Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

The Trump Trial(s) Farce

It’s always a disappointment when you read or view a story and you realize you’re ahead of the characters becuase the plot is too thin and so well worn. You can close the book, click off the remote or leave the theatre. Tougher to do in these fraught times with the Trump farce we’re all forced to live through, because hey, you know it affects our lives. It may be farce. It may feel comical or tragicomic. But the laughs are empty and hollow.

Punch and Judy

At the moment it’s all getting played out as entertainment. Because that’s all that’s really left. It’s obviously lucrative for the players and the storytellers even though the audience knows the storyline, the characters, and what the next moves will be. Will there be surprises? I’m sure there will be a few. But in the end, nothing that happens in the early going will change how you feel about the finale. No one was ever surprised at a Punch and Judy show.

This morning comes the predictable news that the decaying orange turd is asking for a delay. The only possible twist is what his hand-picked judge will do. I’m guessing she’ll stay in character and that will just prolong the story needlessly.

Lordy, I wish someone, somehow tied up in this tale would come up with an original twist or turn.

Evernote Like Everything Was Never Forever

Evernote. It was one of my mainstay apps for so long. As it was for many. There wasn’t much I didn’t squirrel away in that app. It was always one of the first apps I installed on any new device. And as a Tablet PC guy back in the day its digital inking features were a big draw. Evernote was everywhere. Always there when a new platform dropped. Always a way to make data transportable between platforms. But it hit hard times and its future is more than a bit murky.

Evernote splash

“Never, Ever, Forget” was the slogan that accompanied the elephant logo so prominent on so many devices. What we should all never forget is that nothing lasts forever. After cluttering up the service with more features than anyone could possibly have needed, Evernote hit tough times and lost users by the herd. Charging a steep (for the time) subscription price didn’t help the migratory exit either.

Evernote was bought last year by Italy based Bending Spoons and last week the new owners announced they were closing down US operations, laying off staff and consolidating operations in Europe. Perhaps they’ll manage to keep the eventual extinction away.

Not really a new story. But as familiar as it may be it’s a reminder that any of these services where we store notes, receipts, memories, journals, or data in any form may feel like ours but they’re not. The rent always comes due. The investors always want growth. And the eventual march to the end begins. There are a number of note taking data stores you can migrate your Evernote data to and I recommend doing so if you haven’t already done so. But never, ever forget. Nothing lasts forever.

Meta Meets the Moment with Threads. (For the Moment)

You gotta hand it to that huckster Zuckerberg. He and his Meta team have certainly met the moment with the release of his Twitter killer, Threads. It’s not that the app is all that great in this version 1. (More on that later.) But Zuck pushed this thing out with such gusto and killer timing that he was able to eaisly take advantage of Elon Musk’s baffling and ballooning buffoonery. When billionaires go for each other’s throats apparently they use guillotines.

Sure, these social media wars aren’t over yet. Far from it. But these wounds are deep. The number of signups on Threads keeps rising so fast I won’t even hazard a guess at how many millions there have been for fear of the number being old news before I finish writing this. And on it goes.

And on it will go. I don’t think we’ve ever seen such an underpantsing as Zuck put on Musk. He’s taking advantage of someone who has made himself such a detestable target, that Zuckerberg, not all that well liked himself, is momentarily being thought of as the conqueror Elon and his detestables dreamed of being. It’s deliciously funny. But it is also frightening when you take a moment and think about it.

Again, there’s no guarantee Threads will carry this moment’s momentum into something resembling what Twitter was before Musk took MAGA torches to it. And while in this really crazy, and what seems historic, rush there seems to be an appetite for this kind of “everybody into the pool” replacement. That’s guaranteed to fade once ads, bots, spammers, etc… inevitably get their chance to piss in the pool. That’s gonna happen.

The Threads team also needs to move quickly to address some serious missing pieces for a social media app in this day and age. There’s nothing that speaks to accessibility in the app yet. There’s no web access from a browser forcing everyone to use it on their phones. Hashtags aren’t there yet. Forget searching. Or sending direct messages. These are table stakes in the social media game. Lots of iPad users are complaining that there isn’t an iPad app. Don’t hold your breath on that one. This thing is connected to your social network via Instagram and there’s still no appetite for an iPad app from Instagram yet in what seems like another front in the Billionaires Battles, this one between Meta and Apple.

Just about everyone is screaming to only have their feed show only folks they are following. Same here. But, folks, let’s get real. These companies need to push all sorts of stuff into your eyeballs in order to make bigger bank. We lived through this with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the rest. We will probably see some soft of attempt at appeasement here, but it’s not going to last. Don’t kid yourself.

There’s also talk of Meta doing the federated thing with Threads. That’s got pros and cons and lots of consternation stirred up among those who see the beneift of protocols like Activity Pub in the Fediverse. (If you have no idea what that means, don’t worry. Most don’t.) I have my doubts things will go this way. But if it does, there’s going to all sorts of noise made on places like Mastodon and beyond.

So this story has offered a slam bang opening number and for a variety of reasons appears to be sucking many in to see what’s next while it sucks ever more life out of Elon’s Twitter. There’s more to come and more to know when it does. About the only thing we know in this moment is things are changing. But they always are. Score this moment for Meta. Enjoy the ride while we watch it play out.

Oh, and you can find me on Threads at https://www.threads.net/@warnercrocker

Peter Brook Takes on Artificial Intelligence (Well, Sorta Kinda)

News on so-called Artificial Intelligence continues to fill up the digital pages, social networks, air and cable waves with more words, words, words than you can shake a Complete Works of Shakespeare at. Abridged or unabriged. It’s truly amazing how ravenous the appetite for info on this is. But then again it isn’t.

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The purveyors of AI are running so fast with something so incomplete that while the technology is impressive on one hand, they are welcoming the slight of the other. It’s not all smoke and mirrors, but there’s certainly enough smoke to make any reflection feel a bit hazy. We’re told AI is everything from our salvation to the end of it all. There’s a lot of sound and fury from all sides, signifying not much more at the moment than a lot of sound and fury.

I was re-reading some of legendary director Peter Brook’s writings this morning and I stumbled on this quote. I think it comes extremely close to pinning down what’s missing in this moment. Keep in mind this quote was published in his 2013 book, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare.

Yes. You read that correctly. 2013. Brook left us in July 2022.

Once a computer was asked, “What is truth?” It took a very long time before the reply came back, “I will tell you a story…”

/end scene.

Sunday Morning Reading

It’s been a week. But they usually are. I don’t think there’s a theme to this week’s Sunday Morning Reading other than that things continue along the same path of craziness that for some reason we just continue to accept as somehow normal. So perhaps it is.

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Kicking things off is a great piece by M.G. Siegler about the Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg let’s have a cage mage nonsense called These Used To Be Serious People. I think that title could be applied to just about any field of human endeavor in this current moment.

Moral Panic? Mabye. But then maybe you’re just in a moral panic about moral panics. Interesting read from Pamela Paul.

Annalee Newitz says Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky as Twitter and Facebook lose ground to federated platforms. She says we’re in a social media era of chaos that sociologists woujld call a “legitmation crisis.” While the title uses Bluesky and Ben Franklin for attention grabbers she burrows down a bit into how the decentralization desires for some in social media, government and life tend to get thwarted by money. She goes deeper than that in a worthy read.

And speaking of money making the world go around Emma Roth says the FTC wants to put a ban on fake reviews on Amazon. Pick your favorite metaphor for being late to the party and good luck with that one.

A couple of interesting reads on so-called Artificial Intelligence. First up is The Age of AI: Everything You Need To Know About Artificial Intelligence by Devin Coldewey. Good explainer. I’m not sure if an AI bot could have done it better or not.

And Casey Newton says The AI Is Eating Itself. I’m very much in line with his thinking here.

Did you know that Samuel Beckett and Buster Keation collaborated on a film? They did. Thomas Leatham tells us about it in The Film Created by Samuel. Beckett and Buster Keaton. You can check out a small clip of it in the article.

And to wrap things up this week here’s a bit of fun and curiosity. Jisha Joseph highlights an interesting bit of Victorian news and comedy commentary from Tit-Bits Magazine:

a competition that offered a reward to unmarried women who could provide the best answer as to why they were yet to find themselves a husband. The page-full of responses published on April 27, 1889, made one thing abundantly clear: Women in Victorian England had a badass sense of humor.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

The Missing Link in the Artificial Intelligence Story

I’ve written and linked to a bit about Artificial Intelligence. I see the upsides and the downsides. The mislabeling (marketing.) The gold rush. The warnings. And I’m starting to see a bit of tarnish on this shiny new object of desire. It’s fascinating.

What’s starting to puzzle me in this ongoing discussion is what we’re not seeing.

But first a few themes.

One of the biggest stories is how AI is going to give us more freedom to enjoy our lives and be more creative by assuming many of the mundane drudgery of our lives. What immediately follows that is how many jobs we’re going to lose and stories of “too eager for the quarterly results” CEOs cutting jobs.

The next recurring story is how this will affect creativity by replacing artists, stealing from artists, and generally reducing creativity to bits and bytes created by bits and bytes.

And then there’s our continued march away from knowledge and facts to one where we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Especially once the supposed AI bots and Large Language Models start feeding on themselves instead of just on the stuff we make up.

Those three themes seem to predominate the conversation. But back to what I’m not seeing.

Why aren’t we seeing the tech bros advocating ways to use AI to help us get rid of the some of the scourges of the Internet and our lives?

A few examples:

A tool to indentify and remove spam from email, texts, phone calls, etc…
A tool to indentify scams and scammers.
A quick label on any web page that tells us how many trackers there are and where they are from.
A tool that always puts the “Continue Watching” queue at the top of the home page of streaming apps.
A tool that kills ads for products we just purchased.
A tool that actually lets users unsubscribe from content.
A tool that points to which company sold our data to the new content in our in-boxes.
A label that justs says “Bullshit” on content that is bullshit.
A tool that tells us when our ISP is throttling bandwidth.
A tool that always links back to the original source for regurgitated content.
A tool that identifies and labels bots.
A tool that tracks and reports the origin of evil doers on the web.
A tool that actually deciphers error messages, tells us the real problem, and connects us to useful solutions that don’t require wading through scores of bogus and out of date webpages and videos.
A tool that actually lets us vote advertisments up or down and lets us say I never want to see this ad again.

And of course:

A quick label that says this content was created by artificial means.

I’m sure there are others.

Of course this kind of “intelligence” would devastate so many business models that the global economy would probably collapse. But then perhaps there could be an AI tool that tells calls bullshit on the stuff economists and politicians tell us about that as well.

Off Axis

“Off Axis” is a description I use when directing plays quite a bit. It’s simple really. It’s when a character does something that’s different than we’ve expected from the character. Or it’s when circumstances change around the character, forcing adjustment to new realities.

Lights orbiting planet earth royalty free illustration 1660241936

Being “off axis” is an uncomfortable state. Which in story telling increases the stakes for drama, comedy, or some combination of both. It’s where you want your stories to live whether on a stage, on a screen, or on a page.

Here in the real world I think we’re getting far too comfortable being “off axis” to be comfortable.

Sunday Morning Reading

As the picture says, I’m on lake time this Sunday morning. So the list of suggested Sunday Morning Reading topics is a shorter one. Here’s hoping you find a little weekend time to chill as well.

Theatre and opera director Adele Thomas talks about her beginnings, her art and her career and how artists and the challenges (financial and otherwise) that directors face trying to get a career going. Good interview by Fiona Maddocks.

A great piece from Lisa Melton: My Coming Out Party

A couple of interesting pieces on Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial Stimulated Stupidty by Robert E. Wright and Is AI a Snake That Eats Itself? by Om Malik both reflect some of my thoughts on the topic.

And while the world is watching Orcas attack yachts and other sea-going craft, here’s a piece on The Giant Whale That Terrorized Constantinople.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

Creating a Bit of Magic with The Egyptian Bride

Fantastic time last night (and this past weekend) working on a new play in development. The play in question is Fouad Teymour’s Egyptian Bride. It’s been in development for several years and this year The International Voices Project picked it up to present its current iteration in a staged reading. I was asked by Fouad to direct and immediately jumped at the chance.

We put together a stellar cast featuring Catherine Dildilian, Tina El Gamal, Annalise Raziq, Bassam Abedlfattah, Donaldson Cardenas and Anelga Hajjar. We spent a few rehearsals over the weekend working through the piece and the story. Fouad managed to take advantage of the short period of time and slip in a few re-writes. Last night we presented the reading to a very enthusiastic audience. (The photo above is from the talk back after the reading.)

Based on that response the play has legs. Here’s hoping we can keep those legs moving forward for the next iteration.

Congratulations to all invovled and thanks to Patrizia Acerra, the driving force behind the International Voices Project. Fantastic work, proving once again if you put talented artists in a room with a great story you can create a bit of magic.