Revenge of the Iceberg

It's a sobering moment in a long history of sobering moments. The one thing all sobering moments have in common, comic-tragically, is that the person being sobered realizes they should have been "sobered" a really long time ago, ideally since birth. But one understands that the human brain needs time and space to properly develop through its most plastic/elastic periods, so we allow the indulgence of whimsy and fantasy, even encouraging belief in figments of collective imagination, like Santa Claus and the United States Constitution. Of course a time comes when those figments become impediments to clarity and must be brushed away, sometimes with deliberate care by loving parents prepared for the psychological reorientation, and sometimes in a violent spasm of revelation by circumstance, like realizing all the Santa presents are addressed in Dad's handwriting, or watching armed men representing your government steal a child off the street. As a parent, it's a bit of Hobson's choice really: you could decide not to delude your children right from the first firings of cognition and the acquisition of language, but they have the whole rest of their lives to be chased down by the existential dread of a fundamentally disappointing world.

The process of revelation doesn't end with bar/bat mitzvah, confirmation, quinceañera, acquiring a lower-back tattoo of questionable craftsmanship, whatever time-honored ritual your culture practices to mark the passage into adulthood. Of course the moments of inflection, of insight, of re-discovery of the World As It Actually Is, they are harder to acquire as we age and ossify into "what I think about X", and can be somewhat more embarrassing when the necessary re-contextualization makes it clear you'd missed the first 90,000 opportunities for the penny to drop. But it's never, as they say, too late, and possibly why they refer to these moments as sobering, as an arrival at clarity from the obfuscating inebriation Things As They Seemed.

Note that this is not always for the better. Plenty of people found it "sobering" to "realize" that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim sent here with a fake birth certificate on a mission to disarm the American population so he could put white people into concentration camps. Sources of information, it turns out those are important as well, though these days the distance between internet cranks and the anchor of CBS Evening News is getting so short, it's more of a step than a jump.

I know at the moment we've all been forced into (I won't say "awakened" or any other forms of that verb) a new version of reality of one kind or another. This week's unending onslaught of TOO MUCH FUCKING NEWS has been no exception to all the weeks before, forcing confrontation after confrontation between ourselves and what we can/should expect from the world. The idiot president was an idiot in public, Canada broke up with us, the Minnesota occupation continues...

This is the time to reflect and focus and find ways to affect change. It is not the period in history where it is appropriate to want things for yourself. Like if your football team finds itself one game away from the Super Bowl, look, that's nice, but what kind of a frivolous, oblivious asshole pulls up a chair to listen to the string ensemble play on the deck of a badly listing Titanic?

You can't see me, but I'm pointing two thumbs at myself. They're my own thumbs, to be clear.

In an increasingly secular world, I guess sports are the new opiate of the masses. The good news is that, even as we embrace the inky haze of indulgence dulling our senses to the sound of creaking steel and water rushing past what we were told were unbreachable bulkheads, the sobering happens immediately when your team finally loses. It's a hot cup of coffee directly down the front of your trousers. Searing in the moment, but once you recover, you're just grateful for the moment of distraction that was.

Hot Fuzzy

 

Avatar: Fire and Ash

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jack Champion, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco

directed by James Cameron (Aliens, the only good Terminator movies, True Lies, the one about the boat, Avatar 1, Avatar 2, plenty of other stuff)

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THIS IS NORMALLY WHERE I WOULD PUT A SPOILER WARNING, BUT LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS FILM

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OK, I'm not trying to be a snob here. There is something inherently irritating about the way James Cameron talks about this whole Avatar project and the unique message he thinks he's trying to convey through it, but if you aren't all caught up, we're just three films in now to the exact same story Kevin Costner told in Dances with Wolves like 35 years ago. Or Edward Zwick and Tom Cruise told again 15-ish years after that with The Last Samurai. If you haven't seen those films, the message is basically this: the problem is white people. The solution? Adopt a white person to lead the rebellion against the white people, which ultimately fails, underscoring the tragedy of the western colonial mindset but also reaffirming "well, there's really nothing you can do about it ultimately..." I guess the main difference is in those two examples a) the resistance was led by two charismatic movie stars and in these, they're led by Sam Worthington,* and b) it's taken three very long movies already and Jake Sully refuses to get around to dying tragically yet heroically in an act of futile defiance.

Again, not a snob dismissing these films out of hand, it would just be easier to take if James Cameron just said he was out to make a big dumb shooty popcorn movie and not trying to inspire people to save the world or whatever. There are of course major elements of this film and its two predecessors as a whole that work on that first level, but the more of the story we learn about, the only real-world translatable questions its going to raise will have to do with how we spend our increasingly precious disposable income on things that are kind of shit.

So there were a couple of strikes against it. Not prejudices necessarily, because I've earned my skepticism over, what, seven-ish hours of movies so far? Also, this is the third Avatar film and they seem to have made NO SERIOUS ATTEMPT to work the number 3 into the spelling of the title, like Fant4stic or F8 of the Furious or F1. Hm, in retrospect, maybe only movies that start with F are allowed to do that? Plus there's no obvious place to stick a 3 in Avatar, like maybe Avat3r, but that looks dumb. Best I can do is Avatar: Fir3 and Ash, but also, not great. OK, you get a pass on this one, James Cameron, but the other skepticism is valid.

The other thing Cameron talks about incessantly is how hard it is to make these movies and how intent they are on pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible in film with CGI and motion capture and... OK, I gotta hand it to him there. Although the overall visual impact is undermined by the excessive length of these films (this is not the last time I will mention this, almost certainly. These are long!) which makes the parade of UBER-GRANDE visual-scapes become overwhelming, like white noise for the eyeballs. There isn't a single frame that looks bad or out of place, per se, but they still have the problem of emotional detachment from all the grandeur, as the cartoon CG of it all is still a bit most-expensive-Lego-set-ever, with all the limits on investment in any of its survival implied therein. So when these giant things are all exploding or catching on fire or being harpooned (again), there's no real sense of loss or shock. You feel like they could just to go back to the previous save game and reload, try the level again. Astoundingly pretty, but in a weirdly forgettable way.

This is not the case, however, for the motion capture, specifically with the facial performances. Zoe Saldaña and Oona Chaplin specifically, holy shit, these are legitimately great performances. My son and I talked some shit after walking out of the theater, but I also said Chaplin was on some Oscar-level shit. She speaks no English in this role, so it's all raw emotion and she's absolutely riveting, genuinely scary. That was necessary because the main antagonist played by Stephen Lang has been neutered by his own nonsensical actions in the plot and mustache-twirling so as to be a non-threat. Chaplin's character, almost tragically, gets relegated to being his girlfriend, but she still pops off. That is not a joke about having had to see it in 3D.

Is there a plot? Well, yes, but it's literally (and I'm using that correctly here: literally) the same plot as the last movie. The Sullys are in danger and have to move around but in the end they have to fight against the military and the company hunting whales, which they resist by rallying the locals and getting the animals to help them. The kids also get kidnapped by Stephen Lang again, who neglects to kill any of them before their parents have an opportunity to affect a rescue. At least in the last movie one of the kids died! But he threatened them like four different sequences in that film alone, plus the ones here! I'd have more respect for the character if he would just murder a child, that's all I'm asking.

Otherwise, this all feels like a placeholder for some larger arc's grand denouement that we will possibly never get to see. That means nothing gets resolved, in terms of plot (see above) or character. This is supposed to be about a family, but this family spends the whole movie so mad at each other, you find yourself pondering the idea of space-divorce among these cat people. The only bonding that gets done is when they're out there murdering gringos, and that only starts happening because the run-time of the film said it was time to do that. Sure, I'd like to trust that this is all going somewhere, but I'm also going somewhere every time I leave my telework-disallowed job to come home. It would be a bad idea to do 400 circuits of the office parking lot before I decided it was time to head in the actual direction I needed to go.

Yeah, if I had to describe this film in one TL;DR log line: it's 400 circuits of your office parking lot. Just with better scenery.

PS: also I didn't realize Kate Winslet was in this until I read the credits at the end of the film. Normally I'd give an actor praise for disappearing into her role, but it's harder to do when they literally disappear.

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*OK, this was kind of mean, but it's not fully Sam Worthington, it's a cartoon version of him. I've honestly forgotten what actual Sam Worthington looks like.

Get It Twisted

You know, I used to do blogs six days a week. The labor inherent in that kind of frequency was exhausting on its own, of course, but the other downside was just being tied to the news cycle. If you've set yourself the task of ginning up content that often, it's the easiest shaft to mine. The only other option to keep people coming back that often and regularly involves way more nudity and Photoshop fluency than I'm comfortable with.

Switching to weekly blogging was a sanity-saver. Sure, it coincided with me having to stop being a stay-at-home parent and join the work force as my marriage disintegrated, but I was burning out on that posting tempo regardless of where my then-wife was sleeping and with whom. Seven days between posts gave me miles and miles of headspace to consider and foster ideas, let them germinate, root and grow shoots I could then brutally harvest in unripe form and scatter haphazardly to the wind (Blogger). It's a decent metaphor, but come on, what can you grow that's worth growing in seven days? The fastest thing I've seen anyone grow is a radish, and a) those still take like six weeks and b) who wants a radish? All the effort and patience and you get a cherry-sized nubbin that tastes like hot soap.

It doesn't matter though, because all of the headspace we might use to this end or that has been colonized and infected by a relentless news cycle detailing the rolling, bouncing catastrophe that is Late Stage Imperial America. Surprise invasion of a country picked seemingly from a hat? OK, one of those. Hang on, let's also throw in the extrajudicial murder of an unarmed citizen by federal agents. Is that all for this one calendar week? I dunno, I've deliberately not checked by phone since I started typing. For all I know Pete Hegseth has announced we've made contact with aliens, one of which he then attempted to karate-chop in the neck on live TV. It seems far-fetched, but guys, Venezuela? We're eight days into the year! Where is this going?!

Maybe the AI curiosity, the indefensibly inexplicable apparent impulse to cede a lot of basic human functional ground to automation using a system that has actively and repeatedly demonstrated its total inability to do any of the promised functions, is just desperation to dissociate. In the emotional/psychological sense, sure, but also technologically and socially. The promise of the internet was both improved connection and immediacy, but we hadn't really considered how both of those outcomes would leave us battered by every piece of news and completely vulnerable to whatever the next hailstorm of human misery a global army of faceless messengers can hurl at us without regard to our readiness. In fact, the only thing anything like "AI" has gotten right is weaponizing and arming a swarm of info-firing bot accounts on twitter or facebook, directed by adversary states/agitators or (at this point really, because that's just a feature of how the internet works now) all on its own, unbidden.

AI as it works now is promising to put a mediating layer between us and the thousand nettle-stings we're promised every single hour of every single day just by electing to try to navigate through the forest of informational nightmares guided by our smartphones. It sounds like an insulting way to break human connection in its most basic forms by usurping all the things that define us as cells within a social organism, but maybe now the cells are so sick, we could use a bit of a barrier to affect a quarantine. The news and the vectors (human and bot) that carry the blight can't hurt me if they're interacting (coming and going) with a digital projection of myself propped up by my AI valet. Sounds creepy and unnatural, I know, but if we're all pretending to be people, that Uncanny Valley gets a lot shallower really fast.

The kids these days have the right answer, that the solution is to "touch grass," ideally without the app or website on your phone to tell you what kind of grass it is. The point is to be ignorant of some things, at least for a little while. It's not an abdication or surrender of our social obligations; it's really knowing the difference between being information-overloaded and properly informed. Of course you can, if you want, even opt to be ignorant of literally everything, but ironically you might need AI's help with that.

Hands-Free

I don't really like that the coincidence of Christmas and New Years Day falling on the same weekday is really affecting my posting schedule this week. It feels targeted against me in a way I haven't felt, cosmically, since... since...

Oh man, that was a pretty standard structured setup for a good metaphor involving old popular culture references, for the amusement of all. Dang, these knotty writing problems used to be my bread and butter, but now as we enter 2026, the Era of Inevitable AI, an era defined (according to commercials featuring what I assume are the best and most compelling use-cases of a what we pretend is going to be a trillions-of-dollars industry) by a tool that sometimes will mildly help you do things that aren't that hard anyway and we're all used to doing better ourselves, as long as we don't mind the ways in which it sometimes/often gets things catastrophically wrong.

I've been pretty vocally against the creep of a human-created tool coming for human expression and the jobs relate to expressing it, but I think with all the very clear indicators that it's going to be the new normal with no perceived downsides or hiccups, I should be more open to getting on board.

Not quite to the degree that involves actually paying any of these vampires any of my currency,* but just, for now, you know, philosophically.

It's not a resolution as such, but I guess you can look forward to this space being filled with lorem ipsum to a much higher degree than normal as I happily and gratefully lay my neck on the grubby chopping block of progress.

Or to put it another way, to embrace, with both arms, the future, as long as we understand the AI future as a tidal wave. Everyone understands the best way to survive a tidal wave and experience all its (beneficial? probably?) effects is to try to hug it.

Happy new year, everybody.

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*excellent non-AI metaphor, everyone knows vampires crave nothing more than monetary wealth

Likely Story

It's the time of year where we find the best in one another. We also take the time and energy to make ourselves available to friends and family, to cleave unto our loved ones as they cleave unto us, giving of ourselves in ways above and beyond the everyday.

That feeling is pretty much the only way I was going to end up in an IMAX theater watching a 3D showing of Avatar: Fire and Ash this holiday season. Having seen the first two Avatar films, there is no force social or spiritual that was likely to soften my soul to the idea of 3-plus hours of James Cameron's embarrassing cowboys-and-indians non-parable parable about environmental something-or-other. 

No force of course except my youngest (adult) kid asking me to. For even bad movies, we're a good time. We set the precedent way back when we excitedly saw the predictably predictable Dwayne Johnson struggle-fest Skyscraper when he was like 15. It was awful in a way we both really wanted it to be, which led to an animated discussion in the drive home. It's the kind of bonding kids only do now in the Discord chat during co-op gaming.

More about this movie later, but I wanted to pass along this message of family and fellowship and the unifying power of Jim Cameron's pretentiousness in the form of a popcorn movie. Let's all try to carry that warm feeling of togetherness through the new year. We'll fashion our own upsides out of the slow-motion explosion of the post-Cold War international settlement, in this lull before the Great Venezuela War of 2026.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Speculative Fiction

So I'm not a screenwriter, but in my head, I've been compiling ideas for a spec script for an episode of the dystopian near-future anthology Black Mirror. I don't want to give away any of the details because, like most creative types, I live with the crushingly easily falsifiable belief that if my GENIUS IDEA gets leaked anywhere into the public sphere, Fat Cat Hollywood will swoop in, steal it, make ONE ZILLION DOLLARS off of it, leaving me high and dry. Like all made-up afflictions, the only real protection are hokum folk remedies, none of which are afforded by the internet, a body in which going viral is the actual goal. So the only safe thing to do is to keep it locked inside my head for now, kept warm by the frictive dissonance of knowing how impossible it is to get anywhere in show business rubbing up against the rock-solid certainty of my idea's inevitability.

It does't matter anyway, though, because if nothing else, Black Mirror has proven incapable of being able to keep up with the satirization of real life. It's exceedingly difficult to explore the thought-experimental ramifications of current events and behavioral trends when you live in a world where all of the flat ground has been systematically replaced by only all slippery slopes everywhere. Any idea one might have to make a state of affairs seem ominous or potentially silly is, at every turn, outpaced by the goings-on of day-to-day living. It's like entering a clown car into a Formula 1 race, but somehow the clown car is honking and seltzering its way to a full lap's lead with relative ease.

Like, nothing I'm going to come up with is going to be as dramatically and jaw-droppingly stupid as the farce of "artificial intelligence" as it currently exists, in the abstract, or the completely out-of-the-blue insertion of it directly into the most sensitive parts of the government with no warning, training or context.

If you don't know, all military service members and Department of Defense War civilian employees had GenAI pop up as a shortcut on their government-issued workstations all at once last week, together simultaneously with a memo from Secretary of Pull-Ups Pete Hegseth giving zero guidance past, and I'm BARELY paraphrasing here, "you'll use this if you're not a total pussy."

Without burning my sources, I will say, this has been the first time I've seen large language models up close in action and this one... yeah, it's so useless it's actually dangerous. It's not just that it gives wrong answers to basic questions, it's designed to do so in human-emotional language so a) you won't get mad at it for being wrong, and b) it will give you confidence to keep using it, so long as you aren't interested in how it reaches its conclusions. It's like being handed a shovel handle with no spade on the end, but they gave it a pair of googly eyes. Sure, it can't do anything like the job you need doing (and may actually be a hindrance), but awwww, look at the funny little guy! You can't throw away a funny little guy!

It will--and this is true--tell you it is 100% certain about an answer you know to be wrong. And then when you point out that it's wrong, it will profusely apologize and praise you for your keen, piercing insight. It will also (someone told me!) explicitly admit that it is designed to provide useful answers, not correct answers. The criteria for what is "useful" isn't that important or interesting, but the point is, "correct" is an aspect of "useful" in the program as it currently stands, but it's nowhere near definitive or required as a component of a response. What's more important is that you feel as though it's done a job, with the finitudinal confidence of 100% certainty, without any regard for whether it's reflecting 100% of anything, let alone certainty. That's one of the hardest things to have 100% of!

So my Black Mirror idea about a whistleblower/retired ninja in a world where weekly personal blogging ended up on a J-curve trend-line instead of blowing away like a house made of straw or perhaps sticks back in like 2005, so he's also a celebrated cultural figure as well, but he ends up in a battle of wits, nerve and probably some throwing stars against a swaggering artificial intelligence vying for control of the nation's nuclear arsenal and porn sites, well, that's just going to have to get shoved into the dustbin of other GREAT IDEAS I've had as being too pedestrian now. Like my old half-written teleplay where Ronald Reagan eventually becomes a hated villain, it's just become passé. Back to the drawing board.

The Most Important Least Important Thing

You don't often get a shot to redo a mistake of missing The Most Important Thing In The World. It's the premise of a lot of movies of course, but they all involve mysticism or time travel or some woo-woo Hollywood hand-waving that somehow manages to get fully grown legal adults' consciousness puppeting the bodies of their former selves that may or may not be over the age of consent. There's a strong level of creep going on in the barely-sub subtext of it, but if you're Jennifer Garner or Tom Hanks, a boatload of personal charisma can paper over a lot of that.

Wait, those were both movies about kids jumping into the bodies of adults, not the other way around. Way creepier and in no way helpful to my metaphor, but I didn't really realize how extensive that subgenre of body horror comedies was. Huh. Hollywood is disgusting.

See, the 20-year-old me from 1994 has found himself transported to the body of me at 51 years old in 2025. First of all: yuck. What's with all this extra body hair? And who said it was OK for me to get this fat? Note to future-future me: just because "you can always move up to XXL T-shirts" doesn't mean that should be a goal, you know? But alternately, hey, you found a way to make a career out of majoring in history that wasn't law school or barista, good for us! Implausible, but encouraging!

In 1994, the international extortion racket and pirate cartel known as FIFA made the insane decision to put their signature event, the World Cup,* in the United States. It seems absurd now as we have the televisual rights for essentially every top-tier national league in the world (and some of the lower tier ones) in this country, but at that time, I will remind you that soccer was, with grotesque and inexcusable inaccuracy, labelled "gay." In 1980s-speak of course that means "things that threaten me because I do not understand them yet many other people seem to enthusiastically enjoy," which only mostly included actual homosexuality in this category. And the ones who used it the most viciously and vociferously turned out often to be just, as we would say today, manifesting.

Because of the money involved necessitating a high-profile rollout and ad push, and the fact that I was a college student with plenty of free time in the afternoons, I found myself dipping in to watch parts of matches from time to time. I couldn't even say that I watched that much (we were pretty sure about the epidemiology of "gayness" back then, and that's definitely one way to get it on you, by watching stuff other people might make fun of you for if they caught you in the act), or even all of the USA matches. The famous shock win over Colombia decided by an own-goal that eventually got Colombian player Andrés Escobar killed I heard about after the fact. And this happened at the Rose Bowl, like 30 miles from my house. I can't imagine what I was doing that seemed more important at the time, probably just busy trying to figure out how to wear my clothes backward.

And then they had a WHOLE WORLD CUP FINAL in the same place, just like a week or two later! An easy drive away! With mostly adequate parking! And I didn't even TRY to go!

Now, though, redemption is an option. In 2026 they're finally running it back. However, after really drinking the poison in 1998 where I think I watched every available match, the World Cup is probably my favorite thing. I love it more than any movie or book or anything else one might take in with their senses in their discretionary time. This week they've had the draw for the games and Team USA is playing several of them right here in SoCal again, this time at Fancy Landed Spaceship SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, which I know from personal experience I can get to and return home in the space of a single day. It almost bothers me the level of compulsion that now exists in my being driving me to procure tickets to at least one of these matches.

Part of the reason it bothers me is I don't like feeling like something outside of me has control of my decision-making functions, but we are where we are, as far as that goes. I'm not going to choose not to be unreasonably excited about LITERALLY EVERYTHING, that's a pose, not a way to actually live. I'm pretty full on GenX when it comes to apathy and the allergy to earnestness, but even I have my limits.

The second part that bothers me is that my money is going to go to the most absurdly disgustingly brazenly openly corrupt international organization in the history of international organizations, which is saying something when we know the International Olympic Committee exists.

But I'm trapped. It's the thing I love the most, except maybe my children. Would I love my children less if they were involved in human trafficking, slave labor and the general immiseration of segments of the world population that would already show up pre-miserated? Probably, but you know, rest assured, the relationship would then be complicated. Like the way people who became adults in the 1970s now feel about Woody Allen films.

And that's about as much influence as we have in this world where basically everything has been corrupted. We get to feel conflicted about it. Make no mistake, I'm going to overpay for this ticket if I can get hold of one and I'm going to go, mostly because the next time the event rolls around this way, I'll likely be either too old or too dead for the steep rake of upper-deck stadium seats. So I'll take my second bite at the cherry here and let the moral dissonance ride. It's not like I haven't had a Chik-Fil-A sandwich since they were outed as being shitbirds. I've got some real practice at this rationalization thing.

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*We didn't have to call it the Men's World Cup yet as we were still laboring under the delusion that nobody would be interested in women's sports even though like 50% of households had tuned in to watch the ladies' figure skating final alone in the Olympics that year. Oh Lillehammer, you were wonderful.