The moving finger rants

I was in self-imposed isolation when the national lockdown began on 27th March. When I emerged, fourteen days later, blinking into the daylight as might a newborn babe, the world had changed. Edinburgh had become a ghost town. The few people one could see on the streets all looked vaguely shell-shocked. I found it difficult to resist the urge to whistle the soundtrack to 28 DAYS LATER while walking around.

I've always found those animated advertising hoardings somewhat dystopian, but now they were all reading SUPPORT YOUR HEALTHCARE WORKERS and then SHOP RESPONSIBLY and then an advert for lager, because Scotland, and then IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER. It's possible I imagined that last one.

I was given a letter that I must carry on my person at all times, authorizing me to travel as an essential worker. Blue observed that being told by my employer that I'm an essential worker is roughly equivalent to being told by a stripper that I'm her favourite. The hotel has been closed but there's still a need for a security presence, and we've been taking the opportunity to do some deep-cleaning. So I'm basically a night watchman now. But at least I have a job.

Since then everything has changed again, and again, and we speak fondly but with a lingering bewilderment of the before-times. And today is the grand reopening of most businesses in Scotland. Everything's going back to normal, except it's really not.

I know we're ready, at my place of work—plastic screens and signage everywhere, QR codes all over the place, mandatory sanitizing stations, staff all trained and drenched in PPE—but I question whether society is ready. I'm in customer service: I talk to humans for a living. I'm not optimistic.

Eleven people on the rota today, to take care of all of our guest. With that sort of staff-to-customer ratio, I think we deserve an extra star.

See you on the flipside, folks.

I grew up with Captain Jean-Luc Picard. As much as one of the most formative experiences of my adulthood was watching Patrick Stewart alongside Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot^[0], most of the formative experiences of my adolescence were, at least tangentially, related to learning that—to take an example at random—the first duty of any Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether that be scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth. It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform.

That voice! Those assured tones, and that tendency to use them to snap off an impassioned speech at the drop of a space hat. The balance of intellectual nerdiness and understated passion on selected subjects. His origin in, and dogged devotion to, the ideals of a genteel interbellum era that couldn't possibly last, unless he had something to say about it. The confidence to do what's right no matter how many admirals tell you otherwise.^[1] The charisma to have one's crew follow one round the moons of Nibia and through Perdition's flames in pursuit of thos ideals... Starfleet orders be damned^[2]. I learned stability from Spock and interventionism from The Doctor (Who, not EMH), but the moral and emotional core was always mon capitaine. For a man who by his own admission wasn't good with children, Jean-Luc Picard was the best surrogate father a deprived young boy could have.

Which is why I've been totally stoked for the somewhat obviously named STAR TREK: PICARD. I've been waiting twenty years to catch back up with The Further Adventures of Space Dad. And this week he beamed back into my living room as if he'd never been away.

(...but, dad, you said you were just popping out for space cigarettes...)

Ever since TNG ended, I've been rationing my consumption of the remaining episodes that I haven't watched yet, in some possibly misguided application of the inverse taxi driver's fallacy. There are 178 of these in total, there won't ever be any more, and I've already seen more than half. I have, I assume, these three score years and ten in which I get to enjoy the experience of an unseen episode of TNG a maximum of fifty-odd times. Just recently, the projected situation has changed quite radically vis-a-vis hard limits on the scarcity of televisual depictions of Space Dad.^[3] As a result, for purely logical (Captain), economic reasons, my consumption of late has markedly increased.

I've been following the blogs and the listicles telling you which episodes you must watch before ST:PIC drops. They've been okay but all of them have been lacking inna certain something, what the French call I don't know what. It might be to do with the fact that they all focus on plot beats with which you might be expected to be familar, and ignore any considerations of heart and/or soul. Perhaps they're all written by green-blooded sons of bitches, or just by people who don't quite get it. Mostly it's probably that none of them inclue 'Rascals', which I will defend even unto my last breath as a very silly, but nonetheless brilliant, hour of television.

Some members of my team at work have asked me for my definitive Essential Star Trek Primer. I can sympathize with the listicle writers because compilation of such a catalogue is hard work, yo. It must be significantly harder if you're writing to a deadline and you don't have the first clue what Star Trek is actually about. My definitive primer is still in the works, natch, but I promise it will be completed some time before the date of the events it's purported to depict. If there's sufficient demand it might even make its way onto the internets.

And none of it matters anyway, in the end. Plot and continuity are irrelevant. Concordance is futile. Star Trek has always been about journeying to the final frontier and, there, learning about oneself: journeying with them through the magick of narrative, we impoverished Earth-bound mortals discover ourselves. This week, Space Dad returned as if he'd never been away, and I learned about myself that, genuinely and unironically, I love him.

It's been two years since the world ended, and I am still alive.

Caledonia's been calling me, and I'm going home.

It's been two years since the world began. Time to start living.

Does anyone have a sofa available on Monday night, the 23rd? I'm an unassuming houseguest.

Also, anyone for tea/coffee/pints Monday afternoon/evening? Evening. Eeeeeevening. Not too late though. I have a train to catch Tuesday morning.

[This was going to be a comment in reply to someone else's blog, but it wandered a little....]

I found an ink cartridge yesterday. I don't use ink cartridges, because it's not the 1930s. It was in an unused pocket of the belt pouch I use when travelling. At some point, years ago, we must have swapped pouches.

An ink cartridge. Very nearly gave me a relapse.

I thought about it for fifteen seconds, did a little mindful breathing, and tossed it.

I was fortunate, maybe, that shortly after my breakup and meltdown I was compelled to move cities on short notice. It forced me to rationalize: to determine the minimum necessary amount of Stuff with which I can live in reasonable comfort. It forced me to discard Stuff that I might otherwise have insisted on retaining as a keepsake. I had to pack all my Stuff into a single 1950s Admiralty-pattern kitbag and, as a result, it forced me to learn self-reliance at a point in my life when that's exactly what I needed.

Give me a sandwich toaster, a device with mobile internet, a change of underwear, and Kilkerran sherry wood, and I shall move the Earth.

I'm also fortunate that I could leave the rest of the crap in the flat and trust my staff to throw it out for me. The company billed me for it afterwards and they way they went about it was kind of dickish, but it helped a lot to have someone else deal with that for me. I could focus on the moving on.

And then there are things like this ink cartridge. The ink cartridge is a metaphor. We must have swapped pouches years ago: we bought two identical ones in the outdoor supplies shop in Aviemore, 2012 or so. I've been carrying her ink cartridge around for ages without realizing it. Yesterday I was able to dispose of it. A little bit more moving on was achieved.

Things like this are going to keep happening, piece by piece, with no end in sight, but each one is a step in the right direction, although it often doesn't feel like it at the time.

At some point, when I'm back in Edinburgh, I'm going to have to deal with the storage container, 80% of which is still filled with her Stuff (and which I'm still paying for). Does anyone have a need for several boxes of ladies' size 12 underwear?

(Isn't there a womens' shelter in Edinburgh? Is this the sort of thing they might want?)

I added pajh's Rule for Life #40 to the list last week, while I was down in That London, drinking in the pub with some friends. It is this: Never let someone else define who you are.

An obvious corollary is not to let yourself be defined by their Stuff, either. In fact, never let Stuff define you.

Today is my birthday. I am now older than my father was when I was born.

I'm still not interested in breeding—it's cruel enough to bring a new human into this dystopian nightmare world, worse yet to saddle one with my defective genetic legacy. Welcome to the world. The climate's fucked, the government is entirely composed of plutocratic psychopaths, and somehow we're all still racists. Oh, by the way, you have short hamstrings, chronic migraines, and a selection of interesting brain weasels. And stay away from red wine if you know what's good for you. Not going to inflict that on someone.

I do, however, regret the missed opportunity to have a convenient target for dad jokes. I would make the best dad jokes. Or perhaps I mean the worst.

Bloody hell, it's just occurred to me—if I had spawned, I would be a single parent now.

Quite happy staying as uncle pajh. Although I'm considering getting a dog. Or maybe a snake.

I don't think I need to go into too much detail. This year has sucked giant cheesy gorilla dongs. I'd hope for better things from 2016, but frankly, that's setting a fairly low bar.

Half way out of the dark.

Managed to pack almost all of my clothes into a 1950s Admiralty-pattern kitbag, plus the absolute essentials:

• Mug.
• Cutlery.
• Sandwich toaster.
• Two Glencairn glasses.
• Two old-fashioned glasses.
• Bottle Kilkerran sherry wood.
• Bottle Wild Turkey rye.

Found the Chinese supermarket. Five minutes walk from the flat, on the way to work, and they sell Jian's Chop Chop guo tie from the restaurant that's five minutes walk from my Edinburgh place.

I'm going to be just fine, I think.

Back up to Edinburgh tonight, two days at work, and then pack another kitbag to come back down again on Sunday. I might even bring a pan or something this time.

What are you doing with your free time, pajh? you say. Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll skip the otherwise obligatory free time, what's that joke, and go straight to the incontrovertibly true answer: these days I spend my free time dressing up in skintight Lycra® and wrestling with men I barely know.

I may have mentioned in a previous post that Hollywood-grade motion capture systems create the potential for new narrative paradigms for the 21st century. Well, mostly I mentioned that they allow a specific actor, that actor being me, to hear the single most beautiful phrase ever expressed to an actor. We'll get to new narrative paradigms later. Meantime, there have been a number of very rapid learning experiences while working with thew new tech, not least of which is that I actually don't look totally terrible in skintight Lycra.

Unsurprisingly, most of the research in gyroscopic technologies these days is being done by the ballistics division of the US military and their contractors. Many of my readers may not have a particular interest in the increasingly accurate science of the transformation of alleged insurgents into chargrilled jerky from a distance of many kilometres, but fret not! for those of us so callously disinterested in how to blame friendly fire on technology, there are subsequent benefits for all of us (except for the families of the alleged insurgents, presumably): benefits like the upcoming Wolverine movie, and Skrillex' latest tour. I am, as ever, all about the trickle-down.

Yay us!

Another benefit of the fact that this is all repurposed military technology is that it's all incredibly robust. The suit comes in a case that is waterproof to 500 metres, and also conveniently scaled to comply with most airlines' regulations regarding carry-on luggage. In the event of a terrorist attack on a plane in which such a case was stored, it's more likely to survive than the black box. I dread to speculate on the newspaper headlines once the crash recovery team have spent a week attempting to recover data from it. Apparently the Captain spent twenty minutes trying to have an elaborate fistfight with the first officer, followed by an extended period of merengue dancing, with occasional periods of jazz hands. This presumably contributed to the crash, but exactly how is a question we hope maybe to have answered by next week.

Oh yes, the mocap. The suits are surprisingly accurate and expressive, to a level that I didn't think was possible. And you can play the mocap live in realtime into any 3D world you care to devise. In the following examples, we're going to be using Minecraft, because Minecraft. Also, because Minecraft is incredibly pretty, and it shows you just what you can do with a blocky Steve guy with no facial expressions.

Ye First Video: Meet the Creeper

Watch on YouTube

In this short film I play the Creeper, which while it's not exactly a speaking role, does have the benefit of being in the title.

Took us about five minutes to shoot. About an hour of getting the suits configured first, but that's just teething. On a regular film shoot I spend much more time hanging around waiting, and there are usually fewer copies of Transmetropolitan lying about with which for me to occupy my time. These suits are awesome.

Ye Video the Second: in which pajh does acting

I know I'm a middle-class New Town bastard these days, but I do still pay attention to my acting when I get the chance. I have the most popular text-to-speech voice in the known world, and physical acting is no less an important discipline. I have done courses. I've done the Alexander Technique. I do stretches properly before I perform mocap (judiciously excluding the stretches that are likely to tear the €500 lycra suit, natch). I'm not by any means attempting to put myself up there in Patrick Stewart territory, but I think my research has paid off. In this second video I have more of a starring role.

Watch on YouTube

I showed this to stormsearch and she got about twenty seconds in before she had to pause it and proclaim, oh god. It's you. Something about the way I hold my head slightly to one side, it would seem. And then there are little things, like the fact that apparently I pick my right foot up when I'm considering something. I didn't know that about me until I watched it expressed by a blocky Minecraft Steve.

The level of expressiveness and the subtlety you can get from the tech is quite incredible. I'm quite excited to see where this goes next.

In my Copious Free Time, obviously.

It is now possible to have a mocap system that links directly (and accurately!), in realtime, to a fully realized 3D set. Both the motion-capture system and the set in which it is to be rendered are simultaneously available to a sufficiently skilled technician, who can manipulate elements of same as required while the motion-capture is still continuing, from a single laptop. This might not excite you in the way I've just described it, but what you must consider is the fact that we have these tools available. This in itself has potentially broad-reaching effects about the nature of storytelling in the 21st century. And, which is much more important, as a direct result, tonight was possibly the first time ever that the following phrase has been uttered, honestly and without irony, to an actor:

Don't worry. Stand still and I'll rotate the world around you.

Oh yeah baby. If there were ever a reason why I got myself into acting, it's this.

~

The Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody. Presented without any further comment. I'm going to have terrible mosh neck when I wake up tomorrow, and it's entirely the fault of Dr Teeth and his Electric Mayhem. Okay, partially their fault and partially the fault of Penelope Spheeris.

(You should follow that last link; I'm giving you a no-honk guarantee.)

~

It transpires that I gots a smartphone app. Some of you should remember the pajh-inna-box of old. Now it has an app. This would be unsurprising in itself were it not for the fact that Googol Play allows user feedback comments, most of which are about how awesome I sound. There's one there from user Jessica Rabbit thus:

I own many, many tts voices but this is the best, yet! [...] this male, u.k. voice is the most natural sounding and also elegant & sophisticated! [...] I can listen to this imaginary Englishman throughout my day helping me with my appointments and such!

I suspect the real Jessica Rabbit would say LOL somewhat less, being a lady who knows what elegant and sophisticated actually means. If this were the real Jessica Rabbit commenting, none of you would see me for dust.

I'm not bad. I just sound that way.