February 2025 – [wt : 4]

Dystopia

I’ve read and watched more than my fair share of dystopian science fiction, and the thing it always gets wrong, it seems to me — based on the latest evidence — the thing that’s missing — is the relentless fucking mediocrity of it all. Admittedly there’s probably not much market for a YA trilogy about a dumb world of dumb shitbags who are, yes, evil fascists as well, but mostly just boring, charisma-free and so so so dumb.

None of the awful, witless oligarch caricatures currently attempting to carve up the modern world into medieval fiefdoms would make the C list of Bond villains. They’re rubbish. Rubbish. To the last man Jack.

Hannah Arendt identified the banality of evil, but Eichmann was fucking Hannibal Lecter in comparison to Trump and Musk. They are evil, but that word gives them too much credit. It glamourises the contemptible motherfuckers. Really they epitomise the banality of banality, the tautological ghastliness of the ghastliest people alive.

Still, it’s early days. There’s probably so much worse to come.

Full Moon

Liked Vollmond better this time around — last was more than 10 years ago, I guess? It is very much playing the hits, trademark longueurs included, but there’s a lot to be said for Pina’s hits and the youngsters gave it some welly.

RIP

Inescapable

Stuck in the lift yesterday, briefly. We managed to get out pretty soon, but for a few moments it seemed we wouldn’t. It’s a reasonably small box, but it had never even occurred to me to worry about that, even when it’s been a bit unreliable over the years.

More or less the instant it wasn’t moving or responding, doors firmly shut, implacable and unyielding, that blasé confidence vaporised, replaced by sheer chest-tightening panic. I think I might have started screaming if we were in there two more minutes.

This sort of thing has happened to me once or twice before over the years, and the aftershocks last a while. It’s not exactly fear of enclosed spaces, although it is that; but much more the dread of being trapped, the loss of agency maybe.

Each time afterwards it seems to me that it really boils down to a kind of existential claustrophobia, and the terror is not just of the cave or tunnel but of the constraints of physical reality itself. In bed at night, it’s a big bed in a big room, plenty of space to stretch out in, but the darkness presses in close, suffocating, the darkness of the grave, and the terror is of being trapped not just in the room and the bed but in this body, inside this skull, a very tightly enclosed space indeed, from which there is absolutely no escape, ever.

I generally try not to think about this at all, of course, like everyone, because it is quite unhelpful. But sometimes in a broken lift, in a darkened room, there it is.

And here it is.

And here it is again.

Parlous

It’s easy to forget just how shambolic lots of scientific software is. Companies like Google and Microsoft pour billions into favoured mainstream topics, sometimes producing vaguely coherent and well maintained libraries — though even those can be unstable, prone to being broken at the most inopportune moment. But step even slightly off the beaten path and you’re plunged into a steampunk wilderness of mismatched decaying Heath Robinson contraptions lashed together with fish guts and twine. And you have to catch and gut your own fish.

I mostly understand the reasons for this, but it’s still incredibly frustrating. It’s a miracle anything ever gets done, and a lot of the time it just doesn’t.