John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog, page 8

Sunday miscellany: Spinoza, website ads, and a viral outbreak

A possible goal: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, to cry, or to condemn, but to understand). From Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

From something that happened earlier today: It’s funny but kind of stupid when a timed pop-up ad gets in the way of a timed display ad on a web page. If I were one of those clever smarty-pants web writers who’s always talking about things that happen on the web, I might try to work up an essay about this. I’d...

Ted Chiang’s arrival: the story of his life may be about to change

A long writing project has occupied me for much of this weekend. Hence no brilliant, probing, and thoughtful post today—nor any other kind either, except for a few quick notes.

On Friday night, a friend and I saw the new science-fiction film Arrival. Our capsule judgment is that it’s not bad, but it’s not very good either. It seems at times to want to be a Terence Malick film but misses, and it accomplishes too little in the time it occupies. However, I highly recommend the story on which it’...

Gleanings: from recent reading on music, social media, VR games, and feminist SF

In the ars gratia artis view, works of art are their own end and shouldn’t serve any external purpose, but most of us use art all the time. J. S. Bach composed a piece of music, now known as the Goldberg Variations, that was reportedly meant to occupy the restless mind of a patron while he tried to get to sleep. More recently, composer Max Richter (whom I wrote about here) crafted an eight-hour-long project called Sleep, which is meant to be heard while sleeping. Part of his rationale, from a...

Politics got you down? Try a little West Wing therapy

Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda, from the live debate in Season Seven of The West Wing (photo courtesy of Mitchell Haddad/NBC)

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in 1974, after being sworn in as the 38th president of the United States. The current presidential election campaign—which has been far from a clean, issues-oriented matter—strikes me as something of a nightmare, and I’m tempted to say that it’s almost over, but the thing about nightmares is th...

Zombie apocalypse yada yada yada: Looking at The Walking Dead

Decisions, decisions: Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his little friend. (Photo by Gene Page/AMC)

The previous season of The Walking Dead ended with a cliffhanger. Many members of what I think of as Our Gang—the collection of characters at the center of the show’s long-running narrative—were captured by a group that calls itself the Saviors, and in retaliation for Our Gang’s having wiped out almost everyone at a Saviors outpost, their leader, the fearsome Negan, has lined up all the captives...

On “mind crime” and other questions about Westworld

Welcome to the new Old West: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Teddy (James Marsden) in Westworld (photo via HBO)

Last spring, George Musser posted a fascinating article in Aeon called “Consciousness creep,” the gist of which is given by the dek (as we journalists call the story description beneath the headline): “Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness.” Here’s the conclusion (careful readers of my blog may recall th...

Even Netflix is doing it: adventures in advanced film technology

We’re so conscious of movies as cultural expressions—their performers played up on magazine covers, their directors lionized or criticized or both, their storylines hashed over, their titles entering our language—that we’re apt to forget they’re also technological artifacts, the product of an ongoing and increasingly sophisticated set of developments involving chemistry, optics, mechanical and electrical engineering, and electronics. In the beginning, pictures didn’t move at all; then they di...

A few fairly cryptic preliminary notes on Westworld

Last night, HBO ran the premiere episode of Westworld, a new series, much anticipated in many quarters, that derives from a decades-old film written and directed by Michael Crichton. The episode was highly suggestive, proposing much, establishing little, apart from the expected idea of a theme park populated by human-seeming androids. Instead of attempting to write about it, which would take time I don’t have, I’ll simply list a few things I thought about before, during, or after watching it....

Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered: Isabelle Huppert at BAM

Andrzej Chyra as Hippolytus and Isabelle Huppert as Phaedra in the Sarah Kane section of Phaedra(s) at BAM (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt, courtesy Odeon-Theatre de l’Europe)

Though the ability to play multiple roles is essential to the art of acting, there’s something uncanny about seeing the switch happen before us. Even when we know there’s some presentational trickery involved, as when separate performances by Tatiana Maslany are composited into a single scene on the BBC America drama...

Versions of history: on Dallas, computers, & AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire

Don’t mess with Texas coders: a promo graphic for the second season of Halt and Catch Fire (via AMC)

Tinkerers are everywhere and probably always have been. The very idea of ham radio, for instance, was that it didn’t matter where you were; once you built or bought a transmitter, a receiver, and an antenna, you were set—you could chat with people in another part of the country, the continent, or the world. The network of hams formed an Internet before there was an Internet; when other channel...