I watched Hero

February 27, 2023 /

A woman in flowing red garments holding a sword out to her side through falling yellow leaves.

Hero is the first wuxia movie I’ve watched, though I definitely am going to watch more. I’m not especially canny in Chinese history and culture, and I’ll read lots more if I decide to write anything at length about the genre (which I definitely will). Still, here’s my impressions:

  1. Holy crap, what a pretty movie! The fight between Snow and Moon was especially gorgeous, as the leaves changed from yellow to bloodred over the course of the fight. Every action scene prioritized spectacle, which I like, especiallly since the spectacle in question was grace and motion rather than wanton gore. (Not that gore can’t also be fun, but I don’t think that would have flown in this particular movie.)
  2. Not knowing how a Chinese audience would approach this movie, I pretty much assumed that the king would be a vicious monster whose death could be portrayed as ultimately good. Only about halfway through did I realize that this wasn’t a story about facing off against Sauron, but one about facing off with George Washington.
  3. The use of color in the Rashomon-inspired narrative “versions” tickled my brain. There’s the red version of the story, the blue version, the white version, the green version. How these blended with the natural landscapes was super chef’s kiss.
  4. My biggest takeaway: nothing in this movie tries to be realistic. There’s a whole swordfight that takes place across the surface of a lake. “Wire fu” describes the use of ceiling wires to let actors fly across the battlefield — and I am taking a leap of faith it’s is a harmless portmanteau and not a harmful foreignism, pls let me know if I’m wrong. In any case, people perform completely unapproachable feats. What struck me was the lack of explanation needed beyond “they’re very good at martial arts.” Qinggong and neili are the terms of art I’m seeing used to describe this assumption that, if an action hero trains long enough, they can basically fly around and slash gazillions of arrows out of the sky. Western tastes also include the unrealistic, but usually it’s in the form of a) technology (the “cheerfully amoral celebration of Western military hardware“) and b) extreme pain tolerance. Genius fills the role that qi fills in a wuxia flick. Though cowboy movies display some pretty remarkable aim, too.
  5. “A warrior’s ultimate act is to lay down his sword.” Great line.

Better songs

February 21, 2023 /

Kudzu on a cemetary gate.

Saeed Jones, “Kudzu“:

How you mistake

my affection.

And if I ever strangled sparrows,

it was only because I dreamed

of better songs.

Post length

February 20, 2023 /

The current blog post in WordPress's text editor, with a dialog box from "word counter plus" showing a word count of 412 and a character count of 2,244.

There’s no exact science to word count. In general, anything less than 50 words is a poem or a social media post, then under 300 is a complete thought, a wire news article, or flash fiction. Most of my robust blog posts are in the 600-700 range. My published essays are both just over 2,000, but I’d call anything between 3-5k a “long essay.” My favorite piece of creative nonfiction, my favorite written thing, rings in at 10,000 words. (It’s Brian Phillips’ “Sea of Crises.” Stop reading this and start reading that.)

I’ve been trained to think in word counts by my day job. But there’s a relativity issue there, where the difference between 200 and 700 words is much greater than the difference between 2,500 and 3,000.

What I’m asking is: How many words does it take to convey a thought? And it depends on the thought. My instinct is, word count is useless as a judge of ideas, but it’s useful in the same way that resting heart rate is useful. Since I’m 50 days in the hole what with blogging, and I’ve tracked my word counts that whole time, I know what I can vomit out on a Sunday between errands or on a Monday when I get inspired.

My first draft of the Supernormal post is just over 900 — not that far off from my resting BPM. What does that indicate? Maybe I’m not exploring this idea as far as I should be. If I added 300, 500, 700 more words of context, maybe that would indicate a good sprint rather than a breezy jog.

Obsessing over metrics feels bad. I’m thinking of this high-stim word processor I saw on TikTok a while ago. Every time it registers a keystroke, a little heart or a sparkle pops out of the character count tab. There’s razzle dazzle, there’s noise, there’s cheering and gold medals. Writers need some way of feeling like all the clacking away actually has some meaningful result. We write in coffee shops to be seen. We track page views. Anything to give our work a life outside of ourselves.

What’s much harder is deciding that an idea is “done,” that it’s “explained enough.” That you’ve done the best you can do.

One day, I would like to feel like I can string together 10,000 meaningful words that tell a story, describe something, make an impact. At exactly this moment, I’m going to shoot for 1,200.

Substack Week

February 19, 2023 /

Combine that with the culture-wide hatred of things that teenage girls enjoy (the Twilight bloc again), and you’d think cell phone novels never caught on because they got smothered in the crib. Critics and advocates both assumed that cell phone novels would blow up our relationship to literature, that as cell phones grew in ubiquity the written word would fall to the touchscreen abbreviation. But that’s not what happened.

Today I wrote what I think is the first draft of my Cell Phone Novels piece, which will be the first post to Supernormal (my Substack). I want to get it right, but I also want to find a format that I can fit into a week — so while I won’t be posting the first draft, and I do want to get it right, I expect it’ll be another week before I have something ready to go.

I might use this space to talk through my plans and any issues I face, so be ready for that. Except I don’t want to call it “writing about writing.” Let’s call it… Substack Week!

At the end of Substack week, I’ll have started my Substack. During Substack week, I’ll commit to some outline regarding post length and frequency. I’ll also write about, I don’t know, Hero or The Bourne Identity or something. Gotta keep delivering the core product, you know how it is.

Happy Substack Week!

Running out of tanks

February 17, 2023 /

Two tanks during the October Revolution celebration of 1983.

From Zeynep Tufecki’s “Why Protests Work“:

“The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late 1980s. It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers lost the will and the desire to live in their own system.”

Do things

February 16, 2023 /

I noticed the other day, three of the sticky notes on my sticky note wall are “don’t” advice.

  • Don’t be somewhere, do something.
  • Don’t throw away any of yourself.
  • Don’t save your best ideas for later.

Don’t advice is worse than do advice, because there’s many many ways to not do something. Use your best ideas now. Keep all of yourself. Do things.

Starsign people will inherit the earth

February 15, 2023 / ,

A Celestial map from Planisphærium cœleste.

Amanda Montell talks in Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism about how astrology — and TikTok tarot readings, crystals, online alt-spiritualism — gained popularity as a reprieve for people who are marginalized by mainstream complexes of belief. Spirituality, it turns out, is highly marketable. Systems that corner the market on metaphysics tend to feed their beneficiaries well. As with every power structure, lots of people get left out in the lurch, except this time the usual haggardness of inequity comes with the kicker that your soul is also somehow lesser. You’re poor because you don’t work hard enough; you aren’t slim because you don’t eat well; and your soul is unfit for salvation.

So, we seek beliefs that don’t resemble the beliefs of powerful people. You could be stuck in an elevator with a medical doctor, with a priest, with a Fortune 500 CEO, but once you’ve mastered something beyond their control they can’t touch you.

“What, you keep your emergency fund in a savings account instead of an ETF?”

“I don’t know, that sounds like a pretty Libra thing to do…”

Or something. You can at least steal some of their social capital.

None of this is groundbreaking — which, good, because it’s also not my area of study. Research at the intersection of faith and discrimination is vital and has been pursued at length by people who aren’t me. But among many failings I’ve overcome with effort, I used to be an “astrology is bogus” guy. It’s not bogus! It’s populist! I had invented someone in my head who discriminates againts others based on starsign. I imagined someone who decided everything only after watching the sky.

(If that’s someone you know, I ask you this: What do you use to make big decisions? Intuition?)

Now I actually respect astrology, way more than I ever thought I would. It’s an extremely robust system. It never demands that you hate somebody because of their astral chart, it always offers you some way to judge after seeing. “I usually hate Capricorns, but we get along so well! Oh, your Venus is in Sag? That explains it.” Better still, it actually demands that you have a conversation with somebody before deciding how you feel about them astrologically, since nothing about a person’s signs is written on their body.

Overwhelmingly, people I’ve spoken to who are into astrology, even extremely into astrology, tell me it’s mostly for fun. It’s a frame of cognitive play, a highly complex exercise in pattern-finding. Horoscopes prompt us to remember things and direct our attention along paths they otherwise wouldn’t tread. And, sure, I don’t know — if there’s some subvisible squirm beneath the skin of the cosmos, the motion of the stars may manifest there as well as anywhere else.

I’m Cancer sun, Pisces moon, Leo rising btw.

Don’t go breaking my heart (container)

February 14, 2023 /

It’s 11 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, so I’m watching Emma play Breath of the Wild. Somehow I didn’t play it when it was, you know, running the gamut as the best game ever made.

The weapon durability mechanic always confused me, though. In that game, weapons break in like 50 hits. From what I understand its easily the most controversial choice the developers made.

Subtext: I was confused because I didn’t take the time to understand what this mechanic does do. I was content just being vicariously annoyed by what it doesn’t do.

It doesn’t let you keep a favorite weapon. I tend to stick with just the one in FromSoft games. In BioShock Infinite I would literally find the exact gun I put down — not the same type of gun, the same gun — so I could carry it through the whole game. We’re very attached to weapons in games.

Weapons in Breath of the Wild were designed to work like consumables. Because it’s not a fighting game, it’s an exploration game. To continue fighting, you have to explore and find new weapons. They become a reward for engaging with the world.

That’s what game design, design in general, is all about: rewarding the behavior you want.

(Photo from Zelda Dungeon, btw.)

More is more

February 15, 2023 / ,

The sun in the sky with clouds.

You know how extremely smart people when someone does something a little authoritarian say “there’s nothing new under the sun?” That’s complete bullshit! There’s a lot of new things under the sun! Tic Tacs! F1!

Twitter’s ill-begotten For You algorithm is ostensibly mimicking TikTok’s For You algorithm. Lots of companies want to follow TikTok’s success. But this isn’t Assyria. We didn’t see the Hittites using big, wheeled machines and think, “Oh my god, if we started driving around in big wheeled machines we could gain a similar advantage over our enemies. This will revolutionize warfare!”

Imagine the scale of copying TikTok’s algorithm. Imagine the sheer data. Twitter can sniff at reproducing this technology because they’ve been squatting over the vastest surveillance mechanism ever conceived outside of religion. (I mean the data market as a whole, not any one app.)

We are long past the point of elegant solutions. Brute force is the greatest technological advancement in history. What we wrestle with now could not have existed at any point before now.

I’d say there’s kindness buried in that message, and most of us should be kind to ourselves — you can’t pull your attention off of TikTok because it’s a totally unprecedented stimulus — but let’s not give a pass to power structures that do dangerous things just because we’ve never seen the consequences before. Gianluca Mauro talks about the “Chaos Monkey experiment,” arguing that tech enacts world-altering changes while denying accountability. It is the proverbial monkey in the proverbial Netflix server room, unplugging shit and making you miss Dated & Related.

@gianluca.mauro The Chaos Monkey experiment #learnontiktok #tech #siliconvalley #ethics ♬ original sound – Gianluca Mauro

Or to put it another way: “Move fast and break things”  sounds like a lot of fun until you break things. Which someone probably would have known if they ever played outside with other people.