Tag: film

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Things 2025 Q4: Podcasts, long titles, recursive knowledge

Podcasts

I’ve circled around podcasts without diving in for a long time, unsure of how to navigate the medium. With movies or video games, I’m already looking at places that tell me about new and interesting releases, and I know how to find out if something I’m considering might be good; with movies especially I’m aware of directors, writers or actors I like that will form part of the draw. With podcasts, I have none of that!

Despite that, I’ve found a few podcasts over the years that I liked, so it seemed a good time to round them up.

Blank Cheque

Blank Cheque is a podcast about films (apparently a very popular one but I’d never heard of it, I guess because of my distance from podcasts) specifically about the careers of directors who got ‘blank cheques’, i.e. enough power that they were able to make exactly the films they wanted. It takes the (apparently classic) form of two friends chatting about the subject matter, usually with a guest, but if there was ever a conversation I wanted to overhear about film, this is it. The friends are David Sims, a film critic who is often very funny, and Griffin Newman, an actor/comedian who is also incredibly insightful about films.

They came to my attention through their ‘stunt’ podcast that kicked the whole thing off: “The Phantom Podcast”, a long podcast series diving into Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in forensic detail, under the conceit that this was the only Star Wars movie ever made and they are trying to make sense of it. They then ‘discover’ later Star Wars episodes one at a time and continue to analyse them as if nothing else existed. It’s quite incredibly niche and nerdy and there’s only one Things reader I would recommend it to, and I already have, so maybe don’t start with that. (I will say the full ~36 hours (!!) of material covering the prequel trilogy does go out on a pretty audacious high with a George Lucas impersonator defending the films against all criticism in front of a live audience).

I recommend picking a well-known director or film you like and searching the wiki to see if they have covered it (they have covered quite a lot of the big ones by now), then give that episode a listen. My favourite part is that they are often fantastic at drawing out ways in which the film’s meta-text resonates with the text. My least favourite part is that they will often talk over and interrupt their guests, especially women. That’s a pretty sharp down-side, so hopefully the fact I recommend them despite that shows how much I appreciate the good parts.

Link to Blank Cheque podcast

Designer Notes

Ok, I got into this one a while ago but didn’t mention it until now. A little like ‘Blank Cheque’, Designer Notes sees Soren Johnson interview game leads that have produced especially interesting games over their career. As an interviewer, he’s fantastic at drawing out the most interesting stories, with a knack for spotting when a fascinating nugget got skipped and asking the guest to dig into it.

Like Blank Cheque, if there’s a game series or game-maker you like, search (maybe like this) to see if they have been covered and start there.

Link to Designer Notes podcast

Gamecraft

Much shorter than any others mentioned here; if you have any interest in video games as a medium, a business, and in how it has adapted and grown over the past four decades, this is a fantastic listen. Mitch Lasky covers most of the material and is incredibly insightful since, through a lot of luck and some good judgement, he was somehow very close to the action at almost every major evolution the business has been through since the early 90’s. Blake Robins plays the ‘straight man’ role, standing in for the audience by asking the questions you’d naturally want to ask or pointing out context Mitch is sometimes too modest to state.

Link to Gamecraft podcast

Mindscape with Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist with an interest in many different scientific fields, and in this podcast he interviews scientists of all kinds to get a better understanding of their area. He’s a great communicator, and by studying the published materials of his guests in advance he’s able to coax them into explaining it clearly even when they themselves are not quite as eloquent. (Okay, sometimes it doesn’t quite work and he ends up doing most of the explanatory lifting).

Here I recommend scrolling through his list of guests and topics and diving into whichever one you find interesting.

(Random bonus note: I like the way the little intro song has a melody that kind of matches Carroll’s intonation.)

Finally, as an aside, Sean Carroll appeared in Piers Morgan Uncensored to debate Eric Weinstein on the topic of theoretical physics. I’ve seen this characterised as “Jerry Springer for nerds”, notably including the following exchange (only missing a little context):

            Eric: If Sean had actually read my paper…

            Sean: I actually have read your paper! I have it right here!

            Eric: Well first of all, Sean, how dare you…

Someone like Eric is able to get the attention of ‘alternative media’ by sounding very smart and espousing a theory that ‘the establishment’ doesn’t agree with. You need to be incredibly knowledgeable and calm to reasonably debate with someone like this, and Sean pulls it off. I found it fascinating for that reason alone. I even give Piers a little bit of credit for attempting to end the discussion with some grace, given how little he understands the topic (by his own admission).

Link to Mindscape podcast

Useful memorisations

I’m sure a few of you have already done this, but here’s two simple things worth memorising.

First, the numeric position of each letter of the alphabet (a = 1, b = 2, c = 3 etc). In the summer of 2001 I once needed to walk a couple of miles alone and spontaneously decided to memorise this while I walked; I’m amazed how much this has paid off over the years. Admittedly I do move in circles where this sort of thing comes up more often than perhaps is normal.

Second, the ‘major system’ is a simple correspondence between the digits 0-9 and consonants (0 = s, 1 = t/d, 2 = n etc). Once you have memorised this, you can turn any number into a set of letters (e.g. 20251231 = N S N L T/D N M T/D), you then insert whichever vowels you need to make a word or words, which in turn are usually easier to memorise than the numbers because they are a bit weird. This does take a bit of skill, and I’m not very good at it but get by (e.g. NSNL.TN.MT = No SNaiL-eaTeN MuT). Great for PINs or a surprising number of other things. Admittedly sometimes the effort of translating the thing into words and then back again often means I end up memorising the numbers directly, but that’s still a win.

If you have similarly useful memorisations to recommend, let me know!

AI coding trough of disillusionment

In a fast-moving world, this article by Mike Judge, “Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up” is now a bit old (article date 3rd Sep 2025), but it was a pretty thorough look for signs of AI coding being transformative in terms of software / websites / apps / games and not finding any evidence:

  • The METR study found developers thought AI made them 20% faster but it actually made them 19% slower
  • Mike’s own mini-trial found nowhere near the powerful effect he had subjectively thought was happening
  • There is no evidence of increased releases of apps on iOS, Android or Steam
  • No increase in domain name registrations
  • No increase in new public Github repositories

Mike also then directly addresses the most obvious counterpoints that could be raised.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/172538377?=&aid=recKGiRdTrn0tC0OH

Now, to avoid oversimplifying, we should also consider the following:

  • Generating code is just one part of shipping a product, all the other parts can be quite difficult and annoying, so maybe that functions as a barrier
  • This doesn’t mean nobody sees any benefit from AI in any coding situation. People can be coding for personal use, or improving existing workflows
  • Even if there’s no effect on publishing rates, there could be other effects, such as different levels of quality or hiring patterns

There are also, of course, other ways in which generative AI has an impact – there’s dramatically more to this topic than I’m covering here. For example, it’s a great way to make social media spam, presentations everywhere are getting bespoke illustrations that would have otherwise been just text, and some have seen a decline in job roles for junior positions (for example), so there’s still lots to watch out for.

Films where they actually had to Do The Thing

With editing and special effects, movies can weave a lot of magic. However, sometimes the plot will require the film-makers to actually depict something incredibly impressive without any tricks.

I first encountered this as a theoretical example in the book (recommended to me by Will W), “Adventures in the screen trade” by William Goldman, screenwriter of All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride. In one chapter he writes a short story and then has experts in different aspects of film-making give him feedback on how the story might need to change to be realised on film. Of particular note was that the story hinged on a boy getting a transcendently incredible haircut of unknowable beauty; it is firmly pointed out to him that this is essentially impossible to portray on screen.

What I’m getting at here is skills specifically outside of those you expect for film-makers. An example of what I’m not counting: sometimes a character gives an inspiring speech to rouse people to action and it’s literally inspiring – difficult to write, but movies have professional writers. Or sometimes a film requires stunt work, especially a Jackie Chan film in which part of the appeal is he is performing difficult and dangerous stunts himself – but this is still a fairly normal part of film-making, with Jackie Chan being an apex example.

Where it can get harder is music.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) is a film about a folk singer on the edge of musical success and (more often) disaster. They found Oscar Isaac for the lead, who is not only perfect for it but also a legitimately talented musician. At one point he is brought in to record a novelty song, “Please Mr Kennedy” (with Justin Timberlake as the song’s on-screen and off-screen writer; also with Adam Driver doing a silly voice), and Isaac’s character opts to take the session fee rather than any cut of the song’s profits. As an audience you should read this as a mistake, as the song will probably perform well. As a novelty song, and to the point of this section, it is legitimately good enough that you believe that’s a possibility. (It’s partly based on the original Please Mr Kennedy by Mickey Woods, and as @mooviedude141 notes in the comments on the film’s version, a different Kennedy did pretty much go on to send two of the performers into outer space).

There are plenty of other films in which a song needs to do a lot of lifting and they pull it off (“Remember Me” in Coco (2017); the Cloud Atlas Sextet in Cloud Atlas (2012); a central performance in Sinners (2025)), all of which are impressive, but I know of two examples that go the full distance.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a surprising through-line is that the escaped convict protagonists end up recording “Man of Constant Sorrow”, and while their hijinks continue the song is becoming popular in the background, to pay off beautifully near the end. Meanwhile in real life, that song (and the film’s soundtrack) legitimately became extremely and surprisingly popular.

More recently Kpop Demon Hunters (2025) features several songs by the in-movie group HUNTR/X (performed mostly by genuine K-pop group Twice among other expert contributors), who are supposed to be extremely popular – and in real life, to quote from the Wikipedia summary, “it became the first film soundtrack on the Billboard Hot 100 to have four of its songs in the top ten, was certified double Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in October 2025, and received five Grammy Award nominations”.

What about non-music?

In The Ring (1998), a particular video will ‘curse’ anyone who watches it. Perhaps making such a video is arguably within the wheelhouse of a horror film director, but the execution of it really stands out. The video is semi-abstract but nonetheless legitimately creates a deeply cursed feeling, which is why I won’t embed it here and also is part of why that film haunted my nightmares for years, only resolving when I dressed as the main spook Sadako one Hallowe’en.

Very long titles of manga and anime that explain the whole premise

This trend has been running for some years in Japanese anime and manga. Some Examples:

  • The World’s Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated In Another World as an Aristocrat
  • Banished from the Hero’s Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside
  • I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too
  • The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady
  • The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t Really a Guy at All

I wonder if this becoming acceptable (or even appealing) makes some stories more marketable than they would have been in a short-title paradigm. Perhaps this is partly why the Isekai genre (protagonist goes to ‘another world’, a genre lately overrepresented in general and also in my above examples) has had such a boom in popularity.

We could consider how this might play for major Hollywood films. There have been a few examples with titles changing mid-marketing-push to get longer/shorter and more/less explicit about the premise:

  • “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” did not seem to work as a title and had a late pivot to “Birds of Prey”. I can’t help but feel just “Harley Quinn” would have worked better, but that’s a topic for another Things.
  • John Carter was previously to be titled John Carter of Mars, but seemingly Disney thought the ‘Mars’ bit would put people off, so hoped to just… sneak it in there?
  • Edge of Tomorrow sounds cool but tells you very little, so had a late pivot to the much clearer (but equally terse) Live. Die. Repeat.

Perhaps there’s something fundamentally different going on in the marketing strategy though – Hollywood films that aspire to be blockbusters will often signify their intended mass appeal with a very short title such as ‘Titanic’, ‘Frozen’, or ‘Sinners’. Meanwhile, a lot of anime and manga are trying to carve out a niche, and they can best do that by setting out the full premise up front so the people looking for that exact sort of thing will find it.

So, if there’s anywhere we might expect this trend to show up in Western media, perhaps it’s books?

Recursive Knowledge

Laurence once pointed out to me that “you have a vested interest in anyone that has a vested interest in someone you have a vested interest in”, and he remains correct.

In the second book of Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem trilogy, the author dramatises the problem of insufficiently recursive trust. Two groups, who we can label Alice and Bob, have a problem: each of them has the capacity to annihilate the other before there is a chance to retaliate.

  • Alice trusts that Bob will not attack, and Bob trusts that Alice will not attack
  • But, Alice does not know that Bob trusts that will Alice not attack, and vice versa
  • If there’s a chance Bob does not trust Alice will not attack, probably he will attack
  • So to be safe they each should launch a pre-emptive strike

Unfortunately this keeps going even if you can add another level of trust. Consider just Alice’s side in the next level up (using close synonyms for trust/know to try to keep it manageable):

  • Alice trusts that Bob will not attack
  • Alice is also confident that Bob, in turn, trusts that Alice will not attack. Hooray!
  • But… Alice does not know if that meta-confidence is reciprocal. As far as she knows, even though Bob trusts that Alice will not attack, he might not know that she knows that
  • So Alice must consider the possibility that Bob does not know that Alice knows Bob trusts that Alice will not attack.
  • If that’s the case, Bob might be concerned that Alice is unaware that Bob trusts that Alice will not attack. Bob will consider the possibility that Alice does not believe Bob trusts Alice will not attack.
  • If Bob is considering that, it means he worries Alice thinks Bob does not trust that Alice will not attack – and if that was the case Alice, assuming Bob does not trust her, would launch a pre-emptive attack.
  • In this scenario that Alice is imagining, Bob would therefore launch a pre-emptive attack… so Alice had better launch her attack first.

You can see how this keeps going even if you layer on more meta levels of trust. The problem presumably caps out at our ability to compute much further. Unfortunately, if both sides entrust such decisions to AI then this will either become undecideable in the halting problem sense, or they will pre-emptively attack each other while trying to get to the bottom of the recursion just to be on the safe side.

How far can humans really think this sort of thing through? In the previous section I noted there is a manga titled “The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t Really a Guy at All”. As you would expect from the title, the drama hinges on the fact that Aya has a crush on Koga who she assumes is a boy, but Koga is in fact a girl in her class who dresses in a very male-presenting way outside of high school.

I don’t think it’s really a spoiler to say that eventually the secret comes out, because it’s very much about the journey rather than the destination (and at the time of writing the series is unfinished). That knowledge recursion is dramatized over a series of stages – Aya finds out about Koga, then Koga learns that Aya has found out but Aya doesn’t know that, and at a certain point Aya overhears that Koga has realised that Aya knows about Koga’s identity – but Koga does not know she knows that! That sounds pretty abstract, but in the moment of reading, the meaning and emotional significance of this highly meta revelation feels incredibly clear. I suppose as social animals, it makes sense that humans can grasp this stuff pretty well when it’s in the context of a story.

While I was thinking about all this I found out that Steven Pinker now has a book out called “When everyone knows that everyone knows”, which deals with ‘common knowledge’; when recursive knowledge operates at a population level.

I should note a slightly distant and dark irony there: we’re going through a kind of ‘common knowledge’ moment right now with the release of the Epstein files. In 2006 Pinker wrote a letter to his friend Alan Dershowitz, who was Epstein’s defence attorney at the time, on the the wording of the “internet luring statute”, and this apparently contributed to federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein being dropped. Pinker says he was unaware this was how it would be used and regrets sending it.

  • Transmission ends somewhat uncomfortably
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Things 2025 Q2: Constraints, Polarised light, Kuleshov, Infohazards

Artists vs. Constraints

The medium of any given art form creates restraints or encourages certain properties in the art itself.

For example, movies and theatrical productions are somewhat constrained in duration by the capacity of the human bladder. Paintings tend to be painted at certain scales that are easier to perceive, to distribute, and to display. Writers paid for serialised content (such as Charles Dickens or people writing for a long-running TV series) can often see better financial returns if they can find a way to spin the story out for longer.

Here are three examples of this I find particularly pointed.

1 – Tintin

The Tintin comics were originally serialised in a newspaper supplement one page at a time. To entice people to purchase the next newspaper, it helps if there’s a cliffhanger of some sort at the end of each page. I found it very hard to read a collected Tintin comic in full once I spotted this pattern, because it turns out just about every single page contrives a cliffhanger, sometimes in a very silly way.

Two classic end-of-page cliffhangers
Two of the milder end-of-page cliffhangers
Example of a decoy end-of-page cliffhanger

2 – Lubalin internet drama

Lubalin is a musician who (among other things) sets internet drama to music – that is, he takes slightly deranged exchanges (typos and all), and arranges them to music. Execution is everything, so check out part 1 as an example:

You can check out the rest in the series here.

The constraint here is that the current dominant algorithms really like 1-minute videos (specifically TikTok and Youtube shorts). In a ‘making-of’ video you can see the edited highlights of Lubalin constructing one of these songs. The notable moment comes at 8m 42s (link to that timestamp) when he plays what he has developed in full and is horrified to find it is quite a bit longer than a minute! So he has to adapt.

Noooo!! It’s like… double the length!

You get to see the constraint impact the art directly – and I think you can see how it slightly helps, but also slightly hinders. (You can skip to the final 1m song here)

3 – Calvin and Hobbes

Finally, Bill Watterson’s comic ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ was syndicated to newspapers between 1985 and 1995. The constraints on the Sunday supplement colour format were particularly harsh: panels 1 and 2 had to be optional (as they are sometimes dropped for space), and there had to be panel breaks in certain places so the comic could be reconfigured as necessary to fit a full, third or quarter-page format.

Panel breaks must fall where specified (but you can have more). Panels 1 and 2 must be optional. Sheesh!

Eventually the strip grew popular enough that Watterson was able to mandate a single full-page format – which is still a constraint! – with some excellent results. Check the 25 examples here to see the range possible (note, just the ones in colour are the ones where these specific rules apply or were eventually avoided).

What do we conclude from this?

I like the two opposite reactions one can have:
– Take something wildly inappropriate for the constraints of the medium and try to cram it in anyway.
– When you can, question those constraints and see what you can achieve if you break some of them.

Perceiving Polarised Light with Haidinger’s brushes

This is incredible to me: it’s actually possible to perceive polarised light with your very own human eyes! Find an area of pure white on a polarised LCD screen (very likely whatever you are reading this on), then tilt your head from side to side. Faint bow-tie shaped areas of yellow (and apparently blue, but not for me?) will briefly be dimly visible as you tilt your head, caused by polarised light. Read more here:

https://theconversation.com/polarised-light-and-the-super-sense-you-didnt-know-you-had-44032

An advert where a bear directs a film

This is one of those adverts where the creative agency has so much fun with the execution that the purpose of the ad seems a bit of an afterthought. I love it!

This thing is 13 years old now and I keep going back to it every few years so I’m giving it official Thing status:

Bonus bear content via Clare:

Wildheart Animal Sanctuary on the Isle of Wight recently rescued two bears that had grown up knowing only cages and concrete – article here. They raised the funds for a purpose-built large natural enclosure. The bears arrived recently and have been exploring their new home. You can try to spot the bears via one of the live-streamed cameras, or watch them explore their new habitat in recent videos such as this one.

The Kuleshov Effect (via Josie)

Terse description from Wikipedia:

“The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.”

When moving pictures first became possible, it was not obvious that a ‘cut’ would be something a viewer would accept, and early movies were often presented with very few cuts following the established art form of the play.

It turns out several dramatic things happen in the human mind with a cut:
1) An instant change in perspective is … just completely acceptable!
2) Much like Grice’s maxim of relation in language, we assume a cut within a scene has meaning – for example, if we see a character notice something off-screen, then cut to a thing, we assume they are looking at that thing. The mild version of the Kuleshov effect.
3) Building on top of the above point, the full surprise of the Kuleshov effect is that we may even overinterpret the images either side of an edit to have them make more sense!

You get essentially the same effect in comics or any sequence of panels, for example just putting these two images together implies they are related, and our mind invents a story:

You can also see the same effect distilled in GIF form:

You also get a version of this when giving a slide presentation – you can accompany some text or spoken word with an illustration, and the mind of the viewer will automatically interpret them together. This is why a presentation can be improved even with some barely relevant images!

Beyond that, I think there are even weirder effects somehow going on that relate to how we process movies:
4) Non-linear editing, in which edits go forward and back in time (such as Memento, The Prestige, Speed Racer) are also fully comprehensible, if handled carefully
5) Non-diegetic music (music that is not happening in the scene, e.g. the sound of a John Williams score in a space battle) weirdly doesn’t seem weird

One of my favourite examples of this: from pure sound design and Kuleshov effect, Rian Johnson conveyed Rey and Kylo communicating with one another across space in The Last Jedi with nothing more than an edit.

Another corollary is that you can splice new footage into old, and if you take advantage of how we interpret edits, you can recontextualise the old footage to make it seem as if, for example, Star Wars characters are drinking Cristal Beer.

Anti-basilisks

Before we begin, some necessary context: an “infohazard” is information that could harm people if known. There are many tweaks, shades and nuances to this; you can find ‘fun’ examples over at the SCP Foundation (their wiki page on the topic; search for SCP entries tagged as infohazard here), or this very enticing trailhead I have not followed at Lesswrong: “a typology of infohazards”.

Below I’m going to describe something that some consider to be an infohazard, or just dangerously adjacent to one. I will go on to explain why actually I don’t think it is (although the adjacency remains possible). This is the last Thing in the post, so if that freaks you out you can just stop now!

I will give you some space to do so.

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I’m referring to Roko’s basilisk, which is nicely summarised on Wikipedia. It’s a theoretical superintelligent AI that we could build which would “punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement”.

So, you see the problem. It’s clearly a very stupid thing to build, but now you know about it, so you can infer that other people know about it, which means that some of them might eventually have the means and motivation to build it, which in turn maybe means you should help them do that to avoid this ‘punishment’ – probably at minimum by telling more people about it!

The first version I encountered contained the threat that even if this basilisk does not come about until long after I’m dead, nonetheless it would review history and then simulate the minds of the non-contributors in order to punish them. At first I felt no concern about what may happen to some theoretical simulated me, but I suppose the real threat is that the ‘me’ right now might actually be the simulation it is running rather than the original me, and as such I am not safe!

So, maybe if you squint hard you should worry about this a bit, but my counter is that if such a thing is possible, many other similar things are possible that could easily cancel this out.

The anti-Roko’s-basilisk

A superintelligent AI that destroys any instance of Roko’s basilisk it can find, and will reward (or retroactively simulate rewarding) anyone who helps bring it about.

The double anti-Roko’s-basilisk

It’s like the anti-Roko’s-basilisk but it also specifically rewards anyone that would be punished by a Roko’s basilisk twice over (perhaps by simulating two instances of them having a great time), and anyone who helps build it three times over. So you should definitely build this one, and even if you don’t, maybe other people will, and it more than cancels out the antics of Roko’s basilisk.

At this point I think it’s pretty clear we’re just inventing imaginary monsters having imaginary fights, making the whole thing seem quite childish and inconsequential, and certainly not motivating enough to start worrying about making or not making any such things.

Anyway, just to keep things sufficiently spooky, let’s talk about adjacency.

LessWrong was founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and when LessWrong user Roko posted the original formulation of the basilisk, Yudkowsky gave an uncharacteristically blunt response and banned the topic for 5 years (as recounted in the Wikipedia article). It did look like a bit of an overreaction, but as that article goes on to recount, he later explained (or post-rationalised) his reaction, most notably with this:

“The problem was that Roko’s post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone.”

I find that idea quite compelling. It’s very hard to know how large this hazardous part of idea-space is, but it seems like it could be non-zero. I can imagine using the basilisk concept as a springboard into conceiving the most hazardous ideas possible, but at this time I am choosing not to do that, because there really is no potential benefit to anyone.

What about the opposite… the infobeneficial? Well, hopefully that’s everything else you find in Things, at least to some extent.

  • Transmission ends
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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
Categories
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Things 2024 Q2: Project Lyra, Baseline Scene, Singularity

Correspondence on dancing and music in movies

Last time I spoke about temp tracks, and the use of an end-of-film dance sequence as a nuanced way to wrap up a narrative.

Tarim points out that Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver (2017) is an excellent contrast to a temp track, in that it has many sequences precisely written, choreographed and edited with a very particular song in mind. I had hoped to see this catch on as a trend but have so far been disappointed, so do let me know of anything similar I missed.

Miranda pointed out that in video games, Frog Detective also features the Dance Party Ending trope, which makes me want to play it even more.

Finally Ben notes that Der Hauptmann / The Captain (2017) does something at the end that is not dancing but is nonetheless unexpected and produces an interesting overall effect. I’ve not seen it yet but that does sound pretty intriguing.

Real-world puzzle: Frit

In Things June 2022 I invited you to consider “How do rice cookers work?” as a sort of real-world puzzle one could solve just by thinking about it.

Similarly, frit is the name for the black spotted band you see around the edges of car windscreens or train windows. But why is it there and why does it look like that?

As a clue on how deep to go, from what I have now read there are three parts to the answer, all of which I think you could work out just by thinking about it – if you have enough background knowledge of how the science of this sort of thing works.

Chasing ‘Oumuamua

In 2017, an unusual celestial object (NASA description), uniquely cigar-shaped, was observed rapidly entering the solar system before being slungshot (at 87.3 km/s) by the Sun in a different direction, in what looked like an Oberth maneuver – and even sped up slightly as it left! Tantalisingly, and if you are prepared to get tremendously speculative, this is just the sort of thing you might expect an object created by a Non-Human-Intelligence to look like and do. But it was travelling far too fast for us to stand a chance of sending anything out to take a closer look at it.

Or was it? Project Lyra explores the possibility of finding some kind of trajectory through the solar system that could catch up to it, and impressively actually found a way. Launching a craft in 2030 and pivoting it around Jupiter to launch into its own Oberth maneuver around the sun and catch up with ‘Oumuamua by 2053 – albeit passing it at a relative speed of around 26km/s. It’s not clear if we can build a craft that can actually achieve such a feat, let alone muster the ability to fund it, but it’s a pretty fascinating possibility.

A nice animation of this path can be found with this twitter/X post. If you don’t have an account you can try this YouTube video which edits it to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird to greater/lesser effect.

This great astronomy.com article goes into detail about possible explanations for the object (even that acceleration), and multiple methods being investigated to get a closer look at it.

One of my favourite parts was a note on the scale of distances involved. One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Travelling at such an incredible speed, in one hundred years ‘Oumuamua will be about 150 AU away from us. In comparison, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is more than 268,000 AU away. While I already understood that interstellar distances are very very large, this helped me put it in better context.

Video round-up

If you’ve not seen her before, Diane Morgan’s fictional character Philomena Cunk is an “ill-informed investigative reporter”, interviewing subject-matter experts and opining on various matters with a playfully unhinged level of naivety, weaving a kind of verbal slapstick with sudden darts of dark satire (sample quote interviewing a professor of imperial history: “Was the British Empire evil like it was in Star Wars?”)

The approach is very silly and sometimes effective, but the stand-out moment for me is her interview on the topic of nuclear weapons, which possibly only lands if you’ve seen her other stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGrLUNpF7H4

Last time, I wrote about LCD Soundsytem’s “New Body Rhumba”, after which YouTube convinced me to watch some of their other music videos. An excellent highlight of this back-catalogue is the video for Oh Baby, directed by Rian Johnson and telling a short story that I think would be of interest to Things Readers. (Do note that the music and video both take 35 seconds to really kick off):

When I was a kid I said my favourite TV show was the adverts. Perhaps this was a golden age of the form, or perhaps kids just love short-form video wherever they can get it, but in any case one of my favourites was Cog – I literally have it on DVD! So I was very happy to find this behind-the-scenes video about how it was made:

Recommended Media

Spy x Family

As an anime on Netflix, this is notable for being both interesting and comparatively available even to people who don’t usually watch anime. It’s best thought of as a sit-com with a very silly ‘sit’: in an incongruously average Western setting (German style place names, European architecture, English character names, American school buses, vaguely cold war era), a fake family is formed where none of the participants know about the secret lives of the others. Watch the first two episodes to see how this pleasingly mad premise comes about and judge if this kind of silliness is for you!

Delicious in Dungeon

Another anime on Netflix that might appeal to people who don’t usually watch anime! This one is a bit of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing. It initially appears to be about a D&D-style dungeon crawl with a surprising fixation on recipes you could make with the monsters killed along the way – like a fantasy-themed cooking show.

After a while though it reveals writer Ryoko Kui’s passion for thoughtfiul world-building with an emphasis on systems-thinking, with the party’s success coming from knowledge and curiosity. It also does get quite dark and violent. You probably need to watch at least 5 episodes to see if you’ll enjoy what it has to offer, but for me the journey was definitely worth it. Also do note that the primary female character becomes much less two-dimensional and sidelined over time, as I found this aspect was quite off-putting in the early episodes.

Riddle of Fire

Just reading the premise on the cinema listing got me interested:

“In the rolling hills of Wyoming, three mischievous children are tasked with collecting a blueberry pie from their local store. However, what begins as a simple errand soon evolves into an odyssey across the American West, as the intrepid trio faces poachers, witches, huntsmen, and fairies, who all seek to challenge them on their quest. Will the bonds of friendship prove strong enough to guide them home?”

This very consciously evokes 70’s live-action Disney, with the film aesthetic, the haircuts and even the casting. I was a bit surprised to realise early on that these kids really can’t act (or possibly are being directed that way), but I took it as part of the Lo-fi approach, and ended up spending most of the film with a big smile on my face.

The trailer does a good job of representing it from the very first seconds, this is pretty much what you get:

Blade Runner 2049: subtext and metatext of the baseline scene (no spoilers)

I found Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel cinematically striking, but was quite put off by the script’s underlying preoccupation with the elimination of every commonly recognised contribution of women to society (made no less problematic by the suspicion that this wasn’t even intentional). As such I can’t recommend it, even though I do like what the overarching narrative is going for.

Still, I have to respect the ‘baseline scene’, an update and reframing of the original Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampf test, as something strange and mysteriously compelling. This long essay by andi goes into that in a lot of detail, and is worth reading because it justifiably concludes with this excellent remark:

“At this point the text, subtext, and metatext all converge.”

If you know of anything else in any other media that can be described similarly please let me know!

https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene

Oral History of Lilo & Stitch

If you don’t want to read a long article about depressing sci-fi, how about one about uplifting animation?

A recent rewatch confirmed that Lilo & Stitch is my favourite movie of all time (closely followed by Kiki’s Delivery Service and Speed Racer). It also has one of the best behind-the-scenes content I’ve ever seen on a DVD in the form of a 2-hour making-of documentary that covers all the aspects of film-making I’m most interested in – especially the iterative writing process and the way in which a singular creative vision is realised with a large team.

This makes it all the more impressive that Vulture’s ‘oral history’ finds even more fascinating information about the making of this film. With some very candid interviews with key players, it puts the film in the proper context of this somewhat wobbly era of Disney animation. It’s also a great case study for giving creative works a certain amount of independence from outside interference, and the benefits of avoiding crunch:

https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/an-oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html

If you like that, even if you haven’t seen the film you might also appreciate their oral history of the Emperor’s New Groove, which is much more of a roller-coaster when it comes to the evolution of the story.

Quote

“Change? Why do we need change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?” 

Attributed to Lord Salisbury

Why I love the ‘Singularity’ music video

As part of an attempt to add some positivity to the internet, I previously wrote about why I love the ‘Up All Night’ music video.

While there is less to unpack, allow me to present the Jon Hopkins Singularity music video, directed by Seb Edwards. First watch it here, and note that while pondering a metaphorical reading of the action is quite interesting, I am – unusually – much more drawn to trying to interpret it literally:

As with Up All Night, I’ll use the performers’ names for the unnamed leads: Jarkko and Aliashka (source). By the way, if this doesn’t really interest you then feel free to move on as this is the final Thing of the issue!

Your mileage may vary, but the opening worked perfectly for me: all I could see was something incomprehensible and spooky in a forest, and was only able to interpret the imagery when it then recurs towards the end of the video.

We begin in an ambiguous and dystopian-looking setting (actually Belgrade according to this, looks like Block 61 on Google maps) as Jarkko comes home to discover Aliashka mysteriously floating and spinning down from the sky. Immediately we are challenged to interpret what could be going on.

My read is that they do not know one another, but they are curious about each others’ circumstances, and there’s a spark of attraction. The presence of flashing lights and drifting down from the sky immediately suggests something extra-terrestrial, but the amorous developments and eventual arboreal destination suggest to me Aliashka is some kind of fae spirit entering the human realm for the first time.

The next challenge to a literal interpretation is the movement: actions and reactions are almost normal but have a supernatural grace. Jarkko looks confused about this, not sure if he needs to help or evade, and Aliashka seems mostly interested in how he is reacting. My read here is that in a magical exaggeration of the human instinct to read social cues and mirror behaviour, Aliashka’s fae nature ensnares Jarkko, who can’t help but fall into her patterns of movement a little – and later on, a lot.

Ambiguous behaviour reads as threatening, and for a few shots it seems like Jarkko is cautiously backing away but not entering full flight. Aliashka closes the gap, becoming more interested in him – especially as his movements become more dance-like and fluid. I read this as Jarkko beginning to pass some sort of compatibility test.

A sequence of throws might be Jarkko trying to push Aliashka away, but each one turns into more of a dance, and he becomes more enamoured – now no longer backing away, he chooses to follow her up some stairs with her smiling encouragement.

Moving into an embrace that might usually escalate to a kiss, it seems they have both concluded that they have found a romantic partner. But as the music shifts, so does Aliashka’s demeanour. She starts to look frustrated and even sad. This is because despite confirming a baseline compatibility and attraction, she must now submit Jarkko to a more severe process to progress their courtship.

To Jarkko’s bafflement, her movements now shift decisively from ambiguous to physical attacks and throws. He can’t match her supernatural strength, although he can perhaps endure it.

When thrown through the floor, he tries to stand but can’t – not because he is weakened, but because his body is now fully caught up in the rhythm and spin.

In an almost miss-able moment, standing apart, Aliashka hunches and moves her arms – and Jarkko mirrors the movement, or tries to.

He’s not actually being attacked: this is part of the process by which he is brought into sync with the fae. Her attacks change to patterns for him to copy, or encouragement for him to keep going. Her movements become wilder and more desperate as she puts energy into the process, willing him to survive and complete the process of assimilation.

They finally rise and hold one another, locking eye contact, touching heads. Jarkko understands that this was never an attack, but something more like a bonding ritual and a lesson. They bounce in sync and he finally reaches her level – the ability to spin and float! It’s ridiculous and beautiful and represents a sublime level of compatibility.

They drift out of the urban environment and into the woods – her realm, I think. There they finally stop and share a moment, both relieved and cautiously optimistic about where this might go next.

Or, you know, perhaps it’s just a metaphor for a relationship that breaks down and then heals again. But that’s not as interesting.

  • Transmission ends