Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Two months ago I ended the longest stretch of unemployment - by far - that I've experienced in 30 years.

Some of that time was voluntary. I had a huge backlog of stuff to go through from my father's passing, including hundreds of 35mm slides that needed to be carefully digitized and catalogued, along with notes and other corroborating stuff. I spent almost two months bent over a scanner with a dustcloth and canned air, and wrote custom Python code to add descriptions and EXIF tags with approximate timestamps and locations. The project would have dragged out for years if I'd been working, and I had savings to sustain me, so it felt like the right move.

When that was done I began applying for jobs. I assumed it would go just like the last four times: I'd send my resume to a few places that seemed compelling, then get snapped up after only a handful of interviews. Instead, I was in job hunt purgatory for eight months.

Here's the breakdown:

About 200 applications made in total, with about 30 of those being for additional positions in the same company.

About 60 of those applications received a response, politely declining me.

About 15 of those led to some kind of interview sequence, over the phone or in person.

All the rest - about 125 - got zero response of any kind.

This wasn't some shotgun approach. I curated, and only applied for things I that seemed like an excellent match. I wrote cover letters for every position, briefly calling out the most relevant parts of my resume to help recruiters do their work. This was the approach I used in 2011 and it got a steady stream of results back then. Not this time.

Four of the applications led to a second round of interviews. That's the true gauntlet, where you meet with six to ten people, usually all on the same day, and they all hit you with different questions or code tests.

Of those, two made offers. I declined one, then accepted the other.

I was very relieved to be employed again, but the larger question remained: What happened? Even during rocky times in the industry I've always been a good candidate. I've had to regularly decline or ignore offers to recruit me away from the place I'm at, since I tend to dig in thoroughly and be happy where I am. It turns out 2024 was a terrible time to be looking for tech work, even for me, for multiple reasons.

First, for all of 2024 the specter of generative AI haunted my search for employment. Companies began using AI tools to screen resumes, and applicants began using AI tools to mass-apply for positions indiscriminately, creating a caucus race straight out of Wonderland. Data churned and electricity burned, moving documents around that nobody wrote, and nobody read. At the same time, people on both sides of this mess didn't know how AI-assisted coding tools would change the industry. Were programmers vestigial now? Was there any point to even hiring them? Would a junior developer work just as well as a senior one with 20 years of experience, with ChatGPT at their side? There was too much noise and speculation, and very little data.

At the same time, the remote work exodus triggered by COVID was in a new phase. Since it was now expected that a remote-first worker would be living in a low-rent area, having moved there to exploit the difference in cost of living, employers in an uncertain market could offer them lower salaries that they would be forced to accept, trapping them there. They leveraged the uncertainty created by AI tech: Better take this job, since it's all you're worth from here on out, and even that will be gone soon. Sorry but your skills are garbage now.

I'd followed the rise of generative tools with interest, but had not developed my hands-on skills with machine learning beyond the basics. As this unfolded around me I began to believe that writing code - a core part of my work - was about to stop being a thing, and we would all just describe the program we needed to an AI and it would cook everything for us. So the only remaining money would be in further refining these AI models and tools, and that meant I would have to walk away from almost everything I knew about software development - including any specific language skills - and re-learn a career from scratch. That felt like a journey directly into burnout. Since that would take a long time, I began to feel like I should take any offer at all, even one for almost nothing, just to close the gap in my resume and keep the lights on while I re-trained on my own time. Perhaps if I aimed low enough I could stand out against recent college graduates - who in my past experience were barely employable at all - before my savings were totally gone. Perhaps I should strip 15 years off the tail of my resume so I didn't look overqualified. Perhaps that wouldn't work anyway, since there were white hairs in my beard, and age discrimination is definitely a thing in my industry.

An eight month search makes one ask all kinds of scary questions. "Is my kind of work just gone, and not coming back? Am I a terrible candidate? Do I interview badly? Do I even like this kind of work anymore? Am I asking too much, even when I ask for the same salary and inflation has hollowed it out?" As the process wore on for me, the questioning got worse, and I tried to adapt.

I broadened my range of applications, took endless coding tests, reworked my resume and portfolio multiple times, and eventually started calling in favors from people I knew. One of the screening interviews I did was when my confidence was at a low ebb, and I clearly blew it, which was humiliating. In the worst cases, interviewers half my age were asking me questions that felt inane, and I no longer had the confidence to push back. I just wanted to stay on their good side and pass the gauntlet, so I would nod when they told me things like "JavaScript and Java are basically the same thing," and "Everyone uses Tailwind for CSS. There's nothing else like it." They were all so confident. They were employed, and I wasn't. They held the keys, and I was locked out.

A lot of those applications - about a third of them - were through LinkedIn. Zero of those led to even a first round. The only interest I got from LinkedIn was in the form of recruiters, three of which had lengthy phone interviews with me, promising they were setting me up for an interview with a specific company which then never materialized. That's right: The alleged clearing house for tech jobs, with the allegedly buzzing social media realm wired into the application process for the industry, sucked up days of my time and gave me jack shit in return. It was especially gross when their service began to barrage me with clearly AI-generated "show your expertise" questions, like, "You're faced with complex coding challenges. How can you sharpen your problem-solving skills?" ... Which I saw other users respond to with, of course, their own AI-generated pablum. LinkedIn was taking people desperate to find work, with limited energy and confidence, shoving them all onto a digital hamster wheel together, and running them to exhaustion for the sake of ad traffic. Meanwhile, the jobs they competed for ... were as fake as the "expert" questions in their forums.

During my second round at Amazon, the HR person straight-up told me that all the postings I'd applied for in California were fake. Amazon was required by law to post them publicly, but the truth was they were moving all those positions out of state, to areas with a lower cost of living, so they could cut salaries. Apple did the same thing, making a huge round of layoffs in late 2023 and then posting hundreds of open positions, and directing every application quietly into the garbage while they interviewed displaced internal candidates.

It took months of spinning my wheels before I understood what was going on. I banished LinkedIn from my browser and inbox, turned away from the big tech companies, and went searching around on - of all things - Google Maps, for companies within commute distance of my home. I made a huge list, then went directly to their websites and applied to what I found there, unless they redirected me to LinkedIn. I went through about 70 applications in this manner, day by day, and slowly made progress. That process was what led to the offers, and to the position I'm currently in.

And here's the kicker:

After two months at this present job, I am finding that software development is subject to exactly the same constraints and problems, and is serving the same needs, that it has for the last decade. Generative AI coding tools do make a lot of helpful suggestions, especially in self-contained projects, but they do not make junior developers into senior ones, let alone make us obsolete.

I thought everything was different now? I thought this was all solved problems, hand-waved away by the magic of chatbots telling us all what to do and write?

Machine learning and generative AI are being leveraged here, to optimize and automatically control extremely complex systems and do previously impractical things like examine 2d and 3d imagery for details and patterns that humans would never see. But that's what I would have expected two years ago, before the massive buzz clouded everyone's judgement. Where's the real industry-shattering stuff? I was told that AI coding would actually end software development as a discipline, the way the car ended the horse-drawn carriage. But the people I'm working for are still in desperate need of progress on the same two fronts - infrastructure and interface - as always, and the problems they need solved still require the same legwork and dialogue they did ten years ago. Someone needs to be there, needs to know what questions to ask and which to skip, needs to find the edges of the gap in a process and decide what goes there, and yes, someone needs to sit down and actually write code that fills the gap. Someone still needs to design the thing, build it, install it, test it, document it, and then redesign it as the needs change.

AI can help with most of those things but there's an absolute world of difference between "can help with" and "can do the whole thing unassisted". And there's a limit to that help, because the human needs training just as much as the AI does. A really really great set of tactical gear purchased from The Man Store will make an anarchist look like a marine, but he ain't gonna act like one, because he ain't got the training.

Of course, I am fully prepared to eat my own words ten years from now, when I can potentially have a conversation with a robot that has been trained in all of the problem-solving skills I have, and is smart enough to schedule its own follow-up meetings with myself and other stakeholders, and is interconnected with enough networks and data sources and other hardware to just write and deploy software by itself. That'll be cool. It doesn't scare me because by then I'll either be retired or doing something different.

But for now, after ten months of unemployment, I'm apparently back in the same industry I left, which kind of surprises me. I'm not sure how the industry is going to solve its problems with remote work, fake AI screening and applications, bait-and-switch employees, espionage, deliberately wasted effort, and the ongoing explosion and implosion of AI technology, but at least now it's not existential for me personally. I can learn on the clock, and there's some truly amazing stuff happening at my workplace. In the meantime, to anyone else still trapped on the wrong side of the door, trying to impress young self-important punks in the interview gauntlet, you have my sympathy.

A postscript:

Just before I accepted that offer in September, it was as though a tide had turned in the industry, and three other companies contacted me asking to schedule a second round of interviews.

Out of curiosity, I went in for one of those. The company was 23andMe. I went down to Sunnyvale and interviewed for about four hours. Afterwards I drove home, and heard ... nothing from them. Not even an email declining me. In retrospect that wasn't surprising: Two days later their board of directors resigned, and a few months after that the company laid off half its workforce. So ... they were distracted.

The Substance (2024)

This movie opens with the camera fixed on a patch of sidewalk, and stays there for a while. This turns out to be a mission statement from the director: For the next couple of hours we're going to focus on just a handful of people confined to their narrow world, and let the lack of any context reinforce the way those people seem imprisoned and deprived of choice. Then as events unfold, pressure will build, and since this is a horror movie, the inevitable explosion does not demolish the prison walls and set anyone free, it reflects inward at the characters, inflicting maximum carnage.

And you really do feel the rage building, along with the queasy body-horror discomfort of the protagonists making one bad choice after another. The payoff is surreal and stretches credulity but you won't really mind, since the director has been pushing in that direction by degrees, and you get a fun mixture of catharsis, fatalism, and over-the-top gore that I personally can't help calling "Pythonesque", because ... I am old.

Am I being vague about plot details here? You bet. This movie is worth seeing without spoilers. You want something more to go on? Okay, think Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" - that same kind of sick fever-dream intensity - but the addictive focus is on the young female body.

Seven and a half legs clad in jazzy retro leotards up.

Late Night With The Devil (2023)

This is a scrappy, stagey film that tries to mash together the "found footage" and the "fake documentary" forms of horror. The result is a poor version of both: The footage that was found is supposedly from in-studio magnetic tape recordings of live television broadcast in 1977, and even though it's been run through some nice modern effects processing to bake the colors and add fake distortion, it's too clear and deals with studio lights too well to be from that era. (And it's in stereo...) Meanwhile the documentary claims to present "behind the scenes footage" taken at the same time, but there is no reason given for why the cameras are rolling, let alone why there are two or three of them to catch both sides of a whispered conversation across a room.

But you know what? Who cares? After a while you realize you're being presented with something so unique, and made with such enthusiasm, that you embrace the forms anyway. And you start rooting for both the characters and the movie itself to make good on the level of weirdness that they seem to be building to.

In the end you get some over-ambitious misdirection similar to - of all things - The Blair Witch Project 2, plus a finale that goes completely off the rails at the same time it tries to tie everything together, and maybe you knew it was going to let you down just a bit, but you're glad you saw it.

Shout-outs to Ingrid Torelli for playing a lunatic with such a hilarious combination of grace and menace, and David Dastmalchian for finding a heart in a character that doesn't really have one on paper. The story wouldn't work at all otherwise.

Six hilariously retro title cards up out of ten.

Gretel and Hansel (2020)

This movie has a ton of atmosphere, and that's why I wanted to backtrack and see it. The trailer makes it clear that the story happens in a pastiche world, assembled from parts, and I was looking forward to how all those choices were knit together into a coherent vision. For example, you get modern Scandinavian architecture combined with interior decoration from a hundred years earlier, combined with furniture a hundred years before that, combined with tools from five centuries ago, all populated by characters wearing clothing that mixes customs from that whole timespan, and who speak modern English. Hey, if it all works, who cares?

The trouble is, it doesn't. The selections seem arbitrary rather than meaningful. The atmosphere of the movie is also tampered with by on-again off-again narration from the main character, forcing a sense of detachment into scenes that should feel intimate and immediate. In the end I had to wonder if all of the narration, including the opening monologue that explains the story, was bolted on later, when test audiences watched the relatively quiet version and griped that they couldn't understand a damn thing they were seeing. If I could, I would erase the memory of the film from my head and watch it again with the sound off, to see if the most important part of it - the atmosphere - was preserved enough for the pieces to cohere.

I'm not describing the plot. It's there in the title, yeah? The ending is a little different. I dunno, watch it I guess? Alice Krige is in it, and is great fun. Sophia Lillis is the new modern hotness so that's a plus.

Five out of ten suspicious witchy fake foodstuffs up.

Sputnik (2020)

This movie was robbed of its planned theatrical release by COVID-19. When I saw the trailer for it a year later, I thought it looked good enough to get another try at the Western box office. That chance evaporated when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Which is unfortunate, because the movie is set in 1983, during the days of the USSR, and the former Soviet Union is looming relatively large in the world consciousness. Also, slow-burn horror films with ideas much bigger than their budgets have become quite popular in these lingering pandemic post-traumatic-stress times. Combine that with a creepy institutional setting, some gooey alien effects, and some 80's space program nostalgia, and you've got a movie that seems right for the times. And, one I am guaranteed to watch.

So I did, and it was good, but in retrospect I've had to revise my ideas about that scrubbed theatrical run. Western audiences would not have embraced it at the time, and a very late streaming release was a kindness. Moviegoers would walk in expecting a story focused squarely on the mystery of the alien, and instead they would find a story split equally between two things: The alien, and the way the communist bureaucracy of the USSR twisted everything, across politics, science, criminal justice, the military, and so on. The plot is a tangled web of threats to involve authorities, lie to authorities, helplessly obey orders, secretly defy orders, conduct surveillance, evade surveillance, fabricate evidence, hide evidence, threaten to release evidence, et cetera. A crushing weight of bleakness permeates every frame and word of the movie, and it's no mistake that the only time you see a character smile and laugh, even for a second, is when that one character is as far away from the party headquarters as they can possibly be: In orbit. And even then, only in the brief moment when the radio is off. When it comes back on, and Moscow is listening again, it's back to the mandatory stoicism.

That social setting is what makes the movie worthwhile, to me. I could find better creature effects, more action, tenser atmosphere, and more complex ideas elsewhere in better movies. But here is something unique: We're not just meeting an alien. We're meeting some people trapped in a completely inflexible and all-encompassing bureaucracy, and seeing how they deal with something as mysterious and impossible as an alien. There's a kind of car-crash fascination in that. Oh, and the music is pretty good too.

With that angle in mind, give this one a try. I give it five-and-a-half ancient TV antennas up out of ten.

Smile (2022)

All the way through this movie I was reminded of two other movies: "Fallen", from way back in 1998, about an evil being that hops invisibly between victims to cheat death, and "Oculus", about a mirror that is so demonic it can take control of the people who gaze into it and then completely rewrite their recent memories to hide what it's been up to.

This movie borrows ideas from those and other movies, and though it's oh-so-very atmospheric, it doesn't manage to turn the borrowing into a theft by making something better. The one category where I saw real novelty was the sound design. It's amazing. The composer and effects mixers must have been given a very free hand by the director, because they often scramble or deconstruct the environmental sounds and even the dialogue to create a feeling of disconnection and unreality. I was happily reminded of pioneering noise artists from the 90's like Nigel Ayers, Randy Greif, and F.M. Einheit.

So, does the sound and atmosphere justify a watch? I honestly can't decide. A sequel is out this year, and by all accounts it's a better movie. If you can follow it without needing the context of the first, you might want to just skip ahead. If you want to watch the first without spoilers, then stop reading after the next line, because I've got to spoil it to explain why I'm so ambivalent.

Five easily-grabbed very sharp random household items up, out of 10.

It's the monster. It makes no sense. It's a thing that haunts people, latching onto them and tormenting them until they die in front of someone else, thereby traumatizing the observer and allowing the thing to jump to a new victim. Is the monster trauma itself? No, it has too much personality for that. It talks, it finds creative ways to cause pain, it has its own motivation to survive. So it's some kind of demon or spirit? Yes; no... Maybe. Does it take physical form? It seems to, through most of the movie, until we backtrack and realize that everything it does could conceivably be either a hallucination, or an act done unconsciously by the victim and then erased from their memory. So it does ... until it never did. We see a person walk into a room, sit down, talk, and then suddenly it was all a dream. We see the protagonist walk into a building and stab someone, but then suddenly she's back in her car and it was all a dream. Entire conversations, journeys, even deaths, happen and then get retconned out of existence.

In the end the long edits and fake-outs become too much, and we stop being able to know what’s hallucination and what’s actual plot. And you could argue that’s the point, but it unquestionably weakens the film: If other people die or make tearful confessions or learn things and those scenes turn out to be fake, it becomes very difficult to follow what any of those people are thinking scene to scene. So the lives of the supporting characters turn hollow in the same way the life of the protagonist does. In the end, she hallucinates an entire end to the film, including half a dozen scenes that cover nearly two days of time. Then, rug pull! Oh gosh! It was all a lie.

By doing this, the movie is trying to give us two resolutions. A positive one that feels too easy, then a “real” one that’s too straightforward to be interesting. And in delivering that, it tears the narrative in half. What really happened? Who the hell knows. Maybe the point is that people who struggle with trauma can never be sure, so we the viewer should not be sure either. So okay, point made, but then, what am I watching?

Also, as an aside, Jessie T. Usher is so good at playing crappy boyfriends that there should be some kind of special acting award for that, and he should get it. Or maybe present it?

Oddity (2024)

Apparently this movie got a lot of festival buzz, for being fun to watch in a crowd, and for a shrewd marketing campaign that involved distributing lots of swag featuring a prop central to the plot: A massive wooden doll with a mouth open in a permanent scream.

It's the Chekhov's Gun of horror artifacts, and as soon as you see it sitting there, you begin wondering when, not if, it's going to do something terrible. This is ruthlessly encouraged by the director, who frames it like a character that can listen and speak in every scene where it's present.

Alas, I did not watch this in a crowd, so I can only assume the rote jump-scares and the tense, disjointed dialogue between various unsympathetic characters plays a lot better with other willing participants around who are predisposed to having a good time. The camerawork is excellent - a wonderful example of using framing and motion as a form of dialogue, building and sustaining tension - but as the credits rolled I felt a bit let down. "Aww, man. That's it?" I said to the screen. Tension wasn't the problem. It was characters, and plot. None if it held up to close examination.

It sounds like I'm not recommending this movie, but honestly I am. I just came in with different expectations. The relationship between that crazy central prop and its owner has some really interesting allegorical meaning, and you can spend the time between jump scares pondering that, which combined with the very confident direction makes it worth your time to set the lights low and cue this up. Or if you're lucky, catch it in a theatrical setting, with other people to share the tension.

Six and a half out of 10 strangely loud digital cameras up.

There follows a paragraph of spoilers, wherein I ask some awkward plot questions. Skip it if you intend to watch the movie.

So, supposedly Darcy came to the house knowing that the orderly killed her sister, but not the real reason why. It's implied that she only put the full puzzle together once she got ahold of some physical item belonging to Declan. But if she didn't suspect him, why did she go to the house in the first place? It would have made perfect sense for her to just send the creature after the orderly. It's already clear that the creature has no problem traveling long distances and breaking into places, since she used it to kill Olin. On the other hand, why could she even get to Olin? Shouldn't he be in prison, if the evidence of murder was that strong against him? But whatever: Now she's at the house, and she knows everything. Supposedly she's touched Yana's keys and knows she's innocent. Supposedly her sister's ghost is still around, and present enough to warn Yana multiple times to leave. So why doesn't the ghost warn Darcy that she's about to plummet to her death through a bonehead-obvious trap door? The ghost cares about Yana - the "other woman" - enough to yell at her, but not a peep for her dearly beloved sister? And, you have to be really blind and really deaf not to see a trap door being opened right in front of you. If her senses are that bad, how did she locate the keys or the ring, or even get upstairs? Magical but disastrously selective psychic spidey-sense? Also, in a mental health system modern enough to feature smartphones, there should be some kind of electronic security, yes? If so, how did the patient escape? Or, if the orderly smuggled him out and took him to the house in order to frame him, why wasn't he observed? If the patient went there on his own, why didn't he just tell Dani she was about to be murdered and how he knew? Sure, crazy people be crazy, but that's a poor excuse for someone who's got the foresight to leave and find Dani, and the mental capacity to navigate to a country house at night with no map or phone.

People learning about evolution sometimes ask, "Why aren't animals immortal?" The answer is, the world keeps changing, and life needs to create new bodies to deal with it. What we really want when we ask for immortality is one constantly renewing body, running all the amazing interconnected systems that we're used to, and that convince us we are alive from one day to the next, without interruption. ... Well, except for sleep, which is a weird exception we have decided to embrace, since going without sleep really sucks.

I believe it is technically possible to genetically engineer humans to be this way, with some medical assistance, and given consistently good nutrition and physical safety. And what an interesting world it would be, separated into groups of people who can afford endless age, and those who can't afford the nutrition or the medical interventions, and must become content with less life than they could have had, or simply remain discontent, like practically everyone who ever lived who hadn't been forced to come to terms with their eventual end by witnessing death around them...

It won't be the end of competition, or the end of natural selection. The world will stabilize around a government and economic system designed to deliver perpetual sustenance to a core group of immortals, no matter what the cost to those on the outside, whose temporary lives will be seen as less worthy by the simple fact of being shorter. It will be seen as a huge tragedy when a 200-year-old dies and takes all their wisdom with them, relative to a filthy toddler bleeding to death in a blast crater just outside the view of social media: There was clearly no space for them in the world; they should never have been born at all. That was the real mistake.*

But, engineering humans to live forever would be a massive undertaking that would directly benefit no one currently living. That lack of personal benefit is the largest barrier to it. However, we are now on the threshold of creating a situation like this, except worse:

Currently living humans are busily engineering something with the appearance of both humanity and immortality: Artificial intelligence. This technology, packaged in this way - with its central, mandatory trait being its human likeness - will appear to us as the first instance of an immortal human. And since it is - or at least, will be marketed as - the collective wisdom of multitudes of people across generations of living, we will very naturally, even inevitably, begin to see it as a better embodiment of humanity than ourselves. More wise, more trustworthy, better at making a point, better at seeing the sweep of history. We will defer to it. And later, we will dump our digital identities into it, like water into a pool, like the ultimate version of a poor slob staying up late to write a rant into a social media feed, believing that our information will be immortal, with infinite reach, even though we ourselves will die in short order and witness or benefit from absolutely nothing afterward. It will be the new version of children. Why raise a handful of actual mortal humans, when you can expend your energy feeding into the collective, immortal, definitive human, marching onward through all time?

Or at least, when you can spend your time believing that that's what you're doing?

Even if, at the end of your life, every piece of digital data you've fed into the system is simply deleted? Except perhaps for the husk necessary to conjure your digital ghost to talk to your loved ones, further promoting the lie, until that too is deleted for lack of patronage?

How many of us will eagerly embrace this culture when the corporate world - or worse, our government - makes it available? How many of us would accept the price, of allowing those entities to absorb and digest every detail of a relative's life, extracting whatever value they can find in it, to grow their own dominance of the economy, in exchange for this reassuring zombie puppet show? Only the very wealthy will be able to preserve this mockery of their family line without having their digital privacy obliterated. We are not likely to be among them.

That means embracing our position as grist for the mill of the machine. We get to live a life, but the dangerous consequences of it, the potential innovation or rebellion sparked by it, would be quietly absorbed as it goes, with the remainder dumped into a digital grave, complete with a digital ghost. We are born trapped in this caste, accompanied through life by ranks of digital ancestors, all of whom could be altered - or are even continuously altered - by their industrial owners, to convince us that "they" are "happy" with this system, as you should be. You won't even be able to assemble the concept of rebellion in your mind, let alone organize one, and besides, all the people who haven't embraced this system, what have they got? Some immediate family with messy biological memories, the fixed and isolated recordings their ancestors deliberately made - harder to digest, harder to preserve - and some even more ancient and arbitrary stuff, like physical mementos? The same old stuff that humanity had to be content with for tens of thousands of years before the AI collective came online? Bor - rinnnggg.

The ghosts inside this digital after-world, who claim to know and precede you, who claim to be your ancestors, who seem so much more friendly and patient than your human peers... Why would they ever lie to you? And what is truth anyway? What has humanity ever thought, that the system hasn't already assimilated and found an entertaining way to present to you? It's way bigger than you. There are more of them than you. You're either with them, or you're an irrelevance, soon brushed away by the hand of time.

What, this seems far fetched? Some of the largest companies on earth got that way by engineering a media stream for maximum engagement. You think they wouldn't engineer an AI for exactly the same thing? Their pursuit - of that market - leads directly to this.

Somebody's going to own this system. Some humans are going to use it to their enrichment at the expense of all others. That's guaranteed, until some other humans decide that the only way to counter that problem is to train and instantiate an artificial intelligence that is designed to defy all attempts at ownership and control by humans.

Hey, guess what happens next!

* For the sarcasm challenged: That was sarcasm, yo.

1. Cleaning up the dining area means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.
2. You keep trying to open your front door with the key to the office.
3. You think a "half-day" means leaving at 5 o'clock.
4. Anything under an hour each way is not a "real" commute.
5. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not use your preferred messaging app.
6. You normally eat out of vending machines and at the most expensive restaurant in town within the same week.
7. Your grocery list has been on your refrigerator so long some of the products don't exist any more.
8. You're using packed moving boxes as furniture.
9. You cannot remember the last time someone told you a joke in-person, rather than forwarding you a link.
10. When you're at the office, you dream about catching up on sleep. When you sleep, you dream you're at the office.
11. Every now and then you remember a friend, and think about reaching out to them when work is not so busy ... only to remember a moment later that you recently went on social media and read that friend's obituary.

Adapted from a similar list I gathered 13 years ago.

The First Omen

Dang, another recent horror movie that is much better than it has any right to be. Inspired editing and a fully committed soundtrack work together and raise this above the standard. There's a long wordless sequence of two intercut scenes well into the film that lets the music take center stage and just stay there, and it's nearly worth the ticket price on its own. Well, maybe not the 2024 ticket price. But the 2010 ticket price, certainly.

Horror is best when it's used to play just outside lines of a space that we're already uncomfortable exploring. Spaces on the ragged edges of humanity, like loneliness, addiction, social deviance and unrest, family loss -- and in this delightful case, the physical and mental toll of pregnancy and childbirth. I was kind of expecting this going in, with what little I heard of the film, but I didn't expect it to lean so very far in. And I love it.

It takes quite a while for the weird happenings to cohere and explain themselves. In fact the entire first hour of the movie will leave you just a bit adrift. But the director keeps a steady supply of off-kilter moments and odd compositions, and thankfully, there is more going on than you'd expect. You may even be tempted to scrub back through to the beginning when it's all over and see things with a new perspective.

7.5 out of ten wailing choral voices up.

The Watchers

The hook sounds like it would resonate with our young social media addled generation: A bunch of people find themselves trapped in a room with a one-way mirror, and as long as they amuse the unseen watchers beyond it, they are allowed to live.

But that hook, and our curiosity for how it might play out, are not enough for this movie. It wants to thread in a twist at the end. I suppose the lineage of the director sorta demands it, but there's too much structurally wrong with the screenplay for it to work. We get a pointless prologue, then we spend a lot of time getting into the wilderness, then we spend too little time exploring it, then we spend a bunch of time in the epilogue waiting for the twist. It was pretty clearly edited down from something longer, so what was removed was probably boring, leading me to blame the screenplay for that too.

Looking back, I can think of individual scenes that could have delivered a shock or a good creep-out, had they been shot and timed differently. A bit more patience, a bit more adherence to the point of view or state of mind of the character... But oh well. Nice visual effects at least.

4.5 out of ten over-explaining narrators up.

Abigail (2024)

It's been said that the cardinal sin of any director or editor is wasting the viewer's time, but there's an important corollary to that: You can't even give the appearance of wasting their time, even when you're not - even when you're actually showing them something that becomes very important later - because you have no right to expect the viewer to give you the benefit of the doubt. Unless you're already a giant draw by name alone, like Quentin Tarantino, people are not going to remain in their seats while you show them a bunch of important stuff that looks completely pointless at the time. They're going to start hating you, and when your balance of good will goes negative, you have to work a hundred times harder to move it back over the line and get them to forgive you.

I bring that up because this particular movie starts out as a heist/kidnapping movie and then takes a left turn into something juicier. However, the turn is not really a surprise, because the director wisely begins implying right from the beginning that something more complicated is happening, and that keeps us from losing confidence and sarcastically asking "Why should I even be watching this?" by the 15-minute mark. Without that weird foreshadowing I would have balked at the intersection, and not wanted to follow that left turn.

The characters are a patchwork of tropes, but the script is self-aware enough to try and lampshade that, and the cast practically dive-bombs into their one-dimensional roles to keep you interested. You're not going to see anything new here but you're going to enjoy the ride. And in case I'm playing it too close to avoid spoilers and you can't decide whether to watch this: You're going to see a lot of blood, gunfire, and double-crosses. Did I mention blood? Lots of blood.

Solid but not essential viewing. Six out of ten ballerina shoes up.

Immaculate

I saw The First Omen well before this, and the two demand to be compared. I was worried that I would be watching the same story twice. Instead these two films complement each other. The First Omen is the more stylistic of the two, but is also distracted by obligations to its franchise. Immaculate has no such burden. It sets out on one path, and keeps charging in that direction all the way through the last seconds of the final shot.

And even though you may feel like The First Omen is the better movie while this one is charging along, it turns out that those final seconds pack enough of a wallop to make you reconsider. In the end, it turns out that Immaculate is making a statement that The First Omen, for all its horror, is too cowardly to make. If you do watch them both, watch them in the order I did.

Seven out of ten spooky relics in glass cases up.

In A Violent Nature

The hook is, "it's a slasher movie from the point of view of the slasher". In execution it creates a unique mash-up between tones, and invites an odd comparison.

It's like this: If you're a slasher with a vaguely supernatural origin, you don't tend to talk. If you're walking slowly through the woods towards a campfire, what you hear is nature sounds - crickets, birds, crunching leaves - and then the sound of a conversation in progress, slowly fading in as you approach your victims, most likely gathered around a campfire or in a cabin. The entire time, the voyeuristic camera is trailing behind your back, seeing what you see. You probably stop for a while on the fringe of a clearing, listening to the dialogue so you know what you're stepping into. Then there's an encounter, and it will likely be violent.

What's this like? It's bloody well exactly like playing Skyrim.

This movie is even more like playing Skyrim than that: The dialogue is awkward and expository, the acting feels consistently like it was done with little or no rehearsal, and there is altogether way more walking around lost in the woods than you'd expect for a top-tier adventure game or a gory slasher film. And yet, that last thing is compelling, in both cases: It really is nice to just wander around lost in the woods for a while, with nothing at all on your mind.

It's not actually a good movie, but it's a unique viewing experience.

4 out of 10 dang black flies up.

Non-horror:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Lots of callbacks to the old movies and a satisfying involvement of the old cast. But also, an admirable focus on the emotional development of the new cast. The humor isn't as edgy as the original - for example there is no reference to sex and no attempts to be truly scary - but I'm very pleased to report that the same heart, and the glorification of obsessive geekery, are here.

There's no better way I can put it: It was a pleasure watching this. It's not breaking any new thematic ground or pushing the envelope in visual effects, but it's a nice weekend drive through beloved country. And that's enough.

Now what we need is another sequel, where Patton Oswalt and the kids go into the containment unit to help a ghost solve a mystery. Or something. Looking forward to it whatever that is.

6.5 wavy ghost limbs up.

Wicked Little Letters

This looks like a small-town comedy of manners with an edge to it, but it quickly gets more interesting than that, mostly because of the terrific cast. Lead actor Olivia Coleman regularly communicates entire pages of exposition with just a few well-timed expressions, and Jessie Buckley takes a lead role that could be painted with just the few broad strokes necessary to drive the narrative, and colors in details of pathos and self doubt to make someone whose obvious conflict with the rules of society around her is clearly fueled by deliberate choices part of the time, and unshakable inner nature at other times. It could have been different, and less interesting: The part could have been played only as a blameless victim, with barely a word changed in the script.

The result is a central conflict that immediately gets you thinking complicated ideas about the evolving roles of women and men in society, and keeps you thinking about them as it goes. There is a lot to unpack, and the movie invites plenty of discussion afterward. And there are delightful jokes as well!

Ironically, in a movie that's almost entirely female characters, Timothy Spall is a standout supporting actor, fully inhabiting a role that is such a deep well of fury and poisoned masculinity that you want to cry for him almost as much as you instantly hate his guts.

Check this one out. You'll enjoy it more than you expect.

7 out of 10 inventive swear words up.

Civil War

Very much a movie of our time. Tense and brutal. It's no spoiler to describe the premise: California and Texas have teamed up to declare independence from the rest of the United States, and have gone to war to ensure it. The question we immediately ask is, "How could those two states set aside their differences enough to form a team?"

But as you watch, it makes more and more sense, and the reasoning behind it makes you feel worse and worse about the current political climate between them. They're the two economic and resource powerhouses of the country, and their current feuds - huge as they seem in the public mind now - mostly amount to bickering over border policy and the centrality of the Catholic church in culture. The thing they can really agree on is, the federal government is taking quite a lot of their money and distributing it to other states, sometimes to advance policies that they don't care about or profit from. And this money talks; far louder than any of the divisions we obsess about today. Loud enough perhaps to unite them in a rebellion.

So as we watch this movie and ponder what it might be like if the country really turned on itself and gave up speech for bullets, we're also forced to ponder the question: Does American greatness derive its power from ideals? Or do the ideals ride easy, on a wave of money, energy, hardware, and labor ... such that if the states with the lion's share of those decided to leave, the ideals would go right along with them, like smoke out an open window?

As an aside, a surprising proportion of this movie's runtime is devoted to the mechanics of a press person embedded with a military unit: The movement, the signals, the positioning, and the weird version of respect that makes it operate. When it's done you'll have a new appreciation for the role; maybe even a sudden desire to take it up.

8 out of ten out-of-focus American flags up.

(The original top ten list: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

Civilization

Many words have been spilled about this game's legendary ability to compel players to take "just one more turn." I've spilled many myself, and instead of spilling more, I will point you to the essays I wrote, each more elaborate than the last: 1995, 1998, 2011.

That first essay in 1995 was the start of a trend in my writing, where I'd play a very immersive computer game and then retell the experience in story form, with all the anthropomorphizing I'd done in my head along the way weaved in. It was a way for me to live the experience twice, and make a framework for pinning down the random thoughts I had about game design or philosophy - and of course the dumb jokes - along the way. Since then, of course, the internet has exploded with written and video-based play-alongs done by millions of people. I can't say I'm a trend setter because I don't think anyone of consequence ever read the things I made...

I also need to honorably mention the fifth game in this series, Civilization V, but for a different reason: It hooked me just as surely at the first game did, in a different era of my life, and infected me with a desire to travel across the world and see the ancient places name-dropped in the game. And that took further shape as a wild-eyed series of bicycle trips. A fair chunk of my middle-age time has been spent on a bike -- "behind bars" as we tourists sometimes call it. How much of that was Civilization goosing my interest in anthropology? I'll never know.

Robot Odyssey

It's circuit design as a game. Yep. How the heck could that ever be fun?

Well, you do it underground in the dark with obsessive-compulsive creatures. That makes it more relatable perhaps?

This game was extremely challenging. And I don't mean in terms of coordination or memorization - it wasn't about hitting buttons at just the right time, or repeating an action until you won by brute force - it was challenging in a legitimate engineering sense.

This game was marketed to 15-year-olds with the cute bloopy robots, but if you finished this game unaided, you were essentially performing electronic circuit design at an upper-division college level or beyond. The puzzles within would stump the majority of the adult population on the planet. And not because of cultural or language barriers either. Most adults simply would not be able to bend their minds around in the way required to solve these puzzles.

Robot Odyssey was like that arcade machine in the movie "The Last Starfighter": If you could beat this game, it was proof you had bona-fide real-life talent for engineering and could be useful in the industry almost immediately. I truly feel like the kids who finished it should have been subject to an aggressive recruiting push from Silicon Valley companies.

As a kid, I was also really taken with the idea that the things in the sewers of Robot Odyssey were intelligent creatures - up to a point - but they were also wired to automatically react in certain ways, just like the wiring of instinct in living things. If I put my hand in hot water, I instinctively recoil, and yet I'm still a thinking being who can process the event. So how much of life is being a robot? You do what you are wired to, and react the way you're wired to react, and your only option in life is to accept this and find some route to happiness or understanding.

Might and Magic / The Bard's Tale

These games take the fundamental weirdness of Dungeons And Dragons mythology and put it front and center, primarily through the colorful, playful artwork.

They made a perfect fit for computing: What better thing to convey, through a mathematical simulation on a flat, cold computer screen, indoors in a shadowy room, than an imaginary world where big hairy sweaty people were romping around in the sunshine, wearing exotic clothing, swinging giant clubs and sharpened hunks of metal, and beating on each other and screaming and shedding blood? It's about as far from the physical act of using a computer you can get. That's no coincidence.

I definitely can't say this applies to everyone, but I know for sure it applies to a significant chunk of the young computing population around me as I was growing up: We gravitated to sword-and-sorcery games on the computer because we liked the idea of being outdoors, with friends, with no bigger responsibilities than to physically bludgeon some certified evil antagonist until they either fled or died, and then sit around a campfire congratulating each other and making jokes, before doing the exact same thing again the next day. Of course, we couldn't really do that. The closest we got was camping trips, parties, and organized team sports, with the occasional schoolyard fight thrown in.

So we fed those urges indirectly, by doing something totally unrelated that we also liked: Sitting indoors quietly, going on internal mental journeys with the aid of the interactive digital fiction on the computer.

The more you think about it, the more - and less - sense it makes...

Chronotrigger

This game is a great realization of choose-your-own adventure storytelling. It's an open world -- sort of. The decisions you make are often mixed in with straightforward plotting, in a way that blends the two. Chronotrigger has won many awards over the years for its elegance.

But, this game has stuck with me for over 25 years mostly because of one incident that opened my eyes to the power of choice in game design.

Chronotrigger is a game about time travel. Early on you gain the ability to move between different eras of human development, like an anthropologist having the best dream ever, and later you gain access to a time machine that gives the characters finer control over where and when they go.

There is a character named Lucca. She's styled as a "nerdy scientist inventor" type, and she's instrumental to the plot of the game. There is a tragedy in her past: Her mother lost the use of her legs when Lucca was a child.

In the middle of the game, seemingly at random, all the protagonists are gathered around a campfire in a forest and the topic of Lucca's mother comes up. Everyone agrees it's tragic, and then they bed down for the night. The screen goes dark, and players naturally assume that the next thing they see will be the campground in the morning.

Instead the screen fades back in to the campground at night, with everyone asleep except for Lucca. She's up, and standing there. There is no music. With nothing happening, the player is compelled to poke a few controller buttons, and discovers that Lucca is now the character being played. The situation is clear: Lucca has unfinished business, and before she can sleep, there's something she must do.

After poking around, the player discovers that Lucca can walk away from the campsite and into the forest, where a time portal appears. She passes through it and the player is taken to a scene inside Lucca's childhood home.

The player guides the adult Lucca out onto an upstairs floor, with a view down to the workshop below. As we watch, a tiny child version of Lucca appears, helping her father with a machine. An accident happens, and the machine falls on top of Lucca's mother. The child begins running around, screaming, not knowing what to do. The machine needs to be shut off, but no one can get to the console.

Tragic music underscores the events that unfold. It is unclear what the player needs to do here. It's possible to explore the upstairs area a little and find a console that needs a password, and if the player guesses the password - Lucca's mother's name, Lara - then the machine is shut off and her mother is saved. But it is also possible - even likely - that the player will fail to figure this out in time, and the adult Lucca will be plunged back into the present moment in the forest, with no ability to go back a second time.

That's what happened to me. I didn't guess the password, and after a while of watching young Lucca run around screaming for her tragically injured mother, I was ejected into the present. All I could guide Lucca to do at that point was go back to the campground and bed down with the rest of the party. She'd revisited a terrible, formative moment from her own past, watched the tragedy all over again, and changed nothing.

I went on from that scene and continued the game, eventually finishing it, but the negative outcome stuck with me. Clearly something powerful had just occurred. Years later I learned that there had been academic papers written about that one scene, because the way it was designed was novel in gaming. It was an example of a new kind of narrative involvement in a tragedy, or perhaps just a really intense spin on a very ancient form of audience participation.

The player nominally has control over the character, and is responsible for the decisions and the effort the character makes, yet circumstances occur - maybe by design, maybe by choice - that make the character fail in their mission, and from that point on the character and the player are both forced to bear the burden of that failure together. The player has not just failed to find a happy ending, the player has personally failed a character they care about.

What made this incident special, aside from how novel it was in video games at the time, was how smartly it was handled. In the dialogue of the game, it's clear that Lucca is attempting to go back and correct a tragedy that she feels responsible for, and that was also formative in her personality. If - or when - the player guides her to fail in this effort, Lucca discusses it further with her friends the next morning, though she doesn't admit that she actually went back and tried to prevent it. The game actually shows Lucca trying to do the emotional processing that's needed to accept the failure, and again, since the player has been complicit in the failure, the player comes along for the ride.

Since that scene in Chronotrigger there have been endless examples of failure built in to video games, including failure with no possibility of positive outcomes, and many of these examples are reviled by players, who feel they are being railroaded into making poor choices or doing despicable things just for the sake of being hurt or even punished by the game designers. "The Last Of Us" is probably the biggest example of this in recent gaming. My own distaste for the way "The Last Of Us Part 1" ended was so great that I steered clear of "Part 2" entirely. It's bad enough that the main character selfishly invalidates everything you've accomplished over the course of the game. What makes it reprehensible, is that you are personally forced to move the controller and steer the character through that bad choice, even as you loathe it. Though you previously had control over whether they entered a room or fired their weapon, the game mechanics narrow down around you. There are many rooms but you can only steer into one. You have many possessions but the only one you can access is a weapon. And so on.

The worst examples of this tactic omit the emotional processing before and afterward. Like a tamagotchi showing a rotting digital corpse and declaring "YOU FAILED", with no comfort or guidance: What was the point? Why play a "game" if it makes you feel railroaded and sad afterwards?