Currently reading We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which is one of the books that inspired Orwell’s 1984 and holy cow does it show. Very similar books except We is so very, very Russian. So it’s a tougher read than I was expecting. Looking forward to something light after I’m finished.
What I’m Watching
My wife and I have started a rewatch of The Sopranos. (Confession time! I say ‘rewatch’ here but I’ve never actually watched beyond the pilot episode. So it’s a first-time watch for me.)
With the passing of David Lynch, I’m also rewatching (actual rewatch this time) of Twin Peaks. It still holds up.
What I’m Playing
Accidentally picked up a Balatro addiction. Oops! Now I finish off every evening with a quick round. Not sure if I’m actually getting any better at the game though! Feels weird to really enjoy playing something that doesn’t have an obvious and noticeable improvement path, but here we are.
What I’m Enjoying
I hate to be that guy but I’ve noticed a bit of brightness creeping into the evenings and it’s cheering me up. We’re gonna make it!
Also just before Christmas, I picked up a Bambu A1 printer and I’ve been really enjoying churning things out for that. My daughter had a Taskmaster Junior themed birthday party a couple of weeks ago and it’s been great being able to make unique little things to elevate the party, like Taskmaster Stamps for the tasks.
The screenplay suffers from being a little too contrived and Save The Cat-y. The injected emotional drama in the second half never felt believable and ironically achieved the opposite result by detaching me from the emotionality of the story. But my goodness, the performances are incredible. Colman Domingo holds everything together with some genuine movie star magic, but the semi-/non-professional performances are the real beating heart of the film.
Every film I watch only gets so much of my suspension of disbelief. A coincidence here or there? No problem. A convenient meeting of two characters at just the right time? Sure, I’ll go with it! Too much, though, and it feels like lazy writing. The happy chances stack up and cross a line and lose me.
North by Northwest blasts through its disbelief budget in the first 10 minutes. The plot hinges on so much flimsy serendipity that the film strains credulity. At no point in this film does James Mason even say “hey given this nationwide manhunt for Roger Kaplan, maybe my dopey henchman’s dopey plan didn’t identify the right guy”. And the film just keeps rolling with it. On to the next “and it JUST SO HAPPENS that…” until you find yourself in a house just two minutes down the road from the top of Mount Rushmore. Riiiiiight.
And yet! AND YET! Honestly, who needs credulity when you’ve got stars like this? North by Northwest perfectly demonstrates that, sometimes, megawatt charisma really can carry a movie.
A charming shaggy dog detective story that feels like the marriage of Encyclopedia Brown and The Long Goodbye. Adam Brody is terrific. Perfect hungover Sunday matinee viewing.
Danny O’Brien on mystery of whether Elon Musk is Adrian Dittmann:
I feel like I’m spoilering about a week or so of social media entertainment for you here by not trying to lead you down the rat-hole of evidence in favor for Dittman-Elon, but this Spectator piece, apparently based on research conducted by crimew and frends, lays out the counter-argument — in that they kinda doxxed the real Dittmann. It’s not as the lawyers say, dispositive, but I think it holds water better than the pro-Dittmann!Elon arguments. (I’m using the fanfic bang notation here, where Dittmann!Elon is an official variant of the canonical Elon).
Every year, my wife and I do an escape room for my birthday (this year’s was Incognito’s “Prohibition”, which was ace!). Morty is like Yelp but for escape rooms and immersive experiences. Very handy for nerds like me!
In my house, we’ve started singing “everything is broken all of the time” instead of “little bit of everything all of the time” line from Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet”. We do it every time we encounter a problem with our tech (“Hey Siri what’s 5 times 3?” “I found some web results, I can send them to your phone” - great stuff, thanks Siri).
So Ed Zitron’s recent Web Summit talk about why all tech is so terrible now really resonated with me (tl;dr it’s because of greed). It’s great to see someone else so passionate and angry about it.
This morning as I was making a coffee, barely awake, something came floating out of the aether and lodged itself into my brain. I was awake less than five minutes and the universe had already bestowed on me my earworm for the day: the theme song from The Snorks
I haven’t thought about this show in probably 30 years or so? But I could remember every word of the theme song. As these shows go, it’s pretty niche. It’s not like it’s The Smurfs or something. But if I was to ask anyone of my vintage if they remembered The Snorks, I’d say most probably have some memory of it. We could get all nostalgic and be all “hey remember this?” “oh yeah, that was great! And remember this other thing? Good times.” It’s embedded deep and wide.
This got me thinking, what are my kids going to suddenly remember in 30 years? What theme songs are going to unexpectedly pop into their heads as they’re barefoot and bleary-eyed one morning? Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese is on hard rotation in my house, so probably that. Little Lunch maybe, but I don’t even know if that has a theme song.
This is just our house. But what are their friends going to remember? Now that we no longer have a monoculture and everything is so completely fragmented, what’s going to happen to communal nostalgia? In 30 years? Will it even be a thing? “Hey, remember Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese?” “Nah I never watched that” or “We didn’t have Netflix, we only had Prime”. What is going to happen without these common cultural touchstones?
A couple of things to bear in mind here.
The first is that there’s still a couple of franchises that still hint at a monoculture. Pokemon and Bluey are the big ones. It’s small but it’s still there. So maybe it’s not entirely dead yet.
The second and most important thing is: maybe this isn’t a bad thing? During the pandemic, I wrote about how nostalgia was helping me protect my peace as my anxiety was spiking pretty hard. I don’t think nostalgia is, by itself, a bad thing. But maybe, just maybe, there’s such a thing as too much nostalgia and that’s why my generation are, by and large, emotionally stunted adult babies? So perhaps we could achieve more with less of it?
At least the next generation won’t have to put up with jokes about leaving the immersion on.
johnke.me
