Weekend Reads (June 15): Microsoft Excel, Leaving Google, Toto’s “Africa,” Schrödinger’s Cat
Recommended weekend reading for June 15, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
The Verge’s David Pierce traveled to Las Vegas for the Excel World Championship, which finds the best spreadsheet-ers in the world competing against each other for fame and fortune.
Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword — exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year’s competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it’s all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It’s a game. Now it hopes to become a sport.
I’ve come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing — a company’s sales, a person’s lifestyle, a region’s political leanings, a race car — and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.
Via Kottke.
I always enjoy a good cinematic oral history, and this time around, here’s an oral history of Gremlins featuring director Joe Dante and actress Phoebe Cates.
Since its release 40 years ago this week, Gremlins has appealed to our base instincts. But what makes it a classic is that there’s far more to it than its core of silly madness. Director Joe Dante threw horror, science fiction, slapstick, satire, family drama, and holiday nostalgia into a blender and pushed the puree button. Amazingly, the swirl of green goop he created congealed and formed a masterpiece — one that’s both madcap and governed by a specific set of rules that people still remember today.
“Somebody once said to me that I make movies and the MAD magazine parodies of movies at the same time,” Dante says. “That was a big influence on me, MAD magazine. And so all the movies that I’ve done have a certain absurd take on the material.”
I’ve really enjoyed the various essays in Reactor’s “Science Fiction Film Club” series, such as Kali Wallace’s review/analysis of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Spielberg has talked about how the malfunctioning mechanical sharks used in Jaws made him reduce how much he could show the creature, and he seems to have learned a valuable lesson from the experience: you can convince your audience of a lot if you refrain from showing them so much that it looks fake. So many scenes in Close Encounters work this way, with the same psychological effect: heightening the tension, unsettling the characters, telling us enough that we know what’s going on but not so much that we begin to deconstruct it while watching.
Never quite adding up, that is, until the end. In a story that depends on generating a lot of mystery and expectation around an unseen element, there is always a choice about whether to reveal that element fully. We normally think of this in terms of horror movie monsters and the risk that comes with building up something terrifying, only to have all that terror dissipate when the monster doesn’t live up to the hype. But Close Encounters is doing the exact opposite. There has been tension, fear, and uncertainty building all through the movie; Roy and Jillian, especially, are confused and scared by what’s happening to them. The goal of the ending is to erase that fear entirely and let awe take its place.
It’s been close to 15 years since I last watched Close Encounters. I should probably change that soon.
Matt Lee reflects on how the monsters in horror movies like The Evil Dead and The Brood helped him come to terms with his disability.
Even as the maimed, distorted bodies of creatures like the Castle Freak or the Brood or the Deadites or the Wicked Witch mirrored real-world disabilities and offered me an escape, a safe environment where it was appropriate to root for the villain, I realized that I didn’t want to hurt people, to injure others as I’d been, whether physically or mentally. And more than anything, I was determined not to use my disability as a scapegoat, to behave like a monster and blame it on the way I was born.
Gainax, the anime studio behind such iconic titles as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gunbuster, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, has filed for bankruptcy.
In its statement on Friday, Gainax explained that its financial situation worsened starting in about 2012, due to various factors including managing a restaurant that did not meet projections, establishing a mismanaged CG company, giving large unsecured loans to executives, and running its business operations as if it was a small personal venture.
Gainax said that due to massive debts incurred by management, it was removed from production committees after not paying royalties, and it was sued for debts and other matters. During this worsening financial situation, many affiliated companies were established under the Gainax name in regional areas, which led to many resignations at Gainax itself and the resulting loss of its capability to produce animation as a studio. These companies later declared that they were not related to the main Gainax studio, with Gainax claiming these companies “relinquished their administrative responsibilities.”
Related: Back in 2019, I wrote an extended deep dive into Neon Genesis Evangelion, “one of the most popular, influential, and controversial anime titles of all time.”
Aaron Rolston details all of the steps he took to free himself of the “Google Monopoly” after getting an unexpected price increase for no apparent reason.
If you're a normal, sane person who isn't bothered by small monthly fees or enjoys being comfortably nestled into the welcoming embrace of a mega-corporation… then read no further. Honestly, if the tools you're using work for you, don’t change a thing and ignore my ramblings. But for me — and surely lots of other solopreneurs that depend on tools and systems like these to make a living — these red flags don’t sit right. I’m fundamentally opposed to anything that eliminates the user’s right to choose what’s best for them, and Google certainly falls into this camp.
Via Greg Storey. Rolston admits that the amount of effort it took is probably too much for most users. But I found it interesting because I, too, have taken steps to free myself of Google to a certain degree — though I still live much of my life in Gmail. For better or worse, Google has developed a lot of momentum in my life, and it’s a non-trivial task to overcome that.
If you own a Roku-powered TV, then beware: your next software upgrade might turn on motion smoothing.
Reports on Roku’s community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing “motion smoothing” without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered “Action Smoothing” before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV’s general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users.
Motion smoothing is intended to improve the display of live sports footage, but when it’s applied to normal footage (e.g., movies), it results in a flat, overly fluid look that’s straight out the “uncanny valley.”
Toto’s music video for “Africa” has officially passed one billion views on YouTube.
The Toto IV single has lived a lot of lives since its 1982 debut, being certified gold by the RIAA in 1991, then becoming an Internet meme in the 2000s, even leading to a fan-powered Weezer cover that brought the song back to the Hot 100, peaking at No. 51 in 2018. “Africa” now stands at eight-times platinum, as of a 2022 RIAA certification.
Watch the video below:
Related: An oral history of Toto’s “Africa,” which was recorded in the final moments of the Toto IV sessions as a throwaway track.
Also related: Wikipedia has a list of the most-viewed YouTube videos of all time. “Baby Shark Dance” tops the list with a staggering 14.5 billion views (as of May 17, 2024).
This one’s for the old school “Chrindie” folks… Some kind souls scanned a bunch of old issues of 7ball Magazine — i.e., the Raygun or Alternative Press of the Christian music scene back in the mid-to-late ’90s — and uploaded them to the Internet Archive. Cue the Christian music nostalgia in 3… 2… 1…
Finally, Schrödinger’s Cat might be the most famous thought experiment in history — it was referenced in a recent episode of Apple’s Dark Matter, for instance — but it took several decades to achieve its popularity.
While Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger concocted the conceit of the cat, he was not the one who popularized it. The fictitious animal only really entered wider public consciousness after American science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin published a short story called “Schrödinger’s Cat,” 50 years ago. It was just one of dozens of works published by Le Guin, who died in 2018 after a long and celebrated career.
Via 1440.
From the Blog
World Theatre’s 1989 self-titled debut (which was also their only album) offers an interesting glimpse into the world of late ’80s and early ’90s indie/alternative Christian music.
People fail to realize just how underground so much of this music was, existing in its own unique culture that ran parallel to both the secular music industry as well as the broader contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry. As a result, a good deal of this music flew well under the radar even for those of us who grew up in the Church during those decades.
Read my full review.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.