ey i'm blogging here a blog by alex daily

Year: 2023

On blogging

Posted on by Alex Daily

Is anyone happy about the state of the internet in the Year of Luigi 2023? Search sucks now, what you do find is riddled with generated text and SEO land grabs, and everything you use every day has either been ruined by a billionaire or is owned by a billionaire with ruining-it aspirations, which is a problem if you like using it because it’s kicking you off the boat, and a problem if you don’t like using it but are forced to because you’re chained to a boat that sucks to be on even more now. And that’s just what’s top of mind right now because they’re the examples everyone uses when complaining about the state of the internet in the aforementioned Year of Luigi 2023.

So what does make me happy on the internet? What are my e-raindrops on digital roses, what are my electronic brown paper packages tied up with @string? Mastodon, obviously, because that’s where my friends are. Comics of all kinds, from snazzy webtoons to archives of ancient-and-still-running newspaper strips. Playing board games with friends and strangers alike on a website from 2002. Finding little personal websites is a big one. I love clicking on a link in something posted 15 years ago and seeing it still go somewhere. Remember, before he sold it, the way Wordle sprung up?

So what’s the string that ties all of these packages together? It’s all pretty people-first. I think it’s also pretty… billionaire-last. What I like here is the people. You could get rid of the billionaires1Who aren’t people., and everything I like about the web would still be there, but the same isn’t true about the people. No people, no internet worth having. So how do you get rid of the billionaires, or at least solve the billionaire problem2I stand by my pitch of, we make a list, we guillotine number one, and then we look knowingly at the rest.3As always, references to the guillotine in my writing should be read as, we do everything we can, starting with the options they’re willing to go along with, and if that doesn’t do it, well, you know. I talk about guillotining like this because I’m far more interested in being very clear about what the end of that particular road looks like than I am in negotiating. for yourself?

On billionaire-owned platforms4And I keep referring to “the billionaires” as shorthand because the Twitter issue is so fresh, but, say, platforms owned or controlled by black box megacorporations like Google or whatever the company that runs TikTok is called are clearly part of the problem, too. I am restricted in doing so. On these platforms it’s very common for what you put out there to be considered in some way in the public domain, you don’t control what happens to anything you do, you are never the captain of your own ship. And the trends are in the wrong direction. YouTubers chase the algorithm like dogs chasing cars, TikTok has kids saying “s🥚🥚🥚” and “unalive” because to say “sex” or “death” is to hex your relationship with the algorithm.

I don’t know what the solution is here. I do know I don’t want this, and that I don’t think anyone should want this. I think I can alleviate some of the issues, at least for myself, simply by being more conscientious about how and where I put things out into the world. What do Mastodon, this blog, little personal websites, all have that I don’t have on the big platforms? Here I have ownership, control, and freedom.

Baio5Who I have one-sided joke beef with., there, in 2016, in the post Kottke quotes, quotes Kottke from three years earlier saying the blog has died. No matter how much we might constantly ask for it to, the situation has not meaningfully changed in the decade since6Though I guess I can now name, like Baio asks, a great, single-author blog that started in the past few years. I wonder why this one stands out to me so much. and it doesn’t particularly look or feel like it will. But the web isn’t a sea, where the rising tide brings inevitable change over and over again on a regular schedule. The web is the people on it, it’s me, it’s you, it’s all of our friends, and all of our aunts. And change is the decisions we make.

Starting a blog will not make the problems with the state of the internet in the Year of Luigi 2023 magically go away. But I can at least live the change I want to see.

  • 1
    Who aren’t people.
  • 2
    I stand by my pitch of, we make a list, we guillotine number one, and then we look knowingly at the rest.
  • 3
    As always, references to the guillotine in my writing should be read as, we do everything we can, starting with the options they’re willing to go along with, and if that doesn’t do it, well, you know. I talk about guillotining like this because I’m far more interested in being very clear about what the end of that particular road looks like than I am in negotiating.
  • 4
    And I keep referring to “the billionaires” as shorthand because the Twitter issue is so fresh, but, say, platforms owned or controlled by black box megacorporations like Google or whatever the company that runs TikTok is called are clearly part of the problem, too.
  • 5
    Who I have one-sided joke beef with.
  • 6
    Though I guess I can now name, like Baio asks, a great, single-author blog that started in the past few years. I wonder why this one stands out to me so much.

It sucks that the Old Place is still there.

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’ve been on the internet my entire life. I remember my first introduction to it in the same kind of visual flashes that I remember learning to ride a bike in, that I remember elementary school in. I can see the room it happened in. If you broke me down to my constituent parts you’d find the internet amongst the rubble right next to things like comics and reading in bed and taking a quick sip of water from the fridge if I’m gonna stand up anyway, you’d find it next to whistling along to music and the vague belief that if I sat down at a piano I’d be quite good at it despite having never touched a piano in my life. There is no “me” without the internet. But that doesn’t mean I can’t define “the internet” however I damn well like.

I was on Twitter for sixteen years. Literally half, at 32, of my entire life. It’s not easy to be 16. But Twitter made it easier, because Twitter was where I found my people. Some people must never find theirs, and I can feel it chafe when I try to make new friends online, now. Not that I don’t manage. But when I was 16, somehow, we were all in the right place at the right time. I– We– The sheer luck that we found each other.

In the end, then, what I resent about what happened to Twitter, first slowly, over years of time, and then, more recently, very quickly, is that it’s still there. It’s called something else now, and I knew, in my heart, even before the most recent turn, that it would never feel like it used to again, because I’m 32 instead of 16, and because, frankly, it was weird that the website where we talked about what we had for dinner also had elected politicians and famous people and literal criminals on it in a way it didn’t always. I knew I could never go home again, but it sucks that it’s still there. It sucks that it feels like I could still go there. It sucks that I could go there and for a little while know where all the doors go without it feeling like I have to know which ones are the exits just in case it all goes wrong. I’m not easily upset, but I’m upset.

Because it sucks that it’s still there.

There is no “me” without the internet. But there is a “me” without Twitter. There’s gonna have to be.

Review: Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” (2011)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Original Japanese cover of the first volume.I was, chronologically speaking, about to graduate. Unfortunately, the work that led to that moment meant I’d caught up on podcasts. Nothing left to listen to1This is… relative, but the practical effect is as described.. That not having happened in some time, I panicked, decided I should listen to more of the kinds of books adults listened to, read, or at least pretended to listen to or read, and put a bunch (four) of Murakami novels and short story collections on my phone. 18 May, 2022, according to Overcast’s timestamp. I liked Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, I liked, mostly, the short stories I’d managed to find. Killing Commendatore seemed too imposing, which just left 1Q84.

Unfortunately, “catching up on podcasts” doesn’t stop podcasts coming and coming, or Big Finish dropping box set after box set, and soon enough, both 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore were but ideas at the bottom of a pile. Piles upon piles upon piles. So, this summer, more than a year later, having both graduated and finished the first half of a follow-up degree, I finally put it on. A choice, curiosity finally getting the better of me, not just because I’d run out of podcasts.

So. 1Q84. Tengo is a cram school math tutor with aspirations towards published authorship who is asked to shepherd a young writer’s amateurish manuscript to winning a new writers’ prize, only to discover the magical realist work of fiction is actually a true story meant specifically to disarm the real forces behind a dangerous cult. Aomame is a personal trainer slash personal assassin whose line of work eventually puts her in the position of having to take out the leader of a dangerous cult. They had a brief interaction once, as children, and long to reunite. 1Q84 is the story, told in alternating point-of-view chapters, of how they find themselves finally drawn back together in another world entirely.

Where Murakami thrives in his portrayal of this shared journey is in his descriptions of process, ritual, work. Whether that’s Tengo’s writing or Aomame’s killing, the ritual of reading to a comatose parent or of the departure from one world to get to another, or repetitive, boring time spent in isolation, it’s his descriptions of these two people going about their well-rehearsed business where the book really comes alive. Murakami really sells Tengo’s writing as an act of magic, Aomame’s killing as a cosmic duty. The travel to another world an accident, a spell tripped into, but a ritual nonetheless.

But it feels like the book reviews itself in its reviews of Fuka-Era’s novel Air Chrysalis. The magic2The magical kind, not the process, ritual, work stuff I describe above, which, in fact, gets pretty thoroughly explained., reviewers say, is left unexplained, the ending is too ambiguous. But that Murakami himself is clearly aware of the easy criticisms you could lob at 1Q84 — and a lot of his work in general — doesn’t mean they’re not true. If you don’t want people to say your ending is too ambiguous, you write a different ending, one where all the other plot strands don’t slowly fall away until even the A-plot falls away into another world.

So, yes, the ending is ambiguous. It would almost have to be. The magic, of Little People and Air Chrysalii, is vague. Would the book be better if Murakami explained what the Little People eat for breakfast? I haven’t even mentioned the absolutely impressively miserable sex scenes, which I’m pretty sure aren’t actually meant to be gross, they’re just written from a purely Male Writer’s Perspective, there’s truly no attempt made to see it from any other angle. But does any of that matter that much when the journey is so riveting? Does any of it matter when the prose — translated by go-to Murakami translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel — really, genuinely manages to engross in way that makes me go, oh, yeah, the absolutely wild thing that’s happening right now makes total sense? It really doesn’t.

Of course, the quality of the audiobook specifically also goes a long way to why I feel that way — narrated by Allison Hiroto in the Aomame chapters, Marc Vietor in the Tengo chapters, and then in the third volume by Mark Boyett in the Ushikawa chapters, each character’s respective reader so fully embodies both the story and the character that when Aomame and Tengo are finally reunited in the final chapters and their readers voice their dialogue in the other’s chapters, it moved me in a way prose never could have. They’ve not just reunited, they’re talking to each other.

Terrific.

  • 1
    This is… relative, but the practical effect is as described.
  • 2
    The magical kind, not the process, ritual, work stuff I describe above, which, in fact, gets pretty thoroughly explained.

Analysis: “Wreck-It Ralph” (2012)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Also posted as a review on Letterboxd, derived from a thread on Mastodon.

Never got around to the sequel, thought I’d go for a refresher on this one first.

Their respective games’ fellow characters are bigoted towards Ralph and Vanellope in essentially the same ways — total social exclusion through rigid enforcement of arbitrary rules designed to exclude them — but for different reasons.

Where Ralph’s exclusion is because he’s “the bad guy” who wants to be let into “good guy” spaces, approaching almost a faux “trans predator” thing, this idea that no matter what, in the ideas of Gene and the others he’s always gonna be pretending,

Vanellope is excluded because she has a disability, her “glitch,” when confronted she calls it “pixlexia,” the other racers’ mockery resembles common mockery of physical and learning disabilities, her peers make no effort to try to understand.

Felix, in this read, is the well-meaning cis liberal, the guy who on paper is totally fine with Ralph, but can’t bring himself to prioritise Ralph’s well-being over his own status because doing so would endanger his “hero privilege,” a limitation he only overcomes by figuring out a way to make himself the lead character of part of the story.

Unfortunately in the end Ralph and Vanellope’s conflicts are overcome not because Gene and the other penthousers learn to accept and love Ralph for who he is instead of who he was written to be, but because he “earns his medal” by saving the day, literally just trans exceptionalism, and not because reasonable accommodations are made to help Vanellope thrive but because her glitch is essentially brought under control, her disability “medicated,” the thing that made her unique transformed into something nobody finds too uncomfortable.

I realise 2012 is a different country, but there is simply no goddamn way anybody like me — trans, autistic — was involved in the production of this fucking movie.

We will never be able to look to Disney and truly see ourselves, it’s just never gonna happen.

Anyway, fun video game movie. Cute aesthetic, the fictional games fit right in with the real-world ones. Kinda proves these things can work as a movie in a way nobody has quite managed to do since. I say, actively not looking at the Mario movie.

Hello world!

Posted on by Alex Daily

Repurposing the “Hello world!” post not as an introduction post but as a chronological marker. Posts on this blog dated before this one — the morning of 23 August, 2023 — are necroposts. You may be familiar with that term from forums, where it is sometimes used to mean, “posting in a long-dead thread, to the annoyance of other forum users.” In blogging, I’ve seen it defined instead to mean, basically, “accurately dating old writing.”

On second chances

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a necropost. A version of the following was originally posted as a Reddit comment on 7 August, 2023.

For context: This was in reply to speculation that an upcoming Big Finish announcement might involve the return of actor John Barrowman to the company’s Torchwood range after he was dropped, and a big anniversary story went unreleased, by the company in light of a pattern of repeated, open, and enthusiastic sexual misconduct. Wikipedia at this time calls them “allegations,” but Barrowman and his co-stars were openly talking about this behaviour in public on stage at conventions. It wasn’t a secret then, and it’s not a secret now.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan in the places where I’m a Doctor Who fan, you may have seen calls from other fans to bring him back in some way despite all this, because some people prioritise their fondness for a character over the safety and wellbeing of the cast and crew around the actor portraying that character.

This was my response to one such call, asking for Barrowman to be given a second chance.

I’m preserving it here mostly because I’ve got a feeling this will keep coming up, and I’ll want to be able to pull it back out to repost or reference.

John Barrowman has had his second chance. He behaved the way he did throughout the 00s until he was forced to apologise for it in 2008, both behind the scenes for how he was on set and publicly for doing it on Radio 1, and then… openly kept doing it, consistently, at least as late as his time on Arrow, where he was walking around his co-stars’ trailers naked and sending them pictures of, again, him naked, that he made a crew member take.

He claims in his 2021 apology that his behaviour has changed since 2008, but that’s clearly a lie, then, isn’t it. Perhaps it didn’t include crew members who might not have felt comfortable speaking up or saying no back in 2008 and that’s what’s changed? There’s “another chance,” and then there’s, why would you ever employ this walking liability again?

So, when I say, “RTD knows better,” what I mean is, RTD is a PR-savvy showrunner whose previous run on Doctor Who was mired in controversy that he has somehow managed to escape significant public scrutiny over. Even in the best possible scenario, after a thorough redemption tour for Barrowman — which could happen, but won’t start at Doctor Who — bringing him back, even just at Big Finish, would at the very least attach controversy to the show’s brand that, surely, RTD is sensibly trying to avoid. Why do that to yourself? Why do that to the show?

19 December 2023: Here’s a paragraph I think I might add in the future.

In general, I’m against the idea of permanent banishment as punishment for behaviour in different times, right, but there does come a point where I’m fine saying, actually, yeah, this person probably shouldn’t work in this industry ever again, and John Barrowman is on the wrong side of that line. Every opportunity given to him should instead be given to an up-and-coming queer person who’s not gonna commit sexual violence the second they get a chance.

Review: “The Blue Whale” (2020)

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a necropost. This review of 2020 Egyptian internet challenge movie The Blue Whale was originally posted on Letterboxd. You should not watch 2020’s The Blue Whale.

The first sixty of these 77 minutes are trash. At best it’s disposable, and at worst it’s openly vile and toxic about mental health issues and what might drive a person to suicide. In the middle of those two extremes it’s also just very, very dumb about the internet. And not in the fun way a dumb slasher about a cursed phone or whatever can be, it’s more like how your parents or your dumbest uncle can be dumb about the internet.

And then, in the back 17, it drops the most truly unhinged, deranged twist I’ve ever seen. It’s not even a plot twist, because it comes completely out of nowhere, is never examined, and would have no time to go anywhere if it was going to, it’s more of a costume twist —

(And I’m not putting a spoiler warning on this because if I do nobody will read it, but look away and go watch it, even though it’s bad and you shouldn’t, if you don’t want to be spoiled for what is undeniably an absolutely damaged twist — )

But here I can do a read more.

Continue reading “Review: “The Blue Whale” (2020)”

What “Rashomon” is about

Posted on by Alex Daily

Lightly edited from Letterboxd.

My understanding of 1950’s Rashomon had always been that it’s about four witnesses of the same event sharing their contradictory good-faith accounts of it to a court. “That’s not how I remember it,” as one Homer J Simpson once famously put it. A tale of how human memory is subjective, and can not be objective.

But that’s not what 1950’s Rashomon is about at all: It’s about four witnesses of the same event choosing, one way or another, to actively lie about what they saw.

Tajōmaru the bandit lies to big himself up, regardless of whether he did it or not. He wants to be Tajōmaru the bandit, who killed a samurai in honourable combat. But it’s only in his own testimony that he’s ever presented as a person who’s even remotely capable of that.

The samurai’s wife lies because the most plausible account (the woodcutter’s) is, frankly, fucking pathetic. She comes off very poorly in it, and her husband dies a pathetic, pitiful death. A samurai’s honour is a thing that matters, dangit, is the thinking here — perhaps she feels she herself is to blame for what, and this is her way of reconciling those facts. (If the woodcutter’s account isn’t true, she may still simply be finding her own way to deal with the event.)

The medium lies because she’s a medium. It’s what they do. (Alternatively, the spirit of the samurai lies to preserve his own honour and let off his wife.)

Finally, even the woodcutter employs some creative editing to not get in trouble for stealing the valuable dagger — but his account, in which the wife spurs the samurai and the bandit on to fight each other and the samurai dies a pathetic, pitiful death, is by far the most plausible, and his motive to lie is only for not testifying. He has six kids to get back to — seven, now — and in the grand picture of things, that matters more than who stole the dagger.

Though there is some overlap, the accounts contradict so significantly that they can’t be reconciled. They simply can not be good-faith flawed accounts of the same event — the priest at the end isn’t losing his faith over the events described, but because each account is designed primarily to benefit the person recounting it, because this is a movie about what could make people who should objectively know the truth choose to lie about it.

Or at least, that’s how I’ll remember it.

Terrific picture. I regret to inform you all I’m going to be correcting people about it for the rest of my life.

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