Cross-posting a comment I wrote on Abigail Nussbaum’s blog post about 2017 Twin Peaks.  I could have sworn I wrote something similar on this tumblr, but if so I can’t find it, so:

Great review. IMO, a useful perspective on the tension/confusion between fantastical and mundane horror is that it’s a result of the dialectic between Lynch (mundane) and Frost (fantastical).

I was startled to learn, halfway through watching The Return, that earlier in 2017 Mark Frost had published a sort of tie-in novel (“The Secret History of Twin Peaks”) which elaborated on the Twin Peaks mythology. I haven’t read it, but Laura Miller’s scathing review makes it sound like Frost wants Twin Peaks to be just another Lost/BSG: a complicated but ultimately unmysterious tapestry of SFnal “mythology,” full of cosmic forces, conspiracies, and magical artifacts.

In the TV incarnations of Twin Peaks, then, we get this vision filtered through Lynch’s sensibilities – which means the mysteries aren’t all nicely resolved, of course, but also means we get a story about non-fantastical abuse, because there is such a story in nearly everything Lynch works on. In Lynch’s solo work, non-fantastical abuse is depicted surrealistically, but this is very different from depicting it through cosmic SF. (You can’t coherently talk about the “mythology” of Mullholland Drive or Inland Empire, although both contain seemingly fantastical elements.)

Twin Peaks has all of that but then, also, has the Frost mythology, and the two coexist uncomfortably – perhaps less a coherent artistic vision that the result of compromise between two different visions. (I like to imagine Episode 8 was the result of Lynch saying, “okay, Mark, I’ll include your UFO/parasite stuff, but only if I get to do it like one of my art films, and only if we never bring any of it up again.”)

We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there’s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn’t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. God knows why. It’s not five seconds before he’s on ‘Kirk and the green women’. He’s mocking the retrosexist trope, but smiling a little weirdly while doing it. His own insufficiently private enjoyment is peeking out, like a semi-erection on his face. A sort of Mad Men effect: saying, “isn’t it awful” and going for the low-hanging critical fruit while simultaneously rolling around in that aesthetic and idea of masculinity. Camp, but no homo!

“You’re thinking of Pike,” I say. “The captain in the unaired pilot. Some of that footage got reused for a later story, which made Pike into a previous captain of the Enterprise. And it never actually happened—it was a hallucination sequence designed by aliens who didn’t know what they were doing in order to tempt Pike. He rejected it.”

Bah Hamburg makes some attempt to hedge, but when I stick to the story and won’t give him a right-anyway ribbon he gets annoyed. He goes for a predictable, mocking “gosh I see you really know a lot about this,” as if he hadn’t been the one Holding Forth a moment ago.

It would be embarrassing for anyone, I suppose, to possess specific information about a throwaway piece of cheap television. Not to talk about this subject (after all, he felt very comfortable bringing it up himself) but to know what you’re talking about: to hold to facts. One may condescend to be amused by such things in an ironic way, and to declaim authoritatively on them, but not to actually pay attention to them.

(Erin Horáková, “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift”)

U of T profs alarmed by Jordan Peterson's plan to target classes he calls 'indoctrination cults' →

Most historians would agree that they necessarily presuppose that the past did happen.

shlevy:

Yet a team at Google led by Ilya Sutskever did precisely that in 2014. Input a different set of pixel colors, and it replies “A herd of elephants walking across a dry grass field,” again correctly… AI visionary Jeff Hawkins wrote in 2004 that “no computer can…see as well as a mouse,” but those days are now long gone.

— Max Tegmark, Life 3.0

Max, @nostalgebraist would like to have a word with you

Notes on a recent post of mine are split between people saying “but women want X” and women saying they want to try ~X but don’t know how, or saying they do ~X and it works great.

The lazy thing here would be to treat that as a punchline unto itself, at the expense of the former group.  I don’t think that’s actually right, though!  People who reblog my tumblr posts are not a representative (much less sufficiently large) sample of the population, so there’s nothing inconsistent about seeing different traits in this bubble than in some full-population summary statistic.

No, the problem is treating a full-population summary statistic as the last word about individuals.  There are so many humans that if “most” humans have a trait, the number who don’t can still be staggeringly large.  And since most traits are correlated, you can easily find yourself in groups where you are surrounded by counterexamples to certain “mosts.”

This is obvious in less politicized subjects: most humans are right-handed, but you’d look like an idiot if you rounded that off to “humans are right-handed” and denied a priori the possibility of social clubs for left-handers.  (A group where you can just assume anyone in the room is left-handed?  I mean, come on.  Talk about a progressive fantasy!)

It’s also obvious in subjects where the politicization has mostly run its course: most humans are (mostly) straight.  And yet.

What remains is a matter of numbers.  There are things that are like 10% of the population, and then there are things that are more like 0.01% of the population.  This distinction matters, if we’re trying to devise advice with a chance of being useful more often than it is counterproductive (given that people can often figure out whether they belong to a category, but not with perfect accuracy).  Still, we have to be clear that this is what we’re arguing over.

About those creepy algorithmic kids’ videos:

That Medium article about them is just bad.  Badly written, badly argued, conflates a lot of things because they strike the author as “wrong” even if some are much more explicable than others.

Most of the videos he cites are based on very simple forms of children’s edutainment, like little exercises that teach color names.  It makes sense that a certain breed of content creators would say “we can generate these automatically by swapping in different characters, and the more videos we have including popular characters, the more clicks we will get.”  So you get color name exercises with every possible permutation of some Disney characters.

It’s admittedly a lot weirder that people will act out the very same templates in live action.  Maybe the animations were notably lucrative, and some people thought “if we do the same things in live action, that will seem more appealing and we’ll steal their clicks for any given search term.”  There has to be some extra cost associated with live action (one does wonder how much the actors and cameramen are paid), but maybe it’s worth it.

Where it started to strike me as weird was in the very last section.  There, he talks about a type of video that is a lot longer, and has narrative elements and not just color/name games.  There are hundreds of these, closely following remixes of the same basic scene templates, which individually make little sense and are presented in random sequences with no greater plot.  This is a typical entry in the genre:

There are some color-game scenes, although here they are more elaborate and bizarre (as superheroes and supervillains swim in a swimming pool, the Joker sprays them with paint; we learn the name of each paint color).

There are also other scene archetypes that recur: “action scenes,” composed of many repeated shots in which one character punches/kicks another out of the frame, and “chase scenes,” in which some monster chases characters and wreaks havoc until it is defeated.  Sometimes archetypes are combined: in the video above, the heroes are chased by a shark which randomly changes color, and we learn the names of the colors.

At first, I thought these were made entirely by computer, and that the “scene archetypes” were completely pre-made scenes into which character models could be swapped, Mad Libs-style.  But after watching some more of these videos, I realized that can’t be it.  The scenes are too different and too well-tailored to their differences.  In a chase scene with a massive snake, it slithers along a street, knocking aside cars, and then destroys a building; in a chase scene with a shark, it rises from the ocean and we see shots of sailors on capsizing boats.

So some human sat down to animate a chase scene with a shark, and came up with a pretty good one (at one point, the shark grabs a motorcycle in its jaws).  Was that part of some pre-existing library of templates?  But what about the other shark chase scene, the one that teaches you colors, where the shark rises out of a swimming pool and then swims through the air?  Did someone make that archetype for a pre-existing library?  Or was it for that video specifically, given how these videos seem to like sharks?

The kicker: people do live-action renditions of this stuff, too.  In addition to the animations, which are produced by multiple channels, there are multiple channels making the dream a reality:

The adherence to the template is very careful.  Yet the actors, as they must, add little human affectations – you can see them struggling to figure out what “act the part” means in these senseless parts.

Maybe this is all because someone made some money on this template, once, and everyone else jumped on the bandwagon.  Everyone knows the template gets clicks, and so everyone is trying to get a piece of that pie.  And so we have hundreds of lovingly exact renditions of the template, even though the template is terrible.  (Kind of an accidental satire of Hollywood.)

fakelaurent:

(via averyterrible)