Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 32
May 27, 2014
Dept. of Bait and Switch
I paraphrase from The Daily Beast: Okay, so maybe gay marriage wasn’t really about creating equality within the institution of marriage. And yes, all that stuff about “how does gays getting married change your marriage” was a smoke-screen. Because marriage is probably going to change. A lot. But don’t worry–it’ll be great!
As Lando once said, this deal is getting worse all the time.
Reparations Watch
In the course of discussing the Greatest Piece of Journalism Ever (the Ta-Nehisi Coates reparations opus, obviously) Rachel Lu notes, “Coates has a gift for affecting more nuance than he really offers.”
I can’t tell whether or not she’s being sarcastic, and I haven’t read the Coates piece. But I do remember what he wrote about Middlemarch: “I finished up Middlemarch two days ago, and had a good debate about it on Twitter.”
You’re probably thinking, Well, maybe he really did have a good debate about it on Twitter! Here are some of the highlights:
“I thought she was all ‘Gimme the loot, gimme the loot, gimme the loot.’ And she got it.”
“She has a total handle on language, but I just thought she couldn’t bring it all together, as you say.”
The first tweet was about Rosamond, the second is his final verdict on Eliot.
May 22, 2014
Proposed:
Ken Watanabe’s “Let them fight” in the new Godzilla is the most courageous line read ever performed by a great actor in a disposable pop-corn flick.
And not only is it courageous–heroically so, given not just the dialogue itself, but the circumstances surrounding it–but it’s also entirely triumphant. For me, it’s the moment that makes the movie.
May 21, 2014
Possibly My Favorite Piece of Tech Pessimism, Ever
Quinn Norton, writing about why software cannot be secure:
Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.
Now imagine billions of little unknowable boxes within boxes constantly trying to talk and coordinate tasks at around the same time, sharing bits of data and passing commands around from the smallest little program to something huge, like a browser — that’s the internet. All of that has to happen nearly simultaneously and smoothly, or you throw a hissy fit because the shopping cart forgot about your movie tickets.
We often point out that the phone you mostly play casual games on and keep dropping in the toilet at bars is more powerful than all the computing we used to go to space for decades
NASA had a huge staff of geniuses to understand and care for their software. Your phone has you.
Plus a system of automatic updates you keep putting off because you’re in the middle of Candy Crush Saga every time it asks.
Because of all this, security is terrible.
Two Gifts for You
The first is from Galley Friend Joel Engel, a fantastic, only-in-LA story about cinematographer Gordon Willis. The payoff is pure gold.
The second is the transcript of a commencement address given by Galley Friend Mary Eberstadt earlier this week at Seton Hall. It is, by turns, beautiful, magisterial, inspiring, and amazingly–not to say wickedly–subversive. The only possible improvement would have been closing with “Rumeal sends his regards.”
May 13, 2014
It Happened Again–Updated
Umm, yeah. Remember this? Well, it happened again. And it’s even worse. Link to follow tomorrow morning.
Update: So here it is. Is doing a deep-dive reconstruction of Frozen worse than doing it for Star Wars? Who can say.
It Happened Again
Umm, yeah. Remember this? Well, it happened again. And it’s even worse. Link to follow tomorrow morning.
May 12, 2014
When “Justified” Met Harrison Ford
Unbelievably fantastic story from Justified’s Tim Jacob Pitts about being in K-19 with Harrison Ford:
“[The movie] is about a nuclear submarine whose reactor starts failing and melting down, and as the captain of this boat [Harrison Ford’s] gotta send his guys into the core of this submarine knowing that they will certainly die of radiation poison and horrible deaths. And that’s the crux of the drama.
And at this point, it’s three-quarters of the way through the movie, and he’s sent a bunch of people in, and he’s overlooking the sick bay where his men are nearly dying or laid out. I’m one of the men nearly dead in one of the bunks and Harrison Ford is looking across the cabin.
The DP (director of photography) is trying to get his eyeline, and he says, “Harrison, where are you looking for this scene? Where’s your eyeline. Where are you looking?
And Harrison says, (in a gravely Harrison Ford voice): “Into my soul.”
And the guy goes, “All right, Harrison. But where is your soul exactly? Is it to your right? To your left? Where’s your soul at Harrison?”
And Harrison Ford says, “Buried. Under a mountain of money.”
May 7, 2014
Dept. of Awesome
For reasons not worth getting into, yesterday I came into possession of something I never thought I’d own–a Golden Age Batman, courtesy of Galley Sis M.D. Have a look at the awesome:
It’s a beautiful copy. The ad on the back is classic, too–a Red Ryder air rifle!
But of course, you have to read the fine print. Despite having the price of $4.25 listed for the rifle, this ad is just to order the official Red Ryder comic book. Look closely at the wording in the coupon that you’re supposed to cut out and mail in:
This is so great. Cut it out and enclose “one thin dime” plus three cents for postage. But be aware! “Most boys are ordering an extra copy for their Girl Friend.”
May 5, 2014
Dept. of Futurism
Jon Evans has another entry in the post-scarcity economy genre here. It continues to amaze me that people not named Matthew Yglesias can write passages like this:
I’ve been arguing for some time now that the combination of new technology and old capitalism will soon drastically worsen inequality. It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good.
What classifies a job as “good” or “bad”? Who has done the tabulation of jobs destroyed by technology versus created by technology? What, exactly, is the distribution of “good” and “bad” jobs in each of the created and destroyed columns?
Like so much of the tech-futurist press, this is all just taken as given because . . . internet!
As I’ve mentioned before, “post-scarcity economics” didn’t arrive yesterday. It’s been bouncing around the popular press and sci-fi writers for at last three quarters of a century. I’d be interested in knowing to what extent these boomlets coincide with moments of relative prosperity (or hardship) in the real world. Do our futurists tend to be more optimistic about the future when the here-and-now is gilded, or hard? Or is there no correlation between techno-utopian fantasy economics and real economics?
