I get real windy below, so I’ll go short here, in anticipation of a longer graph tomorrow:
Made (Norwegian) kringle dough last night, will be baking kringle this evening. More on the topic mañana.
What I read
There Once Was An Empire, by Anton Cebalo, which discusses the nature of collapsing empire and how the cosmopolitan nature of the Austro-Hungarian Empire allowed it to be observed more thoroughly through modern eyes in its fall, and in the transition between the seemingly permanent world before and the aftermath of a raw new world emerging amid the glacial ruin of the First World War.
A common refrain these past twenty years has been about the perils of living through history and how it’s difficult to keep an outside perspective on current events. Much of the past from which we might hope to learn is undiscovered, the contemporary catalogs lost to time and tide.
Dan Carlin’s series on WWI does many things well, but the piece that most stuck with me was the belief among every stanchion of society entering the war that it would be just another conflict like those that came before. That there would be the glory and triumph and honorable sacrifice that their cultural experience both allowed for and cherished. The unforeseen effects of the automation and industrialization of machinations scoured both the physical and cultural plane.
The generation of artists, writers, and poets that emerged has long been studied for their style, tone, and vantage on the era. It is important that their historical perspective also be learned from, in a time where it feels like we could be on the verge of a renewed crumbling of empires. Lessons forebear and lessons abound.
What I watched
I wrapped a rewatch of Enterprise, which was probably the least loved of all the Trek series, but the one that most resonated with me. It bloomed in the days after 9/11 and spoke in a voice that was still reeling from and reflecting on a new world we had stepped into after the collapse of a status quo coming out of the fall of the Soviet Union and what seemed like a new era of (generally) calm on a geopolitical stage. (As in the previous block, history rhymes.)
Enterprise1Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym, unlike the shows that came before and after, dealt with a humanity still within living memory of their last world war and the darkest times of their history. Hunger and poverty and homelessness had been conquered, but through the work of peoples they knew, through institutions and actions that had living resonance with them, as opposed to the achievements of some ancestral age. They were still struggling to get their heads above water and to step out into unknown space beyond the solar system. To go was still inherently to do so boldly, and the show wasn’t afraid to demonstrate a humanity that was not yet as enlightened or free from internal conflict as Roddenberry would portray.
It had its faults, certainly. An eye that was happy to appeal to male gaze, an instinct to follow the “ripped from the headlines” trend of other hour-long television programming, and a finale that was far too happy to try and pull from a Next Generation fandom for ratings rather than staying true to the voice of the show itself, leaves a hastily wrapped run to a show tied in a sloppy knot. Also, don’t get me started on the damned temporal cold war and how much it weighed on what could have been a straightforward narrative arc.
Still, it was a show willing to be itself and allow interpersonal conflict and growth in a canon that was all too willing to let humanity off lightly as the peacemakers and the anodyne middle ground. It was mostly fun, and let an able Scott Bakula dig his teeth into a Right Stuff role out among the stars.
What I listened to
The newest episode of RIP Corp from Ingrid Burrington and her stellar team. RIP Corp is a podcast about the failure of businesses and what we can learn from the various avenues, experiments, and attempts at building something, and what both the opportunity and the failure can teach us about our society and ourselves.
This ep was on Fansteel and tantalum, which is a “rare metal” whose mining and use in various applications make for a great framework to examine intended and unintended consequences behind profit motives and human behavior. Ingrid focuses on the geographic interplay of a corporate desire for economic certainties and the willingness to cause chaos to achieve them. Listen wherever you get your podcasts these days.2For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.
Projects In Progress
Webapp: Played around a bit with v0.dev, which is pretty damned remarkable, especially as someone with no React chops. A big part of the Why behind this project is to try and learn the modern web stack after learning a bunch of it in my late teens/early 20s, letting that atrophy for two decades, and coming back to an entire world that evolved in the meantime. I’m reminded of The Genesis Tub bit from The Simpsons, in that I fell asleep and woke up into a world of massive change beyond my absent eye. I’m not sure who Bart is in this stretched metaphor. Probably Facebook.
Anyhow, time to lean in hard and learn how Node works!
Notes:
- 1Later Star Trek: Enterprise, but premiering with the mononym
- 2For the record, I’m an Apple Podcasts app guy.