Stumbling Locomotive I

"Keep A-shovelin' That Coal"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One of the earliest of the pre-modern mixes¹ was Stumbling Locomotive.  Like most of the pre-moderns,² this was made to play at parties, and its central conceit was that it would feature songs that started off a bit slow, perhaps staggering around a bit, but then eventually worked up a full head of steam and went rolling and rollicking along.  Such songs are great for parties, in my opinion, because they provide natural breaks: particularly when you’re dancing, as one song fades and the next one begins, if the new song starts off slow, that gives you a little break, a short time to cool off before the song eventually hits its stride and you can get back to your frenetic gyrations.

Now, like all the pre-modern mixes, the original version was both chock full of songs from the period of my second college attendance (roughly 1989 – 1992) and riddled with bad choices.  Not meaning bad songs, of course, just songs that didn’t really fit the theme.  For instance, “Sin” by Nine Inch Nails was originally on this mix.  And that’s a fantastic song, and great to play at parties, but in no way does it fit the description I gave above.³  So this is probably the pre-modern mix that’s been most extensively reworked: less than half the tracks from the original mix survive, and only a third of what remains falls into that college timeframe that tend to dominate the other pre-moderns.⁴  As I started to get the vibe for the mix, it was easy to find songs that fit the theme.

For instance, songs about trains are common, and many of them actually tend to sound like trains.  And that’s sort of the epitome of what this mix is about.  If you can write a song about a train that has the same rhythm as a train rolling down the tracks (and if you can manage to avoid it being a country song), you’ve really got something kinda cool.  “Train” by 4 Non Blondes is perhaps the best example of this; if you’re familiar with that album,⁵ it’s even got a picture of a train right on the cover.  It’s a kind of wacky, cartoon train, sure, but there it is nonetheless.  And, on this album with a train on the cover, there’s a song called “Train” that both sounds like a train and is about a train.⁶  Plus it has a harmonica!  Totally trainy.

Many songs on that album have that train vibe, though none are quite as on the nose.  Still, “Old Mr. Hefffer” gives “Train” a run for its money, so it earned a spot here as well.  But, for powerful female vocals belting out train-inspired lyrics, Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes has a powerful competitor in Liz Phair, whose “Baby Got Going” not only has the harmonica, but also gives us our very trainy volume title.  And we can’t leave out Johnette Napolitano: Concrete Blonde’s “Carry Me Away,” which is the transition song between the “Day Side” and “Night Side” of their amazing album Free actually throws the line “Today I saw a train roll by the river” into its first verse, and the song follows the now familiar pattern of starting off slow and then kicking it into high gear.

Of course, that brings up the question of how Stumbling Locomotive differs from Creeping Rageaholic.  The main thing is, songs on that latter mix tend to burst forth into being; these mostly ramp up gradually.⁷  And these songs have a rolling quality that is reminiscent of riding on a train.  Perhaps the best example of this is to look at Pete Yorn, who has tracks from his musicforthemorningafter featured on both mixes.  “For Nancy” is a song you belt out when you’re in a joyous mood; “Life on a Chain” is one that just carries you along in its wake while you bop your head and carry on with what you were doing.  Heck, some of these tracks actually don’t have the slow start: “Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives has that rhythmic rolling right from the opening notes and it maintains a frenetic pace throughout.  And “Railroad Steel” by the Georgia Satellites—a band which is very good at cozying up to that line that separates Southern rock from country without ever crossing it—keeps a pretty steady pace throughout as well (plus it has lots more train similes).  On the other hand, “Burn Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees really does start out a bit slow in the first half of the first verse, picks up the pace in the second half, and finally hits its strides with the chorus.  No train imagery in this one, but the harmonica is back, and I challenge anyone to listen to this track (which is about a pyromaniac) and not think “train.”

As much as this rework diverges from the original version, there’s one place they’re exactly the same: the opener.  It was always “It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds.  Once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives” by 120 Minutes music critic Dave Kendall, this band from Wales⁸ produced a great Britpop first album (Pop Said), and, while their follow-up Crawdaddy was not quite as impressive, its opening track will always epitomize this vibe for me.  It doesn’t really sound like a train, but it starts out slow and quiet, building gradually, with some breathy vocalizations from Andrea Lewis, and eventually that driving bassline kicks in, and that carries the song (and the listener) along for the rest of the journey.  It’s just brilliant.

In fact, several of the tracks here are less reminiscent of trains so much as they remind me of galloping horses.  One of the first additions to the rework was in fact “Shadow of Love” by the Damned, off the brilliant Phantasmagoria.  With Dave Vanian at his gothiest, the rhythm section of Brynn Merrick and Rat Scabies turned in some of their best work on this track.  The song takes the occasional break from that strong canter, but the sonic reflections of hoofbeats always come back, driving on and on and on.  It was an early choice for second track here.  And another track that showcases that rolling equine gait is “Take Me I’m Yours” by Squeeze.  This was actually their first single, originally released back in 1977, but I never heard it until I picked up what is quite possibly the best greatest hits compilation ever: Singles: 45’s and Under.  Every song on that collection is a winner, and this, the opening track, is a great example of what we’re looking to achieve here.

For another song that gives that riding-on-a-horse vibe, there’s the aptly named “Ride,” also from Liz Phair (she can do trains and horses, on the same album, even).  The titular ride is more of a car ride, granted; here’s my favorite lyric from the song:

I don’t know, but I’ve been told
That the road to heav’n is paved with gold
And, if I die before I wake,
I need a ride ...

The best thing about this bit is that she compresses “heaven” down to a single syllable, which makes it sound remarkably like “hell,” so you’re not quite sure which one she’s singing.  Chef’s kiss.  And I follow that up with KT Tunstall’s “Push That Knot Away,” from her magnum opus Tiger Suit.  As I’ve said before,⁹ Tunstall reminds a lot of Phair, in both style and attitude, but with significant enough differences that pairing them isn’t repetitive.  So I put these two back-to-back in the closing triptych of the volume: “Knot” has a slightly different rolling gait than “Ride,” but it’s quite insistent as well.  But perhaps the best example of this rolling beat outside of “Shadow of Love” is another late-80s-early-90s classic, “Away” by the Feelies.  With two drummers, a great bassist, and some guitar work that somehow manages to sound like lonely train whistles, “Away,” with its Jonathan-Demme-directed video, was my introduction to the Feelies, and still stands as their greatest achievement in my opinion.  It was a natural choice to open up the back third.

Stumbling Locomotive I
[ Keep A-shovelin' That Coal ]

“It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds, off Crawdaddy
“Shadow of Love” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“Old Mr. Heffer” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Life on a Chain” by Pete Yorn, off musicforthemorningafter
“Say Amen (Saturday Night)” by Panic! at the Disco, off Pray for the Wicked
“On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, off On the Corner Where You Live
“Take Me I'm Yours” by Squeeze, off Singles: 45's and Under [Compilation]
“Railroad Steel” by Georgia Satellites, off Georgia Satellites
“Baby Got Going” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Burn-Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Cakewalk” by House of Freaks, off Cakewalk
“Carry Me Away” by Concrete Blonde, off Free
“Train” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“I Wonder Why” by the Heart Throbs, off Cleopatra Grip
“Cecilia Ann” by Pixies, off Bossanova
“Away” by the Feelies, off Only Life
“The Bosses Daughter” by the Lucky Bullets, off Dead Man's Shoes
“Shine On” by the House of Love, off The House of Love [Butterfly Album]
“Add It Up” by Violent Femmes, off Violent Femmes
“Gipsy Threat” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Ride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Push That Knot Away” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“400 Bucks” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat

Total:  24 tracks,  80:23

There are 3 bridges used here, of which “Cecilia Ann” by the Pixies is easily the one which hews closest to the theme: it’s a hard driving instrumental with impeccable basswork from Kim Deal (as always) and a great beat from Lovering, though it’s (somewhat surprisingly) Black Francis’ rhythm guitar that provides the “chunk-a-chunk” that gives it its impetus.  And of course Joey Santiago’s great Western-sounding ringing guitar chords.  I thought it made a nice lead-in to “Away.” Next, the title track of House of Freaks’ third full-length album Cakewalk has that great Johny Hott percussion and the now familiar rolling beat; it introduces the middle stretch of the volume.  Finally, I felt that the back third needed a little something in the middle to introduce the return of Liz Phair, so I found a bit of electronica from Ratatat¹⁰ which also featured that galloping hoofbeat rhythm that features so heavily here.

There’s not too much surprising going on.  I did want to add a few newer tunes, so I slotted in “Say Amen” by Panic! at the Disco, which is, to be fair, more of a happy trot than a proper canter, but I think it still works here, followed immediately by “On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, a lovely Australian band that I discovered through a coworker at my current job.  They’ve been around since 2010, and this album (of which “Corner” is the title track) is from 2018, but I never heard of them until 2020, when this coworker suggested a song from their 2012 EP as our “push song.”¹¹  That song had more of a Simon-and-Garfunkel vibe to raised-by-my-record-collector-father me, but it was intriguing enough to me to send me scurrying to listen to more of their work.  As it turns out, Corner is a fantastic album, and this track is one of those not-quite-downbeat songs with a very steady pace that I thought was quite excellent coming off the much more ebuillient “Amen.” Finally, the Lucky Bullets is a Norwegian rockabilly band (as unlikely as that sounds) that also treads dangerously close to that country line, although they rarely trip over it.  “The Bosses Daughter” [sic] trades the harmonica in for a trumpet, giving it a Western hoofbeat that’s almost enough to earn it a spot on Tumbledown Flatland.  But I thought it worked well here.

For more late-80s-early-90s goodness, “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes is a classic that, again, starts off slow and quiet, then picks up the pace.  As always, Brian Ritchie’s basswork is the stand-out, giving it the requisite rhythm.  Meanwhile, “Shine On” by House of Love hits the pace right out of the gate, then alternates between slowing down (but never too much) and speeding up (but never to a reckless level).  Both are perhaps a slight stretch here, but they match well with “Away,” and using “The Bosses Daughter” to break up the 80s goodness just seemed to work.  Our final track from this period is from the criminally forgotten Heart Throbs, who hail from Reading, home to the lead singer of the Sundays.  And Cleopatra Grip was even released the same year as Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but the latter was a huge hit while the former produced one song that hit #2 on the Modern Rock charts and then they seemed to fade from the spotlight.¹²  And there’s no good reason for it: Cleopatra Grip is a fantastic album with consistently good songs, and “I Wonder Why” has the perfect beat for this mix.

Our volume closer is one of those patented screech fests from the Reverend Horton Heat, “400 Bucks.” The psychobilly auteur is going off this time about some money owed by an ex-girlfriend.  The relentless pace just adds to the desperation in Heat’s voice, and I thought it worked well to wrap up the set.

Next time, it’s time to get dark again.

__________

1 You can find a definition of that term in the series list.

2 Probably all of them, with the exception of Wisty Mysteria.

3 Which is why now you can find it on an entirely different mix.

4 The worst offender on that score being HipHop Bottlerocket, whose volume I is still 80% composed of tracks from that narrow slice of music history.

5 Yes, “album” singular.  4 Non Blondes only ever had the one, and it was primarily known for containing “What’s Up?” Which, as songs go, was ... fine.  It was fine.  Perfectly lovely.  But, like I said about Natalie Imbruglia: the rest of the album is so much better.

6 I mean, technically the song is about something else, but it uses a bunch of train imagery, which is close enough.

7 To be fair, “Carry Me Away” is a bit of an outlier there, and it might have qualified for Creeping Rageaholic if it weren’t for the obvious train imagery.

8 Perhaps oddly—or perhaps not—the Primitives are from Coventry, which is just a bit to the right of Wales on the map.

9 Specifically, on Sirenexiv Cola.

10 You may recall them from Paradoxically Sized World VI.

11 Specifically, it was “Leopold Street,” off Young North.

12 Technically, they produced two more albums, but I didn’t even know that until doing the research for this blog post.  I may have to track them down.

Feeling so good-natured I could drool

This month, we’re getting new Heroscape for the first time in 14 years, and a new edition of D&D (despite the fact that they refuse to admit it’s a new edition) for the first time in 10.  Exciting times for my two primary gaming passions.  So far all we’ve seen are previews, but I’m cautiously optimistic.  Probably more so for the Heroscape “Renegade wave 1” (really wave 14) than the D&D “Fifth Edition 2024 rules” (really 5.5e, or, as the great Dael Kingsmill has dubbed it: “5e2e”).  But still looking forward to both.  Good times for fantasy gaming fans.

Actual Play Time, Part 1: Discovery of the New World

[This is the first post in a new series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[If you’re wondering why D&D is such an important part of my life, I encourage you to read my D&D and Me series.  Parts of this post are adapted from part 8 of that series.]

While I am safely on the Gen X side of the Garofalo curve, I have to cop to being on the backside of that arc.  And one of the things I never understood was the fascination with watching other people play games, especially videogames.  My brother (11 years younger than I) and his friends would do it all the time: I specifically remember going out with him and his friends our first Christmas home after his high school graduation.  We went to someone’s house to play videogames; there were about six of us, and two controllers.  And, when people weren’t playing, they were avidly watching.  I was bored.  I don’t specifically remember thinking to myself “I’m too old for this shit,” but I may as well have.  (And, given that the rest of the crowd was only 10 when the R-rated movie which that quote references came out and so likely never got to see it, it would have been oddly appropriate.)

Later, when I had kids, there was a lot of watching other people play videogames, because: YouTube.  Twitch and YouTube have made videos of watching other people play games something of a new artform (often called “Let’s Play” videos).  These are often very long videos—hours and hours, sometimes—and yet our children, with their suppoedly short attention spans, watch them all the time.  Sometimes this is to see if they want to purchase the game (videogames can be quite pricey, so it’s a good way to be smart with your allowance money), and sometimes it’s just background noise while they do other things, but often they just enjoy watching the people play.

And I was always someone to whom this seemed kind of silly.  Why watch other people play? just play yourself!  Or so I would think.  And I always just shook my head in a “kids today” sort of fashion.  I didn’t tell them not to watch, of course—nothing makes your child want to do a thing more than forbidding them from doing it—but I thought it was a dumb thing that hopefully they would grow out of eventually.  Certainly I never imagined that I would ever spend hours watching someone else play a game.

I can no longer remember when this happened—hell, I can’t even remember which kid it was at this point—but it was most likely in 2016 or ‘17 when I happened to wander through the room where one of my kids was watching a Let’s Play video.  No clue what game it was either, but I distinctly remember the joy in the player’s voice, and the lilting Irish accent.  The guy was hilarious.  “Who’s that?” I asked, drawn to watch over my child’s shoulder.  And, the answer, delivered in that “what are you, stupid?” tone that only your children can deliver, was: ”Jacksepticeye.” This was unlike any of the other Let’s Play videos I’d ever seen: Jack wasn’t trying to make me love the game, he wasn’t trying to make fun of the game, he wasn’t trying to do some artsy or clever commentary on the game ... he was just playing the game, and having fun, and being damned entertaining while doing it.  Even though I can’t claim to have become a big Jacksepticeye fan after that—I didn’t go around watching a bunch of his other videos or anything—I have to credit him with changing me in a fundamental way.  Before I discovered Jacksepticeye, I didn’t think watching other people play games could be fun.  Afterwards ... it was like discovering I’d been fundamentally wrong about something my whole life, and, now that I had realized it, I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.  Pretty much exactly like that, in fact.

And I began to understand that my whole attitude (which, from hanging out on the Internet, I already knew was not unique to me) was kind of stupid.  Why watch someone else play a game when you could just play yourself?  By that logic, the entire sports industry becomes meaningless, and yet there’s a multi-billion-dollar business—several, even!—in having people play games so other people will watch them.  But of course this illuminates why it’s tricky: sure, watching an NBA game can be pretty damned exciting, but that doesn’t mean that watching any random game of people playing basketball will be fun.  There are many factors to consider: the talent of the players, the production value of the presentation, the knowledge of the commentators, and so on. 

But, still, Jacksepticeye proves one thing: it is possible to make watching other people play videogames entertaining.  And, if I could enjoy watching someone else play a videogame, when I don’t even like videogames all that much, surely I could enjoy watching someone play D&D, which I absolutely adore.  Because, up until that point, the idea of watching other people play D&D had seemed just as stupid as watching other people play videogames.  How could that possibly be entertaining?  But now I was living in a whole new mental paradigm.  And I knew that there were a lot of these D&D videos out there (what would eventually come to be called “actual play” shows) ... not just videos, but podcasts too.  The field was still fairly young back then, but there was already a bewildering array of choices.  So, cautiously, I decided to try a few.

And, honestly, none of them were that great.  Oh, sure, they had their moments, but they weren’t sucking me in the way good ol’ Jacksepticeye had.  There were a bunch of “CelebriD&D” videos on YouTube, but they were edited to hell and back.  In a way, this makes sense.  Going with the sports analogy, D&D is not basketball.  In terms of pacing, it’s more like baseball ... if not golf.  And, if you don’t have time to watch the 3 or 4 hour baseball game, what do you do?  You watch the highlights, of course.  But the thing is, you can boil a baseball game down to just highlights.  There’s not a whole lot of context required for any given play, and what little there is can be described by a competent color commentator in a few brief sentences.  But D&D is different: there’s an underlying story, and, without that context, the exciting moments are far less exciting.

Eventually I came across Force Grey (this would have been the first season).  Now, I didn’t really know who this Matt Mercer guy was, though I recognized him from a bunch of the other videos (apparently he was quite popular for running D&D actual plays).  And I’m sure I knew Ashley Johnson because I had almost certainly started watching Blindspot by that point.  But mainly I was here for Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray.  A couple of comedians I knew and liked, playing a game of D&D?  This should be good!  And it was ... okay.  Mercer was competent, and discovering Utkarsh Ambudkar was an unexpected joy, and the story was decent, but it just didn’t grab me.  Some of the players were competent, others were just learning, but it was obvious they were having difficulty gelling as a team.  Once again: you can’t just throw 10 people off the street onto a basketball court and expect magic to happen.  Season 2 would eventually come along and be much better, but season 1 was just ... meh.

And then I heard that a new show was going to come out with Deborah Ann Woll, who I knew (and liked) from True Blood and Daredevil.  And, back then, it was still fairly unusual to see a woman in the DM’s chair, and I thought that might be worth checking out.  Episode 1 was set to feature Matthew Lillard, who most probably think of as Shaggy or “that kid from Hackers,” but I always preferred him in Scream and Thirteen Ghosts, so that seemed promising as well.  As soon as the first episode was out on YouTube, I sat down to watch it.

Relics and Rarities was all I’d hoped for, but also much more.  First off, it was perfectly edited: not just the highlights, like the failed attempts in the “CelebriD&D” videos, but not completely unedited, as seemed to be popular in other, longer videos.  It was still people sitting around a table and actually playing the game—no cheap gimmicks like animation or puppets—but the set dressing was excellent, and there were sound effects.  When Woll described the party as being in a dank castle with a fierce thunderstorm raging outside, a crack of lightning could be seen in the faux window set into the faux stone wall behind the players, and peals of thunder punctutated the table talk.  Just enough, mind you: not so much as to be distracting, but not so little as to make no difference.  Lillard knew what he was doing, obviously; I could tell he was a long-time player, but I could also tell that he was one of those folks for whom D&D is somehow a competitive game, even though it very much is not.  He was the sort of player who competes with his fellow players (and sometimes himself) to always do the optimal thing, always do the coolest thing, and often got frustrated when he couldn’t (or tried to and failed).  But the other four players were very solid: two were obviously actors, and the other two (who I would eventually come to know as two of the best players in the actual play space) were consummate professionals.  Watching Jasmine Bhullar and Xander Jeanneret play was perhaps not like watching Jordan play basketball, but certainly as satisfying as walking into a no-name dive bar and realizing that the rhythm section of the band that just happens to be playing that night is more amazing than three-quarters of the musicians on the albums you own.  And, by the end of the first episode, they had changed Lillard in a fundamental way, teaching him something about the game that he seemed surprised he could still learn.  And Woll herself?  A master storyteller, fond of setting puzzles for her players, always understanding how to motivate the PCs, perhaps a bit more lenient than I personally would be, but always in service of the Rule of Cool.  I was blown away.

Because, you see, I realized that I had been watching this new actual play thing all wrong.  I was treating it like sports: the thrill of watching people at the top of their game perform amazing feats, the empathy of experiencing the highs and lows, the satisfaction of armchair-quarterbacking a game that you yourself play well (or used to).  But, no: actual play is not that.  Or, it sort of can be that, and some of it is nothing but that.  But those aren’t the good ones.  The good ones are the ones that are taking advantage of this entirely new medium of storytelling to tell tales that you can’t really see anywhere else.  Just as a novel can tell stories that a movie can’t (and vice versa), or a comic book series can tell stories that a TV series can’t (and vice versa), actual play can tell stories that nothing else can.  Unlike a novel, it’s collaborative, and far more so than a comic.  Movies and plays and televsion are more collaborative, but still there’s usually one writer (or at most a handful), and the characters in all those other media serve the plot.  If someone forgets something, it’s because they needed to forget that thing for events to be set in motion.  If one character hurts another, it’s because the one character needs to learn from it, or because the other character needs to have something to regret, or because the audience needs to pick a side.  Characters die because an author or screenwriter decided it would have maximum dramatic effect.

But, in actual play (at least when done well), the GM builds a world and sets the PCs loose in it.  Each character has their own arc, and that arc is completely controlled by the “actor” portraying them.  Normally an actor, whether in film, television, or stageplay, has the constraint of playing the character as written on the page, using the words they’re given.  But, in actual play, a player can do anything they want with their character, take them in any direction that feels natural.  And, most importantly, there are dice.  The element of randomness the dice provide adds something that no other medium can compete with.  A good DM harnesses that unpredictability, never letting it derail the story, but letting it add wrinkles and twists and complications.  The resulting tapestry of big swings and near misses, huge triumphs and massive failures, is both complex and beautiful, and unlike any other form of storytelling.

Actual play is a new medium.  The fact that you’re watching people play a game is almost incidental to that fact: it’s a bit fun, especially if you know the game yourself, but it’s totally unnecessary to enjoy the story.  The story is the thing, the thing that makes actual play special.  The stories told via actual play are unique, amazing, engrossing, and transcendent.  And that’s what this series will explore.

Next time we look at some of the different forms actual play can take.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

This week, I had yet another computer go down on me, which means my weekend went to shit pretty fast.  So there’s no time to tell you that I won’t be posting much of anything this week.  So just imagine that I did.  Should be fairly easy.

Enshittification Happens

Once upon a time, Cory Doctorow was known for writing books (inasmuch as he was known at all, which was probably only in very specific circles).  Nowadays, he’s more known for his opinions on modern Internet culture: opposing DRM, encouraging Creative Commons, etc.  He’s been featured in xkcd comics and in Ready Player One (the book, not the movie).  I’ve never read a Cory Doctorow novel (or short story, or graphic novel, or anything).  But I know what enshittification is.

So I was quite surprised—but pleased—to see Cory Doctorow show up in a More Perfect Union video that I was watching.  If you don’t know MPU, they do exposé-style videos, primarily focussing on how the billionaires are trying to screw you over (and mostly succeeding).  Well worth a YouTube subscribe, if you’re into that sort of thing.  And, the other night, right in the middle of learning why food delivery has gotten so ridiculously expensive, there’s Cory Doctorow, talking about enshittification.

Now, if you don’t know what that means, here’s how he phrased it when he first coined the term in a Wired article:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.  Then, they die.  I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Or, if you prefer, just check out the video I just mentioned, and hop to around 6:19.  It’ll take longer, but it’s a more gradual explanation (with examples, even), so it may work better for some people.

Now, first of all, Cory is absolutely correct about what enshittification is, how it works, and that it’s a real, observable phenomenon.  But where I will nitpick his definition is that I don’t think it’s limited to Internet platforms.  This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeated in businesses throughout the modern age.  Remember AT&T?  Once upon a time AT&T was considered considered the most reliable name in the communications business.  Then they were a customer service joke that every business had to use because what other options were there?  None that a fledgling business could take seriously!  And then they were a monopoly and the government broke them up.

Since, I’m very old, I actually remember the breakup of AT&T and the creation of the “Baby Bells.” I distinctly remember my father (the staunch Republican) repeating exactly what he’d been told: this will hurt the consumer!  Prices will go up, not down!  And, you know what?  He was right.  In the short term, the prices did actually go up, while the Baby Bells figured out how to charge and what fees to tack on where.  But, less than 10 years later, minutes of long distance became so cheap that some companies tried literally giving them away: one 90s ad screamed “you can’t beat free!” But then I suppose concentrating on short-term gains and ignoring long-term consequences is sort of the whole vibe of the Republican party.

You see this pattern in plenty of other companies’ histories: IBM (when my father was in charge of computers for a large paper mill, buying Hewlett-Packard instead of IBM was considered a risky move; nowadays IBM marketing is a literal joke: “if IBM bought KFC, they’d rename the product to ‘greasy dead chicken parts.’”), Microsoft (their OS market share went from 93% in 2009 to 27% today; in the same period, their browser market share dropped from 65% to 5%), Boeing (from the only plane some people would fly in to the butt of late-night comedians, Congressional investigations, and NTSB sanctions).  And everyone has their anecdotal evidence.  In my case, it’s Dropbox.  When I first signed up with Dropbox in 2010, they were a small, scrappy company with amazing customer service.  What led me to cancelling their service entirely was having a single ticket closed 4 times in a row without ever receiving a single answer to my actual question.  Ten years ago I could get an email from an actual tech person.  Three years ago, it was obvious people were being judged on how fast they “closed” a ticket and not at all on whether the customers actually got any help.  They had their users locked in, they had their businesses locked in, and the amount of trouble I had to go through to drop them is just not something most people will suffer through.  Personally, I would have paid ten times what a Dropbox subscription cost, as long as I wasn’t paying it to them—hell, I’m sure I actually did end up paying about that much, in the long run.  But then I’m a stubborn asshole.  Most people will just suffer in silence, resigned to their fate.  It takes longer for a company than an Internet platform, but it’s the same process.  Enshittification.

Now, one thing you might notice about Cory’s original definition that doesn’t fit my examples is this sentence: “Then, they die.” AT&T got broken up, but they didn’t actually die ... they’re currently (as of 2023) 13th in the Fortune 500.  Microsoft was eventually declared a monopoly, but no one ever did anything about it; things like Internet Explorer and the Zune and the BSOD (or “Blue Screen of Death”) became cultural punchlines, but they’re currently 14th in the Fortune 500.  As for Boeing ... well the stock has dipped, and its Fortune 500 rating is down (somewhere in the neighborhood of 52nd, I believe), but it hardly seems in danger of disappearing altogether.  Time will tell, but I shouldn’t at all be surprised to see Boeing rising from the ashes in a few years.  It’ll likely get a bit worse before it gets better, but I’m sure it’ll be fine in the long run.

Of course, the trick here is that Cory was talking about platforms ... not companies.  Facebook may well die (and it damn well should), but Meta will likely live on.  Google’s search engine’s lifespan is probably measured in units of AI advancement, but Alphabet will continue to produce gobbledygook that we simply must use.  And how about Über, whose branch Über Eats was fingered in the very video that inspired this post?  Oh, they’re riding high right now: they locked in the users by killing taxi service, they locked in the businesses (in this case, restaurants) by making individual delivery drivers economically impratical and crushing their competition (like Grubhub), and now they’re (finally) making money by charging us as much as 50% more for food than we’d pay if we’d just get off our lazy butts and go pick it up ourselves.  But there will come the inevitable crash—at some point, we just won’t be able to afford to be lazy any more—and Über Eats will probably die ... but I bet Über itself won’t.  In business parlance, this is called “pivoting”: one market is performing poorly, so you pivot to another.  A more apt analogy would be a sharecropper who wasn’t bright enough to rotate their crops and so now the soil won’t grow anything, so they just pick up and move down the road to a fresh plot of land.  Or a traveling carny saying “we’ve fleeced all the suckers we can here; time to move on to the next town.”

It’s interesting to me to watch the landscape changing.  When I was a kid, “socialist” was about the worst thing you could call a policy or an idea.  Nowadays, when anyone on TV says “that’s socialism!” you’ll find a dozen (or a hundred) videos on YouTube or TikTok responding “so what?” All the adults in my life taught me that unions were terrible: any time you saw a bunch of people standing around doing nothing, you’d blame the unions.  It never made much sense to me—the organizations that brought us the weekend, and overtime pay, and minimum wage, and sick leave, and child labor laws ... those are somehow bad?—but almost everyone I knew bought into it.  Nowadays, there are new unions popping up everywhere, and the President is appearing on picket lines to show solidarity.  In my father’s time (and still in my father’s mind) it seemed to be universally accepted that rich people must be geniuses, and that giving them more money would somehow “trickle down” to the rest of us.  Now the majority of society seems to be waking up to the wise words of Dogbert, who once said “Beware the advice of successful people: they do not seek company.”

If you think about it, this makes sense.  Anyone who goes to the trouble of amassing a billion dollars (or more) is just getting money for the sake of getting money.  At some point, you had enough money to buy anything you wanted, to pass on to your children if you felt like it ... to just live off the interest.  But still you kept getting more.  Why?  Just to show you could, I suppose.  So these people—and the companies they found, or run, or espouse—are attempting to separate us from our wallets in the most expedient way possible, and, as soon as one way stops working—or even falters just a bit, so that an easier way seems more attractive—they move on to the next.  I don’t necessarily blame those people: to me, that seems like blaming a tiger for eating you.  The tiger is just hungry, that’s all.  But when there are people in the village telling you how awesome and handsome and brilliant the tiger is for eating all your neighbors ... well, those people I can blame.  The tiger doesn’t need your help.  He’s doing just fine all on his own.  You know who needs your help?  The people building the anti-tiger defense system.  How about we all pitch in on that?  At the very least, perhaps we can slow the tide of enshittification.  Because tiger droppings are full of the corpses of the most vulnerable members of the village.  And ignoring that reality is ... kinda shitty.

How I loved your diamond eyes

When a show I thought was okay premieres its second season (or third, or fourth, or ...), I just watch the new season.  The recap is good enough.  When a show I thought was pretty good premieres a new season, I often back up two or three episodes to help refresh my memory and put me back in the vibe of the show.

But when a show that I really love puts out a new season, I go back to the beginning and watch it all again.  For instance, season 5 of Stranger Things (its final season) will come out next year, and I’ll go back to season 1, episode 1 and start watching, just as I did when season 4 came out, when season 3 came out, and when season 2 came out.  With the end result that, by the end of next year, I’ll have seen season 1 of Stranger Things five times, season 2 four times, season 3 three times, and season 4 twice.  Of course, I’ll only have seen season 5 once, but maybe I’ll rewatch it all from beginning to end a few more years hence.

I bring this up because season 4 of The Umbrella Academy (also the final season) is coming out next month, so I’ve started back around with episode 1 of season 1, and let me tell you: it’s just as amazing as it was the other 3 times I’ve watched it.  It’s about as close to a perfect episode of television as I can possibly imagine.  It sets up some extremely complicated family dynamics in an engaging way that epitomizes the maxim of “show, don’t tell”; it introduces a whopping 10 main characters in a way that cements them all firmly in our minds; it includes some amazing acting, some amazing music (including a gorgeous violin piece performed by Lindsey Stirling), and what may be the most perfect single cinematic shot that I’ve ever seen, set to (of all things) “I Think We’re Alone Now” by 80s pop star Tiffany.  I was really surprised how great it was all over again, the fourth time I’ve seen it.

Anyways, that’s my recommendation to you: go rewatch The Umbrella Academy.  Unless you haven’t seen it at all yet, in which case ... what are you waiting for?

Talking Is a Free Action

For some reason (most likely the reason is Nish Kumar), I’ve started watching Pod Save the UK.  I’m a bit of an Anglophile, and, while my main interest in the British is their comedians, I do find their politics a bit fascinating as well.  I’ll admit that, when I first starting getting into it many moons ago, it was primarily so I could understand more British jokes.  But I think it’s sort of morphed into a fascination with someone else’s politics.  When something in the UK is worse than it is here in the US, I can feel relieved that, as bad as it is here, at least we don’t have that problem; when something in the UK is better than here, I can bask in some envy and tell myself that here’s proof that we can do better too; when someting in the UK is about the same, I can commiserate and feel some camaraderie.  It’s a win/win/win.

As you may know, they recently held an election (which they initiated, conducted, and completed in about 3 weeks’ time), and in it the country roundly rejected the Conservative party (often still called the “Tories”), which had held sway for the past 14 years, privatizing things such as public transportation and water treatment to devastating effect, attempting to ship political refugees off to Rwanda, and (perhaps most infamously) engineering Brexit.  The election was even more of a rout for the Tories than predicted, with Labour more than doubling their number of seats, the Liberal Democrats more than sextupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling their seats (which brings them up to a whopping 4, but still), and the Tories plummeting from 372 seats to 121.  With things going so poorly in my own country’s politics, it’s nice to have a bit of vicarious joy in the politics of others.

But—and here’s the reason I bring all this up—in the run-up to their election, Pod Save the UK aired an episode on “tactical voting.” I wasn’t sure WTF this could possibly be, but it seemed quite controversial: many people were saying this was crucial for everyone to do, and others were saying it was a terrible precedent to set.  As I watched the episode, I began to realize that “tactical voting” just meant voting for the person who needs to win in order to get the outcome you want at the national level, rather than just voting for the candidate whose views most aligned with your own.  Of course, in the US, we just call that “voting.”

Hmph.

And so this whole kerfuffle about Biden really puzzles me.  It’s okay for the Democratic party to tell us to just vote for whoever they put up because they’re better than Trump, but it’s not okay for people to question whether or not Biden is the best choice to win against him?  I thought we were voting tactically here.  Perhaps it isn’t practical to replace Biden at this stage of the game, but for people to denigrate anyone who even brings up the topic is pretty ridiculous.  And there’s a lot of that going around these days.  I’m not sure I understand where they’re coming from.  But let me be clear about my viewpoint on the topic.

If you’re saying people should stop questioning Biden and just support him, you sound like those folks at the tail end of the pyramid scheme saying that everyone needs to calm down so that people continue to make their commissions.  Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.  It’s not like we can just pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that people don’t have serious misgivings about his performance.  I can tell you, for instance, that my father, a staunch Republican for as long as I’ve known him (and undoubtedly long before that), has already said that he will vote for anyone the Democrats put up ... except Biden.  I’m not saying this is a sensible attitude; I’m just saying that’s what he says.  Now, perhaps my father is completely unique among disaffected Republicans.  But I bet he isn’t.

If you’re saying it’s dumb to ask whether Biden can do the difficult job of being President because he’s already doing it, you’re completely missing the point.  It’s utterly irrelvant whether he can do the job or not.  The question is, can he win against Trump?  Personally, I would vote for a turnip running with the campaign slogan “At least I’m not Trump!” ... but that doesn’t mean I want the turnip to run.  Because the turnip can’t win.  Because not everyone is me.  Because not everyone is convinced by the “at least it’s not Trump” argument.  If Biden can’t win, he never gets the chance to do the job, so it makes zero difference whether he’s capable of doing it or not.

If you’re saying that the debate performance doesn’t matter, because we’re not electing the best debater, you’re being deliberately disingenuous.  It’s not just about that one debate (though, admittedly, that was pretty bad).  The appearances since then have ranged from relatively encouraging—like the Chumbawumba speech just days after the debate: when you get knocked down, you get back up again! and then presumably have a whiskey drink, a lager drinnk, etc—to downright terrifying, like the George Stephanopoulos interview where he said that he’d only drop out if God came down and asked him to, and that if he lost he’d still feel okay that he’d done the “goodest job” he could have done.  I mean, if you lose, Joe, you get to go home with your Secret Service detail and live out the rest of your life, and ... not to be harsh, but it’s unlikely to be long enough to really feel the regrets that all the rest of us are gonna have.

Again, I’m not saying the Democrats definitely should replace Biden.  Nor am I saying they definitely should not.  But a meaningful conversation isn’t out of the question.  I dunno; I thought the last time Trump got elected it was going to be disastrous, and it turned out that the man was so incompetent and crazy that he had trouble actually accomplishing the worst things he wanted to do.  But this time we have the whole Project 2025 thing: people much smarter than him (though no less crazy) have laid out a blueprint for how to make all the things work ... even the illegal ones.  Which Trump’s Supreme Court has greased the wheels of pretty nicely by saying that the President can’t be held liable for anything he does.  And, for anyone else in the administration, the President can just issue a pardon.  Done and dusted.

So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to demand that the Democrats put up someone that can actually win against this chilling prospect.  Maybe that’s Biden.  Maybe not.  But at least we can talk about it.

Perl blog post #64

This week I posted on my Other Blog because I wanted to report on our trip last week to Las Vegas for this year’s YAPC (Perl conference).  Of course, since I took two of my children, it was also a bit of a family vacation, so feel free to check out the post even if you’re not a Perl person.  There’s a bit of technojargon, but overall it’s pretty comprehensible.  Enjoy.

Full Plates

Well, we’re back from our week-long trip to Las Vegas, which was a lot of fun, but also somewhat exhausting.  It’s nice to be sitting in my own chair, watching my own television again.  And, later, I’ll be sleeping in my own bed, which will be best of all.  Hopefully I’ll have a more complete report on the trip next week.

Today I’ll just give you a short note on the results of our license plate game.  My two younger children suddenly realized, right in the middle of the week, that the parking lot was slowly filling up with license plates from pretty far away, and started trying to “collect ’em all.” We continued all the way through to the drive back home, whereon I thoughtfully slowed down every time we passed a semi, an RV, or a trailer (those being the vehicles which had the best chance of being from far off).  At the end of the day, we collected 34 states: 31 from the US, 2 from Canada, and 1 from Mexico, which I thought was pretty damned impressive.  Having lived on the East Coast, and having spent a bit of time traveling through New England in particular, I’ve seen a few Canadian plates in my time, but I’ve never seen a Mexican license plate in my life.  So that was exciting.  Anyway, here’s a list of what we managed to geolocate:

• Alberta
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Floria
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Quebec
• Sonora
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

Not a lot from the Eastern half of the country, but a moderately respectable showing, I’d say.  My youngest had a map which she downloaded to mark off the states as we saw them.  Perhaps I’ll post that at some point.

Primm's Cup

No long blog post this week: I’m in sunny (way too sunny, actually) Las Vegas for another Perl conference—my first since the pandemic.  I brought two of my children for moral support.  And I guess I’ll take them to do a few things around town, but mainly the moral support.  From where I live, Las Vegas is a bit over a 4 hour drive, which isn’t terrible.  Of course, it ain’t that fun, either, particularly when your little Prius is desperately trying to get the inside temp down to the 68° you requested while whinging that the outside temp is anywhere from 101° to 106°.  And the drive is mostly a whole lot of nothing: flat land, scrub brush, and stunted Joshua trees.^*  I think I even saw an actual tumbleweed or two.  And the roads are very, very straight—I swear, at one point I glanced up at Waze and the map was entirely blank, with a single, perfectly straight line bisecting it, upon which our little arrow floated, seeming to make no progress.  My children will verify this, as it was so surreal I had to point it out to them.  Anyway, a drive like that can put you right to sleep, regardless of whether you’re actually sleepy or not.  I thought the kids would have to pee more often and that would help break up the drive, but not so much, it turns out.  We stopped once in Palmdale and then not again until Primm, which is nearly 200 of the 284 miles.  If you’re not familiar with Primm, just imagine the sort of “town” that might spring up if you slapped the cheesiest casino possible directly on the Nevada state line and you’ve pretty much nailed it.  And, if you’re not familiar with Palmdale ... well, don’t worry: you ain’t missing much.

Anyway, that’s been my day, so there was no chance to write a proper blog post.  And, next Sunday, I’ll be traveling back along the same route, so don’t expect too much then either.  Maybe in two weeks there’ll be something more exciting.

__________

* That’s not my picture, but it’s pretty much exactly what the whole trip looks like.

Fall in love with a bright idea

Hey, remember six weeks ago when I talked about college campus protests?  Well, this week’s Some More News—a YouTube show I started watching during the dark days of the writer’s strike—says almost exactly what I said, only funnier, and with more actual facts.  If you’ve been feeling unsure how to think about the whole campus protest thing, what with competing reports of police brutality and anti-Semitism and “outside agitators,” I really encourage you to watch “How To Cynically Dismiss The Campus Protests Against Genocide”.  Like every episode of SMN, it contains a fair amount of in-jokes (the writers are mostly former employees of Cracked), but I think you’ll find it entertaining nonetheless.  And, who knows? you might just learn something.

Pre-Screening

On a podcast I listened to recently, someone was lamenting how phones are impacting our children.  “They’re losing their ability to imagine!” this person said (or words to that effect).  This is quite common on podcasts these days ... and television shows ... and movies ... talking heads on “news” shows ... everywhere, really.¹  And my usual take on this² is to point out that our society has been through this before: videogames were making them violent, and heavy metal music was making them worship Satan, and D&D was getting them into actual witchcraft, and television was killing their active thinking, and movies were making them inured to violence, and rock-and-roll was destroying their morals, and reefer was driving them to madness, and comic books were exposing them to adult themes, and even, once upon a time, books were making kids soft by distracting them from going out to play like “normal” kids.  But this time it’s different ... right?

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories about my father.  You may recall (from a previous blog post) that he’s a record collector.  And you may even recall³ that his collection has a hard cutoff, which I believe is 1979.  In our family, he’s somewhat infamous for shitting on my and my brother’s musical taste.  For everything from rap to heavy metal—and, in particular, for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which he has an inexplicable hatred of—he can be heard to proclaim decisively “they can’t sing, they just scream” and “it sounds like a bunch of stray cats fighting” and sometimes just “that just isn’t music, son.” And, once, after he’d said that, I remdinded him that he grew up in the motherfucking fifties: during the foundational years of rock-n-roll, when parents holding their ears and decrying their children’s choice of listening material is practically a stereotype.  “Dad,” I pointed out as gently as I could, “isn’t ‘that’s not music’ exactly what your parents said to you when you were young?” And he furrowed his brow, and shook his head, and responded, with zero irony or self-awareness whatsoever, “yes, but that was different.”

See, we all think we’re different.  Our grandparents no doubt remembered the whole “get your nose out of a book a go outside and play” thing, but still somehow fell prey to the “comic books are trash” meme because that was different: books were literature, but comic books?  Different.  And then our parents shook their heads at how out of touch our grandparents were when they couldn’t understand this new art form of rock music, and then immediately did the same thing when heavy metal came around.  That’s not music: it’s different.  And then we came along and did the exact same thing with videogames: why, yes, our parents did tell us that TV was going to rot our brains, and obviously that was stupid, but Grand Theft Auto is different.  Kids today.  What is the world coming to?  Get off my lawn!

So, is the thing with the phones different?  Well, as a fan of balance and paradox, it shouldn’t surprise you that my opinion is that it both is and isn’t.  And I’m a bit pleasantly surprised to see that, 14 years after writing that post, which seemed radical and a bit weird at the time, the world seems to be coming around to my way of thinking.  “Both things can be true” is a common phrase on the Internet these days, or, as the great sage B Dave Walters is fond of saying: “¿por que no los dos?”⁴  In other words, why pick only one?

See, I think we can all pretty clearly agree that heavy metal doesn’t make kids suicidal, but that doesn’t mean that some kids didn’t commit suicide after listening to metal music.  And it seems pretty clear these days that violent videogames don’t lead kids to commit violence, but that doesn’t mean that some of those school shooters weren’t playing Call of Duty or whatever.  This new panic that we seem to have developed about how our children are losing their ability to connect to human beings because of their phones?  That’s almost certainly bullshit.  But that doesn’t mean that, if you have a kid who is prone to social awkwardness or avoiding the vagaries of human contact and social interaction, they won’t use their phone as an excellent excuse to go all in on that tendency.

All kids are different, even within the same family.  For instance, I’ve had three.  Two of them I’ve had to restrict how much chocolate they eat because they would just eat till they were sick; the other never even considered it, so I never put any restrictions on them.  Two of them would play videogames for hours and not be willing to stop when it was time for dinner (or anything else); the other never developed the habit.  Two of them would run up vicious phone bills by streaming YouTube videos in the car; the other never found that particularly interesting.  And, in those three examples, none of them are the same two kids as any of the others.  That meant that I neeeded to impose restrictions on some but not others, and, you know what? that was fine.  Too often we become convinced that we have to treat all our children the same, or it won’t be “fair.” But the problem with this theory is that the kids are not the same.  They need to be treated differently exactly inasmuch as they are different from each other.  Or, to look at it from another angle, they need to be treated the same in the abstract, using the same founding principles, but the specifics need to be different, because they need to be customized for each child.

I think what it all comes down to is, we need to keep an eye on our kids.  We need to engage with them, and talk to them, and, most importantly, listen to them.  Preferably starting when they’re young: if you wait till your kids get to be teenagers and try to start talking to them then, you may end up sounding like that classic scene from Better Off Dead, and that’s no good for anyone.  But still better than nothing: don’t think it’s too late to start treating your kids like people just because you didn’t start out that way.  Beacuse I believe that, as long as you’re listening to your kids and noticing where they struggle, you can at least try to do something about it before it gets too serious.  And there’s no need to blame the Internet, or their Playstation, or their Metallica albums, or anything else.  If they didn’t have any of those things, they’d just find something else to fixate on.  And I think most any parent who’s tried to take something like that away from their kids can confirm: they’re either going to find a way to use it / watch it / listen to it / experience it anyway, or find something else to replace it with.  Because these things are symptoms.  Not the cause.  Never the cause.  Even though we think: this time ... this time ... it’s different.

__________

1 Paula Poundstone is particularly obsessed with it.  One of the (many) reasons I had to give up her podcast.

2 For instance, I touched on it in both one of my D&D posts and one of my AI posts.

3 But only if you read the footnotes.

4 If you don’t speak Spanish and aren’t inclined to instantaneously Google Translate, that means “why not both?”

I am standing at the edge of my mind

Not too much going on this week, yet somehow I’m exhausted.  I suspect I’m just not getting good sleep.  Probably need to invest in one of those sleep trackers.  Although it’s an interesting question: would knowing that I’m not sleeping well help me sleep better?  Or would it just get in my head and make me so worried about not getting good sleep that it would further impact my sleep?

Perhaps the mere fact that I’ve asked such a question reveals that I spend way too much time thinking about things like that.  So I dunno.  I reckon we’ll just have to see what happens.

Post-Pandemic TV Roundup (part 2)

This is part two of my post-pandemic TV roundup.  See last week for part 1.

The Power (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Scifi/Fantasy)

The ultimate expression of female empowerment, this posits a world where people start to develop powers ... but only the young girls.  Suddenly the abuse of young women becomes something you might die for, and this show does a great job balancing between making you root for the women who are breaking their chains (sometimes literally), and making you think about how the men are dealing with this, and sometimes even sympathizing with them.¹  Great show, great cast (mostly younger female actors, but also the always-reliable Toni Collette), thought-provoking material.

Dimension 20 “A Crown of Candy” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

This is an older season of D20, but I hadn’t watched it when it came out.  When they announced they were doing a sequel season,² I figured I’d better watch the original, which was described as “Game of Thrones meets Candyland,” which is about as incongruous a pairing as you could imagine.  And, yet, it’s a perfect description of this season, where the players are told up front to make two characters because you better expect one to die.  Brennan goes hard after the main D20 cast (Lou, Emily, Ally, Siobhan, Zac, and Murph) and the joy of having a rock candy king and his two licorice daughters, a chocolate bunny vizier, etc is tempered by some real pathos and tragedy.  But every player has at least one amazing, kick-ass moment, and the story hangs together beautifully; this is one of the best D20 seasons, hands down.

Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount Plus, 4 seasons thus far, Sci-fi Animation)

The idea to focus on characters who are not the main bridge crew of Star Trek was perhaps pioneered by John Scalzi’s Redshirts³ (although a case might also be made for the Babylon 5 episode “A View from the Gallery”, so the idea to turn that into a series was, I suppose, inevitable.  That it would be so compelling was a bit unexpected, and that it woudl be animated was completely out of left field.  But it really works surprisingly well.  Plus you have to be up on Lower Decks to understand the crossover episode in S2 of Strange New Worlds,⁴ which is just brilliant.

Warrior (Max, 3 seasons, Martial Arts Action)

In 1971, so the story goes, Bruce Lee came up with a show about a Chinese man doing kung fu in the Old West.  Studio heads took the idea and (of course) made it about a white man who knew kung fu in the Old West, which is how Kung Fu came about, and why it starred David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee.  44 years later, Lee’s daughter Shannon revived the original idea and created Warrior.  Starring a brilliant Andew Koji,⁵ embodying Lee’s style without doing a blatant impression of him, and some strong female leads as well, this semi-historical story is set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1870s, and covers the Tong Wars, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and lots of other very real things from the period.  The later seasons don’t quite live up to the gorgeous visuals and deep stories of season 1, but still a very strong showing throughout.

One Piece (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Live Action Anime)

I am not a huge anime fan.  There are a few shows I’ve enjoyed,⁶ but One Piece was not one of them.  It was just too silly for me, and I never could get into it.  So I fully expected this live-action adaptation to fall flat as well.  Amazingly, it was exactly the opposite: I was captivated early, probably by the infectious positivity of Iñaki Godoy.⁷  This show is gleefully insane, but in a mostly family-friendly way, and it’s just so much fun.  And the characters have surprising depth and likeability.

Deadlocked (Paramount Plus, 1 season, Documentary)

Via The Problem with Jon Stewart,⁸ I was introduced to the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, an amazing podcast focussing on the Supreme Court.  And, these days, that’s a pretty important topic to understand.  Even if you can’t commit to listening to Strict Scrutiny every week, you can watch 4 episodes of really insightful history about it (and two of the three SS hosts show up in this series as well).  I can’t count the number of times while watching I said “oh, that’s how that happened!” Highly recommended.

Bodies (Netflix, 1 season, Sci-fi Thriller)

I used to watch two types of shows, mainly: sci-fi/fantasy shows, and police procedurals.  I cut back on the police procedurals after the Black Lives Matter movement brought attention to how much they normalize bad police behavior, but I still enjoy the format.  And what better way to enjoy it than to combine it with a sci-fi/fantasy story—in particular, a time travel story—as 4 London detectives from 4 different time periods all fight to solve the same crime: the same dead body, in fact, which has somehow appeared in 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053.  Time-travel stories live or die by how well they come together in the end, and this one does a bang up job of that in my opinion.  Definitely worthwhile.

Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Adult Animation)

An exploration of her own half-Japanese ancestry, Amber Noizumi’s Blue Eye Samurai, about a half-white outcast swordsman, is quite possibly the most stunning piece of adult animation I’ve seen, period.  Lighter on the gore than Castlevania or Arcane, but heavier on the nudity than either, it does an amazing job of bringing complex characters to life and putting them in remarkably interesting storylines, all set against the backdrop of Japan’s isolationist Edo period.  Gorgeous visuals, brilliant acting, tense action scenes: this one’s got it all.

The Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix, 1 season, Horror)

Mike Flanagan is quite possibly the best director working in modern American horror.  His movies are brilliant, but it’s really his series that elevate him to the sublime.  The Haunting of Hill House, based on the novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, still stands as the pinnacle, with one of the best (and well-earned) jump scares of all time, and that’s just one scene.  His follow-up, The Haunting of Bly Manor (based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) was not quite as good, though still worth watching.  But the latest series, The Fall of the House of Usher, based on many Edgar Allen Poe short stories, is a worthy contender to Hill House.  Like the seasons of American Horror Story, Flanagan’s series reuse many of the same actors in different roles, and many (like Carla Gugino, Rahul Kohli, and Flanagan’s wife Kiate Siegel) give performances that would demand viewing just on their strength alone.  But Flanagan also has an eye for atmosphere, and the creep factor here is through the roof.  Especailly if you’re a Poe fan (but even if you’re not), this is a must-watch.

Culprits (Hulu, 1 season, Thriller)

Not quite a spy story, not quite a heist story, but containing elements of each, this British show features the talents of Gemma Arterton, Eddie Izzard, and the second appearance this roundup of Kirby⁹ (but not the last).  Plus it was my discovery of Irish actor Niamh Algar, whose turn as the cold-blooded killer codenamed “Psycho” was just breathtaking.  A twisty-turny plot, good (i.e. not confusing) use of flashback, and empathetic characters make this a great show.

Dimension 20 “Burrow’s End” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play)

Yet another Aabria-Iyengar-led season of D20, this adapts the world of Watership Down to use weasels instead of rabbits, injects a healthy dose of Cronenberg-ian body horror, and wraps it all in a bow of Arrival.  Aabria’s storytelling is top-notch, as always, and the players are a great group as well: Brennan as player (as is usual for an Aabria-helmed season), playing the mother to twins, portrayed by his wife(!) Izzy and Siobhan, Erika as the grandmother, and the lovely Rashawn Scott and Jasper Cartwright as the sister and brother-in-law.  Siobhan’s prepubescent boy weasel in particular is delightful, but they all do an amazing job, and this season is one of their strongest.

Fargo season 5 (Hulu, Surrealist Crime Thriller)

Whoever had the brilliant idea to turn the movie Fargo into a American Horror Story-style anthology series (by which I mean each season is a completely separate story) was a genius.  But not all of the seasons live up to the potential.  This one really does.  Recycling just a few of the tropes originally introduced by the Coen Brothers in the movie, but weaving a story just as bizarre and unbelievable, this season harnesses the acting of some major powerhouses: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dave Foley, and John Hamm; Lamorne Morris from New Girl and Woke; Joe Keery from Stranger Things; and, in the primary protagonist’s role, a breakout performance from Juno Temple.  The byzantine plots are there, the interconnections among the characters and the lunatic personalities ... everything you could want from a Fargo story.  And a (mostly) satisfying resolution.

Death and Other Details (Hulu, 1 season, Whodunnit Mystery)

If you like classic detective fiction like Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and/or modern whodunnits like Knives Out and Glass Onion, you’ll dig the intricate plot and colorful characters in this show starring Mandy Patinkin (who’s been in everything from Criminal Minds to Princess Bride to Homeland) and Violett Beane, and the supporting cast (including Rahul Kohli, from just up above in The Fall of the House of Usher) is magnificent as well.  With a number of great twists—some of which you may see coming and some of which you won’t—and very creative use of flashbacks, as well as reconstructions of past events by analytical minds, it’s a fantastic story that holds together in a very satisfying way.

Dead Boy Detectives (Netflix, 1 season thus far, Fantasy)

Somehow managing to be a spin-off of both Doom Patrol and The Sandman, the Dead Boy Detectives are comic book heroes created by Neil Gaiman for the The Sandman issue #25; they then showed up in both Swamp Thing and Doom Patrol in the Children’s Crusade crossover event.  Though they never made it to the Netflix Sandman, they did appear in an episode of the Max Doom Patrol.  And Kirby (Death from The Sandman) does make a cameo appearance in the first episode here.  But, most importantly, this show, about two ghost detectives who died young and now solve mysteries for other ghosts, is neither The Sandman nor Doom Patrol: it’s slightly more fun than the former, slightly less insane than the latter, ultimately charming, full of Gaimanesque characters (even the ones that he didn’t actually invent), and just a joyride of the fantastical and phantasmagorical.

True Detective “Night Country” (Max, Surrealist Crime Thriller)

The first season of True Detective was utterly brilliant, driven by great acting, a complex but grounded plot, and lots of touches of surrealism.  This season is in some ways superior: the acting is just as top-notch (including a Clarice Starling and a Dr. Who), the plot is just as complex, and the mystical aspects are heightened.  It culminates in a downbeat yet oddly satisfying ending, but there’s a surprising amount of body horror before you get there.  A fun ride.

Honorable Mentions:

These are the series that weren’t quite 5 stars, but a slight cut above 4 stars.  I thought I’d give at least a quick shout out to each.

• Invincible (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Adult Animation) – (Actually, there are two seasons out now, but I’ve only watched the first one.)  Bloody, tacky, shocking, borderline disgusting, and epically entertaining; it’s a superhero show that sets out to shatter superhero tropes.

• Hacks (Max, 3 seasons, Comedy) – With a stunning cast, including Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, this is a hilarious show that is also touching and relevant.

• Peacemaker (Max, 1 season, Superhero Comedy) – If you liked the bizarrerie that was The Guardians of the Galaxy, but wish it was even more insane and borderline offensive, you will absolutely love this show.  Great cast, weird stories, fun time.

• Station Eleven (Max, 1 season, Post-Apocalyptic Drama) – Utilizing flashbacks in a way that generates tension as opposed to what it usually generates (which is annoyance), and featuring a stunning performance from Mackenzie Davis (of Halt and Catch Fire), this tells a self-contained story with a lot of heart and just the right amount of surrealism.

• Naomi (Max, 1 season, Superhero Fantasy) – Cancelled too soon, so don’t expect complete resolution, but this teenage superhero story is still pretty amazing.

• The Old Man (Hulu, 1 season, Spy Thriller) – A twisty-turny storyline makes this rise above the usual fare, but it’s the top-notch performances from Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, and Alia Shawkat that really bring it home.

• The Orville (Hulu, 3 seasons, Sci-fi) – Seth MacFarlane’s love letter to Star Trek, season 1 starts off pretty much exactly as goofy as you’d expect from the creator of Family Guy, but it rapidly achieves a depth of emotion and plots that is both surprising and rewarding.  Cancelled too soon, but wrapped up pretty neatly nonetheless; don’t sleep on this one.

• Sweet Tooth (Netflix, 1 season, Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy) – (Again, season 2 is out, but I haven’t yet watched it.)  Another great cast, with possibly an even better storyline than Station Eleven.  It’s a very different show, though, so it’s not a fair comparison.  Just watch both: you won’t regret it.

• Severance (Apple+, 1 season, Surreal Sci-fi) – A lot depends on where they go in season 2: if that is as satisfying as I hope it will be, it might elevate this to a full 5 stars.  It got a lot of attention at the time, so I probably don’t need to convince you to watch it, and, if you don’t like weird shit, you’ll hate it, but the story does eventually resolve in a satisfying way, so give it a chance.  Also, John Turturro doesn’t do bad shit, whether film or TV.¹⁰

• Little Demon (Hulu, 1 season, Adult Animation) – Another ultraviolent cartoon not for children (nor for the faint of heart of any age, really), this is elevated by the voice talents of Aubrey Plaza and Danny DeVito and a plotline that’s just plain fun.  Hulu seems to have jettisoned it, so you may not be able to find it, but, if you can, and if you don’t mind cartoon nudity and cartoon guts (and sometimes both at once), you might enjoy this.

• Lockwood & Co (Netflix, 1 season, Urban Fantasy) – It’s a bit of a YA show, and it was cancelled prematurely, but it’s still pretty great.  Teens hunt ghosts because they’re the only ones who can; set in an alternate timeline London.

• The Night Agent (Netflix, 1 season, Spy Thriller) – Decent acting and an intricate but not wholly unbelievable plot make this better-than-average modern spy fare.

• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon Prime, 5 seasons, Comedy) – If you’re a fan of Gilmore Girls, then you’ve probably already watched this, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s other great series.  But, even if you’re not,¹¹ the magnificent combination of Rachel Brosnahan and Alex Borstein (both of whom are hilarious on their own), not to mention an amazing supporting cast with folks such as Tony Shalhoub, Caroline Aaron, and Luke Kirby as a brilliant Lenny Bruce, really make this show about female empowerment set in 1950s New York sing.  (Also contains possibly the best series ending episode since Six Feet Under.)

• Velma (Max, 2 seasons, Adult Animation) – I hate Scooby-Doo in nearly all its forms, but I love Mindy Kaling, and her reimagining of the origin of the Scooby gang as a multicultural blending is really entertaining and unexpected.

• Dimension 20 “Mentopolis” (Dropout, TTRPG Actual Play) – Yes, another season of D20.¹²  This one is not D&D, but don’t let that stop you: with every character representing a different facet of personality in a story that takes place inside the brain of a scientist embroiled in intrigue, this is The Maltese Falcon meets Osmosis Jones in all the best ways.

• Doom Patrol (Max, 4 seasons, Superhero Surrealism) – If you love batshit crazy storylines, it’s tough to beat Doom Patrol, based on another set of comics from Grant Morrison, the creator of Happy!.¹³  Not as much ultraviolence as Happy! or Preacher, not quite as much sex as either, but more actual superheroes (sort of) than both put together, none of the 46 episodes of Doom Patrol make any sense at all, and yet they tell some truly compelling, completely human stories while following the lives of a batch of misfit antiheroes that will make your head spin.  Very satisfying.

• Gen V (Amazon Prime, 1 season, Adult Superhero) – Every bit as demeneted as the show it’s spun off from—that would be The Boys—this is fantastic side-project.  If you love The Boys, you must watch this; if you hated The Boys, this definitely won’t change your mind.

• I Am Not Okay with This (Netflix, 1 season, YA Urban Fantasy) – Sophia Lillis was in It (where she was amazing), in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (where she was amazing), and this, which is almost criminally unheard of.  Being amazing yet again in a very Carrie-esque turn, this coming-of-age-but-with-powers story is a gripping one, even though it’s left unfinished due to premature cancellation.

• Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix, 1 season, YA Comedy-Drama) – Yet another show that was Netflixed too soon, this one is a lot of fun, and contains the best depiction of “twin language” I’ve seen.  The characters are fun, the stories are fun, the action is crazy but not over the top, and I wish they had let them bring the show to a more satisifying conclusion.

__________

1 Granted, not that often.

2 Which, in the end, wasn’t as good as this one.

3 Check out the audiobook, read brilliantly by Wil Wheaton.

4 See last week.

5 Seen in the G.I. Joe movie Snake Eyes, and the much better Bullet Train.

6 In particular, Cowboy Bebop.  Pretty much everything else I’ve watched I was a casual fan of at best.

7 Who you can also see in The Imperfects, which only narrowly missed being included in this roundup.

8 See last week.

9 She was death in The Sandman last week.

10 unless Adam Sandler is involved.

11 Like me.

12 For those keeping count, that makes six in toto.

13 See part 2 of the pandemic roundup.

Optimistic, but never quite elegant

No time for a proper post this week: ChatGPT has a new model, and I’m trying to wrangle it into helping me solve a problem with my laptop that the previous model utterly failed at.  The prognosis thus far: limited success.  The new model is absolutely smarter, but I’m not sure it’s smart enough yet.

If you want to hear me ramble on about ChatGPT, I did a couple of posts last year on it:

• Getting Chatty
• Do Androids Dream of IQ Tests?

In the meantime, you’ll just have to wait another week for me to get back to my post-pandemic TV roundup.