Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September ...

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September 2022

Oct 04, 2022

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September 2022

Today is Commonday, 18 of Habniah 4115. [4115.06.18]

…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Australia, Belgium, Belize, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, India, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.

September’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the twenty-seventh issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Scooting Around

Long-time readers might remember that I decided to sell my car, back in the spring. I don’t blame you if you don’t. It seems a lot to ask people to find that sort of thing interesting. Anyway, over the last few weeks, I bought an electric scooter, figuring that and public transit should get me around, at least for most of the year.

I had it in my head that I’d pick an hour or two to practice riding it “at yard scale,” a couple of hours on a weekend “at empty parking lot scale,” and then start venturing out…yes, with appropriate safety equipment. And yet, that “yard scale” experiment quickly taught me four things.

  1. The throttle doesn’t work until the rider has brought the scooter up to a minimum speed.

  2. Unsurprisingly, engaging the throttle when not in balance serves to make any existing balance problem worse.

  3. To get up to speed while balancing, one needs to have some experience riding a kick-scooter, since these work as (large) kick-scooters with motors attached.

  4. As it turns out, I do not have experience riding a kick-scooter.

I’ve spent some time during the month, then, riding the scooter without the throttle, to get the feel for it for at least a little while every day, weather permitting. Reading up on stances also helped. It goes slower than I hoped, but I still see myself making progress.

Once I can get it stable, though, it feels surprisingly intuitive to ride. That shouldn’t surprise me, since children ride versions of these things, but it still does.

Strange Things Cooking

I should say that I never got into many cooking shows. America’s Test Kitchen keeps my attention with recommendations and science, but I generally feel comfortable grabbing a handful of recipes that include ingredients that I have handy, then improvising something that integrates different qualities of the recipes. Or sometimes, I’ll skip the recipe entirely. Because of that, “normal” cooking shows tend to bore me, even as I sample the occasional YouTube video or podcast.

Even with that minimal immersion, though, it feels like we recently saw a sea change of some sort that seems bizarre. And I can’t quite pinpoint the source.

I feel like the clearest changes probably revolve around alcohol. Most people might not notice the change, but as someone who doesn’t drink, a few years ago started what looked like celebrity chefs scrambling to shift from using wine to make a sauce, to talking about pairing beer with meals—and they want you to know that they like much-maligned American beers—or making cocktails. Not long ago, laws still banned showing someone drink alcohol on television, explaining why classic television shows often have scenes in bars, but they’ll often cut away as the customer puts the glass to their lips, so I assume that someone deregulated the industry again.

However, I also see what I would call a strange shift in flavor profiles. This has happened before, naturally. While I grew up, professional cooking involved shocking amounts of fat and centered large portions of meat, whereas meat has drifted out of the center, and making sauce for a dinner for two with a full stick of butter no longer happens. But this seems odder than “maybe people shouldn’t risk their arteries” or “many people like alcohol.”

Specifically, it feels like everybody has shifted to an obsession with sweet and salty foods, and an almost pathological avoidance of bitter flavors. To me, this reeks of industrial food products, cooking for an unadventurous mainstream, something that chefs have spent centuries, arguably, railing against. I’ve seen a few forms of this.

  • Adding sugar to sweet things, “to bring out the natural sweetness,” which contradicts itself, masking flavors with the bluntness of added sweetness.

  • Adding salt “because salt helps you taste things,” even though I can’t find any evidence of this, and it conflicts with at least my experience beyond the years when I over-salted everything.

  • Obsessing over umami, as if everything needs to taste “meaty.” I can happily go the rest of my life without ever hearing the phrase “umami bomb” again.

Sour flavors seem to have shrunk to occasional splashes of lemon juice or cider vinegar. We now see people talking about extensive ways to remove bitter flavors…except in coffee. And they seem to reserve nuance for sushi.

It strikes me as particularly odd, in that it seems to have started before COVID-19 hit. I could definitely understand a dietary shift to the five fundamental flavors—which don’t require smell—and a pathological avoidance of “challenging” flavors like bitterness and sourness, when a significant percentage of the population has a diminished olfactory sense. But the goal seems different.

It actually reminds me of three things.

First, it reminds me of the Pepsi Challenge, a marketing campaign where they asked people to decide which cola they preferred, based on a single sip. In small quantities, people preferred the sweeter soft drink, even though they didn’t drink it, because the taste felt cloying over longer terms. This led to the New Coke fiasco, an attempt to make Coca-Cola sweeter, which pleased nobody and embarrassed the company.

Second, it also reminds me of the Internet’s not-long-ago obsession with bacon, as some sort of theoretical construct. You had the inane call-and-response of “mmm, bacon” whenever someone mentioned the meat. But more importantly, you had people talking about bacon contributing “meatiness, smokiness, and sweetness” to dishes, as if trying to simplify a complex food product that many find problematic—we increasingly see evidence of intelligence and emotion in pigs, and the nitrates and nitrites have adverse health effects—to umami, creosote, and sugar. Now, I see recipes consistently refer to meat as a sweet part of a meal.

Finally, it reminds me of processed foods, where companies pack in salt and sugar to make people crave more. Most people don’t appreciate that manipulation, and it may bear some biochemical responsibility for obesity, but it successfully gets people to buy more food that they don’t need.

In other words, I wonder if this change involves some sort of appeal to virality, creating dishes that eaters can understand quickly, and so might pass on the recipe before realizing that it doesn’t have much depth to it. Or maybe we actually ended up with a generation of chefs and food writers who never grew out of their childhood diets, which might also explain the sudden and bizarre obsession with “breakfast cereal, but for adults on diets.” I don’t know, but it seems odd.

(Television) Seasonal Stress

As we get into autumn, I notice television shows coming back, and I find myself wondering…why.

Maybe this reaction has to do with my increasing distaste for current shows, or maybe my ability to find other things to watch figures in. But regardless of why, the new season feels stressful, and reminds me that every television season feels this way. We get a rapid influx of shows appearing at the same time, competing for space on my schedule, while advertisements tease the shows appearing over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I have older/archived shows continuing from the summer, which I’d like to finish. And that doesn’t even get to the services associated with public libraries, like Hoopla and Kanopy, with its use-it-or-lose-it system of monthly credits, that also compete for time.

I look at all this, and wonder why everything releases now. Traditional advertising-driven television networks, sure, I can understand that they still need to build their schedules around a ratings system that revolves around a calendar. Certain kinds of programming, yes, you have a better chance of getting viewers, if your release coincides with the start of the school year. But some of these shows could have had a release two or three months ago, and had almost no competition, especially on streaming services.

I don’t know if I can do anything with this insight, but it definitely frustrates me, every year, to suddenly need to juggle a dozen or more shows, many of which I should probably drop out of a lack of enjoyment…

Project Previews

September basically jumped the rails. I got nothing accomplished, and even the scooter time mentioned above actually looked like ten to fifteen minutes per day, rather than an otherwise-usable block of time.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or read in September.

No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they were short. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.

  • Like American Gods at the end of last month, I picked Ender’s Game through the library, ensuring that Card and his bigotry don’t get any money or any metrics that he can use to sell something new. And also like American Gods…gah. I loathe the “bullied boy has no choice but to become violent” pandering to a stereotypically weak and bullied audience, and every character keeps reminding us that Ender has every right to pre-emptively maim his peers, and then commit genocide; even the people he harms return to approve of his actions. I also don’t care at all about fictional military tactics. And it doesn’t help that the narrative has a consistent drum-beat of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In an alternate reality, I could imagine this as straight-faced satire, but since Card has a lengthy postscript talking about how he believes the heart of the story lies in the zero-G training, that justification doesn’t work.

  • As the book started, I wanted to say that Space Opera desperately wants me to see it as this century’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it definitely makes deliberate Douglas Adams references, but it has a much more aggressive satirical agenda, and generally cares more about its characters and situations, with a similar sense of humor. In that sense, it might actually fill the Douglas Adams-shaped void in modern reading. I especially appreciate the book, though, since it came immediately after the twin disasters of American Gods and Ender’s Game.

  • Collision seems like it should feel significant, as it weaves between a variety of mystery stories that happen to have converged at a highway accident. But the pettiest, most mundane stories get screen time, whereas the stories that seem to have deeper backgrounds mostly get dismissed as “oh, yeah, he died.”

  • Ball of Fire plays fairly directly into my appreciation for the “borderline” screwball comedy. I can’t say that I care much for Barbara Stanwyck’s acting, but the “seven dwarves” more than make up for her lack of energy.

  • Uprooted felt so tedious. Everything needs an explanation, no matter how straightforward—seriously, our protagonist prepares a lemon in full, clinical detail—and with no promise that the book has a reward for this detail down the line; this becomes unintentionally funny, during the gratuitous sex scene. Almost every verb unnecessarily and verbosely comes with adverbs. It also has a special level of pretense, where almost every sentence comes with a metaphor or simile in appositives (so many appositives, and I say this as someone who definitely overuses appositives), like a companion walking to the side of the narrative without adding anything to it but word-count, which essentially doubles the length of the book without adding anything. Oh, and it does that weird thing in fiction, where it describes a solution to a problem, then apparently forgets about it, then introduces that solution to the problem as if we would have missed the connection the first time. I appreciate the intellectual project of building a fantasy world inspired by Eastern Europe instead of England, and it has fragments of an interesting idea for a magic system and other ideas near the end, but not much more than that.

    • You might rightly ask why I finished a book that bored me so. I wanted to give it every chance, because it won most of the major industry awards and only barely lost the Hugo. Novik also grew up not too far from me, at around the same time, has similar interests, and has won something like a dozen major awards, so I wanted to give the story every chance, in case it suddenly became something that would interest me.

  • I like the concept of All Systems Red, but it feels like another “look, the protagonist talks about feeling awkward and having a hard time talking to people, so that you, the nerd reading this, can identify with them” production. Also, “the entertainment feeds” feel like a joke, a phrase to change the subject, rather than a real thing, because we only hear about the shows in the abstract. Everyone obsesses over the shows, but nobody talks about them, so I don’t why they exist in the story.

  • My last attempt at Le Guin didn’t quite impress me, so I took a crack at The Left Hand of Darkness. It still doesn’t resonate with me, though I can see more value, here. But far from science fiction, this feels more like “low fantasy” with the excuse of science fiction. I feel satisfied to have read it, but not much more than that, unfortunately.

  • A Discovery of Witches, season 1 didn’t work for me. Granted, nobody wrote this for me, but it also feels like a parody of so many low-budget supernatural shows, where every man speaks in a low, toneless whisper, and women all have extra-special powers but live their lives as either love interests or victims. Plus, every episode seemed like it came from a different genre; sometimes it wants scientific inquiry of magic, other times it wants standard horror, or torture, or supernatural romance. An interesting premise lies deep underneath all of that, but after eight episodes, not nearly interesting enough for me to follow them into another century for another season…

  • Saga Book Two unfortunately feels a lot more like what I expected the first book to feel like, given its publication by Image Comics, with significantly more coarse language, gore, gratuitous female nudity, and a bit of transphobic trash. I still enjoy the story, but as we get further from the Image’s heyday in the 1990s, the more this seems like a product of the 1990s. Plus, a bunch of characters vanish for most of the story, for no clear reason.

  • High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, season 3 feels like a mess compared to the first two seasons. As I’ve mentioned about the first two seasons, your Disney+ subscription fee goes to waste, if you haven’t watched. This season, though, weirdly trims down the cast, ships them off to a new setting, arbitrarily assigns them new neuroses, adds a bunch of new characters who mostly don’t have much purpose, and then they throw guest stars at the problem. It feels like a different show. It still has decent watchability, but the season operates more like how you imagine the show to run, rather than how it has gone until now. Don’t get me wrong. I can imagine that Olivia Rodrigo’s time costs a bit more money than she did in 2019, for example, and cutting her gives the other performers space to shine. But still…

    • For clarity, I like a lot of the new performers, but since their characters don’t live in Salt Lake City with the main cast—not to mention most of them going to college, I think—I don’t see how this feeds into the announced fourth season. It all seems like a series of poorly thought out choices.

  • I picked Perdido Street Station off yet another “best of the genre” lists. Oof. Miéville always seemed a bit shady to me, from his name implying an ethnicity—definitely not his fault, but still concerning—to his responding to an accusation of abuse with, essentially, “nuh-uh.” But as mentioned earlier, libraries makes it easy to dodge those ethical questions, though I don’t think that it excuses ignoring them. And yet again, no matter how many good ideas sit in the book, we somehow can’t help objectify women, waste time on detailed descriptions of mundane tasks, and have boring sex scenes, like all these books written by borderline-shady men work from a formula, working from a spreadsheet of expletives to use repeatedly in conversation. Oh, and guys, speaking of language, if you ever find yourself in a position where you’d like to deny an accusation of abusing one or more women, could you maybe try not to have a book where your characters throw around denigrating terms for sex workers and use them to denigrate women? In any case, the story has some interesting elements, but I probably also zoned out for at least half of the book.

  • The Daughter of Doctor Moreau kicked off National Hispanic Heritage Month for me, and…I feel torn. On the one hand, rebooting the H.G. Wells novel with a Mexican background works extremely well, especially if you know the history described in the afterword. On the other, the romance subplots feel haphazard, not to mention uncomfortable—despite the unfortunate traditions of the period—given Carlotta’s likely age and their trite coverage.

  • Nimona has a lot going on in it, and refreshingly, ND Stevenson doesn’t feel the urge to describe every little thing. We get implied connections to a fictional mythology, a modern fantasy universe, and vague relationships. You might read more into it, or you might not, and the story has depth either way. Yes, Stevenson has had some lapses in judgment, but investigating the issue, I don’t see it as such a big deal, and they went out of their way to apologize to offended parties and call out people defending the lapse, so I feel comfortable recommending this.

  • It’s Not Like It’s a Secret came out of Banned Books Week recommendations, which unfortunately conflicts with National Hispanic Heritage Month. It drags at times, with the recurring theme of our protagonist inheriting her mother’s prejudiced views and the boring subplot about her father. But honestly, by the time she mentions that she has a crush on the love interest…so did I, and you probably will, too; the character feels real, or at least how a teenager would view a real person. And in the final act, everything wakes up and converges in unexpected ways, with enough going on that I can see why a certain kind of person would want it banned.

  • I treated Strange Adventures like a long-shot. Tom King has never impressed me, except in the number of times that he can pat himself on the back for having worked for the CIA. Adam Strange always seemed like a waste, a supposed everyman hero, who everybody treats as exceptional, but also serving as the entire armed forces of a human-like culture that (a) refuses to defend itself and wants someone else to do it for them, and (b) somehow gets invaded on a regular basis. Neither King nor Strange ever seem to have any irony in them, so the promise of a story that at least tries to interrogate the colonialist ideas in the franchise sounded appealing. But while I wouldn’t say that the story has no value, it actually has no interest in colonialist narratives, just yet another illustrated term paper about how superheroes would never survive the moral ambiguities of the “real world,” showing a smiling 1960s hero making awful and awfully improbable compromises. But the villains remain villainous cannon fodder through the entire story.

    • Every character also has this weird pretentious streak, most notably the Mr. Terrific character, who we can apparently identify as “smart” because he plays quote-identification games in every scene, only a few quotes pertaining to the situation. And each chapter includes a quote from a former professional in the comic book industry, pulled from context to sound like it does apply to the situation.

  • I should probably mention that I started listening to Bob Newhart’s old comedy albums. I couldn’t find a copy of the classic The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, but Hoopla has a few others. I like his work, but I feel like too many of his bits unnecessarily spend time on setting up the joke, sometimes repeating the premise multiple times, to make sure that we all got it. But Newhart also led two successful, self-titled sitcoms—and two less successful, also named for him, though one less obviously—for good reason.

  • New Kid came up as another Banned Books Week recommendation. Craft definitely wrote this more for children than adults, but it still gets into territory that I suspect that most of us will find familiar, and it does so with a great sense of humor. One panel near the end even predicts the book ban, arguing that a teacher wants to feel sympathy for the plight of disadvantaged students, but feels intimidated if they complain about it.

    • Hoopla’s list of banned comics disappoints me, by the way. Getting rid of the big-name writers—Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Brian K. Vaughn, whose works most long-time fans have already read, and so don’t need more attention—it leaves four books.

  • Bindle Punk Bruja needs someone to adapt it immediately, and I don’t say this only as someone who has multiple interests converging on the plot. It uses the century difference in settings to draw extensive parallels to current conditions, and does so delightfully, in a story with a little of everything. I hate writing these as “book reviews,” but hope that people will give the book a look enough to drop those sorts of details.

  • Sex Criminals, actually the first ten issues, again leaning in to Banned Books Week as it ended. And I didn’t dislike it, but it feels so…juvenile and lazy. I mean, it tries to jam in—take that how you please—as many references to sex as it can, but the references all “read” as male, despite having a woman for a protagonist. It also doesn’t seem to have anything to say about its premise. And its presented options end at losing control and living with suppressed emotions, somehow ignoring the possibility of a mature discussion with the doctor about needing a change. It even seems to not have a great opinion of sex, in general. The part that I’d praise, they copied almost verbatim from Planned Parenthood’s website, then move on. I probably won’t continue the series.

  • The Mighty Thor, vol 1: Thunder in Her Veins leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, I like the Jane Foster version of Thor. But on the other, I don’t read comic books for Prose Edda fan fiction. I’ll probably continue it at some point, but I’d much rather my superheroes do…superhero things, rather than pretentious “our modern mythology” nonsense.

  • Green Lantern: Invictus strikes me as incoherent, and I don’t mean that it tells its story non-linearly. It describes itself as focusing on certain characters, but it spends most of its time on the same old roster of Green Lanterns and—tellingly—finding reasons to remove the non-white humans from Earth, killing characters off to pretend that things have stakes, and outright repeating stories that I’ve seen multiple times. On top of that, nobody’s personality seems to match how they used to work. Also? I hate the “glowing insignia” affectation on the uniforms. Rather than accenting the uniform, it muddies the design.

  • Reservation Dogs, season 2 either improves dramatically on the first season, or used the first season to get us (me?) up to speed to make it easier to appreciate. Specifically, unless I missed serious nuance in the first season, this season hits far heavier issues and has a more biting sense of humor.

  • Gravity Falls: Lost Legends revisits the animated series, and does so surprisingly well, though the brevity doesn’t give me much to really talk about. But if Shanklin the Stab-Possum doesn’t get his own spin-off series, I will riot.

  • One of the Good Ones presents a lot to like, but I feel like the layered plot undermines its message. By making the protagonists talented, personable people, embroiled in murder and abduction plot, while under threat from all sides, it makes it seem like we should only care about these characters because of their exceptional natures. It also skips the real resolution, giving us an “end-credits montage” of coping with the events, rather than making that the story. I’d recommend it, but hesitantly.

  • Bee and PuppyCat, volume 1 continues the surreal animated series that started on YouTube and Kickstarter. I haven’t seen it in long enough to remember much more than…well, the title characters. This does a good job of bringing readers back into that weird little world, though I have no idea about half the cast. I enjoyed the longer stories, but the shorts in varying styles feel entirely different.

  • Blue Beetle: Jaime Reyes, Book One collects the first year of the 2006 series…I think. I started reading this once before,but never got around to finishing it, making it awkward to support a character that I’ve never spent much time with. It struck me as one of the highlights of a disappointing period when DC obsessed over trying to make Superman and Batman the most important people in the universe, wipe out their most interesting characters originating at other companies, insist that nobody trusts superheroes, and connect everything in the universe to a Jack Kirby creation. Predictably, this suffers a bit from each of those at some point, but it still manages to mostly find its own path, while also showing the “replace a character as a young non-white person” trope from inside the trope. Admittedly, it would probably go better, if it had a Latine writer on the project, but DC has always had problems realizing things along those lines.

Blog Posts for September 2022

In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.

I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.

Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.

The most popular posts on the blog have been Recutils — Small Technology Notes, An Unexpected Case for Reparations, Politics in Art and Technology, and GitHub Copilot and Other Programming Doom for the month.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.

More from John Colagioia