Running Commentary 8/12/2024

Hello,

I'm back from vacation. I had a nice time, added a bird to my life list (a sanderling, a sort of sandpiper which I think I've probably seen before but definitely saw this time), but I'm afraid I have to open this newsletter with some sad news: since I last sent an edition of A Running Commentary, Lewis H. Lapham passed away at the age of 89. Lapham is probably best remembered as the editor of Harper's Magazine throughout the '80s, but I and you RC readers will recognize the name as that given to Lapham's Quarterly, the excellent history publication. That later project has featured in my "Curation Links" moreso than any other source of links; I do not exaggerate when I say it's often difficult to pick just one LQ link to feature in a week. In this edition, I'll be featuring some of my favorite LQ curations as the links at the end.

Anyway...

Watching...

Skeleton Crew (Trailer)

Skeleton Crew was announced a long while ago, and never really followed up on in terms of giving the public a look until just recently. The trailer came out a few days ago. For a while we've known this would be a show about kids, and that's roughly what we see here. There's not a lot of detail of the story given here, but somehow a bunch of kids wind up in space. This show looks kind of cute; I'm curious on a scale of Rebels Season 1 to Clone Wars Season 6 exactly how kiddish this kid's show will be.

One thing we did get a look at are what I believe are the first lawns we've seen in Star Wars, at least on-screen. The houses are odd-enough looking to not let the suburb look just like a place in America, but it's close. Moreso than the lawns, I'm thrown a bit by the paved road running through the neighborhood; you'd think a world with floating cars wouldn't need pavement. That aside, it's interesting to see something of ordinary middle-class civilian life here, not a frontier outpost or a crowded city or a warzone.

By Edward's Razor for Franchise Media, the lack of fan demand for this show bodes well for its eventual quality. Skeleton Crew has been worked on for a while, as a lot of other Star Wars projects have been canceled, so I'm guessing the people making it see something really special there. That makes me optimistic. The premiere is December 3rd, so we'll have to wait 'til then to see what it's actually like.

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games

The Olympics in Paris are wrapped up. I watched a lot of really incredible feats over the past two weeks. Here are my notes on the highlights:

• The US tied with China for gold medals this year: 40 each. I mark that up to there not being any really great American men's swimmers this year. For women, we still had Katie Ledecky, who delivered probably the most impressive pool performance of the Paris games, but without a Michael Phelps or the equivalent, we missed a lot of swimming golds we'd been known to get in recent years.
• NBC did a decent job delivering the Olympics to the States. Sending Snoop Dogg to interview athletes and tour the Louvre was a good gag. I will say I didn't think much of the racing commentators; in the Men's 100m Race, they called a photo-finish ending for the wrong winner, then didn't say anything to correct themselves until Noah Lyles was well into his victory lap, and left it to the guy at the desk to explain how a footrace is called in a photo finish. After a qualifying run in the Men's Relay Race, one commentator went really hard on the US's 16-year-old first leg runner for putting his team behind, to a degree that seemed kind of mean considering how young the guy is and how his team made up the lost ground anyway.
• Sport Climbing was a lot better this year, since they split the events up this time. Due to the way the speed climbing match-ups worked as a bracket, an American climber set the all-time speed climbing world record (15 meters in 4.74 seconds) but only took bronze for that run. Apparently, Indonesia is really good at speed climbing; they sent two men and two women, all of whom were really fast.
• Surfing was also much better this year, on account of being held in Tahiti where there were some real-deal barrel-forming waves to ride. I still think surfing is a tough sport to bring to television, but the waves were pretty and the sounds were relaxing.
• I don't think France was successful in cleaning up the Seine enough for people to swim in, but they had people swim anyway (and reportedly get sick afterward.) I'm sure having people swim down the L.A. River next time will be much better.*
• I liked the torch this year. Not the one that was carried, that one looked dumb; I liked the cauldron on the hot air balloon.
• It was cool to see France honor Raphael Nadal, a Spaniard, almost as one of their own. He'd the greatest clay-court tennis player ever, and it was nice to see him end his career at the Olympics on those clay courts.

*I imagine they'll have them swim out in the Pacific, but it's funny to think of the L.A. River as an Olympic venue anyway.

Reading...

Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick

As I think I've mentioned before, most of the books I read I get from the public library. In Michigan, the public libraries are all linked up, so if your local library doesn't have something, you can see if a library in another town does and request it from them. 436 different libraries are a part of this network, so it's rare that a book I want isn't in at least one of them. It does happen, though, as it did when I went looking for Plutoshine, a novel short-listed for the Arther C. Clarke award last year. When I went looking, I don't think it had been printed in the U.S. So, I logged a request for my home library to purchase it and went on to read other books that I could get. I'd forgotten all about this until my library let me know that my hold for Plutoshine was available. They'd actually purchased a copy. So I got to read a library book that was also brand new, which was an interesting experience.

Plutoshine is a remarkably old-school sort of sci-fi novel, focusing on efforts to produce a viable human population on Pluto and on a mystery that emerges. Plutoshine is not a whodunnit but it is primarily a mystery story. Something happened before the main character arrived on Pluto, something that left the colony's founder, Clavius Harbour, in a coma and his children unwilling to discuss what happened; his young daughter, Nou, is unwilling to talk at all. Lucien Meriwether, a terraforming specialist brought in to build a mirror to capture what dim light reaches Pluto from the Sun, takes it upon himself to reach out to Nou Harbour and find out what happened.

Kissick captures the experience of living on Pluto very well, even if the characters reasons for doing so are a bit scanty. She writes almost as if her readers were a contemporary audience to the characters. Advanced technology presented very matter-of-factly, without a lot of explanation. All the science here is generally pretty plausible extrapolations from current tech; Kissick is a planetary scientist (studying Mars, not Pluto) who brought a lot of hard science to this tale. She also brought a lot of talent to characterizing both the world of the novel and the people who inhabit it, especially for a first-time author.

Spoilers for Plutoshine (click to reveal)

The ultimate reveal, that Clavius Harbour had set his Pluto colony up for failure to put humanity off terraforming the worlds of the solar system and drive them out into other systems with worlds that could support human life, is muddied a bit by the other ultimate reveal, that Nou had found intelligent life from outside the solar system. The story of driving space exploration and tthe story of first contact have a lot of implications for one another that go unaddressed. Honestly the discovery of the Whistler overall seems to make less of a splash than it really would; maybe it's just that the book ends before news can really get out. The story of hte characters is well constructed and well resolved, but the broader story here is a bit neglected.

Overall I really liked this book. It was well-written but not pretentious; it's not a book that demands a close comparative study to be comprehended, and it doesn't read like Kissick was trying to make the next great Sci-Fi classic. I hope she did anyway. She just needs to get this book into enough libraries. 8/10

Playing...

Warframe

Notes on TennoCon 2024:

The next prime 'frame will be Sevegoth, who got unveiled on the art panel. He has sort of a Trafalgar-era sailor look, which is rather fitting despite being quite a bit different than his base look. He's probably the most different-looking prime since Ivara. We're also getting a deluxe skin for Caliban where he's wearing a Cortés-style helmet, which is also a pretty out-of-the-box idea. This is the first cosmetic released for Caliban besides the alt helmet he was first released with. I don't think, personally, that the skin is cool enough by itself to make Caliban worth playing, but props to the designers for coming up with something creative. Caliban will also be getting a rework to his abilities. We don't know exactly what that will entail yet.

Waframe will be coming to Android "soon", per Sheldon Carter.

There's going to be some sort of prelude quest to Warframe 1999 later on this month. No date has been given for the 1999 update itself as yet, though we did get a look at what the game will be like upon that release:

• As has been teased, there will be motorcycles. Players will be able to zip around the streets of a place called Hölvannia, where, in an alternate AD 1999, the technocyte virus is ravaging the city. We'll fight technocyte enemies as well as an anti-technocyte faction called the Scaldra.
• There's proto-frame equivalents of Excalibur, Mag, Volt, Trinity, Nyx, and of a new 'frame called Cyte-09 who will be coming in the update. We weren't shown anything of Cyte-o9's abilities, but he's described as a marksman frame. So, maybe Hölvannia will provide some kind of opportunity to use sniper rifles in a meaningfully effective way.
• There's set to be a lot of '90s nostalgia tech which I'll admit to being a bit too young to really appreciate. Still, it makes for a design language that's pretty distinct from the main look of Warframe.
• We'll apparently be able to date the protoframes. I'm not sure if this will be as warframes or as the Drifter; presumably it won't be as the Tenno operator, seeing as they're perpetually stuck as children. I also don't know if this will be a fun side activity or somehow tied to progression.
• Gameplay, motorcycles aside, looks very similar to that of the main game; this is not as big a departure as Duviri was, which is probably for the best.
• Overall, 1999 looks like some fun stuff that I'm looking forward to playing sometime later this year.

We also got the first Soulframe DevStream, introducing some gameplay for that game to an audience that largely hadn't played it yet. I actually have played it a bit; players of the closed preview are under NDA, which is why I haven't written anything about it yet. I can confirm that when Steve called it "cozy" last year that he was referring to certain moments but definitely not to others. Once I can say more I will. Soulframe is promising as yet, pretty distinct from Warframe in more than just aesthetics but clearly made for a similar audience.

Game Review | Warframe

I don’t play much in the way of video games; I just play Warframe.

The Edwards EditionDerek Edwards

Bird of the Week

Michigan is an interesting place to look for birds. We have the Great Lakes all around, which makes for a biome that is simultaneously seaside and not. The Lakes are freshwater, which means that they have different sorts of fish than the waters off, say, the Atlantic seaboard. Different fish means different birds. We have gulls and terns, which aren't especially picky, but we don't have gannets, or oystercatchers, or frigatebirds. The most exotic seabirds we have are the quite specifically distributed white pelicans and today's bird, the double-crested cormorant.

Cormorants and shags (the two names applied to different species somewhat randomly) make up a family of birds within the same order as pelicans, which they resemble more closely than anything else. They are all piscivorous, flying out over water and diving after fish. Like the pelican, they have a pouched throat, though it and their beaks are much smaller than those of pelicans. Throughout the world, and especially in East Asia, cormorants have been used in a sort of seagoing falconry, wherein trained cormorants are fitted with collars to prevent them from swallowing large fish, which are then retrieved by their handlers. This practice is no longer widespread, as it is inefficient compared to modern fishing techniques.¹

Unlike many other aquatic birds, cormorants and shags do not have any waterproofing oils in their feathers, and so, after diving, they must sit in the sun with their wings outstretched to dry.² This habit, which was thought to make the birds resemble the crucified Christ, made cormorants a minor Christian symbol popular in medieval heraldry.³ Cormorants and shags can be found in all corners of the world's oceans, but the double-crested cormorant is the only one to also make a home inland, living along the Great Lakes as well as in smaller bodies throughout the Mississippi River basin. I've had sightings of double-crested cormorants at a few places around Michigan: on the ferry dock at Mackinaw City, flying up and down Lake Macatawa in Holland, at the Detroit Zoo (in an open-air pond where they may have been on exhibit, but I don't think so). The most I've seen was a colony of about 80 at the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, just inland from Saginaw Bay; the most surprising was one that arrived in a small pond miles and miles from the big lakes, where I've written about once hearing a pied-billed grebe call.

The double crested cormorant looks, in flight, something like a skinny black goose, in the water like a big black duck. It's pretty readily identified in inland waters, where it's the only bird of its kind. Along the East, West, and Gulf Coasts, they can be differentiated from their cousins by their bright yellow-orange faces.

The term "cormorant" comes to English via French from the Latin term "corvus marinus", meaning "sea-raven".⁴ Indeed, the cormorants are all large black or mostly black birds, though they're considerably lankier than ravens. The double-crested's binomial is Nannopterum auritum. The genus name, meaning "small-winged" is a reference to the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos Islands (and of Master and Commander: At World's End fame), which does actually have quite small wings. The species name is Latin for "eared"; it and the bird's common name are a reference to the wispy, eyebrow-like feathers the bird sports during its breeding season.⁵

Curation Links

In honor of the passing of Lewis H. Lapham, here's a collection at some of the best Lapham's Quarterly features included in previous "Curation Links" collections.

Flight Plan | Orville & Wilbur Wright, Lapham’s Quarterly

Excerpted from an article published in The Century Magazine, the Wright Brothers tell of their history and of their recent experiments in powered flight.

Dissection | Meehan Crist, Lapham’s Quarterly

A history, both general and personal, of the practice of medical dissection, from the perspective of a doctor who performed such grisly tasks while in school.

Frederick Douglass Corrects the Record | Frederick Douglass, Lapham’s Quarterly

A republishing of Douglass’s 1857 argument that slavery was not only immoral but illegal under the American Constitution as written.

In the Beginning, There Were Taxes | Michael Keen & Joel Slemrod, Lapham’s Quarterly

Excerpted from Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages, a history of taxes, from the ancient days of straightforward, no pretense plundering, to the slightly more civilized tribute, to the modern-day pooling of resources for (ostensibly) common causes.

Snap Judgment | Kim Beil, Lapham’s Quarterly

A history of trick photography from the early days of the medium, when there was no Photoshop, and all modifications to the actual scene had to be achieved in-camera, using various tricks of lighting, positioning, and exposure.

Greeks Bearing Gifts | Simon Winchester, Lapham’s Quarterly

For Lapham's Quarterly's issue on Technology, Simon Winchester delivers the preface, a survey of industrial technology from ancient times to the present. Winchester focuses on the shift in the societal mood about new tech, from awe and wonder to apprehension and worry, as advances have come more and more quickly at one another's heels. Winchester draws a great deal, in this piece, on things he covers in greater depth in his book The Perfectionists, which I highly recommend.

The Gradual Discovery of Glasses | Stefana Sabin, Lapham’s Quarterly

From Sabin's history of spectacles In the Blink of an Eye, a look at what people of imperfect vision used to aid in reading before the invention of glass lenses.

Engine Optimization | Plutarch, Lapham’s Quarterly

“Some attribute this success to his natural endowments; others think it due to excessive labor that everything he did seemed to have been performed without labor and with ease.” From Plutarch's biography of the Roman general Marcellus, an account of the devastating effect brought on besieging armies by the war engines of Archimedes in battle at Syracuse.

How to Survive Winter | Bernd Brunner, Lapham’s Quarterly

The author of Winterlust: Finding Beauty in the Fiercest Season writes this overview of humanity’s evolving relationship with Winter. In ancient times, winter was an ordeal to be survived. But as improved technology has given us dependable refuge from the cold and reliable food stores in the off-season, winter has taken on an austere charm.

Construction Site | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Lapham’s Quarterly

A French naturalist gives a passionate, if not always modernly scientific, praise of his favorite creature from the then-new United States, the beaver.

Studying the Script | Silvia Ferrara, Lapham’s Quarterly

Excerpted from Ferrara’s The Greatest Invention, a book on the history of writing, this is a history of Chinese script, one of the oldest forms of writing still in use. It is so old that determining it’s exact origin is difficult, though it seems to be tied to a Shang dynasty queen.

Hive Mind | Mark Twain, Lapham’s Quarterly

Excerpt from an 1878 magazine in which Twain muses about the phenomenon of two people writing roughly the same letter to each other at the same time, and the broader phenomenon of multiple people having the same new idea at the same time. Is this evidence of telepathy, or simply similar people reacting to similar situations in similar ways?

Life on Mars? | Nikola Tesla, Lapham’s Quarterly

“From ‘Talking with the Planets.’ In early 1899 Jacob Astor gave the inventor funds to further develop electric-light technology; Tesla used the money instead to leave New York, build a huge Colorado laboratory, and begin research into high-frequency electricity and wireless transmission. Some came to believe the signals Tesla heard in this experiment were actually from Guglielmo Marconi’s radio device, which was being tested at the time in the Atlantic. Later research showed, however, that Tesla may have heard pulses emitted by Jupiter’s moon Io.”

Fortune’s Child | Blaise Pascal, Lapham’s Quarterly

Writing in 1660, scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal makes the point that European nobility had no intrinsic claim to their wealth and power, even though the law, the people, and even God might allow them that wealth and power.

Sound Systems | Lapham’s Quarterly

The music notation we’re familiar with, dots with tails marked down on a staff of parallel lines, arose from Renaissance-era Italy and has been the global standard for over a century. But other ways of writing down music have been employed throughout history, some of which are outlined in this chart.

New Look, Same Great Look | Kim Beil, Lapham’s Quarterly

A history of color photography and of the way it shaped our understanding of seeing colors. Much of human visual perception relies on the brain making sense of the raw image sent from the eyes. A camera is just an eye, and early color cameras would produce images that simply looked wrong, even though they were a very literal representation of their subjects. The science of color grading is what gives modern photographs a “more realistic” look (that is, a chromatically distorted view of the world that suitably matches our own).

Immortal by Default | Jared Farmer, Lapham’s Quarterly

(Excerpted from Farmer’s book Elderflora: a Modern History of Ancient Trees) More closely related to pines than to the deciduous trees they resemble, ginkgo trees are the last living species of a family of plants that survived their cousins’ extinction taking refuge in remote regions of China. Discovered by the Chinese and distributed around the world, ginkgoes have found a second life as popular ornamental trees, even if their fruits do smell like something a turkey vulture might eat.

A Surprising Dearth of Spectacled Bears | Gloria Dickie, Lapham's Quarterly

Excerpted from Dickie's Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future, this account is of the bear that inspired Paddington Bear (eventually, after his creator learned that there were not bears in Africa, but that there was one in South America). Spectacled bears figure little into the art of local Peruvian cultures, unless a creature typically considered a jaguar is one. And when they do, it's not as a lovable marmalade-eater in a floppy hat, but as a fearsome half-man creature more at home as the killer in a true-crime doc.

1945: Fair Warning | The U. S. Army Air Forces, Lapham's Quarterly

The text of leaflets dropped on Japan between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, calling the emperor to end the war or, barring that, evacuate the cities.

A Likely Story Indeed | Stassa Edwards, Lapham's Quarterly

Alice Liddel is best remembered as the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but she was also the subject of Carroll’s other hobby: photography. “By the time she stood in front of Cameron’s camera, Alice had years of practice transforming herself into a photograph, enacting fictions for the camera since she was only four years old. That’s when Alice met Charles Dodgson, then a stuttering, twenty-four-year-old math lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, where her father, Henry Liddell, was dean.”

The Early Days of American English | Rosemarie Ostler, Lapham's Quarterly

Excerpted from Ostler’s The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, a look at the way American English first diverged from British English. Some of it was Americans changing things, some of it was Americans keeping things that the British changed, some of it was Americans who didn’t speak English adding things.

Ice Breakers | Henry David Thoreau, Lapham's Quarterly

"From Walden. Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days in the cabin he built at Walden Pond near his native Concord. During the winter of 1846, he watched as a hundred Irish immigrants working for the Tudor Ice Company cut ten thousand tons of ice from the pond. The ice was subsequently shipped around the world. 'Thus it appears,' he reports elsewhere in *Walden*, 'that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.'"

Ernest Shackleton’s War Is Over | Ernest Shackleton, Lapham's Quarterly

“From South: The “Endurance” Expedition. On his first journey to the South Pole in 1902, Shackleton came within four hundred miles of his goal; on his second in 1907, within ninety-seven miles. On his third expedition in 1914, his ship was crushed in ice, forcing him and part of his crew on an 800-mile journey in a whale boat to South Georgia Island and then a thirty-six-hour trek to Stromness.“

Shine Bright Like a Diamond | Alexander von Humboldt, Lapham's Quarterly

From Humboldt’s Views of Nature. An account of phosphorescence in seawater, a phenomenon still popular in travel media. If you’ve never seen a video of water glowing blue as a swimming fish or someone’s hand runs through it, look one up, then read this nearly 200-year-old account of the same thing.

Isolation Booth | E. M. Forster, Lapham’s Quarterly

[FICTION] Excerpted from "The Machine Stops", Forster’s prescient 1909 story of a future world where people no longer leave their homes, instead using a great, Earth-spanning Machine to communicate and to summon whatever could meet their needs.

See the full archive of curations on Notion