Author: admin

Generally speaking, we accept the artificial conventions of familiar media. We don’t even think about them much.

A play has a group of people up on stage pretending they don’t see us. A novel is really just a string of words printed on a succession of pages.

In the latter case we can’t even see or hear the characters. And yet they can seem very real to us, because we accept the artificial conventions of the medium.

Similarly, cinema posits that it is perfectly reasonable to watch giant faces moving about on a flat screen, as well as sudden changes in point of view, and to call that reality. We learn the visual language of film when we are children, and from then on we simply accept it without question.

All of these media work because they tap into something within the way our brains already work. All humans have a biologically determined commonality in the ways that we perceive and think about reality.

Every successful medium taps into that common biological heritage. Sometimes a medium does so in ways that we might not think would work (for example, printed words on paper) if that medium did not already exist.

I don’t think we have reached that point yet with immersive media, such as virtual reality. We are still in a stage of experimentation, much as early filmmakers experimented with having trains rush at audiences, and making objects on the screen magically appear and disappear.

When immersive media become mature, it will be because we have collectively figured out how to match their capabilities to the way that our brains and senses really work. That will take time, but the end result will be worth it.

I’ve been having a correspondence with a friend about media. In particular, we’ve been discussing cinema as a medium.

Everyone who is alive today has grown up with movies. So it’s very likely that you don’t know anybody who first encountered a movie when they were already an adult.

Which means that we take the language of cinema for granted. We talk about movies being “realistic” as though we are discussing something that happened out here in the real world.

But out here in the real world, we are stuck in our physical bodies. The language of montage — constructing visual narratives via the instantaneous juxtaposition of different viewpoints — isn’t something we could ever experience in reality.

Yet we generally don’t think about the extreme artificiality of the visual language of movies because we grew up with it. We all know the language intimately, and we’ve known it since we were little kids.

More tomorrow.

It’s weird to realize that two years ago today an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol Building, at the urging of the President of the United States, because they didn’t like how the presidential election turned out. And it’s even weirder to realize that the President of the United States wanted to join them.

If that hadn’t happened, and I were to write that into the plot of a novel, I suspect that readers would shake their heads in disbelief. After all, my readers would probably think, no President with an ounce of integrity would even think of doing something like that.

Oh, right.

The greatest gift you can give someone is to become the person they always believed you could be.

The recent adaptation of the 1988 fantasy film Willow into a TV series has a lot going for it. In the process it has been from translated from the original English into Millenial-speak, which can be jarring, but also kind of fun.

The show contains lots of cool Easter eggs. I like the fact that one of the main characters is named Boorman — a plausibly Tolkienesque name, but also a clear reference to the great film director John Boorman, who once upon a time brought us Excalibur, The Emerald Forest and other movies that are clear influences on the current series.

But there is one place where I feel that they jumped the shark on the easter egg front. At one point a character refers to a “Fibonacci hex”.

It’s one thing to do winking shout outs to relevant filmmakers. It’s another thing entirely to randomly insert the names of actual historical figures from our own world.

That moment yanked me clear out of the fantasy universe. It was as though a great wizard suddenly appeared named Thomas Jefferson.

As George Santos heads to Washington D.C. today to be sworn in, I can’t help thinking about the parallels. Here is somebody who speaks with a voice of authority, yet pretty much just makes everything up.

He is a college graduate who never graduated from college, a Jew who is Catholic, a proudly out gay man who forgot to mention he had been married to a woman, a property owner who doesn’t own property, a generous giver to charity who doesn’t give to charity. He is a self-proclaimed law abiding citizen who is being investigated for crimes in several countries.

Despite all this, the man is now blithely traveling to our nation’s Capital to be sworn in as our Nation’s representative from New York’s 3rd congressional district. He doesn’t seem to see a problem with the fact that his entire election campaign was based on a fictional construct.

This is pretty much what we expect from ChatGPT. When you ask it a question, it speaks with an uncannily impressive voice of authority. Yet if it doesn’t have an accurate answer for you, it will just make stuff up.

How long will it be before we elect a well-trained chatbot for President? And after we do, will anybody really notice?

When I was around 13 years old, I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Well, “read” is not exactly the right word. More like devoured.

I loved all things Asimov in that phase of my life, and I couldn’t get enough of his voluminous offerings. Nightfall, the robot stories, The Gods Themselves, The End of Eternity. Whatever it was, I read it.

I spent many joyful hours in my youth pondering the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline. I would happily design experiments in my head based on that one simple impossible hypothesis.

But the Foundation trilogy was my go-to. And then I grew up, and for a while I forgot about the trilogy.

Until one day, many years later, I picked it up and read it again. This time I read with trepidation. After all, most of my adult re-readings of childhood science fiction turned out rather badly.

For example, I was horrified, as my adult self, upon rereading Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. That beloved novel from my teenage years turned out to be filled with misogyny, racist assumptions, and all sorts of attitudes that I now found unsettling.

But to my delight, Foundation was an even better read as an adult than it had been when I was a teenager. The epic sweep, the original ideas, the sheer intelligence of it all, was even more thrilling to my adult self.

So I’d just like to take a moment today to wish Isaac Asimov a very happy 102 birthday.

Happy 10*98-7*6+543*2-1

Now that A.I.s are able to make every movie
The films that we get are so wonderfully groovy

Stable Diffusion recycles each tale
A font of profusion that simply can’t fail

You can even decide on the cast of your choice
If you want you can choose any face, any voice

Sourced from the Crowd, and crunched in the Cloud
These movies are great, and we’re so very proud

And yet even now the fond memory lingers
Of when actors had always exactly ten fingers

Sometimes your demo code works right away. Other times it can take a solid week of hacking. And then there are those times when you encounter a demo that takes a year or so to finally work.

The first kind is very easy. The second kind is challenging. The third is very very frustrating.

Today I finally succeeded getting a demo of the third kind to work. It’s been a long haul, and I had been starting to suspect that this day would never come.

I think I’ll take the evening off now and watch an old Spielberg movie. Maybe something with mashed potatoes.