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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September ...

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September 2026

Oct 06, 2026

Today is Tuxday, 22 of Habniah 4119. [4119.06.22]

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

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Guatemala, Hong Kong SAR China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, Netherlands, Nicaragua, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, 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.

September’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the seventy-third issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Grand Unified Theories

This might grow into a post someday, but I have a half-formed crackpot theory and wanted to share it: Every major media franchise has a core concept that its success depends on, independent of the quality of individual productions. Let me pitch some examples, mostly but not entirely science fiction.

  • Battlestar Galactica: Dealing with the aftermath of a mass slave revolt.

  • Doctor Who: In a world of (funny) cosmic horrors, solve problems by recruiting possible successors.

  • Highlander: People dressed in silly historical outfits chopping each other’s heads off while shouting about how many you can have or quoting Queen songs.

  • Muppets: The show must go on, regardless of the wacky crisis.

  • Star Trek: Gulliver’s Travels, but in space, each story an opportunity to use an alien culture as a vehicle to chastising part of the audience that holds toxic ideas.

  • Star Wars: Toxic masculinity—prioritizing violence, stifling emotions and relationships, and so forth—harms individuals and society.

Not every franchise has this, interestingly. For example, you’d think that it’d fit right into that list, but Stargate has an aesthetic of United States military might projected onto the universe at large, but it doesn’t have that or really anything else as the guiding principle.

I point this out, because this allows for a kind of quick judgment call on installments of a franchise. You can’t guess how it’ll get received—often, fans like whatever has the highest production values and tells the most approachable story, then try to rationalize it later—but you can get a good sense of what parts of the franchise will stick in the popular imagination longer. I also find it interesting which franchises understand this and others almost seem to resent the idea.

Let’s take Doctor Who as an example. I would argue that, if some part of the franchise had a story arc where a former Companion and their new friend stumble across the cult of some horrible alien god beginning to colonize and terraform Earth, then you can already see that story fitting neatly, and you might already have a cast in mind. It works within the confines where the main character (and trade dress in the credits) could plausibly change at any time. Done well, even with the cheapest available effects, you can imagine people calling that a defining moment. By contrast, if you pitch UNIT scrambling because kaiju have begun tearing apart London, even though that has a lot of the same structure as the other story, it feels like filler.

Or consider the Muppets. If the Muppets need to put on a show—a variety show, a play, or whatever—under adverse circumstances, you probably have something that works. The more the story digs into their personal lives, you might get something fun—see The Great Muppet Caper as such as an example somewhere in the middle that I doubt anybody hates—but it generally feels forced as we interrogate Kermit and Piggy’s romance or whatever.

Battlestar Galactica seems like a massive outlier, here. Every iteration of the concept wraps its storytelling around the slave revolt, but it absolutely refuses to engage with it. After all, the original started out largely as an unauthorized sequel to the original Star Wars, and the Cylons look like nothing if not the Droids and Stormtroopers turning against the Empire. And while the fallout figures into the plot of every version, the scripts avoid seeing it that way, preferring to make the story about the poor refugee caravan set upon by evil forces. Maybe that explains why it collects some occasional fans, but the public doesn’t care.

I don’t really have anywhere to go with this, at the moment, but it seemed worth considering.

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, and instead of digging into my archives for an old project with enough heft to outline, let’s look at some upcoming posts.

Towards the Rim

Last month, I talked about an overt Star Trek pastiche, constructed primarily by taking characters, extraterrestrial cultures, and situations from Free Culture pastiches of the franchise. This time, I want to talk about something further afield: Because I had two ideas related to Star Trek and the earliest seeds of The Light’s Edge came about largely inspired by Star Wars, I wanted something in the same vein that felt nothing like an existing media franchise. Word of warning, this might get a bit long, since it has a bunch of moving parts.

Enter mythology, specifically The Salt Cyclopedia of Comparative Mythology, which I got free as part of supporting the creator on Patreon. The book especially notes mythological ideas common across cultures that probably didn’t have direct connections, so I started there, collecting those ideas that came from enough ancient cultures that it wouldn’t single out any specific culture. As I built that list, I started to see how many of the ideas mapped neatly to space travel.

Think of the apparent prehistoric obsession with bears, resulting in two constellations today, and echoing in the modern world’s obsession with the resilience of tardigrades (“water bears”) in space, a few years back. Or consider the many origin myths that have a succession of powerful figures, one (often an amphibian or bird) diving into the void or a primordial ocean to construct the land from debris to form the world, another terraforming the surface, and a third bringing fire and/or civilization to the people, punished by the gods, sometimes through imprisonment and torture on the Moon, sharing a fate with other cultures’ ruler of the underworld, doing penance or as a “sleeping Satan” whose return would portend some catastrophe. The Axis Mundi sounds like a space elevator, ignoring the rotational physics, and the Axis often has four rivers associated with it leading to other worlds. Floods wipe away entire worlds despite certain people having ways to outlast it. I could go on, and…did in my notes. Critically, you have heard most of these stories before, no matter what parts of the world you might have some familiarity with; different civilization-bringers and world-axes might have come to your mind, but you know the idea.

Looking at the same author’s book on Thalassocracies, or societies ruled by the sea in various ways, I noticed it pitching the Ka-Ay Kawkla, sea-faring nomads who never make landfall, but instead build structures where coastal towns can meet them halfway to trade. As I started looking at adapting that in the same way, it mentions that a space-faring version would probably build space elevators to avoid entering the gravity well. The book also has a culture that believes that some people can speak with either the ocean itself or water elementals, and that similarly maps to space without much effort.

At that point, the world—as if an amphibian started piecing it together from the chaos, maybe—started to knit itself together for me. Near-future Earth detects an extraterrestrial signal offering resolutions to many crises. On accepting the offer, a signal comes in from another direction, warning that the “help” comes in the form of a force intent on washing away all intelligent life and, when we admit that we have no defenses, after a hesitation, astronomers receive plans for minimal arks to evacuate the planet. It probably has too much happening to present at once, but let’s check some of the back-story that I wrote with an occasional annotation.

Many arks launched, probably not enough, but they shot away in all directions shortly after allowing passengers to see the Earth eroded into asteroids by whatever planet-killers.

Over hundreds of years (forty decades or centuries would evoke the ancient love of the number forty), arks make their way back home, receiving updates from the ships “diving” through the solar system to gather the mass to construct a new Earth and terraform it. And people across the arks somehow begin communing with tardigrades, and through the tardigrades to what they call space itself, allowing for some navigation and hyperspace effects.

The arks land their passengers (descendants of the original humans) safely, but do not survive landing themselves, and people settling the world could mostly believe that nothing happened, except…for the space elevator, the World Axis. A creature then arrived on the elevator, furnishing plans for comprehensible faster-than-light engines, insisting that any species surviving the planet-killers deserve a place in the galactic community, even if that means breaking the law by sharing that space-travel technology. They didn’t get much further in the explanation, though, as an invisible force captured and imprisoned them on the Moon.

Unable to reach the Moon, “shamans” guide people through the “currents” in space to discover an abandoned O’Neill Cylinder space station around a distant white dwarf, but seemingly “pointing” back to Earth.

I like this setup, because it provides four major places for this universe to focus. The expedient, traditional approach would follow a ship in the fleet dispatched to search for the missing arks, while the shamans direct building colonies and space elevators along the way; they may also hope to make contact with this alleged galactic-scale culture and maybe free humanity’s benefactor. You might also imagine the shamans wanting to scout the rim of the Milky Way, convinced that “the answers” (an unending supply of faster-than-light fuel, whatever) lie out there, as indicated by the World Axis and the alien space station, while others wonder if they actually have some connection to a powerful force or make decent guesses. At the top of the space elevator, you presumably have Earth’s primary spaceport, which seems like the most focused drama, especially with the interest in watching the Moon. And then you have what I call “the Spindle,” that lonely alien space station that becomes humanity’s first permanent presence in outer space. Honestly, you could even (fifth of four) have an Earth-bound group, dealing with the widely divergent “clans” now reuniting for the first time in more than four hundred years, with more showing up all the time with cultures that have grown in weird directions.

And it doesn’t hurt my view of the scenario that it doesn’t really take a position on whether the mystical-sounding aspects have a serious scientific basis or derive from superstition accumulated while lost in interstellar space that coincidentally got some things right in the early days.

Granted, the premise has some major flaws, too. Blocking off the Moon seems almost silly in all this, though an early draft wanted to use the prison as a shrine that caused many clans to want to bury their dead around it; I forget why. The background also (by design, as back-story, but still) has next to no humanity in the story, no individual personalities to talk about, meaning that this premise still needs the entire construction of characters and their specific situations. In other words, no matter which of the five premises I wanted to start with, I’d still have all the work of developing the concept into a story ahead of me.

Honestly, the complexity and the lack of focus (which, don’t get me wrong, I love) also made it impossible to pick a working name. If I remember correctly, Towards the Rim embarrassingly comes from one of the LLMs—consider it a terrible placeholder title—the best option of probably a couple of dozen along the lines of hilarious trash like “From the Ashes: The Rise of the Replacement Earth,” which sounds more like the worst PhD thesis than a television show or novel or whatever…

Media

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

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.

  • Centipede got a couple of laughs out of me, despite not following the language. It goes from stereotypically gritty crime drama to fun action spoof. And it has a pretty good cast, too.

  • Spider-Man Vol. 1: Trial by Spider certainly rates as one of the better “Big Two” comics that I’ve read over the past few years. It tries to make its points. It seems like a real shame, though, that they saddled it with the “need to keep fighting crime despite the democratically elected government seeing more damage in wrecking a city block than letting someone steal insured trinkets” trope.

  • Eleventh Hour comes really close to getting this sort of show right. The police (FBI) work serves as loose support, and often comes off as shady, as the agents that work with the protagonist increasingly come around to his way of thinking. That said, in the final run of episodes, one episode dives into every anti-terrorism trope, complete with compromising Europeans to “blend in,” and that the rookie becomes a “real” agent by killing one of the suspects.

  • Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Unicorn Crush…do I really still need to talk about these? If you have the opportunity (like the library app providing them for no credits), then read any of them…

  • A Poetry Handbook, I read on a whim, not because I intend to write poetry or have an abiding urge to “understand” it better, but because the PBS documentary on Mary Oliver caught my attention.

  • Alice in Borderland had a lot of potential, but didn’t feel like it wanted to go anywhere with it beyond playing with the premise.

  • Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary and Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime absolutely delighted me. And it makes me wonder why we have so little mystery media that explicitly plays with the (other) classics.

  • You Had Me at Hola does a great job with the story, though it does that weird thing of dropping in plenty of real-world brand names, but then…“Screenflix.”

  • Educators doesn’t quite work, as I’d imagine any long-form improvised work wouldn’t, but it did occasionally get a giggle out of me.

  • Scenes From a Marriage didn’t hold my interest past the first episode. I can see the realism and the artistry, and even appreciate it, but can’t sit through five more hours of it.

  • When We Were Magic doesn’t quite do enough to distinguish everybody in the cast, but I’d love to see an adaptation of it.

  • My Life Is Murder really fell apart at the end, trying to force a romance while also going full-on copaganda, complete with murderers “getting off on technicalities,” with nobody seeming to know that technicalities mean civil rights violations, not a typo on paperwork.

  • Quirke felt extremely over-sold, suggesting a non-police detective story that spends most of its time on the alcoholism of a police-adjacent person who spends all his time with police, then has a fifteen-minute mystery at the end, packed to the brim with gritty scandal…

  • Chicano Frankenstein does a decent job of the satire, though verges on parody a few times as it largely quotes relevant politicians and even inserting real-world figures. That said, it also doesn’t wear out its welcome at all, so I’d recommend checking it out.

  • Changing Ends didn’t hit with me. I gave it a full season, but the whole 1980s bullying vibe felt played out in the 1980s. It does a better job of it than Stranger Things, at least, but I lived through all this nonsense the first time around…

  • Dawn gets a little too deep into its “torture porn” angle and its quasi-incest scandals, but Brec Bassinger can certainly carry off lead roles like this.

  • Separation of Church and Hate felt fairly stale for me, especially after the hype that it got when released. I suppose that the sentiment never goes out of fashion, and they haven’t added much to the Bible in a while, so it doesn’t need a ton of novelty in its core content. But it still plays the same hits in the same ways—noting the line frequently taken out of context by fascists, then talking about the lines immediately before and after to provide context exposing the conservative interpretation as wrong—while including tired “edgy” jokes (Trump impressions, demeaning men by comparing them to women or their anatomy, etc.) and failing to notice the jokes in the Bible. Like, why even bring up the “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” line, barely relevant to the conversation, if you don’t want to talk about Jesus making the joke that anybody trying to get out of paying taxes doesn’t care about faith; they belong to Caesar, not their money, in other words. The book doesn’t care about that.

  • D.I. Ray does fairly well for “yet another cop show.” And thought of as a vehicle to give the lead—who has appeared in a bunch of things that I haven’t seen playing much different kinds of character—room to play tense drama with political overtones, I can appreciate it, because Nagra warrants a lot more attention than she gets.

  • Master Plan falls into a category that I don’t usually mention, here—podcasts—but as it closes out its second season, I did want to call it out for (especially in the first half) putting a lot of historical detail together to show that we didn’t accidentally end up with Trump. The far-right has built the infrastructure for initiatives like Project 2025 for more than fifty years.

  • How We Named the Stars tells a good story, but seems to have absolutely no fun in doing it…

  • Pure has more than a few moments that made me wonder if it wanted to make ill people the butt of the joke, but otherwise manages to both hit serious points but doesn’t take itself too seriously. We need more work like this. On the other hand, we spend far too much time with discount British Macauley Culkin, trying to sell him as a romantic interest, for some reason.

  • Razzle Dazzle Unicorn: A Heavenly Nostrils Chronicle continues the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series, and delighted me like the rest so far.

  • Death Under the Perseids had solid writing, for the most part, but the story gets so over-complicated that the antagonist gets a full first-person chapter (via a letter) to explain it, never a good sign.

  • Marble Hall Murders continues—probably ends, because the author wrote the book to adapt for the show because of the excitement around the show, and I doubt that he can keep squeezing the idea like that—one of the more innovative detective shows out there.

  • Tiny Threads sometimes drags (especially for such a short book), such as with the extensive reminders that the protagonist drinks to excess, but when it digs in, it does really well.

  • Quince #1 sets up a potentially interesting story, but I can’t really judge twelve pages of setup.

  • Misfits, season 1 desperately wants everybody to recognize it as edgy, so it doesn’t bother with silly square things like plot and interesting characters. I doubt that I’ll continue with the series, because I think that I’ve had my fill of “jokes” where a character humps at the air to imply an acknowledgment that sex exists.

  • Little Ukraine bored me so senseless that I caught myself getting ready to go for a walk in the middle of it. Add some tracksuits on people who definitely don’t run, and you could probably play Eastern European American Stereotype Bingo.

  • Double Standards 2, I hope, brings an end to this bizarre “pleasant, overweight woman (somehow) needs to choose between two abusive men” series(?) of films. I like the lead, but it uses vague stereotypes for a bunch of characters and the either/or messaging instead of not letting the lead realize that she could live alone…ugh.

  • Into the Unbeing, vol 1 has a maybe-interesting premise, but didn’t really grab me as it drowned itself in some existential meaning instead of exploring the space to have meaning.

  • The Anatomy of Magic seems engaging enough, but it also sometimes feels like it forgets the story that it wants to tell and instead starts vamping for time. Or maybe I lost track?

  • Train Master adds to the list of children’s films that assume that the audience doesn’t remotely care about the quality. It comes off as so cheap that I thought that they shoddily dubbed the film from some other language, but the performers’ lips move with the dialogue, so I guess not.

  • Two Days bored me senseless from the start. It tries to hang a lampshade on self-indulgent independent films, but still makes plenty of room for misogynist comments.

  • The Day of the Triffids, which I somehow haven’t seen before, owes a lot to many adaptations of The War of the Worlds, I suspect, but it still feels interesting. Although I have to point out that, viewing this in the 2020s, the idea of humans banding together to protect each other from an existential threat seems much sillier. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have shown us that a vocal minority would demand that we ship children to the Triffid fields and keep TGI Friday’s open even under siege, because where else can they harass waitresses on their budget?

  • The Hit delighted me. I expected mindless violence instead of a goofy buddy comedy, so it came as a pleasant surprise.

  • Il Paradiso della Signores, season 12 continues with far too many side-characters. This batch of episodes also brings into focus that I…don’t actually understand the structure, here. In Italy, this airs daily. We get batches of ten episodes. But I don’t understand how they edit it down, because some plots move fast and recur, while others sit in place, giving the impression that Italians celebrate Christmas every few weeks or have a gestation period measured in centuries…

  • The Marlow Murder Club, season 3 continues one of the best mystery shows on television, marred primarily by the close relationship with the police and far-too-short seasons.

  • The Light Touch doesn’t hold together. It feels like they took the best ideas and exchanges from five different films, but connected them as minimally as possible, and filled the remaining time with bland sex comedy-adjacent shtick.

  • Erin’s Guide to Kissing Girls felt like a mess, trying to do too much, but also moving so slowly.

  • Sing Democracy 250 pushed me away for the past couple of months, given that the patriotic holiday concerts on PBS tend towards the miserable. However, despite the sea of white people in the orchestra and chorus, it leans towards diversity and especially Blackness, with adaptations of James Baldwin and Lift Every Voice and Sing.

  • Edgemont, season 1 didn’t land for me. The writing fits into that general 1995-2005 clichéd teen drama, with awful characters. They compound this with some truly terrible acting. And apparently you can leave school whenever you like with nobody caring? I probably won’t return for more seasons.

  • Interview with the Vampire, speaking as someone with no connection to or interest in the source material, I feel like this show would’ve worked far better without weighing it down with 1990s Emo vampires. It has two exciting rebooted characters, and two great episodes with (mostly) only Louis and the interviewer, but instead of capitalizing on that, we burn hour after hour on Lestat or the European theater troupe mincing around as if they serve any purpose beyond (I assume) “took up so much space in the novel/film.”

  • Todos Cambiamos felt like it needed more explanation (or non-verbal, if they handled it in dialogue) at the top, because I spent half an hour watching what looked like everybody in society ignore a man in drag going about his business, which…good for representation, but didn’t seem like a compelling story. It took a long time before they let on why we’d care about these people. Instead, it leaves me with the maybe-bigger problem that a twenty-first century film couldn’t bother to bring a transgender performer to play the transgender character.

  • Fantastic New Worlds: Handmade Puppet Dreams does a nice job of bringing the early Muppet-style energy to a new audience where close-ups of puppets singing no longer really falls under the heading of “anything goes.” It gets as uneven as any collection of short films, though, ranging from clever to the utterly self-indulgent.

  • The Color Wheel irritated me enough that I gave up after fifteen minutes.

  • Mind the Gap kept feeling like it wanted to build to something, but I think that it built to people not liking Manhattan but need to go anyway in the final act…?

Oh, if you start to notice more comics in the mix than usual—not many, this month, since I don’t exactly have the time to sit and read book after book, even if I might sometimes want to—especially without Hoopla links, I discovered that my library now also provides access to Comics Plus. It doesn’t include much (anything?) from DC or Marvel, but does include a surprising number of titles that have caught my interest elsewhere. It might get some decent use, though it doesn’t do well at providing shareable URLs, so I use Bookshop. I mention it, though, because your library might offer it, too.

Blog Posts for September 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 Developer Diary, Hindi Day, Roguish, Developer Diary, Yom Kippur, and What Next? 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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