What would the Arctic be like if the Earth’s spin was perpendicular to its orbit? Instead of a half-year day and a half-year night it would just be perpetual dusk and dawn. Even the creep of a day stretched out over a year indicates time, imagine if it was perpetually out of time, between day and night?

I said I’d make time to read three things a day, but time’s already run out by the time I get to last week’s tabs. I wanted to bring the better behaviours of lockdown and the summer back to work but responsibility gnaws at the edges of the day, like a needy puppy. I’ve also caught myself being angry this week at nothing in particular, just frustration at professional inconveniences. That’s often a sign of losing perspective, a useful way to check myself and appreciate how good things are.

I’m happy with the digital sketch this week. Those screens were meant to have articulated arms like the wall sections in the Portal games but I forgot how to rig them up and then have them repeat along the mesh without doing it manually. So I cheated and made a pneumatic pump instead.

My PhD work is increasingly circling around realism and expectation. This is somewhat disappointing but feels good to have a better sense of it: ‘Realistic Expectations’ The aesthetics of realism in visualising the future. Maybe? I don’t know. It’s slow going, every paragraph keeps being rewritten and mostly I just look at a blinking cursor and feel incredibly stupid. In a way it’s a simple task: What’s required is quite straightforward but the way this is meant to be achieved seems to be completely incongruous depending on who you ask; everything can be picked apart, you patch a hole only to create another hole. And so a small subsection that I had cut back to 800 words two weeks ago is ballooning to 3000 just trying to plug all the damn holes and in the end, it’s not that important and needs to be cut again resulting in more holes. It’s a Sisyphean task that appears to have no intellectual or creative value and serves appease pedantry. Don’t do a PhD, the sole reward is smug self-satisfaction and self-hatred. Maybe I should have just written a book on realism instead, like a readable one.

You know me well enough to know that I don’t get into divisive rhetoric or demonising people or things. People have different motives and I generally try to empathise or at least understand them, even if I don’t agree with them. I’ve found this to be a more effective way of pinpointing and critiquing these motives in order to inculcate change. Folks are most often responding to the world around them and celebrated social and political values like self-preservation, wealth accumulation and individual success rather than malicious intent: The ultra-rich seek primarily to preserve their fortune, not deny others of their own – this is just a side-effect. It doesn’t make the side-effects any less that hurtful and traumatic but I think it’s a mistake to assume maliciousness in other’s actions because they hurt (not to say there aren’t also malicious actions.) Usually hurtful actions are the result of an iniquitous economy and institutions that reward and celebrate individuality, ego and self-worth above community, care or even classical notions of progress. This is why so much of the necessary changes we need to make are put on the individual including social and ecological change, because that’s what are our institutions (including the creative and academic ones) are centred on; individual change and personal growth. All this is to get to the point that I fucking hate Peter Thiel.

The government has decided to put Palantir in charge of our borders because apparently G4S weren’t toxic enough and it just flung that memory dust in my eyes. Some people are beyond redemption.

Short Stuff

• Using machine learning to artificially increase frame rates of stop-motion from 15 to 60fps. Hardly a surprise but makes you wonder what the state of Deep Stereo is five years on.
• As usual, some maths geekery as usual; Quanta magazine’s interactive visualisation of the different mathematical fields, mapping out the relationships between them.
• I idly watched this episode of VFX Artists React where they talk about how the cartoon matte was achieved in Mary Poppins in 1964, long before green screen. It used a process called sodium vapour. Sodium vapour lights emit yellow at a specific, very limited wavelength that falls exactly between the red and green film strips that were used separately (along with blue) in the Technicolor process meaning it was super easy to isolate and matte anything at that particular wavelength while still having yellow generally as a result of the red and green overlay. Problem is, there was only one camera ever made that could do this which Disney jealously guarded for forty years and now it’s lost so the history of special effects went a different way with the slightly more janky, less detailed mattes developed on blue screen years later for Star Wars. Innovation is stupid.
• Lemino is a cool YouTube channel. (I’ve removed the channel recommendations section of this blog because it gave me too much of an excuse to watch YouTube.) He goes over interesting mysteries in quite a good amount of detail, maintaining an air of mystery while offering cynicism to hysterical and conspiratorial interpretations of historical mysteries and events. It’s almost forensic; good 1am stuff.
• Here’s friend and colleague David White offering a provocation for this year’s Digitally Engaged Learning conference; the desituated studio. He nods to the conversation we had on teenage drama simulation website twitter dot com about it and some of the work Eva Verhoeven and I have done in this area.
• Thanks to Joana Pestana for showing me this; the Institute of the Cosmos for the second Riga biennale. Not much to say, very cool.
• It’s weird how protocols sometimes appear in innocuous interactions. Like BBC stuff will not play over SONOS. Neither BBC, Spotify or SONOS will tell you that, you just figure it out after spending ages updating, scrolling, turning things on and off and then Googling it.

I’ve used all the short stuff I had so I will need a new Content Strategy for next week. Blogging is hard, but thank you to the roughly 140 people who check in here on the reg. I love you particularly. I’ll write you again next week.