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Universities and small business aren't working as intended
A number of things seem not to be working in Britain today but these two separate articles on the effectiveness of entirely different areas government spending (universities, The Economist (£) and small-business, The Guardian) both point to the same policy remedy of allowing research and development to be incentivised by simplifying the accounting in mid to large national-based companies (but why not all?).
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Paul Young chocolates, which are a bit of a Christmas tradition for us, ceased trading in August. A bit of a sad discovery but I guess people buying chocolate once a year doesn’t really pay the energy bills.
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Ukraine commentary from November
Two interesting points from newsletters on Ukraine last week.
The first is regarding security guarantees in Europe from Phillips O’Brien’s The Two Futures
What this war has shown is that there are two realities for a European state: being a full NATO member covered by article 5—and everything else.
Russia’s aggression has consolidated NATO but leaves those outside the alliance exposed and with no real choice but to seek inclusion at some point in the future. The article also comments how Russia goes out of its way to avoid provoking an alliance reaction that will crush its remaining conventional force.
The other was about the strange double-standards on Russia’s ineffective offensives from Lawrence Freeman in Why “not losing” is not tantamount to winning.
Whatever limited progress has been made has come at an enormous cost. Zaluzhny claimed on 10 November that Russia had suffered some 10,000 casualties since 10 October, and had lost over 100 tanks, 250 other armored vehicles, about 50 artillery systems and seven Su-25 aircraft.
Even allowing for some exaggeration these are staggering losses, which if experienced by Ukraine would have led to gloomy questions about their ability to stay in the fight, and the wastefulness of their tactics. Somehow it is now assumed that in an unaccountable system, with soldiers taken from minorities and the poor, these casualties barely register in Russian society and cause no political backlash.
I’ve been wondering why when Ukraine suffers losses “realists” start talking about some fantasy of a land deal that will be acceptable to Russia but when Russia loses material that makes it difficult to continue to project any power globally there are not demands for Russia to start to specify attainable war aims.
There is something unpleasant in the idea that all these lives lost in fruitless offensives are meaningless and of no consequence to their own people. The article talks about the signs of change in the Russian attitude to the war and I can’t believe that a country can continue to lose at this rate and it has no impact.
Clearly democracies with citizen soldiers need to think about casualties differently to systems that are inherently coercing compliance. Ukraine needs to think about how to conserve itself as a nation. However it has been a long time since we’ve seen an imperial power manage to maintain control of an unwilling population. For the defenders not losing looks a lot more like victory than the occupiers.
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Two elevated racecourses in #ForzaHorizon this week, both pretty good fun
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Siobhan and Tom’s marriage in #Succession is one of the most complex, sad and unedifying depictions of a marriage I’ve seen on #Television for a long while. It also felt more real and rich that the idealised relationships fulfilling the needs to a story arc. It isn’t just complicated, sometimes it is horrible too.
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I’m really enjoying the neon stylings of Horizon Midnights. The aerodrome in particular is insane.
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The Peripheral
The themes of crisis and collapse along with a clever take on time travel makes it feel very different from conventional sci-fi.
It also features one of the most believable sibling relationships I’ve seen on screen in a while where love and loyalty is mixed with resentment and misunderstanding in appropriate measures. It is refreshing to see a family relationship where both parties make mistakes and unreasonable demands of each other and with the same frequency as positive support; where pettiness mixes with high stakes. At one point Flynn demands her brother leave her room with all the force of countless teenage rows.
After the excellent initial episodes which are more like two feature films than regular television the pacing gets a little uneven with a hillbilly crime element that isn’t as good as Justified or even Sons of Anarchy. The flashbacks into the life of Wolfgang while helping to emphasise how dreadful the collapse was doesn’t really move the story on or help with the flow of the main plotline (and the major feature of Gibson’s fiction I would say is narrative drive).
There was a lot to love about the dark adapted future it portrays. One moment that I felt was really well-observed is when the augmented reality is switched off to reveal how depopulated and damaged London is. Wolfgang/Wilfred explains with a frankness that the illusion of a busier city is for the mental health of the living inhabitants. Later he discusses with his adoptive sister the effect of the implants he wears that supress memories of his real family who, she suggests, were killed in a brutal massacre that he doesn’t actually wish to remember. This are damaged post-humans, almost propped up and made minimally functional by their enhancements rather than cybergods.
Chloe Grace Moretz does the bulk of the heavy lifting on the performance front but Gary Carr and Alexandra Billings also turn in some good work. I also enjoyed JJ Field’s turn as Lev but there was an element of panto to his malevolence so it might not be to everyone’s tastes.
One of the biggest things that makes me want to see a greenlight for more seasons is the cliffhanger of the final episode where as a viewer I wanted confirmation that the sacrifice of the protagonist had been redeemed. It feels like the story is really just getting started.
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I think this is intentional but it feels disconcerting to realise that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is about creating religiously inspired child soldiers.
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Gave Cloud Gaming on the XBox a go this evening, so far it seems better than Stadia but I need to see a game that has a kind of top-end graphics requirement
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I found the latest Extreme E Grand Prix in Forza Horizon 5 really hard. Even with a tune I mostly ended up cheesing the races with sidewipe cornering. The cars handle like tanks and feel like it’s making an elephant take the racing line.
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I just wrapped up playing Carrion which was interesting gruesome and a Metrovania that was just on the edge of my tolerance level. The pixel art for the fleshy monster protagonist is very gooey satisfying.
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It’s frustrating that the current UK government will do anything in its power to avoid putting up Universal Credit to the point that it is now costing more to inefficiently deliver support to the wrong people than to just swallow an ideological objection and do the obvious thing.
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From Fathoms micro plastic pollution of the environment is now so pervasive that there is virtually no ecosystem in the world and certainly not in the oceans that is now not infested with plastic. There seems to be no way it will break down in our current natural systems. 📚
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I started playing Backbone again this week, it’s pixel noir art style is unique and the background details of the lives being lived parallel to the story is a delightful exercise in minimalist storytelling.
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Started playing Forza Horizon 5 this weekend. Amongst the free cars I got on starting was a Mitshibushi Lancer with seems to make offroad almost trivially easy as it’s so ridiculously fast. Or maybe I haven’t got my difficulty set correctly yet…
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Mighty Goose is the Metal Gear clone I didn’t know I needed. Conceptually nuts, often simply too manic on-screen and very statisfyingly playable.
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Brexit and economic migration
An interesting article about some of the rhetoric around UK shortages. The quote that stands out for me: “I don’t accept that the UK’s reliance on unskilled, cheap labour is an unalloyed good”.
Brexit hasn’t provoked the basic discussions about the nature of the country’s economy in the way it should have.
The rhetoric around training and paying better has truth to it but there are a number of jobs that simply don’t require a lot training and really the question is about whether the true costs of labour can be passed back into the wider economy. Part of the Brexit dream was forcing the capital investment into automation required to remove the need for labour but its going to take longer than six months to come up with caravans of self-driving lorries.
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I’ve been watching the Marvel “What If…?” series. The animation approach is really interesting as a lot of things work a lot better in animation than the CGI live action.
The stories are also interesting as the Dr. Strange ends in failure and the Zombies one ends abruptly.
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Goshawk Summer
I have been reading Goshawk Summer which manages to blend the nature diary with some of the queasy uncertainty of the initial outbreak of the COVID pandemic in the UK. The bulk of the book covers a spring and summer spent filming a goshawk nest in the New Forest.
Nature takes the foreground with divergences into the management of land and the balance of demands on the natural environments. The author grew up in the New Forest so occasionally there are snippets of nostalgia, autobiography and memory. The basic beat of the nature diary, the succession of seasons and inevitable drumbeat of live moving through it phases underpins this book in the way it does for the entire genre.
Later with the lockdown lifting the thoughts become darker as the forest fills with people, litter and anger. The respite of lockdown proves fleeting and as with carbon emissions the world rushes back at speed.
A passing mention of the inability to meet with family sets up a darker still epilogue that reveals personal tragedy and combines it with the impact of the forest visitors on the ground nesting birds.
The other diversions are to provide insight into the behaviour of animals and the ecology of the forest and biological systems in general. The balance of information is generally right here. Enough to inform, not so much as to derail from the central narrative.
Natural life exists within the turning of the seasons; but lurking at the back of everything in our current time is a clock ticking that cannot be turned back and which may advance without us and many of the other animals that cling precariously to their space within a human world.
Simply and directly written, the book moves swiftly and satisifies as the summer unfolds. The joy of the nature memoir is to share in the moments of sublime observation without the often difficult waiting that accompanies the wait. The successful writer brings us the beauty and allows us to elide the difficulties in experiencing it for ourselves. We live vicariously for better and worse through our observer. The elegant trick here is also to tap into the emotions of a recent shared experience and set it against ancient rhythms.
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I’m rewatching the Witcher Season One. I’d forgotten how high the production values are the strigia is amazing and the costumes and sets look as good as the Lord of the Rings
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Most of the commentary around why Britain isn’t trying to form some kind of coalition to intervene in Afghanistan seems insane. We were already defeated militarily there ten years ago and it feels like country has been trying to ignore it ever since.
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Loki Season 1 finale
The new Loki series has been engagingly all over the shop. The retro-future look of the TVA was great and then I wholeheartedly agree that it felt like the writers and actors all created their version of Doctor Who. The penultimate episode seemed to strike a balance between the epic, the comic and the mythological.
The final episode though? Mostly I agree with this Polygon article. The logical villain would have been another Loki variant that reflected and contrasted the protagonists. After five episodes it was just hard to care about some character we’d only just met expositing for half an hour.
I met the reveal of Season 2 with a bit of a sigh, given the complete misfire in this episode is there any guarantee that it is going to be the same thing for the next Season, a bold opening to a unsatisfactory bucking of narrative demands.
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I saw this poem near the start of the pandemic and loved it’s challenge to survivor bias and the idea that other people’s suffering is a cost worth paying. readwildness.com/19/smith-…
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I really felt the argument of this article Nothing matter to careless people. The worst thing about tactical short-termism is the failure to appreciate the corrosive effect that convenience has on foundational elements of society.
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Card-game design crossovers
It’s interesting to see the crossover in card games between computer implementations and physical games. I started to read through the Dark Souls card game rules and I felt that I’d like to actually play a digital version of it and avoid the hassle of having to setup the cards, boards and tokens.
The encounter and treasure draws felt like the loot tables in Slay the Spire, which has done so much to popularise card metaphors for computer games and I wondered whether it is easier to prototype games as physical or digital versions of themselves.
All of this made me wonder why I actually bought the game in the first place and I think it came from a different time in a way. When something that could be played with multiple real players and solo sounded great whereas now if you think you are mostly going to be doing things solo then there is a real question as to why you wouldn’t just take the digital version of it.
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