is that the biggest untapped opportunity for companies are people who are only doing good work, but give off the indications that they could be doing great work. “Skilled Pragmatists” he calls them—people who do good work, but aren’t motivated to go “above and beyond”, and are probably bored but are getting fulfillment outside of work. Not risk takers, not big on conflict, probably don’t say a lot in meetings. And most importantly, people who have decided to not step it all the way up, the’ve got agency, and deployed it.

In a truly world-class, olympic level of accidentally revealing gender bias, he posits two hypothetical workers, “Maria” who is the prototypical “Skilled Pragmatist” and by comparison, “Barry”, who takes a lot of big risks but gets a lot of big things done.

He then kicks around some reasons why Maria might do what she does, and proposes some frameworks for figuring out how to, bluntly, get more out of those people, how to “achieve more together”.

Not to use too much tech industry jargon here, but my response to this is:

HAHAHAHA, Fuck You, man.

Because let’s back way the hell up. The hypothetical situation here is that things are going well. Things are getting done on time, the project isn’t in trouble, the company isn’t in trouble, there aren’t performance problems of any kind. There’s no promotion in the wings, no career goals that aren’t being achieved. Just a well-preforming, non-problematic employee who gets her job done and goes home on time. And for some reason, this is a problem?

Because, I’ll tell you what, I’ll take a team of Marias over a team of Barrys any day.

Barry is going to burn out. Or he’s going to get mad he isn’t already in charge of the place and quit. Or get into one too many fights with a VP with a lot of political juice. Or just, you know, meet someone outside of work. Have a kid. Adopt a pet. That’s a fragile situation.

Maria is dependable, reliable. She’s getting the job done! She’s not going to burn out, or get pissed and leave because the corporate strategy changed and suddenly the thing she’s getting her entire sense of self-worth from has been cancelled. She’s not working late? She’s taking her kids to sports, or spending time with her wife, or writing a novel. She’s balanced.

The issue is not how do we get Maria to act more like Barry, it’s the other way around—how do we get Barry to find some balance and act more like Maria?

I’ve been in the software development racket for a long time now, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people I was either directly managing, implicitly managing, or mentoring, and I can tell you I’ve had a lot more conversations that boiled down to “you’re working too hard” than I’ve had “you need to step it up.”

Maybe the single most toxic trait of tech industry culture is to treat anything less than “over-performing” as “under-performing”. There are underperformers out there, and I’ve met a few. But I’ve met a whole lot more overperformers who are all headed for a cliff at full speed. In my experience, the real gems are the solid performers with a good sense of balance. They’ve got hobbies, families, whatever.

Overperformers are the sort of people who volunteer to monitor the application logs over the weekend to make sure nothing goes wrong. Balanced performers are the ones that build a system where you don’t have to. They’re doing something with the kids this weekend, so they engineer up something that doesn’t need that much care and feeding.

I suspect a lot of this is based on the financialization of everything—line go up is good! More story points, more features, ship more, more quickly. It’s the root mindset that settled on every two weeks being named a “sprint” instead of an “increment.” Must go faster! Faster, programmer! Kill, Kill!

And as always, that works for a while. It doesn’t last, though. Sure, we could ship that in June instead of September. But you’re also going to have to hire a whole new team afterwards, because everyone is going to have quit after what we had to do to get it out in June. No one ever thinks about the opportunity costs of burning out the team and needing a new one when they’re trying to shave a few weeks off the schedule.

Is it actually going to matter if we ship in August?

Because, most of the time, most places, it’s not a sprint, and never will be. It’s a marathon, a long drive, a garden. Imagine what we could be building if everyone was still here five, ten, fifteen years from now! If we didn’t burn everyone out trying to “achieve more”.

Because, here’s the secret. Those overperformers? They’re going to get tired. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. And sooner than you think. And they’re going to realize that no one at the end of their life looks back and thinks, “thank goodness we landed those extra story points!” Those underperformers? They actually wont get better. Not for you. It’s rude, but true.

The only people who you’re still going to have are the balanced people, the “skilled pragmatists”, the Marias. They’ve figured out how to operate for the long haul. Let’s figure out how to get more people to act like them. And they want to work in a place that values going home on time.

Let’s figure out how to get less out of people.

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1. I feel like we need a better name for these, since substack went and turned itself into the “nazi bar”. It’s funny to me that as the social medias started imploding, “email newsletters” were the new hotness everyone seemed to land on. But they’re just blogs? Blogs that email themselves to you when they publish? I mean, substack and its ilk also have RSS feeds, I read all the ones I’m subscribed to in NetNewsWire, not my email client.

   Of course, the big innovation was “blog with out-of-the-box support for subscriptions and a configurable paywall” which is nothing to sneeze at, but I don’t get why email was the thing everyone swarmed around?

   Did google reader really crater so hard that we’ve settled on reading our favorite websites as emails? What?

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.

This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.¹ Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.

Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.

One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.

And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.²

And with the preliminaries out of the way…

This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.³

The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.

Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.

Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.

My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.

But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.

This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.

The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.

As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.

Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?

Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.

Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”

(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)

But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.

There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.

The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.

After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.

I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?

About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.

Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.

Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.

Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.

Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”

It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.

The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.

This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.

The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.

It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.

It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.

Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.

Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.

The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.

So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?

In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.

One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.

And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.

At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.

If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.

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1. One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.

2. The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”

3. There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.

April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic

This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. I’m republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .

I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the area—according to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.

Cal Expo itself is a strange beast—a 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekend—RV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.

The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.

As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.

The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.

The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.

The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.

Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously.

I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.

Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.

Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”¹ That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.²

It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.

Asteroid City

It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.

It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.

It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.

And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.

But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.

The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)

There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.

Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.³

It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.

From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.

Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.

I loved it, by the way.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

People love faces.

I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.

And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”

In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.

A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”

Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.

The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…

…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.

The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.⁴

I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.

As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.

Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.

This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.

Some stray observations on the other three stories:

“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.

“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.

Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!

“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.

I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion

Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.

Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.

I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.⁵

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1. This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.

2. Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.

3. It’s incredible.

4. It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.

5. I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?

Doctor Who Grab Bag

The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight

I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.

Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.

Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.

Meanwhile….

If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.

One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?

Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.

Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.

Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”

With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.

And finally…

From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.

And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”

Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):

Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times

My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.

This is gonna be really fun.

Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

Getting Old

A very common trope in 80s movies was the tired, obstructionist, authority figure. You know, the EPA guy, the high school principal, the bad boss, whatever. The guy in a suit trying to stop the premise of the movie from happening.

These characters had two roles, narratively speaking. First, they acted as secondary antagonists, a miniboss for the middle part of the movie, if you will. But they also gave voice to the obvious objections to the high-concept premise, but did it in such an asshole way that the audience wouldn’t take them seriously. There probably are regulatory concerns about storing ghosts in a basement in Manhattan? Or problems with high school kids skipping that much school? But having the person bringing it up be such a jerk defuses it, and solidly positions the audience against the man with no dick, or whoever.

I suspect the reason these don’t crop up as often anymore is that movies feel that audiences are more confortable with those sorts of high-concept premises, and don’t feel the need to smooth that over as much. As an example, every John Hughes high school movie has the principal as one of the antagonists, but Clueless doesn’t even have the principal on screen, even though Cher spends less time in class than Ferris ever did.

I bring this up because one of the weirder changes I’ve noticed in myself—and by extension, my politics—as I’ve gotten older is an increased sympathy with these figures.

This observation is brought to you mostly by having rewatched Die Hard at the end of the year (remember kids, Santa won’t come until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza) and I keep thinking about how Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson is a massive jerk, but isn’t actually wrong.

Die Hard is a great movie that has aged in some really interesting ways, which probably deserve a longer post at some point, but recall there are two sets of authority figure minor antagonists—the LA police, who are basically hapless, and the FBI, who are actively malevolent. The LAPD are there to make things harder at the start of the movie, as Hans Gruber says, he’s waiting for the FBI.

Deputy Chief Dwayne’s major objection is that, as he puts it, all the LAPD have is McClane’s word for what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s in an 80s action movie where reality is bending around Bruce Willis to make sure the first sentence of his obituary won’t contain the word Moonlighting; under “normal” circumstances, none of this would work out. The movie knows this, too, and makes sure we know it’s in on the joke by making his first objection, which the dad from Family Matters angrily denies, “how do you know he isn’t the guy who shot up your car?”—which of course, McClane was. When the FBI show up and turn out to be actual bad guys, the movie makes sure we know that Dwayne is as horrified as we are; he’s a jerk, and a dipshit, but he’s not evil, and he’s not wrong. Most days, he’d have probably even been right.

But that’s not the one I keep thinking about. The one I keep thinking about is the “Duality of Man” scene in the better, funnier second half¹ of Full Metal Jacket. You know, this one: Full Metal Jacket Born to Kill/Peace Button Duality of Man. It’s one of the most quoted scenes in the movie for a reason, it’s basically the whole movie’s philosophy in a nutshell.

The usual “young man discovering the movie” interpretation here is that the Colonel is confused, and that Joker outsmarts him here, and that the Colonel responds to his own confusion with angry bluster and weird jingoism. A scan of the youtube comments, which is always a mistake but bear with me, shows most of the people commenting have that view.

But go watch that scene again. General Rieekan, presumably fresh in from Hoth, knows exactly what the score is before he says anything. He’s not asking Joker about the peace sign because he’s confused, he’s asking because he wants to make Joker say it out loud.

“Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?"

There’s a whole media thesis in all this about the American Individualist Hero as the Lone Sane Man standing up to authority figures who represent The Establishment and the Insanity of the Status Quo, which I’ll spare you because I want to write that even less than you want to read it.

But look. If there’s one thing I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, is that we’re only going to be successful if we all work together. There are very, very few situations where one person can actually ascend and leave everyone else behind. The colonel knows this—he might be waiting for this peace thing to blow over, he might be an asshole and probably a low-grade war criminal, but he knows all the marines are in the same danger, and all the statements in the world about the duality of man aren’t going to stop a bullet. (This is also kinda the point of the last scene in the movie.)

If I was living near that firehouse, I’d want to know that the EPA had signed off on anything called “a containment facility.” School is worth it, no matter how good your synthesizer coughs are. The guy on the radio who likes Roy Rogers really might have been the one that shot up your car.

And sometimes, in real life, the lame authority figure isn’t being obstructionist for obstructions sake, they sometimes know something you don’t. Or they’re remembering that there are other people here that you didn’t.

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that the “punk rocker to aging conservative suburbanite” is a cliché for a reason, and you have to stop and check yourself from time to time to make sure you didn’t accidentally dose yourself with the wrong red pill or whatever. But I think as long as you can keep your empathy up, you can shake that off, no matter how much you realize the boss might have a point.

Because real life is complicated, and messy, and full of choices with no good answers. And you have to power through, knowing there’s no good options, reducing harm as much as you can, linking arms, working together, pull as many people up the ladder behind you as you can. As fun as it is to be “that guy”, this isn’t Die Hard, for just about any possible definition of “this”.

There’s at least a dozen things I’m subtweeting here, but I cannot tell you how often I’ll see something—in the news, at work, just generally “around”—and mutter under my breath “why don’t you jump on the team?”

Kid, we all want to go home, and none of us want to be here. Let’s figure out how to all go home together.

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1. Don’t @-me, it’s true.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Animation Double-Header

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them, and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

In brief: loved it.

The Turtles are a weird franchise for many reasons, not the least of which because they started as a satire of early-80s comics generally, and Frank Miller’s Daredevil specifically and then managed to wildly outlive all the things they were satirizing. (If you will, they’re the Weird Al of comics.). They’re an intentionally absurd concept, the characters look weird on purpose, the whole thing is deeply silly. But, they’re still here mostly because they’re just so much damn fun. As such, they’ve landed somewhere between a fairy tale and a jazz standard; constantly being reinvented, every couple of years someone new does their take; not a reboot so much as a new cover version.

TMNT adaptations live or die based on how well they remember that the turtles aren’t a team, they’re a family. There’s a tendency to write them as, basically, store-brand X-Men, with Leonardo as Cyclops, and Splinter as somewhere between Professor X and that floating head from Power Rangers. But Splinter isn’t their boss, or commanding officer, or their teacher, he’s their dad, and Leo isn’t their field commander, he’s the older brother the others let pretend is in charge. On that front, Mutant Mayhem does about as well as anyone ever has done.

Possibly the most genius move was to cast actual teenagers as the Turtles and then record them as a group; the characters and their relationship’s shine in a way they almost never have. There’s a scene towards the start of the movie—which rightly ended up as one of the first trailers—where Leo is trying to get the others pumped up for their new mission, which turns out to be shopping, whereupon the others proceed to bust on him mercilessly, which manages to simultaneously nail all four words of the title better than maybe anyone has before.

It’s an incredibly thoughtful take on the material. There’s a lot of “stuff” out there to use or not, and clearly a lot of care was put into what elements to keep, which to highlight, and which to leave behind. Its also a movie that knows its main job is to be an on-ramp, so it avoids any sort of extended exposition or complex back stories in favor of a fun adventure movie with fun characters.

The best word I can come up with for this movie’s relationship with the existing material is relaxed. It knows that the core audience it’s targeting doesn’t know anything, and that the older fans who do already have their own “definitive version”, all of which the movie seems to take as permission to try new spins on old ideas.

This leads to some fun choices—the villain is new, and their backstory is assembled out of some fun bits and pieces from previous versions. The tease of Shredder at the end manages to hit the same “oh snap, that’s going to be wild!” energy regardless of if you’re a new or old viewer.

There are some deep cuts here—this is a movie with both Utroms and Mondo Gecko—but the movie assumes you don’t know who these things are and even if you do, you havn’t seen them in this configuration, so the recognition is pure value-add, rather than a reward for finishing the homework.

Even the seemingly-strange call to cast Jackie Chan as Splinter pays off, giving Splinter a fight right out of an early Police Story, staggering around, desperately pulling props out of left field to fight off an endless supply of bad guys—there’s a bit with a desk chair that if you told me was from Rumble in the Bronx I would believe you with no further fact-checking.

But critically, the movie knows the only thing from the past it has to get right are the five main characters and their relationships, and there, it excels. I wasn’t expecting much, and it turned out to be the best take on the Ninja Turtles anyone has ever done.

The animation style here is fantastic, and clearly exists because Spider-Verse cleared the way, landing somewhere around a “hand-drawn claymation” aesthetic, while still being 3d CG. It looks great, from the subtle moves of the Turtle’s eyes or hands while they talk, to things like the Turtle van crashing through a crowd of absurd monsters.

We’re starting to see the projects that were greenlit because the original Spider-Verse was a hit, and it’s clear that movie is giving everyone else justification to explore more and different styles of animation.

It’s fun, the action is exciting, the characters are appealing, the conflicts justified, emotions earned, with a satisfying ending that leaves you wanting more. Yes please.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Speaking of movies that were greenlit because Spider-Verse was a hit…

Let’s start with the negatives: this movie is way too long, and then ends with a cliffhanger. There’s no movie over two hours that wouldn’t be a better movie under two hours—or cut into two movies. If you really need that kind of time, you should probably be making TV? I’m utterly confident that when the sequel to this is finally released, it’ll be obvious how to rework the pair of them into three better 90 minute movies.

Otherwise, this is one of those sequels that actually understands what was good about the first movie, and then does more of that.

Most American comic-book superheroes tend to have a similar set of powers: strong, good at punching, maybe they can fly, some kind of signature weapon. Distinctive outfit, but not too hard to draw. Look at the Avengers; they’re all really good at punching, a couple of them can also shoot, and two can fly.

Part of what makes Spider-Man so fun is how weird the character is compared to that baseline. He’s not just strong, he’s crazy strong. He can’t fly, but he can swing? On Webs? And he can shoot those webs as either a weapon, or a tool, or a way to disable bad guys? Plus, sticks to walls, oh, and ESP. And on top of all that, he’s got one of the most elaborate costume designs out there. And then on top of that, he’s funny. Like the Turtles, it’s a character that started as a spoof—what if the teen sidekick was on his own, but didn’t have a job, and had to make his own costume from scratch and do laundry—that fully surpassed everything it making fun of.

As a result of this, Marvel has kept tossing out new spins on the character; as a woman, from the future, as a different kid, different revisions on the powers, maybe this one can do electricity. Even the “original” Peter Parker Spider-Man has two distinct iterations, one vaguely fifteen, one just shy of 30, occasionally married. Of the crowd of various alternate Spider-People, Miles Morales rose to the top as both a great character in his own right, as well as establishing himself as the definitive take on “Spider-Man as a teenager.”

The first Spider-Verse got a lot of mileage out of putting the older version of Peter and Miles together, with Pete acting as the mentor/experience superhero that Pete never had as a solo teen act, while—correctly—keeping the focus on Miles, and threw in some other Spiders while they were at it. The new movie wisely keeps Peter almost entirely on the sidelines, and fills the movie with other versions, delighting in being able to contrast the various Spiders.

The result is a movie that revels in how fun “Spider-Man” is a concept. Webs, sticking to walls, vaguely-defined ESP. Long scenes of Spider-People swinging through the air, shooting webs, solving problems the way no other action hero, super or otherwise, would.

It’s hard to begrudge the flabby length of a movie that’s enjoying itself so much. “How many times have you watched the Batmobile drive out of the Batcave?” you can almost hear the movie ask, “let’s spend a few more minutes with these ridiculous characters webbing up a falling building!”

This extends through the non-action parts of the movie just as well; these are characters that aren’t immune to gravity, but are highly resistant to it. My favorite scene in the movie was Miles and Gwen on what might be a date at the top of a building, casually walking off the edge of a ledge, and then sitting and watching the sunset from the underside of that same ledge, Gwen’s ponytail hanging down the only sign they’re sitting somewhere no one else could.

Which brings me to the other standout part of the movie, Spider-Gwen. “Gwen Stacy, but she got bit by the radioactive spider instead of Pete”, was one of those low-hanging fruit ideas that’s been waiting around for half a century for someone to finally pick. Originally tossed off as a one-off in the comics, the character hit hard enough she’s stuck around become the other best take on a Spider-Person in the last few decades. Even the costume is fantastic take on how a different kind of teenager would make a costume—spider symbol, but with ballet slippers and a hoodie. Expanding her role from the last movie, here she settles in as the other lead, anchoring most of the emotional journeys of the film.

My personal favorite alternate Spider-Man was Spider-Man 2099, from Marvel’s short lived 2099 experiment in the early 90s, which dared to ask, “what if our characters were just a little more cyberpunk, and a lot angrier?” None of them really worked, either creatively or commercially.¹ So, imagine my surprise when Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099 himself, showed up in this! I was a little salty when I found out he was going to be the bad guy, except he isn’t really—he’s the antagonist, but he isn’t the villain.

Good guys fighting each other is about the most tired trope super-hero comics has, and this movie might be the first time anyone has actually put the time in to work. I takes the time to set up a genuine difference of world view between Miles and Miguel, where by the end, you genuinely buy that neither is willing to let the other continue. Most of the time when the good guys fight each other it’s because they didn’t have one very simple conversation, here, that conversation happens, and things get well past that point before webs start slinging.

The nature of that conflict is delightfully meta. Miguel wants to “defend the timeline”, and if that means terrible things needs to happen to Miles, so be it. Miles, correctly, isn’t really interested in having loved ones die for an abstract point about “history going the right way”. This is explicitly framed in terms of “protecting canon” vs “new ideas”, with Miguel standing in for the old fans who won’t suffer changes to their beloved franchise, and Miles as the voice of the people saying, “yeah, but what if we didn’t just make bad copies of stories from the 70s?” Literalizing these kind of fan arguments feels like exactly the way to do franchise fiction here in the mid-20s.

And, I haven’t even brought up the animation yet, which is, of course, outstanding. Each alternate universe gets its own distinct animation style, which each character keeps when the move to a different universe, leading to multiple styles overlapping each other, which is visually astounding and somehow manages to never be overwhelming. It’s the sort of thing where you look at it constantly thinking “how did they do this?”, and then you find out that the answer was “labor abuse”, which does drain the enthusiasm somewhat.

It looks incredible, but for the sake of all the animators I hope the next one takes a long time to come out.

Fun, exciting, appealing characters, goofy powers, cool visuals. What more could you want from a two-and-a-half hour Spider-Man cartoon?

What did we learn from all this?

This is usually the point where were start talking about high-vs-low art, and questions like “what more could you want?” get answers like “real people with real emotions, we’ve had enough cartoons, thankyou”. This was the central conflict behind the Barbenheimer phenomenon over the summer, and why Coppola looked like he was going to have a stroke when he had to congratulate Barbie on “saving cinema”.

But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Theres a class of movies that don’t get made enough: the adventure film targeted at 9-year olds, but talks up to them instead of down, that they can watch with their parents and older siblings, and everyone enjoys them. This has never been that common a genre, because it’s way easier to either skew younger, or juice it up and go for the “older teenagers sneaking into R-rated movies” demographic. The PG-13-ification of action movies has only made this worse, I mean, they actually made a movie called Batman vs Superman a couple years ago that I couldn’t take my 9-year old to, and he’d have hated if I did.

I’m not looking for something drained of all content, but I am looking to avoid any more nightmares about “the time captain america kicked that guy into the fan”, or “when han solo got stabbed”, or, you know, extended scenes of animals being tortured to death. (Watching movies with tweens, you really notice how much torture these kinds of movies have in them these days.) You know, movies like old Star Wars, not new Star Wars. It’s always worth celebrating when there’s a fun movie everyone can sign up for.

Something else that’s been talked about a lot with regards to 2023’s strange box office has been “super-hero fatigue”, and while that’s not not a thing, it’s also not the whole story. Both of these movies were new swings at old superhero franchises with decades of “lore” and factionalized fan-bases, and they both got a very positive critical reception, they made a bunch of money, and managed to avoid being a flashpoint for toxic assholes. And let’s just really underline this, despite being animation, both movies had explicitly diverse casts and characters. It’s possible. More like these, please.

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1. Ironically the only time the “2099” concept worked, in the sense of “new takes on old characters, but in the blade runner-o-mancer future” was a couple of years later when DC Animation launched Batman Beyond. I’m utterly convinced that show started as “what would it have taken to make Spider-Man 2099 good,” and then worked backwards to make it Batman. Look, Terry is absolutely Spider-Man, he’s just stuck with a Bat-Suit.

Doctor Who Season 1/14/40

As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:

Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?

Electronics Does What, Now?

A couple months back, jwz dug up this great interview of Bill Gates conducted by Terry Pratchett in 1996 which includes this absolute gem: jwz: "Electronics gives us a way of classifying things"

TP: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

BG: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.

“Electronics gives us a way of classifying things,” you say?

One of the most maddening aspects of this timeline we live in was that all our troubles were not only “forseeable”, but actually actively “forseen”.

But we already knew that; that’s not why this has been, as they say, living rent-free in my head. I keep thinking about this because it’s so funny.

First, you just have the basic absurdity of Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in the same room, that’s just funny. What was that even like?

Then, you have the slightly sharper absurdity of PTerry saying “so, let me exactly describe 2024 for you” and then BillG waves his hands and is all “someone will handle it, don’t worry.” There’s just something so darkly funny to BillG patronizing Terry Pratchet of all people, whose entire career was built around imagining ways people could misuse systems for their own benefit. Just a perfect example of the people who understood people doing a better job predicting the future than the people who understood computers. It’s extra funny that it wasn’t thaaat long after this he wrote his book satirizing the news?

Then, PTerry fails to ask the really obvious follow-up question, namely “okay great, whose gonna build all that?”

Because, let’s pause and engage with the proposal on it’s own merits for a second. Thats a huge system Bill is proposing that “someone” is gonna build. Whose gonna build all that, Bill? Staff it? You? What’s the business model? Is it going to be grassroots? That’s probably not what he means, since this is the mid-90s and MSFT still thinks that open source is a cancer. Instead: magical thinking.

Like the plagiarism thing with AI, there’s just no engagement with the fact that publishing and journalism have been around for literally centuries and have already worked out most of the solutions to these problems. Instead, we had guys in business casual telling us not to worry about bad things happening, because someone in charge will solve the problem, all while actively setting fire to the systems that were already doing it.

And it’s clear there’s been no thought to “what if someone uses it in bad faith”. You can tell that even in ’96, Terry is getting more email chain letters than Bill was.

But also, it’s 1996, baby, the ship has sailed. The fuse is lit, and all the things that are making our lives hard now are locked in.

But mostly, what I think is so funny about this is that Terry is talking to the wrong guy. Bill Gates is still “Mister Computer” to the general population, but “the internet” happened in spite of his company, not due to any work they actually did. Instead, very shortly after this interview, Bill’s company is going to get shanked by the DOJ for trying to throttle the web in its crib.

None of this “internet stuff” is going to center around what Bill thinks is going to happen, so even if he was able to see the problem, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The internet was going well before MICROS~1 noticed, and routed around it and kept going. There were some Stanford grad students Terry needed to get to instead.

But I’m sure Microsoft’s Electronic System for classifying reputation will ship any day now.

I don’t have a big conclusion here other than “Terry Pratchett was always right,” and we knew that already.

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide

We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!

Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:

Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.

(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)

Apple Report Card, Early 2024

So, lets take a peek behind the ol’ curtain here at icecano dot com. I’ve got a drafts folder on my laptop—which for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment—is named “on deck”, and when I come across something that might be a blog post but isn’t yet, I make a new file and toss it in. Stray observations, links, partially-constructed jokes, whatever. A couple lifetimes back, these probably would have just been tweets? Instead, I kind of let them simmer in the background until I have something to do with them. For example, this spent two months as a text file containing the only the phrase “that deranged rolling stone list”. I have a soft rule that after about three months they get moved to another folder named “never mind.”

And so, over the last couple of months that drafts pile had picked up a fair number of stray Apple-related observations. There’s been a lot going on! Lawsuits, the EU, chat protocols, shenanigans galore. So I kept noting down bits and bobs, but no coherent takes or anything. There was no structure. Then, back in February, Six Colors published their annual “Apple Report Card”.

Every year for the last decade or so, SixColors has done an “Apple Report Card”, where they poll a panel on a variety of Apple-related topics and get a sense of how the company is doing, or at least perceived as doing. This year was: Apple in 2023: The Six Colors report card . There are a series of categories, where the panel grades the company on an A-F scale, and adds commentary as desired.

The categories are a little funny, because they make a lot of sense for a decade ago but aren’t quite what I’d make them in 2024, but having longitudinal data is more interesting than revising the buckets. And it’s genuinely interesting to see how the aggregate scores have changed over the years.

And, so, I think, aha, there’s the structure, I can wedge all these japes into that shape, have a little fun with it. Alert readers will note this was about when I hurt my back, so wasn’t in shape to sit down a write a longer piece for a while there, so the lashed-together draft kinda floated along. Finally, this week, I said to myself, I said, look, just wrap that sucker up and post it, it’s not like there’s gonna be any big Apple news this week!

Let me take a big sip of coffee and check the news, and then let’s go ahead and add a category up front so we can talk about the antitrust lawsuit, I guess?

The Antitrust Lawsuit, I Guess: F

This has been clearly coming for a while, as the antitrust and regulatory apparatus continues to slowly awaken from its long slumber.

At first glance, I have a very similar reaction to this as I had to the Microsoft Antritrust thing back in the 90s, in that:

1. This action is long overdue
2. The company in question should have seen this coming and easily dodged, but instead they’re sucking claw to the face
3. The DOJ has their attention pointed all the wrong things, and then the legal action is either gonna ricochet off or cause more harm than good. They actually mention the bubble colors in the filing, for chrissakes. Mostly they seem determined to go after the things people actually like about Apple’s gear?

But this is all so much dumber than last time, mostly because Microsoft wasn’t living in a world where the Microsoft lawsuit had already happened. This was so, so avoidable; a little performative rule changes, cut some prices, form a few industry working groups, maybe start a Comics Code Authority, whatever. Instead, Apple’s entire response to the whole situation has been somewhere between a little kid refusing to leave the toy store mixed with an old guy yelling “it’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!” at the Arby’s drive through. I’m not sure I can think of another example where a company blew their own legs off because deep down they really don’t believe that regulators are real. That said, the entire post-dot-com Big Tech world only exists because the entire regulatory system has been hibernating out of sight. Well, it’s roused now, baby.

You know the part at the start of that Mork Movie where The Martian keeps getting into streetfights, but then keeps getting himself out of trouble because he knows some obscure legal technicality, but then the judge that looks exactly like Kurt Vonnegut says something like “I don’t care, you hit a cop and you’re going down,” so that the rest of the movie can happen? I think Apple is about to learn some cool life lessons as a janitor, is what I’m saying.

I may have let that metaphor get away from me. Let’s move on, I’m sure there aren’t any other sections here where the recent news will cause me to have to revise from future-tense to past-tense!

Mac: A-

Honestly, as a product line, the mac is probably as coherent and healthy as it’s ever been. Now that they’re fully moved over to their own processors and no longer making “really nice Intel computers”, we’re starting to see some real action.

A line of computers where they all have the same “guts” and the form factor is an aesthetic & functional choice, but not a performance one, is something no one’s ever done before? It seems like they’re on the verge of getting into an annual or annual-and-a-half regular upgrade cycle like the iOS devices have, and that’ll really be a thing when it lands.

Well, all except The Mac Pro, which still feels like a placeholder?

Are they expensive? Yes they are. Pound-for-pound, they’re not as expensive as they seem, because they don’t make anything on the lower-end of the spectrum, and so a lot of complaints about price have the same tenor as complaining that BMWs cost more than an entry-level Toyota Camry, where you just go “yeah, man, they absolutely do.” Then I go look at what it costs to upgrade to a usable amount of RAM and throw my hands up in disgust. How is that not the lead on the DOJ action? They want HOW much to get up to 16 gigs of RAM?

MacOS as a platform is evolving well beyond “BSD, but with a nice UI” the way it was back when it was named OS X. I’m not personally crazy about a lot of the design moves, but I’d be hard pressed to call most of them “objectively bad”, as opposed to “not to my taste”. Except for that new settings panel, that’s garbage.

All that said… actually, I’m going to finish this sentence down under “SW Quality”. I’ll meet ya down there.

iPhone: 🔥

On the one hand, the iPhone might be the most polished and refined tech product of all time. Somewhere around the iPhone 4 or 5, it was “done”; all major features were there, the form factor was locked in. And Apple kept refining, polishing. These supercomputers-in-slabs-of-glass are really remarkable.

On the other hand, that’t not what anyone means when they talk about the iPhone in 2024. Yeah, let’s talk about the App Store.

I had a whole thing here about the app store was clearly the thing that was going to summon the regulators, which I took out partly because it was superfluous now, but also because apparently it was actually the bubble colors?

There’s a lot of takes on the nature of software distribution, and what kind of device the phone is, and how the ecosystem around it should work, and “what Apple customers want.” Well, okay, I’m an Apple user. Mostly a fairly satisfied one. And you know what I want? I want the app store they fucking advertise.

Instead, I had to keep having conversations with my kids about “trick games”, and explain that no, the thing called “the Oregon trail” in the app store isn’t the game they’ve heard about, but is actually a fucking casino. I like Apple’s kit quite a bit, and I keep buying it, but never in a million years will I forgive Tim Apple for the conversations I had to keep having with them about one fucking scam app after another.

Because this is what drives me the most crazy in all the hoopla around the app stores: if it worked like they claim it works, none of this would be happening. Instead, we have bizarre and inconsistant app review, apps getting pulled after being accepted, openly predatory in-app purchases, and just scam after casino after should-be-illegal-knock-off-clone after scam.

The idea is great: Phones for people who don’t use computers as a source of self-actualization. Phones and Macs are different products, with a different deal. Part of the deal is that with the iPhone you can do “less”, but what you can do is rock solid, safe, and you don’t ever have to worry about what your mom or your kid might download on their device.

I know the deal, I signed up for that deal on purpose! I want them to hold up their side of the bargain.

Which brings me to my next point. One of the metaphors people use for iOS devices—which I think is a good one!—is that they’re more like game consoles than general purpose computers. They’re “app consoles”. And I like that, that’s a solid way of looking at the space. It’s Jobs’ “cars vs trucks” metaphor but with a slightly less-leaky abstraction.

But you know who doesn’t have these legal and developer relations problems, and who isn’t currently having their ass handed to them by the EU and the DOJ? Nintendo.

This is what kills me. You can absolutely sell a computer where every piece of software is approved by you, where you get a cut, where the store isn’t choked by garbage, where everyone is basically happy. Nintendo has been doing that for checks notes 40 years now?

Hell, Nintendo even kept the bottom from falling out of the prices by enforcing that while you could sell for any price, you had to sell the physical and digital copies at the same amount, and then left all their stuff at 60-70 bucks, giving air cover to the small guys to charge a sustainable price.

Apple and Nintendo are very similar companies, building their own hardware and software, at a slightly different angle from the rest of their industries. They both have a solid “us first, customers second, devs third” world-view. But Nintendo has maintained a level of control over their platform that Apple could only dream of. And I’m really oversimplifying here, but mostly they did this by just not being assholes? Nintendo is not a perfect company, because none of them are, but you know what? I can play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch.

In the end, Apple was so averse to games, they couldn’t even bring themselves to use Nintendo’s playbook to keep the Feds off their back.

iPad: C

I’m utterly convinced that somewhere around 1979 Steve Jobs had a vision—possibly chemically assisted—of The Computer. A device that was easy to use, fully self-contained, an appliance, not a specialist’s tool. Something kids could pick up and use.

Go dial up his keynote where he introduces the first iPad. He knows he’s dying, even if he wasn’t admitting it, and he knows this is the last “new thing” he’s going to present. The look on his face is satisfaction: he made it. The thing he saw in the desert all those years ago, he’s holding it in his hands on stage. Finally.

So, ahhhh, why isn’t it actually good for anything?

I take that back; it’s good for two things: watching video, and casual video games. Anything else… not really?

I’m continually baffled by the way the iPad just didn’t happen. It’s been fourteen years; fourteen years after the first Mac, the Mac Classic was basically over, all the stuff the Mac opened up was well in the past-tense. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that happened because the iPad existed. Maybe in a world with small laptops and big-ass phones, the iPad just doesn’t have a seat at the big-kids table?

Watch & Wearables: C

I like my watch enough that when my old one died, I bought a new one, but not so much that I didn’t have to really, really think about it.

Airpods are pretty cool, except they make my ears hurt so I stopped using them.

Is this where we talk about the Cyber Goggles?

AppleTV

Wait, which Apple TV?

AppleTV (the hardware): B

For the core use-case, putting internet video on my TV, it’s great. Great picture, the streaming never stutters, even the remote is decent now. It’s my main way to use my TV, and it’s a solid, reliable workhorse.

But look, that thing is a full-ass iPhone without a screen. It’s got more compute power than all of North America in the 70s! Is this really all we’re going to use this for? This is an old example, but the AppleTV feels like it could easily slide into being the 3rd or 2nd best game console with almost no effort, and it just… doesn’t.

AppleTV (the service): B

Ted Lasso notwithstanding, this is a service filled exclusively with stuff I have no interest in. I’m not even saying it’s bad! But a pass from me, chief.

AppleTV (the app): F

Absolute total garbage, just complete trash. I’ll go to almost any length to avoid using it.

Services: C

What’s left here?

iCloud drive? Works okay, I guess, but you’ll never convince me to rely on it.

Apple Arcade? It’s fine, other than it shouldn’t have to exist.

Apple Fitness? No opinion.

Apple News? Really subpar, with the trashiest ads I’ve seen in a while.

Apple Music? The service is outstanding, no notes. The app, however, manages to keep getting worse every OS update, at this point it’s kind of remarkable.

Apple Classical Music? This was the best you could do, really?

iTunes Match? I’m afraid to cancel. Every year I spent 15 bucks so I don’t have to learn which part of my cloud library will vanish.

There’s ones I’m not remembering, right? That’s my review of them.

Homekit: F

I have one homekit device in my house—a smart lightbulb. You can set the color temperature from the app! There is no power in the universe that would convince me to add a second.

HW Reliability: A

I don’t even have a joke about this. The hardware works. I mean, I still have to turn my mouse over to charge it, like it’s a defeated Koopa Troopa, but it charges every time!

SW Quality: D

Let me tell you a story.

For the better part of a decade, my daily driver was a 2013 15-inch MacBook Pro. In that time, I’m pretty sure it ran every OS X flavor from 10.9 to 10.14; we stopped at Mojave because there was some 32-bit only software we needed for work.

My setup was this: I had the laptop itself in the center of the desk, on a little stand, with the clamshell open. On either side, I had an external monitor. Three screens, where the built-in laptop one in the middle was smaller but effectively higher resolution, and the ones on the sides were physically larger but had slightly chunkier pixels. (Eventually, I got a smokin’ deal on some 4k BenQs on Amazon, and that distinction ceased.) A focus monitor in the center for what I was working on that was generally easier to read, and then two outboard monitors for “bonus content.”

The monitor on the right plugged into the laptop’s right-side HDMI port. The monitor on the left plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports—this was the original thunderbolt when it still looked like firewire or mini-displayport—via a thunderbolt-to-mini-displayport cable. In front of the little stand, I had a wired Apple keyboard with the numeric keypad that plugged into the USB-A port on the left side. I had a wireless Apple mouse. Occasionally, I’d plug into the wired network connection with a thunderbolt-to-Cat6 adapter I kept in my equipment bag. The magsafe power connection clicked in on the left side. Four, sometimes five cables, each clicking into their respective port.

Every night, I’d close the lid, unplug the cables in a random order, and take the laptop home. The next morning, I’d come in, put the laptop down, plug those cables back in via another random order, open the lid, and—this is the important part—every window was exactly where I had left it. I had a “workspace” layout that worked for me—email and slack on the left side, web browser and docs on the right, IDE or text editor in the center. Various Finder windows on the left side pointing at the folders holding what I was working on.

I’d frequently, multiple times a week, unplug the laptop during the middle of the day, and hide over to another building, or a conference room, or the coffee shop. Sometimes I’d plug into another monitor, or a projector? Open the lid, those open windows would re-arrange themselves to what was available. It was smart enough to recognize that if there was only one external display, that was probably a projector, and not put anything on it except the display view of Powerpoint or Keynote.

Then, I’d come back to my desk, plug everything back in, open the lid, and everything was exactly where it was. It worked flawlessly, every time. I was about to type “like magic”, but that’s wrong. It didn’t work like magic, it worked like an extremely expensive professional tool that was doing the exact job I bought it to do.

My daily driver today is a 16-inch 2021 M1 MacBook Pro running, I think, macOS 12. The rest of my peripherals are the same: same two monitors, same keyboard, same mouse. Except now, I have a block of an dock on the left side of my desk for the keyboard and wired network drop.

In the nineteen months I’ve had this computer, let me tell you how many times I plugged the monitors back in and had the desktop windows in the same places they were before: Literally Never.

In fact, the windows wouldn’t even stay put when it went to sleep, much less when I closed the lid. The windows would all snap back to the central monitor, the desktops of the two side monitors would swap places. This never happened on the old rig over nearly a decade, and happens every time with the new one.

Here is what I had to do so that my email is still on the left monitor when I come back from lunch:

1. I have a terminal window running caffeinate all the time. Can’t let it go to sleep!
2. The cables from the two monitors are plugged into the opposite side of the computer from where they sit: the cables cross over in the back and plug into the far side
3. Most damning of all, I can’t use the reintroduced HDMI port, both monitors have to be plugged in via USB-C cables. The cable on the right, which needed an adapter to turn the HDMI cable to a USB-C/Thunderbolt connection is plugged into the USB-C port right next to the HDMI port, which is collecting dust. Can I use it? No, nothing works if that port is lit up.

Please don’t @-me with your solution, I guarantee you whatever you’re thinking of I tried it, I read that article, I downloaded that app. This took me a year to determine by trial and error, like I was a victorian scientist trying to measure the refraction of the æther, and I’m not changing anything now. It’s a laptop in name only, I haven’t closed the lid or moved it in months, and I’m not going to. God help me if I need to travel for work.

I’ve run some sketchy computers, I depended on the original OEM Windows 95 for over a year. I have never, in forty years, needed to deploy a rube goldberg–ass solution like this to keep my computer working right.

And everything is like this. I could put another thousand words here about things that worked great on the old rig—scratch that, that literally still work on the old rig—that just don’t function right on the new one. The hardware is so much better, but everything about using the computer is so much worse.

Screw the chat bubbles, get the DOJ working on why my nice monitors don’t work any more.

Dev Relations: D

Absolutely in the toilet, the worst I have ever seen it. See: just about everything above this. Long-time indie “for the love of the game” mac devs are just openly talking shit at this point. You know that Trust Thermocline we got all excited about as a concept a couple years ago? Yeah, we are well below that now.

Bluntly, the DOJ doesn’t move if all the developers working on the platform are happy and quiet.

I had an iOS-based project get scrapped in part because we weren’t willing to incur the risk of giving Apple total veto power over the product; that was five or six years ago now, and things have only decayed since then.

This is a D instead of an F because I’m quite certain it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Environ/Social: ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This category feels like one of those weird “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Grading on the curve of “silicon valley companies”, they’re doing great here. On the other hand, that bar is on the floor. Like, it’s great that they make it easy to recycle your old phones, but maybe just making it less of a problem to throw things out hasn’t really backed up to the fifth “why”, you know?

Potpurri: N/A

This isn’t a sixcolors category, but I”m not sure where to put the fact that I like my HomePod mini? It’s a great speaker!

Also, please start making a wifi router again, thanks.

What Now: ?

Originally, this all wrapped up with an observation that it’s great that the product design is firing on all cylinders and that services revenue is through the roof, but if they don’t figure out how to stop pissing off developers and various governments, things are going to get weird, but I just highlighted all that and hit delete because we’re all the way through that particular looking glass now.

Back in the 90s, there was nothing much else going on, and Microsoft was doing some openly, blatantly illegal shit. Here? There’s a lot else going on, and Apple are mostly just kinda jerks?

I think that here in 2024, if the Attorney General of the United States is inspired to redirect a single brain cell away from figuring out how to stop a racist game show host from overthrowing the government and instead towards the color of the text message bubbles on his kid’s phone, that means that Apple is Well and Truely Fucked. I think the DOJ is gonna carve into them like a swarm of coconut crabs that just found a stranded aviator.

Maybe they shoulder-roll through this, dodge the big hits, settle for a mostly-toothless consent decree. You’d be hard-pressed, from the outside, to point at anything meaningly different about Microsoft in 1999 vs 2002. But before they settled, they did a lot of stuff, put quite a few dents in the universe, to coin a phrase. Afterwards? Not a whole lot. Mostly, it kept them tied up so that they didn’t pay attention to what Google was doing. And we know that that went.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a modern case where antitrust action actually made things better for consumers. I mean, it’s great that Microsoft got slammed for folding IE into Windows, but that didn’t save Netscape, you know? And I was still writing CSS fills for IE6 a decade later. Roughing up Apple over ebooks didn’t fix anything. I’m not sure mandating that I need to buy new charge cables was solving a real problem. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure breaking up Ma Bell did much beyond make the MCI guy a whole lot of money. AT&T reformed like T2, just without the regulations.

The problem here is that it’s the fear of enforcement thats supposed to do the job, not the actual enforcement itself, but that gun won’t scare anyone if they don’t think you’ll ever fire it. (Recall, this is why the Deliverator carried a sword.) Instead, Apple’s particular brew of arrogance and myopic confidence called this all down on them.

Skimming the lawsuit, and the innumerable articles about the lawsuit, the things the DOJ complains about are about a 50/50 mix of “yeah, make them stop that right now”, and “no wait, I bought my iPhone for that on purpose!” The bit about “shapeshifting app store rules” is already an all-time classic, but man oh man do I not want the Feds to legislate iOS into android, or macOS into Windows. There’s a very loud minority of people who would never buy something from Apple (or Microsoft) on principal, and they really think every computer-like device should be forced to work like Ubuntu or whatever, and that is not what I bought my iPhone for.

I’m pessimistic that this is going to result in any actually positive change, in case that wasn’t coming through clearly. All I want is them to hold up their end of the deal they already offered. And make those upgrades cheaper. Quit trying to soak every possible cent out of every single transaction.

And let my monitors work right.

BSG, Fifteen Years On

It’s been called to my attention that the last episode of the “new” Battlestar Galactica aired fifteen years ago yesterday?

My favorite part of that finale is that you can tell someone whose never seen it that the whole show ends with a robot dance party, and even if they believe you, they will never in a million years guess how that happens.

And, literally putting the words “they have a plan” in big letters in the opening credits of every episode, while not ever bothering to work out what that plan was, that’s whatever the exact opposite of imposter syndrome is.

Not a great ending.

That first season, though, that was about as good a season of TV not named Twin Peaks has ever been. It was on in the UK months before it even had an airdate in the US, and I kept hearing good things, so I—ahem—obtained copies. I watched it every week on a CRT computer monitor at 2 in the morning after everyone else was asleep, and I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They really did take that cheesy late-70s Star Wars knockoff and make something outstanding out of it. Mostly, what I remember is I didn’t have anyone to talk about it with, so I had to convince everyone I knew to go watch it once it finally landed on US TV.

It was never that good again. Sure, the end was bad, but so was the couple of years leading up to that end? The three other seasons had occasional flashes of brilliance but that mostly drained out, replaced by escalating “what’s the craziest thing that could happen next?” so that by the time starbuck was a ghost and bob dylan was a fundamental force of the universe there was no going back, and they finally landed on that aforementioned dance party. And this was extra weird because it not only started so good, but it seemed to have such a clear mission: namely, show those dorks over at Star Trek: Voyager how their show should have worked.

Some shows should just be about 20 episodes, you know?

Book Lists Wednesday

Speaking of best of lists, doing the rounds this week we have:

The Great American Novels

We give the Atlantic a hard time in these parts, and usually for good reasons, but it’s a pretty good list! I think there’s some things missing, and there’s a certain set of obvious biases in play, but it’s hard to begrudge a “best american fiction” list that remembers Blume, LeGuin, and Jemisin, you know? Also, Miette’s mother is on there!

I think I’ve read 20 of these? I say think, because there are a few I own a copy of but don’t remember a single thing about (I’m looking at YOU, Absalom, Absalom!)

And, as long as we’re posting links to lists of books, I’ve had this open in a tab for the last month:

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - Wikipedia

I forget now why I ended up there, but I thought this was a pretty funny list, because I considers myself a pretty literate, well-read person, and I hadn’t even heard of most of these, must less read them. That said, the four on there I actually have read—Guns of August, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, Soul of a New Machine, and Into Thin Air—are four of the best books I’ve ever read, so maybe I should read a couple more of these?

Since the start of the Disaster of the Twenties I’ve pretty exclusively read trash, because I needed the distraction, and I didn’t have the spare mental bandwidth for anything complicated or thought provoking. I can tell the disaster is an a low ebb at the moment, because I found myself looking at both of these lists thinking, maybe I’m in the mood for something a little chunkier.

The Dam

Real blockbuster from David Roth on the Defector this morning, which you should go read: The Coffee Machine That Explained Vice Media

In a large and growing tranche of wildly varied lines of work, this is just what working is like—a series of discrete tasks of various social function that can be done well or less well, with more dignity or less, alongside people you care about or don't, all unfolding in the shadow of a poorly maintained dam.

It goes on like that until such time as the ominous weather upstairs finally breaks or one of the people working at the dam dynamites it out of boredom or curiosity or spite, at which point everyone and everything below is carried off in a cleansing flood.

[…]

That money grew the company in a way that naturally never enriched or empowered the people making the stuff the company sold, but also never went toward making the broader endeavor more likely to succeed in the long term.

Depending on how you count, I’ve had that dam detonated on me a couple of times now. He’s talking about media companies, but everything he describes applies to a lot more than just that. More than once I’ve watched a functional, successful, potentially sustainable outfit get dynamited because someone was afraid they weren’t going to cash out hard enough. And sure, once you realize that to a particular class of ghoul “business” is a synonym for “high-stakes gambling” a lot of the decisions more sense, at least on their own terms.

But what always got me, though, was this:

These are not nurturing types, but they are also not interested in anything—not creating things or even being entertained, and increasingly not even in commerce.

What drove me crazy was that these people didn’t use the money for anything. They all dressed badly, drove expensive but mediocre cars—mid-list Acuras or Ford F-250s—and didn’t seem to care about their families, didn’t seem to have any recognizable interests or hobbies. This wasn’t a case of “they had bad taste in music”, it was “they don’t listen to music at all.” What occasional flickers of interest there were—fancy bicycles or or golf clubs or something—was always more about proving they could spend the money, not that they wanted whatever it was.

It’s one thing if the boss cashes out and drives up to lay everyone off in a Lamborghini, but it’s somehow more insulting when they drive up in the second-best Acura, you know?

I used to look at this people and wonder, what did you dream about when you were young? And now that you could be doing whatever that was, why aren’t you?

Caves of Androzani at 40

As long as we’re talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of “Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davison’s final story as Doctor Who.

One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isn’t totally unusual—Bond does the same thing—but what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.

The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can “regenerate”, healing themselves but changing their body.

This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Who—stories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. “Regeneration Stories” tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something “really extra bad” is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And they’re always deeply unsatisfying, because it’s always the sort of problem that wouldn’t be that big a deal if the main actor wasn’t about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.

Except once.

In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as “fine”. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.

For Davison’s last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the show’s dominant—and best—writer throughout the seventies, but had’t worked on the show since ’79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.

The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as “a pathetic little war”, and he’s right—it’s almost perversely small-scale by his standards.

That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on what’s going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. It’s a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor has—just by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.

What’s really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end he’s only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.

It's also remarkably better than everything around it—not just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. It’s better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.

It’s not flawless—the show’s reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, there’s a “computer tablet” that’s blatantly a TV remote, and there’s a “magma beast” that’s anything but. But that’s all true for everything the show was doing in the 80s—but for once, it’s trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.

My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it back—it’s ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show won’t do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.

It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.

As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the show—it was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, I’m not inclined to argue.

Nausicaä at 40

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!

Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. It’s a corpus of work where “best” is meaningless, but “favorite” can sometimes be revealing. My kid’s favorite is Ponyo, so that’s the one I’ve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted I’ve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.

Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki film—a strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that aren’t really villains, good-looking food—but it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.

I can’t now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the book—as much of it as existed—around the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great “I’m an adult now, and I can just go buy things” moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an “adaptation” than a “companion piece.” It’s the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.

So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but that’s a borderline tautology. If I’m honest, it’s a tick more “action-adventure” that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, it’s action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)

I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you can’t tell if it was built or grown. I love the way it’s a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, “Toxic Jungle”,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why it’s there.

Bluntly, I love the way the movie isn’t as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that it’s an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isn’t willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.

Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to “why do you love that so much?” is “because there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didn’t know was there until this clicked into place.”