alexanderwales

[alexanderwales]

If you could have someone else write a story- and it's guaranteed to be up to your standards of quality, but you get to pick what it's about, if it's a fanfic of anything, the tone it has, etc... what would you ask for? Basically I guess I'm asking "what's a story you've always wanted to read, but don't want to write yourself?"

I have a whole series of #pitchposting posts about stories that I'm interested in but don't want to write myself, but within the specific bounds of this question ...

qntm has a post on hypertime that has always fascinated me. In the naïve form, it's not that much different from stable time loops, but if you introduce some irregularity (by, for example, having a "top" timeline), then there are all kinds of interesting ramifications.

To my knowledge, no one has actually written a hypertime story. Actually, to my knowledge, I'm the only person who has so much as started writing a hypertime story, and I didn't get very far, because I felt like I needed a better way to visualize the paths of the characters through hypertime.

Assuming that you've read that post, the thing I find most interesting about "cascading hypertime" is that you can go back in time and wind up in a timeline that appears, to you, like an alternate timeline caused by someone traveling to the past (because this is exactly what happened). So you could go back to 1965, and wind up in a timeline where someone has killed Hitler and averted WWII, and to a character who doesn't know they're in a hypertime story, this is a real "wait, what" moment.

So this is what I would have someone write, if I could: it would be a hypertime story where our protagonist thinks they're in a stable time loop for maybe ten chapters, then (from their internal perspective) it feels as thought the rules of time travel have fundamentally changed, and ... maybe they're in a branching timelines model? And we do that for another ten chapters. But then they start traveling through time and winding up in timelines where causality seems broken, where they "go back in time" and are in divergent branches that break the rules they thought they had figured out. Real psychotic break territory, until someone explains hypertime to them, and maybe that feels like more of a psychotic break, because even if you can understand the system, you cannot understand what actually happened in a given timeline to make it look the way it does, and you cannot know what kind of timeline you'll end up in you time travel. Causality has been preserved, the universe is still ordered, it all makes sense ... but from the inside, causality is opaque, meaning has been destroyed, our protagonist is adrift in a world that is meaningfully beyond their comprehension.

Anyway, that's the novel that I would like someone to write. It doesn't need to be long, and might be better if it's not, but it needs to follow this progression of hypotheses being peeled back until we're at cosmic horror.

(There is a chance that I write it some day, but it'll take a hell of a lot of planning, and I would think that it would also include diagrams.)

[alexanderwales]

[alexanderwales]

One of the things that makes Worm good is that it's truly taking advantage of the webfiction format, namely, the ability to sprawl far and wide. I think this is one of the things that divides a lot of webfic: some are built for the sprawl, they take advantage of it, they use it to say something, and other ... are just long because length is expected.

And if you go long because a lot of stuff is happening, but it's not thematically connected or narratively coherent, if there's not some guiding star that you're at least loosely aimed toward, that's where you start running into some real problems.

I've said this before, but part of why Worm remains head-and-shoulders the strongest prose superhero work that I've ever read is that for all the arguable resultant cruft, the webserial format gives it the space it needs to actually be the grand, sprawling epic that almost every traditionally published prose superhero work keeps trying to pull off in three mid-length books or less.

[alexanderwales]

I watched the new Jurassic World movie with the family, and I think there was exactly one thing that really stuck out to me: early on, while they're on their way to return to Dinosaur Island, they made this show of getting out some dinosaur neurotoxin and explain that if a dinosaur gets hit with it, it'll die in a matter of seconds. This is the impetus for a bit of conversation on the ethics of dinosaur murder.

They then proceed to lose the dinosaur neurotoxin, and ScarJo has this line about how yeah, they lost some of their tools, and maybe it would have helped and maybe it wouldn't have, but they just have to get it done anyway.

The dinosaur neurotoxin is never mentioned again.

Anton Chekov had this principle you might have heard of where if you put a gun up on the mantle in the first act, you need to have that gun get fired. And so ... what, exactly, is this neurotoxin doing in this movie? Why was this thing included when it could easily have been cut? It would have been painfully easy to cut around, there's no other mention of it, it's not used in other scenes, and even ScarJo's line about missing tools doesn't mention the neurotoxin specifically.

So I imagine there are two things going on here:

The neurotoxin bit is a lead in to the dinosaur ethics bit, so was kept for that purpose. Maybe the neurotoxin did originally feature in the plot somehow, and got cut, but they wanted the characterization stuff, so said "eh, what the hell, we can imply the neurotoxin was lost".

More likely to me, one of the writers had heard some kind of fan theory or CinemaSins ding where someone said, "uh, why are these morons not using neurotoxin or other poisons if they don't have financial incentives to keep the dinos alive like the first and fourth movies". And so the writer on this movie was like, "oh shit, they got me, I didn't think about neurotoxin, I have to answer the neurotoxin question or they're going to roast my ass".

It really seemed like a case of defensive writing to me, someone trying to cover their bases in some way, or metatextual elements intruding into the work, but I can't be entirely sure.

(FWIW TvTropes claims that the neurotoxin darts are used in an early sequence and then fail to penetrate, never to be seen nor heard from again after maybe 20 minutes into the film. Very possible that I missed this, but I would still be left pretty puzzled about the role of the neurotoxin in the film. The underlying theme of failures of control systems, maybe?)

[alexanderwales]

I do kind of like the balls it takes to write a line like "We all know about the genetically engineered beasts of Charles Darwin". Now, does it feel like getting slapped in the face with exposition? Sure. But sometimes getting slapped in the face can feel refreshing.

[alexanderwales]

Movie Review: Superman (2025)

I generally like to take notes, if I'm planning to review something, and I also like to be able to spot check stuff and make sure I didn't read a scene wrong and can get names and stuff correct. Not as much of an option here, so these are my "just out of the theater" thoughts.

Spoilers follow.

One of the things that I've liked about James Gunn's other superhero movies is that he feels free to be silly with it, to bring in 80th percentile weird things from the comics, and then resists the urge to comment on it too much. He keeps "holy cow, a talking raccoon!" dialog to a minimum, he doesn't feel like he's mildly ashamed to be making a superhero movie, he's strategic in his use of irony and the ways in which he lets a joke undercut a moment ... I'm a fan, overall.

Gunn's Superman frontloads a bunch of the weirder stuff. We've got Krypto, the crystalline Fortress of Solitude, a bunch of robots, we're not doing Man of Steel, we're not sanding off the canon cruft that's been built up over time. This is a Superman three years into his career, already established, already in a relationship with Lois Lane who knows his secret, taking a lot of stuff relatively for granted.

One of the highlights of the movie comes early on, where Lois is interviewing Clark-as-Superman, it's a chance for characterization and exposition that genuinely gets to a lot of the relationship between these characters and who they are in this movie. Clark is naïve, he's idealistic, he's hopeful, he's trying to do his best ... and while I liked this, it was also the place where the movie started to lose me a bit.

The background, told via text-on-screen in the opening and then expounded on via this conversation, is that three weeks ago Superman intervened in military action between Boravia and Jarhanpur. We don't get to see any of that military intervention, but we hear about it through Superman's conversation with Lois, and apparently Superman destroyed some tanks and planes, then abducted the president of Boravia, pressed him up against a cactus, and made some threats.

I ... don't really understand why Superman did this, and nothing through the film really enlightened this for me. Like, yes, war is bad, Superman wants to save innocent people. But this is apparently the first time that Superman has done anything like this in his three years as Superman, and as Lois pointed out, it seems that no one knew that he was going to do it. He didn't talk to the President of the United States, the State Department, and it seems like he didn't talk to Lois, or ... maybe didn't listen to her? (This is one of those places I wish I could spot-watch to see exactly what the text and subtext is.) And the weird thing about the conversation is that Lois insinuates that Jarhanpur might be ruled by their own despot, or that this is one reading of the geopolitical situation? But then later in the movie, we're shown peasants and children standing in the way of Boravian forces with no military of their own, so like, what the fuck are you talking about there Lois? And there's a single location that's being used as a stand-in for the Boravia/Jarhanpur conflict, and eventually the Justice Gang comes in to intervene later in the movie, so like ... was this a clear case of the United States soft-sanctioning a clearly unjust war, and Lois was duped? Or why the hell did Clark/Superman act with such surety? Why didn't he talk with anyone and use his soft power first? Surely saying "hey, if it looks like this war is going ahead, I'm going to stop it" would be step one, rather than hopping right to destroying tanks and planes. Not in terms of superhero genre logic, but in terms of superhero genre logic, you're not supposed to unilaterally stop a war and then have people get pissed about it.

Anyway, it turns out that the whole Boravia/Jarhanpur conflict was created by Lex Luthor, who wanted half of the Jarhanpur land for himself to create some kind of technocratic sovereign state and also get all their petroleum to make some money, and it really seems pretty stupid to me for a number of reasons, but not necessarily in such a way that it sticks in my craw.

One of the things that does stick in my craw is that the final villain is Ultraman, who turns out to be a Superman clone, which makes the whole final battle pretty bland.

I guess I had the sense early on that this movie was "about" hope vs. cynicism, with Lex Luthor as the embodiment of cynicism. In this reading, the omnipresence of cameras and social media on Luthor's side is a part of it. Creating a bland Superman clone is a part of it, and with a bit of a stretch, this represents other representations of Superman, the dark and cynical ones. Luthor "knows all of Superman's moves", has seen every fight he's ever done, can call every shot: he's a fanboy, in a sense. Luthor has a whole speech about how he's driven by envy, and yeah, sure.

And I do think this kind of works in the end, because the thing that turns the tide is Krypto the goofy super dog. So in a reading where this movie is about the cultural concept of Superman ... yeah, "dark Superman" is beaten and thrown into a black hole by the bright and colorful, the charmingly goofy.

But on the other hand, it's also just Superman and a clone of Superman punching each other for a pretty long time, and I don't know, I started feeling like it was the end to one of the bad Marvel movies. I was watching the spectacle and feeling a bit of boredom creep in. If it was trying to be commentary, I wanted it more incisive.

One other thing that stood out to me, and it was earlier in the movie, I'm going non-chronological now, sorry: it's revealed that Superman's parents actually sent him to conquer the planet and have a secret harem. Superman's reputation is tarnished, everyone instantly believes it. It's extremely reminiscent of the Viltrumite storyline in Invincible, and played very straight, in a way that does character assassination of Jor-El ... and I think part of the point here, aside from putting Superman in a low moment, is that this is a reaction to the darkness that other continuities have had, a way for Superman to say "wait, that's not me". But I'm less sure on this, I think, it's just my personal reading here.

It did also make me think of Superman as a stand-in for America, and there was something in how Superman was betrayed by these parents he thought he knew that felt like ... a kid who has bought into American propaganda his whole life and then learns about The Bad Shit, and says "wait, no, I believe in the good stuff, the vision, not The Bad Shit" and then has to do some identity reconstruction or something. (If we're reading Superman himself as a stand-in for America, then the military intervention is, uh ... you know. Not historically a great thing for America to be doing! Even/especially when it seems to America like a slam dunk!)

So I don't know, I enjoyed it overall, it was at least unique and felt like it was trying some things. There were several standout scenes that I'm not mentioning here and things that I hadn't seen in superhero movies before, and I'll definitely go see the next one.

[alexanderwales]

If they made a theme park where they had genetically modified dinosaurs, I would definitely go. Sounds awesome.

[alexanderwales]

Alright, that's the last of the robin babies out of the nest, which concludes the saga. I think I'll have just one more post where we press the button to close the garage door and see just how precariously positioned the nest actually was, but that will be later.

An idiot robin has built a nest on top of our garage door motor. The nest was constructed so the chain that drives the door is actually a part of the nest, and if we open or close the garage door, the whole thing is going to get torn apart. So I guess the garage door is staying open for as long as it takes for these eggs to hatch and these birds to leave the nest.

My wife has set up a camera to continuously monitor the situation.

Wife: Maybe we should set up some padding beneath where they'll fall out of the nest? Normally they fall onto grass, not concrete. Me: Seems like we're really coddling these birds. Wife: Well, yeah. Me: I just don't want you to get invested. Wife: Way, way too late for that. I'm all in.

So we're keeping the garage door open for a few weeks, I guess. Whenever I go to use the car, the robin flies away from the nest and watches me cautiously to see whether I'm going to kill her babies, and I can't help but find that a little bit rude of her.

[alexanderwales]

Just one left in the nest, no idea when he's going to get out, but maybe today, and that will be the last of robinposting (hopefully). Definitely some very different styles of leaving the nest.

An idiot robin has built a nest on top of our garage door motor. The nest was constructed so the chain that drives the door is actually a part of the nest, and if we open or close the garage door, the whole thing is going to get torn apart. So I guess the garage door is staying open for as long as it takes for these eggs to hatch and these birds to leave the nest.

My wife has set up a camera to continuously monitor the situation.

Wife: Maybe we should set up some padding beneath where they'll fall out of the nest? Normally they fall onto grass, not concrete. Me: Seems like we're really coddling these birds. Wife: Well, yeah. Me: I just don't want you to get invested. Wife: Way, way too late for that. I'm all in.

So we're keeping the garage door open for a few weeks, I guess. Whenever I go to use the car, the robin flies away from the nest and watches me cautiously to see whether I'm going to kill her babies, and I can't help but find that a little bit rude of her.

[alexanderwales]

I spent some time today looking at "top 100 movies" lists.

One of the things I found most interesting about it was the age distribution of the movies. The history of film stretches back about 130 years, but I would really not expect that most of the early history of film produced the "best" films. They were still getting to know the medium! They were still getting over technical hurdles!

And yet a lot of the "best movie" lists seem really heavily weighted toward earlier eras of cinema history, and I think to myself "alright, so are these the best movies, or are they culturally and historically important movies, or what?" Sometimes it's user voting, which I understand a little more: it'll be heavily weighted toward generally agreed on "good films". But when it's an individual curator doing it, I think to myself "alright, what got bumped off this list for the seventh movie from the 1960s?"

There are more movies being made now than ever, and a lot of them are crap, probably more crap than ever by ratio, but I'm still left to wonder whether people making these lists really think of the 90s (for example) as a relative wasteland of "good film".

[alexanderwales]

Anime Review: Uncle From Another World

Sometimes I don't really know why I end up watching stuff. Being on Netflix really raises the odds, I guess.

Uncle From Another World, also known as Isekai Ojisan, features Takafumi, a college student (?) and his uncle, Yōsuke, who has come back from a coma. In the first episode it's revealed that he was actually in another world, and can do magic, which they then use to make Youtube videos and get some money.

The uncle shows off that he can display memories from the other world on a viewer, and from that point on, maybe as much as three-quarters of every episode take place there, as they go through his memories. A childhood friend of Takafumi's shows up, Sumika, and they become both the B-plot and the peanut gallery.

What I found most interesting about the show was the way that the "other world" plot grew less and less gag-oriented as it went on, and at the same time, expanded in scope to take over more and more of the show. I'm not sure that I've ever seen another example of this being done more than in this show: the humor remains more or less the same, and they keep going to the same wells of comedy (uncle being oblivious is the big one), but it's like the whole thing is speedrunning Cerberus Syndrome. It's only thirteen episodes!

But the central conceit of the show is that the uncle is kind of a hopeless otaku loser, completely oblivious to the people around him, and we're viewing his memories from seventeen years ago after he's returned to Earth.

And where do you go from there? When you start to develop these characters and their relationships to each other, but your entire setup denies it? I know where I would go with it, but I have no idea where the manga is going to end up.

The first season worked for me, overall, and did a good job of eating its cake and having it too, mixing the more serious beats with the humor. The first season brings together a lot of plot threads in a way that made it feel like there was a plan all along, which I am fairly confident there wasn't: the collection of gags coalesces and most of the initially-one-of characters are together at last. There's something very "serial fiction" about watching the way it all develops.

And of course it has a lot of the anime fanservice shit that I find really obnoxious, which is not at all saved by the lampshading, but if you're going to watch anime, you kind just shrug and go along with it.

[alexanderwales]

you're a ratfic oldhead, and you've mentioned the author's other works like TNC and Herschel

have you read Floornight?

i just finished it this afternoon. in my day, TNC was topical and AN was in its early days, and from /r/r i think i picked up an impression that Fn was somehow unpolished, or not worth checking out? and i just never even looked into what it was about

and i'm kind of mad i've been sleeping on it, because it slaps hard. so many ideas that are mind-blowing good, and solid execution throughout

(not sure whether i'd recommend it if you haven't - i loved it, but a friend of mine thinks nost hits the same beats and tropes in all stories, and claims it's easy to get exhausted by it)

I read Floornight as it was coming out, and just went back to it to refresh myself, and ... might not actually have finished it? Might have only gotten halfway through it? I think I might have marked this one read, but actually only got to the in-progress point, I'll add it back to the TBR list.

I found a comment from myself on r/r when it was ongoing, and probably stopped around ch 20 when that was the most current chapter, but will have to start over from the beginning because I don't remember it well (it was ten years ago).

[alexanderwales]

Yahtzee has a new video up on the Standard Mario Biome Checklist Theory, briefly making the claim that you could map the order of "grass world, desert world, ocean world, jungle world, ice world, fire world, boss" onto Joseph Campbell's story circle. And ... I have some problems with this.

I can buy "grass world" as being the "ordinary world" here, that's sensible, it's the starting location, it's a place of familiarity for our hero, that's all fine. And then finishing up the grass world is "crossing the threshold" into the magical world.

And I can also buy fire world and ice world as both being "the underworld", and the boss as being "the ultimate boon" step where the goal has been achieved and the hero gets his reward, and sure, we skip through most of the end stages of the hero's journey in a montage where there's a return to the lands of grass.

Everything else doesn't map though.

In theory, if we were following Campbell's template, ocean world would be second, because right after "crossing the first threshold" comes "belly of the whale". I think maybe you can make the argument that the desert is a form of self-annihilation, and that's why it comes next in the sequence, but then you have ocean world right after that, and it would seem to me to be redundant.

And what's actually going on is that, as far as hero's journey is concerned, the triptych of desert/ocean/jungle is really just "the road of trials", and the reason that they're arranged in that specific pattern (which they aren't always) is a matter of maximizing contrast between the worlds.

The whole business of mapping these things seems very fraught to me though, and I think a better argument is that each world is its own little hero's journey nested within a greater hero's journey. Except that the very nature of interactive games means that so many aspects of the hero's journey have to be thrust to the wayside: the standard Mario game and every imitator and descendant does not have any actual character at its center, it has a player instead, and there can't be any of the beats that require agency or choice or emotion.

I do think that it would be interesting to try to structure a bog standard platformer around the hero's journey, eight or so stages that mapped very cleanly to the motions that Campbell laid out, especially if this was done mechanically: what would it mean to have a world that embodied "meeting with the goddess"? A stage mechanically themed around "atonement"?

But the average Mario game maps very poorly, except maybe at the start and end.

[alexanderwales]

I think of all the anime I've watched, Uma Musume Pretty Derby might be the one that my wife objects to the most. I think she got off on the wrong foot with it by hearing "horse girls" and assuming that there were men riding these horse girls, but nothing has shifted her firm position against it.

Me: It's not a fetish thing. Wife: Isn't it? Me: I mean, I'm sure for some people it's a fetish thing, but they're barely even horses. Wife: The tail. Me: The tail, and the ears, but they don't act like horses in basically any way. They have hopes and dreams and internal experiences. Wife: They could have just made them runners. Me: I'll admit this is true. Wife: And they're all teenage girls. Me: You'd prefer they were all women in their thirties. Wife: Yes, that would be marginally better. Me: I actually don't think it's any worse than cat girls. Wife: (laughing) I don't get it! Why would someone want to have sex with a cat! Me: It's not - I mean, that's not what cat girls are about. Wife: Sometimes they are. There are sickos out there. Me: Fair. I just think that even by anime standards it's pretty innocuous. Wife: They're horses! Me: Horse girls. Wife: I'm getting worried that this is all leading up to you asking me to dress up like a horse girl. To which I say, "neigh".

[alexanderwales]

Almost fully fledged, the nest is getting quite crowded. We've moved the cars out of the garage and set down some cushions from outdoor chairs to provide a landing pad for them. They'll be out of the nest within the next few days.

An idiot robin has built a nest on top of our garage door motor. The nest was constructed so the chain that drives the door is actually a part of the nest, and if we open or close the garage door, the whole thing is going to get torn apart. So I guess the garage door is staying open for as long as it takes for these eggs to hatch and these birds to leave the nest.

My wife has set up a camera to continuously monitor the situation.

Wife: Maybe we should set up some padding beneath where they'll fall out of the nest? Normally they fall onto grass, not concrete. Me: Seems like we're really coddling these birds. Wife: Well, yeah. Me: I just don't want you to get invested. Wife: Way, way too late for that. I'm all in.

So we're keeping the garage door open for a few weeks, I guess. Whenever I go to use the car, the robin flies away from the nest and watches me cautiously to see whether I'm going to kill her babies, and I can't help but find that a little bit rude of her.

[alexanderwales]

Turns out that it was just a bad movie this time, I started watching Sicario right after and immediately thought "wow, what the fuck, I love cinema and also life".

Sometimes I watch a movie and can't tell whether I'm depressed and unable to take joy from life anymore, or it's just a bad movie.

[alexanderwales]

Sometimes I watch a movie and can't tell whether I'm depressed and unable to take joy from life anymore, or it's just a bad movie.