Tag Archives: entertainment

Book List: 2018Q3

We Are Legion (We Are Bob), Dennis Taylor

For We Are Many, Dennis Taylor

All These Worlds, Dennis Taylor

A sci-fi series about a cryogenically frozen software engineer thawed out several centuries in the future by a theocratic state and uploaded against his will into a von Neumann probe. I think there was a lot of potential here, but it never lived up to it. The potential comes from having multiple nearly-identical copies of the same character, which gives you the option of playing with themes about identity and cognition and narratively the ability to interleave lots of different stories together. The latter of these was accomplished. To me, one of the defining characteristics of a von Neumann probe is exponential growth, and the character(s) decide for unclear reasons not bother growing much. They remain production/population constrained throughout the decades of the narrative. This rubs me the wrong way, perhaps because whenever I play Civilization or any other 4X game I go hard for industrial base every time.

For what it's worth, I believe this was semi-self-published — the publisher on Amazon is listed as a literary agency — and probably as a result the design of these books was not pleasing. I know I care more than most about books as physical objects than most readers do, but I'm mentioning it anyway. The title and author were printed in the footer of each page rather than the header, which was disorienting but not objectively wrong. All three volumes I got from the library were set in Lucida Bright, which is an idiosyncratic choice, but more importantly the text of all three were blurry/rasterized. It was not a good reading experience, and these books deserved better.


Powers of the Earth, Travis Corcoran

Another sci-fi adventure, this time with a very strong anarcho-capitalist/libertarian bent. Quite good, if the politics doesn't turn you off. It's got moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, and more. Also features a real-world economy complete with reasons for being in space in the first place, which very few other books bother with. (One exception is Andy Weir's Artemis.) I will give Corcoran credit for writing a protagonist with character flaws that actually matter for the story. On the other hand, the antagonists are farcically inept. It is difficult to take them too seriously, and the drama suffers as a result.


Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

I think enough has been said about this one already, the majority of it positive. I'd agree.


Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie

Red Country, Joe Abercrombie

A follow-on trilogy to Abercrombie's "First Law" series. These three books are only loosely connected, taking place a few years after that in the same world, with some minor characters re-appearing. If you like George RR Martin but find his worldview too cheery and optimistic, this may be the book series for you. (Indeed, I read it partially because GRRM recommended it.) I particularly like the glimpse you get of the cosmic struggle going on just below the surface of the story, hidden from almost all the characters, and the depth of the world out on the fringes of the map. You get comparatively less of both of these in The Heroes and perhaps a little too much in Red Country. All three are recommended, especially because it's nice to have a fantasy series that offers some self-contained stories instead of having to chew through ten thousand pages before you get a conclusion.


milkMilk, Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky's Salt and Paper are two of my favorites. I'm a sucker for non-fiction about common commodities. Milk was good, but not as good as those. It's less well organized, bouncing back and forth between passages on nutrition, health, history, culinary uses, etc. A better road-map would have been appreciated. It was peppered with historic recipes, which was at turns amusing and annoying.

I often complain that the books I read are good, but the economics in them is below part. This is another example of that. Kurlansky offers this assessment for example: "An oddity of the milk business in America and in Europe was that its growth was not determined by demand." How is that supposed to work? How were people being induced to buy something they didn't demand? I understand rhetorically what's he's attempting to convey, but logically what does this mean? A case could be made for increased supply being the principle factor at work, but he doesn't make that case. He just leaves this sentence there as if it explains everything.

In a similar vein, his treatment of regulation, etc. on consolidation, farm size, profitability etc. is confused. He almost acknowledges that regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that is easier for larger producers to bear, but then it slips past in favor of explaining consolidation as the outcome of some sort of capitalist conspiracy.

Good enough, but definitely not the first Kurlansky book I would recommend.


A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

This is a history of the late middle ages, centering on France and the Hundred Years' War. The format is interesting: it traces the life of a particular nobleman — Enguerrand VII de Coucy — from northern France with ties to both the English and French thrones. The result limits the book in geographic scope, but this is more than made up for in thematic scope, resulting in a good trade-off. Like much of the medieval history I've been reading lately, it also seems oddly appropriate for helping to understand the world right now.

[Eustache Deschamps'] complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Definitely recommended.


The Art of Language Invention coverThe Art of Language Invention, David Peterson

Also highly recommended. Peterson is a creator of constructed languages (conlangs), with credits including both Dothrakai and Valyrian for the "Game of Thrones" TV series. This book is partially about the process of language creation, but also serves as a general introduction to linguistics. Foreign language classes were always my worst subjects in school by a mile. I loved being able to learn about what's going on under the hood rather than merely being given tables of conjugations and common phrases to memorize. I had a few minor complaints with the orthography chapter, which is a subject I know a small bit about through my interest in calligraphy and typography, but otherwise this book was excellent.


1632, Eric Flint

A small town in West Virginia is somehow transported back to Bavaria in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. I'm a sucker for this subgenre, but did not care for this at all. All of the characters are Lake Wobegonian, i.e. everyone is above average in all ways. I lost track of the number of perfect couples who fell in love at first site. The worst flaw is that there is no real challenge to the West Virginians: they are in complete command of the situation at all times, and never face a real threat, either from actual enemies or from the sorts of logistical disruptions you would imagine trying to keep a modern town running in a pre-modern world. There is apparently a whole universe of sequels that have been developed with what sounds like an innovative, open-source scheme, but the first book was not good enough to justify reading the sequels.


Labyrinths coverLabyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

More computer scientists in particular should read Borges. This volume has a mix of short stores, non-fiction essays and "parables." I had read many of the stories, but they are always worth reading again. The non-fiction was harder to follow, but it has inspired me to move Don Quixote further up my reading list. The parables were delightful but weird enough that I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from them.

I was told to get this particular edition because of the foreword by William Gibson. I like Gibson, but I didn't find anything particularly insightful or interesting in his introduction here. Don't avoid it, but don't go out of your way for it either.


On Desire coverOn Desire: Why We Want What We Want, William Irvine

Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is one of my all-time favorite books. On Desire is good, but not nearly as good. That aside, I can give it a strong recommendation as a form of bibliotherapy and a round-about way of meditating on the Second Noble Truth. It will not provide you with many answers with respect to desire — and I don't think Irvine would claim that it does offer answers — but it will help you ask good questions, which is a necessary step.


Chuck Klosterman X, Chuck Klosterman

I don't want every other review here to degenerate into "good, but the author's other books are better" but... this is good but Klosterman's other books are better. This is a recycled collection of essays, articles, reviews, etc. that Klosterman has published in other venues previously. Some are good, some are indifferent, some will depend for you on how interested you are in the subject, which tends to cover his typical range of popular music and sports.

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An Untold Stories Tax?

Carnivale - Season 2HBO canceled Carnivàle, a serial show with deep mythology, after two of a planned six seasons. The remainder of Creator Daniel Knauf's story was never told.

The AV Club :: Daniel Knauf tells us his plan for the end of Carnivàle

AVC: Have you ever considered trying to do it as a novel or a comic book [of the remaining story line]?

DK: Constantly. Yeah. Marvel, we had it all set up. At one point, they wanted to go forward and do a series of graphic novels, and they just couldn’t turn the corner with HBO. Since then, yeah, I’ve considered it. But one of the things that makes me a little crazy about Hollywood is, they’re idiots when it comes to their contractual stuff. If I write a novel, it’s like Random House publishes the novel, copyrights it, but when you do business in Hollywood, they say, “Everything in this thing, in all forms, in all potential forms invented and uninvented…” The language is draconian! “…throughout the universe. We own everything in your head. We own everything.” And it’s like, “If you own everything, at least exploit those rights, please. Could you please exploit the rights? And if you’re not going to exploit the rights, can I at least have them back, so I can exploit them?” It’s just a silly way of doing business. [...]

It didn’t make sense to spend $3.5 million an episode. So let’s do a graphic novel. Let’s tell the story!” But they’re on to other toys now. It’s like doing business with that kid down the street whose parents give him really bitchin’ toys, and he’d just leave them broken in the backyard. It makes me crazy, Hollywood.

I think you could make an analogy to Georgist taxation here, or perhaps more generally Gobry's argument in favor of the French wealth tax.

If property ultimately derives from mixing your labor with things, it's not unreasonable to suggest that people have an ongoing responsibility to continue doing so. If you hold some property, most especially land, you may have a responsibility to society to put it to productive use. (We're talking about theory here, not practice. The arbitration of what counts as responsible, productive use is nearly impossible in practice and so even if you had such a responsibility in theory it is likely best if that responsibility is never legislated into reality.) Gobry's argument is, briefly, that capital gains taxes discourage people to put their resources to use, while wealth taxes do the opposite. In essence, capital gains taxes makes it more expensive to put your resources to work, so people do less of that. OTOH if you're going to loose %1 of your accumulated resources anyway to a wealth tax that gives you reason to put your resources out in the world to try to get them to grow more than the amount you'll lose.

If a studio owns the rights to further adaptations in other media, do they have a responsibility to society to actually use those rights? Land may be a special case of property, because people aren't making any more of it. Or so I gather the Georgists, the Diggers, etc. would say. But people aren't making any more Carnivàle either. That idea can only be invented once, only to be owned by one person, just like a particular acre of land. Does that put an extra responsibility on HBO to do something with it? If an owner of arable land has a onus to see it cultivated, does the owner of fecund IP have a similar onus to see it reified?

I have absolutely no idea how you would actually structure this as a policy. Doing so in a way that wouldn't put the actual tax burden on the creators rather than studios would be harder yet. Even so, I think it's an interesting way to look at the ethical responsibility of content owners, if not a way to structure their legal responsibility.

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Roman Mars

The latest episode of Bullseye includes a great interview with radio producer and podcaster Roman Mars.

99percent-invisible-logoMars is the man behind the wonderful podcast 99% Invisible. (No relation to OWS.) 99% Invisible is about the design and architecture of both the extremely weird (Kowloon Walled City, Razzle Camoflage) to the entirely prosaic (broken Metro escalators, check cashing stores, culs-de-sac) to the outright awesome (The Feltron Annual Report, Trappist ales).

I had always thought Mars had a background in architecture. Turns out he actually went to grad school to study genetics. A lot of what he said about studying and learning and why he went to grad school really resonated with me, which is why I'm writing this post. (Besides wanting to evangelize 99% Invisible, which I couldn't recommend more.)

The only complaint I have with the interview came when Mars said that if you simply read a list of his podcast topics without listening to the show you'd think they were the most boring things in the world.

I couldn't disagree more. The topics he chooses are exactly the sort of thing that lead people like me to descend into hour-long Wikipedia spelunking expeditions. (Except his investigations of them have way higher production value and are told much more artfully than the Wikipedia writing-by-committee process produces.) Don't you want to learn about how Gallaudet University designed buildings suitable for the deaf? Or how audio engineers sound-design the Olympics? Yes. Yes you do.

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Netflix, again: HBR misses the point

I don't intend for this blog to be nothing but commentary about Netflix. I promise. But this is the intersection of business and technology and art, so it's got my attention.

HBR :: Grant McCracken :: Will Netflix Flourish Where Hollywood Failed?

So does Netflix have an edge? Is there any reason to think they can flourish where so many have failed? The apparent answer is data. Netflix has lots and lots of data. They know what we watch, when we watch, where we stop watching, where we repeat a scene, where we reach for the fast-forward button, and most critically, when we break off and move on. They know which movies sell well at 8:00 on a Friday night and which ones we like to watch on Sunday afternoon. They can surmise which directors, writers, and stars produce the most watchable entertainment. They have magnificent data.

(1) Yes, data is their edge. (2) They don't need to make better content than everyone else. They just need to make content good enough to give them bargaining chips when they strike deals with other content makers and distributors.

And that's a tragedy. Netflix has so much data that they are going to be tempted to climb into the creative tent and start offering "advice."

This is almost exactly wrong. Or not wrong, but useless. Producers are constantly offering "advice." The difference is that Netflix's advice will be based on numbers, while other producers' advice is based on sophistry and illusion. ("Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.")

They can claim to know exactly what works and what does not. Well, sorry, no. Knowing that something works leaves us a long way from knowing why something works. And this leaves us a long way from knowing how to reproduce it in another movie. The only thing this data can be absolutely sure to produce is arrogance. We have seen this mistake before.

Yes, they can claim to know exactly what works and what does not and why. Or they could not. There's nothing inherent in a quantitative approach that rules out epistemic humility. In fact, there's much to quantitative reasoning that makes it more humble. When's the last time you saw someone run a t-test on an executive's intuitions or gut feelings?

This means that whatever the data say, Netflix cannot tell a director, "We need a fight scene here." And it really can't say, "We need a fight scene at the 14-minute mark." Doing so, will not only drive creatives away, but viewers as well. As Henry Jenkins has said, viewers are newly sophisticated and critical. They can see formula a long way off. They can see plot mechanics the second they hit the screen. And the moment this happens, they are off.

Hold on a minute. Why would you assume that Netflix's results would be more formulaic than the traditional Hollywood approach? Humans can only sort out cause and effect when there are a couple of moving pieces. Computerized pattern recognition can do so in much more complicated environments. Doesn't it stand to reason that Netflix's discovered patterns will be more complex, and therefore less formulaic and noticeable, than the patterns that intuition- and tradition-guided producers hew to?

Netflix, therefore, will have to temper their itch to intervene. Naturally, we are not talking carte blanche here. We are not saying that we take any artist and turn them loose. Because we know a great deal of capital has been squandered by creatives keen to prove how artistic and avant garde they are. No, what we need are culture producers who are — in the language of Goldilocks — "just right." They need to be able to tell a story and obey some of the story-telling conventions even as they do new and interesting things to break and bend those conventions. Only then will painters paint and patrons watch.

The advice in this post true for every company producing creative output. It's masquerading as being specifically about Netflix. It's not only more general than it's made out to be, it's arguably less applicable to Netflix than to their competitors.

I'm also more than a little weary of critiques being made against numerical decision making without any consideration of the faults of the non-numeric decision making it's displacing.

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Netflix Marathon

Tyler Cowen :: Will marathon viewing become the TV norm?

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

Ad-financed shows — still a clear majority of viewing — may prefer to have impressions from the ads spread out over weeks and months rather than concentrated in one long marathon sitting.

On the other hand, when watching an hour long show — or even a half-hour — I routinely see the same ad multiple times. Not ads for the same product or service, but the very same advertisement. I am sure there is a lot of literature about the trade-offs between repetition and staleness to doing this. (Note to self: ask about this at the next marketing quant lunch.)

house_of_cards

Cowen continues:

Furthermore the show itself relies more heavily on an effective and immediate burst of concentrated marketing, with little room to build word of mouth and roll out a campaign with stages.

Yes, you lose word-of-mouth, but you also lose the inevitable week-to-week decay as people drop out of the viewership pool. Most TV shows show a remarkably consistent exponential decay in viewership. It's not at all clear to me that the gaining from WOM and the losing from audience decay is preferable to having neither.

This is being framed as a contest between watching 13 episodes in one day and watching them over four months. My wife and I have been watching one episode of "House of Cards" every day or so. I think this middle ground may be a better solution than either extreme. A two week roll-out keeps viewers focused and concentrates marketing, but doesn't roll the dice on one big push.

Note that Netflix has an advantage that other outlets don't: they can continue to advertise the show for free through their service. This won't drive new members to subscribe, but I think they benefit even when existing members watch the show. True, it doesn't boost revenue, but racking up higher viewership both makes it easier for them to create high-quality shows in the future, and it strengthens their in-house productions as a bargaining chip when negotiating with other content producers and distributors, which I think is the real value of "House of Cards."

One media market which is still highly serialized and has clearly not come to grips with the implications of that is comics. Here is just one recent piece about this. People have been fretting over the serialization-vs-collection transition and the friction it causes since I started reading comics six years ago, and they don't seem any closer to resolving the tension.

PS "House of Cards" is very highly recommended. I haven't had a show I was this excited about binge-watching in a couple of years.

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