Month: September 2024

  • -2,147,483,648 Hours and 24 Minutes

    Decided to reinstall OSX on the macbook air that I mostly use at home. I bought it in 2012 and, other than upgrading it to Catalina (which is as new as OSX will go without using OCLP) it’s always worked great. Over the years I’ve installed a lot of apps, fiddled with the settings and installed a bigger SSD drive so it was becoming sluggish and needed a refresh. And what a LOT of hassle that turned out to be. Of course, trying to use Apple’s method of “Restoring” the OS just didn’t work. Apple don’t seem to want to support “obsolete” devices like my 12 years-old macbook. Not only was there no way of installing Catalina (OSX 10.15.7) but it repeatedly threw up this screen informing me it would take two-and-a-half millenia to install. It wouldn’t as after a few minutes it just gave up.

    Other official Apple methods, like creating a bootable USB installer, also didn’t work. Online the suggestion was that Apple’s servers hadn’t had their security certificates updated and offered a myriad of ways to resolve the issue – usually involving watching YouTube videos punctuated by adverts.

    Naturally, the Internet Archive came to the rescue. I found an ISO of Catalina and used Balena Etcher to create a bootable USB that installed (almost) faultlessly (I needed to install without logging in in order to get past a EULA that was out of date.)

    Even though it’s tremendously out of date, my 2012 macbook is still perfectly useful. It has Windows 11 (maybe 10?) on bootcamp which I rarely use. I try to use Ubuntu on a hand-me-down as my main OS but old habits – that I want to break – are hard to break.

  • Weeknotes wb 16 September 2024

    I have to admit that I’m struggling to maintain these weekly notes (though I will endeavour to do so). Mainly it’s that I’m over-thinking the detail and it’s taking me far too long to put the notes together. So here’s something shorter… The “Season of mists” is most definitely upon us and I’m waking to a sense of a mystery of the mornings. I love misty autumnal mornings better than any other time of the year.

    On Thursday, I drove across into Essex to take my brother to buy a car. It’s the first time I’d been to that part of the country since I trained to be a school teacher there many, many decades ago. Other than the awful traffic – and even more awful drivers – the place seemed much the same. It was a sunny day and we picked his car up from a farm in the middle of the country which was idyllically peaceful. While I waited for my brother to talk with the seller, I realised how rare it is for me to experience moments of complete peace in nature.

    Saturday, we took the children to the Sea Life Centre in Brighton. Got absolutely drenched by rain in the morning and then broiled by the heat in the afternoon. Brighton was BUSY and grumpy children don’t do well in situations like that. (Our children are still at that point where, once they’ve done the thing they’re interested in, they want to go home.)


    Read Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen – Saw this referenced recently and read it in one sitting. It’s a call to write: “The simple, forgettable notations of every day can offer a way into writing, transforming facts into feelings.”I’ve started reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline, a novel I’ve seen discussed a great deal lately. Surprisingly, I like her prose style. Started a book on Hegel by Charles Taylor. Still reading Nicholas Nickleby. Read 2000AD, first half of a multiverse crossover – which is ok but I much prefer the usual prog. Read Jeff Lemire’s new comic, Minor Arcana, which is wonderful.

    TV has been the thoroughly enjoyable Kaos.

    Listened to The Devil Runs Out, the fifth episode of Warren Ellis’ The Department of Midnight.


    Read this online earlier in the week: Society of the Psyop by Trevor Paglan. It’s the first part of a fascinating investigation into the way that mind-control techniques – particularly deception and disinformation – have been used. Paglan begins by drawing attention to the way in which the contemporary “mediascape” is directly intervening and influencing our emotional responses and thinking:

    What does it mean to live in a media environment that knows our wants, needs, vulnerabilities, emotional ticks, kinks, and cognitive quirks far better than we do? That notices which kinds of stimulus induce what kinds of precognitive responses, and uses machine learning to develop, A/B test, and deploy custom-generated cognitive injections designed to manipulate us even further, all without us consciously perceiving what’s happening? And what does it mean to live in a media environment where this is all-pervasive: not only news and websites, videos and movies, but driving assistants in cars, AI-generated customer service representatives, search engines and chatbots, virtual HR managers, gas-station pumps, smart houses and phones, and even washing machines … a media landscape where your refrigerator, vibrator, and toothbrush collude with insurance companies, advertisers, political campaigns, and big retailers, using computer vision, machine learning, and biometric feedback to influence your behavior and worldview?

    And:

    If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. A mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified. That assumes no distinction between perception and reality even as it attempts to intervene as directly as possible into the brains and emotional makeups of its experiencers.

    The focus in this piece is the “darkside hypothesis” and Richard Doty’s use of deception and to cover up genuine military secrets using UFOs. (Doty is a former US Air Force special agent.) We get accounts of the way that Doty manufactured tailor-made deceptions for Paul Bennewitz (“The Air Force was crafting an alternate reality to feed Bennewitz’s predilections and ensure that he believed what they wanted him to believe”) and Linda Moulton Howe (convincing Howe that the US government were colluding with aliens in genetic experimentation).

    Paglan refers to The 1988 edition of the US Army Field Manual which outlines ten principles of military deception (such as “The Monkey’s Paw”, “Jones’s Dilemma” and “Magruder’s Principle”) with the aim of ensuring that the intended target becomes more certain of a falsehood (rather than less certain of the truth)

    Paglan is excellent in articulating why UFOs play an important role in military deception:

    It turns out that US military and intelligence agencies have a long history of using UFOs as a psychological instrument, having discovered their hyper-mimetic qualities in the 1950s. Decades before Doty’s variations on the theme, UFOs were a well-known self-replicating cultural trope capable of infecting individual and cultural consciousness and spreading like a virus.


    Oh, I’m still making slow progress painting my combat patrol. I’m not sure whether my meticulous sub-assembly and (sub-)painting is worthwhile or not. We shall see.

  • Radio Times Lord of the Rings Cover

    Lovely piece from 2021 by Brian Sibley about the cover to the 7th March 1981 issue of Radio Times. Sibley writes about the illustration, Eric Fraser, and his acquistion of the original artwork. Much like Jimmy Coulty’s stunning 1976 poster illustration for the novel, Sibley’s BBC dramatisation which was originally aired between March and August 1981 had a tremendous impact on me. (I was in my final year of primary school and remember listening to the eighth episode suring a school trip in April aboard a barge drinking hot chocolate.). Eric Fraser’s illustration is another visual that shaped the way I imagine Middle Earth which is very different from the Peter Jackson movies and the dreadful Amazon tv series.

    I guess then that there are four major influences on how I imagine Tolkien’s world:

    The novel itself. (Particularly Pauline Baynes’ cover design for the first single-volume edition of LotR published in 1968.)

    Jimmy Cauty’s 1976 poster.

    The Ralph Bakshi 1978 animated version (poster by Tom Jung).

    BBC Radio 4 dramatisation in 1981 scripted by Brian Sibley. (Radio Times illustrations by Eric Fraser).

    Here’s the actual Radio Times cover (from Sibley’s blog):

  • Make Something to Your Taste

    At the bottom of Jay Springett’s latest post, Destination Distraction, he’s added a short video, Make Something to Your Taste, his latest 301 Permanently Moved podcast episode, which caught me at exactly the right time. It’s a mesmerising video where Springett is convincing in reinforcing the importance of creativity and a call to “Make a little chaotic corner on the web.” Great stuff.

    Here it is:

  • The Hartnell Years

    Picked up a copy of The Doctor Who Production Diary: The Hartnell Years by David Brunt. I’m in the middle of watching the first season of Doctor Who from 1963-4 and, while I make great use of both the first volume of About Time and The Television Companion – both of which I’ve owned for years! – the Production Diary gives an exhaustive, day-by-day account of how the show was made. I’ve had my eye on the book 600+ page book since I saw it earlier this year and only recently found a secondhand copy online. I love the detail: down to giving a list of the office allocations (room numbers) at the BBC.

     

  • Weeknotes wb 2 September 2024

    Weather’s changed and there’s now a definite sense that Autumn’s begun. It’s cooler – almost cold – and darker during the day and we’re experiencing sudden showers. By the end of the week the children were both back at school (fairly happily, which is a relief) and I’m getting to grips with how things seem to be for me at the moment. The week has included some end of school holiday tidying and organisation. It’s alarming how much I loose track of time and find myself looking back over the days wondering where all my time has gone). Weirdly, I’m beginning to realise that waking at around three in the morning is more than a temporary thing now; it has to be a marker of aging (and, more than likely, a reason I’m feeling exhausted around 9 o’clock in the evening). I’m not reading nearly enough. We played a LONG family game of Munchkin – and the next day that we got some of the rules wrong which caused the game to go about five times longer than it should have done.

     Fiction I read

    • The Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud (started).
    • Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (still reading)

    Non-fiction I read

    • Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh.
    • Uniquely Human
    • Sinister Forces

    Comics I read

    • 2000AD prog 2398 – continually excellent.
    • Flash Gordon Quarterly #1
    • Exceptional X-Men #1
    • Brzrkr #1-12 – Started strongly then tapers off. I wanted to read this before starting the China Mieville novel. Ron Garney’s art is great and I’m sure that Matt Kindt did the best he could with the scripts but I think that Reeves wanted a deeper, metaphysical ending which, for me, didn’t really work.

    Online texts I read (and thought about)

    A Complete Person by Jay Springett
    • Very thoughtful piece – as all Springett’s writing is – about cutting off noise from social media platforms (to “prune and refine my digital landscape”) and expresses how social media is far too “fleeting” and lacks “depth and permanence”:

    I’ve managed to extract myself from the clutches of social media and learned not to have an oversized emotional reaction to things happening in the wider world that I can do nothing about. Maybe this is just getting older, but it’s been a six-year process of figuring out where I stand and who I am in relation to this vast semiotic megastructure that is culture.

    TV and Movies I watched

    • Ancient Aliens – I watched one episode (honestly!) and only because it featured Jacques Valee. It was filled with repetitive bombast! Terrible.
    • Jordskott – Finished the first season of this Swedish supernatural police drama. Yes, I enjoyed it when it wasn’t chasing its own tail.
    • The Watchers – A movie that takes itself far more seriously than it should. Vast forests in Ireland that aren’t on any map?

    Music I listened to

    Podcasts, audiobooks and audio dramas I listened to

    • Temporal – I’ve listened to the first (of six) parts of Julian Simpson’s new audio drama. Simpson is without question one of my favourite writers.
    • The Final Beginning – Second Doctor audiodrama set between War Games and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. David Troughton performs the role his father played flawlessly. I REALLY enjoyed this.
    • The Department of Midnight #3: Song to the Siren – Third episode of Warren Ellis’ short audiodramas starring James Callis as a science/paranormal investigator. This episode is a weird crime that has taken place in a locked room.
    • Žižek And So On podcast – excellent interview with Anna Kornbluh on her book Immediacy. Kornbluh seems a brilliant thinker.
    • Scriptnotes podcast – interview with Ryan Reynolds about his involvement with the creation and scriptwriting of the Deadpool movies. Reynolds comes across as a genuinely nice human being.
    • William Ramsey Investigates podcast – 2019 interview with Tom Mellet about Peter Levenda, Hal Puthoff and Jacques Vallée in early ufology.
  • Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches

    I’ve just backed Andrew MacLean’s Kickstarter project, Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches. It’s a prequel to MacLean’s fantastic quarterly series, Head Lopper, a comic I’ve bought from its first issue. (The last issue, #16, was released in 2021.) Anything Head Lopper gets an automatic “must buy” from me.

    There are a range of “rewards” for backing the campaign starting at £8 for a copy of the comic, with lots of bundled “add-ons” available. The project, which has already more than met its target closes on 25th September. Ships in November.

     

  • Weeknotes wb 26 August 2024

    September has always been the pivot on which the year turns. My birthday is in a couple of days and, as a child, it would be the signal that the return to school would shortly follow (though in those days, the start of school seemed to be about a week after my birthday). And here we are at another turn.

    Doing (Done?)

    An odd week where I lost track of things towards the end. Our children are back to school from Monday so there’s a mix of last-minute preparations and a sense of anticipating the change of pace from the summer. I’m losing days to nothing (or, at least, that’s how it feels) where the unstructured nature of the summer collapses into entropy. I know that I’m best – or feel more productive – when I plan my days with a greater sense of intention.

    Still making and beginning to paint my Black Templar combat patrol. Luckily, Soren has a gadget that lets you spray paint the base coats of multiple miniatures at a time. I still can’t get over how long it takes to clip, construct and glue the figures. Things are taking longer as I’m painting the bases separately and also tiny parts of each miniatures like arms and tabards which just makes everything take longer.

    Reading (fiction)

    • Still reading Nicholas Nickleby.

    Reading (non-fiction)

    • Still reading Uniquely Human.
    • Started Sinister Forces Book One: The Nine by Peter Levenda.

    Reading (comics)

    • 2000AD #2397 – All excellent (though I’m sure that there’s a page with the text missing in Brink.)
    • X-Men #3 – Terrible cover (for some reason going for humour). There’s a 90s vibe about X-Men that I’m not sure I’m into. Not that much happens.
    • The Nice House by the Sea #2 – Post-apocalyptic sequel to TheNice House by the Lake which turned out to be a daring and original take on survivors of an alien invasion.
    • William of Newbury #4 – Fantastic. Cross between Mignola, Peterson and Eco.
    • X-Force #2 – Unlike the first issue (and the latest X-Men), I enjoyed this. X-Force break into Wakanda.

    Reading (online)

    Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang

    Chiang draws attention to the limitations of AI generated “art” and neatly counters the boasts made about LLMs. Chiang draws on the definition of skill and intelligence made by computer scientist François Chollet (“skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills”) and suggests that “art is something that results from making a lot of choices” and that while AI can make (unintelligent) choices, it lacks a communicative nature because

    any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it.

    And goes on:

    The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

    to conclude:

    Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

    Nathan Ballingrud

    I had no idea that Nathan Ballingrud’s new novel, Crypt of the Moon Spider, had been released until I read this interview with him. Ballingrud describes the novel – the first of a trilogy – as “lunar gothic” and describes being in a “retro space fantasy phase”. The most interesting aspect of the intervew is Ballingrud’s insistency of the psychological and fantastical nature of the the new novel:

    Once I introduce an explanation for why there is air on the moon, as well as forests and spiders, everything else will want an explanation, too. And I don’t care about the science of it. In fact, the science is not only not the point, it’s antithetical to the point. Gothic fiction is psychological. Pulp fiction is (usually) fantastical. The only logic this story wants or needs is that of the nightmare and the penny dreadful. Any concern for scientific plausibility undercuts the whole enterprise.

    Oasis

    I read lots of slop this week about the Oasis reunion. Lots of it involved struggling to come to terms with why the reunion has made such cultural noise in the UK and seems to have excited so many people, including youngsters who may not have even been born during the band’s heyday. There were commentators like Simon Price (Stop the celebrations – Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history) who attacks the Gallagher brothers as being socially regressive and argues that

    The Gallaghers’ knuckle-dragging ideas on sexuality and politics arguably shouldn’t matter. We’re all familiar with the concept of separating the art from the artist, though everyone’s mileage varies on where to set the line in the sand. But the art needs to at least be good. Oasis, memorably described by the late great Neil Kulkarni as the “English Rock Defence League”, offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.

    Simon Reynolds (hyperstOasis) is a little less acerbic but condemns the band for being uninterested in music beyond their narrow, Beatles-infatuated groove:

    Not that I’ve read every, or even many, interviews with Oasis but I’ve never seen an indication they are interested in anything at all apart from music – and even then only an extremely narrow furrow of canonical rock-as-it’s-supposed-to-be.

    Reynolds does praise Liam and Noel for a handful of songs which capture “the invincibility of youth”:

    On some visit to England many years later, when I’d been sent to do a story so I was staying in some fairly central hotel, I was woken by the sound of a drunken bloke hollering the chorus to himself as he staggered along the street below  Yes, I thought: it’s a song purpose-built for those times you are so so wrecked and you feel like no one else in the entire world is having this much fun.  A song for people who say things like “we are such fuckin’ legends” …. as they engage in the standard excesses… the stuff that people do each and every weekend…  that are being replicated all over the country at that very moment.

    Matt Colquhoun (The Reurn of Oasis) laments that “Time is and remains a flat circle for British rock’n’roll” and quotes Mark Fisher’s withering observation of the timeless depthlessness of contemporary music from 90s on and

    I mean Oasis could have existed in 1980 more or less, but they would have been like fourth on the bill in a small pub. There just wasn’t that level of tolerance for ’60s throwbacks at that time. There was a sense of historical narrative and a sense of time having moved on. But time since the ’90s has got increasingly flattened out, such that exactly that kind of phenomenon can happen.

    Stewart Lee (Oasis: a guilty pleasure without fringe benefits) draws on the reunion to explore his thoughts about bands getting back together in general and laughs at “Oasis [being] a guilty pleasure for a pseudo-intellectual like me”:

    Oasis, who 30 years ago represented a kind of condensed nostalgia for the previous quarter-century of British rock, are re-forming. The cocaine dealers of Britain are already putting in advance orders so thousands of middle-aged men can stand in stadiums next summer bellowing trivial conversations about fuck all at each other all through the gigs they’ve paid hundreds of pounds to touts to attend. The trail of dead South American drug war casualties will stretch all the way from Heaton Park to Pablo Escobar’s ruined hippo enclosure. All the same, I wish I was going.

    Barbara Ellen (Oasis are back. So why all the hatred?) celebrates their return and explores what it is about the band that causes them to be reviled by many commentators. Ellen sees it as a form of snobbish, class hatred:

    Only Oasis have provoked such polarised (love/hate) reactions, including retrospective condemnation of their domination of 90s music culture. For some, Oasis were beyond a band, they were tantamount to Big Parka, presiding over a climate of stifled creativity, conservatism, and such socio-political atrophy it facilitated flag-waving nationalism. It’s this sort of charge that makes me think, woah, let’s slow down. There’s nothing wrong with being partisan, even a cultural snob: for music journalists, it’s the actual job, and it’s only right everyone else gets to join in. But this feels different: sharper, nastier, uglier. At moments, it’s felt genuinely shocking: like undiluted class hatred.

    For me, I think the interest is much the same as that (on a much smaller scale) of Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre back in the late 90s. It’s the perverse fascination in watching musicians self-destruct. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the bookies have bets on at what point over the next 18 months Liam and Noel feud and Oasis breaks up again.

    Viewing (Viewed?)

    • Longlegs – First half of this movie is engaging enough: a rookie FBI agent appears to have psychic powers that enable her to track down a serial killer. The second half leans into a weird supernatural involving dolls, large ball-bearings and Satan. Nicholas Cage is awfully good as the bizarre Longlegs.
    • The Red King – 6 part British tv mini-series about a rigid detective sergeant who is reassigned to St. Jorys,  a small island community off the Welsh coast who investigates a missing boy. It’s melodramatic and plays on folk-horror tropes (but stays away from anything supernatural). Anjli Mohindra and Mark Lewis Jones are both great in their roles. There is a sub-plot about a DCI homicide investigator who undermines the investigation and appears to be part of the cult on the island – but isn’t resolved and only explained in a throwaway line by a senior police officer at the end about cultist infiltrating organisations on the mainland. Perhaps it’s deliberately unresolved to allow the possibility of a second series.
    • Jordskott – I watched the first few episodes of this 2015 Swedish tv series about missing children and something mysterious in the woods.

    Listening (music)

    • Magazine – mostly their Secondhand Daylight album.
    • A Grand Stream by Smote – droning psychedelic. Powerful.
    • Ritual by Jon Hopkins – Unexpectdly gentle ambient.

    Listening (podcasts)

    • The Department of Midnight #2 – Ellis is doing a “a tour of gothic horror subgenres” in this audio drama and this one is both a story of possession and an interrogation. I enjoyed it more than the first episode.
    • Word in Your Ear podcast – episode chatted about Oasis and band reunions in general.