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Things 2024 Q1: Dancing, Temp tracks, Creativity

LEGO is doing okay

This nice visualisation of LEGO group annual revenue shows that after a lull in the late 2010’s, there has been incredible growth since 2020 – presumably somewhat assisted by pandemic lockdowns?

Not shown – revenue growth flattened in 2023

As someone who enjoys LEGO but is running out of storage space, I’ve been trying out BrickBorrow for the last year, where for a subscription (and some postage each time) you can borrow LEGO sets.

A well-designed feature restricts big sets to those who have been subscribed for 3 months – this shows reliability, and also helps with availability of those sets. Now that BrickBorrow have shifted to a Royal Mail sticker postage method, and added a filter on the sets to only show those that are available, I recommend it!

£915 of LEGO I got to build for £235… but had to send back. Worth it!

I Am Not Left-Handed

This is the name of a trope where a character reveals they were previously fighting with a self-imposed handicap, which they then shed to fight at their true power. This is a classic technique for shallow power-fantasy stories, but despite that I find it incredibly compelling every time.

My favourite concentrated example of it is this (now very old!) Anime Music Video which edits together a particular fight from Naruto, which I also appreciate for how it establishes a rooting interest in one of the combatants without any dialogue:

Temp Tracks in film

In this episode of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos break down the way in which ‘safe’ creative choices around music in the Marvel films has led to a weaker overall effect:

Towards the end they highlight the problem of the ‘Temp Track’: a piece of film is edited to a suitable existing piece of music, but the film-makers work with that version for so long they become wedded to the way it sounds, so when they eventually commission original music, they request something almost identical. In a spin-off video, EFAP show a lot of examples.

The opposite of this is Tom Tykwer’s method (director of Run Lola Run (1998) ), in which the soundtrack is composed first. You can hear a bit about it in this segment of the making of The Matrix Resurrections, and it does seem very effective.

While we’re on the topic, I personally greatly enjoyed The Matrix Resurrections (2021) for it’s metatextual resonance rather than literal content, apparently in marked contrast to most people. But that is a story for another time.

Dancing at the end of films

A Bollywood staple, after the film reaches its narrative conclusion, even if it’s not a musical and there has been no dancing before, the film ends with the whole cast performing an elaborate dance number (TV Trope: Dance Party Ending). This can have a fascinating effect on how you feel about the film as a whole, sometimes redeeming antagonists, bringing back characters who died, or just providing an emotional catharsis after an otherwise tense time.

Unfortunately I suspect that citing my favourite Western films that do this is also a strange kind of spoiler. So instead I will recommend to you several films that I have seen recently, at least one of which uses this to good effect, but all of which I think are worth watching for one reason or another. Some will even be improved by you thinking there might be a dance at the end, even if there isn’t!

  • Knight and Day (2010), Disney+, a strange clash of genres that works great… some of the time
  • Labyrinth (1986)
  • Medusa Deluxe (2022), a ‘single-take’ hairdressing competition murder mystery
  • Saltburn (2023), directed by Emerald Fennell, whose previous film Promising Young Woman (2022) I also recommend… for adults that like ambiguous protagonists
  • The Marvels (2023), Disney+, MCU take some creative risks! Some of which work!
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
  • White Noise (2022), Netflix, weirder and less ‘fun’ than the trailer implies (but I still recommend it)
  • The Zone of Interest (2023)

Dancing in a fursuit

Probably best to jump in with no context and watch this one-minute clip, which annoyingly I can’t embed so you will have to actually click on it:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L03td6_rOvk

Wow! What the heck was that? This ad-laden article lays out the whole story. Gintan is some kind of K-pop star in his own right, but is now known for performing at ‘Random Dance’ events in this very distinctive fursuit. In these events, clips from K-Pop songs with popular choreography are played, and anyone who knows the routine jumps into the centre to perform it. There’s a delightfully over-academic essay about these events here.

What’s really impressive is that not only has Gintan memorised so many of these routines, and not only can he perform them with incredible precision and panache on demand, he does all of this while wearing a heavy fursuit – which is like a really fun version of the ‘I Am Not Left-Handed’ trope described above!

On top of that, the slightly serious expression on the suit is a great contrast with the frivolousness of the whole thing, and it always brings a smile to my face.

Find lots more Gintan footage like this with this Youtube search.

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

Let’s get a bit more serious for a moment.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a philosophical one: to use Wikipedia’s summary, it asks why and how do we experience qualia, phenomenal consciousness, and subjective experiences? Related questions: where does consciousness reside? Is it a quantum effect? Is it separate from our physical forms in some way?

I never found this problem convincing at all. Why would we expect consciousness to feel any different to the way it actually does? Literally our only reference case is how we experience it, on what grounds can we say this is surprising?

I first read about this some decades ago, so I was delighted to find that in 2018 philosopher David Chalmers proposed a more precise and slightly sassy formulation of my line of thinking: the “Meta-problem of Consciousness”. This is “the problem of explaining why we think that there is a [hard] problem of consciousness.”

Yes! That does indeed seem to be the more pressing problem.

The Temp Track that went well

I know of one example of a film that used a temp track to edit a key scene, and (in my opinion) this actually produced an excellent final result. Even as someone quite averse to spoilers, in this particular case I don’t think reading about it – or even watching the scene on its own – actually spoils the film!

However, if you worry even more about spoilers than me, you might not want to know about it. So, just know that it is from one of the films listed above, I’ll be talking about it after the extended Thing about creativity-over-time below, and it is the last Thing of this episode so you can easily skip it if you want. Be ready!

Creativity over time: productivity and scope

I’m very interested in the creative process. The brain is a machine that can come up with ideas or whole creative works, but the methods by which you can best achieve that are not obvious.

When it comes to long-form works this is particularly tricky. Here’s a segmentation I came up with for thinking about this:

Planning style: Plan in advance vs. Freestyle
Routine style: Fixed schedule vs. When it’s ready

The pro/con on these is pretty clear, at least for narrative works.

Plan in advance
Pro: A solid overall story that wraps up satisfyingly (even if you have to alter it a bit as you go)
Con: Characters may not act consistently as you’re forcing them to hit story beats

Freestyle
Pro: Characters and situations evolve naturally
Con: Plot may spiral out of control and not go anywhere

Fixed schedule
Pro: Progress is made consistently, can retain and build an audience
Con: Quality may suffer

When it’s ready
Pro: Maximise quality
Con: Easy to put off and polish indefinitely

If you know me, you know what’s coming next… a consideration of the four combinations!

The four approaches to ongoing narrative

As with any classification of creative works, some of this is subjective or debatable for many reasons. Regardless, here’s some examples:

Plan in advance, fixed schedule
Star Wars original trilogy (sort-of), Babylon 5, Breaking Bad.

Plan in advance, when it’s ready
The Gentleman Bastards book series

Freestyle, fixed schedule
Questionable Content, Star Wars sequel trilogy, Lost

Freestyle, when it’s ready
Game of Thrones, Dresden Codak, Confinement animation

Now, just from writing down the first examples I could think of, some very natural patterns emerge.

A plot planned in advance and delivered to a fixed schedule has produced some of the most beloved completed works there are.

In opposition to that, Freestyle and When it’s Ready has produced works that I think have an even more intense fandom (as it maximises quality), but frequently slow down and stall for one reason or another.

Freestyle with a fixed schedule generally seems like a bad idea, but over long time periods works in a sort of ‘soap opera’ format.

Plan in advance, release when ready seems to be very rare, and seems intuitively the most likely to become a victim of procrastination / anxiety / writer’s block stalling progress.

Some case studies in slowed progress

Game of Thrones (or properly titled, the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) is perhaps the apex example of ‘Freestyle, when it’s ready’ slowing to a crawl (or possible halt). Here’s a chart showing the release date and length of each book, running up to the present day when ‘The Winds of Winter’ has not yet come out.

To be clear, I don’t consider this a failing. I think the books are as well-loved as they are precisely because this method of production maximises quality and character. However, expectations for a timely finish should be held quite low.

A recent example was shared with me by Laurence: Confinement, a series of animations based on the SCP Foundation (referenced in Things November 2022). These had an even more dramatic stall: episode 7 was extremely popular and drove many to support the creator’s Patreon. However, about 3.5 years later the creator admitted they didn’t have it in them to make episode 8 any more and formally closed all their social channels. (There’s a lot more drama to that, which you can read about here).

Here’s how those releases looked, running the x-axis to the point when the project was officially cancelled:

In what is (I think) an example of the rare “Planned in advance, release when ready”, the Bee and Puppycat animation managed to reach a pretty satisfying conclusion (so far) about 9 years after it began – with an astonishing 83% of the run-time dropping all at once at the very end:

The slowness of early releases was due to a very small team working on the animation. Then a series of complicated licensing delays and disasters conspired to delay later releases. But in the end, a soft reboot / series 2 eventually dropped all at once on Netflix in September 2022.

I’ll tell you why Bee and Puppycat is so good another time, but for now just know that when I audited all 50+ in-jokes I share with Clare, this series accounted for more of them than anything else.

While less narrative in nature, the web comic Hyperbole and a Half had a very prolonged hiatus. In the dangerous “Freestyle, release when it’s ready” category, but without the burden of an overarching narrative, artist Allie Brosh had published a series of excellent and very personal hybrid comic/narratives, from 2009-2010. Output slowed in 2011 due to mental health issues, a medical condition, and a focus on turning the content into a book. Things seemed to end with the book coming out in October 2013 and at the same time the truly excellent “Menace” strip being published (shortly after the Bee and Puppycat pilot aired).

Then, nothing, for a very long time. This was also quite concerning given the prior comic was a very personal one about coming to terms (perhaps?) with depression. On the other hand, author Allie Brosh had said “In the world of writing internet content, there’s all this talk of “maintaining an audience” and “staying on the radar,” but I’d rather just work really hard for a really long time on one thing that I feel really good about publishing.”

So it was that a sequel book “Solutions and Other Problems”, announced in 2015, eventually came out in September 2022, 9 years after the last published work (and also around the time the Netflix Bee and Puppycat series finally dropped, as it happens). The content of that book follows the previous form, and also details some of the things that happened to Brosh in the intervening years, and the reason for the gap in public output becomes devastatingly clear. I highly recommend both books.

Finally, in that rare “Plan in advance, release when ready” category, Scott Lynch published The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006. Nick recommended it to me, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, but it seemed like the author liked world-building a little too much. As the first in a planned series of 7 books called the ‘Gentleman Bastard’ series, I decided to wait until the series finished before reading on.

A second book appeared in 2007, a third in 2013… and at the time of writing, nothing else.

Scott Lynch wrote very candidly in 2022 about what has been going on. He has in fact been writing very productively, but a kind of anxiety is holding him back from publishing any of it, including updates about how it is going. (As a Things reader you probably enjoy ‘meta’ things, so you should read that post).

Here’s the point where we get meta about it right here: I recognise that problem because that is exactly what happened to me since 2020 (when a pandemic happened, funnily enough). I have 4 rather long and pretty much complete blog posts about various topics, none of which I felt confident enough about to post. This hasn’t happened to me before!

As a Things reader you might also recognise that even aside from that, the rate of Things posts gets slower and slower (with the surprise exception of this one… at the time I’m writing this sentence, anyway). That is something I find a bit harder to explain.

Having written all the above, it does make me wonder: should I commit to a schedule for Things? Wouldn’t once a quarter be a completely reasonable one to try?

Let’s say this is the 2024 Quarter 1 things and see how things go from there!

The Temp Track that Went Well: not a spoiler, but might be if you’re very worried in which case don’t read this

Are you ready?

So this is about a scene that happens at the very end of one of the films in my list above.

Specifically a scene where everyone starts dancing

That’s enough line spacing, so here we go. Perhaps you are familiar with the LCD Soundsystem’s 2005 song “Daft Punk is Playing in my House”. It seems to be their 3rd most popular song on Spotify, and 2nd most popular song on Youtube. It is rather repetitive but has a very compelling hook:

(The music video references the Things-favourite Michel Gondry-directed music video to Daft Punk’s “Around the World”, another repetitive but compelling song).

So at the end of White Noise (2022), there is a scene where the characters visit the excellently set-dressed 80’s supermarket and everyone there starts dancing as the credits roll. Incidentally, this tipped the movie over from something I thought was interesting-but-a-bit-weird into excellent.

LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Daft Punk is Playing in my House’ was used as the temp track for this scene – and indeed was the track the dancing was choreographed and performed to, which ordinarily I would say is going a bit too far for a temp track. However, here’s the twist: they commissioned LCD Soundsystem themselves to write a new track to play over the scene instead.

I had previously written about how fans of a band often cling to the past and are less keen (at least initially) on new musical directions, with the example of the audience response to a DJ Shadow gig (“Artistic Stasis or Death!”). So it seems like an outrageously bold thing to ask a band to make a new song so specifically similar to a well-loved old one.

And the beauty of it is, LCD Soundsystem did it. They made a new track – “new body rhumba” – that for me is even better than DPIPIMH from 17 years earlier, and is completely perfect for this scene in the movie. You can listen to it here or just watch that scene itself (accepting that this is perhaps more of a spoiler, although not really given how loose the rules of continuity are when it comes to Dance Party Endings).

Side-note, this may just seem weird and boring without the context of the film leading up to it, or even with it since everything is subjective. But anyway, enjoy!

  • Transmission ends
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Things February 2024: Naming, AI, Sarcastic songs

Aspirational Naming

Philosophy is a battle against bewitchment of our intelligence by language

Wittgenstein

Language is a strange thing. There are words with multiple meanings, in some cases even words with opposite meanings to themselves: contronyms, such as sanction, oversight, dust. Despite this we are generally pretty good at figuring out the meaning of even these words by context.

It becomes trickier when words have close but distinct meanings. Names in particular have power, and sometimes a name can exploit ‘adjacent’ meanings of a word, or bake in an assumption. Here’s some examples I’ve collected over the years.

Social Media. John B highlighted this to me back in 2008. As Web 2.0 was becoming a thing and the mainstream started to find ways to be social online, ‘social media’ became the term of choice. This baked in the assumption that social content could function as a new ‘media’ in the sense that it was a kind of content that you could put adverts in, like TV or newspapers. It took quite a few years to make that work financially, but that is exactly what happened. I do think it’s unlikely it would have gone a different way if we had called it something else – but sometimes I wonder.

Influencers. In a similar way, as the power-law curve kicked in for social media, some people became a lot more visible than others. That meant they could be used to sell stuff in a different way! By terming them ‘influencers’, the message is that the main thing they do is influence their viewers/readers – most probably to buy products that they just happen to mention. But is this really the best way to think about them?

Web 3. Somehow in all the hype and froth of the crypto frenzy, the idea was fomented that this represented a paradigm shift similar to Web 2.0, and the end result would be a collection of services and algorithms we should call Web 3. But the parallels are strange – in particular blockchain technology, while clever in many ways, does not naturally have the kind of scaling properties we would want for anything that looks like the web as we know it. What’s fun here is that the number ‘3’ has now been effectively reserved, so assuming blockchain doesn’t live up to the name ‘web 3’, the next big internet thing will have to find another way to go – my money is on ‘Internet 3.1’.

Crypto Winter. Speaking of blockchain, this is perhaps the most obvious example of a name with an assumption baked in. The metaphor of seasons is completely assumed: a winter will naturally be followed by a spring, and eventually a summer just as glorious as the last. But that’s not how it always goes – sometimes things just die! A more apt framing here is probably the ‘trough of disillusionment’ from the Gartner hype cycle – but that’s certainly less catchy. (Side-note, the value of bitcoin itself is having a bit of a ‘spring’ right now, but I’m less sure about the wider blockchain paradigm).

Fan Service. Moving out of tech, in manga/anime and now beyond, the term “fan service” arose to describe… let’s say moments in which the sexual gaze of the (usually presumed hetro male) reader/viewer is titillated by a particular choice of camera angle or staging of action. I suspect this term generally spread half-ironically, but the way it bakes in an assumption of who a fan is and what they want is not ideal, and can reinforce the implied gatekeeping of communities discussing this sort of content.

(There’s another meaning which is just ‘give the fans what they want’ in the sense of “see the cool super-powered person use their powers to the max!!”, which is a bit less problematic)

Statistical Significance. In statistics the term ‘significance’ has a very specific meaning; it tends to mean that the results of some sort of test ‘signify’ that two test populations are different in some way. But in everyday language, if we describe a difference or change as ‘significant’, we usually mean that it is large! Two things that have a ‘statistically significant difference’ may not be very different at all, or different in a way that is very unimportant, but the term’s connotations say otherwise. I think it may even be plausible that this ‘bug’ was viewed as a feature by the founders of these sorts of statistics, as it turns out they were a bunch of eugenics enthusiasts very keen to find ways to show that one group of people is different to another, as this long article quite fascinatingly lays out.

Smart Anything. Emergently, describing an object as ‘smart’ now means that it is connected to the internet. That isn’t always going to be a good idea, but the connotations of ‘smart’ suggest that it is.

Artificial Intelligence. The temptation with computers or even simple algorithms is to think of them like our own brains: taking some input, evaluating it, and taking an action as a result. We consider ourselves intelligent (arguably homo sapiens could also be on this list as a biased name), so it feels natural to describe a process that looks like this as some kind of intelligence. But like the two meanings of ‘significance’, intelligence can span a spectrum of behaviour (from low intelligence to high intelligence), but if we describe someone as ‘intelligent’ we mean they are at the higher end. So while it is arguably fair to describe even fairly simple algorithms as some form of ‘intelligence’, the term AI has the connotation of high intelligence. Great for anyone who wants to impress people – perhaps to gain funding – about some sort of tech endeavour. More on that later.

Natural Gas. Moving outside of digital technology, describing methane as ‘natural gas’ is a great piece of propaganda. It exploits the fact that ‘natural’ has positive connotations, while technically also being anything that occurs in nature – which includes a lot of things that aren’t nice at all. Looking it up, it does not seem as if the term was coined for this reason, but those connotations have more recently been leveraged to encourage use of gas instead of renewable energy.

This is all very well, but can I come up with better names for these things? Honestly, probably not. But here’s my suggestions anyway:

  • Social Media -> Digital socialisation
  • Influencers -> Social hubs
  • Web 3 -> On-chain paradigm
  • Crypto Winter -> Crypto disillusionment
  • Fan Service -> Titillation
  • Statistical Significance -> Statistically Signified
  • Smart anything -> Online anything
  • Natural gas -> Methane gas (technically there are impurities so it isn’t just methane, but you get the idea)

Turning Test reductio ad absurdam

In pondering an approach to the question of whether machines could ‘think’, Turing proposed a test that eventually took his name: can a machine convince a human interacting with it through text that it is actually human?

Some extrapolate this rather too far and conclude that if a machine can do this, it proves that it can “think” or is “intelligent” (in the colloquial sense). Existential comics deploys a beautiful reductio ad absurdam to this argument that you should definitely read in full here.

(I tweeted this a long time ago but it’s well worth re-visiting, especially in the age of generative AI!)

Generative AI

As I’m certain Things readers will have noticed, AI became the new hot thing after crypto.

The ability to generate surprisingly plausible images from a text prompt surprised a lot of people, and the advances in that tech since have also been rapid and impressive. At first it was easy to laugh at how the ‘machine’ struggled to understand how hands worked or render scenes with multiple people in them convincingly, and then very quickly that became a solved problem (for the better models, anyway).

Just as that was happening, Large Language Models took hold, through ChatGPT in the most mainstream case. John B (him again, 15 years later!) pointed me at this purported ‘leaked Google memo’ on the topic which concludes with an excellent timeline of events describing how this came about.

This brought the ambiguity of ‘Intelligence’ and the Turing Test quite suddenly to the fore. LLMs solve some of the obvious weaknesses of previous language-generating-algorithms in that they can hold a pretty convincing thread of conversation. With a few guidance prompts and a less obviously superhuman typing speed, it could very likely pass the Turing Test in many cases. But it is a big mistake to consider it ‘intelligent’ or to actually be ‘thinking’.

First there are what is called ‘hallucinations’. (Note again the bias of the word – the most common use of the term is something that humans experience, tacitly encouraging us to think of an LLM as a mind). These are cases where the output says something completely fictional. I asked ChatGPT to list the solstices and equinoxes of all the planets in the solar system, and while it did a beautiful job of laying out the answers (much better than a Google search), it got quite a few of the answers completely wrong. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the most egregious examples of this can be fixed, but this problem will run deep because ultimately there is no algorithm for truth. It doesn’t necessarily show something isn’t ‘thinking’, but it can very quickly undermine an impression of high intelligence.

Second and more significantly there is no actual reasoning. It’s just a language model! It’s just producing words that look plausible in context! The fact it can give smart answers to some difficult questions does not mean any thinking is taking place. This can be tested by proposing simple riddles. My colleague Ben H challenged ChatGPT to figure out how someone could reach an object given some restrictions and a few objects to use (including a pencil and chair), and got a response of a sequence of steps that included “straighten the pencil by placing it between two sturdy objects such as the legs of the chair and gently pushing down on the middle of the pencil until it is straight”. There are layers of problems there: pencils are straight; you only need one sturdy object to straighten something; if you did need two they would presumably be close together in a way that chair legs are not.

It has taken me so long to finish this issue of Things that it feels like the generative AI hype has settled into a – perhaps shallow – trough of disillusionment, and generally the above concerns are I think widely recognised. The use-case of someone already being adequate at writing code and using ChatGPT to help you seems pretty strong.

Generative AI + Metcalfe’s law = massively expanded collaboration

In terms of interesting new paradigms that are unlocked, this is quite frivolous but may be a sign: the Mona Lisa AI Cinematic Universe.

First, an emergent format in the ChatGPT Reddit is to generate an image with a prompt and generate more in sequence incrementing something each time (e.g. A cool dude who gets cooler each time, a marshmallow that gets angrier each time).

Then people subvert that format by deviating from the stated rubric to give a twist ending of some sort. Someone did “Average day in France“, so the increment is time – but the man ends up stealing the Mona Lisa. People then started expanding on that story with a day in the life of different nations, and the whole thing spiralled out – see the diagram above.

What I think is interesting here is you have a collaborative silly comic, but many more people than usual can contribute much faster, because anyone can write a prompt. It’s not a terribly amazing new emergent art form, at least not yet, but it’s something I think is categorically new!

Recommended Media

Video Games: Superliminal

Superliminal has a bit of a tough time because the closest reference game is Portal: a fairly short, linear, mind-boggling puzzle experience with a cute narrative framing. But Portal was a ludicrously good game, setting the bar very high. Superliminal unsurprisingly can’t reach that bar, and felt to me like it took a little while to find its feet, but it gets close enough that I think it’s well worth the time.

It takes perhaps just 3 hours to playthrough, which I found to be ideal. I recommend diving into it knowing nothing else, but if you need more convincing you can watch this trailer that lets you know what kind of approach it takes to puzzles.

Video Games: Tangle Tower

I much prefer media that is outstanding in a few areas with a few flaws to anything that is uniformly good (but not great). I also love to see innovation in what a video game can be. This is exactly what I found in Tangle Tower.

Superficially the game most closely resembles a point-and-click adventure, but with a locked-room murder mystery framing. The ‘real’ game, though, is finding various clues, and talking to the nine suspects. You can talk to any suspect about any clue or any other suspect. That possibility space multiplies pretty quickly, and this is what enables you to try to be a ‘proper’ detective: by asking the most meaningful questions out of the very wide possible range. That can still get a bit overwhelming, but there’s a nice in-game hint system if you find yourself baffled or overwhelmed at any point.

What really sets the game apart is that even though the above design makes it dialogue heavy, every line is voiced, and the writing is great and the voice acting is brilliant, and the art and animation of the characters is stylised and fantastic! This completely elevates what could easily have been a slog (I have seen a lot of bad writing in games) to something I found consistently entertaining.

The ending was a bit disappointing, but I did not mind this at all as the journey was far more important than the destination. At around 6 hours to get through, I found this another highly enjoyable and reasonably short indie game.

TV series: Star Wars – Andor (Disney+)

Although I don’t have it in writing, I’ll always let people know that I anticipated the Star Wars universe as ripe for TV series from around the release of Episode I in 1999. It’s such a rich playground for stories of all kinds. What I didn’t properly understand then was that the budgets required to pull that off were not reasonable until the last few years, when the streaming wars pushed budgets up and advances in technology pushed the cost of special effects down to actually meet in the middle.

That said, despite being a weirdly huge fan of all of the Star Wars films (aaalllll of them!!!), I didn’t understand the hype around The Mandalorian, I found The Book of Boba Fett infantile (even for the kid-focussed Star Wars universe), and Obi-Wan astonishingly non-compelling. I was about ready to give up on the whole concept until people started saying how great Andor was.

It took a few episodes to get there but those people were absolutely right. Andor does what some of the best TV series manage to do (going right back to The Wire), introducing interesting characters on all sides of a conflict and playing things out in a compelling way.

I really hope the upcoming seemingly endless stream of Star Wars TV series continue to explore new tones and themes, as my original optimism for the whole endeavour is now fully reignited.

[Update: this Things has been so long in the writing that another series came and went: Ahsoka. It was… okay.]

Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse (2023)

Back in 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse finally broke the mould in feature-length animation, introducing some brilliant stylistic innovation that has since been widely copied. I wasn’t sure how they could up the ante in a sequel, but they found a way – actually multiple ways. Anyone at all interested in animation, or superhero stories with a bit of a meta theme should seek it out:

Film: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

This is something I can only recommend if you like weird/cult 80’s films and want an amazing example of how not to tell a story and introduce a world. Stand-out features:

  • Peter Weller (Robocop) as Buckaroo, a does-it-all hero (musician, brain surgeon, scientist…), like a nicer but more violent Dr Who
  • Also stars Christopher Lloyd and Jeff Goldblum!
  • Had a budget similar to Star Wars (1977)… not all of which shows up on screen, but allows it to be a lot weirder than other bad films
  • Features a sci-fi car accelerating to break a law of physics, and came out around 5 months before Back to the Future started filming. Interesting!

If that sounds at all interesting to you then do check it out. And if you do, I highly recommend following it up with the 7th episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, ‘The Viewing’. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, this is similarly quite weird (although a lot more stylish and competently put together), but more importantly stars Peter Weller again, nearly 40 years on, in a role I enjoyed imagining as a much older Buckaroo Banzai after decades of weird adventures and a bit of time travel.

Podcast: The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome

I’ve not got much into podcasts but this one was well worth seeking out. Nicky Woolf gets quite seriously investigative into exactly what is going on with the Anomalous Health Incidents (AHI) widely termed ‘Havana Syndrome’, with interviews with a very impressive range of relevant folks.

AHI have been variously attributed to sonic or electro-magnetic weapons, or psychogenic effects triggered by the sound of particularly loud crickets. I was left with the strong impression that, quite amazingly, all of those explanations are probably true to different degrees (although it’s EM rather than sonic weaponry that looks most likely).

The documentary also features some excellent original music, and while it occasionally veers into an overhyped sense of “what a dramatic new twist to this mystery!! This overturns everything we thought we knew!!!” it’s overall as clear and thorough as you could reasonably hope for in such a complicated topic.

Check it out here. (The name is not sufficiently distinct to just say ‘find it wherever you get your podcasts’)

Book: The Vegan Baking Bible

This book was not named lightly. Karolina Tegelaar is extremely intense on the subject of vegan baking, and from what I’ve seen of it so far the book lives up to the name. I particularly enjoyed her foreword, which Clare pointed out to me, and which reads like a mission statement carved into a stone tablet – as likely to scare someone off as it is to convince them to buy the book! Here’s an abridged version of it:

I hate the low standards that are so common in vegan baking. I have hated them ever since I became a vegan over a decade ago, when I realized what people would accept and what was served as vegan. The whole point of baking is that it should be luxurious and decadent. My feeling is that anything you bake that doesn’t taste really good is pointless. Therefore, this book is not just one baking book among many. It is not just about feel-good baking, it is packed with information. It does not just want you to bake cakes, it wants you to learn a new way of baking and make the world a better place at the same time. […]

There has never been a basic book about vegan baking, but one like this couldn’t have been written before as the methods needed to succeed did not exist until now. […]

I have developed and test baked all the recipes in this book many times so that you can succeed when using them. However, as I also discovered and developed many of the methods used, it is important that you read the instructions at the beginning of the book so that you understand how they work. Particularly important is the section on the different stages of whisking aquafaba, as otherwise it is easy to overwhip the aquafaba and the sugar, which produces poor results.

Wow! That’s really how it ends too. Aquafaba is critical.

Awful abbreviated aphorisms

Language is determined by usage, and the same thing is true of sayings or aphorisms. But what I find particularly fascinating is when that usage turns a saying completely on its head. When this happens, it tells us something about human nature.

Here’s the examples I have collected so far.

Build it and they will come

People think this is a line from Field of Dreams, and it is used as a short-hand for the idea that if you make or build something great, the world will notice and appreciate it. But in the film, nobody says this – the line is actually “If you build it, he will come”, referring to the ghost of Kostner’s characters father. Still, the idea of it does sort-of happen in the movie.

I think as humans we love the idea of this meritocracy. The problem is it’s just not true. My favourite example of this is the game Among Us, which is wildly popular, but existed for 2 years before it actually got picked up among streamers and became popularised. If the saying was true, the game would have taken off much sooner.


One bad apple…

The original “one bad apple spoils the bunch” gets shortened to “one bad apple” or “a few bad apples”… and in so doing completely loses the original meaning. When an organisation is found to have a few corrupt members, those in leadership like to characterise that the problem is not pervasive. It seems unintentionally revealing that this is the phrase that they fall back on, describing the problem as limited to “a few bad apples”. By invoking this expression they inadvertently invite us to consider that the actions of the corrupt few will spread to the rest.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorn’d

From William Congreve’s 1697 play, the original phrasing is “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d”. By adopting a fragment, the quote seems to be about women specifically, and takes on a vaguely derogatory and perhaps misogynistic tone. But if we remember the quotation in full we actually have a much greater and more important truth that tells us something about the kind of toxic fandom we see today.

Great minds think alike

Many aphorisms are not so much great truths as they are short-hand for an idea. For example, “Many hands make light work” sounds good but if you want to argue the opposite you say “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. In this particular example, the aphorism and counter-aphorism are wrapped up in one when given in full, the full thing being “great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ”. Taken as a whole, it tells us that agreement does not imply rightness or wrongness. But it seems we like the idea of social proof so much that we only keep the first half.

Sarcastic songs

Last time I listed some songs where the motif of repetition implied endorsement, sometimes to weird effect. More generally, it’s easy to assume any topic sung about is an implied endorsement of whatever the lyrics are saying. This doesn’t work if a singer is being sarcastic or satirical.

Randy Newman wrote a song that was very mean about Short People (sample lyrics: “They got little cars that go beep, beep, beep; they got little voices goin’ peep, peep, peep”). The song is of course meant to be a satire about prejudice, and indeed has lyrics in the bridge running against this prejudice, but some people still took it seriously and he even received threats about it.

(People don’t notice the countervailing bridge lyrics in much the same way as they don’t notice Meat Loaf giving the exact list of things he won’t do for love: the lyrics are simply less audibly / catchily delivered)

Janelle Monae’s “Americans” swings between two very different viewpoints, which will confuse an uncautious listener, including things you wouldn’t expect her to say such as “I like my woman in the kitchen, I teach my children superstitions”. In her case, I think her general vibe makes it pretty clear these statements are not intended sincerely.

Dire Straits ‘Money for Nothing’ has some very catchy turns of phrase intended to denigrate rock stars: they get “money for nothing, and chicks for free”, and so on. Mark Knopfler has described how he was inspired by a man working in an appliance store commenting on the music videos playing on MTV on the display televisions. It seems that from Knopfler’s position these remarks were amusing since they are pithlily expressed but untrue, coming ultimately from a place of envy. However, if this is the ‘joke’ it certainly looks like an example of ‘punching down’, and I would say… that ain’t working.

  • Transmission ends
Categories
Special

Go big, go home, or – consider this – go small.

One of the ways we deal with the complexity of the world is to reduce the uncountable number of things we could do to simple binary choices. This can happen so automatically that we may not even question it, and so miss out on something better.

I like to use the framework “Go big or go home… or go small” as a reminder that there is often a third choice we could make. Depending on context, different pairs of those three options will occur to us as a binary choice. I call each these three possible pairs Burindan’s Ass, Do It Badly, and Squeeze the Lemon. If you squint at those names you could figure out what I mean but let me just lay it out.

Go home by accident: Burindan’s Ass

When I first heard of Burindan’s Ass I thought it was too extreme to be a useful thought experiment. Unable to choose between two equally good food options, the animal ends up choosing neither and dies of hunger. Then I realised that I make that very same mistake – albeit with lower stakes – alarmingly regularly!

In the most direct example, I wanted to support someone on Patreon but wasn’t sure whether to do so at the $1 tier or the $4 tier. There was so little at stake, but nonetheless I couldn’t make the decision and put it off… and then forgot about it entirely. I chose to neither go big or go small, but “went home” by mistake, and – metaphorically – starved to death like Burindan’s Ass.­

I’ve noticed that especially in a period of low energy on a weekend, one can consider doing some important thing like paying a bill or fixing something (go big), then feel a bit overwhelmed by it and consider doing something fun instead (go small), then feel guilty about doing the fun thing and do pretty much nothing instead (like checking social media or watching TV – go home).

Sometimes doing a small fun thing can give you the energy to do the bigger thing! And doing a fun thing is for sure better than just wasting time, just set a timer if you feel too guilty about it!

A variant on this is choosing between two “small” options, like the Patreon example above. When I was a teenager, an astrology book told me that I would have trouble deciding between similar things. Not believing in astrology but noticing that this was actually true, I got annoyed and resolved to change it. I made a series of rubrics for myself to get at this specific problem: “If you can’t tell the options apart, it can’t matter that much”; “If the consequences of choosing badly aren’t that bad, don’t sweat it”; “better to make a decision than no decision”. This helped in the end, and I can go back to not believing astrology without feeling like a hypocrite.

From Pictures for Sad Children, lightly censored

Don’t go home by mistake!

Going small is an option: Do It Badly

I’ve seen this phrase a few times on the internet: “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”. It sounds wrong, but there’s a truth to it, which is what I like about it. For example, exercise is worth doing – and some exercise is better than none. If you can’t find time to go to the gym / rock wall / tennis club, it’s worth doing exercise “badly”, i.e. just a short bit of yoga / running / stretching at home – rather than nothing.

Generalising, this is where we consider going big vs. going home and forget that we could actually go small, which is especially important to remember if we find ourselves leaning towards “go home”.

A classic example is when you consider replying to an email that will take a lot of headspace and time to write properly. Putting it off is an option, but is rarely ideal. We could instead consider sending at least a short reply acknowledging the email and letting them know we’ll get back to them later. We would probably appreciate that, much more than nothing, if we were on the other end! Or perhaps we at least take a few minutes to start the reply and then save a draft.

From XKCD, see also this one.

This goes for pretty much any task you might procrastinate on. Remembering the ‘go small’ version (such as breaking off a small bit of a big task) can help you make some progress rather than none. That small bit could be just taking the very first step, or work on the thing for x minutes – and if even that seems too hard to figure out, just taking the time to make a plan of approach! A plan that you may follow at a later date! Keep ‘going small’ until you find something you can manage. Some progress is infinitely better than none!

Going big is an option: Squeeze the Lemon

So this is kind of the opposite version of the above, and I think is more rarely applicable, but it’s very cool when you can spot those opportunities. Also having set out on this three-pairs framework I am obligated to complete it.

I heard the expression “Squeeze the lemon” in the brilliant writer’s commentary on the Pirates of the Caribbean (2001) DVD. In filmmaking, this denotes working out what is cool about your concept (in this case, cursed pirates who appear as skeletons in moonlight), and working out how to squeeze the most ‘juice’ out of that idea. In Pirates, this meant coming up with as many excuses as possible for them to walk into/out of moonlight, with a final battle taking place in a cave where they move in and out of moonbeams while swordfighting. ‘Squeezing the lemon’ is a nice way to think of the “go big” option.

In personal life, ‘going big’ can be hard to achieve, but it’s worth checking that you’re not compromising on something without even considering the bigger, better version. Instead of a 1-week holiday, could you perhaps do 10 days, 2 weeks, 3, 4?! What would it take to make that happen? Might it be worth it?

You could go to the cinema to see Avengers: Endgame, but what if you found a cinema showing Infinity War / Endgame as a double-bill, wouldn’t that be more of an adventure?

Yes!

You could reply to your friend’s text message, but would a call be better? (Texting first, of course). A letter?? Have you seen them face to face lately?!

Our chances to really try metaphorical lemon-squeezing may be greater at work, depending on what we do. Is a particular business venture too much of a cop-out to really succeed? Would a much bigger version be disproportionately better? Might it be worth taking longer to make the product better? I find in business the default is to scrutinise the other direction (cutting corners, going fast and breaking things, fixing it in post), and often that makes sense – just remember to sometimes look the other way.

Go big, or go home, or go small… just make sure to consider all three.

  • Transmission ends
Categories
New

Things November 2022: Spooky

This edition of things accidentally gained a spooky theme and almost came out in October! Almost.

Learning from the best vs. the worst

You can learn how to do something from a good example, or how not to do something from a bad one. Each method of learning has its advantages, and some things lend themselves much more to one than the other. You might learn good rock-climbing technique by watching an expert; you might learn film-making by seeing a bad film and noting what doesn’t work.

Games of all kinds are arguably about learning, and the same question comes up: how should a player be taught to play?

In board games one should in theory read the instructions; in practice this is wildly more difficult than it seems (a subject I will return to in depth one day). The usual approach is for someone else to demonstrate – i.e. you learn from a good example.

In video games, the default approach is trial-and-error; generally you won’t be told in advance that, say, a certain enemy fires projectiles or the best way to evade them; you’ll be expected to figure it out. While designing with this type of learning in mind can be done thoughtfully and well, it can also be punishingly slow to learn and achieve mastery. This was my experience in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, where a boss might dispatch me in 20 seconds and I then had to spend a few minutes of traversal to get back to them and have another 20 seconds to learn how to do better.

In contrast, a nice design trick in video games is to take the lead from the way people learn board games mentioned above: the player can learn the basics by seeing another character, similar to the one they control, make mistakes and suffer the consequences. The player understands the rules of the game world quickly but doesn’t feel like they’ve suffered from the mistakes themselves. Then when it comes to mastery, watching experts play – usually on streaming services or in an eSport – can be very efficient.

The distinction of learning by example vs. counter-example was brought to my attention by Charlie Stross’ framing of the two types of reality TV: those that centre on competence vs. those that are fundamentally about incompetence. When we consume stories, we again have the chance to learn from good or bad examples; incompetence-based reality TV (e.g. Love Island, Big Brother) is an example of the latter, and is the opposite of competence-based TV (e.g. The Repair Shop, Queer Eye).

When it comes to horror films (we finally arrive at the spooky point!), there’s a very natural lean towards ‘learning from incompetence’: characters in danger take inadvisable risks, split up etc. and we learn how the consequences of these decisions play out. Criticising characters for making these bad decisions misses the point of story type.

More usefully, being annoyed at those bad decisions is perhaps a sign that you have mastered the basics of “not dying”, and now you’re interested in mastery. Just like in games, you now want to find competence-based fiction instead. This is where the SCP Foundation comes in!

SCP Foundation and competence-horror

The SCP Foundation is a really fascinating work of collaborative fiction that Laurence introduced me to a couple of years ago. While the writing varies in style and quality (as you’d expect for something open and collaborative), I find it most notable for the entries that do the rare thing of combining (usually) supernatural horror with competence. Faced with an extremely dangerous threat, what would extremely competent and well-resourced people do?

To back up a bit, I’ll quickly recap the history of the SCP Foundation.

On 9th June 2007 the best Doctor Who episode of all time, ‘Blink’ was broadcast. This featured ‘weeping angels’, beings that have the appearance of statues that can’t move when observed, but if you so much as blink they can move and attack tremendously quickly.

Shortly after this, a post appeared on 4chan (link to lostmediawiki particle) pairing the image of slightly scary humanoid sculpture with a text description of what it can do – essentially the same as the weeping angels. But the really interesting part was the framing: the text was written in the form of a slightly bureaucratic set of instructions for safely ‘containing’ the entity, labeling it ‘Item SCP-173’. This immediately implied that hundreds of other things are somehow being contained by some kind of organisation, and competency is inherently part of the concept since a reasonably precise set of safety procedures are outlined. (You can read the article in its current form here).

The SCP Foundation is the logical follow-up to this intriguing idea: a collaborative wiki about the ‘Foundation’, some sort of organisation with a mission to ‘contain’ supernatural threats. Various individuals contribute different entries, each with their own SCP number.

At this point, I recommend you read a few of the shorter entries:
SCP-173, the original, as described above
SCP-055, a nice example of how some entries give more questions than answers
SCP-____-J, possibly the shortest, essentially a joke

SCP-●●|●●●●●|●●|●, entirely image based, having read the above you should have the context needed to understand most of it (and as you get deeper into the Foundation more of it makes sense).

Laurence’s recommendation was to read some of the entries tagged as cognitohazard/infohazard/memetic, and THEN look up the Antimemetics Division. A more mainstream approach would be to go straight to the top-rated articles list and work your way down, although this method of ranking has an inherent bias towards older articles.

Either of these could be a good introduction to some stuff Things-readers would enjoy, and I recommend them – but if you’re not sure and/or don’t have much time, I suggest jumping straight into ‘We need to talk about Fifty-Five’ which is a neat little introduction to how clever (and also a bit silly) these things can be.

One warning: a lot of SCP entries tip quite steeply into horror, and in particular there’s a tendency towards ‘supernaturally unending suffering’, so readers with high degrees of empathy may wish to stay away. On the other hand, if that’s exactly what you’re looking for then I suggest SCP-2718 as perhaps the best/worst of that subgenre.

Video Game: Control

Most (all?) of the SCP Foundation wiki is distributed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0), which means anyone is free to adapt and even exploit the material commercially as long as they give credit, link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

There have been a few spin-offs, but the most successful seems to be Control (available on PSN, Xbox, Switch, Steam).

While technically not a direct reference, Control is clearly very heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation. The game is set in a vast and windowless building run by the ‘Bureau of Control’ which attempts to contain dangerous supernatural things in much the same way.

A particularly neat twist is that the building itself has some strange properties, and makes fantastic use of brutalist design. When you join all these concepts together, I would describe the result as extremely my jam.

I really enjoyed the game and did essentially all the things you can do in it. If any of the above sounds cool to you I would recommend it… but there are some fairly heavy caveats!

  • Unfortunately this is one of the many video games where the majority of your time is spent killing what are essentially aggressive zombies. I don’t mind a bit of shooting, but this is not the best example of it.
  • Getting confused and lost seems to be part of the design. You are given a 2D map which is only partially useful in a 3D space.
  • Weirdly spiky difficulty is also – I think – part of the design. You never know what kind of horror awaits you, and the fact that some of them can kill you very fast helps to create a feeling of ambient dread (and makes the end-game, once you are fully powered up, all the more satisfying). But often this can create a feeling of frustration, which is weirdly much less pleasant than good-old dread.

To go back to selling the idea a bit more, I’ll give an example of how this all comes together. In this moment (below) you catch sight of a plastic flamingo, which you know almost nothing about, and it is genuinely terrifying:

Control is available on PC, Playstation, xBox, and the Switch.

Consensus or Death

After some discussion in my work’s politics Slack channel, I came up with the following thought experiment:

Aliens arrive on earth and announce a challenge. After some time to prepare, all humans will be asked to vote either red or blue. If more than 62% vote for the same thing (regardless of which one it is), humanity will survive; if it’s any less, humanity will be destroyed. Can we manage it?

You can immediately see what I’m getting at: considering the partisan debates on elections, referenda, or climate change, could humanity come to even moderate agreement if you stripped out the issue being debated entirely?

To answer that question I wrote a short story about it: Consensus or Death (reading time ~15 minutes). You may be able to tell that the style is influenced by the SCP Foundation!

(Also in the dry-article-style sci-fi genre, I highly recommend Lena by qntm, which takes the form of an article about the history of the first mind upload).

Spooky unrecommendations and recommendations

I usually like to stay on the positive, but after some disappointing spooky TV experiences I figured I should at least share these with Things readers as a warning.

Dark

So Dark is a German TV series that is very difficult to describe without spoilers. The marketing material shows serious-looking characters looking small in large spooky environments with some sort of kaleidoscope effect. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is an effective graphic shorthand for what the series is: a bit spooky and mysterious, with elements of horror and possibly some sort of sci-fi/genre business going on.

As the series gradually (very gradually) unfolds its mysteries, it becomes clear that it is tackling a fascinating setup that is very rarely attempted in fiction. That is worthy of respect and is the reason I kept watching.

Unfortunately, in trying to carefully work through its central concept, many aspects of good storytelling are sacrificed. Characters don’t ask questions when they should, take advice that they wouldn’t, and generally all behave like weird automata. The tone is resolutely bleak. The complexity ratchets up very rapidly.

A big part of ‘mystery TV’ is how satisfyingly things are tied up by the end. To get a view on that without spoilers I like to check RatingGraph to see the IMDb ratings of each episode. There’s self-selection at work but it can at least tell you if the kind of person who perseveres to the end is happy with it, and the answer appears to be yes:

Well, unfortunately this did not hold true for me. My suspicion is that as a Things-reader you likely value consistency and cleverness; in my opinion Dark doesn’t manage either of those by the end, and as such was disappointing.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

A modern, darker update of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, CAOS had a lot of promise. In particular it has some fun world-building with various magic rules that at least kind-of make sense, and it sets out a general ‘witches vs patriarchy’ theme which is very appealing.

I was particularly interested in the ambiguity of the protagonist: is Sabrina good or evil? Chaotic neutral perhaps? Are we supposed to start out rooting for her and then realise we were wrong to do so? Will she gradually become the antagonist instead of the protagonist? Unfortunately it seems the series isn’t interested in those questions at all. That’s about all I can say without spoilers.

Once again Rating Graph was a useful guide here, and unfortunately I checked it when only 3 seasons of data were available; you can now see that the final ending was (in contrast to Dark) widely seen as a disappointment.

Oxenfree (video game)

Oxenfree is a short spooky point-and-click adventure where the primary innovation is the conversation system. The gambit is that at various points you are given a few choices of what to say – as in the above screenshot – but (unlike other games) conversations continue to proceed naturally, so you have to choose when to interrupt to get your remark in, or miss the moment so you don’t say anything!

This is the primary way you make choices in the game and is quite effective.

It does have the classic problem in dialogue selection: to make the choice manageable, the options are terse summaries of what the character will say – particularly important here because you need to read and comprehend your choices while simultaneously listening to the ongoing conversation. Unfortunately, sometimes the full version of your remark will add a slant or tone that is really not what you intended, which can make the choice feel a bit unfair.

A tiny example: Jonas suggests splitting up, and you have the option to say ‘Let’s keep together’. But if you choose that, your character actually says ‘C’mon, Jonas, this is… let’s just all go up. I don’t wanna send Ren away like a… deer hound.’ Which is a bit snippier than I expected.

(Side note, I found Horizon Zero Dawn really excellent in this regard, where each terse choice unfolded to a really great full-length expression preserving the tone).

Here’s ProZD illustrating the point in 6 seconds (with NSFW language):

So anyway, the down-side of Oxenfree is that it’s mostly about some teenagers who are a bit silly and grumpy with each other, but the up-side is that it has some really well-realised spooks and some excellent ‘genre business’ (I’m avoiding spoilers) going on. As I tweeted after first finishing it, one moment of the game was so creepy that I felt physically nauseous – which I found really awesome!

So if you’re interested in narrative video games and/or spooks and/or ‘genre business’ then I highly recommend it, especially as it’s relatively short at around ~5 hours. (A sequel is due in 2023).

Oxenfree is available on Steam, Switch (how I played it), PS4, Xbox One, iOS and Android (as part of Netflix subscription)

Marvel Snap

Okay, this isn’t really spooky, but it’s worth noting. I work in mobile games, so I think I can authoritatively say that Marvel Snap (iOS, Android) the first game in a long time to do something really new, interesting, and widely appealing. (I guess the last one was Pokemon Go).

It takes the genre of a tactical card game (like Magic or Hearthstone), but radically distills it down so a match only takes 2-3 minutes. It’s like a simplified version of the card game Smash Up, and is similar in the way it can be a bit strategic but also chaotic and delightful. Notably it adds a very light ‘raise the stakes’ mechanic (the ‘Snap’ of the title) that gives you some strategic control over the randomness.

Now the game is free, and makes money from in-app-purchases, but if you’re not a fan of how those games tend to go I should point out that this is one of the least aggressively monetised high-quality games out there, with money primarily being used purely for aesthetics. So if any of the above sounds appealing, give it a go! (iOS, Android)

[Edit: a subsequent update added the ability to buy specific cards you don’t own from a rotating shop, with a currency that you earn very slowly, while offering an expensive bundle that gives you that currency. While I do think the game deserves more money than it was asking for before, and this tactic will almost certainly better ensure it’s longevity, I can no longer describe it as being one of the ‘least aggressively monetised’ games. You can absolutely have a huge amount of fun without spending though. – T.M. 16/12/22]

Music Video Video Mysteries

My current music discovery/collection method is as follows:

  1. Listen to the world’s-best-radio-station, Fip
  2. Shazam any interesting tracks to identify them
  3. Later, look those tracks up on Youtube
  4. If I still like the song, I add it to a playlist for that year

(If you’re interested you can check out my playlists from 2019, 2020, 2021)

During the Youtube review stage I’m usually not paying much attention to the video, but occasionally it will suck me in, and my very favourite videos produce a profound sense of mystery that feels like there is something going on here and I don’t know what it is.

So, here are my top 3 of those. I highly recommend watching the video before reading the explanation so you get the authentic “what is going on?” experience. To that end, I’ll post all three videos first and the explanations after, and also note that this is the last Thing so you can drop out here if you need to make time for video watching.

(Side note, I recommend using the Youtube ‘watch it later’ button that looks like a little clock as a shortcut to making a playlist for exactly that purpose).

ALA.NI – Le Diplomate, video by Ira Rokka

Noga Erez – You So Done, video by Indy Hait

Jamie xx – Gosh, video by Romain Gavras

Music Video Explanations

Watching Le Diplomate I experienced surprise in three parts: there’s something weird going on with this diplomat character, we have Iggy Pop speaking French, and finally there’s some satire/political commentary and I’m curious about where it’s coming from. Conveniently, all of these questions are answered in this interview with ALA.NI.

You So Done similarly has some layers to it: I was first impressed by the strange musical aesthetic (which Ellie informed me is very similar to Billie Eilish, particularly Bad Guy, which I had somehow never heard before); then the strange not-quite-violence of the video, and the only-slightly-indirect lyrics speak to some core emotional truth behind the whole thing. Once again, the artist herself directly answers these implied questions.

Jamie xx’s Gosh is a little different, in that there isn’t a mysterious lyric component, but the visuals are a whole other thing: what are we seeing? Is it real? Where is it? How did it come about? It seems like it means something… but what? Happily, once again, almost all of these questions are answered in an article here.

–Transmission spookily cuts to static