Rock and Death

I appreciate this piece about AC/DC and Malcolm Young’s legacy. I never really cared for them myself. I was on the other side of the punk/metal wars, of course, and screechy vocals always put me off.

I completely understand the spirit of that piece, though, and feel the same way about The Clash, the Velvet Underground, probably others. But there is one telling line in it that says something about the different attitudes of the different sides in those not-really wars. I don’t know, maybe not; but this:

But we thought we were gonna live forever. The music too.

is not how things were for me, for us. We didn’t think we’d live beyond the eighties. The nineties at a pinch As Queen put it, we were the ones who:

grew up tall and proud
Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

But so too did the author of the AC/DC piece. He’s a decade older than me, but that still means he experienced the cold war.

Maybe it’s not generation, but location. I lived a few miles from the Faslane naval base, where the Polaris submarines were based (and where the Trident ones are still). We knew we’d be one of the first places to go.

Generations are too abstract, too arbitrary to make sweeping statements about in any case. But I still sometimes find myself surprised to be here, now, in this century.

Missing Dates

I’ve just noticed that this WordPress theme I’m using, Independent Publisher, doesn’t show dates and times of posts. And as a side effect it doesn’t have permalinks for posts without titles (the datestamp should be the permalink in that case).

How can this be? Has it always been like this and I just haven’t noticed? I hate sites that don’t have dates on posts.

One way or another, this will have to change.

To Nano or Not?

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and I still haven’t quite decided whether to throw myself into it this year or not. I’ve taken part several times in previous years, but never completed the 50,000 words. And this year I still have the novel that I’ve been working on intermittently for about four years, that I’d like to finish off.

Maybe it would be better, and more in the Nano spirit, to start something new. But I think if I were to do that, I’d never finish this one, and it would sit there forever, haunting me. Maybe taunting me too, who knows.

I should have a better chance of getting the word count up this year, as I have a longer commute, and I usually get a seat at or near the start of the longest part (Dalston Junction to West Croydon, if you’re interested). So it should be entirely possible to get two free blocks of writing time each weekday. But I have found it to be strangely offputting to write in that environment, when there’s a person sitting on either side of me.

Sure, they’re probably not in the least interested in what I’ve got going on, but as Stephen King says in On Writing, you’ve got to write the first draft with the door closed.

Still, I have recently been looking at the novel again, and I think I’ve worked out how to end it. That has always been the problem for me: I don’t do a detailed plot, but I need to know how a story’s going to end if I’m going to have any chance of finishing it. If I just start writing with only an idea, maybe a setting and some characters, I tend to meander around all over the place and never get anywhere. Or at least, not to a sensible end.

I don’t have to know much about the route, but I need to know the destination, in other words. So as I now know the destination — or at least have a much clearer idea of it — I think it’s time to take one last run at this thing.

But this is me declaring that I’m throwing my hat in the Wrimo ring. I’ve signed up, and even given it a working title1 — by raiding that fount of quotes, The Tempest.

  1. Another problem has been and remains that I don’t have a title for it. Why are titles so hard? ↩︎

On Blade Runner 2049

Spoilers ahead, obviously. Although I don’t go into much detail.

We saw it in the Rio in Dalston, because all the Hackney Picturehouse showings were full (or at least just had a couple of separated seats left). Which makes me surprised to read these stories about it not doing very well on opening weekend. And weirdly, from the balcony. I don’t know when I was last in a cinema with a balcony. I mean, the Rio, obviously, though probably not since Harry Potter 8; but I hadn’t been in the balcony before, and I don’t think I even realised that it had one.

But to the film of the moment. I tried to lower my expectations, I really did. But I’d read that Guardian review, which was so unbelievably glowing. I listened to Mitch Benn hoping they wouldn’t fuck it up and believed that they hadn’t.

But…

OK, they haven’t fucked it up. But I’m going to have to break ranks with all the legions of newspaper reviewers who love it to death & back (honestly, I can hardly find a bad, or even a mixed, review), and nearly everyone else.

Because I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I spent a lot of the time (of which there is a lot) saying, “What the fuck is going on here? Why did they do that?” The former is fine, as long as it becomes clear over time, which it generally did. The latter less so: understanding characters’ motivations is fundamental to understanding and enjoying a work of fiction.

But much worse than those: I spent some of the time bored.

The main reason for that is that it’s paced like an 80s movie. Which is to say, much more slowly than we are used to today.

I should have expected that, I suppose. The original Blade Runner moves slowly even by 80s standards. That’s part of its visual and storytelling style. So it’s reasonable that a sequel, even one thirty years later, should follow suit. But they could have picked the pace up a bit.

The reviews all describe it as “thought-provoking” or similar, and it’s true that the questions of what it means to be human or to be artificial are in there. But to my mind there’s not enough of that. Which in a way is linked to another problem: world-building.

As before the world is very visually striking. What we have is the world of Blade Runner with thirty years of technological advancements. Like the film, the pace of advancement has been slow, but I suppose that’s not surprising, given how damaged the world is.

But slowly or quickly, technology advances in parallel with a conversation about that technology. What’s missing here is any in-world debate about the legal and ethical status of replicants. Certainly there’s a nod to the idea that the casual use of “skin-job” is insulting and shouldn’t be used. But it never seemed that insulting anyway — indeed I think it’s only the voiceover version of the original that tells us it is an insult. Deckard likens it to the n-word. (He does so using that word, which, rightly, would not happen today.)

In a more realistic world there would be a debate about replicants. There would be rights groups campaigning against using them as slaves, and even for them to be given full citizenship status. And from others there would be discrimination against them, abuse of them. That could all be going on in the background of this society — and the debate is not what the film is about — but I think a small acknowledgement that the debate existed would at least hint at a richer society.

That all applies to the original too, of course, but now it’s much more common for the replicants to be living among humans on Earth, so the conversation would be that much more active.

And speaking of that commonality of the replicants on Earth, one question you might ask is, are there any humans actually left on Earth? Because only two characters appear to be unambiguously human.

One is K’s boss in the LAPD, Lt Joshi, who could unknowingly be a replicant, though nothing suggests that. The other, Ana Stelline, who creates the memories that are implanted in replicants. She lives in isolation because of sensitivity to the environment, and the implication is that only a human can provide the memories. But since not all of the memories are actually hers, all that needs is gift for imaginative imagery. And, now that we know that replicants are fully-biological beings who can reproduce (whether only with each other or also with humans is unknown), then anything is possible.

The situation appears to be that anyone with the money and without any disqualifying problem has left Earth. “A new life awaits you in the offworld colonies,” after all. I always suspected that the colonies would consist of grinding hardship based on subsistence farming, but I suppose the idea is you have replicant slaves to do the work.

The Earth that we see is incredibly empty. The original’s LA streets were packed with people, but now it seems sparsely populated at best. Empty highways — because of course nobody’s driving cars anymore. But the air is empty too. Mostly there’s only ever one car flying at a time. All those giant buildings might be filled with people, but you don’t get any sense of them being there.

San Diego is a literal dump, and Las Vegas a nuclear wasteland. Apart from the still-standing casino hotel, of course. A million bottles of whisky and you choose Johnnie Walker Black Label? Come on. (That brand is owned by Diageo, though, which is the first of the big neon advertising signs you see.)

I don’t know, I wonder if it was just my expectation of something more striking, more startling. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate it, or even dislike it. I was just disappointed by it. Yet I think I want to see it again.

I loved the music, by the way, though it was perhaps a bit overwhelming in places.

And as a last thought: I still see people talking about the replicants being ‘robots’ or ‘androids.’ If it wasn’t clear from the first film, where they bled what seemed to be blood, it is powerfully obvious now: there are no robots in these films. The replicants are fully biological. They are probably more like clones, genetically engineered for enhanced strength and stamina.

The original book had androids (the clue was in the title); but not these films.

Faces and Feeds

I think I might have to develop an app for reading Facebook the way I think it should work.

There was an article doing the rounds the other week about how “our minds can be hijacked,” which was all about how terrible social networking is for us. I skimmed part of it, but got annoyed when it seemed to be about rich Silicon Valley entrepreneurs deciding to go “off-grid.” That’s all very well for them, but most of us have to make a living.

More pertinently, since the main target for the attack was Facebook, it annoyed me because I use Facebook to keep in touch with people that I might otherwise not. For that, it can be very good.

And yet… it struck a chord with, me to some degree. I realised that Facebook has increasingly become more of a time sink than a pleasure. Not that I spend vast amounts of time on it each day, but when I do open it up, I often end up spending longer than I’d have wanted to. And not reading updates from friends and family, but following links to articles and quizzes and nonsense, most of which I wish I hadn’t bothered with.

By comparison, a similar length of time spent in my feed reader lets me read blog pieces by people I actively want to hear from, and which I’m generally glad I’ve read.

But they mostly aren’t friends and family.

And then there’s the fact that the Facebook algorithm is tuned to show me what it thinks I should see, not what I want to see. What I want to see is all the updates from my friends, in reverse-chronological order. And that’s all. But there’s no guarantee that it will show me everything everyone posts, and the order is close to random at times.

One way to work round this is to visit people’s individual Facebook pages. You could see all your the posts by all your friends by going to each of their profiles in turn. But that would mean you’d have to keep track of all that: remember who you visited and when, and somehow manage the list of people.

Keeping track of things is what computers are good at. The software should be doing that for us.

So I’m thinking that what I want is an app that will do that for me: that will keep a list of my Facebook friends, and show me all their posts (which of course is what Facebook used to do).

As far as I know, no such app exists. This seems strange and unlikely, but I don’t think Facebook make a public API available for third-party clients, so such an app would have to work by scraping the web pages, which is neither good practice nor much fun.

Of course, what this means is effectively turning Facebook back into a set of RSS feeds — or now, especially as I have some experience with them, a set of JSON Feed feeds. Which would then be usable in all sorts of other places.

Web scraping may be bad and painful; still, I think I want to write this thing. Watch this space.

The Kickstarter Corporate Communication Conundrum

Today I chanced to see an email in which a manager was asking his staff to work for extra hours. Well, ‘asking’ is putting it generously, to be honest. There didn’t seem to be much that was optional about it.

The Kickstarter connection, though: you’ll be familiar with the idea of ‘stretch goals.’ If not, the idea is that the basic target is to make X amount of money, but if we make X + 10%, or whatever, we’ll be able to do these other things. Develop additional features, make the item in more colours, or whatever. My guess is that the term originally comes from sports.

So this email included in the subject the phrase ‘stretch targets.’ Meaning we want you to do more this week/month/whatever, than we originally planned. It was clearly written by someone who thinks that the way to develop software faster is to work your staff to the bone. When in fact that’s much more likely to result in people taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

In this team they’re already working weekends, and now they’re being ‘stretched’ even more. It bodes ill. But perhaps co-opting the language of positive things for something so negative is worse.

Blades and Running

Watched Blade Runner in preparation for tomorrow. Chose the original theatrical cut, voiceover and all. I think I’m increasingly down with Mitch Benn’s thinking on the matter.

And you should watch the video of his song, ‘Don’t Fuck Up the Sequel to Blade Runner’

Also started watching Dangerous Days, the ‘making of’ documentary. Fascinating and surprising to learn that Rutger Hauer came up with the ‘tears in rain’ line.

Anyway, more news tomorrow, perhaps.

Trekking

Past

I can remember when I first saw Star Trek.

That’s not so unusual, but if my memory is right — and I’ve just more or less confirmed that it is — then when I first saw it was the absolute first time anyone could see it, in this country, at least.

Here’s the memory (and it’s tied up, as many good things are, with Doctor Who).

It’s 1969. It’s the summer holidays, and we’re in a holiday home with a TV. That in itself makes me doubt the memory, because back then holiday houses just didn’t have TVs. A lot of houses in general didn’t. But this memory has always told me that we were on a family holiday. And it’s Saturday, late afternoon. I’m settling down at the TV, and somebody says — I think it’s my sister — ‘Martin, Doctor Who finished, remember?’ Because it was Doctor Who time.

And I said, ‘But this is like Doctor Who!’

And as the new programme started someone else — my Dad, I think — said, with a tone of surprise, ‘He knows all about it!’ And then the Enterprise swooshed towards me out of the screen.

I’ve long wondered how true this memory was. It was 1969; I’d have been five. But I just checked:

Initially, the BBC was the first-run broadcaster of Star Trek (12 July 1969-15 December 1971).
…
The series was shown in four seasons, the first on Saturday evenings at 5:15 pm (in the time slot usually taken by Doctor Who).

Which exactly matches my memory: summer, Saturday, Doctor Who slot. And the calendar confirms that the 12th of July 1969 was a Saturday.

I wouldn’t be five for another month plus. Not a bad bit of early-memory retention. I wouldn’t have remembered it at all, if it wasn’t for one thing: trauma caused by fear that my parents would turn the TV off just as this exciting new programme was starting burned it into my brain.

My Dad always liked Star Trek too, so I guess I was partly responsible for that.

Present

Yesterday I watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, which are on Netflix (in the UK and Europe, at least; in the US they’re on CBS’s own new streaming service). And I really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t say it felt like being that nearly-five-year-old again, but it did feel like they’re trying something new and potentially very exciting.

Today I was looking at its entry on IMDB. It turns out there are user-written reviews there, which I don’t think I’d been aware of before.

Sadly they are almost universally negative. ‘It’s not Star Trek,’ is a common theme. But there’s a strong whiff of racism and misogyny coming through. Two non-white women as leads means ‘social justice warriors’ are running the show, it seems. Well from what I’ve read of Gene Roddenbery, I think he’d have been happy to be called a social justice warrior. Star Trek was always about diversity and tolerance.

Future

I don’t know how many episodes of this new series they have lined up, but I know I’m looking forward to watching them. So is my inner five-year-old. So would my Dad have been. And so would Gene.

Harvest Home

Collected a load of Apples from the garden yesterday. Started to write this post, too, but left it for a bit, and Micro.blog had lost it when I went back. It felt very autumnal. And the title ‘Harvest Home’ cane to mind because there’s a Big Country song by that name. So I listened to The Crossing for the first time in years. Still really good.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (Books 2017, 4)

Yes, the end of August and only my fourth book. What on Earth is happening? In short, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem is happening. All 1000-plus pages of it. I’m just over two-thirds of the way through it, and I’m loving it, but I think my target now must be to finish it by the end of the year!

But I got this one for my birthday, and it’s short, so I read it in two or three days while I was on holiday recently. It’s an odd one. It tells a story of some people and some strange videos in the days when there were still video rental shops stores and VHS tapes within them. Which allows someone to insert extracts from strange home videos into some of them, leading our protagonist to start investigating.

It takes place in the farmland of Iowa, and it’s interesting enough, but it’s one of those stories where you end up wondering, Why? Both why did the characters behave like that, and why did the author choose to write that particular story?

Not a bad story, but not that compelling either.

Setting Myself Free of the Bear (and Others)

If you work with plain text, as I prefer to, then you probably try out different text editors from time to time (or, you know, constantly). I recently tried out a nice one called Bear. It’s an attractive environment to write in, syncs well between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, has good previewing and exporting features, as well as a host of different themes to suit your preferences. All in all, it’s got a lot going for it. I used it exclusively for a while, and paid the first month of its subscription.

But I’m dropping it.

The reason why is simple: although it’s all about plain text notes, it doesn’t store your notes as plain text files. Instead, it keeps them all in some kind of database and syncs that via iCloud.

Using iCloud for syncing isn’t a problem, but locking my notes away in a form that’s not accessible to any other text editor definitely is.

Its export features are good, so it’s not that your notes are locked away irretrievably. But while you’re using Bear, you can only edit your notes — or view them, for that matter — in Bear. And that’s just not how I want to work.

It’s kind of antithetical to whole plain-text ethos, to my mind. You should be able to switch text editors without having to even think about it. Just open the file in the new editor and get on with it.

Next I tried the unimaginatively-named Notebooks. A similar setup with the syncing, but you can point it at a directory of files on the filesystem. It has its own strangenesses, though, in that it wants to keep tight control of the directory structure, and when you look at the directory in Finder or another text editor, you find it has been polluted with plist files, one for each plain-text file.

So I dumped that one, too.

And right now I’m trying Ulysses, which is very much of the moment, because it has just switched to subscription-based pricing, and caused much furore in doing so. I happen to also be trying out the SetApp service, which is interesting in itself, and which includes Ulysses as one of the apps it makes available.

It’s fine, but is also prone to dropping the odd plist file in my folder, I see.

In the end I’ll probably stick with nvAlt for short-form notes on the Mac, using a folder synced via Dropbox, and Editorial on iOS. Not forgetting Drafts on iOS, of course, but you only type things there to export them somewhere else, really. And then BBEdit or Sublime Text for longer pieces.

Those last two might become the subject of another piece, about how I don’t get what’s so great about BBEdit. But that’s for another time.

Nuts to Dough

Just thought I should mention, en passant, that when I referred to misspelled donuts the other day, I was talking about the ones that can’t spell “crispy” or “cream”,1 not the spelling of “donut” itself. I was brought up with it as “doughnut,” but I guess I’ve come round to the other, presumably American, spelling.

  1. And that don’t taste at all like proper do[ugh]nuts. ↩︎

New Job

As you may know, I’ve been between contracts lately. Had quite a lot of interest from my CV, but not been so lucky with the tests and interviews.

Yesterday at about 10am a recruiter called me. Today at just after 5pm I was offered the job. A new contract, six months initially, with the likelihood of extending. Sometimes things go fast.

Some Open-Source Software for Your Delectation

I have made a thing, and pushed it out into the world. Well, really, this is me pushing it out into the world, because nobody will have noticed it before now, and with this, there’s a chance they might.

A couple of months ago Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced the existence of JSON Feed, a new syndication format to sit alongside RSS and Atom; but using JavaScript Object Notation or JSON, instead of XML.

They invited people to write parsers and formatters and so on for it, and I quickly realised that no-one had yet written one in Java. As far as I can tell that is still the case. Or at least, if they have, they haven’t made it public yet.

No-one, that is, but me, as I have written just such a thing: a JSON Feed parsing library, written in Java. I’m calling it Pertwee. That’s the product page at my company site (more on which later). It’s open-source, and can be found at Github

As software projects go, it’s not that exciting. But it is the first open-source project that I’ve released. I hope someone might find some use for it.

Not the Nails I'm Looking For

I got an email from Songkick about a forthcoming gig in Camden by Nails.

You’ll recall, being the avid reader of this blog that you are, that a while ago — OK, six years ago — I wrote about a great song called ’88 Lines About 44 Women’ by a band called The Nails. I know nothing else by them, but the idea of seeing that song live in a tiny basement club is pretty cool.

But I had my suspicions. Especially when the first comment on the Songkick page was all about how it was the loudest gig they’d ever been at. Clicked through to the band’s page, played the video there, and it was immediately obvious that the hardcore band Nails are not indie/new wave/whatever band The Nails.

Just goes to show the difference a definite article can make. Nails sound pretty good, but I don’t think I’ll be going.

Site Moved

This site is now running on a Linux virtual private server (VPS) at Linode. There may be some teething problems from the move, so please let me know if you see anything strange.

Mayday for Human Rights

More evidence, as if it were needed, that this government is not just incompetent, but actively malevolent:

The EU (withdrawal) bill, published on Thursday – known as the “great repeal bill”– which will formally enact Brexit, includes a clause which says: “The charter of fundamental rights is not part of domestic law on or after exit day.”

Yes, Theresa May and her cabal of crazies do not believe that British citizens should have the same fundamental rights guaranteed to them as citizens of the rest of the EU.

Mayhemic Mistake of Two-Year Parliament

This is amusing. Turns out that May has shot herself in the foot:

May has blundered with the threat to use the Parliament Act to force the Lords to pass Brexit bills: a bill must be rejected by the Lords in two successive sessions before the act can be invoked, but that’s been nullified by May’s creation of a two-year session.

Great New Phone; All the Wrong Reasons

My iPhone 6 was getting slow, and its battery was poor. I have been thinking of replacing it. But September is approaching, and Apple will announcing new iPhones (three new ones, according to rumours). So I had more or less set my mind on waiting till then.

That would also be consistent with my iPhone buying history: 3G, 4S, 6… the next in the sequence is 7S.

Friday changed my plans. I was standing at a bus stop on Old Street, just replying to a WhatsApp message. Something touched my hand, and for half a second I thought someone was bumping into me. Then there was a firm grip on my phone and it was gone. Pulled right out of my hand and off down the road on a moped — which must have come across the pavement from behind me.

I should have been more aware. I knew this kind of theft was a thing. We’ve been hearing about them for a few months. But you don’t always think about it, and you never think it’s going to happen to you. And, yes, OK, drink had been taken. But not that much.

The bus arrived a few seconds later, so there was nothing I could do but get on and head home. There was another guy at the stop who witnessed it, and he very kindly set up a hotspot on his phone and let me use it from my iPad. The Find My iPhone app didn’t find it, so the thief had probably turned it off right away. But I was able to request a remote wipe in case it’s ever turned back on, and I got an email from Apple saying all the card details had been removed from Apple Pay.

All of which meant I had to make a trip to the Apple Store on Saturday. And to the Three store, where it was alarmingly easy to get a replacement SIM. I just had to tell them my phone number and give them a payment card. No questions asked. Not even my name and address.

So I now have jet black 256 GB iPhone 7. Which is lovely. I’m late to all the new features, obviously, but here’s a quick rundown:

  • TouchID: it’s now insanely fast to unlock my phone. Seems like it’s almost before I touch the home button sometimes.
  • 3D Touch: people on podcasts seem to be saying they’ve stopped using this, but I’m loving it. Especially the edge-press for activating the app switcher (a feature which seems to be going away in iOS 11, I hear, so I probably shouldn’t get too used to it).
  • The haptic feedback generally. Little clicks that tell you when you’ve activated something. Just makes the whole experience much nicer.
  • The “taptic” home button. When I’ve tried this in the shop before now I wasn’t too sure about it. But a couple of days using it for real and I think maybe I prefer it to the feel of the old real button.

Plus, it’s black. Really, really black.

Even the box was black.

The cables are still white, of course. Which reminds me, I’ve always disliked Apple’s ear buds, and passed all my past ones on to my kids. But I thought I’d give these a try, not least because I wouldn’t mind trying the AirPods if they’re ever in stock anywhere,1 and they have the same form factor.

And I don’t hate them. I thought I always had trouble getting them to stay in, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now. The main problem is they don’t give enough sound isolation, so you can hear the traffic and people talking even with music or a podcast playing. I’ve always preferred the kind with rubbery tips, which form a seal. But aside from that, these are better than I expected. Which bodes well for AirPods.

Downside: the battery life doesn’t seem dramatically better than my old one, weirdly. For the first couple of days it was busy downloading updates and restoring things (and getting hot), but that should be over now. I’m assuming that I just have to give it a few full cycles till it beds in and the measurement gets more accurate.

And all the things you have to set up again. That’s not the fault of the phone, though, so much as the way it came to me. If had planned this I would have done an encrypted iTunes backup, which would have meant more things were restored to the new phone.

Anyway, that was a lot of words and no links about not very much.

  1. I asked in the shop if they had them in, and of course they didn’t. ↩︎

Micro.blog iOS Going Universal | Manton Reece

I’d like to be able to use Micro.blog from the iPad — well, I can, but it’s iPhone sized scaled up (or tiny in the middle of the screen) and doesn’t rotate to landscape, so I can’t use it with the keyboard. Manton tells us he’s going to fix all that, which will be great.