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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 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
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Things 2024 Q1: Dancing, Temp tracks, Creativity

LEGO is doing okay

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

Not shown – revenue growth flattened in 2023

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

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

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

I Am Not Left-Handed

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

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

Temp Tracks in film

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

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

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

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

Dancing at the end of films

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

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

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

Dancing in a fursuit

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

The Temp Track that went well

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

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

Creativity over time: productivity and scope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The four approaches to ongoing narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some case studies in slowed progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready?

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

Specifically a scene where everyone starts dancing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Categories
New

Things February 2024: Naming, AI, Sarcastic songs

Aspirational Naming

Philosophy is a battle against bewitchment of our intelligence by language

Wittgenstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning Test reductio ad absurdam

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

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

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

Generative AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Generative AI + Metcalfe’s law = massively expanded collaboration

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

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

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

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

Recommended Media

Video Games: Superliminal

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

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

Video Games: Tangle Tower

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

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

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

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

TV series: Star Wars – Andor (Disney+)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome

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

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

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

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

Book: The Vegan Baking Bible

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

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

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

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

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

Awful abbreviated aphorisms

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

Here’s the examples I have collected so far.

Build it and they will come

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

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


One bad apple…

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

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorn’d

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

Great minds think alike

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

Sarcastic songs

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

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

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

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

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

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