Friday Notes (Apr 11, 2025)

Given everything going on these days, blogging seems more pointless than ever. My disgust and ennui have reached new levels, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m witnessing the downfall of democracy and society. We seem in the last stages of a trainwreck I’ve been bystanding for 50 years.

The Dumpster fire rages so hot that it trivializes ordinary pursuits. Add a bushel of minor personal concerns, and my will to write is all but gone.

All but. And of course I have Notes…

In self-defense of my sanity and equilibrium, (as I wrote about last month) I’ve been watching old TV shows. In most cases, shows I watched back in the 1960s and 1970s, but one exception is Danger Man, aka Secret Agent. It’s that old black & white British spy show starting Patrick McGoohan (currently available on Amazon Prime). The show ran from 1960-1962 and from 1964-1968.

I saw some episodes, but for whatever reason never saw most of them. Or if I did, they’re long gone from my memory. Regardless, back then I was too young to appreciate what a good show it was. The writing is good and has aged relatively well. John Drake (McGoohan) is James Bond without the silliness.

The stories are often gritty and rather dark. In the early history of humanity, spying was a gentleman’s game with unwritten rules acknowledged by all involved. There were no “dirty tricks”. But Sidney George Reilly (1873-1925) — the “Ace of Spies” —changed the game. He was dubbed “the greatest spy in history”. His exploits are the source of the British TV show Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983) — a show I’ve been meaning to watch for decades.

John Drake is very much cast from Reilly’s mold. He does what he deems necessary regardless of the consequences. He differs from Bond in rarely using firearms and not seducing every female in sight. These differences were due to McGoohan, who wanted a family show.

None of which is the point I’m leading up to but does contribute to the show’s quality and near timelessness.

What I want to write about here is how physically well-grounded the show was. That point alone sets it off from the (ever increasing) silliness and spectacle of James Bond. John Drake is an ordinary guy (with a lot of training, experience, and cynicism). One can imagine oneself in the role. The few gadgets that appear in the series all have physical plausibility.

It’s refreshing and sensible. Fresh air in a world gone insensible.

Something else I’ve noticed in old TV shows is how much screen time is devoted to details, and texture, and process. Several-second-long shots of cars driving someplace, for instance. Or people walking someplace. And yet they still had time for the plot. Shows today seem more stripped down to the plot-carrying essentials.

I’m so used to this that in Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune I was actually bored by all the shots of people walking someplace. I dubbed the movie Dune: People Walking. That said, Dune I was a bit slow because it sets the table for Dune II. I got restive the first time I watched it but got more from it on the second viewing. In part because I knew what to expect. And because Closed Captions gave me the dialog I missed watching it in the theater. But Dune II was a lot more fun, even the first time through. I think it’s a fairly worth adaptation overall.

[But I wish they’d get Baron Harkonnen right. The evil is ugly meme. David Lynch’s Dune adaptation was egregious on this point. Villeneuve’s Baron was a bit better, but still physically loathsome. We forget the seductive beauty of evil. Lucifer was the most beautiful angel, the morning star.]

One other observation about Danger Man. The bright chirpy harpsichord music in the title/end credits music sounds more like it belongs to The Munsters or The Addams Family. Unlike the darkness of spying. Makes me smile every time.

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I like to play with weather data and make charts. The last two Marches here have been warmer than average.

This year:

Last year:

The bold lines show the temperature high (red) and low (blue) for the year in question. The faint lines show previous years (from 2013). Clearly, the highs and lows are in the high range even compared to the recent past. In 2024, we hit 70+ just once during the month. This year, we hit it twice.

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Lately, I’ve been reading Bruce Sterling — by many considered, along with William Gibson, a founder of cyberpunk. While I’ve read a bit of Gibson, the only Sterling I’ve read is The Difference Engine (1990), which is co-authored with Gibson.

[It has been ages since I read it. Just pulled off my shelf and set it aside for a re-read when I finish the stuff I’m reading now. (Sterling’s The Caryatids (2009) and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 Discworld novel Faust Eric.)]

I enjoyed Gibson but wasn’t hugely whelmed. Work that breaks ground in a past era often becomes dated with age. This is especially true when the story involves technology. (In other words, a large fraction of science fiction.)

There is also the “Seinfeld isn’t funny” effect where groundbreaking work is so influential that it spawns a genre or mode. Modern readers (or viewers — we need a word that embraces both) often know only about recent iterations of the mode, so when exposed to the original find it imitative (a cruel irony).

It may be that I wasn’t as impressed as I should have been with Gibson’s work because I’ve read so many of the stories that followed. And because cyberpunk is very visual, lots of movies and TV shows. There is also that Gibson’s writing isn’t the most accessible. It often is more about tone than narrative.

To a large extent, enjoying work like that requires an appreciation for the writing itself (as opposed to the plot or ideas). And I’m not sure I’m smart enough for that. I definitely wasn’t when I first encountered Gibson as a young SF fan. This seems even more the case with Sterling.

Apparently, those who know writing think highly of him. I said I wasn’t hugely whelmed by Gibson. Call me a philistine, but I’m underwhelmed by Sterling. Especially when he ventures away from science fiction. Some of his short stories, for instance, are historical fiction involving the predictions of the “future” (but still in our past). Others have only a dash of what I’d call SF.

I’m reading The Caryatids (2009) now and skimming page after page looking for dialog or other meat. The “show don’t tell” dictum applies to writing as well as visual media, and for my money Sterling does way too much telling. And because so much of it is dated, it’s boring. There is also that the novel is something of a screed about the environment. All writing is ideological in some sense, but I really don’t care for blatant ideology in my fiction.

[It’s not that bad here, but many years of Hollywood laying it on with overenthusiasm has me over-sensitized to it. I’m at the point where all I want is “rippin’ good yarns” — stuff your ideology.]

I did much better with his 1988 novel Islands in the Net but was rather amused by certain aspects of his future vision.

For instance, in his near future, telex and fax remain key communication vehicles, though fax is viewed as more “fun to play with” than useful. Even funnier is that video phones exist but require too much bandwidth for common use. In fact, most pre-record a video presentation and transmit it highly compressed. Interactive video is considered beyond range for most.

Further, everyone carries “video rouge” for face makeup when recording or appearing in video. Not having it seems to be a faux pas — an embarrassment.

Overall, the book has a strong hacker/Napster vibe and provides another good example of how hard the future is to predict. Unpredictable “technical explosions” occur constantly (that phrase comes to me by way of the Three-Body books by Liu Cixin).

A lot of Sterling’s work in this genre — apparently the early/middle part of his career — reminds me of early Cory Doctorow (before he became so activist). For that matter, late Sterling seems to lean the same way. I’m not enjoying The Caryatids much at all, albeit on more counts than its activism (I’ll review it in more detail tomorrow).

I made a note: “the dream millennials would get it right”. We hippies had the same notion. Thought the world would change. It did, but not how we thought.

I’ll give Sterling this much: “America’s had a black President, even” says one character. This in a book from 1988. But he had no conception of the racist backlash that would create. Or the seeming impossibility of electing a woman. This remains a very stupid country.

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“The needle was close to empty.”

I may have posted about this before, but I still have the note, so here it is again.

I had this notion of writing several short-short pieces with each one starting with the above phrase but using it in a different way. The obvious one is the gas gauge needle, but I thought of hypodermics and pine needles and sewing needles and any other kind of needle I could think of.

The problem turned out to be finding a way to use “was close to empty”. It works with hypodermics but not so much the others.

Ah, well, so it goes. Not all ideas are good ones.

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Back in 2013 I posted about color [see Color My World and Color Redux and more whimsical and only vaguely related Light Beams]. I’ve had a note since then on a third post about color but never got around to it. At this point, I think it’s fair to say I never will. For one, I’ve lost whatever notes I had about the intended content.

But this image I’ve saved all that time:

Makes me think I planned to write about color temperature and color vision (white balance and so forth). The image above shows three different light sources, fluorescent (upper right), incandescent (upper left), and LED (lower left). To the eye, they seem nearly identical, but photos don’t have the perceptive adjustments our visual cortex makes.

It’s possible to see some difference when comparing them close together as in the photo (though not as stark as in the photo), but when seen alone, each seems to be “white” light.

Anyway, no more note, and now I can file away the image as “used”.

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Speaking of old posts, I cringe now at the overuse of exclamation marks.

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I’ve been thinking about Ai “kingdoms” — application domains for Ai:

1. Search engines for known facts.
2. Machine Control.
3. Mathematical questions.
4. Art/Literature production.
5. Social questions.

The first three seem useful because they can ultimately be verified as correct.

The fourth to me is empty, and I have as much interest in it as I do motel “art” or wallpaper. I believe art comes from the blood, sweat, and skill of the artist. I have a strong disdain for the “creative output” of what amounts to a search engine.

I’m especially unhappy with the recent Studio Ghibli style “art” being cranked out by the bushelful. The disrespect to Hayao Miyazaki and his beliefs is typical of a world that has no sense of respect or shame.

To be clear, this isn’t moral outrage. This is utter disgust and revulsion.

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I do like the grammar Ai Microsoft is using, but it sure misses the mark sometimes:

Nope. Got that completely wrong you dumb robot.

Or:

Seriously?

I’m losing count of the number of times I’ve had to rewrite something trying to find a version it doesn’t (mistakenly in my opinion) choke on. I’m also learning to ignore its suggestions (but remain very annoyed by its “this is wrong” underlines).

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To end on a pleasant note, here’s a recent picture of my pal Bentley:

She’s going in for surgery on April 16th to remove a tumor from her lower-left gum. Wish her good luck!

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Stay away from Ai, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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