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Things November 2022: Spooky

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

Learning from the best vs. the worst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCP Foundation and competence-horror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Game: Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consensus or Death

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

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

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

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

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

Spooky unrecommendations and recommendations

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

Dark

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

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

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

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

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

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

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

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

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

Oxenfree (video game)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel Snap

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

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

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

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

Music Video Video Mysteries

My current music discovery/collection method is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

ALA.NI – Le Diplomate, video by Ira Rokka

Noga Erez – You So Done, video by Indy Hait

Jamie xx – Gosh, video by Romain Gavras

Music Video Explanations

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

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

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

–Transmission spookily cuts to static

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Things June 2022: Lyric repetition, puzzle design, Outer Wilds

What just happened?

You may have noticed that Things posts/emails slowed in frequency over the years (from weekly to monthly to sporadic) and more recently had effectively stopped!

There’s a whole aspect of this that I plan to unpack later involving my levels of personal creativity and motivation. I posted in August 2021 that I would try to work around this by trying to focus on a post about a single Thing each time. Well, this has started to work, and I’m jumping off from that to a more traditional round up of things!

Beginnings and Endings in public performances (link)

In this post I examined the ways that different cultural forms (movies, gigs, puppet shows etc) signal to an audience the start and end of a performance, and why this is important.

While writing it, I realised that online talks/presentations, which have become much more prevalent during the pandemic, had not reached a good consensus on these difficult problems, and I set out my own list of suggestions of how to start and end them. Honestly, I’m not that satisfied with these and if anyone has any better suggestions I’d love to hear them. Read the whole thing here.

Why I love the ‘Up All Night’ music video (link)

Effectively a dramatically expanded paragraph from a normal issue of things (this one), I explained in some detail what I think is so good about this music video:

This fascinating short film seems weirdly underdiscussed on the internet, so again I’d be very happy to hear anyone else’s thoughts on it! Mine are here.

Repetition for emphasis in lyrics

When a particular word or phrase is sung repeatedly in a song, the meaning changes slightly: it starts to feel like something the singer really really desires.

This was my favourite feature of Frozen 2 (2019)‘s song “Into The Unknown”

Elsa hears a siren-like voice, and in the first verse sings about how she plans to ignore it, culminating in this:

I’ve had my adventure, I don’t need something new
I’m afraid of what I’m risking if I follow you…
Into the unknown
Into the unknown
Into the unknown

‘Into the Unknown’, music and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez

You can read it between the lines, but the repetition of ‘Into the unknown’ and the tone in which it is sung tell us that, deep down, Elsa really does want to follow the voice. This is then validated in the second verse which instead concludes

Don’t you know there’s a part of me that longs to go
Into the unknown?
Into the unknown
Into the unknown!

This device is really nicely exploited in The LEGO Movie 2 (2019) (another animated sequel from 2019, but which came out before Frozen 2). The protagonists encounter Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi who then goes into a musical number to explain that she is not evil, which brilliantly plays out exactly as you would hope from that premise:

Here the repetition is partly from the backing singers (denoted in brackets):

And if you make eye contact with me
I totally won’t have you executed immediately
‘Cause that’d be evil (evil)
Evil (evil)
Evil… and that’s so not me.

‘Not Evil’ by Jon Lajoie

The repetition of ‘evil’ reinforces the unconvincing negatives, giving the impression that she is, in fact, actually evil.

So anyway, all of this is an elaborate build-up to explain a problem I have with ‘Roxanne’ by The Police.

Sting sings earnestly about how much he loves Roxanne, a sex worker, and how he wants her to stop doing that and just be with him. It’s a little odd as there’s nothing in the song indicating that he would support her or that she could do really anything other than just belong to him, but perhaps that’s supposed to be implied.

Specifically he asks her to change by saying “You don’t have to put on the red light”, which is fine and a reasonably delicate turn of phrase. Where it gets weird is in the conclusion of the chorus, and especially the outro. Again denoting backing singers in brackets, this reads as follows:

(Roxanne) You don’t have to put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) You don’t have to put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light
(Roxanne) Put on the red light

‘Roxanne’ by Sting

So Sting sings two times that she doesn’t have to put on the red light, but then seemingly that she should put it on thirteen times, which for me always undermined what I assume was the intended sentiment.

Puzzle: Rice Cookers

Returning to the old tradition of puzzles in things: how do rice cookers work?

Now you can ask the internet for the answer to this, but I suggest this is worth figuring out on your own! If you’re not familiar with this excellent device, the key mystery is that you can add any amount of rice (up to some limit), then add 1.5x as much water, and switch the rice cooker on. You don’t have to tell it how much rice you are cooking, but it will cook it perfectly and then let you know when it’s ready. So how exactly does it know when the rice is done?

Puzzle Design

I know many things readers are not only interested in solving puzzles, but also setting them. I found Elyot Grant’s series of videos on the subject pretty fascinating, albeit a bit longer than they could have been (although this is the ‘extended’ version of his GDC talk).

I particularly appreciated some useful terminology he introduced me to for speaking about puzzles:

Fiero vs Eureka

Elyot likes the term ‘Eureka’ for the moment a core understanding of a puzzle kicks in, arguing this does better justice to it than the more prosaic term “aha moment”. In particular he calls it out as distinct from ‘Fiero’, which describes the warm feeling of accomplishment after you have achieved something difficult. Video games often end up falling back on creating Fiero; creating Eureka moments is harder to do but often more rewarding to experience in the end.

Sparkle

This refers to anything incorporated into a puzzle that isn’t essential to the design, but somehow makes it more attractive or pleasing than if it was the purest distillation of what is needed to provoke a Eureka moment. For example, a sliding block puzzle could be shaped like an animal that it already nearly resembles; or the words in a word puzzle could be thematically linked somehow. This all adds to the pleasing sense in which engaging with and solving a puzzle can feel like understanding a message from its creator.

Aporia

Finally, ‘aporia’ is the term for when a puzzle seems to be impossible. Ideally, the setting and trust in the puzzle’s creator should be sufficient to convince you that there really is a solution, that this isn’t a mistake or a trick. This can make the sensation particularly fascinating: you know a solution exists, you’ve perhaps even proved it doesn’t, so you know there must be some gap in your logic – you just don’t know what it is. For me this happened repeatedly as I played Snakebird (Steam/iOS/Android; referenced in Things April 2017) and is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.

Part 1 of the video series is here, and the YouTube description links you to parts 2 and 3:

Media I Recommend

A long time has passed since the last general Things round-up, which means there have been more chances for me to encounter some really excellent things that I recommend to Things readers.

Video game: The Outer Wilds

Available on PC (Steam), Playstation, Xbox

More than most other media, video games often have the problem that they are not at all accessible or engaging for someone not familiar with the form. So even though this is the strongest I’ve wanted to recommend something for a very long time, you do need to be comfortable navigating 3D environments to enjoy this game.

The Outer Wilds is a sci-fi time-loop mystery puzzle-game set in a kind of toy solar-system. That sounds cute, but I need to expand on that: it’s a really solid sci-fi, with the best-realised time-loop I’ve ever seen, a fantastically crafted mystery with brilliant diegetic puzzles set in an excellently designed toy solar-system that is obsessed with piquing and rewarding your curiosity and may make you think differently about death.

Referencing the puzzle terminology above, while it has its moments of Fiero, The Outer Wilds is particularly notable for being built around Eureka moments, with pleasingly diegetic hints to help you figure them out.

This may provide further context:
– Best Game of 2000-2009 according to me: Portal
– Best Game of 2010-2019 according to me: The Outer Wilds

So to be very clear, I recommend playing this game in the strongest possible terms if any of that sounds even remotely appealing to you.

Here’s a few notes that may help with your decision to play/finish it:

  • It takes ~15-25 hours to play
  • Note this wild game is called ‘The Outer Wilds’, and should not be confused with ‘The Outer Worlds’, a game that unfortunately came out around the same time
  • I recommend setting aside an hour for your first session
  • To get a bit cryptic, there are a few things that you may find annoying about it, but almost all of those things have ways to make them less annoying!
  • I personally recommend buying the base edition and then buying the DLC if you want more, rather than diving straight in to the complete ‘archaeologist edition’
  • There are moments late on that may test your patience, especially if you don’t work out some of the ways to make things less annoying – I was personally so invested I didn’t mind these at all, but I can appreciate that your mileage may vary. Still, if you enjoy it half as much as I did it will be well worth your time.

TV Series: Russian Doll

Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll

As it happens, Russian Doll also involves a time loop, but much more of a magical-realism one than the sci-fi of The Outer Wilds. Its most notable feature is Natasha Lyonne as the protagonist Nadia, who has an approach to life not often seen on screen: a woman who says ‘yes’ to most decisions, especially the inadvisable ones, and is remarkably driven and selfish – but still humane. This makes her a particularly excellent protagonist for the time loop situation she finds herself in and I was gripped by this series all the way to the end.

If this sounds appealing I recommend diving straight into it (it’s on Netflix), but if you need more convincing at the expense of slight spoiling, the trailer is here.

(There is now a second series in which she encounters a different magical-realist sci-fi situation, but I found her character a worse fit for it and I was not surprised and delighted in the same way. The first series can certainly stand alone.)

Film: Everything Everywhere All At Once

IMDb: 8.5/10. Rotten Tomatoes: 95%.

The above trailer looked very promising to me, and I sought out the very first screening I could; the amazing part is that I found the film entirely lives up to the trailer, even to the extent that each minute is almost exactly as intense. A mind-boggling experience that truly delivers on the idea of a multiverse (unlike other films I could mention), I found it so fascinating I saw it a second time at the cinema; I enjoyed it even more, and it has joined the ranks of my all-time favourite films.

At the time of writing you may even still be able to catch it in the cinema, which I strongly encourage you to do!

(If you’re interested, others on my ‘all-time favourites’ list include Speed Racer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Inception, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche New York, and Lilo and Stitch)

Song: Dan Deacon – Change Your Life

It seems music is more personal than other art forms, and I feel as if the more a particular piece speaks to someone, the less likely it is to work for most other people. With that in mind, I don’t expect many to find Dan Deacon (referenced a few times in past Things) particularly appealing, but if you only try one of his songs, I recommend ‘Change Your Life’ which really captures the frenetic optimism he achieves, and which is what I find most appealing:

Enormous ever-evolving IP: Star Wars

Since I last wrote about it (in September 2018!), a lot has happened in Star Wars, and as you might expect I have a lot of opinions about it. But that will have to be an entire Things in its own right. So, you can look forward to that. Or not.

–Transmission ends

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Things July 2017: Archive Adventures – part 1

In November, Things will be 10 years old. Since the beginning, I’ve collected an archive of interesting things, and at various intervals then created Things out of that archive. I tend to collect slightly more things than I publish, so the archive has grown. Rather than cull it, I’m going to just put them all out in two big catch-up editions. In this edition: Stories, Technology, Imagery, and all the Puzzles. This is going to be intense!

This Just In

Before I get to the archive, a couple of recent things.

Damien Henry’s video for Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” makes excellent use of machine learning for art. Using video shot from a moving train, an algorithm learns how to predict what the next frame will look like. Every 20s into the video the amount of learning used increases. The result is fascinating, and perfectly complements the music. You can skip through the video to get an idea of the effect, but it’s best played in full!

There is an awkward vein of humour in which comedians interview (often) unsuspecting subject-matter experts in a non-serious manner (Philomena Cunk interviewing Brian Cox is one I don’t mind so much). Superficially, Werner Herzog sometimes takes a similar approach in his documentaries (noted in Things 118 in 2012, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel”), but there is a hidden earnestness behind his questions. If you’ve never seen any of his documentaries, this excellent short clip on penguins shows you what you’re missing.

Stories

I think via Richard L, here’s an interesting piece on Plots not involving conflict.

In some stories/fables/myths the inciting incident or key point of drama is a character attempting to do something different to normal. In old stories, the character often fails and is punished, the moral being “know your place” (for example, the crow that tries to sing and in so doing drops a piece of cheese). In more modern stories, the character often succeeds and is rewarded. Is that generalisation true though? And what does it mean? I was going to collect examples of each and try to see a pattern, but never ended up doing that, so I’ll just leave it here as an unfinished thought.

The Cosmology of Serialised Television is an essay by David Auerbach which categorises long-running TV fiction by cosmological universe types: Steady State, Expansionary, Big Crunch. I didn’t find it particularly useful in terms of identifying solutions to the intrinsic storytelling problems of the medium, or even uncovering hidden gems (just the expected “Everything is terrible except for The Wire and Babylon 5“).

Still, it’s a lot of fun to read and nod along to, with some great terse summaries along the way, for example:

“So comics evolved by directing creative effort away from any moments of quality and toward large-scale creative bankruptcy”

See Maris Wicks’ 16-panel summary of Kitty Pride’s relationship with Colossus (penultimate comic in this post [dead link, try here – T.M. 7/4/21]) for a great example of this.

Choose Your Own Adventure

One of my favourite kind of stories is any subversion of the “Choose your own adventure” format. Previously on Things I’ve linked to Luke Surl’s perfectly terse ‘Free Will‘ page. As an implied CYOA, this previously-linked Beaver and Steve comic also remains a classic.

The “Prog 2012” issue of 2000AD featured a story called “Choose your own Xmas”, and subverts the format while also shattering the 4th wall. It’s completely brilliant but isn’t online so you’ll just have to trust me and buy or borrow it.

Viviane Schwarz also subverted the format beautifully to convey what it’s like to suffer from anxiety.

Working within the extraordinarily tight constraints of having a fixed panel and art layout, Ryan North still found a way to make a CYOA version of Dinosaur Comics.

Save The Date (recommended to me by Tarim and Richard L, available for free on Windows, Mac or Linux) leverages the Ren’Py ‘visual novel’ engine in a rather clever way, and if you’re interested in games and storytelling, have 30-60 minutes to spare, and can tolerate an apparently high rate of failure, you should give it a go. It could perhaps have delivered its message more elegantly at the “end”.

Also via Richard L, Trapped In Time (pdf) is a nice twist on the traditional choose-your-own-adventure format that leverages the format in a few interesting ways I’ve not seen before, and actually works very well as a pdf!

And I should mention this just in – browser-based interactive time travel fiction, One Night in Skegness, by Matheson Marcault (Holly Gramazio and Sophie Sampson). More time travel, but in a more relaxed way.

Technology

Perhaps surprisingly, a link about technology that sat in my backlog for 5 years has become more interesting with age. John B recommended the article, in which Alexis Madrigal laments that (in 2012), internet startups are just retreading the same ground and no longer promise to revolutionise our lives. John also pointed out the comment below the article by Urgelt (comment link doesn’t seem to work, wait for comments to load, which they often don’t, then find ‘Urgelt’ in the page). Urgelt more precisely categorises startups into those that grow the economy vs those that just take market share from existing businesses, and the issue is that most startups are falling into the latter category.

Both make a very interesting read 5 years further on, leading one to ask: has anything changed since then? Two trends jump to mind.

The Gig-economy-style startups (Uber, Deliveroo, AirBnB) suggest major changes, but might not actually scale. Uber charges around half of the true cost, subsidising the rest in a bid to achieve market dominance when driverless cars arrive; Deliveroo similarly rides an unsustainable cost/charge balance for much the same reason; only AirBnB arguably doesn’t fit into this category as the market sets the price.

Crowdfunding seems to be a more impressive development. In 2012, Kickstarter was just turning the corner, and Patreon is now in the ascendancy. From artists/game-makers that I follow, these services genuinely seem to be creating viable revenue-streams that were not previously available, to the benefit of culture in general. For example, Captain Disillusion (referenced in Things March 2015 and Things 17) was never mass-market enough for ad-revenue to be viable, but now raises sufficient money from Patreon to work on his videos pretty much full time.

In more “modern life is terrible” news, here’s an article from Cracked in late 2013 that is really just an enjoyably angry and sarcastic rant about clickbait content-farming. I remember at the time thinking that, if nothing else, the clickbait headline style would have to change as humans will fall for anything once, or maybe a hundred times, but eventually will develop a sort of semiotic herd-immunity to these well-dressed empty promises. Four years on… have things changed? Well, if nothing else, Facebook is at least attempting to deprioritise these sorts of headlines; more specifically, headlines that withhold key information, and headlines that senselessly exaggerate the content.

Imagery and Comics

Wondermark on the thought-experiment of money having a continuity rather than just being an abstract quantity of value. Wet owls. Inopportunely placed stickers [Dead :\ – T.M. 4/7/21]. Bikes recreated (digitally) from drawings. The Door to Hell [Gone, try here – T.M. 4/7/21]  “They set the hole on fire, expecting it to burn itself out of fuel in a few days. Now, some 42 years later, it is still burning”.

Puzzles/Questions

Collecting all unused puzzles here is probably too intense, but I quite like that about it, so I’m doing it anyway.

1) 2D News

Sci/tech news is often quite one-dimensional, revealing a single scientific discovery or technological advancement at a time. As a thought-experiment, try combining two or more such stories from the past year into something amazing. For example, advances in drone technology + advances in ‘invisibility cloaks’ = army of invisible drones. Finding loads of other planets + anything = awesome.

2) Put Put boat

A toy Put Put boat has an amazingly simple heat engine, which you may recognise from the film Ponyo. A candle heats a small boiler; some water in the boiler vaporises but cannot escape, generating pressure that pushes the remaining water out a pipe. The momentum of the water keeps it pushing out, leaving the inside of the boiler with low air pressure. As a result, water then rushes back in, and the process repeats. Water thus repeatedly enters and exits a pipe pointed out the back of the boat, which then travels forward in a halting manner. The puzzle is this: why does the boat actually move forward, instead of just moving back and forth, given water is just going in and out?

3) Bernoulli vs the Train Window

In a similar vein to the Put Put boat, we have the Bernoulli train window problem. Bernoulli’s principle roughly states that faster moving air acts as if it has lower pressure. The classic demonstration is to hold a piece of A4 paper by one end in front of your chin so it droops downwards away from you; by blowing over the top, the pressure is reduced, and the piece of paper rises up due to the higher pressure underneath it.

A similar effect could be seen in an old-fashioned push-to-close narrow train window. If such a window was open and the train entered a tunnel, the window would slam shut. Or, would a shut one blow open? Depending on whether you take the perspective of the tunnel or the train, the faster moving air is on one side of the window or it is on the other. So which way does the window go?

4) Catbird seat

The Catbird seat is one of those puzzles I like because you can solve it with drawings and trigonometry, and then you can solve it better with simpler drawings and simpler trigonometry, and then you wonder if you can solve it in some kind of purely intuitive manner.

5) Shape of a Harp

When plucked, a longer taut string makes a deeper note. A harp has progressively longer strings to cover a range of notes. However, even though the interval between each note is the same, the length of the strings does not change linearly, or even following a simple curve, but rather an S-curve. Why is that? I thought this question might have a nice intuitive solution that could be reached by reason rather than by physics, but the answer is a bit more disatisfying, so this question remained in my backlog unasked. If you don’t want to figure it out (and my personal opinion is it’s not that interesting to do so), you can read about it here, although you’ll need the internet archive page for the harp citation.


Not a harp, but the principle is the same

– Transmission finally ends

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Things 129: Kids Special (Strange Hill High, Octonauts, The Phoenix)

People tend to assume children’s entertainment isn’t as good as it was when they were young, probably due to a three-pronged attack of rose-tinted nostalgia, the best shows being renewed (Sesame Street) or repeated (Bagpuss) so giving each new generation a sense of ownership over them, and poor curation for adults out of the current crop.

Recognising that this is a highly subjective enterprise, I’m going to pick out a few good examples of current kids fare in attempt to at least fix the latter. There’s even a kid-entertainment-based puzzle at the end.

TV Series with Puppets: Strange Hill High
I occasionally take a look at current children’s TV to see what sort of animation techniques are being used, and Strange Hill High caught my attention through its fascinating combination of designer-vinyl-toy-style puppets combined with CG mouth animation.

The premise is entirely encoded in the name so I won’t bother to elaborate on that. Most importantly, it actually makes me laugh a few times per episode, which can’t be said of many other TV series. To be fair, 90% of it is fairly standard kids ‘comedy’, but it’s sufficiently fast paced that I don’t mind sitting through that to get to the other 10%.

If you seek reassurance from known quantities, it also features the voice of Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd), and the head of the writing team is Josh Weinstein (The Simpsons).

It’s on iPlayer right now (I recommend starting with 99 cool things to do with a time machine), and you can start to get a bit of a flavour (though not really enough) from the opening few minutes:

Picture Books: Octonauts
Again, I first engaged with this franchise through the graphical design: I was impressed by the stylishness of their bath toys. It turns out there’s a whole CG animated series, which is quite good (mostly due to the use of regional accents), but it all started with a series of charmingly whimsical picture books. Here’s a few snippets to give you an idea:

Decoding the language of a sad fish:

Pictures that glow in the dark (from this book), which it turns out fascinate me just as much as when I was a kid:

Weekly comic: The Phoenix
Now I look back on it, more than anything The Beano looks like a primer on culture, mapping out the tropes and stereotypes of an idealised sort of pre-war age (vicars having tea, go-carts, hi-jinks, the threat of The Slipper), equipping the child with the reference points needed to navigate modern entertainment, while keeping said child entertained with a never-ending stream of speech bubbles that all end in exclamation marks (I only noticed this years later, and haven’t been able to read more than a few pages at once since).

The Phoenix is a modern kids comic that’s nothing like that. For one thing, it features work by James Turner, who I’ve featured in Things before (with this mind-bending 9-panel comic).

It’s also got a bunch of other surprisingly good stuff. Bunny vs Monkey by Jamie Smart features high-quality hijinks like this and ever so often will just go incredibly dark, like this:

For being simultaneously educational and entertaining, I’ve never seen better than Corpse Talk by Adam Murphy, in which he interviews the reanimated corpses of the “dead famous”, and doesn’t really sugar-coat things that much:

There’s wonderful art by Lorenzo in Long Gone Don:

Finally, ‘Professor Panels’ by Neill Cameron teaches kids to make their own comics, sometimes delightfully deconstructing the form, such as the episode in which a mecha-comic-creating-monkey starts to misfire when a banana is added to its workings:

If you’re interested, do check out their website, which has a free digital issue, a link to the iPad app, a starter pack you could buy, and a bunch of other good stuff.

Video: Tune-Yards My Country
I like this music, and the video is pretty good too. Be sure to stick around for the funky syncopated brass solo around 2’40”.

Puzzle: The Perfect Power-up Purchase Path
The LEGO console games are aimed at children, but provide some solid co-op entertainment for adults too, especially if you derive pleasure from smashing things and collecting coins – or in the LEGO-themed parlance of the game, ‘studs’.

In many (all?) of them, studs collected in the course of play can be used to purchase various upgrades. One such upgrade is the ‘x2’, which once bought, doubles the value of all the studs you subsequently collect – so a level where you might collect 100,000 studs will instead net you 200,000. There are other similar upgrades, like the ‘x4’, which multiplies by 4 – and they apply cumulatively, so if you have both x2 and x4, you get an 8 times multiplier, so that level would now net you 800,000 studs.

Naturally, the more powerful multipliers are more expensive to buy… but having a multiplier will help you save up for the others more quickly. Here’s a price list:

  • x2 = 1 million studs
  • x4 = 2m
  • x6 = 3m
  • x8 = 4m
  • x10 = 5m

So, the question naturally arises: if you want to eventually purchase all 5 of these multpliers, what order should you buy them in? (In case you were wondering, yes, they really do keep accumulating, so when you have them all you have a 2 x 4 x 6 x 8 x 10 = 3,840-times multiplier).

For the more mathematically inclined: what is the generic strategy for any multiplier series f and pricing series g? For the more game-design inclined: if you really wanted to encourage children to do some maths, how would you design the pricing for these multipliers? Alternatively, if you wanted to make the game as fun as possible, what multipliers and prices would you set?

Answer: Spoilers Sometimes Matter
Last time I asked if we could really believe research demonstrating that spoilers always improve enjoyment. The consensus seems pretty clear – even though ‘mystery’ and ‘twist ending’ stories were included in the research, it nonetheless seems very likely that there exist a few counter-example stories in which experiencing them unspoiled adds a tremendous amount to the experience. Since one can’t tell reliably tell which these are in advance, it seems wiser to err on the side of caution, and continue to avoid spoilers.

-Transmission Finally Ends