everyone believes their own version of the world, and it’s killing us. meanwhile, artists still act like this is an important, subversive act in their work; that failing to say anything is empowering, or provocative, and maybe it is in small doses. but when the dominant form of entertainment is one which refuses to state its values, for fear of alienating the audience, I don’t think it’s very healthy.

on the other hand, the creators of Dark THINK they did this, just because of the ending. but the series hammers its nihilist, deterministic philosophy SO. HARD. throughout, that thinking you’ve created a cleverly-ambiguous story is just… delusional?

Friese: We are big believers in ambivalence. We don't think there's only one answer to a thing. That relates to everything. It's both hopeful and ominous at the same time. In other [projects] we've done before, we don't like to end on a dot. We put a dot, wait a little, and then we put a question mark at the end. It's just a nice nuance with which to end.

Odar: It's really up to the audience to answer it. I have an answer, but it's very personal. You might have an answer, and it's very personal. That's the beauty of storytelling. You will have something very personal toward the story. It's the same with Blade Runner, and how there are still people thinking Harrison Ford is not a replicant; where I'm thinking, "How can you think he's not a replicant?" That's the beauty of that story, that there's a question mark.

I want: the mechanics of a story to remain largely unexplained — the technology, the magic, the maneuvers. Don’t explain every little moment. But I honestly want artists to say what they believe, even if it’s infuriating. because then we can assess its effectiveness, and its merit, without having to dance forever in the ambiguous zone of perpetual commerce.

Dark makes its philosophy clear, and I hate it. But I hate it even more that they think they were being nuanced, and that everybody’s talking about THE PLOT rather than going; “So, what you made was unbearable and empty. After such a compelling start, how did this happen?”

you can leave the particulars ambiguous, but I believe narratives should land in a place of meaning, not meaningless ambivalence. And almost every prominent genre creator operates in the inverse mode: they overexplain the mechanisms, til all the fun is drained from them, and then wants to leave us asking questions about “what really happened” or “what did it all mean?”

It is my crystallizing belief that this mode arises from large-scale commodification. But it’s not the only way!

And yet, as violently as Dark bludgeons the viewer with explanations, people are still going, “Wait WHAAAAAT?” So, maybe, you DO have to suck the life out of the useful ambiguity, while leaving the husk of ambiguity at the end so that no matter what, someone can decide they liked your bullshit waste of time because it’s “up to the viewer to interpret”

get! fucked!!!

My friend Shane said it was like they shit the bed and showed everyone, and I agree completely. The end of the series, after two increasingly-interminable seasons devoid of narrative tension or meaning, told with some of the worst dialogue and ham-handiest editing in recent memory, managed to somehow get Worse and WORSE with every passing minute until the credits rolled.

They set a slow-motion montage of people disintegrating to a discordant cover of “What a Wonderful World,” including a straight-from-fight-club “let’s hold hands while the world burns” shot, and it didn’t mean anything;

they “it was all a dream”ed it, to no end, and it didn’t mean anything;

they made us look at some computer graphics that were BOTH the matrix AND interstellar ON PURPOSE, showed two characters who DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER because they ARE BOTH FROM DIFFERENT WORLDS FROM LIKE AN HOUR AGO look at each other’s child selves through Narnia Time Doors(???? which isn’t a thing at any other point?????) and then learn it was them in their memories AND THEN THEY EVAPORATE BECAUSE THEIR WORLDS DON’T EXIST AND IT DOESN’T MATTER;

they use the WORST biblical Adam & Eve + bullshit German philosophy hodgepodge of symbols to show these two old lovers slash rivals slash aunt and nephew slash they never actually met, sort of reconcile for no reason and it doesn’t matter??????

They said over and over again that it has all happened in an infinite loop and had to be preserved but if the time loop started over catastrophically then there’s LITERALLY NO WAY THEY COULD KNOW THAT BUT IT ALSO DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THE SHOW ISN’T ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT TRYING TO PROVE HOW SMART SOMEONE WITH A LATE-90S POP CULTURE EDUCATION IS,

BUT THEY AREN’T!!!

IT’S FUCKING STUPID

THIS ISN’T EVEN 10% OF WHAT I CAN CRITICIZE ABOUT THE SHOW, and it doesn’t matter, because no one can hear me, it isn’t my job, and I just have to put it on the mental shelf with every other “I wanted this to be cool and instead I hate how bad entertainment products are, and how I have no role in improving any of them, and it’s also the stupidest thing to be mad about in our backwards world, and all I wanted was to watch an interesting story that other people said was good and instead I have to wonder what’s wrong with everyone, including me.”

Anyway don’t watch it, thanks

hum — desert rambler

I find that Hacker News is really good at attracting people who think technology is cool, which is a particularly dangerous thing for anyone who actually expects to work in the tech industry. Computers are awful. You need to really embrace the hatred before you can be an effective technologist.

— roguelazer

Unfortunately, I smile when I read something like this, because it feels so true.

I've been in a pretty bad mood for most of the last 48 hours; not for any big reason, just everything. Still hiding inside, still chugging away at the game I'm programming that I should have finished two months ago but, hey, that's not really how software works, particularly when you're doing a thousand things you've never done before.

Unfortunately, I've "chosen" a career path where I don't get paid more money when something takes longer than I budgeted for. I just drain my bank account and get increasingly frustrated while trying to carry on and eventually make it. I shut down to the outside world; I can't manage external communication; it's no good! But I do get the project done. What I really need is to be embedded somewhere with a project that should take a year, with a budget for it to take two years, and also to not live in hell. While I'm making a list of requests.

Besides that, I've been doing a good job. I'm writing better code all the time, learning and applying new techniques, filing bugs to improve the software I'm using to make the game, and working with people I like on a thing that I hope I'll eventually get to be proud of. But let me tell you: I've dealt with so many software problems in the last few months, of all kinds, at every level of the stack, from firmware to SDK to code editor to 3rd party libs to multiple operating systems to, of course, my own code. It's exhausting. I'm grateful to have help, and I suppose I'm grateful to have finally gotten my cannonball mind to work this way, patiently teasing out the way to make something work, somehow, eventually.

And it is working. But computers are awful. Everything you ever do on a computer that even remotely works is a minor miracle of human perseverance. And as frustrating as they can be, it's worth remembering that.

As a corollary, here's a real anecdote from Bethesda's Todd Howard, about how they dealt with the limited memory of the original Xbox when porting Morrowind:

We were really unsure about the Xbox. I had made a bet, internally, that there’s no chance the Xbox would come close to the PC sales. And someone bet me that the Xbox [edition] would outsell it, which it did. The Xbox version was extremely difficult. We had never done a console game — even though the original Xbox was very PC-like. Microsoft was a great partner; they believed in the game and helped us quite a bit. But we had so many issues trying to get that kind of game in a system that had so little memory.

You could do a trick on the original Xbox, which was that you could reboot it during a load screen. So you could put up an image that stayed there, reboot your game, and people who play it on the Xbox won’t be able to tell. But those of us who worked on the game can tell you: “That load screen? Your Xbox is actually rebooting the game.” It just couldn’t handle the memory situation, so we had to clear it out. And it actually worked really, really well. That was one of our final tricks. Our Hail Mary.

lol

In the last few weeks, I started watching "Dark" because I'd heard enough people say it was cool, or something. I just wanted something interesting to watch. I suspected it might be bullshit, but I gave it a try. And the first season, like so many first seasons of television, was pretty interesting! The entire time I was thinking, "Okay, this has some neat stuff in it, but they'd better be going somewhere interesting! Don't jerk me around for no reason, TV people!"

Well, the second season started to drag out, repeat itself, and then indulged in big-time prequelitis — when a story thinks it needs to show you the things it's been suggesting, but it really doesn't. And this one super didn't need to do it!

I don't know whether it was badly-written in the beginning, and just felt interesting because it was unfamiliar, or if the writing got bad during the second season, because... why? I know it must be terribly difficult to write and produce an entire season of television in a year. I don't want that particular job! But it's a horrible thing to watch someone run out of ideas right before your eyes. The camerawork grew less interesting, the plot lost its spark, the dialogue... the fucking DIALOGUE. WHAT the FUCK happeNEDDD??????

What is wrong with TV people? Why is manufactured drama, which fails to resemble real human conversation in any regard, the standard for television? What the fuck is wrong with us? And why do people SAY that it is GOOD???

At the end of the second season, I was shouting at the television every five minutes that it was too stupid to exist. Against my better judgment, I watched s3 e1 just to see. And even then, I was ready to say, "Okay, maybe this is interesting! Maybe the insipid philosophy, the nihilistic fatalism, the corrupt ideology of predestination that's being wrung out of every moment of this cursed entertainment product is at least going to do something interesting."

So I looked up some reviews. I didn't learn what happens. But I did learn that the 3rd season is the last, and there were a number of reviews where people said, "It's a mess, but it somehow works out to land somewhere really good."

Well, I just watched episodes 2, 3, and 4 of the 8. And I tell you what!!! I already hate it so much that there's no way it can be redeemed. But I'm going to watch it anyway, because fuck me, I guess! I am compelled to endure media I despise so that I can think about it, fruitlessly, to no one's benefit. Perhaps I am fated to do so. What the heart wants, etc. But holy shit, the lifeless, dour, ennnnndlessssss draaaaaagiiiiiing onnnnn and onnnnnnn, repeating the same vapid, faux meaningful bullshit lines over and over again. Every time someone says, "The end is the beginning," I groan SO loudly, to drown out the 60th time I have to hear someone say, "... and the beginning is the end." Jeezus fuck.

If you watched this, and said it was good, and wrote a review that was anything other than a beam of hot fire intended to destroy its memory and re-write time itself so that the show never existed in the first place (and I know no one reading this is the target of this question, so forgive me for wasting your time, too) —

Fuck, I don't know. How? Why? What the fuck? It's so frustrating to hear people talking about how interesting and compelling something is, and then have every minute of it be excruciating in its inhumanity and plot-bulldozer mechanical horseshit. At one point, I said out loud, "I hate this stupid planet and the people who inhabit it, myself included, because of how stupid this is and how stupid so many of us are so much of the time, and it's bad for a television program to make me feel this way!!!"

IN summary, any argument for predetermination is a philosophical excuse for oppression of all kinds, written by fascists and consumed by idiots. And if the show tries to end on some fucking note of the possibility of change, after spending its entire length reiterating the ineluctable nature of time, if it tries to do some weak-kneed late-script fight club "but really what I said the whole time is wrong" bullshit, I will remain, as I am now, furious and powerless to change anything about it, and it will simply join the ranks of "things other people like that I'm the asshole for thinking was empty and poorly-made but somehow people were paid to make."

the rubik's cube of, "but how can we prove there's free will" is a baby toy for baby thinkers. get fucked

oso oso — shoes (the sneaker song)

just some important research from earlier today

and, since we’re both here for some reason, here’s a picture of Cricket, also earlier today, taking up all of my desk that isn’t Products!

I didn’t expect to discover the future of music videos by a fun young artist last night, but…!

Brace yourself:

Remi Wolf is hilarious and brilliant!!!

Great interview with Gunpei Yokoi about the Game & Watch.

From Daniel Steinberg:

The man who killed Kim was on the phone while he was driving.

It feels so avoidable.

There are things you are supposed to do when you are driving for your safety and the safety of those around you.

Fasten your seatbelts.

At one point that was a major issue and seen as an infringement of your freedom.

... I remember my mom telling me how stupid they thought seatbelts were when she was a kid. “We never wore seatbelts when I was a kid, and we were fine.” She said this to me in her 50s, and there was still a trace of sneer in her voice; not at her own past ignorance, but at being forced to do something she had never fully believed was right? Fucking wild.

It takes little effort on your part to do the many things it takes to drive safely.

It requires that you understand the risks to yourself and that you care about the risks to others.

The man who killed Kim was on the phone while he was driving.

He ignored the risks to himself and cared little about the risks to others.

In this time of the Corona pandemic don’t be that person.

Don’t be the person who could do the least they could do but didn’t. And for what?

The driver didn’t want to wait to talk to his friend in Romania.

In this time of the Corona pandemic don’t be that person.

Wear a mask.