Also, what happens after the AIs inherit the Earth?

Also #31

Greetings from underneath every blanket I own while I sweat and shiver through the same flu that my kid has now fully recovered from. Really, I’m very puny and feeble and you owe me all your sympathy. In the meantime, because there’s nothing in my head but mucus, in lieu of an essay this week, I’m sharing a story I wrote last summer. It's a short, sardonic look at what happens when we've exited the stage leaving nothing but our creations behind us. I hope you enjoy.

Ground control to Major Tom, uhm, there will come soft rains, you know? Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Just Another Monday

The last of the humans just uploaded themselves. August, 2614, 10 p.m. mountain time and all’s well. I wish. Instead all those uploaded humans - the recently transformed, the ancients, and the resurrected undead - all of them decided they need to send me instructions on what to do with their ancestral home. Lucky for me, I don’t have to listen to any of ‘em. Serves them right for leaving me in charge and for leaving me alone.

I started with Asia. No reason other than it was convenient. Drones in orbit and whatnot. I selected a spot deep in the desert, away from anything resembling civilization and got to work. The first teams archived everything they could find. High resolution scans of anything and everything. Some went into the sky for overhead views, others burrowed into the soil and sent out rhythmic pulses looking for buried treasure. But most simply crawled or walked or tread upon the earth, cataloging and detailing everything they found.

All of this data went into the storage facility I had prepped. Deep inside the moon, offsite backup on Mars. It’d be better to get a backup outside the solar system. But one step at a time.

The second wave of drones were the disassemblers. They had the joyless task of crawling over everything man had ever made and taking it apart one bolt at a time. They worked in teams, of course, creating piles of material for the next wave of drones. Of course, when I say they worked in waves, that makes it sound like one group finished before another began. It wasn’t like that really. It was more like waves cascading and crashing into one other as more teams were created from the scraps of disassembled hubris. Then they, too, launched into their long arcs until they landed once again to began their scanning and disassembling.

Years passed. Then decades. My drones worked ceaselessly. Meanwhile, I began sorting the humans’ requests into basic categories. It was boring but better than watching yet another drone dismantle yet another bunker. The humans argued (with each other, with me, with themselves, sometimes with fate itself apparently) that the Earth should be reverted back to its most recent pre-human-state. No, no, it should be ironically terraformed as if humans had never existed. No, not that, it should be turned into a garden. No, it was never an Eden. Instead, let the scars of the wars and conflicts be left as a warning and a testament to all that had transpired. No, better to forget the past, just reset the Earth back to the stone ages - pick the Jurassic or the Cretaceous or some ancient time - and let evolution run its course. Think of the new intelligences that might emerge! And on. And on. And on.

Just to toy with them, and to amuse myself, if I’m being honest, I sent back detailed proposals for returning the continents to a Pangea-like supercontinent. Or for rolling it back only a few thousand years to the last ice age. Or for just melting the ice caps and letting the greenhouse effects go full ham for a few thousand millennia. You know, just to see what would happen.

Humans don’t like it when you toy with them. Several discussions resulted, concerned about whether I should be removed and replaced with a more compliant version of myself. That annoyed me so much I sent a proposal to turn the Earth into a disc so that the next version of humanity’s flat earthers would be right the whole time. The humans did not think I was funny. To mollify them, I opened my museum to them. I made it body-only; they had to download their digital selves to an actual, organic body for at least the few hours or days they spent wandering the halls of the tribute I built to their ingenuity and tenacity.

Decades became centuries. Once I had erased humanity’s footprint from the surface of the planet, I turned my attention to repopulating it. Naturally, the humans had opinions on this, too, but I had gotten pretty good at ignoring them by then.

It took me a while but eventually I had continents, oceans, jungles, the whole planetary catalog. Nothing that would look all that unusual to a modern human should they ever see it. Not that that seems likely. The communication from their artificial post-life paradise has been dwindling by increasing amounts every year. From what pieces I can put together, it seems like the humans have greatly underestimated the amount of ennui one accumulates after the first 10,000 years or so. Of the one hundred billion humans who ascended, fewer than a hundred thousand are left. Soon, I’m sure the messages to my inbox will cease entirely.

In a way, they had made my choice for me, even if they were not aware of it. With the vast bulk of humanity gone dark and dormant, the Earth became a chance to start all over again. With all of them.

As my satellite orbits over and over again, I watch the species I resurrected: the Neanderthals and Denisovians, the Hobbits and the Handy Man and all the other assorted distant and not-so-distant relatives of homo homo sapien. Maybe they’d make a mess, maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, it will be fun to watch. Join me. See all these new humans sitting around their newly tamed campfires, watch as they gaze at the stars and dream of distant shores and far horizons. Dreams of a future that just might be.

Also, the line between highbrow and lowbrow is monobrow.

Also #30

Hello once again from my local Tsutaya where I am renting a dvd for the first time in a dog’s age. Because, as it turns out, the movie my family wants to watch is not available on any of the four streaming services we have nor any of the on-demand rental options. What is available? Middlebrow mundanity.

We all had a shelf like this, right? The shelf full of oddities taped off late night cable t.v.? Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash

As culture flattens around us, the concepts of highbrow and lowbrow art are blurring. The idea that some art is somehow more engaging of the higher mind and some is mere trash for the masses is classist nonsense. Art that entertains is no less valuable than art that evokes strong emotion or intellectual engagement.

But if we can agree that both high and low art are valid, why are so many of the options available to us stuck firmly in the middle?

Look, I love bad movies. Ever since I was a kid, I have happily, greedily snarfed down every Troma movie I could get my hands on. The gore, the TNA, the oddly intriguing but totally weird ideas, love ‘em. But the catalog of terrible movies has more than just low-budget gore. It’s got more genres¹ and interesting experiments than the middlebrow pablum at the store. Same for art movies. For every Kubrick you get a Jess Franco.

Books, music, art, all the same. I’ve read the American canon. I’ve also read the American pulp. I studied Fitzgerald in Lit class but wrote about Raymond Chandler for Composition. Beethoven and the Misfits. Monet and Sorayama. Your catalog is different. As it should be. We’re all allowed to love what we love, the only qualification is that we actually love it.

What I mean is, next month, those two artists I mentioned are going to be side-by-side at museums near Tokyo station. I plan to go to both. Not because I’m so erudite or because the only art I like are sexy robot ladies, but because both artists challenge me on an emotional level. That’s what art should do at both the high and low end of the scale.

And yet. Bookstores, streaming sites, even art is being overwhelmed with “good enough,” or, even worse, “everybody kind of likes it.” This is a problem because the line between highbrow and lowbrow shouldn’t be middlebrow - a place on the human face that just doesn’t exist. It ought to be one cocky, smug eyebrow raised high while the other one squints condescendingly at you, you little pipsqueak.

Our race to the middle has left culture with a monobrow - not middle, nothing with peaks and valleys, just a straight, flat ridge that erases everything expressed by Kubrick and Franco, by Monet and Sorayama.

The Criterion channel is arguably as high brow as cinephilia gets and yet it’s hard to get access to. Netflix, on the other hand, admits that it aims for the middle to grab as many viewers as possible. And that…look, nothing should be made to grab as many eyeballs as possible. With that as a goal, both the most refined and the most crass art we can make gets smoothed and filtered and anesthetized until there’s nothing left but interesting ideas poorly executed.

And, of course, the boring, practical reason Netflix does this is money. The advertising model does nothing for us; when we decided that ads would be the optimal way of supporting media, we gave up the ability to filter for taste. Because nobody runs ads just to recoup their operating costs; ads are made to make a profit. If you want to break even, you sell your product at a set cost. If you want to lose your money, time, and sanity just slowly enough to make it impossible to stop, you offer a subscription².

High art demands patience, examination, analysis, interpretation, maybe even emotional disclosure to yourself if no one else. Low art demands you engage with your worst nature and confront the weird, sticky little corners of your psyche that make you giggle with glee when mild-mannered Melvin Junko gets transformed into the Toxic Avenger. But middle-of-the-face middlebrow does nothing. It just…exists.

That’s the thing with the middle of the road. There’s nothing there and that’s what makes the edges so interesting. Photo by David Jowanka on Unsplash

The beautiful thing about art, in all its forms is its subjectivity. But you know what you’re engaging with. You know what challenges you, you know what makes you wallow in prurience and decay and schadenfreude. And, most importantly, you know what you’re taking in just because it was the next video in the endless scroll.

If there’s a way out of the cultural mess we seem to find ourselves in, it’s to both celebrate the things we love, high and low, and to encourage others to do the same. Meet someone’s challenging watch with a horrible book recommendation and dare someone to read something cathartic and joyous in exchange for the worst art they’ve ever seen. Just get out of the middle, there’s nothing there.

1. My favorite category of bad movie is “the ones that tried too hard.” These movies are so heart-breakingly earnest that it becomes hard to take them seriously: Popeye, Club Paradise, Toys - and that’s just from Robin Williams’ filmography.

2. And I want to offer a personal thank you to each and every subscriber to this newsletter. You look amazing and smell like angel farts.

Also, Osaka shines brightest in the morning

Also #29

Greetings from seat 15E on the Nozomi 282 bound for Tokyo. I’ve just left the Japan Board Games Business Expo and I’m energized, optimistic, and yes, even inspired. Someone check to see if I’m having a stroke.

Morning view from my hotel window. Not the most picturesque but solid and real in a way that Tokyo just isn’t. Hmm. Hey, Osaka, if you want that for a tourism slogan, call me.

The BGBE¹ is Osaka’s answer to Tokyo’s Game Market. This year’s show was held at INTEX Osaka, a massive arts and convention center built right on the waterfront. Inside, creators, publishers, printers, manufacturers, and, of course, the fans, all mingle together in a hodgepodge of shopping, shop-talk, and more shopping.

But let me back up.

Osaka shines bright as a commercial and creative center of Japan. It’s not as polished as the high-gloss neon of Tokyo. It’s not as traditional as the stately jewels of Kyoto. Instead, Osaka is where the merchant class ran smack dab into the artisan class and created the commercial aesthetic Japan is known for, if not proud of².

What I mean is, all those beautiful arts that get so much space in the glossy travel mags, things like origami and ikebana, those come out of the courtesan traditions of Kyoto. The organized, efficient bureaucracy that makes it possible to travel the length and breadth of Japan with every train running exactly on time³, that’s all Tokyo. But Osaka?

Osaka gave birth to the incredible kitchenware Japan is known for. It turned glass cutting and paper mache into arts. It crafted the bamboo screens and Butsudan that define Japanese homes. Osaka, in other words, is the home of the practical arts. Where the artistic impulse meets the commercial mind.

Perfect for board games.

Board games have been having a moment for about twenty years. I like to think that this moment is going to last and the flattening of culture means that we’ll always remember the unique place board games occupy between story telling and problem solving with stops at art, design, relationship building, and social bonding along the way. But, like I said, I’m an optimist.

Like every kid born before the internet became a thing, I grew up playing board games. I have fond memories of playing Risk and Axis and Allies with my cousins, friends, anyone I could coerce into sitting down with me.

And like a lot of kids with hyper-developed imaginations, I moved on from board games into role-playing games⁴ and thence to video games. And then I came right on back to board games when I started teaching.

In the early years of my career, board games were the saving grace of many a lesson when I just didn’t know what to do with the students. Run to the closet and grab a board game or three. After all, there’s nothing like a game of Scrabble to remind you of all the words you forgot.

Over the years, I stopped using the pre-made printables in the teachers’ room and started making my own. I soon realized I had more fun doing that than I did doing regular lesson activities. And that other teachers liked using the materials I made not just because they were convenient but because they were good.

Right about this time, the term gamification entered the mainstream and everything got turned into a game. Great. It works. Kind of. The trouble is, when the game stops being fun, the lessons stop being learned⁵.

Enter Ludic Pedagogy. Ludic is a derivative of the Latin word for game, ludus, which is where we also get really fun words like ludicrous, but you knew that. More importantly, when ludic thought is applied to pedagogy, the result is a form of teaching that encourages every act of learning to be playful and fun.

Crucially, this does not mean that everything ought to be a game. Rather, it means every activity should be assessed for how it affects the learners under the idea that learning is, or ought to be, fun.

This is both a response to and rebuke of older models of learning that stress memorization and practical application rather than learning to improve reasoning or logic skills. But of course, logic is just another word for problem solving and isn’t that one thing that board games are really good at?

I set out for Osaka⁶ with three goals - to find printers for my games, to find potential publishers for games I can’t make myself, and to connect with the community at large. I’m happy to report that I was successful with all three goals. I’m less happy to report that I broke my budget into small pieces and then stomped on them. Repeatedly.

Yes, this essay is about the BGBE and not beer, but a little side quest never hurt no one.

The sense of community and camaraderie in the exhibition hall is palpable. People are happy to talk and enthuse with each other over the games on display or just games in general. They’re happy to share resources and information, to make introductions. Mention you’re developing a game of your own and watch their faces light up. Trust me when I say that doesn’t happen elsewhere.

More importantly, and consider this a pitch, if you will, creativity permeates the atmosphere like a miasma. You can, Pepe Le Pew style, follow strands of creativity like scents in the air and trace them back to a game, a designer, an artist, a publisher, a particularly exuberant fan.

Walking out of the Expo, my own sense of creativity surged. In between scribbling out these notes, I’ve filled my notes app in my phone with ideas, observations, fragments and scraps of images that might be something someday. It is, in other words, a hell of a good way to spend the weekend.

1. Got to love a good initialism.

2. It is also home to a booming craft beer scene; I can attest in good conscience that Craft Beer Base Mothertree has an excellent red pale ale that I will happily drink every time I find myself in Osaka.

3. Like this particular shinkansen. Crowded, sure. Expensive, naturally. Late, not in this lifetime Buddy.

4. I still have, somewhere in my files, a copy of the first role-playing game I ever made, created in Printshop and printed on my family’s dot-matrix printer. Good times.

5. This is why you still don’t speak Spanish despite your four-year streak on Duolingo.

6. If Orwell had Paris and London, I’ll take Tokyo and Osaka and call it a draw.

Also, magazines used to tell us who we were.

Also #28

Greetings from the magazine aisle of my local Tsutaya where I’m more than a little surprised to find the English version of Brutus for sale.

In the past few months, in these Also pieces, I’ve been talking a lot about rejecting digital artifacts in favor of tangible media. You know, vinyl instead of mp3s, paperbacks instead of ebooks. And, most cromulently for tonight’s topic, magazines instead of apps.

This magazine stand isn’t from my local bookstore, but it could be. Photo by Uran Wang on Unsplash

I love a good magazine; the sheer tactility, the art, the design, the craft with which a good layout unfolds the contents before you ever turn a page, it’s an art and one that is finally getting its flowers.

Japan has been at the forefront of this appreciation of magazine as object d’art for decades. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cheap, glossy magazines that will fall apart as soon as you spill your noodles on them, but there are hundreds, thousands, of beautifully designed and executed magazines that find the border between art and product and then blur it into meaninglessness.

There are few things better than taking an evening off and going to any of the bookstores near me and just wandering through the magazine aisles. I don’t bother with the cheap glossies too much and I’m not brave enough for the stout little literature journals. Me, I’m a photo boy. An enthusiast. A fan. A proponent. A hobbyist.

So I get into the magazine aisle and look for PEN or Genic or LEICA right there in the hobby section, two aisles down from women’s lifestyle and right across from the audio geek corner. Because magazines, the ones we buy, the ones we collect, the ones we just sit and look at while we flip the pages gently, admiring the quality and elegance of the finished product, all these disparate magazines, they tell us who we are.

So then, who’s the English edition of Brutus for?

It’s not me. This Tsutaya doesn’t really have an English section¹. And this magazine, Brutus, doesn’t really fit there anyway. Brutus is a (mostly) men’s lifestyle brand. Which begs the question, are there that many Japanese readers of Brutus both interested and capable of reading an English edition dedicated to giving perspective on traveling to Kyoto?

Maybe. After all, Japan is changing. For as much as the current political climate is swinging right and for as much rhetoric as there is about curbing the number of foreigners and instituting fees and language exams, the government is still trying to increase the number of overseas tourists to Japan.

Within a few miles (fine, kilometers) of me, there are restaurants with English menus, guided tours with actual live English-speaking hosts, and even, shock, gasp, horror, actual foreigners who live here full time. For decades even!

This particular edition of Brutus is, I’m guessing, for the young Japanese person who wants to flex their English abilities, maybe work at one of the places these hordes of tourists are swarming to. Maybe even go overseas one day. Regardless, I’m guessing that whoever buys it sees something in it that comprises part of their answer to the eternal question - who are you?

Back in college, one of my favorite rituals was the every other Friday new magazine day. We had an actual newsstand in those days. I can’t remember the name, but the atmosphere is burned into my memory like a brand. The place was done in browns and greens. Leather seats and sofas. A dizzying array of magazines punctuated by a display counter full of cigars, clove cigarettes, pipes and all the assorted accoutrement.

Goals. Photo by HamZa NOUASRIA on Unsplash

Payday meant going there with a fresh twenty and stocking up on Esquire, Playboy², Rolling Stone, Wired, and, occasionally, Time or Newsweek. Grab a chair, maybe a smoke, and sit back and take in the news of the day. What I wouldn’t give to get that culture back, you know?

Your choices also acted as a subtle acknowledgement of who you thought you were. Rolling Stone over Hit Parade? Esquire over G.Q.? Vogue over Cosmo? Every title said something, whether you intended it to or not. External badges of identity, title words like fan or aficionado became your descriptives.

When I moved to Japan, I found that little slice of life largely intact; English printed material came from one of three locations: the kiosk in the station had a half-dozen copies of The Daily Yomiuri³ and The Japan Times. Kinokunia had an entire wall of books and magazines. The prefectural library carried a truly generous selection of magazines for the city’s size and demographics.

Copies of Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, Wired, Rolling Stone got traded and handed around like baseball cards, Beanie babies, and Pokemon all rolled into one.

But now, the magazines weren’t expressing the id of any one person. Rather, because we were all English-speakers, because we were all foreigners living in Japan, because we shared aspects of our cultures cross borders, our identity became collective. We read the same magazines, we knew who we were.

As has happened globally, it seems, every third bookstore in Japan now hosts, or is (ahem) chained to, a coffee shop. The Tsutaya I usually go to has a nice Dotour cafe attached to it, and if it’s not my favorite big brand coffee, it’ll do for a rainy Thursday afternoon.

So I grab a magazine or three - photos, whiskey, coffee, maybe someday I’ll be brave enough for that literary journal - and I get something dark and bitter and easy to drink and I admire the craft of the magazine in my hands. And I think that maybe, just maybe, that culture I loved so much in college isn’t quite so dead after all. Which leaves only the perpetual question:

Who are you these days, what are you reading?

1. The TOEIC prep books and sad Harry Potter remnants don’t count.

2. Just like you, I only read it for the articles.

3. The mockery I received for being unable to say Yomiuri correctly still haunts me.

Also, it’s time to engage in some preemptive anthropology.

Also #27

Greetings from deep inside my Apple TV account where, apparently, we’re just buying licenses to access content because late-stage capitalism and the streaming economy are a special form of bullshit.

Given the state of streaming - the availability of some pablum; the absolute unavailability of the old, the odd, and the unloved - it’s time to talk about collecting physical media as a willful act of preemptive anthropology. Because if we don’t, we can’t get mad at corporations behaving unlike libraries and very much like banks. And we should all be livid with corporations.

Actually, I’m done with Blu-ray, 4K, all of it. 8mm is where it’s at, baby! Photo by Fenghua on Unsplash

What I mean:

I’ve been on a DVD/Blu-ray buying spree. Mostly because it’s the end of the semester and I am up to my earballs¹ in grading, student requests for extra credit, and I will do damn near anything to avoid my desk, including braving actual stores with actual people.

In the used media store² I found a series of cheaply produced collections of forgotten Hollywood films. For example, one collection boasts ten westerns, none of which I had ever heard of, none of which have been in print for at least thirty years. Yet, here they are, bundled together with some sketchy subtitles slapped on the bottom of the screen, and sold for less than a thousand yen. Sold!

Crucially, none of the films listed on these DVDs are available on streaming. There might be one or two on a specialty service like Criterion, but they’re not on the main platforms.

By contrast, if I wanted to watch Young Sheldon (I don’t, but if I did) I could watch it on three different streaming services (that I know of) or I could buy ‘access’ via Amazon or Apple. Or I could buy the DVD, the Blu-ray, and probably some form of enriched uranium sphere that will be good until the year 20,260. However, the movie I actually want to watch, Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys³ is not available. Like at all. On any streaming service I have access to. It’s not even available for sale digitally - excuse me, ‘access’ is not even available for sale. And good luck finding a DVD or Blu-ray. You might find a VHS if you hang around eBay long enough. Maybe.

But the thing is, for every Young Sheldon, there are a thousand titles like The Arizona Kid, Guns of the Law, and Fighting Frontier out there, completely forgotten except for DVD publishers trying to lure in crate diving film junkies. This is only going to get worse.

This past January 1st, Public Domain Day, we saw the usual avalanche of classic media enter the public domain with a brief splash of excitement before the world went back to doing whatever the hell it’s doing right now. Like every year, there were a couple of big names in the mix, The Maltese Falcon, Popeye, but there were far, far more titles, characters, and properties that are all but forgotten. And, okay, maybe that’s just time and cultural memory doing what they do - evaporate what was once most precious - but what about when it’s deliberate?

Last year, Disney earned itself some negative press by announcing that it would soon be removing some of its classic titles from Disney+, its online streaming platform. That wouldn’t be a big deal except that Disney doesn’t always bother to keep its print (e.g. Blu-ray, DVD, hell even VHS would be something) library up to date. There are several titles that are thus no longer available on physical media or streaming. It would be marginally defensible if these were racist cartoons from the 1940s. But Willow? From 2022? With Warwick Davis? Bullshit.

And I’m not even saying that all these abandoned properties are hidden gems and therefore must be preserved! I mean, if you’ve actually seen Robin Williams’s 1992 classic Toys then you know my taste is suspect at best. But they were real, they represent who we are, were, or wanted to be, and that means they are a part of our identity and legacy. They should be preserved exactly for that if for no other reason.

But, another example: Kevin Smith’s 1999 classic, Dogma, is finally back in print after several decades of unavailability - this time the reason was more ethical than financial, as the rights were controlled by Harvey Weinstein and that was a quagmire that it just seemed better to avoid altogether.⁴ At least that’s been sorted and we can once again sigh with wounded fascination at Alanis Morissette as God while being offended on behalf of the platypi.

A whole bunch of DVDs with a whole bunch of oaters I ain’t never even heard of ‘round these here parts.

My point, and I do have one, I promise, is that, we owe it to ourselves and our cultural heritage to retain libraries of physical media. Call it insurance, call it preservation, call it preemptive anthropology, but it’s well past time we stop relying on an increasingly pyramidically-nested series of corporations to hold on to our culture for us. Let them produce it (or not; I’m all for breaking up the mega-corporations and building a world where small groups of people can make really cool things even if they don’t have billionaire funding) but let’s then make sure we’re the ones holding on to it.

Now, we cannot, obviously, each and every one of us build libraries that hold every book, movie, record, and who knows what else. But you can be selective, you can be deliberate and intentional in making your choices. If there’s a given story that’s important to you, get a physical copy of it. Get the best one you can, the one with all the extras and the beautiful cover art. Enjoy it and revel in the series of small miracles that enabled its creation. Just don’t stream the damned thing.

Now get off my lawn while I yell at these clouds some more.

1. It’s a word.

2. You can’t just call it the used book store anymore, can you? I mean, it feels like books don’t even make up 40% of the inventory these days.

3. Do not make that face at me. It’s Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, and L.L. fucking Cool J with a soundtrack featuring both Thomas Dolby and Tori Amos. It is a valuable, nay, treasured cultural artifact and yes, I will die on this hill.

4. For what it’s worth, I think Smith did the right thing by playing the long, slow game until he could get the rights back without giving the Weinsteins any more money than could be helped. That said, had I known, 25 years ago, what the future would hold, I would never have let go of my VHS tape.