If Only It Was Over and Done With
1) Since I only use accounts here and at Pillowfort I didn't notice the suspiciously timed FB empire outage. But I heartily agree with this assessment of where our behavior has led us:
"a key part of the value of the internet, originally, was in its resiliency of being highly distributed, rather than centralized, and how it could continue to work well if one part fell off the network. The increasing centralization/silo-ization of the internet has taken away much of that benefit. So, if anything, yesterday's mess should be seen as another reason to look more closely at a protocols-based approach to building new internet services."
2) Watched the miniseries "The Trial of Christine Keeler" over the past two weeks. I was quite interested since I had heard of the Profumo scandal and its central players but never knew the details. Given that not that much emphasis was put on the whole Russian spy angle (probably because, as the end credits noted, the files on Stephen Ward are secret until 2046!) the whole thing came off as ridiculous and a matter of political gamesmanship.
Christine herself was portrayed as an emotionally delayed pinball that had terrible taste in men and kept ricocheting around from terrible decision to terrible decision. Mandy Rice-Davies actually came off rather well in both attempting to be Christine's friend while also having some sense and an eye to maximizing the situation. The series conveniently filmed two years after Keeler's death at which point everyone involved was deceased.
The series really turns on the portrayal of Ward which is quite sympathetic. There's the suggestion that his conviction had to do with looking for a scapegoat and a feeling of envy by the all-male jury and prosecution system. I got the sense we were supposed to see him as a good-time boy who, unlike Keeler, had both education and perspective but whose inner nature was as reckless as hers. The problem is that while we know about Christine's background we know nothing about either Mandy's or his. In reading about his background his story certainly seems far more interesting a subject.
Part of this, of course, is that Ward had lived a life by the time the scandal occurred whereas Christine is 21 by the end of it. But the series portrays her relationship with Ward as key, both in that it improved her condition but also that it exploited her naivete and lack of options.
There's also a suggestion that the whole case reveals the tortured intersection of gender, class, race, and age in how power is exerted over people's lives. The corruption of the police and its complicity with political power, the exploitation by the press of anything they can market as salacious, the lies that people agree to abide by until they become inconvenient, and of course the exploitation of young girls is unchanged from 60 years ago. There is one scene between the Profumos about what little power women have which has a rather bizarre ending where Profumo brings up his war experiences as if that somehow rationalized anything else he had done. It seemed to suggest that the two sexes are equally bad off which, given he was a War Minister, seemed laughable.
Overall I felt the series dragged, probably because it was tiresome watching Christine lurch from disaster to disaster largely of her own making, and because the trials take place in the last episode and a half of the series. The movie hides the differences in the lives Mandy, Stephen and Christine had lived prior to the scandal. Her erratic behavior is potentially an outcome of the very different upbringing she had and the comparative lack of choices. Without that contrast it's harder to connect the dots between her path and the better decisions the other two made.
3) I did a big review of the board game site we use in the last two weeks and minimally checked on the descriptions of all their games while test playing some 100 games of their 340+. (Most of them are fairly short, under 10 minutes and all under 30). Mike gave me access to his account so I could launch most of them, which was quite important because explanation videos and rules are geared to physical play. These do not always prepare one for either the rules version the online game uses or for the mechanics of how you have to do particular things. In one case I totally failed to understand I wasn't laying cards on the "table" but instead in some sections provided for the player to organize sets.
Looking at that many games in short order was rather interesting in seeing how similar many are. There were whole groups of games that operated the same way but with a different theme or with fewer or more twists. Some were mostly pretty to look at but didn't end up being that interesting to play. Some looked like early computer games.
It definitely helps to know something about the group one plays with. There were bunches of games I passed by not only because world development bores them but also because games with a lot of features (and thus explanations) meet with a lot of concern or resistance. And in the end we're meeting to have fun, so games that someone can grasp in a single round go over a lot better.
Not being able to see what others are looking at can be very frustrating, as we end up routinely sharing with one another that the computer isn't letting us do X or we can't understand why it did Y. Sometimes it's user error (inadvertently selecting more than one card), sometimes it's not understanding what a message is referring to, and sometimes the game just seems borked. Luckily I could sometimes find similar types of games that were a lot easier to explain (Forbidden Island or Dice Hospital vs Pandemic, The Builders vs Seven Wonders, Onitama vs Chess).
Sometimes instructions are simply unclear. We played Queens and Kings Checkers last week and I was very glad I had run through it before so since I had assumed from the directions that the same piece that had first become a King would later transition to a Queen. Instead the usual checkers process had been relabeled whereas the traditional King process now produced a Queen and a King got the ability to move in any direction but still only one space. But a King that reached the opposite side never became a Queen!
Anyway, the upside is that we won't have any worries about running out of new games for at least 6 months even though I'm going to try introducing 2 new ones each week.
4) I have never seen Miami Vice the Movie although I was quite familiar with the TV series at one time. I want to digress a moment to mention how mine was probably the last generation that understands you often watched shows on Friday nights not because you really liked them but because they were the best of the few choices that were on. I am convinced quite a few shows became hits mostly due to their time slots.
However I found the discussion of the movie rather interesting as it's considered one of those films that became appreciated after it bombed at the box office. The talk in these last few years, and particularly during the pandemic, has been all about how movies were meant to be seen in theaters. But this overlooks how many movies became beloved hits because they were seen at home. Princess Bride is probably among the best known, but others were even before VCRs such as It's a Wonderful Life. And this review praising the film notes:
"the very factors that worked against it as a new release became virtues once it no longer had to compete in that arena: “When people first watch something…they go in with this critical judgmental thing, checking the boxes: Does this have narrative momentum? Does this have a coherent plot? Is this realistic? All these kind of obnoxious defenses against getting into something… Over time, that ungainliness, that weirdness, that not-very-normalness makes it possible to re-watch it sooner than some other films.”"
In other words, people paying to see a show want something they can enjoy in the time frame of 2 hours or so, and to feel that they got their money's worth. Going out takes effort as well, you don't want to feel it was time wasted. That is very different from taking time to get to know a movie (or TV show) at home where the stakes are low and you can appreciate it for things that do not make it a hit, or even because you only take in parts of it.
I see this framing of an economic decision as a "cultural battle" to be disingenuous. It can be seen again in the current "crisis" of not having enough paper to print books. Yet this sure seems like a simple problem to fix -- get the digital version! Better for the environment too, yes? Aren't we all supposed to be reducing carbon footprints and deforestation? However the real issue, just like movies, is that it's being steered by short-term financial thinking that has nothing to do with "art".
"Some worry that the current crunch could reverse the yearslong trend of stable and sometimes rising print sales, sending readers back to digital books, which are less lucrative for publishers and authors, and especially brick and mortar retailers. “With a lack of capacity and growing uncertainty in a printing world, will that force the marketplace back to digital?”"
Heaven forbid we take this as an opportunity to make a needed change.
5) This article caught my attention because it startled me that Jools Holland is still playing this role. But I wonder if there is any TV in the U.S. doing this either? I long stopped watching MTV and is subsidiaries, and I know there are radio shows and podcasts as well as long running shows like Austin City Limits that feature musical acts. But are there musical curators on TV that have regular shows?
View poll: Kudos Footer-319
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
"a key part of the value of the internet, originally, was in its resiliency of being highly distributed, rather than centralized, and how it could continue to work well if one part fell off the network. The increasing centralization/silo-ization of the internet has taken away much of that benefit. So, if anything, yesterday's mess should be seen as another reason to look more closely at a protocols-based approach to building new internet services."
2) Watched the miniseries "The Trial of Christine Keeler" over the past two weeks. I was quite interested since I had heard of the Profumo scandal and its central players but never knew the details. Given that not that much emphasis was put on the whole Russian spy angle (probably because, as the end credits noted, the files on Stephen Ward are secret until 2046!) the whole thing came off as ridiculous and a matter of political gamesmanship.
Christine herself was portrayed as an emotionally delayed pinball that had terrible taste in men and kept ricocheting around from terrible decision to terrible decision. Mandy Rice-Davies actually came off rather well in both attempting to be Christine's friend while also having some sense and an eye to maximizing the situation. The series conveniently filmed two years after Keeler's death at which point everyone involved was deceased.
The series really turns on the portrayal of Ward which is quite sympathetic. There's the suggestion that his conviction had to do with looking for a scapegoat and a feeling of envy by the all-male jury and prosecution system. I got the sense we were supposed to see him as a good-time boy who, unlike Keeler, had both education and perspective but whose inner nature was as reckless as hers. The problem is that while we know about Christine's background we know nothing about either Mandy's or his. In reading about his background his story certainly seems far more interesting a subject.
Part of this, of course, is that Ward had lived a life by the time the scandal occurred whereas Christine is 21 by the end of it. But the series portrays her relationship with Ward as key, both in that it improved her condition but also that it exploited her naivete and lack of options.
There's also a suggestion that the whole case reveals the tortured intersection of gender, class, race, and age in how power is exerted over people's lives. The corruption of the police and its complicity with political power, the exploitation by the press of anything they can market as salacious, the lies that people agree to abide by until they become inconvenient, and of course the exploitation of young girls is unchanged from 60 years ago. There is one scene between the Profumos about what little power women have which has a rather bizarre ending where Profumo brings up his war experiences as if that somehow rationalized anything else he had done. It seemed to suggest that the two sexes are equally bad off which, given he was a War Minister, seemed laughable.
Overall I felt the series dragged, probably because it was tiresome watching Christine lurch from disaster to disaster largely of her own making, and because the trials take place in the last episode and a half of the series. The movie hides the differences in the lives Mandy, Stephen and Christine had lived prior to the scandal. Her erratic behavior is potentially an outcome of the very different upbringing she had and the comparative lack of choices. Without that contrast it's harder to connect the dots between her path and the better decisions the other two made.
3) I did a big review of the board game site we use in the last two weeks and minimally checked on the descriptions of all their games while test playing some 100 games of their 340+. (Most of them are fairly short, under 10 minutes and all under 30). Mike gave me access to his account so I could launch most of them, which was quite important because explanation videos and rules are geared to physical play. These do not always prepare one for either the rules version the online game uses or for the mechanics of how you have to do particular things. In one case I totally failed to understand I wasn't laying cards on the "table" but instead in some sections provided for the player to organize sets.
Looking at that many games in short order was rather interesting in seeing how similar many are. There were whole groups of games that operated the same way but with a different theme or with fewer or more twists. Some were mostly pretty to look at but didn't end up being that interesting to play. Some looked like early computer games.
It definitely helps to know something about the group one plays with. There were bunches of games I passed by not only because world development bores them but also because games with a lot of features (and thus explanations) meet with a lot of concern or resistance. And in the end we're meeting to have fun, so games that someone can grasp in a single round go over a lot better.
Not being able to see what others are looking at can be very frustrating, as we end up routinely sharing with one another that the computer isn't letting us do X or we can't understand why it did Y. Sometimes it's user error (inadvertently selecting more than one card), sometimes it's not understanding what a message is referring to, and sometimes the game just seems borked. Luckily I could sometimes find similar types of games that were a lot easier to explain (Forbidden Island or Dice Hospital vs Pandemic, The Builders vs Seven Wonders, Onitama vs Chess).
Sometimes instructions are simply unclear. We played Queens and Kings Checkers last week and I was very glad I had run through it before so since I had assumed from the directions that the same piece that had first become a King would later transition to a Queen. Instead the usual checkers process had been relabeled whereas the traditional King process now produced a Queen and a King got the ability to move in any direction but still only one space. But a King that reached the opposite side never became a Queen!
Anyway, the upside is that we won't have any worries about running out of new games for at least 6 months even though I'm going to try introducing 2 new ones each week.
4) I have never seen Miami Vice the Movie although I was quite familiar with the TV series at one time. I want to digress a moment to mention how mine was probably the last generation that understands you often watched shows on Friday nights not because you really liked them but because they were the best of the few choices that were on. I am convinced quite a few shows became hits mostly due to their time slots.
However I found the discussion of the movie rather interesting as it's considered one of those films that became appreciated after it bombed at the box office. The talk in these last few years, and particularly during the pandemic, has been all about how movies were meant to be seen in theaters. But this overlooks how many movies became beloved hits because they were seen at home. Princess Bride is probably among the best known, but others were even before VCRs such as It's a Wonderful Life. And this review praising the film notes:
"the very factors that worked against it as a new release became virtues once it no longer had to compete in that arena: “When people first watch something…they go in with this critical judgmental thing, checking the boxes: Does this have narrative momentum? Does this have a coherent plot? Is this realistic? All these kind of obnoxious defenses against getting into something… Over time, that ungainliness, that weirdness, that not-very-normalness makes it possible to re-watch it sooner than some other films.”"
In other words, people paying to see a show want something they can enjoy in the time frame of 2 hours or so, and to feel that they got their money's worth. Going out takes effort as well, you don't want to feel it was time wasted. That is very different from taking time to get to know a movie (or TV show) at home where the stakes are low and you can appreciate it for things that do not make it a hit, or even because you only take in parts of it.
I see this framing of an economic decision as a "cultural battle" to be disingenuous. It can be seen again in the current "crisis" of not having enough paper to print books. Yet this sure seems like a simple problem to fix -- get the digital version! Better for the environment too, yes? Aren't we all supposed to be reducing carbon footprints and deforestation? However the real issue, just like movies, is that it's being steered by short-term financial thinking that has nothing to do with "art".
"Some worry that the current crunch could reverse the yearslong trend of stable and sometimes rising print sales, sending readers back to digital books, which are less lucrative for publishers and authors, and especially brick and mortar retailers. “With a lack of capacity and growing uncertainty in a printing world, will that force the marketplace back to digital?”"
Heaven forbid we take this as an opportunity to make a needed change.
5) This article caught my attention because it startled me that Jools Holland is still playing this role. But I wonder if there is any TV in the U.S. doing this either? I long stopped watching MTV and is subsidiaries, and I know there are radio shows and podcasts as well as long running shows like Austin City Limits that feature musical acts. But are there musical curators on TV that have regular shows?
View poll: Kudos Footer-319
Comments at Dreamwidth
.