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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, March 2026

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, March 2026

Mar 31, 2026

Today is Wikiday, 33 of Broket 4118. [4118.11.33]

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

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR China, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Réunion, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam 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.

March’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the sixty-seventh issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Rebooting What Now

Like many, the announcement that Firefly would get an animated revival took me by surprise. And like (apparently) half the surprised people…I don’t see the point. Or rather, I see a prospective worrisome point.

As you might guess, I have something of a history with the show, hinted at in a variety of blog posts over the years. Having spent a lot of time watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel—which I don’t think that I have returned to since, because that sounds painful—I primed myself for another show by the same creator. And then almost changed the channel during the pilot, with a nonsensical plot and terrible audio. Fox (the terrestrial television network, then only loosely affiliated with the far-right news service) dropped the series a couple of weeks later.

When it came out on DVD, I picked up a copy cheap and, to my surprise, got fairly deeply into it. I even gave DVD sets as gifts for a couple of years.

When I talk about how I previously had fairly far-right views, it happened at around this time, and the two probably fed each other. I mean, in retrospect, the show definitely has a political position, and it seems hard to square that with people’s excitement for it.

Whedon has talked about how he built the premise around former Confederate soldiers in the United States, for example. The show never says “Lost Cause,” but they carefully never talk about what the rebellious governments actually wanted beyond some amorphous freedom, giving the impression of an ideal that we wouldn’t agree with. Then we have a world that constantly plays up its pervasive Chinese influence, but couldn’t bother itself to hire a single Asian performer, not even for the “gorram” Chinese-coded Tan siblings. And we also have the constant denigration of (unmarried) women, including trying to play sex work as both titilating and objectionable. At least one member of the cast endorsed Gamergate, and none of them spoke out in support of colleagues when performers in other Whedon shows spoke out about on-set bullying. Some of the people involved went on to other troubled and problematic productions.

Because of that, I don’t understand how it remained such a fan darling, and can only envision one reason for revisiting it in an age when the ethos of the Confederacy sit in the highest offices of American government. I won’t see it, at least in part because I have dropped access to anywhere that it might appear, but also…I can’t imagine caring after almost a quarter-century, when you could argue that it had a lot to do with how we got here.

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…

As mentioned earlier, while I decide what to do with The Light’s Edge, rather than a “real” preview, I want to provide some retrospectives on projects that never really came together. This one ties to the idea of expanding a media franchise such as Star Trek for new audiences instead of the same aging audiences.

The Maxwell Plan

To go with the piece about Firefly earlier, it seemed worth dipping deeper into my old Celestial Patrol material to talk about how a similar-looking show might have worked. Interestingly, I only saw the resemblance to the mainstream show after putting it together.

H. Beam Piper’s The Cosmic Computer, also published as Graveyard of Dreams and Junkyard Planet with some differences, features young engineer Conn Maxwell tasked with finding an ancient supercomputer that he doesn’t believe exist. He, therefore, floats the idea of using the myth of the computer (Merlin) to rebuild his homeworld’s failing economy. If I remember correctly, Maxwell brings together a crew including the hardened veteran of a war of secession, a perky young woman engineer attracted to Maxwell, an affluent doctor “slumming it” in the area and in love with Maxwell’s sister, a mysterious preacher from off-world, and a violent pirate/mercenary. In other words, it has most of the Firefly cast under different names, sitting in a 1953 book, even if it doesn’t predict the relationships.

They travel on the Ourouborous, which in my version, Maxwell has started using to “steal” and “smuggle” his family’s own goods to make himself seem shady, and uses illegal substances as cover for transporting necessities for the less-fortunate. He then turns to the Merlin story to suggest improvements to people to spur growth in the community. At some point in the story, they might find the real computer and need to deal with its secrets.

At the time, I liked the idea. Now, the similarity to Firefly makes it feel like it doesn’t fit, even if the network of confidence schemes to trick people into improving the economy feels more clever now than it did then. If I went back to it, I’d probably work to distance the idea from the well-known show, instead of accentuating the similarities.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or reading in March.

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.

  • Wilfred started out feeling like an excuse for crass jokes, but I admit that it grew on me, especially through the second season.

  • The Madame Blanc Mysteries (first two seasons) works well enough, though I’d really like to find some version of the amateur detective trope that doesn’t involve so much cooperation with police…

  • The Night Manager has a couple of fun moments peripheral to the main plot, but so much of it lives in that outdated masculine posturing space, with men grunting insinuations through gritted teeth that they already said conversationally.

  • Grassroots, despite the language gap, struck me as interesting…except for how they keep referring to a brutal, racially driven attack on a woman as a “prank.” Ugh.

  • I gave up on Monsters, with so much that feels drawn from a dozen other projects.

  • I admit to not enjoying Call Me Dad at all, maybe because of the language barrier, maybe because many in the cast irritated me, and maybe the plot points that I followed didn’t work for me. Because all of those problems make an appearance, I can’t rightly say…

  • Harry Wild, season 4 continues one of the better detective shows out there, and does it fairly well.

  • The Count of Monte Cristo tells the story, I guess…

  • Douglas Is Cancelled does the increasingly irritating thing that I associate more with British television, where it wants to say something about social progress, but also wants to make it “funny” for both sides, so you end up with the nihilistic everybody-bashing, but desperately wanting us to feel empathy for the accused white man with institutional power. It tries to pull it together in a couple of the last ten minutes, but using less than two percent of your runtime on anything like a condemnation of bad behavior? And even then, it desperately wants to miss the point.

  • The Juniper Tree, in retrospect, probably only holds any interest for anybody because it features Björk before she became famous…

  • Ancestral Night has some great ideas and usually solid writing, though it sometimes felt like it had drifted off-topic or didn’t want to engage with its characters.

  • Green seemed almost incomprehensible to me, reminding me a lot of old 1950s short stories for men that largely existed to tell us that women don’t make any sense. Based on the description, the film definitely had deeper aspirations than that, but didn’t seem to want to share any of that with us.

  • I don’t have any history with the character, but I got a few laughs out of How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). Some of it fell flat, but it plays enough with the standard form to keep things interesting.

  • Il Paradiso della Signore, season 10 seems increasingly opaque as it definitely assumes that I care about all these once-side characters, while the actual store from the title almost feels like a grudging afterthought.

  • Minority Report comes fairly close to actually interrogating policing. It doesn’t quite get there, but it does at least try…

  • The Puzzle Lady doesn’t really innovate, other than maybe the overly ambitious teenagers, and it has a premise that doesn’t really do anything for the show, but it does have a charming cast and solid writing.

  • A Normal Life felt like it came from another era, fascinated by the trials of caregivers of a person with a (developmental) disability, rather than the actual person. Boo-hoo, the family sometimes needs to put in more effort. And yeah, that can get hard, but maybe somebody else in the story possibly has it worse?

  • Fenris bored me a bit. It has good music and some nice scenery, but not exactly the most interesting plot, even ignoring the language barrier that sometimes drifts from Norwegian to French.

  • Will to Love probably qualifies as one of the better iterations on this low-budget, definitely not created for a general population, one-off films. It has a couple of worthless characters who seem to exist to pad the run-time, but actually has a fairly clever plot, some good acting, and a couple of well-written bits.

  • The Freedom Race felt a bit too paint-by-numbers in its world-building, and some characters feel wedged in, but I mostly enjoyed the story and the protagonist.

  • Haru Book 1: Spring sometimes felt like it tried too hard to seem “cute,” instead of staying in its sincere space, but worked more than it didn’t.

  • Filaments: A KerBop Story embraces its weird premise and runs with it. We need more work like this…

  • Storm Boy didn’t hold my attention.

  • Why do we not have more work like The Tipsy Mystery? I admit that it gets a little too deep in the “teen sex comedy” weeds in early episodes to set everything up, but combining it with some fun (and funny) action scenes and the mystery, and…I forgot that I can’t understand a word that anybody says, which I consider high praise.

  • K9 World Cup…ugh. This feels like that class of children’s media where the writers assume that the audience has already moved on after the credits.

  • Here Comes Peter Cottontail came fairly new to me, probably because I never found Easter particularly interesting. The story probably doesn’t hold together, but it has a spectacular voice cast, so I’d call it a good use of an hour…

  • Dark Winds (first three seasons) impressed me, even often feeling like it doesn’t necessarily require constant buy-in on retributive law enforcement. I had concerns about watching it seeing Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin as executive producers (not a deal-breaker, but felt like a desperate move), but it has a fantastic main cast, and things only really fall apart when they try to remind us that this takes place in the 1970s. Oh, also, because (one of the few criticisms) it keeps wedging in white people, particularly Jeri Ryan, I keep calling it Dark Skies in my notes, the 1996 X-Files knockoff set in the 1960s that added Ryan near the end.

  • The Wedding Banquet has sat on my list for a while, and at the end of Women’s History Month and Asian American History Month on the horizon, I gave it a shot, and I shouldn’t have waited. Other than a (brief) worry that we’d get yet another Kelly Marie Tran character throwing tantrums because of problems with her mother, I enjoyed it a lot.

  • The Love Hypothesis made me laugh pretty much throughout, sometimes aloud, after the early setup.

Blog Posts for March 2026

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 Copyright Searches, Free Culture, Responsibilities, Developer Diary, Day of the Book Smugglers, 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.

Web Pages That Caught My Attention

These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.

That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.

—John

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