Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, February 2021
Today is Gnuday, 08 of Broket 4113. [4113.11.08]
…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!
Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Canada, China, Czechia, France, Russia, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, and Unknown this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission.
February’s Idle Thoughts
Welcome to issue lucky number seven of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.
Reconsidering Some Software
Somewhat amusing to me, given that I needed to work through the annoyance at garbage showing up in my RSS feed, I needed to spend (waste) some time this month reconsidering whether I want to change RSS feed readers.
A recent update—I run the code in the repository, which probably isn’t too smart, but has worked fine—broke…well, everything, but the symptom I noticed was that I hadn’t seen a new article in a while. The error led me to believe that my server was configured incorrectly, so I wasted hours double-checking everything and setting things up again, just in case.
Along the way, searching for the error, I found that the project lead responds to requests for help by denigrating people who aren’t on his specific platform, and believes that the only people who should ask for help are the people who…already solved their problems?
In any case, debugging the problem myself (because I wasn’t about to waste time on the forum), I discovered that the problem is that the server configuration file format has completely changed without notice.
I’m sticking with it for now, but I’m definitely now evaluating alternatives.
Fawning Review Proliferation
Over the last few months, I’ve started to notice a weird trend of uncritical—almost defensive—reviews of big-studio productions, with a certain sameness. Despite being confusing and pointless, with a famously problematic production and muddy politics, the Mulan remake was allegedly terrific. WandaVision can’t just be a fun show, and I’ll talk about that next month, after it’s over; it’s allegedly perfectly plotted (despite points where the omniscient perspective lies) with a feminist message (even though the “villain” is a mentally unstable woman) and “pitch perfect” sitcom references (that sound nothing like early sitcoms). Superman & Lois is allegedly hopeful and progressive, even though it’s lecturing everyone on how the “heartland” is morally better, the media and banks can’t be trusted, unionization is bad, the incel needs more love, and the only Black people in the world are antagonists…oh, and they fired a writer for recommending wider representation. There have been others, but these are the big shows in recent memory.
It’s disturbing to see people treat the enjoyment of corporate-owned franchises as some sort of cult, where everybody develops amnesia regarding everything the company has done, all the show’s flaws are treated like brilliant plot twists, and critics need to be called out and shamed. I’m used to conservative factions of fans trying to act as gatekeepers and clutch their pearls against any added representation, but this twist is a new level of toxicity, and it’s concerning. After all, if people with large platforms aren’t willing to take big companies to task on the little things, and the people in power don’t care to do so, the odds that they’ll ever try to improve on the big things are low.
Project Previews
Nothing, this month. I put in some work on the various side-projects, but no results that I think are worth releasing.
Media
In no particular order, here are some things that I finished watching or listening to in February. No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they were short.
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The Fantastic Four (on…well, let’s not talk about how I got access) is Roger Corman’s infamous unreleased 1993 attempt to bring Marvel’s premier superhero team to the big screen, commissioned by the studio to retain the movie rights. It is, in fact, extremely cheap, and there’s no interpretation where it’s a good movie, but it knows its source material well—all the important characters are there and most of them are recognizable—and it feels a lot like the monster and romance comics that Marvel (or, rather, the cluster of fly-by-night companies that became Marvel in the early 1960s) published in the 1950s, and those are good things.
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Koyaanisqatsi (on DVD) is…an experience. I don’t think that I entirely agree with the premise and I don’t think that disjointed images of the industrial world set to ominous Philip Glass compositions makes the “life out of balance” point that at least the title is promising. That’s especially a problem, given the fact that one of the most critical aspects of the industrialized world—sound—is absent beyond the music. It’s worth watching, because there isn’t much else like it, and a Philip Glass soundtrack is always worth the time, but it’s probably not going to provoke much thought beyond the literal film-making.
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Cobra Kai, formerly YouTube Red’s darling and the continuation of the Karate Kid franchise, is basically watchable with a few solid laughs, but I honestly don’t understand the rave reviews it seems to get across the board. Nostalgia has a powerful effect on people, sure, but were all these people that obsessed with these movies as kids? Does the world desperately need a long story about different classes of Trump supporters—without the trademark, they could have named the leads “white male grievance,” “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps,” and “crazy fascist”—desperately jockeying to be the “alpha male”? How are so many characters still hung up on city competitions from forty years ago? Why does anybody live in a town that has had a problem with gangs of murderous bullies for over sixty years? And, given that the story centers on an East Asian tradition and is set in a highly diverse part of the country, why are all the important people (except for one Latinx family) white and need to fly around the world to see Japanese people?
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Spy Smasher (downloaded, seemingly in the public domain) is the 1942 serial about a vigilante from the same company (originally) as the Shazam franchise. It’s not my favorite serial—it relies too much on the main character having a twin brother who works for the Navy—but for an early superhero film, it’s pretty good.
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Dr. Strange (on DVD) is the 1978 TV movie, basically a pilot for a proposed series to sit alongside The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk on CBS. It’s not nearly as much fun as the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” Dr. Strange—it’s more of a medical/psychiatric procedural than an action story—but it does a great job of introducing the characters and concepts, and a young Anne-Marie Martin (still under her birth name, Edmona “Eddie” Benton) was an inspired choice as Clea. I’m a bit offended by the romance pushed into the story, but the Strange-Clea relationship was always pretty creepy in comics, so that tracks.
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Bendito Machine (on DVD) is a series of computer-animated shorts that are (more or less) shadow puppets acting out allegorical stories about relationships with machines. I donated to one of the Kickstarters a lifetime ago (hence the DVD), and it’s fairly charming, getting its stories across with no dialogue. The six episodes total around an hour.
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Captain America (downloaded, seemingly in the public domain) is the 1944 movie serial. Sort of like the 1979 made-for-TV movies, this doesn’t really resemble (apart from the costume) any version of the character from the comics—the evidence is that the serial was probably written for Fawcett’s Mr. Scarlet to go with Republic’s and Fawcett’s Spy Smasher (above) and Adventures of Captain Marvel (last month’s newsletter). Given that King of the Rocket Men bears a passing resemblance to Bulletman and Fawcett also published comics based on the lead in Jungle Girl, this is another case where one is left wondering how close we might have gotten to an early “cinematic universe” of superheroes from Republic. In any case, this is worth watching, though there are some unclear moments and some hilariously poor scripting in the final episode where our hero stops to explain a clue to one of the villain’s henchmen.
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The Corporation, I forgot about shortly after downloading the free version (on now-defunct Vodo), but it turned up again when I was archiving old hard drives. It’s fine for a documentary of the time, but it doesn’t dig too deeply into the topic, and it’s almost sadly quaint to see an ending that suggests that advertising is the worst that corporations have to offer.
- The supplemental material (an interview) is sort of interesting in seeing the massive failure of the Free Software/Free Culture/Open Source movements to capitalize on the era’s distaste of corporate control and fear of increasing proprietary solutions. It should have been such an easy win to get them interested in the Creative Commons/GPL spaces, but it looks like the effort was never put in, and instead was “colonized” by people who think that the greatest strength of the ecosystem is the ability to abandon the ecosystem…
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I Dream of Jeanie (with the Light Brown Hair) (on DVD) is—believe it or not—a 1950s jukebox musical that loosely interprets the life of Stephen Foster, using his music, and is almost comically disjointed with several scene changes in the first minute that have no bearing on the movie. Don’t get me started on the racism inherent in idolizing a man who wrote minstrel music prior to the Civil War, as he pats Black kids on the head. It even has the nerve to stage such a minstrel show—an uncomfortable, long minstrel show—including blackface. I really could’ve done without this, especially during Black History Month. The singers are fine, but it’s enough of a mess that I would’ve turned it off, if I wasn’t also reading while it played.
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…Forgotten, Detroit. (on DVD) is a simple story about a retirement home, who needs to confront his own trauma through the lens of an escaped resident with Alzheimer’s disease. There’s nothing fancy about it, but the short works well. I do wonder why I pledged to the campaign, though.
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Coming to America is the classic Eddie Murphy movie with a sequel coming out…probably just before this gets sent out. I’ve never seen it before, but with the sequel coming, I figured it was worth a shot. It’s surprisingly good, only really marred by the weird obsession of having Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall play multiple characters.
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Fiddler on the Roof is the movie adaptation of the classic musical, which I have apparently never seen. The songs aren’t the best and aren’t really integrated into the narrative, but they’re fine. The real draw is the story, honestly. But it’s also worth the three hours just for “May God bless and keep the Tsar…far away from us!”
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Imaginary Bitches (on DVD) was one of the—relatively speaking—big breakthrough early web series, about a woman who tries to work through her issues with imaginary friends…who turn out to be terrible. It’s one of the funniest hours-and-a-half that I’ve spent and there’s still really nothing like it.
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The Man of La Mancha (on DVD) is the classic adaptation of the musical, which adapted Don Quixote, starring…basically everybody at the time? Unfortunately, none of them (except James Coco) are singers, so a musical with some great music falls a bit flat.
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The Good Place, I rewatched so that I could listen to the excellent podcast. The first time I watched it, I had a problem with the sudden shift in philosophy that insisted that the Good Place was also torture, and that the only solution was death. That still seems silly, but it’s a superficial attempt to understand classical Eastern philosophy, so it at least makes sense. It still seems to have abandoned the core concept of the show, though, of constantly revealing new layers of problems with the system that can’t be fixed with a change in the rules. Instead, we got that twice, a simple “Hell is tests to get into Heaven” change to the afterlife and then “just let dead people die,” and now everything is fine.
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Star Wars: Rebels is fairly good, though it really feels like it’s trying to reboot the franchise more than find its own direction, until the end, like encountering many of the same characters in the same contexts. At other times, it just wants to assure the audience that everything is almost ready for A New Hope to start and what they’ve revealed won’t affect the plot. Really, though, the “breakout star” of the series is the quality of the animation models, which (with some huge exceptions) are close to the point where the “extras” (and even a couple of major characters) could almost be mistaken for live action work. Walking looks hilariously fake, though. There are some bizarre visual choices, with a somewhat diverse cast (main and guest), but human characters shown as white people who have tanned to various degrees—Forest Whitaker’s character from Rogue One inexplicably has green eyes—except for Lando Calrissian. When your animated show has more diversity among aliens and its cast than among its human characters, it has a problem…
Blog Posts for February 2021
In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.
The most popular posts on the blog have been Recutils - Small Technology Notes, Developer Journal, Self-Injury Awareness Day, Entropy Arbitrage | John has thoughts. Some of those thoughts make it here. Some of those thoughts might even be worth reading., and Free Culture Book Club — The Spiraling Web, Part 2 for the month.
Articles I’ve Been Reading
You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.
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Media Find ‘Heroes’ in Republicans Who Oppose Trump…and Also Democracy from FAIR
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Meet 6 women pioneers of American diplomacy from ShareAmerica
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How your brain backs off bad solutions to a problem from Futurity
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Why white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts are obsessed – but very wrong – about the Byzantine Empire from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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The science behind frozen wind turbines – and how to keep them spinning through the winter from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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Honoring corruption fighters around the world from ShareAmerica
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GOP Rejects Childcare Money in Idaho for Very Modern Reason: Moms Should Stay Home from VICE RSS Feed
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Fed money to smaller companies boosts the economy more from Futurity
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Tennessee Lawmakers Want to Make It Nice and Legal to Run Over Protesters from VICE RSS Feed
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Social media checks can bring bias into hiring from Futurity
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Wow a Republican Voted for the George Floyd Bill—Nevermind, Wrong Button from VICE RSS Feed
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Ma Bell with Mind Control: Liberalism, Radicalism, and the Evolving Face of Censorship from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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Cops Keep Shooting Black Men With Cell Phones Assuming They’re Guns from VICE RSS Feed
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Revisiting reparations: Is it time for the US to pay its debt for the legacy of slavery? from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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What the policing response to the KKK in the 1960s can teach about dismantling white supremacist groups today from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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Mitch McConnell Working With Kentucky Legislature on Senate Exit Strategy from The Intercept
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Federal Protective Services Looking for Terrorists on Facebook, Not TheDonald or Parler from emptywheel
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How the Pandemic Economy Could Wipe Out a Generation of Black-Owned Businesses from ProPublica: Articles and Investigations
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As House Passes For the People Act Without One GOP Vote, Progressives Warn Bill Is ‘Dead’ If Senate Filibuster Remains from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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Amazon crushed affordable housing. Now it’s trying to offset the problem it helped create from Co.Exist
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How interoperability could end Facebook’s death grip on social media from Co.Exist
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Equality Act Coverage Provides a Platform for Hate—but Not for Trans Voices from FAIR
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Mike Pence Is Back From Hiding to Spread More Election Conspiracies from VICE RSS Feed
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30 Years After Rodney King, LAPD Still Corrupt and Violent and Brutal from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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Humans settled the Bahamas earlier than we thought from Futurity
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Stop wishing ill on Texans just because of the state’s poor leadership from Co.Exist
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‘Endangers the Entire Country and Beyond’: Grave Warnings as Texas Gov. Abbott Lifts Covid Restrictions from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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No, Antifa Was Not Behind the Capitol Riot, FBI Tells GOP from VICE RSS Feed
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Can the words you use reveal your politics? from Futurity
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Can QAnon survive another ‘Great Disappointment’ on March 4? History suggests it might from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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Tobacco killed 500,000 Americans in 2020 – is it time to control cigarette-makers? from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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Women in politics: A timeline from ShareAmerica
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To ‘Ensure Justice and Accountability for Police Brutality,’ Pressley Leads New Bill to End Qualified Immunity from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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T-Mobile Promised Its Megamerger Would Create Jobs. It Laid Off 5,000 Workers Instead from VICE RSS Feed
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Amazon slapped with federal lawsuit for alleged discrimination and sexual harassment from Co.Exist
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Minneapolis Cancels Plan to Hire Influencers for Derek Chauvin Trial, Is Very Sorry from VICE RSS Feed
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Massachusetts’ Progressive Lawmakers Push Congress to Abolish Qualified Immunity from The Intercept
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Minneapolis Will Pay Influencers to ‘De-Escalate’ Tension During Derek Chauvin Trial from VICE RSS Feed
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Trump Used His CPAC Speech to Call Out 17 of His Haters by Name from VICE RSS Feed
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To Help Fund Covid Recovery and Redress Inequality, Warren Unveils Wealth Tax on ‘Ultra-Millionaires’ and Billionaires from Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
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Northeast US: Walking, biking could save billions, lives from Futurity
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Republicans Went Full QAnon at CPAC from VICE RSS Feed
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Spinach Pie from Budget Bytes
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How a Discriminatory Algorithm Wrongly Accused Thousands of Families of Fraud from VICE RSS Feed
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A History of Video Game Patents in 5 Famous Examples from VICE RSS Feed
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What the mythical figure of Şahmeran in Turkey represents and why activists use it from The Conversation – Articles (US)
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With this Black History Month misstep, Google forgot how racist the internet is from Co.Exist
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The 5 trigger phrases every leader should stop using from Co.Exist
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What if USPS delivered local produce in the mail? from Co.Exist
Web Pages That Caught My Attention
These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.
That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.
—John
