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2021.01 Monthnote

January 31, 2021

Back, back, back

As they used to say in Smash Hits. Weeknotes don't really work for me, either too much to say (and felt like it needed filtering) or not enough. Let's try month notes. If this doesn't work I'll just use the Druid calendar and come up with some non-standard interval. Also, may do some normal blog posts (!!) as well.

Monthly Goal: No Alcohol

This month the goal was to not drink alcohol - goal achieved pretty easily. No massive reason why, just felt like giving it a rest as beer consumption had crept up over 2nd lockdown just from boredom. Disappointing that it didn't suddenly give me infinite energy and positivity. Oh well.

Next month is fitness month so maybe that will help.

Moar Lockdown

Like that bit between Christmas and New Year but you have to go to work. Everyone is bored of it now. The most ambiently stressful thing I've ever encountered. I'm just ignoring it now.

Work

I got asked to manage another team so I'm now "running" the public website dev team as well as the web app team. Had to start unarchiving all the knowledge about normal websites out of the long term storage bit of my brain - it's all there but taking a while to load back into working memory. As is all my management experience, need to have a bit of structure now I'm managing a lot more people. Must be doing something right though, so that's nice.

My first PR was optimising an image, so some things never change. Chrome's algorithm for resize interpolation of large images is surprisingly bad compared to Safari/Firefox. Also, difficult to take screenshots of something that looks different on standard density and retina screens.

Books

Read quite a lot of books this month.

The Ministry For The Future - Kim Stanley Robinson

For me KSR's best book since the Mars trilogy, brings together a lot of his recurrent themes in a brilliant imagining of how bad climate change would have to get for us to actually do something about it, and some interesting ways of getting out of it. Genuinely think this is one of those "important" books

City - Clifford D. Simak (1952)

Hadn't read this sci-fi classic and Hugo winner and it's great, has aged well so still a good read. It's a fix-up novel - basically a series of short stories put together into a novel - which can sometimes be a bit shonky but this one really works. Hard to describe what it's about as it spans thousands of years and takes in lots of different genres/tropes - it's very much a big picture, sweeping history of mankind story but told in close-ups of the day to day rather than big screen action. Simak's work is always described as "pastoral sci-fi" and I can't think of a better description of what he does, but it's doesn't lose any of the sense of wonder by looking at the personal rather than the big picture. Highly recommended, even if the section where humanity all got agoraphobia was a bit close to the bone.

More Than Human - Theodore Sturgeon (1953)

Another Hugo winner and sci-fi classic, this one delving into the "next step in evolution" trope by imagining a gestalt organism that consists of many human bodies that work in concert to surpass normal humans. Hasn't aged as well as City, there's definitely some offensive content and language here that doesn't sit well in the 2020s but it's well worth a read if you can get past that. It really sings when Sturgeon

Burn-in - P. W. Singer, August Cole

Fancied something a bit light and had heard some good things about this techno-thriller and it was pretty enjoyable if you aren't put off by huge Tom Clancy-esque chunks of "here's how this all works" exposition. The notional story is about a future Unabomber being tracked down by a human/robot duo, but most of the enjoyment is the descriptions of a very near future which is a pretty well rendered, very much a believable extension of what's going on now, good and bad.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise & Fall of WeWork

Was interested to see the inside story of WeWork but it was really the same story as every other tech company that's gone wrong - over-privileged CEO gets given far too much leeway with no oversight, greedy people believe the hype and then eventually reality intrudes catastrophically. After this and Bad Blood (the Theranos one) I'm not sure I need to read any more of these. Both the problem and the solution are blindingly obvious.

TV

Star Trek: Discovery S03

Still watching, I liked the direction the early episodes were going but as usual it managed to fail as hard as possible in the season finale. Nothing about the last few episodes from the Georgiou exit 2 parter made any sense, and the already unbearable emoting was raised to a new high. What is going on in the writers room for this show?!?

The Expanse S05

Best one yet, the books get better from 5 so it makes sense this was a step up for the series. Still not sure I like this as much as some fellow geeks but definitely improving.

Call My Agent

Everyone is saying this is good so tried a few episodes. Not to heavy and kind of fun, will probably watch the rest.

The Sopranos

I think it's only this and Mad Men that I've not seen from the "important television" list so filling in those gaps. Only a few episodes in but it's pretty damn good so far.

Film

Les Misérables (2019)

No, not that one.

Seen a lot of comparisons of this to La Haine but, apart from the subject matter, they seem quite far off the mark. The director, Ladj Ly, grew up in the place he's depicting and he goes for something almost neorealist, he doesn’t heighten the poverty for effect, doesn’t make the characters angels and devils, he just tries to put a real place on screen and populate it with real people. For the most part he succeeds, the characters seem a little thin at times, but by undermining the usual cliches he makes it quietly powerful.

Hard not to see the warning to Pento that he thinks he understands things after 1 day as a warning to the audience. Unless you’ve been here ten years you don’t really understand, and you don’t really know how things are going to resolve - there’s no easy answers. Well worth a watch.

Watched on Netflix UK

Kill List

Have been meaning to watch this for a long while as it was quite hyped and I enjoyed a lot of this, the Mike Leigh with guns vibe worked beautifully for most of the run time and it progressively ramps up the tension (and weirdness) to great effect. The ending seemed a bit rushed though and it didn’t quite work for me, left me feeling that I didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to work out what it was all about. Always nice to see something original though.

Kill List rental on Amazon

No Blade Of Grass (1970)

Not a great film, but I was captivated for the entire run time. Based on the book The Death of Grass by John Christopher (more famous for his Tripods novels) it’s environmental catastrophe setup is a familiar one these days but must have been pretty radical for 1970. Definitely a spiritual precursor to things like the BBC’s Survivors and the later crop of nuclear apocalypse films like Threads.

What really makes this special is the fact it was made in England in 1970. This film could be exhibit number 1 in the case for sci-fi alwasy being about the present. Sitting squarely in a time where the class system is under attack and the shockwaves of the swinging sixties are still propagating outward from London this film is extremely mixed up. The stiff upper lip ex-army man takes about 5 minutes to start killing the innocent, rape trauma is cured by a cup of tea and the “love” of a strapping psychopath, the lower class die for their set of saucepans. As John Mulaney would say, we don’t have time to unpack all that.

Some of it is laughable, but there’s a lot of great touches as well - the lovable policeman but he’s got a rifle!!, the advert voiceover that plays over the shots of an abandoned Rolls Royce, the lol-worthy “this motion picture is not a documentary...but it could be” and many other moments are genuinely inspired, but it pulls back from the experimentalism too much to be truly great.

Overall this is a real curiosity and I'm glad to have seen it.

No Blade Of Grass rental on Amazon UK

Charly

Terrible adaptation of Daniel Keyes` sci-fi classic Flowers for Algernon. Structurally awful, takes far too long to get going then skips over the details that make the source material so good. With such an inept structure it has to rely far too heavily on Cliff Robertson impressive performance, but there’s only so much he can do, at least he got an Oscar for his efforts. Avoid.

Watched: DVD

Also watched:

  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - still the best
  • Outside The Wire - another mostly forgettable Netflix scifi
  • The Vast of Night - not sure I like it as much as some, but very good
  • Bad Boys for Life - extremely meh
  • The Power (1968) - another interesting sci-fi oddity but overall a pretty bad film

Interesting Links And Stuff

What happened in January

  • UK government still generally shit at most things
  • Another free school dinners scandal
  • Brexit finally happened - all a bit of a mess, definitely bad for some but too early to tell what overall level of catastrophe it's going to be
  • Snowed a bit
  • More lockdown
  • Schools opened for 1 day in a textbook BoJo shambles
  • Storming the Capitol - US looked a bit shaky for a minute, very weird.
  • Biden sworn in as President - nice to have a bit of boring back in politics
  • Gamestop share madness - the /r/wallstreetbets Reddit crew drove some stonks through the roof and "destabilised capitalism" (e.g. rich people lost some money), still ongoing
  • EU went a bit bonkers about vaccine deliveries, then backed down when it all got out of hand.