False protagonists

False protagonists

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The movie Sicario starts out and seems to indicate Kate is the movie’s protagonist. We see the story start through her eyes. But we experience people, operations, and goals that are confusing and often very violent – what is going on? As Film Thought Project points out – it’s because she is NOT the protagonist. This storytelling method is meant to draw us into a familiar story in a very different way. Instead of the classic Hollywood narrative that makes the protagonist the center of the attention, we find out she is brought in almost as a piece of necessary but meaningless equipment so that others can do the things they want. The plan was started long before she was involved. The movie isn’t even sympathetic to our, or her, confusion as the real story unfolds.

This method of following someone who is in the dark to only to later figure out they are minor/unimportant to the real, much bigger story is something I first saw in 90’s era Japanese anime. I remember how many times it unsettled and confused me. American movies almost always follow the plucky young protagonist’s adventure as they grow through the challenges in the story. I think that’s why many people find 80’s and 90’s era Japanese anime so confusing. What’s going on seems arbitrary and things change and twist with no seeming reason.

I remember thinking that besides the bigger story arc it tells, this kind of storytelling mechanism shows you the experience of being a person who is a cog. I think this mirrors the average person’s experience in many highly authoritarian cultures. Many Asian cultures have extremely strong social norms about following and not questioning superiors or orders – even if they cost you your life. Leaders do not ask your opinions or input, invite you to the planning meeting, nor do they bother wasting time to explain themselves or the goals. Your job is to carry your orders and job out at peak efficiency – for good or ill.

Only later do these people even brush elbows with the real people in power when the plan fails or succeeds. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Berserk, Psycho Pass, and many other anime fit this bill. Blade Runner 2049 does this when you find out that K is not the protagonist he imagines himself to be. There’s a sense of disillusionment that hits very different – often leaving the viewer with a sense of powerlessness, confusion, and anxiety. Your life is controlled by forces you don’t have access too.

How Stories Work with Jay Sherer shares how the story works from a writer/director’s perspective. When you see how well these narrative structures and writing are done – you see why most modern movies (superhero movies, cheap series cash grabs on Star Wars, Star Trek, Aliens, and Preditor series for example) are so bad.

Edgar Allen Poe’s influences

Edgar Allen Poe’s influences

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PBS has a good little 2 part documentary on Edgar Allen Poe called “In Search of Edgar Allen Poe” that you can watch for free.

I’ve always been a Poe fan since I found his stories in my elementary school years. The documentary did a decent overview of his life – which was quite a story of struggles and loss in itself.

One of the things I learned was the breadth and accomplishment on his influence in many genres. He is cited as the inventor of not only the horror story, but of the detective story, and science fiction. He also wrote impressive essays on poetry, cryptography, cosmology and even the nature of the music of bells.

At the end of the documentary, there is a list of works that inspired other authors (either directly stated by the author or having obvious influence). I thought it was worth putting them here to record just how influential his work became.

  • The Gold Bug
    • Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
    • William F Friedman – man who broke Japanese “Purple” cypher in WW2
  • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
    • Moby Dick – Herman Melville
    • At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
    • An Antarctic Mystery – Jules Verne
  • The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
    • In the House of Suddho – Rudyard Kipling
  • The Man of the Crowd
    • Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
    • The Seven Old Men – Charles Baudelaire
  • Murders in the Rue Morgue
    • Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle
  • The Mystery of Marie Roget
    • Hercule Poirot mysteries – Agatha Christie
  • The Purloined Letter
    • Nero Wolfe detective mysteries – Rex Stout
  • The Oval Portrait
    • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  • The Premature Burial
    • Ulysses – James Joyce
  • Three Sundays in a Week
    • Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne
  • William Wilson
    • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Eukreka
    • Pioneering treatise on an expanding universe – Alexander Friedmann
  • The Balloon Hoax
    • Five Weeks in a Balloon – Jules Verne
  • The Tell-Tale Heart
    • Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Fall of the House of Usher
    • The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Poetic Principle (essay)
    • Art for Art’s Sake movement
    • French Symoblists
    • The Pre-Raphaelites
  • The Pit and the Pendulum
    • The Inn of the Two Witches – Joseph Conrad
  • Annabel Lee
    • Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Masque of the Red Death
    • The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
  • Poe’s Short stories
    • Inspired science fiction of H.G. Wells
    • Charles Baudelaire – French poet who translated Poe and popularized him in France
    • Jorge Luis Borges – Argentine short-story writer/poet that translated Poe’s work to Spanish
    • Fernando Pessoa – Portuguese poet/writer/philosopher and translator
    • Edogawa Rampo – Japanese mystery writer that introduced modern detective stories in Japan in 1920’s. Used a pen name which was the Japanese version of the name “Edgar Allan Poe”
    • Allen Ginsberg – claimed you could trace all modern literary art to Poe’s influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan…etc
    • Roger Corman – made 7 movies based on Poe’s work
    • Stephen King
    • Alfred Hitchcock – “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films”
  • Poe added over a thousand words to the English language including:
    • memory-stirring, normality, odorless, epilepsy, bugaboo, sentience, irreducible, multicolor, aeronaut, and cryptography
Runescape and the rise of bot warfare

Runescape and the rise of bot warfare

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Runescape was one of the first really big, popular online games. Soon, people wrote bot programs to do repetitive tasks for you. Then the game designers started fighting back from the bots.

What came next was the rise of the back and forth arms race with attack and counter-attack that created a lot of early MMORPG memes and cultural touchpoints. Today the arms race has advanced to ill-advised kernel based anti-cheat system and even AI based cheat detection.

Learning how and why these systems developed is an important part of any software engineers toolbag.

Strange festival of San Bartolome de Pinares

Strange festival of San Bartolome de Pinares

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Each year on January 16, the town celebrates the traditional Luminarias festival. Purportedly held for five centuries, the origins of the festival trace back to a ritual purification to preserve the health of the horses in the village. Bonfires are lit in the central streets, and horses jump through the flames, with the smoke intended to protect the animals from disease.

Pentangle

Pentangle

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The 70’s was famous for folk songs, but did you know this trend was also occurring overseas as well? Pentangle did a number of folk songs – but the songs they song weren’t from 20 or 30 years earlier like in the US. They were from 300 years earlier in 1775 like this song – Willy O Winsbury.

They also recorded this fantastic version of Hunting Song: