Hello hello!
Confession: This second thing in the list of 14 is often the hardest to write. The line between warm and welcoming and time-wastingly trite is thin. Fudging it by being self-referential is a cheap workaround.
‘Humans don’t trade with ants.’ This is, apparently, something that AI doom-mongers are fond of saying, by way of pointing out that when it reaches consciousness AI will likely treat us with the same offhand dismissiveness that we treat insects. Katja Grace reckons we don’t trade with ants simply cos we can’t communicate with them. But if we could… we’d likely ask ants to do a whole load of super-useful stuff: clean the outside of tall buildings! Investigate blocked pipes! Repair tiny things!
Katja’s Jobs For Ants thing the kind of riffing that should remind us that imagining how things might go wrong always sounds more persuasive than imagining how things might get better. Which is worth keeping in mind when you read John Gruber’s account of using Apple’s frankly mind-blowing-sounding Vision Pro headset.
Do you remember how snobby people used to be about boxed wine? And then a bit later on, about wine with plastic corks or – *gasp* – screw tops? Then at some point we got over ourselves.1 Here’s Joe Fattorini on what wine packaging of the future might be like, which is a pleasingly philosophical question. He also opens with the line ‘wine is a Neolithic invention with a Roman stopper in a Restoration container,’ which I am definitely gonna say like it’s just occurred to me the next time somebody pours me a glass.
Digging tunnels! Detecting smoke! Checking for drugs!
Laura Olin’s newsletter is back! Which is where I found the link to The Verge’s pick of best laser printer 2023. ‘Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine.’ The whole thing is a kind hymn of praise to normal. Made me realise it’s the product review I’ve been yearning for for2 years.
In fact, a review site called ‘get this one, it’s fine’, would be a total winner.3
Also back: The writer Jamie Jauncey is writing his ‘Few Kind Words’ blog again. Long before any of us upstarts had Substacks, Jamie’s Friday missives were one of life’s gentle joys. Part of the reason he stopped for a bit was cos he was working on a book about his great-great Uncle Don Roberto – who sounds like an extraordinary and excellent chap.
‘Procrastination may, in fact, enable writing of unusual beauty and nerve’. That’s the kind of big-up for faffing around that, let’s face it, almost EVERY writer can get on board with. It’s from this excellent piece about Samuel Johnson’s legendary procrastination.
Reminder: if you suffer from incorrigible procrastination and feel you would benefit from throwing money at the problem, grab yerself a pack of my ‘Get The F*ck On With It’ productivity cards. Stupid idea. Actually works.
Measuring hard-to-access distances! Delivering small packages! Spying!
I’ve always hated it when TV or film uses overly-obvious chunks of backstory to ‘explain’ a character’s poor decisions or flaws. It’s the cheap carbs of ‘psychological depth’.4 Sam Kriss absolutely nails this ‘tedious explicability’ here. Packed with goodness: it’s a fabulously entertaining demolition job, an anti-pitch for ‘Basil Faulty: Origin Story’, and a warning against seeing The Green Knight.
Bye! If you enjoyed this, do tip a quid for Arts Emergency. (Link below.)
A similar shift happened with beer, didn’t it? A few years ago, ‘good’ beer came in bottles, and tinned beer was the shit stuff. Then craft IPAs took to cans – and ‘pop-sized’ cans no less – and now it’s the other way round. Heh.
My grammar checker is NOT happy about this double ‘for’ construction. But it’s how you’d say it, innit. Though you’d stress the two fors differently. More like ‘yearning forr [micro-pause] fuh years.’
I was gonna make a connection to Rory Sutherland’s distinction between ‘maximising and satisficing’ – but, well, that would be over-optimising the whole idea, wouldn’t it.
I’ve been working up my annoyance since at least Willy Wonka’s daddy issues in Tim Burton’s tedious remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Which, I’m staggered to realise, is nigh on 20 years old! Which - oh no! - makes it kind of my back-story…)