Tag: animation

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Things 2025 Q1: Muji music, Russian disinformation, Reincarnation

Exercise for the reader, part 1

I found this very simple two-part thought exercise incredibly powerful. It’s more effective to separate the parts out, so I’ll post the first here and the second at the end, along with the source.

In your next life you can choose to be reborn as anyone, with any job, anywhere and any time – what do you choose?

I recommend giving this some thought! Feel free to think of a silly answer and a serious one, or just as many as come to mind.

Unused Muji soundtrack

In 1983 for the opening of their first store in Tokyo, Muji commissioned Japanese music legend Haruomi Hosono to create a soundtrack. As Jen Monro sums up in this excellent overview, the tracks he produced are “not as neutral, or even chipper, as one might expect for storefront use: they willfully stray into eerie, dissociative territory, suggesting hypnosis and foggy, dreamlike states.”

That’s great, but the cherry on the top is that a Youtube upload of these tracks has inspired a pattern of upvoted comments in which people provide whimsical descriptions of what the music (specifically the first track, I suspect) sounds like to them. Samples below, best read while listening to it:

“can only assume this is what it feels like to be a fungus”

fadesblue

“This is the music that plays when you get to the end of youtube.”

Carcosahead

“this is the music that plays as the credits roll on the movie of your entire life, the theater is dark and empty except for you and you know you’re going to have to get up and leave soon and you’re okay with that but you want to sit and watch all those familiar names scroll past for just a little longer.”

midnightcthulhu5551

Use-cases for text-based AI

I remember back when Wolfram Alpha was released in 2009, I tried to figure out how to fit it into my mental model of online tools. For example, as well as conveniently solving some maths problems, you can also just ask it “How old was Mark Hamill when Star Wars came out” rather than go to IMDb/Wikipedia and do some maths yourself. Well, I didn’t manage to adapt to it very well and hardly ever remember to use it in practice.

Now we have a dramatic increase in capability with AI tools of many different kinds, and once again we need to work out how best to use these new tools. (There’s also a huge rabbit-hole of data-source ethics and workforce implications which I am putting to one side for now; if you want a blog that gets more into AI stuff John B recommended Interconnected, so try that!). I feel like I’m being quite slow at picking this up, so I thought I’d share my pretty basic use-cases and ask you, the Things readers – what do you use AI for? Let’s just focus on text for now.

Examples:

  • Answering vague queries, like “what was that film from the 80’s where there was a portal and weird monsters came out of it”
  • Summarising long text (although I’ve found the compromises in accurate insight too great to rely on this)
  • Generating a terse summary of leads on a research topic that you can then follow up via more reliable means (e.g. what are some considerations for building an interstellar spaceship)
  • Code (taught to me by Beinn): Use Windsurf to get some quick game prototypes up and running – in practice I am still so far out of my depth on this that even incredibly helpful AI can’t really help me make what I want!
  • Weirdly, technical help (e.g. I was struggling to find a certain system option on my Macbook, and even Google’s AI had the solution better covered than regular Google search which surfaced irrelevant answers for different make/model/OSes)

Examples I know of others using that I can’t quite get my head around:

  • Using AI to coach you on challenging conversations
  • Giving AI several complicated documents (e.g. small print of different insurance options) and asking it to make a decision for you that relies on understanding the full contents of the documents

So, how do you use text AI?

Animated film sequels: getting worse, doing better

I remember the old rule-of-thumb for sequels was that they would make about 2/3 the box office of the original. This might have been a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as studios might invest less in the sequel given how reliable that revenue could be regardless.

In recent times, with franchises making so much money, some of that calculus has changed, and my sense is the success of a sequel is much less predictable.

Most notably though I realised animated sequels seemed to almost always make more money than the original. To test out that hunch, I charted the difference in global box office for each of the top grossing animations with sequels, and put it against the difference in IMDb rating. The results are pretty dramatic:

Sure enough, every animated sequel made more money than the original – and with exception of wild outlier Ne Zha and also Spiderverse, was also worse based on IMDb ratings!

It feels like animated films in particular are being chosen by parents who have a strong desire to find something reliably entertaining for their children. The fact a film got a sequel is an endorsement (Ian’s suggestion), and I think children can also show a very strong interest in the orginal in home media, and that gives parents more confidence to take them to the cinema for the sequel. These effects may even artificially reduce box office of animated originals!

The largely consistent decline in IMDb rating of sequels could be covered by the effects I wrote about in Paradoxic Fandom.

Russian Disinformation

I read a long time ago that Russia had state-funded ‘troll farms’ generating content on social media with the intent to manipulate the Western audience towards their own ends. Having worked in marketing, I was doubtful about how effective this could be as I knew how hard it is to shift anyone’s opinion.

But first, a weird tangent before we go on:

  • Web analytics tools will frequently use extra text in a link in order to report information about it, for example adding something like “source=potatoes” to indicate a link came from this blog
  • By default this data is not sanitised, so you can manually edit the text of a URL (for example change ‘potatoes’ to ‘hello-world’), and when you then follow that URL, you can pass through a fake campaign name which an analyst may then see. For example, when I worked at Skype and looked at the web site visitors by source, I saw 1(one) visit from a campaign called “i-hate-bill-gates”!
  • On my own websites, I would routinely see clicks from these manually-faked campaigns where the text they have added is for some kind of website they want me to purchase things from – it’s a spam vector!
  • This problem got so bad I even started to see spam links selling the ability to stop this from happening (meta-spam!)
  • … but to return to the original point, in 2016 I got a wave of these fake campaigns all saying words to the effect of ‘elect Trump’
  • The fact someone somewhere was doing that to such an extent that even my tiny websites were caught up in it tends to make me believe a larger operation was at work, but of course I can’t infer who.

End tangent

The idea that Russia’s online efforts might actually be effective gains credibility for me when I recall two things:

  • Social media has a strong pareto effect: a very small number of people account for a very large number of posts.
  • We often form our ideas about what is happening not by careful consideration of credible sources, but by what we tend to see evidence of repeatedly (e.g. a newspaper repeatedly reporting on a particular type of crime makes people think it’s a big deal, rather than a careful consideration of crime statistics)

If you then combine that with social media’s built-in tendency of pushing inflammatory content (because algorithms prioritise engagement and this is one of the easiest ways to get it), it suddenly becomes much more credible to me that this sort of campaign could help drive the kind of increasing polarisation we’ve seen in the West.

Despite all of that, it still felt a little bit like a conspiracy-theory to me, which is why this Reddit post is very helpful to substantiate the idea – it gives a long sequence of examples and credible citations for each, making the primary contention, “You’re being targeted by disinformation networks”, very credible:

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.
byu/walkandtalkk inGenZ

Even having read that, I think it’s still easy to forget. For example, I saw a Reddit post by someone saying they worked for the US Government and will soon be fired; their Republican-voting parents’ response was that “there are plenty of jobs at McDonalds”. How heartless! Their own child!! These Republicans!!!

Now, it remains possible that this is a true story (actually because of this very problem), but it does also seem like exactly the kind of thing you might fabricate if you wanted to further polarise things.

At minimum we should remember that this sort of content is anecdotal evidence of behaviour at best, so should be considered relatively low in terms of how much it shapes your opinion on what is really going on.

(Of course, this is just one aspect of Russia’s grey-zone aggression, this Observer summary of interference in democracy in Moldova is quite salutary and has this excellent quote:”Moscow wants to show that it can use all measures short of outright invasion to keep nations it sees in its “zone of influence” chronically destabilised.”)

An ethical interaction with Sugar Gliders

I found this promotional flyer for ‘Cuddly Colony’ in Brighton. I just really love the way they promote this thing – looking at cute animals in a very serious and carefully considered way:

Do note that it’s about £45 for this ethical interaction and I can’t vouch for it personally.

Exercise for the reader, part 2

As a reminder, part 1 was as follows:

In your next life you can choose to be reborn as anyone, with any job, anywhere and any time – what do you choose?

Do you have something in mind? If not, just think of something now! The first thing that pops in to your mind may well be springing from your subconscious!

With that fresh in your mind, here is the second part:

Given you desire that alternative life on some level, and that reincarnation is not real*, what could you do in your own life to get some way towards that desire?

For example, if you imagined being a cowboy, could you at least go horse-riding? If you wanted to be an astronaut, perhaps you could get a telescope? If you want to be an author, could you just write a short story?

The world is so full of incredible possibility (as a random example, you could go to Asda and buy an item for each letter of the alphabet), that it can be very hard to work out what to do, especially over the long run. I found this exercise extremely helpful.

I encountered it in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book that Clare got me and I found very inspirational. It is based on Cameron’s long-running workshops to help people be more creative, and to overcome creative block (or really anything that acts as a block to creativity). Like Alcoholics Anonymous, it is a 12-step program, and also like AA weirdly involves God – but Cameron helpfully outlines how the process can be made useful even for an atheist. For example, she might say it’s helpful to have as a mantra “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality”, but instead of God/Creator you can just make it a general trust in the process, or a faith in your subconscious, and the effect is much the same.

I highly recommend the whole book, to everyone, but if you were to just take 3 things from it, one is the above exercise, and the other are these two simple habits that facilitate the creative process:

  1. Morning Pages
    Each morning, write three sides of hand-written text. There is no goal of what to write about, and you should not re-read it or share it afterwards. You just write and see what comes out. My experience is this kind of cleans out your preoccupations that cloud your mind, often turning them into concrete actions for a to do list, and this then leaves space for more creative thoughts. (In practice I only make time for this 2 times a week, but it is still useful!)
  2. The ‘Artist’s Date’
    Cameron’s mental model is that you have an ‘inner artist’ which is very childlike and needs pampering before it can create. To do this, you should take your inner artist (i.e. yourself) on a ‘date’: 2 hours each week doing something nice – something that appeals to you intuitively, something that do on your own, that can be inspirational, or just expose you to new things, to distract you just enough that ideas can come to you naturally. This could be watching a film, going for a walk where you haven’t been before, going to an art gallery – or (I think) a lot of things you might do while listening to a podcast, just without the podcast so you are free to think. This better enables the inner artist / subconscious to create moments of inspiration.


So, when being reincarnated, what do I want to do? A lot of things, but notably I really want to write stories and make weird games. I do already do a little bit of both, but I should do more!

*Reincarnation without memory is indistinguishable from no reincarnation in the life we lead today. Reasons to doubt reincarnation in general are left as an exercise for the reader.

  • Transmission ends
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Things February 2018: YouTube series, Poor estimation, The Patriarchy

The patriarchal explanation

The Octonauts is a charming kids TV series, based on the picture books of the same name (referenced in the Things Kids Special in 2013). It features eight anthropomorphised animals on a Star-Trek-style mission to explore the ocean and encounter the Interesting Sea Creature of the Week.

I noticed that the same three (male) characters go on exploratory missions almost every episode, even when other (female) characters would be better qualified for the task at hand, which seemed odd for an otherwise progressive kids TV series. Looking for people who agreed with me on the internet, as you do, I stumbled upon this excellent mumsnet exchange:

Bumperlicious:  Why are the girls relegated to mere sidekicks & not even mentioned in the opening titles? Is because they’re girls or because they’re both [foreign]?

TunipTheHollowVegemalLantern:  It is because of the patriarchy.

This turns out to be a highly versatile response which you can use to answer many questions about modern culture! It also has the benefit of sounding like a joke, while also frequently being accurate.

YouTube series of note

The Vox ‘Earworm‘ series by Estelle Caswell digs into various aspects of music, including a few really interesting pieces on long-term musical trends in the US pop charts. I particularly enjoyed the episodes on the triplet flow in rap, the fade-out, and especially repetition:

The ‘Fictional Fight Commentary‘ series does exactly what you hope: pitch-perfect delivery from Auralnauts creators Craven and Zak commenting on various famous fight scenes from movies. My personal favourite is the Revenge of the Sith Anakin/Obi-wan fight, but the Batman vs. Superman one is also great.

(Incidentally, Auralnauts had the dubious honour of having a video in which they removed the original music track get flagged as copyright infringing – for using the music track they removed, by the copyright holders of the song that was no longer present. Also incidentally, they made the generic film trailer I put in the last Things).

Every Frame A Painting was an incredible series of videos about movies and I’m amazed I haven’t featured it in Things before. It’s narrated by Tony Zhou, jointly written and edited with Taylor Ramos – although this latter part was only revealed in the post-mortem, the reasons explained in more detail by Taylor herself here, but more tersely one can say It Is Because Of The Patriarchy.

Aiming for quality over quantity, all 28 EFAP videos are brilliant, but as you have to start somewhere, I particularly recommend Jackie Chan – How to Do Action Comedy, The Spielberg Oner, and The Marvel Symphonic Universe.

Terrorism using the media as a megaphone

As I understand it, the aim of a regular terrorist is to create terror disproportionate to the amount of power they actually have. So perhaps the media response to these incidents should be a little more tempered, since that attention is exactly how terrorists gain a disproportionate response. I’m not sure there’s any good way to balance that though, especially with social media doing much of the amplification.

Still, I found it interesting that this quite wide-ranging study found a correlation between media coverage and subsequent violent incidents.

 “one additional New York Times article about an attack in a particular country increased the number of ensuing attacks in the same country by between 11% and 15%”

Poor estimation as a feature, not a bug

When doing indoor rock-climbing, or during my brief dalliance with extremely amateur parkour, I noticed that I and others tend to underestimate what we can physically achieve. We could jump further than we thought; we could stretch to reach a hand-hold that seemed too far; we could gain greater lift by running and kicking off a wall than we expected, and so on.

Now, I know that “evolutionary psychology” theories are usually untestable and often useless, simply servicing to reinforce one’s existing prejudices. Still, it’s easy to imagine that this physical capability bias (which I haven’t found named, but presumably must be) would work as a survival trait: creatures that overestimated their ability to achieve physical feats would presumably be at a mortal disadvantage in the long run.

This led me to wonder about another tremendously strong bias we have that runs the other way: the Planning Fallacy, best summed up by Hofstadter’s Law:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. — Douglas Hofstadter

Superficially this bias seems like it should be a disadvantage. However, since many humans can benefit from one human’s work, perhaps we collectively benefit, as people work on things (and eventually, sometimes, complete them) that they wouldn’t have tried if they had correctly anticipated how long it would take, to society’s benefit.

It’s a trivial example, but I naively thought I could tell a particular story in a comic at one page a week in two years; it ended up taking more like seven. I probably wouldn’t have started it if I had realised that, but I’m glad that I did it, and now people – or at least, fans of two particular video games from 1999 – benefit from it.

Bitcoin

When I first read about Bitcoin, I figured it was a cute idea but it didn’t scale, so couldn’t really work as an alternative global currency. Some of the scaling issues are now becoming apparent. As is so often the case, Charlie Stross has an insightful take on the matter.

Unendurable Line

I found this video quite satisfying:

https://vimeo.com/231498722

Marie Kondo

In an age of abundance, we now routinely run into the problem of having too many things, and things like loss aversion make it difficult for us to deal with the issue. This scene from Labyrinth (1986) makes a lot more sense to me now than it did as a child:

Clare introduced me to a comic that summarised the ‘KonMari’ method (by Marie Kondo) of dealing with clutter. It isn’t really one method so much as a series of ideas and principles to apply to the task of decluttering. I think it’s particularly effective because it intuitively gets at some of the biases that make this a difficult problem. Here’s a few choice principles:

  • Don’t sort things by location, sort by type. Get all your (say) books in one place, then figure out what to do with them.
  • Don’t think about ‘what can I throw out’. Think about ‘what should I keep’. Only keep things that ‘spark joy’.
  • Don’t buy more storage units. This is sort-of tidying up, but isn’t decluttering. It’s just a way of getting the clutter out of your sight.
  • The correct time to read a book is when it’s you just acquired it. If you have many books you have not read for years, let them go. When it’s time to read one, you can easily get it again.

Most deeply, Marie Kondo observes that a lot of useless clutter takes us out of the present moment: we over-attach to the past with belongings that are no longer useful to us, and we over-attach to a theoretical future version of ourselves by keeping things we aspire to use but never will.

This echoes a message from the amazing show The Encounter (recommended to me by Tarim), in which a climactic insight is that “objects hold us stuck in time”.

There’s a KonMari method book or alternatively a comic version.

[This just in, thanks to Anisa – there’s going to be a Marie Kondo Netflix series – T.M. 15/2/18]

Emergent Stop Motion

Like a more accessible version of Thomas Sauvin / Lei Lei’s short film Recycled, Oliver KMIA’s ‘Instravel’ compiles recurring patterns in Instagram holiday photos to create stop-motion-style animation:

https://vimeo.com/253334732

– Transmission finally ends

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Things December 2015: Star Wars Special

As you may recall from Things 43, I’m a bit of a Star Wars fan.

So in terms of Things I found interesting in December, there was really only one. If you hate Star Wars I’ve got one other Thing for you below, a bit more music, and then it’s wall-to-wall Space Opera. I’ll save spoilery stuff until the very end and give fair warning.

Meine Schmusedecke / Patchwork Pals

At the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2010 (which I wrote about in this Things special), one of my favourite short animations was Lebensader by Angela Steffen. Last year at the DOK Leipzig film festival I was pleased to recognise her hand in a series of very short children’s animations about the adventures of some animals on a patchwork quilt.

There is an English dub, but I most enjoy the original German – I don’t know the language, but that’s what I like about it: the context and certain similar-sounding words make it a lot of fun to guess what’s going on. It’s about 3 minutes, and you should at least stick with it until the fox shows up:

Things Updates: Music and Dialogue

In Things November 2015 I quoted Dennett’s recommended method of dialogue, which involved carefully identifying areas of agreement, disagreement, and accurately re-stating your opponents position before attempting to debate it. Tarim wonders if this is inspired by “Buberian Dialogue” (pdf link):

The emergence technique proposed herein is sometimes called “Buberian dialogue.” The technique calls for two discussants, a moderator and an audience. The discussants each say their initial piece. It is the role of the audience to listen for what the two discussants have said or implied which might be in common. The audience is called upon to inform the discussants of these commonalities (which the moderator captures on a white board) and then for the discussion to turn to the revealed items. This occurs through three or more rounds. The aim is for a transformational experience. There is no effort to reach consensus or conclusion. Rather, the goal is for a transformation to take place in how the discussants view each other in the context of the debate. If a more human based respect emerges, the technique is successful.

Just imagine a political debate taking place through this form!

Tarim also adds his nominations for notable musical reworks (which began in Things with covers, reworking in general, and other examples from Things readers), while noting that unfortunately most of his favourite covers are those he heard live:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfvIMTlM4sY

(also)

Frank Zappa’s takes on Bolero and Stairway to Heaven:

And finally Far-Cue, a “3 piece punk band who do notable versions of: Mike Batt’s Remember You’re a Womble, Motorhead’s Ace of Spaces and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.” Youtube videos exist, but “they just don’t capture the essence of Far-Cue” – which I can well imagine!

So what is this ‘Star Wars’ thing anyway

I grew up with Star Wars, and it’s now so much part of the cultural furniture that it’s quite hard to see what it really is.

Strip away what you already know, and think about how odd it is to launch a franchise with ‘Episode IV’. So odd that Fox didn’t allow it, and it was just ‘Star Wars’ until George was allowed to change it for the 1981 re-release (and of course he’s continued to change the films whenever he has the chance). This is just the most telling sign of what Lucas was trying to do: recreate the adventure-serial movies he enjoyed in his youth, in which you would usually be encountering a random episode and hearing talk about back-story you knew nothing about – “You fought in the Clone Wars?!” The other biggest clue is that he had first tried to get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and being unable to get them, decided to just make his own thrilling space adventure instead. (As if annoyed how many people don’t realise this, Lucas mentions it repeatedly in all of the commentaries on the most recent DVD/Blu-ray release!)

The best modern analogue for what Lucas was doing is probably Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, in which Rodriguez tries to make an exploitation B-movie as good as he always wished they were.

This is all very reasonable; the really weird part is how ridiculously successful it was. Here’s the US box office of the top 10 grossing movies in the 5 years running to 1977:

In 1975 Jaws was an outlier, a freakish break-out hit… and then Star Wars almost doubled Jaws’ US domestic takings. Worldwide, across all re-releases and adjusted for inflation, ‘Star Wars’ (aka Episode IV or A New Hope) is second only to Gone With the Wind, which came out in 1939, when 45% of the US population went to the cinema weekly, as opposed to 1977 when that figure was down to 10% (pdf source). Incredible.

I personally think three main factors helped Star Wars achieve this excessive success.

Generational Nostalgia

It seems for various reasons that people have their greatest ability to create influential cultural works between the ages of 30-40. That age group also commands a large amount of the money going to entertainment: those without children are at a peak ratio of earnings to needs, those with children will spend to entertain the whole family. This means entertainment that resonates with the 30-40 year-old generation can prove disproportionately popular, and nostalgia for their youth is a good approach. (When you enter this age group yourself, the first sign is that shops start playing the pop music of your youth).

Back to the Future  went back from 1985 to 1955; Hairspray, The Wonder Years, Grease, Happy Days, and perhaps most nakedly That ‘70s Show all did a similar nostalgic leap. So in 1977 an audience existed that, like George Lucas, was nostalgic for the adventure serials.

This is also why we see favourite movies of the 80’s coming back 25-35 years later with sequels or remakes: Alien, Terminator, Robocop, Total Recall, Ghostbusters, Rocky, and Indiana Jones to name a few of the biggest.

Hairspray actually benefitted from the effect twice (set in 1962, made in 1988, remade in 2002). Star Wars has arguably benefitted three times: the initial adventure-serial throwback, and then the prequel trilogy and (just about) sequel trilogy each resonating with the generation that grew up with the previous Star Wars movies.

The Hero’s Journey

Aka the Monomyth, this is a story structure George Lucas studied and then consciously followed with Star Wars, and is one of the most popular story types that exist. Whatever else is going on, with this at the core you have a very strong narrative hook.

Execution

Episode IV’s script is weak: “This bucket of bolts is never going to get us past that blockade”, “Boy, it’s a good thing you have these compartments!” The pacing is also weird – at age 7 a friend and I were playing with our Star Wars toys when we realised we could watch the movie on VHS; after about 20 minutes we got bored and went back to the toys.

But apart from that (!), much of the execution is really incredible for the time. For one thing, Lucas founded a special effects company and a sound company that were each so successful they remain leaders in their fields even today. Relatedly, I suspect Ben Burtt’s sound design in particular elevated the film dramatically above other genre fare of the day (lightsabers, Vader’s breathing, blaster bolts, alien languages, background hum on ships… hundreds of convincing, world-building sounds in a single film).

How do you follow the most successful film in a generation?

Lucas found directing Star Wars incredibly stressful. With so much success, the world’s expectations would make directing a sequel even worse. I also suspect he knew a sequel would be held to a higher standard, and this adventure-serial schtick was going to wear thin. The one thing he had going for him was that the arc of the Hero’s Journey had plenty of life left. So he brought in a different director, got some pretty good script-writers, and took a back seat.

After seeing Star Wars films frequently throughout my life, it was only after a 5-year hiatus that I could re-watch them somewhat afresh as an adult, and realised that The Empire Strikes Back really is a step up in quality. Return of the Jedi then concluded the Hero’s Journey beautifully and assured Star Wars a long-lasting place in the minds of a generation.

In light of all the above, the seemingly weird prequels make a lot more sense. With financial security behind him, Lucas was able to get back to doing what he really wanted: adventure serial movies, complete with cheesy lines, melodrama and slightly wooden acting. I think the prequel trilogy is just the kind of movie Lucas wanted to make all along, and he actually got better at achieving that rather than worse.

I suspect the greatest problem for the prequels was that they’re not doing the ever-popular Hero’s Journey, but rather some sort of rise-and-fall tragedy, which the nuance-free adventure serial form is terrible at supporting.

The Force Awakens (no spoilers yet)

Which brings us to The Force Awakens. Back in 2005, after queuing for 16 hours, I got a ticket for the first 6-film Star Wars marathon and world premiere of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith at Leicester Square (showing the Original Trilogy and then the Prequel Trilogy, in order to save the newest addition until last).

At the end, George Lucas came over from the more star-studded premiere that had taken place in the nearby Odeon, and addressed the crowd. He was quickly drowned out by a chant that spontaneously arose from the fans: “We want nine! We want nine!”

Lucas calmed the crowd, and answered the request with these words I can still hear now:

“Star Wars is the story of Anakin Skywalker. It begins when he’s 9… it ends when he’s dead… there is no more story.”

(The BBC reporter recorded slightly different wording).

[Update – I rediscovered the recording I made of that intro! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC reporter’s wording was closer than my memory – T.M. 16th April 2017]

As we now know, Disney thought there was at least $4bn more story, and they’re set on proving it, with new Star Wars episodes and spin-off films planned for every year from 2015 – 2020.

With all that history and no more Hero’s Journey story arc, how could Disney possibly satisfy the expectations of three generations of fans?

Well, that looks quite plausible. I particularly enjoyed the way a seemingly new and haunting piano progression evolves into a familiar theme – Han and Leia’s love theme in fact, which is a particularly apt choice following the end of Return of the Jedi.

At the time of writing, The Force Awakens has set the record for (unadjusted) US Domestic box office, and more impressively is at number 15 in the worldwide inflation-adjusted box office, putting it ahead of The Phantom Menace, Return of the Jedi, and just about on track to overtake The Empire Strikes Back, which would make it the most successful Star Wars film since 1977.

So that seems to be working.

I would say The Force Awakens has three major elements which could be ‘spoiled’, so is well worth trying to see with as little knowledge as possible. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should really do so before reading the rest.

Here’s a video to make it less tempting to read on:

The Force Awakens: True Successor or big-budget Fan Fiction? (SPOILERS!)

Over the first half an hour of the film I alternated between feeling that scenes, characters and designs were either not Star Wars enough, or just too much like old Star Wars. I finally realised I was holding the movie to an impossible standard, and substantially enjoyed the rest of it.

But by the end, it was undeniable: The Force Awakens looks a lot like a remake of 1977’s A New Hope. To try to make that assessment more fairly, I picked the most important 10 story elements from each and put them side-by-side:

Episode IV: A New Hope Episode VII: The Force Awakens
Opening arc of The Hero’s Journey Opening arc of The Hero’s Journey
Scrappy underdogs vs. Fascist Military Scrappy underdogs vs. Fascist Military
Destroy planet-scale superweapon Destroy planet-scale superweapon
Death of the mentor Death of the mentor
Protagonist triumphs through skill and faith Protagonist triumphs through skill and faith
Males free female from captivity Males free female from captivity (subverted)
MacGuffin in a droid: superweapon plans MacGuffin in a droid: location of old hero
Escape from a death trap Male frees male from captivity
Triumphant return of a protagonist Bad guy turns good
Conclude with award ceremony Conclude with ambiguous meeting with old hero

So that’s 50% alike, 20% related, 30% new.

I can’t help wondering if this was actually the master plan: take the structure of the most successful of the series, add a scriptwriter of the most well-regarded, have the original cast pass the baton to the new, and laugh all the way to the bank. It seems to have worked.

In terms of style, I was very pleased to find it kept my favourite things from all of the Star Wars films: the adventure-serial (more mysterious back-story), family melodrama, and a script much more like Empire than any of the others (which makes sense, given Lawrence Kasdan’s involvement).

Let’s Get Nerdy (MORE SPOILERS)

Finally, as a Star Wars fan I can’t leave off without addressing some of the questions people tend to ask immediately after seeing the film.

How did Kylo Ren get beaten by amateurs?

The movie goes to extraordinary lengths to show Chewbacca’s bowcaster as some kind of devastating superweapon. Kylo Ren then gets shot with it, and the movie emphases his heavy bleeding and difficulty with the wound. Meanwhile it’s fair to assume Finn has some training in melee combat, and so is able to slightly injure Kylo’s sword-arm before being beaten. This means when Rey enters the fight, she’s fresh, and has been demonstrated capable in melee combat, while Kylo has two serious injuries!

How can Rey be so good with the Force so quickly?

I wondered this while watching the film, but it’s worth benchmarking. Anakin could drive pod-racers at inhuman speed at age 9, and demonstrated some sort of telepathy / far-seeing (in Yoda’s simple test) with no training. Luke deflects three blaster bolts while blindfold on his second try, uses the force to make a missile shot that was ‘impossible, even for a computer’, and later extracts a lightsaber from ice, again with no formal training.

By contrast, Rey does a Jedi mind trick on her third go, and beats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber summoning contest; in the latter case we again have his injuries to consider, and she was also pulling in the same direction as him.

Why did R2 take so long to wake up?

This requires some mumbo jumbo about R2 taking a while to process the information of BB-8 returning with the map piece and to come out of hibernation. The real reason is if he woke up immediately, it would create a difficult story-fork between fighting Starkiller Base and seeking out Luke.

Where are these planets relative to one another in the galaxy?

It’s unclear how Starkiller Base can really be “aimed” at another solar system, but apparently it can. We’re told it can somehow shoot through hyperspace, hence the ability to hit something light-years away. Dramatically less justifiable is that in a completely separate solar system, it’s possible to look in the sky and see the beam traverse and hit several planets in real time.

The only ‘explanation’ is that Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction: planets are simply locations that are ‘far apart’, hence their uniform environment and the fact that everything that takes place on a planet seems to happen in one very small part of it. The worst offender in the original trilogy was arguably Empire, in which the Millennium Falcon apparently travels between two solar systems without a hyperdrive in a matter of weeks.

Who is Rey?

Child of Solo and Leia? Seems very weird they did not mention her when discussing their past troubles in The Force Awakens.

Grandchild of Kenobi? Seems very weird given that in Empire it is Kenobi’s ghost who says “That boy is our last hope” and Yoda who says “No… there is another”. Unless Yoda followed up with “Oh, and didn’t you also have a kid at some point, how are they getting on?”

Child of Skywalker? It seems insane he would abandon her with no training, and the whole bit with Kylo turning to the dark side and disrupting things comes much later.

In terms of trying to second-guess the series, I think it’s worth remembering that A New Hope set up Empire’s surprise-parentage twist by explicitly lying about it! As reliable old Ben told Luke, “A young Jedi named Darth Vader […] betrayed and murdered your father.”

So, and as usual: trust no one.

– Transmission finally ends

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Things July 2015: Royalty Redistribution, Live Train Data, Future Cameras and Robot Art

Fairer Royalties, Better Music

I’m very interested in how the internet is changing the music industry. Some things are better (from some viewpoints): it’s cheaper to make music and distribute it; it’s easier to find and listen to a wider range of music. Some things might be worse, but it’s hard to tell: has the average amount of revenue made per song, or per minute of music, gone down? What about for the most popular 10 artists? What about for the median artist by income? Are there fewer full-time musicians, or more?

I’ve not seen good data on that, but this piece in The Economist is suggestive at least: the average age of festival headliners has gone up by 10 years over the past 20 years. But it’s not clear if that’s just because demand (for festivals) has gone up, and supply (of festival-pleasing artists) has risen more slowly, driven by older artists whose audiences now find festivals cater to their needs.

Over on PopJustice (which has my favourite cookie warning message), they suggest the move by Apple to streaming is the final nail in the coffin for not just paid downloads, but a thriving new music industry in general. If this seems hyperbolic, bear in mind that music buying doubtless follows a Pareto curve, and the small cohort that account for most of the music-buying have the strongest (short-term) incentive to switch to streaming.

With all this going on, it’s interesting to take a look at royalty distribution on streaming services. Superficially it seems simple and perfectly fair: they collect subscription fees and ad revenue, and then distribute them to artists based on how often their tracks have been played. This is how it works on Spotify.

But as this thoughtful article points out, that’s not necessarily the fairest. It would be fairer to directly distribute the revenue from a particular customer to the artists that customer listened to. That doesn’t sound like much of a change, but it really is, so I do recommend reading the article to see why. The author also argues that such a situation would be better for everyone, even the labels, and as such should be adopted. I’m less convinced by that. It’s true ‘on average’, but I suspect the current system benefits the bigger labels more, and they have a lot more of the power.

On the plus side, with Apple and Google (and others) getting into the game, perhaps this might emerge as a competitive strategy from one of them…

 

Dan Deacon: WIWDD

On the subject of new music, well, Dan Deacon is one of my favourite musicians, and it seems Adult Swim had a bunch of animators contribute segments to go with the track “When I Was Done Dying” from his most recent album, and all of those animators seem to have put in about twice as much effort as I was expecting, with this mind-boggling result:

 

Noticing Racism

For an eye-opening insight into what one might term ‘soft’ racism, I highly recommend reading this sermon followed by these excerpts on prosopagnosia. Primed by the first article, the last couple of paragraphs of the second hit pretty hard.

 

Real Time Trains

(via @PlanetTimmy)

I found it absurd that I could be on a train with internet access and yet be unable to find out when that train was expected to arrive at the various stops along the way. Evidently I wasn’t looking hard enough, because it turns out this brilliant website has that covered: RealTimeTrains.co.uk

There’s also a wonderful site with much more precise data than most people would know what to do with regarding the exact positions and statuses of trains at various key junctions. Each day a random map is free, and it’s £10 for a full year subscription. I haven’t done that yet but it’s very tempting. Check it out!

Of course, once you have this data, you want to make more efficient use of it. For instance, it’s possible with many clicks around RealTimeTrains to figure out if you can make a more efficient connection by boarding a delayed train that was originally supposed to depart before you arrived. So the next thing I need is a service that will tell me not just the best route, but the best route based on where trains are right now.

 

3D Maps of London Underground Stations

If, like me, you ever wanted to see maps of all the underground stations (specifically the 120 that are actually underground), Ian Mansfield has cleaned them all up and presented them nicely here.

 

Here Comes The Future

Finally a couple of things that gave me a bit of ‘future shock’.

This (proof-of-concept) camera is powered by the light that its sensor receives. Which, given the similarity between a digital camera’s sensor and a solar panel, actually makes sense. So cameras don’t need batteries. Wow.

Secondly, neural networks can make art. Okay, there is a human operating the controls and deliberately manipulating things to make cool-looking stuff, but maybe later a neural network can figure out what ‘cool-looking’ means better than us, and start producing all kinds of cool stuff. Okay, that bit’s probably a lot further away, but this does make me lose a bit of confidence in the belief that artist’s jobs are robot-proof. Nobody’s job is safe from the robots. The robots are coming. We have been warned.

– Transmission abruptly ends