April 4, 2022

s11e25: The Wind That Blew The Preschoolers Away

0.0 Context setting

It's Monday, April 4 2022 and the national weather service has issued a wind warning for the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area. This means that the five year old's nature/forest preschool has been cancelled today, presumably because they're small and might get blown away. (Or that trees might fall on them. Probably the latter).

The family and I went out to the Oregon coast for the week for tide pooling, digging holes in sand, digging even bigger holes in the sand, being very angry at the ocean (this manifested in the five year old as facing the pacific ocean and yelling "COME AT ME, POSEIDON! YOU CAN'T TOUCH ME!" as the waves broke upon the beach), losing myself watching jellyfish float and swim, and having lots of conversations about what, exactly, is acceptable behavior in a gift shop.

A grab bag, today.

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Severance

I binged and caught up with Severance on Saturday night and so far I'm pleasantly surprised that it hasn't turned into some sort of endless mystery box-type show where the explanation behind one mystery or strange occurrence merely reveals yet another non-sequitur.

Anyway, Severance, so far, is not that. One thing I remember from seeing the opening titles¹ is yelling YES THIS IS FANTASTIC, THIS IS LIKE THOSE TILT-SHIFTED AGENT-BASED VFX DEMOS FROM YEARS AGO, which after digging in my Vimeo favorites (page 8!) turns out to be I've fallen, and I can't get up from 2015 by Dave Fothergil. Dave also did Crowd Dynamic 2013 from 8 years ago, and if you're like my friend sha, then you too might be a friend of Siggraph Technical Papers Trailers Season², a mainstay of things that caught my attention.

Oh, and I just remembered Humanity, an announced 2019 PlayStation game that's still not quite ready to come out, and totally has the same aesthetic of "hundreds of agent-based inverse kinematic humans being made to go through a series of physical trials much like the way we do in life, only we control them in a videogame".

Plants

Jörg Hillebrand is a fan of Star Trek in the way that I'm a fan of being alive. Hillebrand has a stupendous eye to detail, which means that if you like the planters one of the characters had in last week's episode of Picard, you too can buy magnetically levitating planters. Plants can sense magnetic fields, by the way.

Shorts

Chronic illness, a new hypercard

v buckenham gave a talk at GDC 2022 on making room for people with chronic illness. It's a great talk, you should read/watch it, and also I buried the lede because v is making what I can only parse as a new hypercard for making games on phones. You can read a thread about it from them, too.

The decision to use the bomb and... consciousness/decision making?

The decision to use the bomb wasn't a decision to use the bomb. Look, here's a good piece on the history of the usage of the first two nuclear bombs, what the "decision" was and how it came to be, and a reminder that things are always more complicated. It kind of makes me think of after-the-fact constructed consciousness, the old idea that there's a bunch of competing agents in your head, one of them or some of them, or some sort of coalition of them "win" and then you tell a story about how you totally meant to do that afterwards. One thing I took away was that the "the way the bombings were done was not according to some grand plan at all, but because of choices, some very :small scale: (local personnel working on Tinian, with no consultation with the President or cabinet members at all), made by people who could not predict the future". There's a companion piece, Were there alternative to the atomic bombings?

Technology is hard, let's go become activist investors

• Two British technology stories: one in economics/finance in the Guardian, where British Airways' IT is so bad even investors are starting to wonder what's going on and this great line:

"Even luddites understand that upgrading multiple legacy IT systems is not simple, especially when you have to keep an international fleet aloft at the same time."

Meanwhile, Randstad, a... temp agency? Won a contract to run the UK's National Tutoring Programme but apparently it went tits up for lots of reasons and went on pause or something, not least of which because the "website" or "portal", implemented as far as I can tell on Salesforce, has been "confusing" and "difficulty" which is just another entry in the line of "you can't deliver services without digital capability" and "most digital capability is shit" because "it should be easy" and anyway, "delivery is a thing".

Facebook

A thing about a Facebook bug leading to increased views of harmful content over six months caught my attention and instantly led to associations with: hidden pollution, superfunds, transparency in reporting, how do you test for regressions in, I don't know, moderation systems, the euphemism of "integrity risks" as if there's some sort of "containment field" that's going to result in a "coolant leak" and Geordi's going to have to "evacuate engineering" before "rolling under a closing bulkhead" and then "jettisoning the warp core". Sorry, I got distracted.

Abstract stuff is real, abstract stuff has effects in the real world (dark matter, which so far we think is real, is something we can't detect but nonetheless affects what we can detect). But here we have a situation where even trying to detect the effluent from an environmental like this is frustrated by the industrial content processor.

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Okay, that's it for today. I went over again, which I'm trying not to feel too bad about, and it's one of those triple-or-more transition days: back from vacation, back from the weekend, and disrupted thanks to The Wind That Blew The Preschoolers Away.

It's been a week for me. How have you been?

Best,

Dan

Things That Caught My Attention - Volume 1 is out now, collecting the best 50 essays from the first 45 episodes of this newsletter. Paid subscribers and supporters get a copy for free, subscribers get a copy at 20% off.