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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, April 2024

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, April 2024

May 07, 2024

Today is Duinday, 34 of Jabim 4117. [4117.01.34]

…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.

April’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the forty-sixth issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

What Does One Do with Timelines, Anyway?

Every once in a while, I sift through my old notes. Usually, I hope that something will stand out as worth writing about now, for the blog, or that I can work on with the available technology and attention. Other times, I mostly sweep through to see if any patterns manifest that I hadn’t noticed before. Recently, I found either an unnoticed pattern, or one that I knew about and subsequently forgot about.

Readers may know that I did a lot of my early writing in terms of table-top superhero role-playing games. With the same sort of attention that I give to Star Trek’s society on the blog, I spent a lot of time poring over old comic books trying to determine the exact limits of things or sequences of events.

In the latter case, I’d compile the history of a character, a location, or something broader, as a text file with entries along the lines of the following.

2019
John starts **Entropy Arbitrage**.

2024
John writes his forty-sixth newsletter issue.

In many cases, I planned to use those worlds as game settings, or something along those lines. These range from the banal, to the unusable for copyright reasons, to the unusably detailed, to the potentially interesting. The worlds include novels, comic book publishers, and more. I had the thought to write this, because I have dozens of them.

And this raises the question: What the heck do I do with these timelines?

It doesn’t feel like I’d run a role-playing game anytime soon. I could plausibly try to build books around the premises, to see how that goes, replacing the dry timelines with a more compelling historical text, but that would take a lot of effort. Without a lot of context, not to mention formatting, they’d make no sense as blog posts. And it seems pointless to “dump” them somewhere and hope someone makes sense out of them.

Regardless, this situation struck me as odd enough that I wanted to open the question of potential uses of timelines like these, to a wider audience. At some point, maybe I’ll publish the same question on the blog, too.

For now, though, they sit in wait, for the next time that I sift through my notes…

Project Previews

The renewed job search (alas) soaks up a lot of time that might have previously gone to side-projects, but I can still occasionally dig into weird ideas that might become something down the road…

The Light’s Edge

I haven’t gotten much done, here. Or rather, I have done quite a bit of work on the story—setting up some infrastructure on the Fediverse—but I’ve done that work in the open and written about it in Developer Diary posts, meaning that I don’t have anything to preview.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or reading in April. Admittedly, not much this time out.

No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they didn’t take long. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.

  • The Stardust Thief goes in a few odd directions that I assume set up the sequels, such as spending so much time trying to build suspense out of whether that one character will support the protagonists or betray them or both as if we haven’t all seen that trope before, but on the whole tells a fairly interesting story with enough legitimate folklore and mythology to feel credible.

  • The Shape of Thunder felt deeply insulting, to me. It presents itself as dealing with the Arab-American experience, but engages with it far less than the protagonist’s white friend. It tries to cram scientific and technical jargon in places that it doesn’t really belong, especially loving the embarrassingly outdated idea of the brain as a desktop computer. Often, it thinks that it has something important to say about sexism and racism, but stops at telling us that you can read some bad things on the web, as if sexism didn’t exist prior to the 1990s. And while it claims in an author’s note to concern itself with gun violence and how to limit it, the text doesn’t seem to back that up, as it worries much more about the anguish felt by the perpetrator’s family with people not wanting to spend time around them, and has exactly one line about gun control, a child saying that we should do it. But that doesn’t even touch on the worst part, the insipid attempts to write how teenage girls think that make them seem like fools.

  • Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I came late to Bluey when I heard everyone else raving about it, and almost every episode delighted me—h’ray!—and I may go back to rewatch the series soon. I almost posted about it a few weeks ago, but then I discovered the Bluey Bites shorts on YouTube; then, when I had finished those, I learned that we had three episodes remaining, which have aired over the past few weeks as I write this. Admittedly, despite enjoying it thoroughly, I don’t understand how it became popular. Superficially, it has nothing to attract the adult audience that it has, and in substance, it doesn’t feel like something that would keep the attention of children long enough for parents to become interested, because it deals fairly directly with the lives of the middle-aged adults. I hope that it figures out how to come back for a fourth season, and I hope that someone checks in on Frisky, because I don’t care whose family he comes from, but rushing into a marriage with a one-night stand who wanted to secretly move her across the country probably won’t end well for her…

  • I didn’t like Sho̅gun at all, sorry to say. I appreciate the Japanese involvement, but I see two opposing ways that it doesn’t work. As a remake, it works from a 1970s American’s vision of a loose fictionalization of an Englishman’s story in and domination of Japanese history, as if the Japanese have nothing to say about their own history. As an entirely modern project, though, it feels unpleasant in 2024 to watch a show that you could argue has the premise that the world would’ve worked fine if everyone had stayed home to protect their little ethnostates from outside influence. My opinion of the show declined over time, too, starting out as “has potential, but I have trouble getting into it,” and ending with “why bother with Japanese authenticity, if the show focuses so tediously on discount-Jeremy Renner?” and “why won’t this end?” I liked seeing so many good Japanese actors, but it didn’t really have much going for it, especially given that they could’ve waited a year—after all their delays—and made a big deal about the fiftieth anniversary of the novel.

Blog Posts for April 2024

In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.

I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.

Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.

The most popular posts on the blog have been Tag: startrek, Real Life in Star Trek, Requiem for Methuselah, Copyright Searches, and Recutils — Small Technology Notes for the month.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.

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