No Sleep Til...

It's kind of a bummer when the best you can do in a good news/bad news situation is a qualitative relativism that lets you recast what would normally be the kind of thing to ruin your week in normal circumstances as "well, maybe it's for the best." That's a fair ways away from "actually possibly good," but that condition as a concept seems to have been pause-buttoned in about 2014.

For example, this past week my team lost one game away from the championship, which I talked about in the previous blog; the positive spin would be to point out that I'll be spared a lot of stress-watching from here on out, so that's a win for my over-taxed limbic system! I do lose the chance at distraction, missing out now on the sweet soft-caramel florality of sportsball superficiality masking the bog-fever fetid reek of... well, literally everything else. But that doesn't get to qualify as "bad news" when we've got state sponsored extrajudicial murder and acts of terrorism by government actors describing what would be an otherwise peaceful, normal American city as though it were a war zone. Without the sports, I guess now I have time to really focus on the important stuff. Which is terrible news for my over-taxed limbic system!

If it sounds like I've run myself in a complete emotional circle here, that's because it's the only shape we're allowed to experience anymore. Complexity in all its forms has been banished from every social and experiential level, from politics and economics and news in general to entertainment and sports, the gravity exerted by the grim, inevitable banality of the black hole at the center of it all, warping every news cycle it touches, leaves us with a perfectly circular ouroboros in the form of a snake angrily fellating itself. Which is no small feat considering snakes have two dicks.

Everything is so obvious and overwhelmingly simple, it frustrates the possibility of hiding out in a niche corner of interest or self-interest to find even a bit of relief, which would be the best we could do when we know that anything actually good isn't even remotely on offer. The historian in me says that the long view is the right one, that the way things are now is unsustainable and will pass. Happy things small (football!) and great (the concept of a just society!) will reassert themselves at some point, certainly, right? But when things like whole Constitutional liberties are being set aside in favor of arrest quotas and extortion for the sake of undermining future elections, even that gets the gritted-teeth emoji and a long exhaling "yyyyeeeeeeeeeahhhh...." trailing off into a question mark.

I wish I had a better message of positivity and hope, but it looks like the only way forward currently, when it comes to your community, is to look to the Upper Midwest and see that the best way to keep yourself occupied is actual action. I don't know what it will look like in your community when the need arrives, it just seems like it's going to involve a lot of whistles.

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.