2021.02 Monthnote

March 21, 2021

Half a Century

Super late on these as I had a bit of time off to have my 50th birthday. 50! Could have sworn I was 30 about 5 minutes ago. Will probably write a bit more about that next month but bought a few things to assuage the pain of looking into the void:

PS5

Managed to snag one by joining a tracker Discord, Game site crashed for most of the morning but managed to check out eventually. Games are probably the main thing that disappeared when I had kids, lots of things just decrease but games were gone, I just didn’t have the time for them anymore. Now my kids are pretty self sufficient it’s time to take them up again. The PS5 is very nice kit, Sony are slowly getting better at onboarding, device integration etc. My phone tells me when a game has finished downloading patches, which is a nice touch over constantly checking whether it’s at 100%. Currently playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales and it’s very cool, the seamless transition from cut-scenes to gameplay and the lack of loading screens is very impressive. Next-gen is pretty next-gen this time.

FCB-1010

This is basically just a big pedalboard that sends midi event. I want to hook it up to Albeton so I can do more complicated looping stuff hands free and get more of a flow going, it’s pretty hard to get into the groove when you’re constantly having to press buttons to record yourself. We will see if this is the way.

Monthly Goal: Fitness

A massive fail on this, did a few sessions and then managed to destroy my left elbow so badly I could hardly move it. Had to put everything on hold for a bit. Oh well, these things happen, will try again when it’s sorted, I think it’s nearly there.

Work

An avalanche of stuff to absorb to get up to speed to on modern website best practices having been doing more app based stuff for a few years. Need to dig into some of the more advanced Gatsby stuff and the latest bits of SEO. As always after a while away I’m a bit “What hath the web become!!” with the whole thing, but it’s the reality of the situation.

Books

War of the Maps, Paul McAuley

I’ve always liked Paul McAuley since Red Dust, but haven’t read much of his stuff in the last couple of years so picked this up as it cropped up on quite a few end-of-year best of lists. It’s set on an enormous world that exists on the outside of a Dyson sphere, the Maps are huge planet size areas of the world, and McAuley channels a bit of the fantasy vibe as “the lucidor” goes on a quest across his Map to find his nemesis Remfrey He. The people that live on the Maps seem to have regressed from the high-technology of the “Gods” that built the sphere, although there’s still bits of tech and AI lying around. Also, some people have powers, although they’re all pretty low level - bioelectricity, farsight, coercion (silvertongue), another one that’s something about “reading life maps” that’s never really explained. The lucidor has a meta-power, damping, which stops the other ones working when they’re near him. The backdrop to all this is a plague of invasive lifeforms from a nearby Map that are slowly taking over the native ecology.

I’m not usually a fan of this kind of semi-fantasy setup, it tends to involve a lot of ambling around and very little plot. This one is guilty of that, but surprisingly I enjoyed the world building and characters so much that I didn’t really mind. Even the fairly perfunctory ending didn’t spoil it for me, so I guess that’s a pretty positive recommendation, sometimes the journey is the lesson etc. etc.

Cold Storage, David Koepp

A fun Crichton-esque action movie in a book from Koepp, a screenwriter who has written a lot of movies you’ve heard of (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, etc.) Basically extrapolates what a mutated Cordyceps fungus (that one that takes over insects) would do with human hosts, with huge amounts of artistic license. As airport novels go this is a good one, Koepp knows how to write and avoids the cliches that make a lot of these kinds of books unbearable. Definitely worth a read if you fancy something light.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” - the book. As a quick overview of the disastrous impact of post-Fordism & it’s neoliberal cheerleaders it’s pretty good. As a signpost to the what we should do instead it’s pretty bad, but then so is pretty much every other book in this vein.

TV

The Changes

I’ve had the DVD of this series sitting in my bookcase for a while. I remember seeing clips of it as a kid and wondering what the hell was going on. Having watched it now I’m not surprised I was confused, it’s pretty weird.

Warning: spoilers for a 46 year old series ahead.

The Changes is a pretty dark kids series. Less than 2 minutes in nearly everyone in the UK goes bonkers after hearing noises in their heads and smashes up any technology more advanced than a horse and cart.(they didn’t hang around in the 70s!) Panic ensues and everyone leaves for France, except our hero, Nicky, who’s parents lose her in a crowd and then decide that she’ll probably be fine (excellent parenting!) The rest of the series is her trundling around getting into scrapes in this strangely pastoral post-apocalyptic England. She hangs out with a group of Sikhs for a bit, who apparently aren’t effected by the “noise” that caused everyone else to smash up the tech - this is probably the most effective bit of the series as it’s gets into some racial issues that must have seemed pretty cutting edge at the time. It’s a bit dodgy now, but you can see what they were trying to do and it’s good stuff.

After leaving the Sikh group she nearly gets burnt as a witch (standard) meets a lovely middle class couple who are like a young Tom and Barbara from the The Good Life, just chilling in their nice house being self sufficient, then eventually hears the call of the “noise’ that started the whole thing and sets off to find source of the troubles.

This is where it gets really strange. Nicky eventually finds the source of the madness and it’s a big bit of rock in a mine?!? - this has been telegraphed by the decision to show a picture of a rock (which doesn’t actually look at all like the problem rock) at the end of every episode for no apparent reason. Cut to thousands of kids in the 70s as they say to themselves “ah, that’s what that was!” Even more weird is the hand wavey explanation for what the rock is - it’s kind of Merlin, but not Merlin, it’s some ancient power, and it’s woken too early, or maybe not, something something pollution, technology, blah blah blah. This is all just monologued by Nicky while standing in front of the rock for a few minutes, then the rock decides to stop being mardy, the mine collapses and that’s the end.

The 70s were weirder than I remember.

For All Mankind

Loved the first series although it had a few faults, for the second series they’ve jumped to the 80s and the cold space war is in full effect. The showrunners seem to have taken a good look at the first series and tuned the whole thing a bit, seems to be better balanced and generally more gripping. This is probably one of the most underrated shows on TV at the moment.

The Sopranos

Mostly watching this at the moment. It is very very good but you don’t need me to tell you that.

The Expanse

As the novels get better, the series gets better. Thought this one was the best yet. Was a bit confused about surprising plot twist, but it turned out to be caused by sexual harassment case against the actor, which is a very good reason to kill someone off early.

Wandavision

Maybe not quite as good as it first appeared to be, but pretty enjoyable all the same. It’s pretty obvious that Marvel couldn’t resist having a big finish when it probably needed a smaller ending to match the emotions it was dealing with. The bits that actually dealt with grief and loss were surprisingly moving. I’m hoping the final fate of The Vision is a setup to give him a solo series so they can do the Tom King miniseries as a follow up, would flow pretty nicely from his current predicament.

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

Adam Curtis back on his bullshit again. Watched one episode and he just gets worse over time. Nope.

Film

A poor month for films, but then looking at this list I've only got myself to blame.

Greenland - tried to do something different in the disaster movie genre, pretty much failed
The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things - Groundhog Day as a teen romance movie, not bad but then not that great either.
Down With Love - pastiche of 1960s screwball comedies, Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellweger do a good job, pretty enjoyable but can’t really recreate the charm of the originals. Peyton “Ant Man” Reed has had an interesting career.

What happened in February

It snowed
Another Mars rover 🎉
Reddit became our most useful weapon against capitalism (Gamestonks!)
Daft Punk split up :(
Deepfake Tom Cruise proved what everyone has been saying about deep fakes for a while
The monarchy continued it’s excellent work on destroying the monarchy
Jeff Bezos resigned as CEO of Amazon
Trickle down economics doesn’t work - shocker!
“Claudia Winkleman doesn’t believe in water” was an actual headline
“All Your Base” was 20 years old