Shift-Y For Reload

A long time ago, there was a Children’s BBC show called Boxpops.

Music, newsreels, drama, and comedy, all linked together via text captions and exploring a different theme each episode. To be fair, the theme was normally something like “travel” rather than “Margaret Thatcher conjures up an imagined British history, obtains power and then finds herself trapped in the limited power of that vision”, but that sort of thing is more Doctor Who’s job anyway. But there is a line from Boxpops to Adam Curtis that I never really see mentioned. The other interesting thing about Boxpops is that they went to quite some length to show clips that children wouldn’t normally see. It was the first time I’d seen anything from Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Young Ones, or Monty Python. They even had clips from _Kevin Turvey: The Man Behind the Green Door _. Obviously, you weren’t going to see what you can get up to with an American Express card and Pamela Stephenson, but to go through all that effort to find things you can transmit on a children’s show going out at 11am on a Sunday…that’s quite an effort, and I’m very grateful to them for showing me such a variety of different things every weekend. And I think they deserve a little more credit.

Anyway, Shifty. Despite what Curtis is saying in interviews about how this series has been sparked from reading a book about 1848 (and, sure, the book in question seems to be a great read so far), the series goes over ground Curtis has covered before; all the way back to Pandora’s Box and as recently as Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Individualism, neoliberalism, failed systems, conjured visions of the past, and lots of clips of people dancing. Other large chunks of the series, including the star turn from Francis Beveridge, The Civil Service Man Waiting For His Wooden Box, appeared on his blog during the early 2010s. The blog is pretty much defunct now, but you can still find all the clips, some in versions that are significantly expanded from the edits in Shifty.

The Beveridge section highlights something that often goes unmentioned - Curtis actually has a great sense of humour that often comes out in his editing (as pointed out by Hatherley). The part where he gleefully talks about Stephen Knight’s “the Royal Family were behind Jack The Ripper” theory over a bed of clips of Diana — obvious, yes, but grimly amusing. And of course, the audacity of opening the series with Jimmy Saville leading a bunch of children into Margaret Thatcher’s hands. That’s a bold choice, and it gets bolder as Curtis then gives credit to an interview Thatcher did on immigration for giving the Tories a polling turnaround in 1979…instead of…the Winter of Discontent. A claim like that demands compelling evidence and John Curtice (Britain’s polling mastermind) rips the idea to shreds around thirteen minutes into this Radio 4 broadcast.

But Curtis is infamous for this sort of thing, where you can just about forgive him for stretching a point as the vibe is mostly right. Up until midway through Shifty’s second episode where he heavily implies ZTT invented the remix. Just, no. I draw the line at historical 12” mistakes. And why was Morley missing? After my first viewing, I joked about not standing for Paul Morley erasure, but now a fortnight has passed, I’m even more mystified. The Trevor Horn clips were taken from a Newsnight segment about ZTT, and Horn, his wife, and Morley are all prominent in the feature, so why cut him out? Plus Frankie’s notoriety was pretty much all masterminded by Morley. Who said “Frankie Say Arm The Unemployed”, after all? I’m not expecting I Love 1984 but it is such a weird omission, not least because Morley has so many incredibly pretentious and wonderful interviews from this time period.

(the ghost of Anthony h. Wilson stalks the footage)

There are other roads not taken. Golden Wonder is shown in the first episode but then never mentioned again. Was there a strand of their late 80s crisp factory fire and the rise of American-backed Walkers that got left on the cutting room floor? Katie Baring is shown with Derek Hatton, but we’re not treated to any of the great Curtis/Nick Leeson interview clips about the downfall of Barings? John Major barely registers a presence, and the fall of monetarism isn’t even mentioned, despite it being a big part of the early episodes. I will say, though, that the series does a good job of pointing out that the ‘boom’ years of the 80s were really quite short, bookended on either side by grim industrial decline and negative equity. But there’s some weird time-jumping going on every once in a while, where, for example, the text narration is talking about events in the early 90s but you can plainly see a mid 90s-period Take That poster on the person’s wall on the clip being shown. It’s very much just ‘if you know, you know’, but if you do it throws you out of the narrative.

And then there is the ending.

OR IS THIS JUST ANOTHER FEEDBACK LOOP OF NOSTALGIA?

REPEATING BACK SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF THE PAST.

WHICH IS THE WAY THE SYSTEM CONTROLS YOU

AND IS THE WAY THIS SERIES WAS MADE.

Curtis is certainly aware of the limits of the form he inhabits, expressed in large point Arial¹. It’s also pointed out a with a little more humour during the Remix part of episode 2, which comes shortly after repeating an entire segment of Pandora’s Box, and the many old interviews from other Curtis documentaries that litter the series — Curtis himself becoming part of that historical edifice. But I’m wondering if this is signalling a larger end. There are limits to strip-mining the past², and again in interviews he indicates that footage beyond 1998 or so seems to lose the hauntological power that earlier clips have, signing up to Mark Fisher’s “Slow Cancellation of The Future” hypothesis³, where the replaying of the past is keeping us from establishing a new future. There’s a clip towards the very end which is clearly a phone video from the 21st century of two girls singing along to The Smiths⁴ which highlights this⁵. Meanwhile, Curtis himself tries to remove himself from the documentary, continuing his lack of vocal narration in the same manner as Traumazone⁶.

What intrigues me though is that his frustration here is a large part of his first foray into fiction, The Way, where at the end, the old stories are explicitly rejected in favour of forging new ones. And while that series definitely had its flaws, maybe it’s time for him to explore that future than mining the past…

Still, you have to love a BBC series that has a caption saying:

PRIVATISATION WAS AN IDEA INVENTED BY THE NAZIS

The Blog Is Starting To Repeat

I Will Not Stand For This Paul Morley Erasure

If you’re making a documentary on the strange end of the twentieth century in Britain, opening with a clip of Jimmy Savile taking a group of children to meet Margaret Thatcher is not exactly subtle. It’s been too long, Mr. Curtis.

(current thoughts on having seen the first episode of Shifty: feels like an expansion of The League of Gentlemen from Pandora’s Box and The Attic from The Living Dead, with some of the footage being directly lifted from those episodes. In fact, at one point, Curtis is lazy enough that he takes the clip of Not The Nine O’Clock News’s ‘Unemployment Figures’ sketch directly from Pandora’s Box, as it still has ‘1980’ in Futura burnt into the clip, instead of going back to the original footage¹. Having said all that, the ‘new’ clips are great, and to be honest, I’d be happy if he just dropped the narrative text completely at this point)

This week, we have been mostly learning how to play with sand and staring in awe at watching all our systems go down due to a global Google Cloud Platform failure…

And That Is Where I Decided To Wear A Watch Again

This week has sucked in a variety of ways, but it turns out I have been quite productive.

• The Adam Curtis image searching site, BUT THIS WAS A FANTASY has been refactored to use Qdrant as the backing vector store, which means it now has proper series filtering instead of the hacks I’d lashed together for it. All ready for Shifty!
• I’m about half-a-million entries into my latest synthetic data project
• I finally wrote up the proposal & demo for my new search research — Four Candles (and yes, it is)
• I built an MCP server for Lucidworks AI
• I created a model for [REDACTED] (it’s rubbish, but I did it…although I need to do more there)
• I built a semantic typeahead service that has a p50 time of under 1ms, and a p99 that just crosses 2ms. In Python, too!

There’s no way I’ll keep that pace up for all of June, but it’s a pretty good start.

The bad news is that on Saturday night, I discovered this Swatch website and Choices Were Made.

I mean, just look at this beauty.

Yes, sure it’s absolutely hopeless at actually telling the time (though surprisingly, nowhere near the worst in vintage Swatches, it turns out), but just look at it. Somebody thought this was a great idea for a watch. AND THEY WERE RIGHT.

(also, 1989 was a very good year if you wanted your watch to look like a Peter Saville New Order record cover. Which apparently is actually something I now covet)

Okay, I will now go back to refreshing windows to see if Switch 2 is back in stock anywhere in the Cincinnati region…

It's Goodnight From Me

Quite frankly, I would have thought less of RTD if he hadn’t made that Two Ranis gag.

“We’ve got the bangers now, but they’ll be followed by the bummers”

Of course, the problem with that is that even the Los Campesinos! bangers are…in fact bummers. I cherish with fondness the day (before) I met you and all that I can read is you’re the B-side! after all.

But still, always a treasure. Blowing the doors on a smallish indie venue on a Friday night in Columbus, Ohio as if they were on their first overseas tour, not nineteen years in. And I still don’t know why they come to Ohio on every tour (they even referenced the fact, but Gareth didn’t really delve into it except maybe it’s to piss Minnesota off), but I’m glad they do.

(If Saint Etienne were the band that presented a cool, modernist Ideal For Living and how you wanted to present yourself in the world, LC! are the band that is more who you are. Sure, you get the B.S. Johnson references, but also I think we need more post-coital and less post-rock)

Also: so many families there! Not just us, but a whole brace of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, or a mix and match. Never seen that at an LC! concert before…

Oh, and if you were the guy in the Agora Cleveland t-shirt that leered over a bunch of people on your way down to the front, making an entire section of the first four rows incredibly uncomfortable for the second half of the show: we all hope that somehow you picked up a nasty boil on the way home and it just slowly grows year after year. Never life-threatening, just enough pain to make you wince every day…

Don't It Make You Glad?

I have perhaps read too many Tessa Hadley novels in succession.

Thanks to the efforts of Tammy, Robert, and Myles, we now have an adventure playground in the back garden. And I’m not kidding around when I say ‘adventure playground’. It’s something that you’d see in a decent council playground back home. And it’s just sitting behind our kitchen. Maeryn, of course, already loves it, and I imagine it’ll be a fixture in her life for at least a decade. It’s a banal cliché, I know, but I am loving how the mostly blank canvas of behind the house is changing as she grows up, becoming her space as it has become ours (with the guiding hand of Tammy, who has lots of thoughts for the garden. I did get lights for the deck this week, though!).

Can I make it to the end of tomorrow night avoiding Who spoilers?

Eyes Left, Eyes Right

Well, I guess it has been a while (Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was 2021, after all). It also looks like we’re back in firm Curtis territory versus the narration-free TraumaZone.

This means I really do have to get a move on to update But This Was A Fantasy with all the updates I’ve been planning for a while - mainly: using a vector backend that allows me to do proper metadata filtering instead of the current system hacking bits onto FAISS in an attempt to make filtering work. I’ll also take the opportunity to re-encode all the images from the documentaries with SigLIP2 to get better text-image similarities too.

Anyway, the hope is to get most of the changes and migrations underway next weekend so I’ll be good and ready to upload the new series very soon after broadcast. Let’s see if that really happens…

Otherwise, back from Vegas and celebrating Tammy’s graduation this weekend (Masters #2 for her!). Thank goodness for Memorial Day next week…

A Change In Scenery

A later blog this week, because as I write this, my computer is a couple of thousand miles away to the east. I, however, am in Las Vegas, where I have flown in to surprise my family while they’re on their trip. And they were somewhat surprised! So now, it’s very much a traditional Pointer holiday, at least until Monday afternoon when I fly back home. Also, a quick stop to an out-of-the-way liquor shop which appears to have the last stocks of last year’s Wild Turkey 70th Anniversary edition left in the country (seemingly a complete case of it, too).

The odd thing when talking about being in Vegas is that everybody expects me to spend the 48 hours on the Strip, but our family’s visits to the city have evolved to the point that we hardly ever go there when we’re in town. Which sometimes leads to us wandering around a very large set of fields in 35ºC heat trying to find food trucks, but it does let us see more of the place than a lot of visitors do.

(Some things are traditional though. I got propositioned twice by ‘adult entertainers’ in the first 24 hours of being here, and my family found a way to watch football matches in the morning)

Once again, I brought the iPad with a view of using some quiet time to hack on an embedding idea I have; and once again, it has fallen flat. I don’t know what’s at fault, but even with a keyboard and a mouse, Google Colab is pretty much unusable in Safari, locking up the screen on a simple small copy/paste and scrolling sometimes working, but most of the time being a janky mess that causes a reload of the tab randomly. So I guess, back to just scribbling on papers with the Pencil; which admittedly, it does do very well. But sometimes, I want to go beyond scribbling to playing with ideas, but I don’t want to lug my laptop around.

May????

Astounded at how fast the year has gone. Already May seems to be completely locked up (with some news this week, I think the only free weekend I have all month is Memorial Day weekend…which at least has a Monday off too. But busy busy busy otherwise.

And as I don’t have a lot else to talk about this week, welcome to Ian’s Round-Up of TV Things He’s Watched FROM THIS YEAR!

The White Lotus S3: I feel cheated that the central UNC/Duke tension was not resolved. Otherwise, a bit of a step down from S1 and S2, longer in length, but feeling twice as padded. Still, here for Carrie Coon rave scenes.

Andor S2 (so far): Not the greatest show that television has ever produced, as some would have you believe. But here for the Mon Mothma rave scenes. And it really is the best Star Wars thing in absolutely ages.

Doctor Who S2 (so far): Considering how S1 went off the rails, it’s probably still far too early to say (if Anita Dobson ends up being The Rani than RTD needs a quiet talking to), but a decent run of episodes, probably the best since the Capaldi Era, even if the politics of Lucky Day were pretty muddled…

When GERD ATTACKS!

Currently suffering through a particularly acute acid reflux flare that makes me not want to do pretty much anything. Hopefully the medication will help out a little in the days to come.

My GRPO adventures in April were…pretty much a bust. I’m trying to do something that’s a little more complicated than just trying to do multiple choice answers to the AIME dataset and it is failing miserably. Possibly because I’m using too small a model, but that was the main point of the experiment. Not everything works out, but it has been a bit of a dry spell lately. But I haven’t entirely given up yet…

Next up: May. Fun and games ahead!