The Junkyard, managers of Australian comedians like Aaron Chen and Sam Campbell, goes into administration
Let it be known that, of the younger Australian comedy set, I've always enjoyed Aaron Chen's comedy persona. That Sam Campbell - well I first saw him recently on an episode of Would I Lie to You (english version) and it was a few years old, but he seemed amusing in a similar eccentric persona to Chen. But then I think I watched some other clip of him on Youtube and didn't like it, so I dunno.
Anyway, back to the point: about the only fictional portrayal of a talent agent I can remember is from that Matt Berry series - Toast of London. And it fitted in with what is probably a widely shared assumption that actor's agents sit around doing nothing much all day other than reading the occasional casting call news and ringing up people on their list and saying "why don't you try this, I think it suits you". It seems like such a flaky way to make a living - even if, in the case of top Hollywood agencies, it's a very lucrative one.
But is it really like that? Does no one do a realistic portrayal of this line of work because it's hard to make "networking" interesting?
Update: Maybe there was an agent or two featured to a little extent in Bill Hader's dramedy Barry. But I think that shows attack was more against the incredible flakiness of cable television executives. In fact, I found it kind of amazing that the executives at (I think) HBO let such a damning portrayal of their job be part of the story! I presume they thought - it's not our network's execs he's attacking - it's the one down the road.
Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:
A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well. (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone! I always liked the look of their dishes. There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)
Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia: see this story, and this one.
[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes. Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.]
The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical. Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.
Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them.
Following last weekend's flash flooding around parts of Brisbane, the ABC has this article up:
More wild weather forecast for Queensland raises questions about how Brisbane drains handle intense rainfall
with one guy saying:
"With the bureau forecasting more frequent events, the storm drains across the city simply aren't designed to take in flows of run-off and intense rain," Mr Winders said.
Rather than being flood-resilient, Mr Winders suggests residents need to become "storm-resilient".
"The local council can't do anything about the network, the drains are already in place and there's too much existing development," he said.
"All these things impede the ability of the council to provide any relief from local flooding."
And I suspect he's right.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the article, and that I'm pretty sure would be true, is that Brisbane's drainage system does seems to often handle much higher total rainfall events without flooding, compared to cities such as Melbourne, and probably Sydney too?
I mean, over the years, I have seen many news reports of flash flooding from storms in other cities, and the rainfall totals that caused it often seem to be well under the rainfall we hear about in Brisbane storms or rain events.
So I have always suspected that our drainage system has been engineered to expect higher surges than those of drier cities. (Melbourne in particular seems to get most of its rain in far less intense events than Brisbane - it's just spread out over drizzly days rather than in 10 or 15 minute bursts like here!)
* A month or so ago, I posted about whether or not I should go see a performance of Beethoven's 9th (for the first time.) I was encouraged to do so, but delayed buying tickets. I checked about 9 days ago if seats were available, and some were, but I still didn't book. Then, on Sunday, I thought I should check again - then thought "whoops - it's December!". I had become so busy with one work matter that I had completely forgotten the concerts were on last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. :(
When the seated choir (Brisbane Chamber
Choir Collective) rose to their feet, we were in for a surprise.
Unexpectedly, around the concert hall – in the stalls and side balconies
– other choir members also stood with opened books. Undercover,
plain-clothes, choral operatives had been inserted into the midst of the
unsuspecting audience.
As the instrumental and vocal volume
swells, Clerici is conducting a 360-degree enterprise. The sound is
heavenly, harmonious. Beethoven has played his trump card. The pitch
rises as the beautiful voice of the soprano soloist soars above the
music and the choir.
The performance earns the orchestra and
conductor a standing ovation. Orchestral sections are individually
applauded. Clerici shakes hands warmly with the concertmaster, Natsuko
Yoshimoto. As the soloists exit, Umberto bows graciously to the two
women before giving the baritone a hearty high-five. A tremendous
performance by our state orchestra and a triumphant conclusion to the
2024 season.
Ugh...
* There was flash flooding yet again in Brisbane last Sunday, yet oddly enough, in my corner of the city, it got dark and a bit thundery, but virtually no rain at all. Only 15 km down the road, people went to a well know pub car park, only to get their cars inundated:
This spring and early summer in Brisbane, and the south east generally, has been so wet that it is making me worried that Brisbane is in for yet another flood this summer. I checked the SEQ Water dam levels, and virtually all are full or overflowing, except for Somerset and Wivenhoe (the ones that protect the Brisbane River from flooding) and they are at 80%. (The last time I checked, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, they were 80% then, too. I'm guessing water is being released enough to keep it there.)
But, gee, I don't know. Seems to me it wouldn't take too much more torrential rain in the right spot to cause another major flood.
* So, Biden pardoned his son. I can't get too excited about it, especially with the absolute nutjobs who Trump wants to appoint who seemingly want to spend another 4 years of wasted effort on trying to pin corruption on him. Jon Stewart isn't happy - but his takes are only right about 75% of the time, it seems...
I saw a video on the "Megabuild" channel on the weekend about how Singapore is massively expanding its port facilities, from the seabed up. It's - kind of amazing:
But - if you don't have time to watch that, you can view instead a good multimedia graphics explanation that appeared a couple of years ago at the Straits Times website here.
It also explains something I was curious about - wouldn't the steel reinforcement that is throughout the giant concrete caisson corrode quickly when its in seawater? Would the whole box be a crumbling mess in 20 years?
Apparently, it's solved by spraying a sealant on the sea exposed parts. Huh.
I have now seen 3 Youtube reviews of the movie version of Wicked, all by male reviewers who are not the most "bro" reviewers around, but still feel like their tastes skew towards the Rightwing-ish views on "woke" as a cultural issue. And they all enjoyed the movie quite a lot - saying they went in with no or low expectations, and two I think said they had never seen the stage play (nor have I), so they were surprised about how good they found it.
I think this is particularly surprising given that (as the Critical Drinker said in a video about the lead actress going a bit nuts about changes to the movie poster), the musical could be said to have started something of a "woke-ish" cycle of movies about a misunderstood villain (often female) who we would have some sympathy for if only we understood the backstory and her perspective.
In the medieval past, people would routinely employ "cunning folk" or "service magicians" to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.
This part, about love magic, I found pretty amusing:
Before there was Tinder, there was seduction magic. It was deemed so powerful that a thirteenth century Christian theologian named William de Montibus felt it necessary to warn his fellow believers about the perils of consuming food prepared with a love spell, infused with the essence of a courting woman in, well, rather unique ways.
The first worry was that one might consume a loaf of bread kneaded not by hand, but by buttocks. Bread, a staple of a medieval diet also used in religious rites, could be a vector for an irresistibly magical feminine essence embedded in the dough, particularly if the cunning woman had sat on it and wriggled around in her natural state to prepare the loaf.
With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology
among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope
is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was
surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between
people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were
Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to each other, and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.
Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.
This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.
The bit about astrology is interesting. I thought it was long dead and buried; or at least, now a very fringe interest with much less popular following than in what seems to have been its heyday from the 1960's to the 1980's. But then again, I was surprised recently to see the most generic type of astrological weekly forecast pap being put up near the end of one of the commercial TV news services on (I think) a Sunday.
And, of course, as I don't use TikTok, I have no idea what things are gaining popularity there with the youth.
Anyway, Gill ends with a bit of overreach, I think:
Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?
Still, it's a topic that always interests me - how people find meaning and how much religion or other metaphysical beliefs really have to do with it.
Surely I am not alone in thinking this: never has my opinion of billionaires been lower, in light of recent events.
The prime example, although there are so many to chose from, is (of course) Elon Musk. A peculiar man seeking to exercise immense power by proxy, having succeeded in helping get said proxy elected via his social media empire, dwindling though it may now be.
Yet if questioned, he would claim it is all in the interest of "making humanity multiplanetary", his perceived vital long term goal.
What is irking me at the moment, with the "gee whiz" factor of the recent Starship test flights (the most recent one featuring a gormless Trump in tow), is that the future technical challenges to doing anything especially useful with this rocket system seem so far below the public radar.
I mean, relying on both a booster and the enormous manned vehicle to land safely via retrorocket and guidance that are to work perfectly each time? The deadstick landing of the space shuttle had a worrying enough component of "everything has to go right", but at least if they got close to the ground but not near a runway, there was some chance of exit of the horizontally moving machine. Seems to me that there are going to no similar systems possible on Starship, because if there is going to be a major problem, it is more likely to be at the very last minute, with the rocket having no opportunity to align itself to allow a slower descent or an attitude to allow easy crew escape.
Sure, the landing system looks cool, and it's not great disaster if it doesn't work each time with the booster - although there is a very good chance of huge and expensive destruction of the landing pad and facilities. But the manned rocket? I reckon it will only take a couple of fatal accidents and people will leap from "that's so cool" to "you know, this is just inherently dangerous and can you really ever use such a system reliably enough for humans?"
And how many people are really following the development story close enough to realise that it's going to be an enormous problem getting the thing to the Moon, or Mars, because of the need for in-orbit refuelling?
Have a read of this lengthy article from earlier this year, pointing out that it seems already the system is heavier than expected, and noting the huge difference it makes to the whole re-fuelling idea:
“Currently, Flight 3 would be around 40-50 tons to orbit.”
To understand the significance of this statement, one only needs to review prior statements about Starship’s performance. Ever since Musk’s 2017 presentation, Starship’s estimated payload capacity has ranged between 100 and 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). SpaceX’s official Starship Payload Users Guide clearly states that “At the baseline reusable design, Starship can deliver over 100 metric tons to LEO” [3]. For the past six years, Starship’s diameter, height, and propellant mixture have remained constant. The most straightforward interpretation of Musk’s comment is that the rocket is suffering from a 50% underperformance.....
The success or failure of the Human Landing System program will be decided by Starship’s payload capacity. Due to its high dry (unfueled) mass, Starship HLS cannot reach the Moon without first refueling in LEO. To complete the Artemis 3 mission, SpaceX must therefore implement orbital refueling on an unprecedented scale. Even on Earth, loading cryogenic propellants into a launch vehicle is no easy feat; if anything, this will be more difficult in space. Prior to every Artemis mission, a flotilla of reusable Starship tankers will transfer liquid oxygen and liquid methane to an orbiting propellant depot. The lunar lander will then launch, receive a full load of fuel and oxidizer from the depot, and continue onwards to the Moon.
The number of tanker flights which will be required to complete Artemis 3 is hotly debated. Estimates range from four [5] to nineteen [6] launches of propellant per lunar landing. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin recently noted that the probability of mission success is directly correlated with the number of launches in each refueling campaign [7]. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that each individual Starship launch, plus the subsequent propellant transfer operation, will have a 98% probability of success once the procedure is refined. If five tanker flights are required, the mission as a whole will succeed in 90% of scenarios. In contrast, if twenty launches are needed, that probability drops to just 67%.
The precise number of tanker flights depends on several variables,
including the Starship launch rate and the rate at which cryogenic
propellant boils off to space while the depot is in orbit. However, no
parameter is more important than the vehicle’s payload capacity. If
Starship’s payload mass grows, the number of tanker flights required to
complete an Artemis mission will decrease. Conversely, a reduction in
payload capacity will increase the number of propellant launches.
The current iteration of Starship can store 1,200 tons of liquid
methane and liquid oxygen in its propellant tanks. Recent renderings
suggest that the lunar lander will be slightly taller,
with a propellant load of approximately 1,500 tons. If each tanker can
deliver 100 tons of fuel to orbit as advertised, then it will take 15
flights to complete an Artemis mission. This number is large, but given
SpaceX’s demonstrated ability to scale up to a high cadence of
missions, it is not insurmountable in medium- to long-term timeframes.
However, if SpaceX is only able to launch 50 tons of propellant to orbit
inside each Starship tanker, then it will need to launch the world’s
largest rocket a staggering 30 times to refuel a single lunar
lander. Two additional launches will be required to place the Starship
HLS and the propellant depot into orbit. To make matters worse, this
hypothetical manifest does not take boiloff into account. Even if NASA
and SpaceX achieve their stated goal of a 6-day turnaround between
Starship launches, it will take over half a year to stage all of the
propellant in orbit. Several additional flights might be required to
replace the oxygen and methane which are lost during this time period.
I know there has been some publicity about the extraordinary complicated system NASA has been planning all these years for a return to the Moon, but it seems to me not enough.
And it's all because making a large rocket land vertically looks cool.
Another irony about Musk - I mean, beyond the one where he thinks everyone should have lots of kids, yet seems like the most absent father possible to his own - is the recent discussion on Sabine Hossenfelder's channel about concerns that we are getting much closer to a making low earth orbit unuseable due to a Kessler syndrome disaster.
Given that Muck Musk is already cluttering up the orbits with Starlink (another example of something with a "cool" factor but on deeper consideration, we might be better off not using), the ultimate irony would be an exploding Starship in orbit, combined with his hundreds of his other satellites, making low Earth orbit pretty much impossible to safely traverse to get to Mars.
Here's the video:
I think there is a better than even chance that Musk will go down in history as leading humanity to disaster and/or expensive dead ends, rather than being the saviour he thinks he will be.
You can see I'm still looking at Twitter for laughs and giggles - seriously though, if Noah Smith ever abandons it for Bluesky, I'll probably only be back there once a week or so.
But have a look at this for an absurd claim:
Such shameless stupid gaslighting. He would be insta-blocked by so many at Bluesky if ever he shows up there.
How old is Rowan Williams now?* Have his eyebrows been allowed to grow ever higher til they reach his hairline?
Well, that's a bitchy way to start talking about him, because despite his strong inclination towards the sort of modern Church of England waffle theology that tries to offend no one and ends up losing relevancy because of it, I have always had a soft spot for him. Let me search this blog to see if this is right - gosh, yes, I have mentioned him in posts a half dozen times over the years, and yeah, I had forgotten I once described him like this:
"...seems to be a philosopher who ended up a Church's world leader by
accident. He's a nice enough sounding man, but one suspects he has
helped more people out of his Church than into it."
I suppose, now that I think about, that there is something pretty common in their approaches - except that if I recall correctly, Williams did try to convince us that he really did believe that God (or something close to God - "ineffable transcendence" or some such, probably! - was real.)
I actually have been feeling the need to talk about the whole "how do we find meaning in the modern world" topic, but work is so busy today. Will come back to it soon....
This very much reflects my views, and it explains why I am not worried about the "but it's bad to have echo chambers" aspect. (See, Tim T, if Krugman agrees with me, how can I be wrong!):
Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.
I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.
But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.
Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.
And yes, most of the new Bluesky posters I find useful are liberal, but that reflects the modern right’s anti-intellectualism rather than political bias on the part of the site.
I have no idea what this means for X’s financials, and I don’t care. What I see is that you can indeed ruin a network if you try hard enough. And it’s starting to look as if Musk has managed to pull it off.
Seriously, though: can you imagine the MAGA uproar if a liberal billionaire was Harris's shadow everywhere if she had won?
We have never seen anything like this, and it's bound to end badly. The only question is "how badly?"
Update: It did occur to me that this might be a photoshop, and while I have seen many MAGA types claim it is, I have seen others deny it and claim it was on Musk's own feed. If there is an original photo "hair on", I haven't seen it yet...
Brisbane City Council is working with police to crack down on "anti-social behaviour" at the city's homeless camps.
Council City Standards chairwoman Sarah Hutton said the council was receiving increasing numbers of complaints from local residents and businesses near the tent cities.
"Following the Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner's personal call to the Police Commissioner, we've established a joint taskforce to help address escalating violent, aggressive and anti-social behaviour in Brisbane parks," Cr Hutton said.
Roma Street resident David Mech
said he had repeatedly complained to the council about the state of
homeless camps around the inner city.
He said he wanted to see homeless camping criminalised to make the Brisbane cityscape "aesthetically beautiful" again.
The
retired porn star gave a speech at council chambers on Tuesday last
week, where he advocated that Brisbane follow the likes of Florida and
make public camping a crime.
He told ABC Radio Brisbane there should be a designated campsite in Brisbane where homeless sleepers were permitted, but outlawed everywhere else.
"There's an old saying all around the world that beggars can't be choosers, but here in Brisbane they absolutely can," Mr Mech said.
As I've complained before - it's pretty much a modern nonsense to think that a reasonable response to homelessness is to let encampments develop in any public park or space. I know we are far behind America in the extent of the problem, but as the backlash there is finally gathering pace, I see no reason to let our cities even start developing the same issue.
I really don't care at all for director George Miller's movies, but I do usually find Tilda Swinton extremely watchable. Hence I decided to take a chance and watch their 2022 fantasy flop 3000 Years of Longing on Netflix.
I found it extremely dull, with problems that should have been obvious from the screenplay to any studio funding it. I can't think of any other film with such long, long periods of purely narrated flashback story, without the characters on the screen in said scenes actually speaking. And the fantasy versions of the past were just too silly, even for a movie about a genie from a bottle.
Overall, after the first 10 minutes (which do seem to show some promise), once another 20 or 30 minutes passed I found it impossible to avoid thinking "when is this film going to give us a hint as to where it's going." It does, eventually, get to a relationship of sorts between the two characters, but there is no reason at all to feel invested in it; and once established (like the rest of the movie) it has a profound feeling of "going nowhere". It is such a badly written film. Nothing feels real about any of the characters, including Swinton's, or their reactions. (And Miller co-wrote it, so he can bear all the blame.)
Yet it seems George Miller gets some sort of "benefit of the doubt" all the time from reviewers. I can't help but feel it's something to do with the glasses and always seeming to give off the (pretty typical for an Australian director) vibe of "I'm in the artist class, so if your politics are Left you must appreciate me". Here, for example, Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave it 3 out of 5, but his description suggests it deserves a "fail" more than a "pass":
It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Swinton and Elba sit around in the hotel room while all the exotic drama is given to us in flashback-fragments of wonder. There is something very old-fashioned about it, and I think a younger film-maker might have wanted to engage more knowingly with ideas of orientalism, race and gender. Yet for all that it is a little bit underpowered, with not much of a screen-relationship between Elba and Swinton.
Of course, I have to admit that some people seemed to like it, if online reviews are anything to go by. I can't fathom why, but I guess its commercial failure gives me some encouragement that my view is the more widely shared.
It's rare that I have any interest at all in a boxing match, but I'm having a particularly hard time understanding why anyone on the planet would be keen to watch Jake Paul fight Mike Tyson. Yet somehow, this has been promoted as if it's something consequential.
It feels more to me like the modern Roman circus in the days of a declining empire.
Paul is 27, I see. With his heavy set body, tatts and beard, he could easily pass for 40.
I wonder if even Jason Soon is cynical about this?
Here we were thinking the first Trump presidency was full of weirdness; but the American public decided to just see how much weirder it could get, and man, are they being rewarded.
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
But even away from Trump, this seems pretty weird too, doesn't it?:
Yes - I can confirm that BlueSky is looking pretty good - for whatever reason, I finally seem to have managed to stop the weird overrun of my "Discover" feed by cat photo and amateur anime art accounts. (It took a fair bit of blocking accounts for the first week or two - or maybe they changed something else in the algorithm - I really don't know.)
But it is now feeling somewhat like old Twitter: pretty much a micro-blogging site with a liberal bent, although still without the quick and often witty community input, because the numbers aren't there yet. At least a lot of journalists, commentators and scientists who I like to follow have made the move recently, and I like it. (The thing I miss about old Twitter was that its popularity meant it was actually good for breaking news in your own area - if a big storm was happening, say, you could search "Brisbane storm" and find a lot of contributions to how bad it was in other parts of the city.)
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