By this time tomorrow, you’ll know how well I did on my predictions and how happy I am about who won and who didn’t.

Edit from the day after the Oscars.

I predicted 14 out of the 15 winners correctly. Not bad!

Ironically, the one prediction I got wrong, that for Best Actor, was the one I cared about the most, but things didn’t happen as I thought they would. So it goes.

Best Picture

Nominees:

• Bugonia

• F1

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• Marty Supreme (should win)

• One Battle After Another (will win)

• The Secret Agent

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners (could win)

• Train Dreams

At this point, Best Picture is basically a two-way race between Sinners and One Battle After Another. No other film has a chance. I’m predicting OBAA to narrowly cross the finish line because it has won literally every precursor award it was up for. It was also hugely acclaimed when it came out and the industry seems to genuinely love it.

That said, after Sinners won big at the Actor awards recently - keeping in mind that the Actors Guild is a subset of the Academy - there’s been a new Sinners narrative on social media with many predicting that film to sweep tomorrow. It already made history with sixteen nominations, the most ever, but I think this narrative is a bit forced and that OBAA will hold the line.

Personally I think Marty Supreme was by far the best film of 2025 and a cut above the rest. I would rate the ten nominees somewhat like this:
Marty Supreme >>
Hamnet, Train Dreams >>
One Battle After Another >
Sentimental Value, Bugonia, The Secret Agent >
F1, Sinners, Frankenstein.

I wouldn’t mind OBAA winning, as it has some great parts, but Sinners is one of the weakest out of all ten, which is what makes its dominance so annoying. You can read my thoughts on each nominated film on my Letterboxd.

I like this year’s crop of nominees, though. They’re generally good films from diverse genres and languages and they all deal with interesting ideas. If you’ve been following the Oscars for a while you know things could be a lot worse.

Best Director

Nominees:

• Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another (will win)

• Ryan Coogler, Sinners

• Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme (should win)

• Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value

• Chloé Zhao, Hamnet

PTA is a lock for Best Director. He’s won every precursor award this season, OBAA is genuinely inventive in its filmmaking, and though I haven’t seen most of his work, he’s been an acclaimed filmmaker for three decades and has the “long overdue” narrative going for him. The latter might be the most important factor here.

Personally I would pick Josh Safdie because I found Marty Supreme to be a uniquely chaotic and intense experience in a way only a Safdie film can be, and when an auteur filmmaker is able to execute their vision that well they should be awarded. (That someone like Wes Anderson still hasn’t won Director grinds my gears so much.) But I’m fine with PTA taking the prize too. The sensei-underground-railroad and the car chase sequences in that film alone make him a deserving winner.

Best Actor

Nominees:

• Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme (should win) (will win)

• Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another

• Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon

• Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

• Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

This is the main category of the night. It’s genuinely unstable in the sense that you could make a strong argument for four out of the five nominees etching out a win (Hawke seems the weakest), and it would sound believable.

Timothée Chalamet was the guy to beat all along and won a couple of precursor awards early on in the season, but after Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor at SAG and Chalamet said some mean (but true) things about ballet and opera in a recent interview, the tide seems to have turned, with all publications and prediction markets now predicting MBJ to take this home.

I still think Chalamet has enough star power and international appeal to see this through. MBJ is the weakest performance for me here - and not even the best double-role performance of 2025, something Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 did way better - and his SAG win doesn’t mean as much when you factor in that Chalamet probably lost SAG because that body doesn’t seem to like repeat winners, and that he won in 2025 as well, when he made his infamous “I’m in the pursuit of greatness” speech.

I’ve seen four out of the five nominees here, and I need Timothée Chalamet to win this for the simple reason that he gave the best performance out of all four. (Never going to watch Blue Moon, sorry Richard Linklater!) Also, the Oscars keep making this mistake of not awarding actors for their best performances in their prime, and thus giving them a long overdue trophy years later for something far more forgettable, robbing someone else in the process. (See DiCaprio winning for The Revenant, Gary Oldman winning for Darkest Hour, and so on.) Best Actor has in the last decade become this weird proxy for a Lifetime Achievement Award and that needs to stop. The funny thing here is that even by that logic Chalamet would still be the most deserving nominee just based on his filmography.

There is a theory that MBJ and Chalamet could split enough votes between themselves that DiCaprio sneaks in to win, which I wouldn’t really mind because he’s hilarious in his movie and funny performances don’t win Oscars very often. (“What’s up, guys? You guys cool? You guys hangin’?”)

Best Actress

Nominees:

• Jessie Buckley, Hamnet (should win) (will win)

• Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

• Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue

• Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value

• Emma Stone, Bugonia

This is the single easiest category to predict for the entire night. Buckley has won possible show business prize in existence leading up to the Oscars already. Each year, of the four acting categories, there’s always at one actor that sweeps every award they were ever nominated for for that movie, and is thus 100% guaranteed to win by Oscar night, and that seems to be the case for Best Actress this year. (Ironically, though, that's what everyone thought about Best Actress last year as well, where Demi Moore won every precursor only to lose out at the end to someone much younger. Art mirrors life, truly.)

I haven’t seen two of the nominees here, but having watched Hamnet I’m not in the least surprised that Buckley is set to win. The entire film, especially the ending scene, rests on her shoulders, and she’s able to give a very moving portrayal of parental grief, and coming to terms with it, solely through her expressions and body language, without speaking a single word. It’s mesmerizing.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees:

• Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another

• Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein

• Delroy Lindo, Sinners

• Sean Penn, One Battle After Another (should win) (will win)

• Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value

This is a category I wouldn’t mind anyone winning as I liked all the performances here for different reasons. Elordi was the only good part of Frankenstein, Del Toro’s line reading of “a few small bears” alone deserves its own award, and Skarsgard played a character so complex I had no idea what he was thinking, I just knew it was something deep. (Haha.)

This is a race between Skarsgard and Sean Penn, though, and it seems Penn is going to take it. It’s genuinely hilarious how two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn doesn’t seem to give a damn about awards, has not campaigned this season at all, and has in the past claimed that he gave “Ukraine his Oscars so they could be melted into bullets”. LMAO. And yet the Academy keeps awarding him.

But the acting speaks for itself. He deserves it just for adding so much personality to Lockjaw, making him so detestable with the facial ticks, the grotesque body language, and that Looney-Toons-esque walk. A truly great performance.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees:

• Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value (should win)

• Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value

• Amy Madigan, Weapons (will win)

• Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners

• Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Contrary to Best Supporting Actor, this is a category I’m not much invested in because I didn’t particularly care for any of the performances here. I don’t think Teyana Taylor should’ve been nominated at all. Amy Madigan seems to be the frontrunner, and I love Weapons, but the fact that she’s the one aspect they liked most from that film is baffling. It should’ve been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the very least.

If I could I’d vote Elle Fanning simply because she plays an actress in Sentimental Value, who’s acting in a movie within the movie you’re watching, which I’m sure is way more difficult than it seems, and actors pretending to “act” is something I’m always fascinated by.

Best Original Score

Nominees:

• Bugonia

• Frankenstein

• Hamnet

• One Battle After Another (should win)

• Sinners (will win)

The real “should win” of this category is Marty Supreme. It’s score was electric and energetic in a way that perfectly suited the film’s energy. But the current music branch of the Academy seems to hate electronic music and swings way more towards the old school orchestral kind. In retrospect it’s incredible that The Social Network won in this category back in 2011 at all.

But if not for Marty I’d rather have OBAA take this because I’ve seen that film only once, last summer, and I still remember the hypnotic, minimalist piano that underlined much of the film’s movement. Hamnet also had good music but I later discovered that a huge chunk of the music in it was non-original played at the end was an old song. Sinners will take this but that would be deserved, the music was great, especially in that one scene everyone talks about. Ludwig Göransson is on a generational run and is set to score Nolan’s The Odyssey as well.

Best Cinematography

Nominees:

• Frankenstein

• Marty Supreme

• One Battle After Another

• Sinners (will win)

• Train Dreams (should win)

I can’t believe that Frankenstein, a movie that looks like a video game cutscene, was nominated here. I’m predicting Sinners to carry all technical categories just by default unless I have good reason to think otherwise. I thought the nature photography in Train Dreams was gorgeous and would like to see it win here. OBAA also had some crazy camerawork though.

Best Film Editing

Nominees:

• F1

• Marty Supreme (should win)

• One Battle After Another (will win)

• Sentimental Value

• Sinners

Editing is the secret sauce that makes Marty Supreme such a high octane ride. The relentless pacing of that film is immaculate. The problem is that I don’t see Marty winning anything other than Best Actor, if that at all, and OBAA is the next best contender that could take this for similar reasons.

Best Visual Effects

Nominees:

• Avatar: Fire and Ash (will win)

• F1

• Jurassic World Rebirth (should win)

• The Lost Bus

• Sinners

In spite of me predicting Sinners’ dominance in most technical categories, I know that only three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and a James Cameron movie winning Best Visual Effects.

I haven’t and never will watch the third Avatar, though, and so will pick Jurassic World as my preference just by default, because those dinosaurs did look quite good. In the last decade, though, Best Visual Effects has been an extremely unpredictable category and I genuinely think all five of these could win.

Thoughts on Other Categories

Even though I consider the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay categories to be one of the “major” ones, I didn’t elaborate on them above because the nominees in both almost completely overlap with Best Picture, and I didn’t have anything new to say about either. I’m predicting Sinners and OBAA to win each respectively, obviously.

I’m generally into Best Animated Feature but this time have seen only two of the five nominees and thus couldn’t elaborate on it either. Obviously KPop Demon Hunters is a lock here, and for Best Original Song as well.

Every year I think to myself, “this time I’ll watch all the Best Documentary nominees!”, and every year I never do so, not even one. Same with shorts.

I think F1 could legit snatch Best Sound cause those cars do be going vroom vroom pretty loud.

There’s a new Best Casting category and I have no idea how you’re supposed to judge the casting for a film without knowing who all auditioned for it. But then again, that could be said for most categories. How can anyone judge Best Editing without having seen all the raw footage of the film, you know? This is all stupid fun anyway.

My final take on this whole thing is that the nominees this year are good, but the Academy has gotten quite lazy recently and just nominates a select bunch of films for everything. This is a general trend among awards in show business. It’s the result of people watching fewer films, and nominating the select few they watched in everything. I miss the days when more movies were nominated in total, when films not nominated for Best Picture could sneak in a nomination or two in major categories, and even win sometimes.

Otherwise, generally looking forward to watch the Oscars tomorrow.

Subscribe now

We’re at the end of 2025. Against all odds, time’s arrow continued to march forward and another year has gone by. I personally did not see this coming and am a bit shocked that it’s happened.

But that didn’t stop me from - as always - collating this humongous list of all my favourite art and media and generally-cool-stuff I came across in my life this year. I hope something in here brings you joy and that you have a fantastic 2026.

You can check out my favourites from previous years here.

Movies

I watched 60 movies this year. You could honestly say I didn’t do much of anything else. Here’s my Letterboxd. Below are my favourite ones.

(good)
25. Superman | James Gunn, 2025
24. Stand By Me | Rob Reiner, 1986
23. Memories of Murder | Bong Joon Ho, 2003
22. Cléo from 5 to 7 | Agnès Varda, 1962
21. Wake Up Dead Man | Rian Johnson, 2025

(very good)
20. Weapons | Zach Cregger, 2025
19. The Brutalist | Brady Corbet, 2024
18. The Wizard of Oz | Victor Fleming, 1939
17. Salaam Bombay! | Mira Nair, 1988
16. Hard Boiled | John Woo, 1992
15. Police Story | Jackie Chan, 1985
14. Collateral | Michael Mann, 2004
13. Past Lives | Celine Song, 2023
12. Unforgiven | Clint Eastwood, 1992

(great)
11. The Peanut Butter Falcon | Tyler Nilson & Michael Schwartz, 2019
10. Conclave | Edward Berger, 2024
09. The Phoenician Scheme | Wes Anderson, 2025
08. Pan’s Labyrinth | Guillermo del Toro, 2006
07. Anora | Sean Baker, 2024

(transcendent)
06. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning | Christopher McQuarrie, 2025
05. Spring Breakers | Harmony Korine, 2012
04. Marty Supreme | Josh Safdie, 2025
03. Sunset Boulevard | Billy Wilder, 1950
02. Y Tu Mamá También | Alfonso Cuarón, 2001
01. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story | Jake Kasdan, 2007

Events & Experiences

Some cool stuff I got to see IRL.

Othello on Broadway

Okay, so this play was actually not that great and wouldn’t normally make my list, but also, like, what’s the point of watching Othello on Broadway starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal if you’re not gonna tell people you watched Othello on Broadway starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal? (h/t AD)

—

Sheryl Crow, Bob Dylan, & Willie Nelson concert

I got tickets to this just for Bob Dylan and couldn’t believe that a) he was still performing and b) I was going to get to see him live. Ironically, his act turned out to be the most disappointing, whereas Sheryl Crow and Willie Nelson (92 years old!) were absolutely incredible.

—

Linkin Park concert

All I’ll say is that some childhood dreams came true for all of us that night. Ooof, what an experience. (h/t SJ, PP)

—

Waymo ride

This was the first time I sat in a fully self driving car. It felt like literal magic in a way no technology has in years. Our experience with the Waymo itself was flawless too and I highly recommend it. The future is going to be very strange. (h/t AA)

Songs

Here are the songs I discovered this year that I liked the most, ranked from good to great.

36. Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945
35. Ghulam Ali - Dil Mein Ek Lehar Si Uthi Hai
34. Kendrick Lamar - heart pt. 6
33. Danny Brown - XXX
32. Neutral Milk Hotel - Ghost
31. Keane - Everybody’s Changing

30. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
29. Carlsie Blanton - After the Revolution
28. Drake, J. Cole - Evil Ways
27. Tom Waits - Come On Up To The House
26. Kanye West - After You [unreleased demo]

25. The Outfield - Your Love
24. Father John Misty - Chateau First Time [demo]
23. The Cure - Boys Don’t Cry
22. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
21. Fleetwood Mac - I Don’t Want to Know [original version]

20. Britney Spears - Everytime
19. The Gregory Brothers, TomSka - The Muffin Song (asdfmovie)
18. Neutral Milk Hotel - King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1
17. Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag
16. blink-182 - I Miss You

15. blink-182 - All The Small Things
14. Kavita Seth, Vylom - Uden Jab Jab Zulfen Teri
13. Sublime - Santeria
12. The Weeknd, Ariana Grande - Save Your Tears (Remix)
11. Billy Joel - Vienna

10. Mk.gee - How Many Miles
09. Maude Latour - Miss America
08. Lata Mangeshkar - Aaja Piya Tohe Pyar Doon
07. Addison Rae - Diet Pepsi
06. Abhijeet, Anuradha Sriram - Chunnari Chunnari

05. Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
04. Connie Francis - Pretty Little Baby
03. Fleetwood Mac - Second Hand News [original version]
02. Adrianne Lenker - anything
01. Better Oblivion Community Center - Dylan Thomas

Online Writing

Articles

Out of the many long form articles I read online this year, the few mentioned below really stuck with me.

Interstellar Movie Review, Lauren Wilford

“As I approach middle age, I’ve developed a taste for stories about someone crossing a threshold—stories of someone walking through a door that locks behind them. Interstellar is a very adult epic, in that sense. It’s about the things you can’t take back. It’s about becoming prepared for the moment, and then realizing that nothing could have prepared you, not really. There’s no way you could have known, and you had to choose anyway. It’s about the way that a sense of destiny might kill you—but that it might save you, too.”

The Great Outsourcing, M. E. Rothwell

“The atom was split and cities engulfed. Plastic ate the world and a curtain divided the earth. Liquid fire was loosed upon the jungle and rockets launched into space. Man strode the dust of another world and tore down the wall. He was happy, for a time. But even computers get lonely, isolated in their little boxes. So Man, ever resourceful, yoked them together in a network of glass tubes. Data was packetised and sallied forth across the web. The world was knit together and dreamed of becoming one. Man outsourced communication to the internet, and information to the hivemind. And it was good.”

Superficial aspects, cybermonk

“There is nothing more disturbing to the conditioned mind than the fact that we are simply here. There is nothing more freeing than accepting this.”

It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature, Naval

“Feedback from other people is usually fake. Awards are fake. Critics are fake. Kudos from your friends and family are fake. They might try to be genuine, but it’s lost in such a sea of fakeness that you’re not going to get real feedback.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Lightness, Anna Leptikon

“The truth is, they could not have been persuaded of its value until they had first become the kind of person capable of perceiving it. Philosophy classifies these as a special kind of decision-problem: situations where the significance cannot be grasped until after a deep transformation has occurred exactly through taking that course of action.”

The Lore of the World, Erik Hoel

“A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real.”

—

Blogs & Newsletters

Shoutout to some other blogs and newsletters I regularly enjoyed reading from throughout 2025.

• Brackish Waters, Barren Soil, Rohan Ghostwind

• The Lindy Newsletter, Paul Skallas

• Social Matter, Alan Schmidt

• Adorable and Harmless, kitten

• SatPost by Trung Phan, Trung Phan

Albums

I listened to 11 albums this year. I thought 3 in particular were very good and are worth listening to in full.

(very good)

03. Mk.gee - Two Star & the Dream Police (2024)

02. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

01. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours (1977) [original, non-remastered version]

Websites

A few websites I discovered in 2025 that I found to be either really useful or exceptionally cool. Would recommend opening these links on desktop and not mobile.

• Historical Tech Tree

  • From the creator’s blog post: “It’s a timeline to visualize the full history of all major technologies […] also contains more than 2,000 connections between them […] that allows you to understand how one thing led to another.”

• The True Size Of

  • A site that lets you compare country sizes by dragging any map over another.

• Tech Layoffs Tracker

  • The most up to date and comprehensive layoffs tracker. A bit morbid but useful.

• Posthog

  • Posthog is an analytics tool, but their website (which isn’t even the main product) feels like a complete OS in and of itself. The care and attention to detail put into this is staggering.

• Messenger

  • A browser-based game where you’re a messenger on a small planet. Really well made and beautiful.

Videos

All the best video content I discovered this year, including straight up bangers, thoughtful video essays, brainrot, sports highlights, interviews, standup comedy, and fan edits of various media which are their own artform at this point.

Best of YouTube

• Keep thinking with Claude

• Everything is a Remix

• Timothee_Chalamet_internal_brand_marketing_meeting_MartySupreme_11.08.2025.mp4

• How Marlon Brando Changed Acting

• Robert Lewandowski's 5 goals in 9 minutes

• Can We Agree On the 4 Major U.S. Cities?

• Magician Reviews Sleight of Hand and Visual Tricks In Movies & TV

• How the World Came Together to Beat Smallpox

• Who Killed the DCEU

• the death of 24 hour america — why nothing stays open late

• Why Jurassic Park Looks Better Than Its Sequels

• Donald Trump on IPL Final

• No wonder they needed so many takes (The Social Network)

• How To Make A CPU

• What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

• Dua Lipa versus the literary landscape

• Barcelona vs. Inter: Extended Highlights | UCL Semi-final Leg 1

• Barcelona vs. Inter: Extended Highlights | UCL Semi-final Leg 2

• Jindal Steel | The Steel of India

Interviews

• Lex Fridman x Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire

• Kate Scott x Thomas Müller

• Tim Ferriss x Brandon Sanderson

Standup Comedy

• Sarah Cooper - Classic Stuff

• Pretty Good Roast Show Ft. ‪@AnubhavSinghBassi‬

• Sam Morril - Same Time Tomorrow

• Aries Spears - Arnold Schwarzenegger Impression

TikTok/Instagram Edits

• A$AP Rocky x The Sound of Music

• Miley Cyrus x Mulholland Drive

• Diet Pepsi x Crash

• Billy Joel x Manchester United

• End of Beginning x YJHD

• Danza Kuduro x Fast & Furious

• Kendrick x Spider-verse

• Taylor Swift x Tony Blair x Gordon Brown

• Akon x Kevin De Bruyne

• Come On Eileen x movies

• Bittersweet Symphony x Buster Keaton

• ABBA x technicolor

Books

Twas not a great year for books. (Looking at the long lists of blogs and videos I mentioned above, it’s no wonder.) I only read 6 to completion, abandoned many others, and liked 2 of the ones I finished.

(good)

• Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States by Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge (published in 2018)

• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (published in 1999)

Tools & Tech

Some stuff, both software and hardware, that made a huge difference in my life. Only mentioning things I recommend very highly.

Software

• Focusmate (paid)

  • A website that matches you up with other users to cowork with virtually over a timed session.

  • Focusmate has been life changing for me and is my strongest recommendation in this entire post.

• Vimium (h/t SJ) (free)

  • A Chrome and Firefox extension that lets you use the browser using just keyboard shortcuts. I barely use even 10% of its full capability and it’s already made my browsing experience so much smoother.

• Google search keyboard shortcuts (free)

  • A browser extension similar to Vimium, but far simpler: it allows you to navigate across Google search results using your up and down arrow keys. You’ll never go back once you have this.

• Instapaper (free)

  • A website + extension + app that lets you save links for offline reading. A great replacement for Pocket which shut down this year.

Hardware / Electronics

• Daylight Computer

  • A near-perfect reading device. Has the non-bluelight-screen of a Kindle so you can read for hours without straining your eyes, while running on Android, so you can install any app you’d like to use on it like any other tab or iPad. The stylus works great too.

  • Only real downside as of now is its pricing.

• PlayStation 5

  • Wow, what a niche recommendation, I know, but I had to add it here since this is the first gaming console I’ve ever owned and it’s been so much fun to play on.

TV Shows

Here are the best TV shows I watched this year, separated and ranked by seasons.

(good)
10. American Primeval - miniseries
09. Pluribus - season 1
08. Panchayat - season 1
07. All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur - miniseries
06. The Wire - season 4
05. The Wire - season 3

(very good)
04. Seinfeld - season 2
03. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - season 1
02. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - season 2

(great)
01. The Wire - season 5

Video Games

While I continued playing Civilization V, which I’m clinically addicted to I occasionally enjoy in healthy (and not worrying) amounts, and while I did get FC 26 this year, which is fun to play with friends but was mildly disappointing overall, I only played one (1) other new game to completion this year and really liked it.

(great)
01. The Last of Us Part 1 (PS 5)

Quotes

And, to end with, here are the most memorable quotes sourced from various works of media that I collected over the year.

“Wasted my entire Sunday. Maybe the last 32 years as well”
- @guywhoiswoke

“You asked me what I learned. I didn’t learn anything. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basket case and couldn’t help myself. So, maybe I learned not to do it again, but I already knew that.”
- Stanley Druckenmiller, recalling his worst investing mistake (most relatable thing I’ve ever read)

“The job is done. We can go home now.”
- Nikola Jokić’s reaction after winning the NBA championship, 2023

“Nobody ever reads meeting minutes. But now, thanks to AI, nobody has to write them either.”
- Mike Veerman

“And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it’s better than drinkin’ alone”
- Billy Joel, Piano Man

“Leave the football before the football leaves you.”
- Jamie Carragher

““Content” is an advertising term for whatever fills the space between all the ads.”
- comment on Hacker News

“Good good coffee is good, good bad coffee is good, bad bad and bad good coffee are both bad”
- @ThreeHatsInARow

“It’s too soon to tell.”
- Zhou Enlai, in 1971, on the impact of the French revolution of 1789

“She was continually surprised at what a good time she had, what a multitudinous number of friends she accumulated, what fun she had with Dick. This to her was reality; she lost herself in living this life to the full, and that other life, the one of solitude and introspection, where she guarded jealously all her secrets, even from herself, that other life seemed unreal, a life that she had read about somewhere, that belonged to someone else. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

“And perhaps, what is this?”
- DJ Khaled

“your favorite podcast is a reflection of the friends you seek […] your favorite game is a reflection of the thrills you seek”
- @anuatluru

“No phones in the barber chair please. That’s a time for reflection. Meet yourself in the centre of the ring. Don’t shy away, surrender yourself to it”
- @andrewkerr

“All this buttoning and unbuttoning.”
- anonymous 18th century suicide note

“Actually in history when you look at life of true nomads who are always on the move and in open space, they never engage in the kind of depressive introspection and questioning of life that you only see in settled and civilized peoples.”
- BAP

“[Calvin] Coolidge prided himself on never working more than four hours a day and never sleeping less than eleven hours a night. “His ideal day,” H. L. Mencken quipped, “is one on which nothing whatever happens.”“
- excerpt from Capitalism in America

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.”
- Sydney Harris

“Their system’s never down because they don’t have systems.”
- @delamomanny on Spirit Airlines

“Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?”
- Kristen Stewart, 2025

“Men are hanged not for stealing horses but that horses may not be stolen.”
- George Savile

“You cannot dream when you talk numbers. When you create desire, profits are a consequence.”
- Bernard Arnault

“I have this theory that children are molested by the internet in a way, but we don’t have the language to describe it. It’s obviously not the same as like a physical act, but it is deeply impactful.”
- @default_friend

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
- Michelangelo

“After you
What am I gonna do?
You took a part of me
As you were passing through”
- Roberta Flack, After You

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
- C.S. Lewis

“You’re not even a good trader. You’re just lucky.”
“Yeah? Tell me… what’s the difference?”
- Rishi, Industry S03E04

“Always dizzying to watch someone completely crush a person who would completely crush a person who would completely crush me. A sort of mental vertigo.”
- @jonathanlovelace521, in a YouTube comment on a chess video

“How strange it is to be anything at all”
- Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

“To really study a film you should have reached the point where you are no longer involved in the dramatic action. In a sense you must become bored with the story before you can study the technique. Of course as you become more and more accustomed to watching films in this manner you will automatically become more sensitive to technique on the first viewing.”
- David Lean

“Violent headache for two days after behaving awkwardly in front of a girl he fancied (March 1764, age 20)”
- excerpt from the health and medical history of Thomas Jefferson

“a camera is an instrument for learning how to see the world without a camera”
- @simonsarris

“the humble and the mundane will save you in ways much of what is seen as sacred or special would never dare”
- @Viscerart

“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
- Pope Leo XIV, 2025

“This recipe only takes 20 minutes if you don’t count the rest of the time it takes.”
- from a cartoon, posted by @asherperlman

“In terms of results, Mick, one win in seventeen, it can’t go on like this, can it?”
“It can.”
- Mick McCarthy, 2023

“The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.”
- Alfred Adler

“Your soul has a hymen and it shatters the first time you make a LinkedIn account”
- @starifice

“Hi everyone, I’m just writing to say that today felt like the first day of my life. It was a normal day, but there was something very subtle, strange, and new about it.”
- unknown (from a meme)

“People in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels - it’s very impressive. They’re cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%.”
- Tyler Cowen

“If I see a picture of a woman, might I look at it longer than a sunset? Yeah.”
- Brad Sherman, 2025

“Chess is When You Microdose Infinity”
- title of a YouTube video

“Do things you think are stupid but other people swear by. Maybe you’re the stupid one.”
- Nat Eliason

“And the piano, it sounds like a carnival
And the microphone smells like a beer
And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
And say, “Man, what are you doin’ here?””
- Billy Joel, Piano Man

“I’m being a little cute. I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into heaven. I really don’t. I think I’m not, maybe, heaven-bound.”
- Donald Trump, 2025

“you say very intelligent calming things; your life must be a trainwreck”
- @ossamandere, replying to a Tweet

“Mayor Adams admits to jumping subway turnstile to visit a “shorty””
- New York Post headline

“I look at you these days, you know what I see? I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here. And maybe, just maybe... not smart enough for them out there.”
- Avon Barksdale to Stringer Bell, The Wire S03E08

“How does it feel to be
One of the beautiful people
How often have you been there?
Often enough to know
What did you see when you were there?
Nothing that doesn’t show”
- The Beatles, Baby You’re a Rich Man

“The sea is transparent music.”
- @aybena (translated from Japanese)

“I’ve heard that there is no virtue in rising before the sun unless you are harvesting olives or fleeing the authorities.”
- Tomas Aguir

“The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like. In T. S. Eliot’s words, we are ‘distracted from distraction by distraction.’ The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you—that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself—that might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated, without your realizing anything’s amiss.”
- Oliver Burkeman

“Prioritization isn’t real until it hurts.”
- @Kpaxs

“My signed tie is up for auction. I don’t think even my mum would buy it”
- Adrian Chiles, opinion piece headline in The Guardian

“Ni**as think I won’t get ‘em hit
But like an Indian marriage, it could be arranged”
- Drake, Evil Ways

“You didn’t construct the image you have of yourself, it was handed to you. Constructed layer by layer, built out of glances, comments, expectations. Like a mirror made out of other people’s thoughts. From the moment you are old enough to speak, you are told who you are.”
- Alan Watts

“You can only think about things that you know.”
- Zander

“Her songs, hushed and patient, often seek in-the-moment honesty over retrospective wisdom. She’s equally adept at capturing an omnipresent fog of melancholy and the cosmic joke looming just outside our periphery.”
- Sam Sodomsky, on Phoebe Bridgers

“What’s the difference in how you approach fashion to how you approach music? Is it similar? Is it completely different?”
“Everything in the world is exactly the same.”
- Kanye West

“People don’t really get to choose who they are; many of the things we call “merit” are actually just another form of luck.”
- Cate Hall

“I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.”
- John Green, Paper Towns

“Bad comedians say things to make people clap, not laugh.”
- Norm MacDonald

“A good reminder the law doesn’t just exist to protect you from criminals (you can do that yourself), the law exists to protect you from the mob. The crowd is always more vicious than the law.”
- @LindyMan

“Doing my best to try and retroactively deserve all the gifts I’ve been given”
- Gas station Barbie

“For university presidents, as for politicians at all levels, one of the most valuable talents for the success of their careers is the ability to say things that make no sense, with a straight face and a lofty tone.”
- Thomas Sowell

“This [chess] game brilliantly shows that not all combinations have to float on the surface of the position. The tactical features of the position were masked, as they often are, by its entirely innocuous appearance.”
- Daniel Naroditsky (RIP)

“A crime is something someone else commits.”
- John Steinbeck

“There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.”
“Well, every day is all there is.”
- Joan Didion

“There are many poets in football, but poets don’t win many titles.”
- José Mourinho

“When I made my brain a safe place for me to exist in, I no longer needed you to make my world safe for me.”
- Brooke Bowman

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- C. S. Lewis

“Behind a remarkable scholar one often finds a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist, often, a remarkable man.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

“One of our Tiger tanks is worth four of their Shermans, but the Americans always bring five.”
- German tank commander, 1944

“Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence.”
- Roger Ebert, Princess Mononoke movie review

“We tend to think that if we just explain ourselves better, everyone will agree with us. But if you are building something truly new, explanation is not enough. The world cannot see what you see. When we turned down the billion-dollar offer for Facebook, everyone thought I was crazy. My whole team quit. I learned then that you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long period of time. It is the price of admission for doing something important. If you need external validation to keep going, you will quit. You have to run on internal conviction.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, 2022

“My thoughts are ‘too complex’ for journalists, says Emmanuel Macron”
- article headline in The Telegraph UK, 2017

“By the way, nice trucks. You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life. My life was great.”
- Donald Trump, 2020

“You return from distant lands and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use then of all your traveling?”
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“A tiger mom can get a kid to play Beethoven but will beat out any capacity to compose like him.”
- @MaxDemian36

“I weigh my words, when I say that in my judgment the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial or, in the long run - after we understand it and know how to use it - by its political, effects. Even steam and electricity are far less important than the limited liability corporation and would have been reduced to comparative impotence without it.”
- Nicholas Murray Butler, 1911

“Saying “happiness” is your goal is like saying “getting paid” is your job”
- @pli_cachete

“What made this episode in our collective history possible was not so much the lies we told one another, but the lies we told ourselves.”
- Michael Soussan

“I get the urge for going but I never seem to go.”
- Joni Mitchell

“The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
- G. K. Chesterton

"The lives in Mad Men are compartmentalized, their segments fit between commercials, and we’ve yet to see if the show leaves us with any larger insights about our moment. While its lingering melancholy makes for ineffective marketing, the metropolis that The Wire wove together with unprecedented patience and honesty left us with one killer tagline of a message. It’s that any good that’s done today will get done in secret, off the clock, by a few obsessive headcases, probably defying direct orders not to do it. America does not run on Dunkin’. It runs, when it runs, on these people."
- Chris Norris

“If I know only one thing
It’s that everything that I see
Of the world outside is so inconceivable
Often, I barely can speak”
- Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”
- G. K. Chesterton

Fin.

I don’t think we as a society are collectively talking about AI enough, and it’s time someone made the brave choice of giving this niche topic the attention it deserves.

Hah.

Because trends in tech move so quickly - remember NFTs? - and because trends within AI seem to move even quicker, I thought it would be a good idea to note down all my thoughts on AI right now, as a snapshot of what I think and feel about it in this particular moment in time. It might be fun to see how these notes read even a year into the future, when the bubble is sure to have burst the tech landscape is sure to be substantially different.

Another reason I felt like noting this stuff down is that there’s so much variance among folks in their opinions and uses of AI, depending on who you ask, and I want to capture where I stand at this moment. Because it seems to me that the tech landscape currently exists in a world of extremes. There are people who don’t use AI at all while others who’ve already integrated it deeply into their digital setup. There are people up to speed on the latest behind-the-scenes drama at OpenAI down to the hour, while others who wouldn’t even notice if ChatGPT was nuked tomorrow. There are VC’s pumping millions into every startup that mentions “agentic workflows” on its website while big tech is simultaneously laying off thousands of employees. There are people who think AGI will save us while others are sure it’s going to bring about the literal destruction of humanity. There are people who believe we’ve created a new consciousness while others are frustrated they can’t get their LLMs to write decent code. Some are sick of hearing the term AI itself while others can’t get enough of it.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

- Charles Dickens, inadvertently describing 2025

Maybe the only thing tying us all together in this giant cacophony of technological and social change is that each one of us has their own takes on it. Here are mine.

I’m sure a lot, if not most, of my opinions below will look embarrassing in the future, if they don’t already, but that’s kind of the point.

My takes on everything AI adjacent as of November 2025, not that anybody asked

Am I an expert on AI?

Oh hell naw. While I have done some basic machine learning projects in my past academic life I’ve since forgotten everything I learned by doing them. (Classic me!) I couldn’t tell you the first thing about how an LLM works (me at a party: “so, uhh, it’s a neural network trained on a corpus of text, and it basically predicts, like, the next token, y’know…”), have barely a clue what terms like “alignment” and “scaling” mean beyond their literal definition, and at the moment am perfectly fine using LLMs without really understanding them very deeply, or at all.

—

How up to date am I about what goes on in the AI world?

Quite enough, I think. I do end up hearing about most major product launches, new models that claim to have beaten all the benchmarks, deals, acquisitions, and even AI-adjacent Tweets and memes and interview clips that go viral, simply through Twitter and the blogosphere. That said, I don’t follow any of the actual research these labs are doing, nor do I read any papers, and nor am I personally in touch with anyone in this space the way a lot of folks online seem to be.

—

Do I find AI to be a genuine positive for society? Is it actually a useful technology or just all empty hype?

It’s absolutely useful and I can’t believe there are people who think otherwise. An AI chatbot is literally an omniscient machine trained on all of humanity’s written knowledge that will endlessly, patiently answer any questions you have about almost any topic or situation: legal, medical, technological, personal, and the like, all the while keeping your previous questions in its context window so that the conversation naturally flows. It’s the kind of stuff you’d dream about in a science fiction novel. It’s the distribution of intelligence itself, and arguably the most democratizing technology to have become mainstream since the internet itself. I can’t imagine going back to an AI-less world. I think artificial intelligence as a term has gained a very particular flavor of negative connotation among certain kinds of people - creatives and artists, especially - who look down on anyone using it, and I do get where that sentiment comes from, but the technology’s overall usefulness vastly outweighs many of the concerns I have about it.

—

What’s so vital about it? What do I actually use it for in my day-to-day life?

I only use chatbots like ChatGPT. I don’t use any AI-based image or video generation tools, agents, workflows, code editors, or APIs. (I’m ancient that way.) I mostly use AI to ask it questions regarding whatever I happen to be curious about that day, new things I’m trying to learn, stuff I need explained, problems I need solved, projects I’m trying to do, programming, stuff I need help remembering, niche topics I want to have a conversation with an expert about, legal/medical documents I need analysed because I don’t understand legal/medical jargon, and so on. Basically, if there’s anything a friend or a quick internet search cannot help me with, I will be asking an AI.

That said, trying to answer “how do I use AI” is a bit like trying to answer “how do I use Google search”, just because I use it so much, you know. So here’s a snapshot of some of my past conversations with ChatGPT - my “AI search history”, so to speak, with all the truly embarrassing queries removed - which hopefully gives you a better idea:

—

So the hype is all real? There’s no AI “bubble”?

I’m not a hundred percent sure on that, honestly. The money being poured into certain AI-related investments and deals is so huge it makes my head spin. (OpenAI and Oracle signed a deal worth $300B earlier this month, and no, that is not a typo.) So while I am bullish on AI just because it’s been a great tool for me personally, I just don’t know enough to speculate whether it will genuinely create as much economic value as these companies hope/assume it will. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

—

Do I think AGI is here?

I honestly don’t know what the term “AGI” even means anymore. I’ve heard it used in so many different contexts over the years that it’s now lost one coherent meaning to me. I will say that if you went back in time and showed ChatGPT to someone from even, say, 2015, they’d probably call it AGI, no?

—

So if AI is that good, do I think it poses an existential risk to humanity?

I lean towards no simply because it feels too far fetched, too sci-fi-esque to say that “AI is going to kill us all”, but that’s honestly not a good enough reason to have the opinion I have, because we live in an inherently far fetched world now. (The movie Her, which features a sentient and conversational AI, supposedly takes place in the distant future, and took only ten years to become a reality.) However, AI risk is thankfully a very well known and highly discussed topic in these circles, and I assume that the companies building these models have priced and factored this risk into their engineering. Or so I hope.

—

Since I’m a software engineer by profession, do I vibe code?

Nah. Last I checked, AI just wasn’t good enough for that yet. I mean, I do use AI tools when engineering sometimes, don’t get me wrong, and they can be so incredibly helpful, but the thought of letting an LLM directly edit and write to files in my local repository fills me with anxiety. That’s because the one time I gave vibe coding a genuine shot a few months back didn’t go so well.

What happened was that I found an open source web-based tool that I wanted to contribute a simple change to. So I installed Claude Code and starting hacking away to see if it could help me make the change I needed quickly. And yeah, Claude Code is very slick, and works quite smoothly, and while it did solve the core problem at first, it would always miss some improvement or optimization that I needed done subsequently for me consider the fix complete. And so we got into this loop of a) me asking it to modify or fix something it missed, b) either it replying with, “You’re absolutely right!” without actually fixing anything, or it fixing that bug but creating another one as a side effect, c) me pointing out that its changes hadn’t worked, and us going back to step a). After about two hours of us going through this cycle together without reaching a fully working solution, I ended the afternoon by calling it a bunch of slurs and slamming down my laptop in frustration. My conclusion was that if the best model at the time couldn’t help me make a minimal change in a project written in vanilla JavaScript, vibe coding really wasn’t going to help me with anything even slightly more complex. I’m sure the newer models are far better at this now but I haven’t been curious enough to try.

—

Are LLMs actually conscious, like many people seem to think? Do they actually “understand” what they’re saying?

LMAO. Just put the next token in the bag, bro.

—

Do I think AI is capable of making real art?

On a long enough time horizon, yes, I think so.

This is a hot take because we like to consider the ability to make art of any kind as something distinctly human, but looking at the rate of progress in AI, especially among the image and video generation models, it just seems inevitable that we soon won’t be the only species doing genuinely creative things. (We’ve been here before: we used to be the only species that played chess, but since about thirty years ago we’ve stopped being even the best at it.) And trust me, I don’t say this with glee at all. But it was this ACX blog post, where thousands of readers were asked to guess whether a bunch of paintings were made by humans or AI, that really changed my mind. I did very badly at the test myself and encourage you to try it as well. I’m not saying that any of the AI-generated paintings I’ve shown above (which are from that very post) are Real Art, per se, but that they resembled human-made art closely enough that it’s no longer outside of my overton window to think that an AI model could someday make a great painting or even a great song. (Great movies or novels might be quite further away. God, I hope…) I think that when people say that “AI can never make real art”, they are only thinking about its current capabilities and are at least a tad driven by insecurity. And honestly, I get that. The fact that AI could someday be as creative as humans doesn’t really fill me with joy, but then again, I would’ve said the same for chess had I been able to talk when Deep Blue bested Kasparov, and I would’ve been wrong.

Now, the question of who made an AI-generated work of art is another one entirely. What percentage of the credit should go to the prompt engineer, to the underlying AI model (and thus, by extension, to the researchers and programmers who built it), and to the millions of works of art the AI likely scraped to make its vision come true? This is a question that deserves its own post, though here’s a thoughtful essay that should serve as a good starting point to think about this thorny issue.

—

Is AI going to take away all of our jobs?

I don’t know about the short term, and definitely not “all” of our jobs, but yes, it will make a bunch of jobs obsolete, which in fact seems to have happened in certain professions already. On a long enough time horizon, however, I think it’s just the next wave of automation that will grow both the size of the economy and the number of things people are enabled to do to a large enough extent that it will end up creating far more jobs than it kills, just like every automation technology did before it.

—

Am I concerned about the water usage and environmental impact of AI, as a lot of people seem to be?

No.

—

Okay, if not environmental, do I have any other concerns about it?

Oh, so many. There are thousands of people out there who are deeply attached to their AIs to a worrying extent, which is sure to affect society and culture in ways we can’t even predict right now. The internet is getting actively worse because of the deluge of AI slop content that’s pervading every social media platform these days. Deepfake as a technology also scares me because I genuinely can’t think of a single positive use case for it. The growing prevalence of AI-enabled scam phone calls and bot replies is also gross, and is making our digital environments increasingly lower-trust and not as fun to inhabit.

—

Do I think the positives of AI outweigh all these concerns?

Yeah, it’s a technology, and any technology is going to have positive and negative use cases. These are all genuine problems and I don’t know the fixes for them - if I did, I probably would have more money than I do right now - but I don’t think it makes the technology itself necessarily evil. Maybe this sounds banal but I still think it’s true.

—

And what do I think of the myriad of different AI products out there?

That’s what the next section is about.

My thoughts on every popular AI product as of November 2025, sorted from least to most used by me

Windsurf, Lovable, Llama, Cursor, Deepseek, NotebookLM

• These are five entirely different products made by separate companies, but I grouped them together because they all have something in common: while I have heard of each of these, I’ve never used them more than a couple of times, if at all, and so they’re mostly just product names in the AI space I’ve vaguely heard of.

• I first started a draft of this post in early 2025 and most of these products were in the zeitgeist back then, hence their addition here, but at this point I barely recognize some of their names. Still, thoughts on each below.

  • Windsurf

    • This is an AI code editor I’ve only heard about because, earlier this year, OpenAI was set to acquire this company for like $3B, but then Google snatched them up, and this became a huge story because a lot of Windsurf employees apparently got screwed over in that deal.

  • Lovable

    • This is also an AI IDE whose name rings a bell, but I’ve never used it, nor heard anyone talk about it online or IRL in a long, long time, i.e. a few months.

  • Llama

    • All I know is that this is Meta’s large language model that developers seem to use mostly through the API and not a user facing client. It is integrated into all their products, though, even WhatsApp, but I’ve never used it, and find forced AI integration into consumer apps generally annoying with every few exceptions, this not being one of them.

  • Cursor

    • This is an IDE that lets you use any underlying AI model you want to help you vibe code. Of all the AI code editors, I’ve always had the vague sense that this is by far the most popular one, without knowing any actual usage numbers.

    • It being “just a VS Code fork” is kind of a meme at this point.

    • I did download it once, but because of my distaste for vibe coding - see the previous section - I never did anything significant with it, and so I can’t speak to its quality.

  • Deepseek

    • Deepseek was a state-of-the-art model created by a Chinese company, and was in fact the first major AI release from a country that wasn’t the US. This caused all the podcastbros and Twitter anons to collectively lose their shit, because it was the first time that people seemed to really consider the possibility that the US could potentially lose the AI race. As of right now, though, that seems impossible.

    • I remember that asking Deepseek about Tiananmen Square became a huge meme around the time of its release, because that was the one topic it would decline to answer any questions about. People considered this a gotcha about Chinese censorship while forgetting that all the American AI models we use are heavily censored - “lobotomized”, they call it - as well.

    • I did try it out once and didn’t have any strong opinions on it.

  • NotebookLM

    • NotebookLM is a chat based tool by Google that uses Google’s Gemini model under the hood. (More on Gemini later.) The unique thing about NotebookLM is that it’s meant to be used as a research assistant specifically, and allows you to upload more files, PDFs, and web links to it for context than any other tool out there.

    • I did check it out once, and I can imagine this being very useful to researchers and academics who need to go deep into their niche, but the extent of my depth of research when using AI is asking it questions like “what’s the difference between coriander and parsley”, and that’s how I know that something like NotebookLM is not meant for me.

— — —

DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Sora

• These are, again, a few different AI models that have one thing in common: they were created specifically for image and video generation. I have toyed around with some of these, but not too deeply, and don’t really have anything interesting to say about any of them individually. I just have the vague sense that Midjourney has always been the most popular one of these, though the fact that it’s usable only through Discord makes me never want to use it myself.

• That’s not to downplay how unbelievable these models are, though. Image creation to me is when AI feels least like an engineered technology and most like literal magic. What do you mean that I can type in any detailed description as a prompt, and have a computer perform matrix multiplications to create a JPEG image for me - and now, even video (!) - based on whatever I just wrote? It feels far more surreal than text-based token completion.

• Because of this I always check out any new image generation product like I’m a five year old looking at a new toy, but just like a five year old I also somehow get bored of it in a few minutes and never use it again. It’s incredible how fast our minds adapt to new realities, how quickly something that once seemed magical becomes mundane.

• In spite of my initial fascination, I think I eventually get bored of these tools mainly because I struggle to think of any real use cases for image or video generation in my day-to-day life. The one time I did use this technology was earlier this year, when I wanted to buy some new bedsheets and a duvet. I couldn’t quite picture which colors would look good on my bed, and so I uploaded a picture of my bed to ChatGPT (which has DALL·E inbuilt) and asked it to show me what it would look like in various colors, and it was actually pretty helpful. But that was like six months ago and I’ve never needed to have an image created by AI since then.

— — —

Nano Banana Pro

• So Nano Banana Pro is also an image generation model similar to the ones mentioned above. It’s from Google, and uses their latest Gemini 3 model underneath, both of which came out literally this week. I normally would’ve ignored this release, as I was already in the middle of writing this post, but I was so astonished by Nano Banana Pro’s results that not only did I have to add it here but I had to give it its own section.

• As you can see above, the images this model can create are so photorealistic, so indistinguishable from a picture I’d normally take from a camera or my iPhone, that they have surpassed my ability to tell AI-images from actual photographs. Those SOBs did it. They actually crossed the uncanny valley.

• While I have said that I’m very bullish about AI in general, this particular aspect of it, along with deepfakes, makes me extremely squeamish, and I don’t know what it’s going to do to us as a collective. I think most people tend to be narrow minded when thinking about paradigm-shifting technologies - there are people out there still opposed to self-driving cars, for instance - but I have to confess that with regards to realistic image generation, I myself am at a complete loss as to how it’s supposed to benefit society for the better. Because I can think of a bunch of far reaching implications once this technology becomes more widespread, but they’re all quite dystopian:

  • Very soon, you will have no way of knowing whether any photo you see on social media, on the news, on a billboard, or anywhere else, is AI-generated or not.

  • Photographs will not trustworthy evidence anymore, whether socially, culturally, or legally. Profile pictures will mean nothing.

  • Spams and scams will increase a hundredfold. Identity theft, impersonating someone, phishing, and things of the like will be much easier to do and harder to spot.

• You get the idea. Of all the products I’ve mentioned in this post, Nano Banana Pro is both the newest one and the only one that makes me genuinely uncomfortable. And it’s just the first one to be this good; I’m sure OpenAI and the other companies will catch up to its quality very soon. I don’t know how the engineers and researchers at Google feel about this, how they reckon with what they’re making, and how much they’ve thought through its implications. I hope I’m wrong, and that they see productive and ethical uses of this technology that I don’t yet. Let’s move on and discuss other products before I lose my mind any further.

— — —

Perplexity

• The unique thing about Perplexity was that it was an internet search engine that didn’t give you search results, but rather a summarized answer using AI. I thought it was pretty cool. I remember playing around with it a bunch when it was hot, asking it things like, “What’s the current status of the Russia Ukraine war?”, and getting a pretty concise, informative answer in response, updated to that very day. Arvind Srinivas as a founder also made some online waves during that time.

• That said, at this point, every major AI product seems to have figured out how to search the web and summarize what it found for you. ChatGPT does this without even being explicitly asked to; it figures out whether it needs to look something up based solely on what you say to it, as if you were talking to a friend. And as you might have noticed, most Google searches give you an AI-generated summary at the top, whether you asked for one or not.

• And so Perplexity’s moat has disappeared. I don’t know how this company is going to stay relevant. I myself haven’t needed to use the product in quite a while.

— — —

Copilot

• Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant, which uses GPT underneath as part of their deal with OpenAI, so it’s not really a unique model. Still, it’s clear that Microsoft intends to go all-in on AI and has integrated Copilot into literally every single product they have: Windows, Edge, Bing, and all their Office products.

• I find this integration mildly annoying, but there are two use cases for it that I find very interesting.

  • The first is that if your employer uses the Microsoft 365 suite (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the whole nine yards), Copilot knows everything you’ve ever written in these products. It can thus act as a personal assistant who can integrate information you entered in different documents, presentations, and emails across the suite, and who thus has all the context to help you with any abstract queries you might have. I don’t personally use this, but can imagine it being a game changer for a lot of people whose job is mostly emailing and writing. So you could ask it things like, “go through all my emails and Teams messages and tell me what my urgent tasks are for this week”, or “summarize every interaction I’ve ever had with a [company] over the last five years”, and so on.

  • The second use case is more relevant to me. Because Copilot is integrated into GitHub as well, you can install the Copilot extension on VSCode (also a Microsoft product), authenticate yourself with GitHub, and basically use it as an assistant programmer that helpfully autocompletes a lot of code for you.

    • Getting inline code suggestions like this is very different from the vibe coding phenomenon I ranted about in the previous section, where you give an IDE instructions in English and it just spits out entire files of code for you. Here, you’re still doing all of the thinking and writing 90% of the code, with the AI is just finishing your sentences for you and taking care of some of the manual grunt work.

    • But it makes so much of a difference because the veracity of Copilot’s (rather, GPT’s) autocomplete is exceptional. It’s not too ambitious, doesn’t suggest anything too wild, but is rather able to extrapolate the next variable name, conditional statement, inline comment, or helper function you’re about to type, based solely on what you’ve typed in so far and on all the other code in the file you’re editing, with shockingly high accuracy.

    • Once you use this enough, typing all one hundred percent of your code “by hand” starts to feel archaic. (Ask me how I know - I’m currently out of GitHub Copilot free credits and am in great agony.) This has quickly become one of my absolute favourite uses of AI across all domains.

— — —

Grok

• Grok is an AI model created by researchers at Elon Musk’s xAI. While I have tinkered with its chat interface a couple of times, I would’ve otherwise never cared about Grok except for the fact that it’s integrated into Twitter exceptionally well. It’s one of the only two features of post-Elon Twitter, the other being Community Notes, that I really love. (It will always be “Twitter” and never “X” to me, though, sorry.)

  • Basically, every Tweet has a button for Grok, which if you click it, results in Grok elaborating on and explaining that Tweet to you. You can even tag it in any Tweet you write - a lot of replies on that site are basically, “@grok is this true?”, as a form of fact-checking - to which the bot will reply to your question with a researched answer.

  • Now, Twitter has certain posts that come up once in a while that would make absolutely no sense to most users on their own. That’s because these Tweets are either using a super-niche meme, or they’re implicitly referencing (“subtweeting”) another post that everyone on the TL is currently talking about, or they’re using shibboleths that would only be legible to users on a certain part of the website (eg. football Twitter, film Twitter, and so on). What’s utterly mind-blowing to me is how good Grok is at explaining any Tweet, even the niche kinds mentioned above, whose meanings would not be easy to extrapolate from just text or image analysis. It’s somehow able to factor in the current discourse on the site, the tone a Tweet was written in, and a bunch of other data in its context window when analysing any Tweet, and is thus able to explain almost anything with deadly accuracy and thoroughness. It even spots irony and sarcasm. (Other users seem to feel the same, see here and here.)

• Even beyond its Twitter integration, Grok stands out for being the least politically correct, most blunt, and least sycophantic of all the AI models out there, both in terms of its style of writing and the substance of what it says. It does hallucinate and gets things wrong sometimes, especially on the topic of Elon, about whom it will often exaggerate things (what a coincidence!), but it generally seems like the least likely to actively lie or sugarcoat information, which is quite refreshing. That said, my AI usage is pretty tame, and these are not good enough reasons for me to switch over from Claude and ChatGPT.

• So while I don’t really use Grok that much, apart from the occasional explanations I need on Twitter, it’s obvious to me that the model is clearly very good. xAi definitely seems to have the sauce. I’m curious to see how they compete with the other companies over the coming years.

— — —

Gemini

• Gemini is Google’s own AI model, created presumably by researchers at DeepMind, an AI lab that Google acquired a few years ago. You might recognize DeepMind from the excellent 2017 documentary, AlphaGo. (The entire film is available on YouTube. Highly recommended.)

• In some ways, Google’s position is similar to Microsoft’s. Both are trillion dollar companies that sell a bunch of tools to both consumers and businesses, including entire B2B productivity suites. And so, just like Microsoft Copilot, Google has also decided to integrate Gemini into every single one of their products, including Google search, Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Docs, and so on. Gemini now comes with its own app as well.

• Although my entire personal life runs on Google’s products, I’ve never once used any Gemini feature through them, even though Google seems intent on shoving it down my throat just to increase their KPIs.

• Well, I do use it in search, I guess, because Google is still my goto search engine, and it now gives you an AI-generated result for most of your search queries. I’ve sorted all the AI products listed in this section from the least to most used by me, and the only reason Gemini is this close to the end is because I technically (am forced to) use it very frequently simply by virtue of using Google search.

  • Now, Gemini’s summaries are well written and often helpful, obviously, but I find it incredibly overused, and wish there was a toggle to turn it off by default. That way I could opt-in to seeing it only if I want to. Most of my searches are simple enough to not require any AI involvement at all, and so I find that wall of generated text that appears every time I search something to be both wasteful and aesthetically ugly.

  • The only use case where I do like it is in the realm of programming. I’ve often Googled stuff related to a certain API or language, expecting to be taken to the relevant documentation page to get what I need, but had Gemini give me the exact documentation spec I needed on the results page itself.

  • However, it’s gotten to an extent that even Googling something like “what time sunset today” generates an AI summary, even though Google has always given me the time for such a query on the results page itself. C’mon, Gemini, just chill out a bit, man. But anything to make those usage metrics go up, I guess.

• Among all the big tech companies, Google’s journey in the AI race has been the most interesting one by far.

  • In the few months after ChatGPT came out, and the entire industry was clamoring to get in on the AI hype train, Google was nowhere to be found. When they did release their first model, Bard, I remember it was mocked online for being inaccurate and hallucinatory almost to a point of parody.

  • Google then either scrapped or rebranded Bard, and pivoted to an entirely new multimodal model, Gemini. At first they continued to be dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic, but each Gemini version release has been significantly better than the last.

  • Add to this the fact that Google has billions of monthly active users, and thus has both the best dataset to train its models on and the best distribution network to launch them into.

  • Which all brings us to Gemini 3, the latest version, which came out just this week, which the aforementioned Nano Banana Pro also uses, and which is currently supposed to be the best model out there based on all benchmarks, and you just know that Google has awakened and that things are about to get very interesting.

  • So, in just two years, Google went from having the worst model in tech to the best one. Its reputation in the AI space has taken a 180 degree turn in that time, to the extent that a lot of people have begun speculating that Google could emerge as the big winner in AI, which is something that was unthinkable even a year ago. Talk about a comeback, huh.

— — —

Claude

• Anthropic’s Claude is one of the two AI tools I’ve used deliberately and regularly for at least the last year or more, and is the second-last entry on this list.

• Claude was launched only a few months after ChatGPT, and was the second major AI product to really make some waves in tech, way before the space was crowded with this many options. With each update, it began developing a reputation for being far better than its competitor for technical tasks like programming, and so naturally I decided to check it out.

• When I signed up for Claude, ChatGPT was the only tool that I had to compare it against, and it was refreshingly different in just about every way. It looked unmistakably unique, with its sans-serif font and its light-brown-ish color palette. It wrote differently too: more formally than GPT, but also in a more opinionated fashion. It just gave the vibe of being like a weightier tool to use, somehow, and not in a pretentious way.

• The claims about Claude being better at technical tasks turned out to be very true. You could instantly feel the difference even from a couple of conversations, especially if you gave it code to work with. It was far sharper at debugging errors. The code it wrote was just better. It explained technical things with more flair. (And this was back when the models weren’t half as good as they are now, so even minor improvements felt like huge leaps in performance.)

• I was quite used to ChatGPT though, and didn’t want to switch entirely, but Claude was too useful at certain tasks to be ignored. And so I started using both. ChatGPT became my default assistant to run any quick day-to-day queries by, and to ask anything personal, since it maintained memory, whereas Claude became my “old wise wizard” like mentor that I sought out to go deep into a certain topic, or discuss anything work or engineering related with.

  • Even outside of programming, I remember uploading my lease document to it to ask it some questions about my renewal. I remember reading a book on economic history, having no clue about the subject, and pasting passages from the book into Claude and asking it to explain them, which is how I was able to actually understand the book and make it through to the end. I remember uploading a blood report to it so that I could have it explain basic stuff from the report to me and ask follow up questions.

• All that said: you’ll notice I’ve used past tense to describe everything I have about Claude so far. That’s because its superiority is no longer inarguable; GPT 4 and 5 have caught on significantly, and are as good at all the technical stuff I used to go to Claude for, not to mention the other models that are presumably supposed to be equally competent. In fact, the last couple of times I hit a major technical snag, I started a conversation with both models with the exact same prompt, and it was actually the conversation with ChatGPT that eventually led me to a solution. So as of now, I don’t have a real reason to keep using Claude.

• That said, I find the messaging and aesthetics of Anthropic as a company to be far superior than pretty much any other one in the AI space. There’s just something polished about their whole vibe, their comms, and their visual look. Their “keep thinking” video is by far the best work of media to come out of this AI era, and is a testament to how refined and well-crafted everything they do is. I’m sure that that’s a huge part of the reason I got drawn towards Claude in the first place, and why I can never seem to truly let go.

— — —

ChatGPT

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the AI product that started it all. It launched in late 2022 and has since - I don’t think this is hyperbolic to say - changed the world.

• It was my first AI tool as well, and I remember checking it out the very week it launched. What’s surprising is that all these years later it’s still my goto model for most tasks; nothing has fully replaced it. At this point I have its app installed on my personal laptop, phone, work laptop, and tablet.

• The months after ChatGPT first came out were quite something. I’ve never seen a product catch fire this quickly. All of social media was talking about it constantly because no one had ever seen anything like it. (Twitter was especially on fire, because it has a lot of SF/tech/AI adjacent folks who actually work in the industry and understand the technology better than most. Twitter in general has always been ground zero for any AI discourse, news, or breakthrough, and if you care about this field even slightly you should be on there.)

• ChatGPT then reached 100 million monthly active users (!) in just two months (!!) and is the fastest product to ever do so.

• It’s been exactly three years since its launch and I think it’s fair to say that ChatGPT is still the most significant AI product in the entire world, be it technically or culturally. I imagine that for a lot of non-technical folks, ChatGPT is AI, sort of like how Xerox is photocopying.

  • You can feel its cultural significance even if you just pay attention outside. It’s the one product you consistently see in the wild. Every time I’m at a café where people are working, I notice that at least a few laptops have ChatGPT opened on them. It’s the only model you know for a fact that anyone you talk to has likely heard of. It’s the only model I’ve overheard people on the street talk about, and I don’t even live in SF.

  • If I had to judge the popularity of AI products based only on my lived experiences and not any online data, I would have to assume that ChatGPT is the only thing out there. The others don’t even come close to its level of penetration.

• OpenAI clearly had first-mover advantage when they launched ChatGPT, but that’s not even close to a complete explanation for why it’s still so dominant. The interesting thing about this is that first-mover advantage is historically not the norm in tech at all; in fact, many would call it a disadvantage. Google wasn’t the first search engine to hit the market, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, yadda yadda yadda. Most monopolies that we now know of were actually products that knocked out many incumbents. Which makes OpenAI’s reign even more impressive. Sam Altman might be the GOAT.

• I will say that although ChatGPT has often not been the best AI model in every single aspect - Grok, Claude, and Gemini have, at points, been superior at certain specific things - it’s always been the best overall product to not make those edge cases matter much.

• I’m not an AI expert and can’t speak to its various models’ qualities - they’ve always been generally near the best, both in my experience and in terms of benchmarks - but what I can say is that all the non-AI-related engineering OpenAI does is exceptional too. Every time they’ve launch a new interface to use ChatGPT through, whether the iPhone app, or the Windows desktop app, or voice mode, it’s been flawless. It just works.

  • This is one area where other products often fall behind. When I first installed the Claude desktop app, for instance, it often didn’t work, or would be slow, and so on. I hardly ever faced a tech problem like this with ChatGPT.

• OpenAI has also always been the most innovative at adding new features that make a real difference as well. They came up with personalization and custom instructions, the ability for users to upload files, web search, voice mode, and projects, and these are just features I can recall off the top of my head. To be fair, OpenAI might not have been the first to ship each of these features, but they were the ones to launch a very solid version of each and make them mainstream, sort of like what Edison did with the lightbulb.

• Having used it this long, I think the personalization feature might be ChatGPT’s moat. Because it remembers things about you across conversations, and because you can give it certain preset instructions that’ll apply to all conversations, you’re not just talking to an AI but an AI that knows you and what you want, and can thus tailor its responses to your preferences. This adds up significantly over time, because you don’t need to give it new context every time you start a new thread; it just knows what assumptions to make. And once you have enough of a history with it, you can ask it personal questions about yourself and your life - everyone’s favourite topic! - and get shockingly insightful answers.

  • I’m not going to share examples of personal conversations I’ve had with it here, but reach out if you want to know.

  • No wonder it’s being used as a therapist and for emotional support so widely.

  • If you think it’s terrifying how much data Google has about you, don’t even think about what OpenAI has. Please don’t sell my deepest insecurities to advertisers, Mr. Sam Alt Man.

• I also need to emphasize how good ChatGPT’s voice conversation mode is. It’s fast enough, and the text-to-speech is natural enough, that you feel as if you’re talking to a real person, man, it’s uncanny. The film Her is a reality now.

• ChatGPT is even more significant to me as a Twitter person, because OpenAI is a constant topic of discussion there often due to internal political drama. The timeline when Altman was fired as CEO by the OpenAI board only to come back a few days later was especially insane.

• I won’t say ChatGPT is a perfect product though. It never has been. For starters, their model names are terrible and I can never keep track of what’s what. Some of their models have also been sycophantic and agreeable to a worrying degree. But none of that stuff really matters too much in the long run, at least to me. It’s been such a game changer for me and is so deeply integrated into my life that I probably will end up asking it what I should wear for my own funeral.

And that’s all I got

Having said so much, my only parting thought on the topic of AI for now is that I’m amazed to live in a time where wonderful technology like this can exist and am grateful for all those who have helped make it happen.

Mission: Impossible is one of those franchises that’s been in the pop culture ether for so long that I couldn’t quite remember which of its eight films I’d watched and which ones I hadn’t, because growing up I’d always come across scenes from them in bits and pieces on TV. That said, I was keenly aware this franchise wasn’t just generic-C-tier-action-movie-slop but something genuinely good. But whether it was just James Bond / Jason Bourne / John Wick level good or something even better remained to be seen.

The thing is, I literally never watch action movies, so based on my own preferences I knew deep down that if I didn’t binge-watch these films in a lead up to the final one now, I wouldn’t bother ever watching them in my lifetime, and might miss out on some great cinema. That potential movie-FOMO was enough for me to want to forge ahead. And so I did.

The basic setup of the series is that Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a super spy who’s maxxed out on every trait a man can have - intelligence, agency, athletic ability, presence of mind, plot armor, you name it. Head to head he would wipe the floor with any of the other guys I mentioned above. He works for what’s called the “Impossible Mission Force (IMF)” (lol), a shadow organization of the US military with an infinite budget and cutting-edge tech straight out of science fiction, and is only called on for critical espionage missions that are considered by most to be, umm, neither realistic, nor achievable, nor probable, but something far more unlikely. Urgh, I wish there was a word to describe them.

So while these movies are connected story-wise, they can easily be (and are) enjoyed as standalone films because the basic premise of each one is usually structurally the same. Ethan Hunt gets assigned to a mission on which both his life and the fate of humanity depend on. Him and his crackpot team of fellow IMF agents then do everything they can to stop the bad guys, which usually involves:

• travelling to exotic locations around the world in cute J.Crew outfits,

• infiltrating the most secure places on earth with less effort than it takes me to log into Outlook every morning,

• getting into fistfights, knife fights, gun fights, running chases, rooftop chases, bike chases, car chases, helicopter chases, or plane chases with the villain or his goons, and,

• ending up in an absurdly difficult do-or-die situation, which only Hunt can find a solution out of, which usually involves him having to do a thing no other human is capable of.

Of course, the franchise’s real claim to fame is its sublime action sequences, and that Tom Cruise, unlike most other actors out there, performs the stunts in these sequences by himself. And when I say that “Cruise performs his own stunts”, I’m not just talking about generic action movie stuff like punching a goon in the face or shooting up a room full of people, but unbelievably insane things like hanging off the side of a plane while it takes off (!), or riding a dirt bike literally off a cliff and then parachuting down to safety (!!). And yes, I’m being very literal with my words here - in the example above he literally strapped himself to the outer side of an airplane and then hung on to it as it gradually actually took off in the air. These are just one of the blatantly dangerous things that Tom Cruise has done in real life for these movies. He’s sixty three years old.

Now you might wonder, isn’t modern VFX good enough that action sequences like these can be shot safely in front of a green screen and made to look real using CGI? Absolutely - that’s what most big budget films do. So is there really any need to actually perform these stunts on location outdoors, instead of on a green screen inside a studio? Nope. In fact it’s quite a safety risk, and involves large teams and months of preparation to ensure nothing goes wrong. Okay, but say the production crew does decide to shoot these stunts for real, is there then any need for the stunts to be performed by the movie’s lead actor himself, instead of a professional stuntman? Again, no. In fact it’s quite ill advised because an actor getting injured can delay a movie’s production by months.

So is Tom Cruise clinically insane to want to perform these genuinely dangerous stunts, on location, by himself, for every new M: I film, essentially putting his life at risk every few years?

Yes.

And we as audiences are all the better for it.

Reading all of this you might think that action inherently bores you as a genre, that it’s full of unrealistic fights carried forward with stupid plots, and who really cares how these films are made if they’re going to be so mindless and vapid? But I felt the same way. And then I blazed through this series, and while a lot of these action movie stereotypes are to some extent applicable to it as well, at their best moments these M: I films are such viscerally thrilling experiences that there’s at least a scene or two from each one that’s seared into my brain forever.

Now, to be fair, these movies aren’t particularly realistic or super deep in any way. They’re inherently quite silly, but to their credit I don’t think they’re claiming to be anything else either. They are, however, the two things they need to be: extremely well made and unabashedly fun.

One super minor detail that adds to this sense of fun is the consistent use of the series’ signature theme song. Each movie has a scene or two that essentially functions as a cold open, a la Breaking Bad, which then perfectly transitions into that banger of an opening theme and gets you hyped for what you’re about to see.

After the latest film was released and I was done watching all eight, I noticed that other fans of the series have since been posting their own rankings of these films from worst to best, and the variance in opinion has been quite stunning. As I saw these rankings I honestly started questioning if we’d seen the same set of movies, because I couldn’t believe how wrong some of their choices were. And so I decided to make my own, but looking at it now, I can’t believe mine either.

So below are my thoughts on each of the eight Mission: Impossible movies, ranked from my least to most favourite one. No major spoilers.

08. Mission: Impossible (1996)

dir. Brian De Palma, 1st in series

The original and self-titled Mission: Impossible is a good movie that I somehow don’t gel with at all. It’s quite clever, full of plot twists and cool spy stuff, but there’s just something a bit wobbly about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. Everything about it, from the dialogue to the pacing to the cinematography, feels choppy and uneven to me, and I didn’t really enjoy it as much as most people do, who rank it generally quite high.

To me, the most interesting thing about this movie now is how distant it feels from the series it would eventually spawn. It has the vibe of a forgotten 90’s spy flick more than anything else. Had I seen it back when it came out - granted, I wasn’t born till a few months later - I would never in a million years have expected a three-decade-long behemoth of an action franchise to come out of it. The fact that it did says everything you need to know about Cruise’s tenacity as a producer and his endurance as an A-list movie star.

Worth watching if: you’re either really into spy movies or want to see the genesis of this franchise.

07. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

dir. John Woo, 2nd in series

M: I 2 is objectively the worst film in the series and often finds itself at the bottom spot on most people’s rankings. But as we’re going to see, my rankings are anything but objective.

M: I 2 is the only movie I’ve ever seen that is actually quite bad for its first two acts and then somehow miraculously redeems itself in its third act. (That is, once they get to the storage facility on the island.) I've literally never seen a movie switch up so much in quality and I was glad I stuck through.

The action in the third act - the takedowns, the pigeons flying, the vehicle chase, the hand-to-hand boss fight, all amplified by a high octane score - is so freaking baller that it makes me forget all the crap that came before it. I shit you not, there’s a moment in here where Cruise is speeding on a bike while another rider shoots at him, both of them charging towards each other from opposite ends, and he dodges those bullets by jumping off his bike but not letting go of the handle, standing next to it while still in motion to shield himself, and then getting back on once the threat has passed. I'm a simple guy: if a movie has something as objectively cool as that moment it's automatically a good movie. Sorry I ever doubted you, John Woo.

M: I 2 is also by far the most Bollywood-coded American film I've ever seen. It's now apparent who all the Indian action movie directors of the mid-2000's were “borrowing” their ideas from. There's a few shots in here that I swear have been photocopied into Dhoom. Bollywood's plagiarism is like Hermione Granger’s bag: bottomless.

So in spite of its flaws I find this to be superior to the original M: I just because it has higher highs. Cruise even has a better haircut in this one.

(Fun fact: the actor who plays the villain here was originally cast as the first choice to play Wolverine in X-Men, but dropped out of it to star in this movie instead, and so the X-Men producers went ahead with an unknown actor named Hugh Jackman for that role.)

Worth watching if: you can somehow skip to the last half hour and view it as a short action film.

06. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 7th in series

For our sixth entry we jump way ahead into 2023. Originally titled Dead Reckoning Part One, this is the second-last film of the franchise and the third directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

This movie had quite a bit of bad luck. It got screwed during production by COVID-19, which resulted in multiple production difficulties and months of delays - check out this leaked audio of Cruise yelling at crew members who weren’t following COVID protocols on set (though I think he was completely right here) - and once released it then got screwed at the box office due to the Barbenheimer hype and flew under most people’s radar.

All in all it’s a pretty decent movie, but in just about every aspect is still a huge step down from the previous three entries in the franchise, two of which were directed by McQuarrie himself. (Like, how did you forget how to cook your own recipes, bro?) One weird thing about this series is that every single M: I film has been longer than the previous one, and at a whopping 163 minutes, Dead Reckoning is where the bloat really starts to show. And because the movie introduces a bunch of new characters but is also meant to be the first of a two-part storyline, everything about it feels simultaneously too much yet inherently incomplete.

Of course, this is the film with the legendary stunt where Cruise literally rides a dirt bike off the edge of a mountain and then parachutes out of it down to safety. (The in-story reason for this is that Ethan Hunt needs to get inside a moving train to save someone, and time is ticking out, and it’s the only way how.) This scene is one of the craziest things to ever happen in an M: I film - actually, in any film ever made - and is by far its biggest (only?) highlight. This behind-the-scenes video showing how that stunt was set up and shot is an absolute must-watch, and has more tension in it than most action films do. In fact you could say that that video is better than this movie itself.

Because Dead Reckoning is so long and because it's highly dependent on both its predecessors and successor to work, it feels like the least independent film in the franchise, and the one least likely to be watched by people in the future.

Worth watching if: you’ve made it this far into the series and really want to finish it off, or if you really want to see the final movie. (If nothing else you should at least watch the cliff jump video linked above, I swear it’s worth it.)

05. Mission: Impossible III (2006)

dir. J. J. Abrams, 3rd in series

After having mixed feelings about both 1 and 2, III was the first Mission: Impossible I watched that felt like a complete movie with solid footing.

M: I III was the directorial film debut of Lost veteran J. J. Abrams, who’d go on to have a huge career after this and eventually direct one Star Trek and two Star Wars movies, so I guess you have Cruise and Co. to thank (read: blame) for that.

Abrams does a good job here, but one aspect in which this is the clearly the franchise’s worst film is its visual look. He makes every frame look grainy, he zooms in way too close to his actors’ faces during conversational scenes, and he relies way too much on handheld shots. These creative choices do give the film a more raw and intense vibe, which I think is what he was going for, but do make it look, well, bad.

On the positive side, M: I III does have the single best cold opening of the series and what’s got to be one of the best opening scenes in all of cinema.

Of course, aside from all that the film is now known for one thing only - the Kanye song in the end credits. Kidding, it’s for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as the arms dealer, Owen Davian, who kidnaps Ethan’s wife and plays psychological games with him throughout the film. He is by far the franchise’s best villain and its only truly great performance. This lack of a compelling antagonist was really felt in later films.

M: I III made me realize how little I understand acting as a skill, because Hoffman manages to somehow be utterly compelling without doing anything over the top. He doesn’t even have a lot of screentime here, really, but every time he is on screen you can’t look away. I honestly can’t tell what he specifically did as an actor to bring so much gravitas to this role - it feels almost like a magic trick. RIP.

Worth watching if: you want a solid action movie with a riveting villain.

04. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 5th in series

Now we’re onto the really good ones.

Rogue Nation is the fifth film in the series and the first directed by Christopher McQuarrie. What’s interesting is that until Rogue Nation, every M: I film had had a different director, each of whom had left their own stylistic mark on their entry. But sometime around the early 2010’s McQuarrie became Cruise’s go-to collaborator for literally everything and thus took over this series as well, directing every one of its films from hereon till the end. Though I would’ve liked to see some other filmmakers’ version of an M: I film I think this worked out quite well.

Rogue Nation is a smooth, slick ride whose only sin is that strangely front-loads all of its best action sequences within the first half, and then keeps the climax relatively lowkey, which feels like a baffling screenwriting choice for a Mission: Impossible film. It has the weakest third act of any entry in the franchise since maybe the first one, which is the one thing you don't want out of these movies - you always expect them to end with a bang. All of this makes the movie feel less mission-impossible-esque and more like a straightforward action thriller, which isn’t bad in itself, per se, but feels subversive in the wrong way.

But that one nitpick aside, man, what a banger. This is the one where Cruise hangs off of a plane flying at 5,000 feet (unimaginably dangerous), the one with a three-way assassination attempt, a cool underwater sequence, a femme fatale, tons of espionage and mind games, and a highway bike chase that both surpasses the one in M: I 2 and feels so visceral you’re actually scared for everyone involved.

Rogue Nation also has the distinction of having the only good poster out of all movies in the franchise. Just about everything about it has that sheen of quality; it’s all exceedingly well done and I can’t imagine someone not coming away impressed.

Worth watching if: you need a calm, cool, sexy action flick that knows exactly what it’s about.

03. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

dir. Brad Bird, 4th in series

Ghost Protocol is the fourth Mission: Impossible movie and was a major turning point for the franchise. It’s as close to a complete revamp/reboot/reinvention as I’ve seen any long-running series do, while still keeping the same characters and moving the overall story forward with them.

It marked a huge shift for the franchise going forward in every aspect: the tone, storytelling, aesthetics, as well as the scale of its action sequences and the difficulty of stunt work required. Something must’ve snapped in Cruise around this time that made him want to pivot fully from a character actor to the adrenaline-junkie-action-star we know him as to this day.

Once you watch GP you realize you can divide the franchise into two eras: BGP (movies 1 to 3) and AGP (movies 4 to 8), with the AGP films having been seemingly made in Ghost Protocol’s image, with a more modern look, smoother dialogue, and a much larger scope and budget.

Directed by Brad Bird in his live action debut - this is the animation GOAT who made both The Incredibles and Ratatouille - Ghost Protocol is a fantastic film rife with Bird’s signature kinetic energy and an easy sense of movement that he brings from previous films. It’s also the “most” of all the M: I films, in the sense that it seems to stuff the most amount of movie within its runtime than anything else I’ve seen. It’s honestly unbelievable how many things happen in this and how quickly it all goes by. (It’s just like life itself!) Once you finish watching it you feel completely exhausted in the best possible way.

Ghost Protocol also has the best “they said the title of the movie in the movie” moment of this franchise, as well as a ton of behind-the-scenes drama in which the producers wanted this to be Cruise’s last M: I film - with Jeremy Renner as a potential successor - and the initial script was written accordingly, but when McQuarrie was brought on as a last minute script-doctor he immediately decided that there would be no impossible missions without Tom Cruise in them. What a great professional meet cute story.

Anyways, because the story (in the movie) has the highest stakes so far, it does get a bit too glib with the plot and asks for copious suspension of disbelief from its audience, even by the franchise’s own standards. But that’s a small price to pay to get incredible sequence after sequence packed into just over two hours of runtime. You have, in order: a prison break, an espionage mission inside the Kremlin followed by its bombing, the iconic Burj Khalifa sequence, a two-way handover bluff (my favourite scene), an incredible blind chase through a desert sandstorm, and a climax that somehow involves a seduction, a jump on top of a large fan, and a fistfight inside a multi-floor parking garage, all of which lead to a down-to-the-wire ending that had me on the absolute edge of my seat.

Of course, this movie is most famous for the scene in which Tom Cruise climbed onto the side of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which I remember became a huge point of marketing for the film that everybody was talking about when it came out. In fact I’d guess that it might be the one thing people who’ve never seen any of these films know about the franchise. And rightfully so, since it was the beginning of the sort of insane theatrics and stunt work that would become Cruise’s signature going forward.

I also remember this movie was heavily marketed in India because the ending was shot there and because Anil Kapoor is in it - he’s pretty funny in this, actually - and so the poster feels a bit nostalgic because it was on billboards everywhere that year and reminds me of school.

Worth watching if: you a) love tall buildings, b) worship at the altar of Brad Bird, c) are a fan of Welcome, or d) have ever downloaded the Jeremy Renner App.

02. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 6th in series

I don’t have too much to say about Fallout except that it might genuinely be the greatest action movie ever made.

To be fair, Fallout is equally if not more cartoonishly over-the-top than every other Mission: Impossible that came before it. And while it has the same general tone and story beats as the previous films, it manages to scale up its sense of spectacle and bombast to such intense highs you’re left a bit flabbergasted at the end.

You have in this movie a High Altitude Low Opening (HALO) jump, an intense and violent three way fistfight in a restroom (the one with that iconic shot of Henry Cavill “reloading” his arms), a chaotic bike chase through the crowded streets of Paris, the best Tom Cruise running sequence ever (that too across building rooftops, because running on the street is too mainstream), and of course, a climax involving two helicopters in which Cruise climbs up a rope on a flying copter, pilots it, and then chases Cavill in the air in order to get hold of a bomb detonator while Cavill tries to shoot back at him with a machine gun. Yup.

And, of course, it’s all real. I don’t know how but it is. Cruise apparently trained for and then practiced a HALO jump 106 times across several months (!) just to finally shoot three takes that were usable. (I used to think that The Social Network’s 99-take-opening-scene story was crazy, but this outdoes it.)

For the Paris chase he biked across the Arc de Triomphe against the flow of traffic, all of which were actual cars driven by extras who had to be careful not to hit him as he rode right past them.

The famous scene where he wobbles back up after having jumped between two rooftops happened because he actually broke his ankle during the jump, thus shutting down production for months, and they used that very take with his broken ankle in the movie.

The entire helicopter chase sequence at the end was filmed fully practically and on location in New Zealand. Cruise first obtained a helicopter pilot’s license and trained for a year just to be able to pilot the chasing helicopter himself. The crew then choreographed the whole chase sequence, the aerial maneuvers involved, and shot it using multiple copters deep in the mountains. No wonder it looks so good.

To call this stuff crazy would be an understatement. You just have to watch this movie, man, I don’t know what else to say.

Worth watching if: you have eyes.

01. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 8th and last in series

The Final Reckoning, the latest and final Mission: Impossible film, came out just a couple of months ago and thus concluded both this franchise and my binge watch of it.

Upon release the movie received generally positive but not glowing reviews. It didn’t get the kind of universal acclaim the franchise once had with Fallout, nor did it dominate the online Twitter/Letterboxd discourse for too long, nor did most of my friends see it, and nor did it do too well at the box office.

After I watched it the response seemed understandable. This is a clunky hot mess of a film that runs way too long, has way more characters than it can balance, and generally feels bizarrely paced and edited. It’s very apparent that they test screened and Frankensteined the shit out of this.

The reason for a lot of these creative choices is that the previous movie, Dead Reckoning, was supposed to directly set up the events in this film but massively underperformed at the box office. And so in order to maximise viewership, McQ and Co pivoted hard during this movie’s post-production and completely re-edited it, so as to now make it function as a standalone entry, so much so that even someone who’s never seen an single M: I movie could follow along.

(In fact I learned through this excellent interview that they added a new cold open into the movie two days before locking picture. And I thought I was a do-things-last-minute kinda guy.)

This pivot came at a cost. It’s why TFR’s first act is spent setting up and repeating plot points already previously established, why the movie ends up with a whopping three hour runtime, and why the only thing that characters in this movie do is exposition. They’re always explaining their situation and re-hashing their plans, as if the film is terrified the audience is going to forget what’s happening at any given moment.

Generally this movie feels fundamentally insecure and simply does not have the calm sophistication of previous entries like Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation.

And yet.

In spite of its very many flaws The Final Reckoning just so happens to be the greatest theatrical experience I’ve ever had in my life. Watching it on an AMC Dolby screen, I was completely at the film’s mercy, reacting to every little thing and holding back my need to yell at the screen every few minutes. For a good while after I got out I was literally tweaking, man, I was vibrating with a different kind of energy. That experience is what made me want to write this piece in the first place.

The Final Reckoning basically continues the story of Dead Reckoning and rests on the shoulders of two major sequences: a 20-minute long underwater sequence where Ethan Hunt needs to dive into a sunken submarine to retrieve a piece of equipment, and then a sequence at the end where Hunt needs to chase down the villain who has something he needs and is escaping away on a flying biplane.

I’ve repeatedly talked above about how this franchise is built upon ambitious set pieces and dangerous stunt work, but TFR outdoes itself even by the franchise’s own standards. The submarine sequence, because it’s one long score-less scene that doesn’t cut away to anything else, has this quiet, hypnotic intensity about it I rarely see in any kind of movie, and especially not a Mission: Impossible one. And the biplane sequence, in which Hunt climbs onto his enemy’s plane and gets into a fight with him while the plane is in the air, is so viscerally terrifying, so outrageously, mind-blowingly insane, it’s straight up some of the craziest stuff I’ve ever witnessed with my own eyes inside or outside of a movie theater.

And as always you could create an entire movie out of the making of this one alone, complete with footage of Tom Cruise hanging off the wing of a flying plane in real life, and holding on to it as the plane inverts while in the air, because at this point we’ve accepted that that is simply what Tom Cruise does. His vanity, the blurring of his and Ethan Hunt's personas, his savior complex combined with his willingness to literally risk his life for these films... Say what you will about him and McQuarrie, but these are the kind of insane perfectionists who end up pushing the boundaries of their chosen artform more than anyone else. The fact that these scenes were even conceived of, let alone executed so well, feels like the crossing of some kind of a Rubicon within action movies as an artform.

Now, while I do love these scenes I also did just complain a lot about this movie, so does having two great scenes make TFR the very best Mission: Impossible movie? Honestly… no. And would it have ended up in my top spot here if I hadn’t experienced it on the big screen? Again, probably not. Even to me it feels somehow wrong to have this movie at number one. But the experience I had watching it was so gratifying that it just felt wronger to have it anywhere else.

And that’s precisely the point. Movies aren’t objective works of art that feel the same no matter how and where and when you watch them. The circumstances in which you watch one matters. The medium is the message. It’s not a coincidence that the only two films in this franchise that I’ve seen in theaters are at my top two spots here.

I used to think that catching a film while it was in theaters was a bonus, but The Final Reckoning made me realize that the theatrical experience is almost essential, and that by watching a film any other way you’re compromising your experience of it, which seems pretty on point since its star has been the biggest advocate of movie theaters for a while now. It just took some time for me to catch up.

Worth watching if: you can somehow get rich enough to one day own a mansion and then build your own movie theater inside it and then watch The Final Reckoning in there. I’ve been hearing rumors that if you ever play this on your 13-inch MacBook Tom Cruise personally barges into your house and throws it out of the window.

“It takes five hundred shows to get a trick right, and more than a thousand to make it feel good.”
- David Copperfield

One consequence of spending too much time on the internet is that I have, at some point or the other, skimmed through the Wikipedia pages of most of my heroes. And once you read enough Wikipedia pages of the kinds of people who end up with Wikipedia pages written about them, a pattern starts to emerge. It’s that most people who are world class in their field were doing some version of that work really early in life. Not as in their early-twenties-early or even in their teen-years-early. But, like, before-the-age-of-ten-early. The craft that became their profession wasn’t even their “work” as much as it was the only way they wanted to spend their time.

Christopher Nolan was making homemade movies when he was seven. A.R. Rahman began studying piano at age four. Vladimir Kramnik already had an ELO rating of 2000 at age seven. Yadda yadda yadda. Go look up your favourite artist or athlete right now and you’ll find a similar story. These guys had been in the zone for decades; it just took a while for reality to catch up.

Once you see this pattern, you can’t unsee it. The more exceptional someone is at what they do, the earlier they seem to have started putting the work in. Of course, this is quite obvious stuff, but what surprises me about this is not the fact itself but the extent of this earlyness. Even with an ungodly amount of raw talent at any skill, it seems that it takes at least a few years of focused work to gid gud at said skill and at least a decade to hone into something great. Every expert seems to have their own version of Kanye’s “five beats a day for three summers”.

Here’s the thing, though: the older you get and the more people you meet, the more you realize that this pattern is everywhere. Anytime you see someone who’s even remotely good at anything - be it your colleague at work, the burrito guy who makes your lunch, or the podcaster who you listen to on the way home - know that they’ve been doing this for way longer than you’d have ever guessed. And if someone’s world class at the thing they do, like some of the rich and famous top 0.001 percentile folks I mentioned above, it’s likely that the thing they do is the only thing they’ve ever done their entire lives.

“Here’s what I know: if someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it.”

- Ava, Effort

Again, nothing mind blowing, I know, but the implications of this once you think about your own life can be uncomfortable. Because everyone has that one skill, hobby, sport, game, artform, or project that they want to “someday” dip their toes into but haven’t started on just yet. The timing ain’t right. But this is the dream project, the dream hobby. (“This was the no-brainer. This was the banker…”) I have one, you have one. And you know it’s gonna feel incredible once you’re good at that thing, once you really get it. It’s gonna finally make you whole. But there’s just one problem: as my Wikipedia snooping has showed me, even for the professionals it did take quite a while to get good at the thing they do. They just started unreasonably early in life. Which means that no matter what, you’re a long time away from seeing any tangible results out of your dream-thingy. And that’s assuming that you even try.

Okay, so let’s say you accept this fact. Let’s say you accept that for anything new you choose to pursue, you’re going to suck at it for a long time. It’s going to take weeks, months, years even, before you’re actually good at that thing. (And that’s assuming you stay consistent, which most people don’t (myself included)). And let’s say you know that the process of learning this skill, of getting incrementally better at your craft every day, is not going to be particularly quick or easy. Chances are that you’ll give up. Do you still go ahead?

If you really think about it, you only have two choices here:
a) either don’t pursue that skill or hobby at all, and thus avoid the growing pains of getting better at it, or
b) accept that you’re gonna suck at that hobby for a while and then do it anyway.

So then, the only question becomes: how badly do you want it?

Because if you’re venturing into something that’s entirely new to you, your only choices are to do it badly for a long time or not at all. And assuming this new hobby is something you genuinely, authentically want, the only question then becomes: what’s the earliest you can start, so you can pay that time-tax quickly? And the answer to that is, of course, at the earliest. Which is right now.

It sucks that skills take a long time to build. It sucks that it takes so much effort for us humans to become proficient at anything. But, assuming you’re genuinely interested in doing the thing for its own sake, paying this price still seems a vastly better option than the alternative of never once giving it a try. Because a few years from now you’re going to be that many years older anyway, so you might as well have something to show for it.

So I wrote a browser extension for Google Chrome that instantaneously accepts cookies for every website you visit, by auto-clicking any buttons that say “I Agree”, “Accept Cookies”, “Accept All”, and so on.

You can install it on your Chrome browser by clicking here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adeapinkdilngpcbbjipmoidmbdbdkkg?utm_source=item-share-cb

This extension is free and does not collect any of your data. It seems to work fine for most websites I’ve tested it on. Hopefully it makes your web browsing experience slightly more smoother.

Feedback welcome :)

Making Movies (Goodreads, Amazon) is a book he wrote in 1995, in which he draws upon decades of experience and delineates each stage in the movie-making process. If you’ve ever been even slightly interested in the behind-the-scenes of film production this is a fantastic read. It’s quite short, insightful, opinionated, and filled with a love for the artform.

The only major downside of this book is that it’s full of references and examples exclusively from movies Lumet himself directed, and so if you’re not familiar with his filmography it’s sometimes hard to follow what he’s saying.

Either way, I thought that there’s certain passages in here that’ll interest even the most casual movie-goer who might not want to read the entire book. Hence this collection of highlights below.

Although I’ve added links and boldened my favourite quotes here and there, all words below are Lumet’s and not mine.

I once asked Akira Kurosawa why he had chosen to frame a shot in Ran in a particular way. His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport - neither of which belonged in a period movie. Only the person who's made the movie knows what goes into the decisions that result in any piece of work.

—

Actually, I've been directing this picture for some time. Depending on how complicated the physical production of the movie will be, I've been in preproduction anywhere from two and a half to six months. And, depending on how much work had to be done on the script, perhaps for months before preproduction began. Major decisions have already been made.

—

There are no minor decisions in moviemaking. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down around my head many months later.

—

I also make sure that I have the time to read a script straight through. A script can have a very different feeling if reading it is interrupted, even for half an hour. The final movie will be seen uninterrupted, so why should reading the script for the first time be any different?

—

Because the truth is that nobody knows what that magic combination is that produces a first-rate piece of work. I'm not being modest. There's a reason some directors can make first-rate movies and others never will. But all we can do is prepare the groundwork that allows for the "lucky accidents" that make a first-rate movie happen. Whether or not it will happen is something we never know.

—

Whatever I am, whatever the work will amount to, has to come out of my subconscious. I can't approach it cerebrally. Obviously, this is right and correct for me. Each person must approach the problem in whatever way works best for him.

—

I don't know how to choose work that illuminates what my life is about. I don't know what my life is about and don't examine it. My life will define itself as I live it. The movies will define themselves as I make them. As long as the theme is something I care about at that moment, it's enough for me to start work. Maybe work itself is what my life is about.

—

Lighting is the most time consuming (and therefore most expensive) part of moviemaking. Most relighting takes minimally two hours.

—

Do mountains of preparation kill spontaneity? Absolutely not. I've found that it's just the opposite. When you know what you're doing, you feel much freer to improvise.

—

Preparation allows the "lucky accident" that we're always hoping for to happen.

—

In a good drama, the line where characters and story blend should be indiscernible. I once read a very well-written script with first-rate dialogue. But the characters had nothing specific to do with the story line. That particular story could've happened to many different kinds of people. In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. Melodrama makes story line its highest priority, and everything is subservient to story. For me, farce is the comic equivalent of melodrama and comedy the comic equivalent of drama.

—

I think inevitability is the key. In a well-made drama, I want to feel: "Of course that's where it was heading all along" And yet the inevitability mustn't eliminate surprise. There's not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn't mean predictability. The script must still keep you off balance, keep you surprised, entertained, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give you the sense that the story had to turn out that way.

—

Normally, I'm not concerned about audience reaction. But when you touch on sex and death, two aspects of life that hit a deep core, there's no way of knowing what an audience will do. They could laugh at the wrong places, catcall, start trying to talk back to the screen—any of a hundred defenses that people throw up when they're embarrassed, when what's on the screen is getting too close, or when they're looking at something they've never confronted before.

—

In the early days of television, when the "kitchen sink" school of realism held sway, we always reached a point where we "explained" the character. Around two-thirds of the way through, someone articulated the psychological truth that made the character the person he was. Chayefsky and I used to call this the "rubber-ducky" school of drama: "Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that's why he's a deranged killer." That was the fashion then, and with many producers and studios it still is.

I always try to eliminate the rubber-ducky explanations. A character should be clear from his present actions. And his behavior as the picture goes on should reveal the psychological motivations. If the writer has to state the reasons, something's wrong in the way the character has been written. Dialogue is like anything else in movies. It can be a crutch, or when used well, it can enhance, deepen, and reveal.

—

Most writers hate actors. And yet stars are the keys to getting a picture approved by a studio. Some directors have enormous power, but nobody has the power of one of the top stars. If the star demands it, any studio will drop the writer in less than thirty seconds—and the director too, for that matter.

—

Chayefsky used to say, "There are two kinds of scenes: the Pet the Dog scene and the Kick the Dog scene. The studio always wants a Pet the Dog scene so everybody can tell who the hero is."

—

Most writers are so used to being slapped around that they're stunned that I want them at rehearsal.

—

Doctorow was thrilled, though he worried that the picture might be injured once it was turned over to a studio for distribution. I told him this couldn't happen, because contractually I had final cut: Final cut means that whatever I hand in as the final picture cannot be touched in any audio or visual component. This is the last thing any studio wants to give up, so its very difficult to achieve.

—

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that on the best of movies a third intention emerges, which neither the writer nor the director can foresee. I don't know why this happens, but it does. On every movie I've done that I felt was really good, a strange amalgam was reached that surprised both the writer and me. This is the surprise that Arthur Miller talked about. Of course, the original intent is present. But all of the individual contributions from all the different departments add up to a total far greater than their individual parts. Moviemaking works very much like an orchestra: the addition of various harmonies can change, enlarge, and clarify the nature of the theme.

—

There are four primary forms of storytelling — tragedy, drama, comedy, and farce.

—

Someone once asked me what making a movie was like. I said it was like making a mosaic. Each setup is like a tiny tile. You color it, shape it, polish it as best you can. You'll do six or seven hundred of these, maybe a thousand. (There can easily be that many setups in a movie.) Then you literally paste them together and hope it's what you set out to do. But if you expect the final mosaic to look like anything, you'd better know what you're going for as you work on each tiny tile.

—

When we're sitting at rushes, watching yesterday's work, the greatest compliment we can give each other is, "Good work. We're all making the same movie." That's style.

—

I worked with Marlon Brando on The Fugitive Kind. He's a suspicious fellow. I don't know if he bothers anymore, but Brando tests the director on the first or second day of shooting. What he does is to give you two apparently identical takes. Except that on one, he is really working from the inside; and on the other, he's just giving you an indication of what the emotion was like. Then he watches which one you decide to print. If the director prints the wrong one, the "indicated" one, he's had it. Marlon will either walk through the rest of the performance or make the director's life hell, or both. Nobody has the right to test people like that, but I can understand why he does that. He doesn't want to pour out his inner life to someone who can't see what he's doing.

—

Actors are very different about love and sex scenes. Some shy away from them. The wife of an actor I worked with wouldn't allow him to do them. I know that if an affair develops between two actors, it will usually begin on either the day I stage the love scene or the day I shoot it.

—

In Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Russian Princess Dragomiroff. She wanted to play the retarded Swedish maid. I wanted Ingrid Bergman. I let her play the maid. She won an Academy Award. I bring this up because self-knowledge is important in so many ways to an actor.

—

Knowing your feelings lets you know when those feelings are real as opposed to when you're simulating them. No matter how insecure, almost all the stars I've worked with have a high degree of self-knowledge. They may hate what they see, but they do see themselves. And you thought all that gazing into the mirror was just vanity. I think it's self-knowledge that serves as the integrating element between the actor's natural persona and the character he's playing.

—

How can we get actors with totally different life experiences and acting techniques to look like they're making the same movie?

The answer is remarkably simple, but like all simple things, it's hard to achieve. Just as in life, really talking and listening to one another is very, very difficult. In acting, that's the basis on which everything is built. By now I have an almost set speech I make just before the first reading of the script. I will say to the actors, "Go as far as you feel. Do as much or as little as you want to. If you feel it, let it fly. Don't worry whether it's the right emotion or the wrong one. We'll find out. That's what rehearsals are for. But minimally, talk to each other and listen to each other. Don't worry about losing your place in the script as long as you're really talking and listening to each other. Try to pick up on what you just heard."

—

Most good actors have their best take early. Usually, by the fourth time you've done it (Take 4), they've poured out the best in themselves. This is particularly true of big, emotional scenes, Movies, however, are a technical medium. Things go wrong despite preparations. A door slams off the set, the microphone gets in the shot, the camera operator goofs, the dolly pusher misses his cue. When this happens, the actor has an awful time. Having "emptied out" once, he now has to fill up again. The only way around the problem is to shoot take after take, because the "refill" can come at any time after Take 8 or Take 10 or Take 12.

—

If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third star is the camera.

—

But changing lenses for the amount of information the lens gathers (its "field") is only a partial use of a lens. Lenses have different feelings about them. Different lenses will tell a story differently.

—

Lenses have different characteristics. No lens truly sees what the human eye sees, but the lenses that come closest are the midrange lenses, from 28 mm to 40 mm. Wide-angle lenses (9 mm to 24 mm) tend to distort the picture; the wider the lens, the greater the distortion. The distortions are spatial. Objects seem farther apart, especially objects lined up from foreground to background. Vertical lines seem to be forced closer together at the top of the frame.

Longer lenses (from 50 mm upward) compress the space. Objects that are lined up from foreground to background seem closer together.

—

In addition, I shot the first third of the movie [12 Angry Men] above eye level, and then, by lowering the camera, shot the second third at eye level, and the last third from below eye level. In that way, toward the end, the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie. On the final shot, an exterior that showed the jurors leaving the courtroom, I used a wide-angle lens, wider than any lens that had been used in the entire picture. I also raised the camera to the highest above-eye-level position. The intention was to literally give us all air, to let us finally breathe, after two increasingly confined hours.

—

During shooting, most directors' closest relationship is with the cameraman. That's why most directors work with the same cameraman year after year, as long as the style can be achieved.

—

The script girl may whisper in my ear, "He's picking up the drink a little late." When we shot over his shoulder yesterday, he picked up his drink at the beginning of the sentence. If he's now picking it up at the end of the sentence, I'll have a problem later in the editing room when I want to cut from yesterday's shot to today's.

—

When the actor is being photographed looking at someone off-camera, he can obviously see past him to the whole darkened studio. We call this the actor's "eyeline." It can involve both sides of the camera. Just before we roll, any well-trained AD will always say, "Clear the eyeline, please." If William Holden is making love to Faye Dunaway, he doesn't want to see some teamster sipping coffee behind her. He doesn't want to see anybody other than Faye watching him, even if he has great concentration. Since most crews don't understand this, "Clear the eyeline" becomes a never-ending refrain.

—

Sometimes the actor will ask for another take. I always go along with that. About half the time the actor does do better. Sometimes if I feel the actor is struggling with a scene, I'll call "Print" even though I don't intend to use the take. I do it as encouragement. When actors have heard "Print," they know they have a good one in the can and they relax. This frees them for something more spontaneous.

—

By the way, I always call "Action" in the mood of the scene. If it's a gentle moment, I'll say "Action" just loud enough for the actors to hear me. If it's a scene that requires a lot of energy, I'll bark out "Action" like a drill seargent. It's like a conductor giving the upbeat.

—

When this magic happens, the best thing you can do is get out of the way of the picture. Let it tell you how to do it from now on. I think it's quite clear by now that my movies proceed with great control and replanning. But on those pictures when this feeling arose at rushes, I'd slowly jettison a lot of the ideas I'd formed before shooting began. I'd trust my momentary impulses on the set and go with them.

—

I guess I'm talking about self-deception. In any creative effort, I think that's absolutely necessary. Creative work is very hard, and some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to begin. To start, you have to believe that it's going to turn out well. And so often it doesn't. I've talked to novelists, conductors, painters about this. Unfailingly, they all admitted that self-deception was important to them. Perhaps a better word is "belief." But I tend to be a bit more cynical about it, so I use "self-deception."

—

Don't let the difficulty of actually achieving a shot make you think that the shot is good. In the finished movie, no one in the audience will know that it took three days to light or ten people to move the camera, the walls, or whatever.

—

Don't let a technical failure destroy the shot for you. Obviously, any mechanical error endangers the reality of the movie. And those errors must be eliminated in the future. But you have to keep your eye on the dramatic impact of the shot. Is there life there? That's what matters.

—

For many years, the cliché about editing was: "Pictures are made in the cutting room." That's nonsense. No movie editor ever put anything up on the screen that hadn't been shot.

—

In the thirties and forties, directors rarely cut their own movies. The studio system was totally compartmentalized. There was an editing department. It had its chief editor, to whom all the editors reported. The chief editor saw the cut movie even before the director did. In fact, the director might not see his movie until it had been completely finished. He was probably off doing another movie. In those days, directors under contract to a studio did four or five, sometimes six, movies a year. Like everyone else at the studio, they were simply assigned to a new job as soon as they had finished their last one.

—

Movies are full of battles you think you've won, only to have to fight them over and over again.

—

Like everything else in movies, editing is a technical job with important artistic ramifications. While it's absurd to believe that pictures are "made" in the cutting room, they sure as hell can be ruined there.

—

I've read that a certain picture was "beautifully edited." There's no way they could know how well or poorly it was edited. It might look badly edited, but because of how poorly it was shot, it may in fact be a miracle of editing that the story even makes sense. Conversely, the movie may look well edited, but who knows what was left on the cutting room floor. In my view, only three people know how good or bad the editing was: the editor, the director, and the cameraman. They're the only ones who know everything that was shot in the first place.

—

The second but equally critical element in editing is tempo. [...] Think of each cut as the beat of a visual metronome. In fact, quite often entire sequences are cut in a rhythm that will accommodate the musical scoring that will be added later. The more cuts, the faster the tempo will seem. That's why melodramas and chase sequences use so many cuts. Just as in music, fast tempo usually means energy and excitement.

—

In movies where I'm not using tempo for characterization, I am very careful to continually change the pace of the movie in the editing. The use of sustained shots, with no intercuts, is laid out very carefully at the beginning, before shooting begins. If it's going to wind up a long uncut take in the final movie, chances are that I'll want camera movement. That means I'll want a floor that I can dolly on so that I can move freely. In my original conference with the art director, at least sixteen weeks before my entry into the cutting room, I'm already thinking of the tempos of my final cut. I may not use the sustained take in its entirety. I may chop it up. But if I haven't shot it, I can't create it now in the cutting room.

—

I said earlier that there are no small decisions in moviemaking. Nowhere does this apply more than in editing. One of the miracles of film cutting is how a change in reel 2 affects something in reel 10. (A one-hour-fifty-minute movie will be composed of eleven reels: ten minutes per reel.) One can never lose sight of the relationship of cut to cut, and reel to reel.

—

If the cliché about pictures being made in the cutting room is false, that other cliché, "It'll play better when we add the music," is true. Almost every picture is improved by a good musical score. To start with, music is a quick way to reach people emotionally. Over the years, movie music has developed so many clichés of its own that the audience immediately absorbs the intention of the moment: the music tells them, sometimes even in advance. Generally, that would be the sign of a bad score, but even bad scores work.

—

After the screen-writer, I think movie composers are violated more often than anyone. Everybody thinks he knows something about music and wants to get his two cents in about the score. If the composer comes up with something too original-that is, something the producers or the studio people haven't heard before-the score can get thrown out.

—

Working in movies is the fatal compromise composers make. In return for very good pay, they go to work writing for a form that can never belong to them. Music, clearly one of our greatest art forms, must be subjugated to the needs of the picture. That's the nature of moviemaking. Even though it may take over completely at certain points, its function is primarily supportive.

—

As must be clear by now, I feel that the less an audience is aware of how we're achieving an effect, the better the picture will be.

—

When tracks are beyond rescue or a word is unclear, we "loop" it. The actor comes into a recording studio. The scene or line is placed on a repeating film loop. The original sound is fed into an earphone. The actor then says the line in the quiet of the studio, trying to get exact lip synchronization. There is an editor in charge of looping called the ADR editor.

—

Scenes of violence, whether car crashes or battles or fires, can use all sixty-four tracks on the board or even more. A simple car crash can easily have twelve sound-effects tracks: glass breaking, metal tearing, metal folding, tires on macadam, tires blowing (two tracks), impact (three tracks, one of them timed a frame late so that it can have "echo" added to it), car doors popping open (two tracks), one overall crash effect to provide body for the basic sound.

—

As in so many other aspects of American life, audience research is one of the dominant factors in the distribution of movies. When the picture is turned over to the studio, the first thing they arrange is a preview.

—

I think previews can be helpful for certain pictures. In a comedy or melodrama, for example, the audience is part of the movie. By that I mean that if they're not laughing at the comedy or not frightened by the melo-drama, the movie's in trouble. In comedies, changing the timing of a reaction shot can make all the difference in whether the joke works.

—

Then comes the big question [to the focus group]. He says, "What didn't you like about the movie?" Sometimes there is an awkward pause. Then one person suggests something, then another speaks, and in no time there's a feeding frenzy, with the body of the movie as dinner. There are disagreements, wrangling. Stronger personalities dominate. People who liked all of it have nothing to say, so they sit quietly by.

Every comment is being absorbed by the studio people. Later, many of their conversations begin with, "You know, this came up in the focus group, and I've always felt it was a problem." That only one person might have said it doesn't matter. It's treated as if the entire group voiced the same objection. Every opinion, no matter how wild, is given weight, and suggestions about what needs fixing are directly related to what the execs heard at the focus group discussion.

—

Equally if not more important is the percentage [of focus group participants] that would "definitely" recommend the movie to others. This is considered a strong indication of whether or not a picture will receive strong "word of mouth," the main ingredient of a successful commercial engagement. The "numbers" can determine a great deal: release date, number of theaters, and, most important, advertising budget.

—

How many movies went through changes dictated by "Audience Surveys" and lost whatever quality or individuality they might have had? We'll never know.

—

Commercial success has no relationship to a good or bad picture. Good pictures become hits. Good pictures become flops. Bad pictures make money, bad pictures lose money. The fact is that no one really knows. If anyone did know, he'd be able to write his own ticket. And there have been two who have. Through some incredible talent, Walt Disney knew. Today Steven Spielberg seems to.

—

That night at dinner, I literally burst into tears. My wife asked what was wrong. I said I was just so tired of fighting. I'd fought for the script, for the right cast, then fought the heat of the desert, the exhaustion, the British rules about extras. I felt like Margaret Booth, who had fought with me about the same picture. And now I was fighting about an idiotic ad.

And that's what so much of making movies is about: fighting.

—

One studio I know will not green-light a picture unless it stars Tom Cruise or his equivalent. This has two immediate effects. First, the stars' salaries skyrocket. And because major stars are getting ten and twelve million a picture, even supporting actors' salaries rise proportionately. Two to three million dollars is not uncommon now for an actor who was getting $750,000 for a picture. The average cost of a movie is up to $25 million and still rising. The second effect is that the agencies that represent the stars are automatically in a more powerful position.

[...]

In all fairness, I should mention that another company makes its decision to green-light a picture strictly on the basis of script and budget. Then they get the best stars they can. Over all, they're often more successful than the star-based studio.

—

Moreover, as far as I know, no studio chief has ever died poor. But an awful lot of writers, actors, and directors have including D. W. Griffth.

—

My job is to care about and be responsible for every frame of every movie I make. I know that all over the world there are young people borrowing from relatives and saving their allowances to buy their first cameras and put together their first student movies, some of them dreaming of becoming famous and making a fortune. But a few are dreaming of finding out what matters to them, of saying to themselves and to anyone who will listen, "I care." A few of them want to make good movies.

The computer was once a special object that had a designated spot in the house. It was a portal, a gateway to another world. For a long time it was the only pipeline to the internet. You went to your PC with hopes of doing a task or entertaining yourself for a while, and when you were done, you left it alone.

For most of my childhood I didn’t have one at home. I could only use a computer at a cyber cafe, where my time was rate-limited. I grew up exclusively on TV which is maybe why I love it so much as an artform to this day.

My family bought our first real PC with Windows XP when I was thirteen. This PC was a gift for me and was kept in my bedroom, and so I naturally spent a lot of time on it even though we didn’t have an internet connection just then. For the first few years I used it almost exclusively for listening to music and gaming.

Even pre-internet, calling the computer “fun” would’ve been an understatement. The more I learned about the different things it could do, the more riveting it got. I learned how to burn CDs, how to port and edit photos you took from a DSLR, how to install and play cracked games, and what tools (like VLC Media Player) were a must-have. I learned about a store in my city called Gadget which sold PC games to you on the cheap. I learned about tech magazines like Chip and Digit that gave you a DVD full of cool tools with each issue that you could try out.

As I got older there was soon an extensive file sharing network among all my friends as more and more of us got PCs and wanted the good stuff. We would share music, movies, games, and softwares that someone or the other had Limewired or Torrented among each other. Through certain friends (shoutout Arjun) I was introduced to media that resonated with me like nothing else had till then, and is still among my favourites to this day.

My PC soon became home to a huge collection of music, starting with Linkin Park and Green Day, sitcoms, Dragon Ball Z video compilations, and games like FIFA 08, NFS: Most Wanted and GTA: Vice City. It was a treasure trove of all the media I loved, and I was spoiled for choice as to whether to use it as a gaming console or a music player or a movie theater at any given time.

A couple of years later my dad bought home another PC and hooked up a broadband internet connection to it. Of course I wanted to use the internet but we didn’t have WiFi then, and so could access it only through this new “family PC”, which was kept in my parents’ bedroom, which meant that I had limited time to be online every day.

Till then, my touch with the online had exclusively been through hangouts at other friends’ places or through cyber cafes. I’d mostly used the internet either to do last-minute Wikipedia research for a school project, play Counter Strike 2.0 with friends on LAN, or to play online games on websites like Miniclip and Club Penguin. After this arcane magic entered our home it was over for me. Once I began using YouTube and then Facebook regularly it became even more over, and after I discovered Torrenting I knew I’d succumb to a spiral of endless media consumption and never amount to anything useful in this lifetime.

2010’s era Facebook really was, to quote Kanye, the best of all time at the time though. In a way it was like 2010’s era Manchester United. Those red notification badges on that navy blue UI hit like crack. We were hooked. I would write status updates like “Height of sarcasm: I love exams!!” and get five likes from my friends and feel like the king of the world. I would spend an evening meticulously growing crops on Farmville after school and then switch back to my personal PC to play some Price of Persia at night, all to avoid that day’s piling homework. Life was good.

While my early childhood was dominated by TV, the PC quickly took over as the go-to choice of entertainment before smartphones arrived on the scene in college. (Boy am I glad that I didn’t have them in school.) But before the smartphone era there had always been a very clear demarcation between my digital life and my “real” life, back when my real life mattered more than my virtual one. When I wasn’t using a computer, I wasn’t using one. That constant lack of access, that sheer anticipation of going home and finally getting to play with all my digital goods made all the time I was on my PC that much more precious.

“Could I interest you in everything?
All of the time?
A little bit of everything
All of the time
Apathy's a tragedy
And boredom is a crime
Anything and everything
All of the time”

- Bo Burnham, Welcome to the Internet

Cut to fifteen years and multiple generations of PCs, laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets later, the computer is my life. In some form or another it’s there when I wake up and need to check my email, it’s there when I’m taking a dump, it’s there when I go for walks or when I do laundry or when I meet up with a friend, it’s there when I’m working, and it’s there when I’m relaxing after work. It’s everything everywhere all at once.

And it’s so goddamn exhausting sometimes.

Gone are the days of the PC being in its assigned place in my home. Gone are the days of my time online being limited. Gone are the days of anticipation, of waiting in any sense to use a computer of any kind, of going to the internet rather than having it be literally all around you, always. Top comment on a blog post about the 90’s: “I miss when the internet was a place we visited, not a place we inhabited.”

I personally own more electronic devices today than my entire family collectively did at one point. My life is like Times Square: anywhere I look, I see a screen. The longest stretch of time when I’m not looking at one is when I’m asleep at night.

Now, I’ve never been the proverbial tech-bro-slash-hacker-slash-cracked-10x-engineer-with-an-anime-pfp-slash-brogrammer kind of guy, but I do fundamentally like technology. I’ve always enjoyed programming and I’m more optimistic about AI than most. But there’s just something about staring at a screen all day for years on end that creates this sense of malaise about tech that starts to creep in over time, a certain need to touch grass, a need to do something else with both my hands and my life other than type words into a machine, a need to actually live, whatever that means. It’s a feeling that says, there’s more to it out there. It’s a voice that goes, I cannot spend every day of the next forty years hunched over a laptop like this.

To be fair, this isn’t a Big Problem of any kind and is something I directly chose. I love tech, I’m never gonna stop using it, and I’m amazed at how fast the industry has progressed in the last decade. I just think that this feeling of malaise I’m talking about is the inevitable endpoint of years of overexposure to the same sMaRt dEvIcEs, streaming services, apps, operating systems, and interfaces, day by day, over and over and over again, and I think it could somehow have been avoided without avoiding using these devices entirely.

Even the internet starts to feel homogenous over time: if you don’t proactively curate your feeds, every social media platform devolves into a stale soup of memes, ads, influencer-posts, short-form videos, thirst traps, discourse, humblebrags, announcements, and/or hot takes. This infinite stream of consumption accrues day by day until at some point all this “content” merges into one sloppified digital entity in your head and drives you to a point of insanity where you feel like chucking your phone out the window.

Over the years, the thrill of buying a new machine has slowly faded away too - no matter what phone or laptop I get, I know I’m going to install the same apps, bookmark the same websites, and login to my same accounts on it anyway. Wherever you go, there you are.

This “techaustion” is also a function of age, I think. I’m not “old” (wait, am I?! OH FUC-) but I’ve now used computers for long enough that any semblance of newness is completely gone. The reason using a PC felt so good as a kid was because it was a completely unexplored paradigm. It was the first time you could actually interact with a machine and make it do things instead of passively consuming what it showed you. And I’m sure I’m being overly nostalgic here and that PC-time wasn’t always all jolly, but I’m fairly certain that at its zenith it gave me more joy than it does now. I know for a fact that everything feels good as a kid because I remember really liking Windows Vista.

It’s pretty ironic that I feel this way at a time when a computer has never been more powerful. It’s Archimedes’ proverbial lever. You have what’s equivalent to the modern library of Alexandria in your pocket, you have instant access to all the art humanity has ever made, and you have tools that have democratized the process of creation like never before in human history. (And this is before we even get to the latest AI stuff that has the potential to make anyone 10x more agentic.) There are artists, entrepreneurs, and programmers who have changed the world using just their crappy laptop. I’m very aware of these facts, and yet they make no difference to this feeling of anti-tech angst that I feel now and again. It seems to stem more from my body than my mind.

More than anything else, there’s a certain inescapability to this tech-industrial-complex that really gets to me. I’m a software engineer by profession and don’t know how to do much of anything else, so it seems pretty unlikely that I’m going to be able to reduce my use of these devices at least professionally anytime soon.

My personal life isn’t any better. Everything is scheduled on Google Calendar, my entire life’s gallery is on Google Photos, I get all official correspondence on my Gmail, and I talk to friends only through WhatsApp, if at all. Even if I qUiT sOcIaL mEdIa I can’t realistically stop using any of these tools for too long without needing to drastically alter my entire lifestyle.

And so I feel trapped in these digital systems which, to be fair, have made my life infinitely easier and feel good to use most of the time… until they don’t, and my body channels its inner Chuck McGill and starts screaming at me to throw away every device I own into a river and run away from it all.

“Hey, put the cellphone down for a while
In the night there is something wild
Can you hear it breathing?
Hey, put the laptop down for a while
In the night there is something wild
I feel it, it's leaving me”

- Arcade Fire, Deep Blue

This “problem” is probably a failure of my imagination more than anything else. It’s not even a real problem as much as a feeling that comes up sometimes that I don’t really know what to do with. (To be fair, that’s all feelings.) All I want is to make tech a joyful part of my life instead of having it be my life.

Maybe the solution is to constantly do new things with it. Maybe there’s some obvious cool tool or game I’m missing, some project I should be pursuing but am not, that’ll make everything exciting again. Maybe if I just learn Rust or try out Crusader Kings III or make something in Blender or get a PS5 and speedrun Horizon Zero Dawn on it, I’ll feel completely techjuvinated (sorry).

Or maybe a new form factor is the answer - switching to beautifully designed devices of the kind I’ve never used before. That’s why I get excited by companies like Rabbit, Daylight Computer, and Teenage Engineering, and often browse their websites even though I might not buy (read: afford) their products. At least their devices look exotic. They’re exciting in a way the next iPhone just isn’t. But I know for a fact that even if I did own any of these gadgets I’d get tired of them eventually and then write another blogpost complaining about that instead. “Newness” is just a bandaid solution.

Maybe the most obvious solution really is the best one: simply reduce my screentime. Duh! But what’s the point of actually doing something about a problem if you can just write an essay complaining about it? Jokes aside though, my issue is that most of my hobbies outside of work (like this blog) are also quite laptop-dependent, and I don’t know of a good way to get around that hurdle. That said, I still could read more and watch less Netflix (such a LinkedIn-esque phrase I almost threw up), use Twitter only for three hours a day instead of five, go for walks without my phone, start listening to music solely on vinyl, and so on… There’s definitely steps I could take if I bothered to start walking.

Anyways. I don’t really know which of these solutions will help me get rid of this tech-weariness. Maybe doing a bit of each will help. Or maybe none of these are worth it and that feeling is here to stay forever. Deep down inside I don’t believe that’s true though, I do think a perfect balance of mechanization vs humanity is possible, even if I have no clue how to get there just yet.

I do sometimes fantasize about a future in which for some reason I take a break from all electronic devices for months. Maybe I’m living in a remote cabin somewhere or backpacking on another continent or whatever. During this break I imagine only talking to people IRL, only reading words printed on real paper, only paying with cash everywhere. No smartphone, no laptop, no Spotify. I then imagine returning to my digital life once this so-called quest is done, back home to my comfy devices and to the sweet, sweet release of getting to waste time on the internet again. I imagine booting up my dusty laptop, the Windows logo turning blue, and feeling that rush of euphoria I used to feel as a kid whenever I was about to spend the next few hours gaming, till eventually the new becomes the old once again and this rush inevitably fades away, because apparently that’s what being an adult is about, or so I’m starting to learn.

Having now lived in the US for three years and having recently been back in India for a month-long trip, here’s a short list of things I found newly different about India that I’d always assumed to be the defaults worldwide. A lot of these might be specific to Pune.

• It’s way dustier, man. This isn’t new, everyone talks about this, but you really feel it once you get used to things not being as dusty anymore. This dustiness is also the main reason that a photo taken in the US looks so much better than a similar photo taken in India - the air is just cleaner. And that’s before we even get into AQI numbers or mention New Delhi here.

• Inflation in just the last couple of years has gotten crazier in India than in the US.

  • Having lived in the same city all my life, I had a pretty okay sense of how much things used to cost in Rupees (₹), but that’s gone out of the window now. I was going back after just two years, but every time I tried to guess how much something would cost on this trip, even simple stuff like groceries and restaurant food, I’d end up underestimating the actual price. I made a joke with some friends that these inflated prices make me feel like India is using a new currency called Rupee2 (₹₹) now, because the entire paradigm I had of Rupees in my head is now outdated. At this point I have a better sense of how much things cost in US dollars, which is kinda weird and arguably a bit sad.

• Naturally there’s more people on the streets, which is expected given the differences between the US and India in both the total population and population density, but what I noticed newly is that there’s so many people on the streets talking on the phone at any given time. Who are they all talking to? What are they talking about? I mean, I’m on bullshit phone calls with friends all the time, but that’s always when I’m chilling at home and not outdoors at a tea stall on a business day at 2pm. The reason I felt this difference is that I hardly see anyone in the US talking on the phone in public - most people are looking into their smartphone screens.

• My experiences with domestic flights and airports also had slight differences.

  • Most domestic flyers in India check in their luggage, even the carry-on sized bags. Indian airlines - at least IndiGo - don’t charge extra for checking in baggage even on domestic flights. In the US this would be unthinkable as most airlines will charge you $50 or more for each checked-in bag, and I’ve hardly seen anyone do it. I don’t know what the cause-effect is for either country here, whether the airline costs determine what people do or whether the culture of carrying bags with yourself or not causes airlines to price things accordingly.

  • This is purely vibes based and I could be wrong, but I feel like airport-inflation in India is much higher than it is in the US. Generally things in American airports seem to cost the same or just slightly more as everywhere else. In Indian airports you feel the extra markup.

• I noticed new things while eating at restaurants as well.

  • The US simply does not have these “udupi-style” restaurants where you’re seated outside of the restaurant’s building but with a tarp or a corrugated roof sheet over that section, so you’re technically indoors but get the outdoor-ish benefits of sunlight and pleasant weather. Any US restaurant is either completely indoors or with optional European-cafe-like outdoor seating, which doesn’t really hit that sweet spot.

  • Having women wait tables in restaurants is common in the US, even the default maybe, but unheard of in India. All my life the waiters I’d seen everywhere were men. The first and only female waitress I ever saw in India was on this trip, which felt odd for some reason, which is how I realized that it was new.

  • Waitstaff in restaurants in India actually serve food from a large serving dish into your plate, like they literally scoop gravy and rice into a spatula and serve you your servings till you ask them to stop. I’ve never seen this in the US and it feels unthinkable here; either you get your meal in a plate itself and there’s nothing to serve, or you get a large dish and serve it onto your plate yourself.

  • Similarly, if you want to take food home they’ll transfer your leftovers into a disposable container for you, and hand you the packed container. In the US they just hand you an empty to-go box and you pack the food yourself.

  • Mango lassi seems to be the staple choice of drink for Indian food in the US and I don’t know how that happened. Nobody in India drinks mango lassi, I’ve never even seen it on a menu in my entire life. In fact if you ask for one in a restaurant they drag you into the back kitchen and shoot your kneecaps.

• Parking is so much more easier.

  • In the US, if I want to park a car on a street I have to find an empty spot, decipher the complex parking sign nearby to find out if I can park there on that hour of that day, shove my car in, pay on the meter nearby, and then later on make sure I haven’t exceeded my time limit.

  • In India, all I had to do was check for No Parking signs, then check for P1 and P2 signs (P1 indicates that you can park on that side of the street on odd-numbered dates, P2 on even-numbered dates), and shove my car in. Street parking in India is free. No meter, no ticket (as long as you don’t block an entrance), no hassle. I always took this for granted.

  • Another reason parking is easier is that I go to most places on a two-wheeler and they’re even easier to shove into open spots.

• Ride sharing apps like Uber and Ola have an OTP (one-time password) system. When you get into an Uber the driver doesn’t bother asking your name to confirm that you’re the guy who booked the cab. Instead you just give them a 4-digit number that’s displayed on your app, they enter it into theirs, and the ride (and your identity) is confirmed. Pretty slick, though a strong indicator of a low-trust society if there ever was one.

• I was at a bank and a customer walked in and started literally screaming at this bank employee for having made some mistake earlier and it reminded me that I’ve seen verbal abuse of staff regularly in public places like banks and stores throughout my life in India but never once in the US.

• I never noticed this before, but in Pune when you’re talking to a stranger, you start talking in one of three languages depending on context, really. And if the person doesn’t speak the language you started with, they won’t tell you that directly or ask you to repeat yourself, but rather they’ll reply to you in their preferred language and then you can continue the conversation in that language. This isn’t a big deal but this language-friction simply isn’t there in the US, though I have had people in some places start a conversation with me in Spanish to which, like Kanye, I always reply with “No hablo”, which is the only Spanish I know.

• I agree that UPI as a payment system is absolutely revolutionary but Apple Pay is so much easier because I don’t have to type in an amount or a PIN anywhere, I simply have to tap my phone near the card reader and voila. But that said, UPI is truly more “universal” because I can use it for all transactions, personal or business. I don’t need separate apps like Venmo or Zelle to send money to friends, just one UPI app is enough for literally everything.

• There seems to be a lot of overemployment. As soon as I landed in Mumbai, I saw so many policemen and staff in different parts of the airport just sitting by idly. I only noticed this because it felt new somehow. Even at the parking entrances of shopping malls, where the driver is simply supposed to press a button at the gate to get their ticket and gain access, they have a person hired who stands next to the gate arm and presses the button for you and hands you your ticket. Why?! My cousin said that “India is AI proof” because any automated solution will still be somehow implemented manually LMAO.

• A new crop of delivery apps like Blinkit and Zepto have come up in the last couple of years that deliver most kinds of groceries, food, and other goods to your home in less than fifteen minutes. Yes, literally. Apparently these companies have multiple warehouses stocked with these goods in different parts of each city, which is how they’re able to get riders to deliver so quickly, but it’s still absolutely bonkers.

  • In general, because of the abundance of both labor (see point above) and of bikes (which are way faster and easier to park), any kind of B2C delivery experience in India is miles (kilometers?) ahead of that in the US. I miss Swiggy every day.

• There’s way too much SMS spam in India, dude. We abuse SMSes. I get an OTP through SMS any time I want to make a credit card purchase and another one confirming that I’ve made the purchase. I get a confirmation SMS even for UPI transactions, even though I can see the confirmation on the UPI app itself. And this is without mentioning offers, scams, and other SMS spam. At this rate in the future I’ll get a text every time I take a dump.

  • In the US I don’t get a text for any transaction at all. My credit card could get stolen and the thief could purchase $500 worth of crystal meth on my name and I wouldn’t find out till I checked the statement. That said I actually prefer this (not the meth).

• Speaking of taking dumps, I miss my handheld bidet spray so, so much. It’s insane that Americans don’t use bidets at all.

• Maybe the only thing I miss more than my bidet is the thing that causes me to use it in the first place: food. There’s no shortage of good grub in most places in the US, but in terms of optionality and availability there’s really no comparison. I legit have better snacking options at 4am in any major Indian city than I do even after 11pm in most places in America. In fact if you dare search “food” on Google Maps after midnight anywhere in the US they lower your credit score by fifty points.

Congrats on making it to the end of 2024 and thank you if you’ve ever read anything I’ve written. It’s really quite bizarre that anyone does at all.

It’s that time of the year again. Below is a massive, ginormous dump of all my favourite art I watched and read and listened to and experienced over the last twelve months.

As always, to clarify: these are all works of media that I consumed in 2024, but not necessarily released in 2024.

I’ve recently moved all my previous best-of lists to one place. You can also check each of them out individually: 2023, 2022, 2021.

Songs

Here are my favourite songs I discovered this year.

38. Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Can’t Stop
37. Big Thief - Paul
36. Timothée Chalamet - A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
35. Rocksun - Gulabachya Phula
34. Maude Latour - Lola
33. The Sutherland Brothers - Sailing (h/t AT)
32. Karan Aujla - Tauba Tauba
31. Kid Cudi - Erase Me (feat. Kanye West)

30. Djo - End of Beginning
29. MF DOOM - THAT’S THAT
28. Shaggy, Rik Rok - It Wasn’t Me
27. The Walters - Sweet Marie
26. fun. - Sight of the Sun

25. Maude LaTour - Save Me
24. The Cast of Hamilton - Alexander Hamilton
23. Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso
22. The Cast of Hamilton - The Room Where It Happens
21. Future, Metro Boomin, Kendrick Lamar - Like That

20. Pritam, Sachet Tandon, Amitabh Bhattacharya - Kudmayi
19. Leslie Odom Jr. - Wait For It
18. Steve Lacy - Bad Habit
17. Kendrick Lamar - Meet the Grahams
16. Childish Gambino - Lithonia

15. Mk.gee - I Want
14. Billie Eilish - BIRDS OF A FEATHER
13. Jonathan Groff - You’ll Be Back
12. The Cast of Hamilton - It’s Quiet Uptown
11. Vampire Weekend - Hope

10. Shaggy, Rayvon - Angel (h/t AD)
09. The Cast of Hamilton - The Election of 1800
08. Allison Russell - Persephone
07. Charli xcx - 360
06. The Sweptaways, Anders Wendin - They Don’t Know About Us

05. Vampire Weekend - Capricorn
04. Cocteau Twins - Cherry-coloured Funk
03. The Innocence Mission - Evensong
02. Kali Uchis - Melting
01. Vampire Weekend - Mary Boone

Events

Leaving aside personal travel and some beautiful weddings, my favourite live events and shows I saw this year were:

06. Shreya Ghoshal concert (h/t AP)
05. Standup at The Comedy Cellar (h/t AR)
04. Kanan Gill’s standup show
03. Green Day concert
02. Cigarettes After Sex concert
01. Vampire Weekend concert (h/t DM, AT)

Albums

My favourite albums I listened to this year were:

(good)
06. The Black Keys - El Camino (2011) (h/t MD)
05. Coctaeu Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)

(very good)
04. The Velvet Underground, Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
03. Maude Latour - Sugar Water (2024)

(transcendent)
02. Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us (2024)
01. Lin-Manuel Miranda - Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) (2015)

Essays

Here are the best essays and blog posts I read online this year.

Most favourite:

• the metaphysics of Waffle House, MythoAmerica

• Goodbye to All That, Joan Didion (h/t VB)

• Book Review: Two Arms and a Head, AmandaFromBethlehem

• Thoughts on Kung Fu Panda, Eric Weinstein

• 50 Things I Know, Sasha Chapin

• The Insult, cybermonk

Also incredible:

• Memories of an Enron Summer, Giuseppe Paleologo

• Speed Matters, James Somers

• Frank Auerbach and the unexamined life, Janan Ganesh

• Heroes Suck, Here’s Why, Steve Rolston

• In Praise of Uselessness, Ava

• Entry Points, Ava

• Stuff I’ve Learned, cybermonk

• Thick and Thin Cultures, Paul Skallas

• I’ve spent a lifetime…, Adrian Chiles

• Let’s Be Friends, Ryan Lizza

• hometown inertia, inhale, scream

• Sensitive Young Man in The Gym, worst boyfriend ever

• The Cost of Apathy, Jack Raines

• There’s a place for everyone, Adam Mastroianni

• The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano, Catherine Shannon

• Obvious travel advice, Dynomight

Also very good:

• Charisma as Natural as Gravity, Christopher Nolan

• Clock Speed, Sriram Krishnan

• My Own Private India, Joel Stein

• The reality of the Danish fairytale, David Heinemeier Hanson

• Real Life, Kasra

• Networking for Nerds, Benjamin Reinhardt

• Book Review: Dominion, Drew Housman

• How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?, Scott Alexander

• Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI, Erik Hoel

• You can’t tell people anything, Habitat Chronicles

Movies

Not including rewatches, here are my favourite movies I watched this year. Also add me on Letterboxd!

(good)
17. Burn After Reading (2008, Ethan and Joel Coen)
16. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, Francis Lawrence)
15. Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)

(very good)
14. Hit Man (2023, Richard Linklater)
13. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
12. No Hard Feelings (2023, Gene Stupnitsky)
11. Dune: Part Two (2024, Denis Villeneuve)
10. Laapata Ladies (2024, Kiran Rao)
09. Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook)
08. Red Rocket (2021, Sean Baker)

(great)
07. Sir (2018, Rohena Gera)
06. Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)
05. Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022, Cooper Raiff)

(outstanding)
04. Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee) (h/t NK)
03. Riddle of Fire (2023, Weston Razooli)
02. Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven)
01. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)

Podcasts / Audio

Here are the best podcast episodes and other audio-thingys I listened to this year:

• The Economy Is Fake, the Jobs Are Fake, the Money Is Fake

• The Corporate Office Rant - Tim Dillion

• No friends is fine - Madeline Argy

• Joe Rogan Experience #2234 - Marc Andreessen

• Chris Williamson - Morgan Housel

• Turns out I’m a Vampire Weekend fan - "Only God Was Above Us" analysis

• The Philadelphia Incident - Bill Burr

Standup

Here are my favourite standup specials I watched this year:

• John Mulaney - New in Town

• Kanan Gill - Is This It? (h/t VB)

YouTube

Out of the hundreds of YouTube videos I watched this year, here are my very favourite ones:

• Days of Summer (h/t VJ)

• American Class Hierarchy System

• How each Batman understood the character

• I don't know what day it is

• How J Cole fans were when they heard the Kendrick diss on metro album

• Hannibal Buress - Jaywalking Is a Fantasy Crime

• Alex Jones Founders Fund Pep Talk

• The Greatest GeoGuessr Game Of All time - Grand Finals ‘24

• love is (not) a laserquest

• George Hotz | Just Chatting

• Nakamura Fan Reacts to Gukesh Winning Candidates

• The Shooting AKA Dear Sister

• Homem caindo do céu GMOD (h/t SJ)

• The Infinite Weight of Mediocrity

Books

The books I read and liked the most this year were:

(good)
06. Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland
05. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (h/t SJ)
04. Dune by Frank Herbert
03. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

(very good)
02. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
01. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

TV

Here are the best tv shows I watched this year.

(good / worth watching once)
09. Beef - miniseries
08. Severance - season 1

(quite good)
07. Death Note - miniseries
06. Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story - miniseries

(really good)
05. Arrested Development - season 1
04. The Wire - season 1
03. The Wire - season 2
02. Key & Peele - season 3

(outstanding)
01. Arcane - season 2

Quotes

Last but not least—the most memorable quotes I came across from any source this year that I just had to note down and share.

"She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."
- Frank Herbert, Dune

"there are people who thrive and start having fun under amounts of stress that would kill you or I. there are people who play world building like their favorite strategy game. there are people who don't sleep and have less brain fog than I do on a normal day. there are people who understand every line of a million line codebase or have a pointer in their head for who to ask. there are people who are bus factor 1 at a thousand person company. there are people who answer phone calls for help at any moment of any day […] heroes are real. you shouldn't defer to or worship them but you should understand the multiagent environment you live in. many times the most effective thing you can do isn't to try and solve the problem yourself but to get a hero interested"
- Roon (@tszzl)

"The club is bumping, the ladies look good, the alcohol is flowing. There is much pain in the world but not in this room."
- drunk European guy in that old video

"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
- Alan J. Perlis

"the thing about America is that its clearly always functioning at like 10% of its power level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom"
- Roon (@tszzl)

"I try and tell myself it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn't matter. That's how I handle stress."
- Donald Trump, 2004

"Now this type of shit happens all the time / You gotta get yours, but fool, I gotta get mine"
- Snoop Dogg, Gin and Juice

"You can only be as interesting to someone as the questions they ask you allow you to be."
- m-unknown

"As much as I love self-depreciating (especially in these last few weeks) I factually cannot call myself a loser anymore, it just wouldn't be accurate."
- me (from my personal notes)

"And all you touch and all you see / Is all your life will ever be"
- Pink Floyd, Breathe

"Science progresses one funeral at a time."
- Max Planck

“Papua New Guinea is so violent that more than 820 languages are spoken there."
- Katherine Morayati

"working through your triggers is realizing that your lovers were just lovers, your job is just a job, your personality is just a personality, your parents were just parents. the world is simply the world. none of it was ever a big deal. none of it was ever a problem"
- @grantbels

"There is no pain in the world greater than your own."
- unknown

"...but please, have mercy on me a sinner, if i were naturally good at this i wouldn't be able to talk about it explicitly."
- @sympatheticopposition

"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
- William James

"Ah, but I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now"
- Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

"There is no penalty for asking. You can apply to the same thing 10 times and no one’s gonna get mad at you. You can advertise something on the Internet and even if 99% of people think it’s dumb, 1% might think it’s really cool. You are always doing things for the one person who will give you the yes. And often one yes is enough."
- Ava

"I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo."
- unknown

"In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money."
- Jack Raines

"What did socialists use for light before candles? Answer: Electricity."
- Alex Tabarok

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
- Walt Whitman

"i think you ultimately become whoever would have saved you that time that no one did"
- roach-works on Tumblr

"It’s ni**as dying that ain’t never died before"
- unknown (from Twitter)

"You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
- Paul Graham on Sam Altman, 2008 (Altman was 22 at the time)

"The money never made me happy, but it never made me sad / This shit had never made a difference, but, shit, I carry the flag"
- Bladee, Lucky Luke

“Nine-tenths of politics is choosing the same scapegoat as everyone else.”
- Rene Girard

“There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions. Because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this.”
- Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor, 2013

"You are all just perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse."
- Slavoj Žižek

"If someone mentions your race or sex or ethnicity when criticizing you, you can usually assume that this is the real reason they dislike you."
- Paul Graham

"You don't seem to grasp the distinction between having a limited vocabulary and choosing to write simply. From the midwit peak, all you see is lowlands surrounding you."
- Paul Graham, replying to another Twitter user

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- Frank Herbert, Dune

"You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you."
- Lester Freamon in The Wire, written by David Simon

"You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them."
-Bill Waterson

"Good things come from going down rabbitholes. Rabbitholes have the potential to be powerful portals into worlds that you don’t yet know that you deeply care about. That you care about being a part of not just for a moment, but in a meaningful way. I'm convinced that your enduring passion lies in the rabbitholes you've been down or will go down — if you just let yourself fall."
- Anu Atluru

"It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives."
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“A father hopes to be as extraordinary as his youngsters, in their innocence, imagine him to be, so that they need never become disillusioned with him. Perhaps some fathers accomplish that.”
- David Von Drehle

“The people I see living the best lives are central nodes in networks rather than at the top of a hierarchical pyramid.”
- Tom Morgan

"I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that's not true. There's a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: the off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it's entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they're like, eh, we wouldn't mind a little more globalization actually."
- Bono

"To record unkindness is tragedy, for the unkind word lives long after the event that caused it is forgotten."
- Elbert Hubbard

"Life wasn't single in its purpose... or even in its direction.... The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely in it."
- Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

"The work works on you more than you work on it."
- Alex Hormozi

“All lies and jest / Still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest”
- Simon & Garfunkel, The Boxer

"He was beautiful. He was the point of difference. He has always been the point of difference."
- Peter Drury, commentary on Lionel Messi winning the World Cup, 2022

"Again, the medicine man arrives and sinks his flaming spear into the hearts of Real Madrid... Messi, born in the crossfire hurricane and he is jumping jack flash... You could drop a tarantula into his shorts and he'll still be cool."
- Roy Hudson, commentary on Lionel Messi's 500th goal, 2017

"You live in a world choked with ideas, where anything that rises to your consideration has necessarily won a Darwinian battle among hyper-specialized memetic replicators competing for your attention."
- Scott Alexander

"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
- unknown

"The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."
- Colin Powell

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours"
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"there's something at the core of the american ideology that's only captured in happy go lucky 80s movies, which is that the noble pursuit of fun is probably one of the most productive forces in the universe and works way better than grinding away dutifully on things you hate"
- Roon (@tszzl)

“You argue and you bicker and you fight / Atheists and Catholics, Jews and Hindus argue day and night / Over what they think is true / But no one entertains the thought that maybe God does not believe in you”
- Bo Burnham, From God’s Perspective

“You pray so badly for heaven / Knowing any day might be the day that you die / But maybe life on earth could be heaven / Doesn't just the thought of it make it worth a try?”
- Bo Burnham, From God’s Perspective

"All you can take with you is that which you've given away."
- quote on a portrait from It's a Wonderful Life

"The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people."
- James Baldwin

"In high school I volunteered for a couple years at a care home for people with dementia. All anyone there ever talked about was their children (I think their spouses were mostly already dead). The ones who had children who visited were happy and the ones who didn’t weren’t. Everything I needed to know about life was revealed to me right there, though it would take me a long time to see it."
- Ava

Fin.

Eighteen year old Gukesh D from India recently beat China’s Ding Liren to become the new and youngest ever World Chess Champion. The World Championship is one of the oldest tournaments in professional chess and the most important one, sort of what the World Cup is to football, and so even casual fans who don’t otherwise follow the game often closely tune in.

Chess has boomed since the pandemic and the game’s popularity is at an all-time high. So predictably, tournaments like these get a ton of coverage through livestreams, YouTube, and social media. Each game is recapped and summarized by dozens of YouTubers and grandmasters who provide their own analysis and commentary on the players’ moves. These recaps collectively get millions of views from ordinary chess fans like myself:

We can refer to this sprawling chess scene teeming with content creators, subscribers, and casual viewers as Big Chess. Like any online community, Big Chess has certain creators and players who dominate the scene and have the biggest megaphones. It also thrives on memes, controversy, and drama.

Anways, back to Gukesh and Ding. The deciding moment of this entire match happened in the very last game, before which both players’ scores had been tied. This meant that if the players drew game 14 the match would continue into tiebreaks, but if someone won it they would clinch the World Championship itself. After a relatively dull battle that looked like game 14 was heading towards a draw, Ding inexplicably played 55. Rf2, a catastrophic blunder that collapsed his position and essentially handed Gukesh a victory. Game, set, match.

As soon as this move was played, Big Chess collectively lost its shit. Every livestreamer and commentator was in disbelief. In the video below you can see an Indian audience’s real time reaction to that move as they were watching the game live. The couple of minutes after 0:15 mark, as Gukesh slowly realizes he’s about to win it all while the crowd simultaneously erupts with joy, are really worth watching. They’re up there among the most emotional sports moments I’ve ever seen:

Here’s the funny thing about this video, though: apart from maybe the commentators on stage, none of the people in the audience who burst out with joy could tell you why 55. Rf2 is a bad move, let alone a blunder. The only reason they started celebrating is because they saw that the evaluation bar (which indicates the computer’s analysis of the position) suddenly jumped upward to denote that the game was now completely winning for black.

Essentially, the crowd wasn’t really reacting because they saw a bad move, but because a computer’s analysis told them that the move they saw was bad. If they’d watched the game with the engine evaluation turned off they would not have reacted at all, simply because most people aren’t good enough at chess to instantly calculate that this is a winning position for black. Neither am I.

This video is a perfect microcosm for what I think is so absurd about Big Chess. This is an apparatus dedicated to covering and explaining grandmaster-level chess games to casual viewers, but there’s fundamentally no way for casual viewers to ever understand what is truly going on at a grandmaster-level chess game.

That’s because the delta between ordinary chess players and a World Champion level grandmaster is so wide that no amount of explaining a move will ever really explain it. Because a chess move isn’t about the move, it’s about the lines that lead from that move, the calculated endpoints of each line, and all the moves that were not played instead. To understand a move - and a game, which is a series of such moves - would require a deep understanding of chess which most people, myself included, simply don’t have.

Think about it this way. There are around 2,000 grandmasters in the world right now. There’s no way for an adult chess player to become a grandmaster, even under the best of coaching, because adult brains simply do not have the neuroplasticity necessary to embed within themselves that deep chess instinct required to compete at a GM level. So the gap between a regular chess player and a GM is already unsurmountable.

Now, to take things a step further, there is another huge gap between a typical GM, and one who’s ranked top 50 or so worldwide. Let’s call these top players super GMs. Again, it’s well known that if a regular GM were to play a 14-game match against a super GM, they would probably draw some games here and there, but there’s no chance they would win the match itself. The skill gap is again too high. Chess is extremely competitive that way.

So knowing these two thresholds, now try and imagine the skill gap between a regular player and a super GM. Light-years apart.

Which is why, when a GM in a YouTube video tries to explain to an audience of regular players a game a super GM played, he’s basically analyzing each move a) as best as he understands it, which will be lossy, and then b) in a way that the ordinary player could understand it too, which means simplifying it even further.

This creates an analysis of the game that’s such a watered down oversimplification of it that in some cases it might be actively misleading.

I get that to a certain extent, this is true for everything. Experts and live-participants in any sport see things inherently differently than plebians. But here’s the difference between chess and other sports: with other sports, even as a layman, a noob, I still feel like I fundamentally understand what’s going on. When I watch a football match I’m sure I don’t understand the game at Pep Guardiola’s level, but I still get how it’s is going. I know which team is dominating, who’s creating more chances, and so on. And most importantly, I can feel it. When Garnacho scored that bicycle kick for Manchester United last year, I didn’t need Peter Drury’s commentary to tell me that it was a great goal. I just knew.

This is basically the appeal of sports. It’s fun to discuss tactics and strategy and numbers, but deep down it’s something you feel. It’s why it moves us.

This isn’t the case for chess. You don’t “just knew”. With very few exceptions, you have to be told whether a move is good or bad by a higher being, i.e. a grandmaster or The Chess Engine. And even then you don’t really just knew, you sort of think you just knew. You’re not watching chess, you’re watching a proxy of chess.

If I watched a World Championship game without commentary I’d fall asleep. Sure, I’d understand the moves and the basic intent behind them, but my overall analysis of each position would be so shallow I might as well be watching a different sport than the players would be playing. It’d be like watching a Shakespeare play as a baby.

(This is why I really enjoy and recommend non-professional chess tournaments like Pogchamps and Comedians on Board, because the players in these tournaments aren’t grandmasters, so they think and play like me (read: badly), which makes the games way more relatable and exciting.)

So my basic point here is that millions of us chess casuals are genuinely wasting our time watching top level chess because unlike other enjoyable wastes of time, we have a near-zero understanding of the thing we’re wasting time on. We’re like puppets dancing to the strings of higher beings who tell us what to feel about the thing we’re watching. I can’t think of any other sport or activity for which this is true.

Subscribe now

But here’s the kicker… deep down inside, ever chess fan knows everything I’ve said already.

All the people in the crowd who cheered when Ding blundered, all the millions who tuned in to YouTube to watch the match, every casual playing online bullet chess at 2am, they all know this.

They know that whenever they watch chess they’re watching a proxy of the game. They know how unbelievably good these grandmasters are because they know their own ELO rating and the ratings of top players. (Chess is brutally blunt that way; you know exactly where you stand.) They know they couldn’t possibly be watching the same game these players are playing. They know it’s a complete waste of time to even try and understand their moves.

And it makes no difference at all. They, myself included, continue watching. We never stop. And I don’t quite understand why.

Maybe we all just want a show. Maybe we just want to watch the best of the best go at it, head to head, in the ultimate contest of mind games, even if we might not understand the games themselves.

Maybe we got emotionally invested in certain players because we inherently like their style or because they’re representing our country, and we just wanted to see them win.

Maybe we simply want to witness brilliance, to watch a Great Move that only a Great Player can produce, and to admire its genius in awe after having it explained to us by someone else. Feints within feints within feints.

Or maybe we’re all just bored and lazy and easily succumb to whatever slop the YouTube algorithm decides to feed us that day.

Or maybe, just maybe… deep down, against any and all evidence to the contrary, we like to think that we could someday be as good as the players we watch. That we could wear suits and make brilliant sacrifices on the board, outplaying our opponent, while the chess world watches us. That our matches would someday be analyzed by others.

This is our green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will play better chess, get one step closer to mastering the sport and someday truly stop blundering. . .

And so we watch on, eyes against our screens, drawn back seamlessly into the game.

Soon as the teacher leaves, students speak, the teacher peeps

Back inside, students hide they eyes, too awkward let's let it slide

You see both parties know of each other's state of mind

Teacher tired of this grind, but it pays, she don’t resign

~

If I read her mind, would I find her thoughts neatly aligned?

Likely not, not a robot, they must collide just like mine

As for my thoughts, they drift away and I simply let ‘em glide

It's bad: I'm writing on the wrong paper, the answer sheet's by my side

~

But what's a guy to do when his head is empty, take a nap?

I literally know nothing, I’m on that John Snow crap

Should've studied, fault is mine, blame I don't assign

Waste time then, hate yourself now, that's how the cycle's designed

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Music

Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City is an album that makes me want to believe in God. On some mystical, subconscious level, it resonates with who I am deeper than most works of art I’ve read or seen. If I could be an album I’d want to be MVOTC. This blog is titled in reference to its opening track, after all.

While I still vividly remember the first time I listened to it back in 2016, I’ve never been able to point out what it is about this record that resonates so deeply. That’s because Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, while always witty and erudite, have never been straightforward. They’ve aimed to give listeners impressions of an idea, fleeting glimpses of a feeling, often creating a collage of words and phrases assembled from the writers’ lives and experiences that somehow add up to a greater whole.

And on MVOTC, they add up to a lot. Rooted in references to Judaism and New York City, this is an album mostly about belief, I think, about faith, disillusionment, existentialism, and a general sense of growing up and moving on from things. But it’s also somehow paradoxically an album filled with love and a sense of hope.

As one reviewer aptly put it, this is a “deeply God-haunted work”, with a “recurring sense of engagement with God throughout the album, a sense of wrestling with the implications and impossibilities of faith.”

I really don’t know how Vampire Weekend achieved the sound they did here either. Based on what I said above, you might think that this is a self-serious album that requires work and effort to listen to, but it’s actually just a collection of catchy indie rock songs, nothing too experimental or avant-garde. Ezra Koenig’s singing is immaculate, the instrument choices are zany and creative, and all the songs go really well together. But even beyond all that there’s just something else going on under the surface that gives this music serious heft and adds up to a sum greater than its parts.

To echo Dickens, it’s the happiest of records, it’s the gloomiest of records. It combines the anxieties of aging with the fresh breathlessness of being alive. It sounds modern yet feels ancient. It’s both exuberantly energetic and exhausted with worldly wisdom.

There’s perhaps no better example of these dichotomies than track three on the album, Step, which is also my favourite song ever made:

If there’s one thing we ask from music that no other medium can give us, it’s that it take us places within ourselves we’ve never been, inner-selves we didn't know even existed. Only music can touch us on an entirely new dimension, making us feel in ways that cannot be described using mere language. It’s rare but when it happens, it’s magical, and it’s what makes MVOTC a masterpiece. Whatever this album may be about, and it seems to be about a lot of things, in forty-two minutes it shows you something quietly precious, and you’re never the same.

Modern Vampires of the City to this day remains to me an inexplicably beautiful, esoteric mystery. The album’s charm lies not in trying to find any grand answers within its music, but in drowning yourself in the perplexing beauty of its questions.

Earlier this year I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, the godfather of all science fiction novels.

On one hand, I thought that while book had some fascinating parts it was very uneven on the whole. The story was oddly paced and was often a slog to get through. But on the other hand I found Herbert’s writing to be consistently profound, deep, and mesmerizing, and thought that the best paragraphs from the novel are up there with all other works of great literature.

So here’s a collection of what I thought were the best passages from Dune. Everything below is quoted directly from the book, none of the words are mine. Personal favourites in bold.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

—

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

—

“She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”

—

“She said the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

—

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

—

“Knowing where the trap is—that's the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale—a feint within a feint within a feint.. seemingly without end. The task is to unravel it.”

—

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

—

Yueh ventured a thin smile, thinking: I believe it has worked. Now, she'll think anything unusual in my manner is due to embarrassment. She'll not look for deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer.

—

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns — endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.

—

For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of a pattern more involuted and complicated than his mind could grasp.

—

Jessica stopped beside him, said: "What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child."

He spoke mechanically: "If only adults could relax like that."

—

For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

—

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

—

The Duke watched Halleck, admiring the ugly lump of a man, noting the glass-splinter eyes with their gleam of savage understanding. Here was a man who lived outside the faufreluches while obeying their every precept.

—

Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it.

—

Dry chuckles sounded around the table, and Paul realized that his father had said the precisely correct thing in precisely the correct tone to lift the mood here. Even the hint of fatigue in his voice was right.

—

It was a scene of such beauty it caught all his attention.

Some things beggar likeness, he thought.

—

—

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man— with human flesh.

—

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of human-kind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

—

A thing to note about any espionage and/or counter-espionage school is the similar basic reaction pattern of all its graduates. Any enclosed discipline sets its stamp, its pattern, upon its students. That pattern is susceptible to analysis and prediction.

—

Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.

—

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

—

Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.

—

The Baron shifted his attention to the guard captain—Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe—a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.

—

"I never could bring myself to trust a traitor," the Baron said. "Not even a traitor I created."

—

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

—

Something had happened to his awareness this night—he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness.

—

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.

—

Paul's mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery-as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.

—

Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.

—

So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked.

—

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

—

And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene.

—

And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge.

—

The mind can go either direction under stress-toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

—

There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.

—

—

The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization - agriculture.

—

And he thought how strange it was that the mind, long fixed on a single track, could not get off that track.

—

The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.

—

"Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life," his father said. "Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism."

—

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

—

"Arrakis is a one-crop planet," his father said. "One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings."

—

"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero," his father said.

—

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

—

It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown.

—

She knew what it was she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death— the drive to seek immortality through progeny.

—

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.

—

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action-the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand— moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern.

—

The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.

—

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture — it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

—

—

This was a dream for which men would die willingly. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul's place for him.

—

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

—

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.

—

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

—

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

—

Gurney saw then the sinewy harshness in Paul that had never before been seen in an Atreides—a leathery look to the skin, a squint to the eyes and calculation in the glance that seemed to weigh everything in sight.

—

Something had happened inside him while he faced the Sardaukar. A sum of decisions had accumulated in his awareness.

—

"The people who can destroy a thing, they control it," Paul said.

—

"The land is beautiful, true," Chani said. "But there is much grief in it."

"Grief is the price of victory" Jessica said.

—

In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.

I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.

—

There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.

—

How can you tell what's ruthless unless you've plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?

We live in strange times. We don’t buy most of our entertainment products physically anymore, we “subscribe” to services that digitally provide them to us. We don’t make a one-time payment to own any of the songs, videos, TV shows, and movies we consume now; we make recurring payments to the streaming gods to avail them each month, as if they’re basic utilities. (Please don’t turn off my Spotify, you guys.)

At no other point in human history has the exchange of artistic goods worked this way. This “subscription model” of making recurring payments for access to digital media is a uniquely novel phenomenon.

This model has created a paradigm shift in how content is consumed, and predictably so. It’s admittedly incredible for the consumer. But it also has major drawbacks that nobody talks about.

One of these drawbacks is that it makes content ephemeral and fickle. You never know what’ll last. I’m sure you’ve noticed this: you go to Netflix and learn that your favourite movie is suddenly not available on it. (Where did it go? No clue!) You open Spotify and realize you can’t play half of your Bollywood playlist - those songs were apparently removed because of a licensing dispute. You visit HBO Max but can’t even find certain HBO-original shows on it. The irony. And so on with every service.

Another drawback: censorship. Back in 2020, Netflix removed the Community episode “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” from their catalog, because it featured a character doing blackface. Ignore that “Dungeons” (i.e. season 2 episode 14) is one of the show’s best installments and that the reason it was taken down was idiotic. What makes this removal noteworthy is that Netflix then renamed episode 15 to 14, 16 to 15, and so on, effectively erasing episode 14 from its history.

Since Netflix kept no indicator of this removal, millions of the show’s fans have now watched the series with no idea that they skipped the real episode 14, which happens to be one of the show’s best! That’s some Orwellian stuff right there. And this has happened repeatedly since. It’s not just that digital media can be censored, but that too without your awareness.

Community is no longer on Netflix - another instance of shows jumping from one platform to another! - but this instance of blatant censorship was so egregious I never forgot it.

And it’s not just TV shows. eBooks get the same censorship treatment. Last year, Puffin Books decided to update all of author Roald Dahl’s official eBooks to remove insensitive language from them:

“Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.”

That’s just disgusting. I’d rather have a book I love get outright banned than be pathetically altered like this. And on the topic of books, on a more personal front I’ve noticed that Amazon often updates the covers of certain eBooks on my Kindle that I’ve already purchased. This is not okay!

To make things worse, Amazon has apparently even deleted purchased eBooks (!) from certain customers’ Kindles overnight. From an article cleverly titled, “Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others”:

“This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author [Orwell, of course] had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for— thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

It gets worse for Amazon. Apparently, buying a movie on their platform is completely meaningless as well. Excerpts from an excellent article, "​The Deception of “Buying” Digital Movies":

“You are not buying the content in the common definition that people would expect, were you own a copy of that media.

You are not provided any ownership of the content you have bought. Only that the content you “bought” will be “generally” available. Amazon is allowed to “sell” you a movie where they don’t have perpetual and irrevocable license to the movie they are selling. Leading to movies purchased being taken away from customers when the copyright pulls the rights from Amazon. The same situation applies to other internet storefronts that claim to sell digital movies and TV shows, such as iTunes.

If you buy a DVD or a Blue-Ray at a retail store, you are able to play that disk for as long as that disk physically works (often over 20 years). There are very few if any countries that would allow a shop to send around bailiffs to seize DVDs already bought years past, because the distributor no-longer has the rights to distribute the content.”

Amazon is living proof that digital media is clearly mutable, and they use that mutability to its full advantage.

While it may seem a bit silly to care about TV shows missing episodes and eBooks getting deleted, it’s worth paying attention to, because stories like these are indicators of a fundamental shift in the definition of ownership itself that nobody signed up for.

II. Three Models

Before elaborating further, we need to think about how media consumption fundamentally works.

Consuming any art is essentially the process buying a file and then performing a read operation on that file. The output of this file-read exists in the form of text, video, and/or sound, and you process it by reading, watching, and/or listening to it. This entire mechanism can be modeled in three ways.

—

Model A - Physical Media

[You] → [File]

In this model, you make a one-time purchase to buy a file that physically exists in the world, and access it directly. For example:

• admiring a painting in an art gallery,

• listening to an album on vinyl, or

• reading a newspaper, comic book, textbook, or a novel.

In each of these cases, you need neither a device nor the internet to access the files you're reading. Although there can be technology involved (such as a vinyl player), there's no screen you have to interact with, nor do you need any kind of password to authenticate yourself.

Barring someone literally breaking into your house, your files can’t be stolen, but even in that scenario they can’t be altered or censored without your knowledge, only sabotaged.

Model A is the oldest model historically and predates most current technology and electronics.

—

Model B - Offline Digital Media

[You] → [Electronic Device] → [File]

In this model, you make a one-time purchase to buy or download a file that’s digital, and access it through the device on which it is stored. For example:

• listening to a downloaded mp4 song on your phone,

• reading a novel on your Kindle,

• playing a Steam game on your PC,

• listening to a music CD in your car, or

• playing a movie on your home DVD player.

In each of these cases, you do need a device to access the files you're reading, but not an internet connection, except maybe when purchasing them. They exist on some kind of local storage, such as a hard disk, SSD, SD card, or DVD. All you need is your device password for authentication, if at all.

Barring someone literally breaking into your house or hacking into your devices, your files can’t be stolen, and even in that scenario they can’t be altered or censored without your knowledge, only corrupted or deleted. (The Kindle is a slight exception here.)

This was a fairly common model for the decades after the advent of computing and before the era of streaming. Which brings us to model C.

—

Model C - Online Digital Media

[You] → [Electronic Device] → [Streaming Service] → [File]

In this model, you make recurring (not one-time) payments to gain access to a service that hosts digital files online, and then access their files through the internet. For example:

• streaming songs on Spotify,

• viewing your vacation pictures on Google Photos,

• streaming a movie on Netflix,

• watching a TV show on Amazon Prime, or

• watching a YouTube video.

In each of these cases, you need both a device and an internet connection to access the files you're reading. Because they exist on some company's servers, you need your device password and your streaming service password to authenticate yourself at least once.

Even if someone does break into your house or hacks into your devices, they can’t really “steal” your files, because there’s nothing to steal in the first place! These files don’t exist on your devices at all, which is exactly why you never have full control of what happens to them either. These files can be "stolen" (i.e. wiped out), altered, or censored by the company that hosts them, even against your wishes. And this happens often.

Of course, model C strongly overlaps with the monthly subscription model that’s now ubiquitous for all kinds of purchases the world over. It is now the default model to sell software as well, but this essay is more about art and media, so we’ll keep SaaS aside for now.

It’s hard to understate how revolutionary model C has been, though. Imagine telling someone from 1972 that one day they could listen to any song in the world, from a pocket sized device, any time they wanted. Imagine telling someone in 1985 that there exists a website (“What’s a website?”) with any video you’d ever want to watch in your life, available at a moment’s notice. You get the idea. All of these products we use every day are extraordinary feats of engineering.

But of course, all the personal examples I gave at the start here stem from model C services as well, which goes to show that this model has a lot of problems of its own that we don’t seem to acknowledge or realize.

Because the streaming company in model C is the intermediary between you and the file you wish to access, they have a lot of power. You have no say as to what files the company chooses to host, for how long, and in what format. (Notice that Netflix doesn’t have a “request movie” feature.) And because you can only access the file through the company’s user interface, you’re even more restricted to what you can and cannot do with it.

Model C sometimes leaks into the physical world too. Just recently BMW tried to introduce heated car seats based on monthly subscriptions to quite a backlash. I won’t be surprised if every industry outside of tech has already adopted the “recurring subscriptions” aspect of this model in some way or the other.

III. The Litmus Test for Model C

All the issues about model C I mentioned above arise from a fundamental lack of ownership over the media we consume from streaming. Essentially, in today’s day and age, you’re renting most of the stuff you pay for, and not buying it. While this might make sense for certain things like newspaper subscriptions or web based software products, art has never worked that way.

This core difference regarding ownership between model C and models A & B can be stated as such:

If a file you’re reading does not exist physically, or is not stored on your device’s local storage, you do not “own” that file.

Or, to put it much more simply:

This is the simplest litmus test for media ownership. Because, if you need the internet to read a file, it by definition exists on a someone else’s computer, and can thus be mutated by whoever’s computer that is.

Of course, it’s easy enough to grasp that the shows you watch on Hulu or the songs you stream on Tidal aren’t yours. But what this also means is that you don’t own all of your half-finished Google Docs on your personal Google Drive, or your favourite vacation albums shared on Google Photos, or the billion Notes you’ve written to yourself that are now on iCloud. These files belong, first and foremost, to Google and Apple. If you lose your Gmail or iCloud account tomorrow, you lose access to these files, period.

This litmus test applies not just for Big Tech but for any service that hosts any kinds of files you wish to access: mp3s, mp4s, PDFs, EPUBs, mkvs, JPEGs, PNGs, DOCs, and so on.

If it ain’t stored locally, it ain’t yours vocally. Or something like that.

IV. Downstream Effects

So, to summarize the problem, any content served to you via model C:

1. must be paid for, monthly or annually, till the end of time,

2. can be censored,

3. can be taken down, deleted, removed, or “stolen” because:

   1. the company might stop hosting it, because of:

      1. contractual reasons,

      2. societal pressure;

   2. your account may get locked out,

   3. the company itself might stop existing.

Of course, these are all edge cases. Nobody expects YouTube to remove their favourite creators’ videos. Nobody expects Amazon to lock out their Kindle account. Everybody simply assumes that Spotify will be around forever, and that their playlists are permanent, just like they assumed that their songs on MySpace would be around forever. And nobody ever expects Google Cloud to accidentally delete all their company’s data, worth $135B. Things like that only ever happen to other people… until they happen to us.

But while these drawbacks of Model C services are very real, I do think they’re downstream of the fact that all media is now digital, and that on a long enough timeline, digital media is inherently more difficult to preserve than physical media.

This ephemerality is doubly true for the internet as a whole. A recent Pew Research Center analysis revealed that a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, and around 38% of all webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today. Insane numbers.

V. Why Should I Care, Though?

You should care because you want to own your favourite movies, TV shows, and books for the rest of your life, without the constant threat of them getting censored or lost to the digital ether.

You should care because you want to make sure that all your personal files on any cloud service are always readily available to you, at least as a backup.

You want to sleep soundly, knowing that you can watch Welcome anytime you wanted in the next twenty years, and don’t have to depend on a streaming service to provide it to you. You want to know that your tattered copy of The Namesake will always be with you anytime you want to pick it up. You want to listen to Yeezus with the knowledge that it’ll never be altered even a little, no matter what the artist who made it says or does next. (And he’s done too much lately.)

If you care about art and its preservation even a little bit, all of the world’s digital art being behind the gates of streaming services should terrify you.

As someone who’s extremely fond of both pop culture and archiving things, this issue is particularly important to me. I get that it won’t be for most people, but it’s heartening to know I’m not alone. There are folks all over the world who’ve made their own private digital museums of whatever things they’re into - you just have to find them. In his article, “Collecting Is an Act of Devotion, and Creation”, Questlove pretty much echoes exactly how I feel:

“I have been collecting things for as long as I can remember. As a very young child, when I listened to music, read interviews or watched movies, they lingered in my memory, and I didn’t want them to leave me. Eventually, I got to thinking about the physical objects that brought me those experiences — vinyl records, print magazines. Collecting those items became a way to prevent the past from slipping away.”

For me, this whole shtick about “media ownership” is not about showing the finger to tech companies, but about having everything that’s precious to me available for my own enjoyment in perpetuity. It’s simply a matter of removing external dependencies between myself and the things I love.

VI. Counterpoints

Of course, a general rule of online writing is “if someone is advising you to X, they’re probably more guilty of X than any human being alive”. While I have painted the current media landscape as sort of an Orwellian ecosystem, I do use most of these model C services regularly. I’m always reading something or the other on my Kindle, I’m watching season 2 of Arrested Development on Netflix as I write this, and I might one day learn to live without oxygen but not without Spotify. And don’t even get me started on the miracle that is YouTube.

Am I a hypocrite for criticizing these products but using them so frequently at the same time? I don’t think so. We’ve established that model C is an incredible win for the average consumer and that we can never go back. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the ways in which it fails us. All these flaws with model C companies are worth highlighting precisely because this model is so ubiquitous. It reminds me of the Bjarne Stroustrup quote: “There are only two kinds of [programming] languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

At the end of the day, it’s good to remember that streaming companies are not public utilities that provide art to us. They are for-profit entities that’ll do what it takes to increase revenue even at the cost of media preservation, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But somewhere along the line, because all digital media ended up behind the paywalled gates of these services, we somehow expected them to act as museums of culture, a role they never signed up for. Or maybe they did, who knows.

All that said, I do wish there was a middle ground somewhere, a way by which we could get all the benefits of streaming while also retaining full control over the content we stream. Maybe that’s paradoxical and thus inherently impossible; I don’t know. As of today, though, there are only two ways I can think of that allow us to fully own the media we want to consume: to use outdated technology, and to go another way I can’t quite legally endorse.

VII. Solutions

How do we gain ownership over digital media? Let’s think about this from first principles. You basically want to go from model C to models A & B. This means that you want your favourite content to be offline, on some kind of local storage.

(For personal files and photos hosted on your Google Drive/iCloud/whatever, this is quite easy: just backup your data regularly.)

The first way to do this is is to buy media that is available on local storage already: physical books, VCRs, cassettes, CD, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and so on. This is how music and movies have been historically sold anyways. Now you might find these technologies to be slightly or extremely outdated, depending on how old you are, but they are definitely a viable option, if not the most convenient one. In fact, DVD sales in the US have even gone up in the last few months.

@haydenbegley#DidYouYawn #fyp #fy #foryou #foryoupage #fypシ #mom #hoarder

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The second way to go from model C to models A & B is to pirate the media you want, using Torrents and the like. I imagine that this is not a radical idea for any guy who grew up playing video games in the late 2000’s. If you don’t fit this bill or have no idea what Torrents are, well, time to git gud.

Now, I’m not saying that you should Torrent all your favourite movies and TV shows. I’m not saying that piracy is not morally wrong - it absolutely is. What I am saying, though, is that as of the time of this writing, there are zero (0) products that let you legally purchase a movie, a song, or a show as a digital file, and own it in a non-proprietary format that’s guaranteed to last forever. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this.

This is precisely why Torrenting and P2P file sharing in general will never become obsolete, even with all the convenience streaming provides us with. It is the only way that guarantees the procurement of uncensored, unaltered media in popular file formats that you know will work as long as your computer does.

And I’m sure there’s good legal and technological reasons for why the entertainment landscape became this way, but purely from a collector’s perspective, it’s quite sad that the most reliable way to collect digital art is the one method that completely screws over the creators of said art.

I don’t have much of a thesis or conclusion to end with here, except to say that you might want to seriously think about which works of media are truly precious to you as an individual, and find some way to have them stored offline for your own sake. You might thank yourself later.

Of course, in a universe abundant with irony, it’s quite fitting that I’m writing an essay about media ownership not on a personally hosted website but on Substack Dot Com, a privately owned domain. Which means that the good folks at Substack, Inc can, quite easily, censor this very blog post without me ever finding out about it. They can alter my words, delete my essays, and do pretty much whatever they feel like with my content. All of this also means that if Substack, Inc. goes belly up tomorrow, there goes this piece and the rest of my blog into the unreachable digital ether, never to be salvaged again.

But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Because, of course, things like that only ever happen to other people.

Each heading is a link. You can check out all previous recommendations here.

Animals Interrupting Wildlife Photographers

Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us (Spotify, YouTube)

A beautiful record. VW don’t miss!

some good tweets

1 Second of Some of the Best Rap Songs Ever

Solar and Lunar Eclipses Explained

Nakamura Fan Reacts to Gukesh Winning Candidates Chess Tournament (funny)

Hannibal Buress - Jaywalking Is a Fantasy Crime (funny)

Bayern Munich’s legendary penalty shootout against Real Madrid in 2012

1 Drum Beat Used in 100 Songs

Each heading is a link. You can check out all previous recommendations here.

Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI

“The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look.”

“Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response, cheery Wikipedia-style repeats of the original post, all just to farm engagement. AI models on Instagram accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers and people openly shill their services for creating them. AI musicians fill up YouTube and Spotify. Scientific papers are being AI-generated.”

The Unbearable Sadness of the Health Influencer

“Consider the archetype of the modern health influencer, fixated on the latest research studies, yet oblivious to the enduring wisdom of the Lindy effect. This principle suggests that the true test of a food's (or drink's) safety and efficacy lies in its historical longevity. If a food has been consumed for centuries, if not millennia, it's likely not harmful; in fact, it's probably beneficial.”

“The neglect of the time-tested wisdom in favor of recent research studies is a concerning trend. This reliance on new studies over traditional knowledge is driven by a desire to appear informed and intelligent to the public. However, this approach overlooks the fact that time-honored practices have proven their value over generations, whereas scientific studies are frequently debunked and revised.”

You can’t tell people anything

“We all spend a lot of our time talking to bosses or investors or marketing people or press or friends or other developers. I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so.”

“With luck, eventually there will be an “Aha!”. If you’re really good, the “Aha!” will followed by “Oh, so that’s what you meant”. But don’t be too surprised or upset if the “Aha!” is instead followed by “Why didn’t you tell me that?”.”

some good tweets

How To Escape A Flooding Vehicle

Recommendation inspired by the recent Baltimore bridge collapse.

How J Cole fans were when they heard the Kendrick diss

Literally me.

Steven Spielberg vs Alfred Hitchcock. Epic Rap Battles of History

Linux got wrecked by backdoor attack

Inspired by the craziest tech story of the last few months.

Don’t Laugh at Penguin

Money’s Mostly Digital, So Why Is Moving It So Hard?

Each heading is a link. You can check out all previous recommendations here.

Key & Peele (Netflix)

Key & Peele is the best sketch-comedy series ever made. It’s better than Chappelle’s show, SNL, and even AIB (sorry).

If you’re like me you probably do a Key & Peele YouTube binge every few months. But if you haven’t seen the actual series (now on Netflix), you probably haven’t seen > 80% of their skits and are seriously missing out.

What surprised me about watching the show was how good the average skit was. Almost all are bangers. I started with season 3 directly for some reason and it’s been on fire.

This month’s recs is just my favourite K&P skits.

But first, some good tweets

Each heading is a link. You can check out all previous recommendations here.

in praise of uselessness

“There’s something powerful about allowing yourself to fully, obsessively love something that makes no sense. And it’s so contrary to how we’re told to live our lives. Identify and capture value! Go into the field where the best jobs are! Marry someone who is reliable! I’m not saying that’s bad advice—it’s good advice from many a perspective—but I also feel like I’ve stumbled into everything meaningful in my life when I was just like, hey, I’ll just give this a shot and it definitely won’t work.”

Heroes Suck: Here’s Why

“I find myself watching movies lately empathizing more with the villians.

The villians have a PLAN. They are focused, talented, skilled. They have something they’re actually trying to ACCOMPLISH.

The hero? The hero’s job is usually the same: to STOP them. To keep things the same.

Are there ANY adventure stories where the hero is actually trying to DO something?

Seriously. Star Wars– stop the Death Star. Every James Bond movie– STOP the billionaire villain’s plot. Superman– stop Lex Luthor. Harry Potter– stop Voldemort. etc.”

How do Open Source Companies even make money?

“Proprietary competitors have a feedback loop that they need to traverse: gather feedback from users, formulate plans based on feedback, develop new features or modify existing projects accordingly, deploy and repeat. But open source companies skip massive steps there and can iterate faster, because of how their users and developers are often the same person. This allows open source to innovate faster.”

Machi Koro

Fantastic board game! Hugely simple yet fun!

some good tweets

Days Of Summer

One of the best YouTube videos of all time.

SNL - What’s That Name?

George Hotz - Just Chatting

New favourite video genre unlocked: smart people rambling about a bunch of topics.

Kanan Gill - Is This It?

The 🐐 is back 🔥

This is the engineers’ manifesto, applicable to things beyond engineering as well.

• Be ethical

  • Your hands are on the keyboard, not your manager’s

• People first

  • Code is written first for people to use (users), and also for other people to read (fellow devs or you in the future)

  • Processes are created for people. Processes should fit people not the other way around

• Quality is non-negotiable

  • Negotiate scope, negotiate time, negotiate resources, do not negotiate quality

• Invest in yourself

  • Hone your craft and learn your tools

  • Don’t do work you don’t understand

  • Understand both how to do it from a technical perspective, but more importantly understand what value it provides to the world

  • If you are not moving forwards, you’re going backwards

• Embrace failure

  • Fail fast and learn from it

  • Iterate

• Respect your teammates

  • Respect their time. Be present. Participate

  • Embrace asynchronous collaboration

  • Be humble

  • Teach through code reviews, learn from code reviews

• Happy developers are productive developers

  • Take time off

  • Find meaning in your work

Fin.