Watched: Ocean's Eleven (2001) 🎥
We watched Ocean’s Eleven.
It’s a surprising five-plus years since we watched Ocean’s Eight, noting that you didn’t have to have watched any of the other ‘Ocean’s’ films first. Also somewhere in the last few years we watched the original Ocean’s Eleven, the 1960 version. I appear to have forgotten to make a note of that, either here or in Letterboxd. Probably within the last two years, but these things have a habit of being longer ago than I think.
Anyway, I see I gave Eight three-and-a-half stars on Letterboxd. I’m now using Micro.blog’s ‘Movies’ feature, which doesn’t have a star-rating element built in, but if were to give this version of Eleven such a rating, it would probably be two-and-half. It’s fine, but really not all that good.
I don’t really understand why it’s so well thought of, to the point that two or three sequels got made. It’s like the broad outline of a heist movie without much of the tension and drama, and possibly some lapses of logic. How did they get the fake money they blew up, into the real vault, for example?
And the eleven characters: several of them just seemed superfluous, or so poorly defined that they might as well not have been there.
Curiously, all of that makes me want to watch the sequels, if only to see if they get better.
📚 Books 2026, 21: Hum, by Helen Phillips
A story set in a dystopian near-future, where everything is much the same as today but just that bit worse. And there are humanoid robots everywhere (in the US city in which it’s set, at least). For reasons that are never explained they are called ‘Hums’. I’m guessing it’s because ‘hum’ is nearly ‘human’.
They operate autonomously and are helpful, but it’s not clear who owns or controls them. They advertise products both in conversation and by displaying things on screens on their chests.
The main character, May, has lost her job to AI, and the family is struggling to get by on her husband’s gig-work. May volunteers for experimental facial surgery which make changes that are minor, but noticeable by people, and crucially, which prevent facial recognition systems from picking her up. Which causes problems, as well as providing a windfall which she uses to take the family to the ‘Botanical Gardens’, which are a recreation of unspoilt countryside in the middle of the city.
Problems ensue, and stuff happens. Mostly interpersonal conflict between May and her kids. The message it’s sending is ambiguous. The hums seem to be antagonistic, or at least annoying for much of it, but one of them might be their saviour by the end.
The cover boasts ‘Winner of the Climate Fiction prize’, which is odd, because while the climate and damage to it is there as background — not least in the fact that the only way they can experience nature is to go to an artificial zone — it’s not really about that. It’s more about the surveillance state and the ubiquity of advertising, as well as the difficulty of life under late-stage capitalism.
Which are all interlinked, of course. It makes this kind of a depressing read, though the characters are engaging enough.
Good piece by Robin Sloan on using ‘AI’ to create personalised apps:
'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century robinsloan.com
it does seem a powerful use case, if you have a matching need.
Later he says:
Most of life doesn’t happen in here. If, indeed, none of your needs or desires are app-shaped … well, that’s not unusual! I have chatted about this with several friends who pondered a while, then declared: “I don’t have any problems that software can solve.”
If that’s you, close this tab and proceed with your day.
Maybe that’s me; that’s the answer to my post the other day, about not having anything to ask the bots.
At work, though, I could have such questions, and the idea still makes me uncomfortable.
Yesterday I wrote the end of draft zero of a novel. I call it ‘The Edinburgh Novel’, as that’s where it’s set, and I don’t have a title yet. Now I have a load of rewriting to do and many comments from my novel-writing group to incorporate.
First though, what next, while I let that stew?
It remains confusing to me about ‘AI’ that so many people ever started using it. I never used it, aside from a few odd things at work, and I could never think of anything I wanted to ask it.
No other software I can recall got adopted by so many, so quickly. What happened?
Reform continues to cast doubt on climate science. Do its supporters agree?
For fuck’s sake, The Guardian, learn to write an accurate headline. Whatever shite Reform talks about climate science, it doesn’t cast doubt on it. It lies about the evidence for global heating, is probably what you should say.
Started reading: The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke. 📚
📚 Books 2026, 19: Persuasion, by Jane Austen
I’m perhaps reading with too much of a modern writer’s eye these days, because I was constantly thinking, while reading this Penguin Popular Classics edition of Persuasion: it’s all telling, no showing at all!
Which is not entirely true, and I’ve also commented in the past on these pages, that we shouldn’t treat that instruction as sacrosanct anyway. There are plenty of times where telling is the best way, the right way, to approach part of a story. We call it storytelling after all. And this is Jane Fucking Austen!
So yes, there is a sense at times that we’re skating across the surface of things, not really seeing the interiority of Anne, except when we are; and there are times when the narration switches from close-third-person to omniscient, in a way that can be slightly confusing: are we getting Captain Wentworth’s thoughts here, or is it Anne projecting what she thinks he’ll be thinking?
But I still sat up till 2 o’clock finishing it.
The oddest thing is the way how some dialogue is rendered. There’s a lot of free indirect speech, including in places where I would have preferred actual, reported speech (and as I write I realise that’s probably the main cause of the slight disconnect I felt). But there are some parts where direct and indirect speech seem to be merged in the oddest way.
Here’s an example from chapter VI:
Mary deplored the necessity for herself. ‘Nobody knew how much she should suffer. She should put it off as long as she could;’
The section in quotes is clearly meant to be Mary’s dialogue, but the ‘she’ in question is Mary herself. There are numerous examples like this throughout the book, but it’s far from all instances of reported speech. Just at the end of the paragraph immediately before the above, we have :
Mary, who, on having occasion to note down the day of the month, exclaimed, ‘Dear me, is not this the day the Crofts were to come to Kellynch? I am glad I did not think of it before. How low it makes me!’
Similar formulation, but conventionally structured. Now there’s no absolute ‘correct’ way to render speech. Everything we use today is a convention. But I don’t recall that kind of formulation in Austen before. I would say I don’t recall seeing it anywhere before, except I think there was a similar instance in my recent reading of Moby Dick. But a singular instance in a long book like that feels like a genuine mistake, whereas here it was surprisingly frequent.
My minor gripes aside, it deserves its place in the literary hall of fame.