Elf Sternberg

Today, I swam in the Antarctic Sea.

We officially reached Fournier Bay, which means we had crossed the Antarctic Circle line sometime in the morning, so it was time for the (apparently) “traditional” Polar Plunge, where brave and foolish souls jump into the water just to say they have done that. I had to be one of them.

A large raft is affixed to the side of the boat, and passengers use the same routine as with the Zodiacs to get onto the raft, which has a set of steps for getting into and out of the water. A safety belt is put around your waist to make sure someone can pull you out if it turns out you don’t have the strength to pull yourself out. We’ve been assured that in all the time IAATO has been permitting this sort of shenanigans no one on any cruise has ever had a medical crisis doing this sort of thing. The bartender was ready with his hot chocolate and liquor, and the DJ was pumping out EDM into the excursion bay.

Omaha and I lined up in our bathrobes and waited with other people from our excursion group. We listened to the delighted whoops and screams of the victims who went before us. As we put aside our robes and exposed our almost naked flesh to the subzero air (centigrade), the song that had been playing played out and a new one started up.

It was perfect. When Omaha and I jumped, the music playing was the scifi convention staple “Rasputin.” Omaha shouted, “For science!” as she dove in. I shouted, “Ivan, you idiot!” as I climbed out.

So, I’ll let you in on a secret: when I jumped into water that was actually below 0℃ (because it’s some of the most salty water in the world), your brain cannot believe you just did that and absolutely refuses to process any signals about your actual condition until it starts to get confirmation that, no really, you just did something really stupid.

And despite being salty, the water is super clear. I could read the numbers on the ship’s side from three meters away. It didn’t hurt my eyes at all. I have no idea why. All this analysis is not to say that I dawdled, oh no. I was up and out after less than a minute in the water.

But less than sixty seconds in freezing water just isn’t enough to penetrate my decrepit, ancient hide. I climbed the stairs with Omaha immediately behind me. The air, the breeze, was what made me feel cold. I grabbed a towel and my bathrobe, belted the robe on, and quickly grabbed a hot chocolate laden with Irish whisky.

That afternoon, there were a few more Zodiac tours, which I did, but they were otherwise unremarkable. The best part of the afternoon was the lecture on humpback whale feeding activities. There are documented cases of new, emergent feeding patterns that no one had ever seen before. One of them is “bubble feeding,” in which a team of five or six whales will decimate an entire school of fish. Two whales will start to encircle a school of fish in a huge net of their bubbles from the whales’ massive lungs while the others use their loud voices to scare the fish into staying within the bubble net, and once the fish are sufficiently concentrated the whales will dive into the school of fish, rising quickly, their mouths open, sieving as many of them down their gullets as they possibly can.

Another activity is when a whale will just stay vertical with their mouths in the air, holding as still as possible, until a bird decides the whale is a nice place to land, at which point the whale will use its tongue and jaws and… no more bird.

Both of these are new behaviors, at least as far as we’re concerned, but the biologist said they might have been behaviors common to humpbacks before the whaling industry killed so many, it’s just that now that the population has made a comeback these alternative feeding methods are viable for the whales again.

We spent dinner with another couple, a fellow who made his fortune the same way I did, coming up in the 90s and doing something spectacularly singular that earned him the stock options necessary to secure his future, more or less. We spent the evening doing that butt-sniffing sort of sounding each other out, establishing bonafides, and nerding hard, much to our spouses’ eye-rolling.

It was a lovely day altogether, and I have a certificate saying that I’m really the sort of idiot who’s willing to jump into 0℃ water just to say that I jumped into 0℃ water. In Antarctic seas.

I really should stop talking about my COVID-19 hospitalization in spaces with normal people. When someone asks me why I mask so routinely, I sometimes explain that the first time I caught COVID it sent me to the hospital twice, for a total of a month, including short-term disability, because my “recovery” the first time was a mirage that hid the real damage that damned virus did to my insides.

The explanation is counter-productive, because they’ll just nod sagely and say, maybe not in so many words, “Ah. That explains it. You’ve been through something horrible and are afraid to experience it again. That explains why you’re not willing to be free and share the air with the rest of us. You’re trapped in your trauma.”

As if there was something irrational about wanting to avoid a disease that

• lowers your IQ by an average three points every time you get it


• quadruples the risk of urinary incontinence in men my age


• can cause erectile dysfunction, loss of testosterone, and “direct testicular damage”


• destroys the body’s ability to respond postively to exercise


• destroys your ability to fight other infections


• can cause brain inflammation leading to mental illness


• doubles your risk of developing diabetes


• significantly raises your risk of heart attack and stroke


• does progressive damage with every re-infection


• is seventeen times more deadly than influenza

… and yet, somehow, I’m the one who needs pity and understanding because I’m not willing to risk what’s left of my life and my health after nearly dying of it the first time. As if I’m the one who need accomodation.

Just fuck off, the lot of you.

What surprised me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have, is how quickly this level of luxury became routine, and just how aware I was that all this luxury had a human price, because I know damn well the staff and crew of a cruise ship aren’t well-treated and put up with a lot of crap, sometimes literally, and especially often from the people who feel entitled to a little bit more “service” than custom would allow. Up around 6:30, I’d make my way to the cafe and find that the morning barista, a pleasant young fellow from the Czech Republic, pulling my coffee and setting out the water. I’d read and write for about an hour, then go get Omaha and we’d head to breakfast.

It was Friday, but on board that doesn’t mean anything. It’s easy to forget there are days of the week. It’s easy to forget there’s a world outside the ship.


Today’s trip was to Palaver Point, which involved a hike up the side of a tall hill take in a colony of Chinstrap Penguins and the view across the Palmer Sea. Omaha decided that she wasn’t up for a kilometer long walk with a 100 meter rise, so I went alone, crossing the switchbacks to reach the top.

At the top was Professor Marcel Lichtenstein, who I’d already met. He gave us a brief lecture on moraines, the dirt and rocks that glaciers pick up as they move down the terrain and calve off into the ocean. Marcel is a character, a big man with a powerful voice and a lot of charisma. “You know, I’m a biologist, not a geologist. The first time I was in Antarctica and I heard someone say ‘Look at the moraine,’ I was looking around for the beautiful woman because in Italian ‘moraina’ means ‘brunette,’ and I figured that’s what they were looking at.”

When we got back, lunch was “Australian,” which I’m not sure meant much to me, but Omaha appreciated the meat pies.

That afternoon was a Zodiac excursion; we sat in boats and were driven around to listen to more explanations of icebergs and the history of Antarctica. All of the guides have extensive stories about the Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen. One of our guides, Sebastian, who was also the submarine pilot, had taken leave from the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy to be on an expedition to recreate Shackleton’s amazing voyage from his doomed Antarctic expedition back to civilization on nothing more than a large lifeboat. In fact, you can see Sebastian in this video at the 2:40 mark. He told an after-dinner, over-drinks, truly harrowing tale about the voyage he and his mates undertook, including how, when they finally reached the island of St. George, they were almost washed up on some rocks and killed. This being a documentary, they had a monitor boat, but the captain of that boat declined to rescue them until they were actually in distress… and somehow they made it to shore without being killed. It was hair-raising stuff.


The afternoon excursions usually ended around 5pm. The ship had so many experts there were lecture series to fill the time before dinner; history, geology, the biology of the birds that flew, the penguins (yes, birds, but a separate topic), the seals, just about anything and everything you could think of as being a part of the Antarctic experience. One thing that I did not find while in Antarctica: Pokemon. There are no Pokemon in Antarctica.

Evenings aren’t quite so busy. Usually, I just read. I ripped through a number of books during this vacation, all light reading and just generally fun. I also tended to go to bed fairly early. This isn’t a cruise with nightlife; there were only two places to “hang out” after dinner and both of them were sedate. This isn’t the sort of cruise where there are so many bars and nightclubs you can pick one from whatever spectrum of nightlife you can possibly imagine.

I've been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn again, and I've come to the conclusion that the greatest failure in writing of the series is the relationship between Laulai of the Banuk and the punk band Concrete Beach Party.

Warning: if you haven't played the game, there are some minor spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds in here.

When you decide to play The Frozen Wilds, one of the missions you can find and complete is named Waterlogged. In this mission you meet the musician Laulai, who loves to "play" the vast pipes underneath The Yellowstone Dam's drainage basin. Using massive drumsticks reminiscent of Taiko drums, her playing could be heard for kilometers in every direction. But the location where she played has been flooded, and you have to find out why and see if you can drain it and give her access to her instrument again.

There's a lot of adventuring that goes on, but eventually you succeed. Along the way, this being Horizon Zero Dawn, you find a lot of audio recordings of two people from the ancient days: Shelly & Laura. They were part of a team, originally a large team, that maintained and administered the dam. As time went on and automation came to Yellowstone, the size of their team dropped to ten, then five, and then finally two. For a year, Shelly and Laura maintained the dam themselves. Laura had an electric guitar, and Shelly figured out that if they drained the receiving pool the pipes at one end had an amazing sound quality. They created a band, "Concrete Beach Party," and recorded a single song, "The Last Two Girls On Earth."

And then Ted Faro and one of his corporate arms took their jobs away, breaking them up and sending them to opposite ends of the Earth before the robots came and ate them. Or they killed themselves... because those were the only two options for humanity in 2064. Laura and Shelly both loved the other, best friends until the end.

The greatest writing failure in Horizon Zero Dawn is that literally seconds after Laulai thanks Aloy for saving her instruments and gives a short speech about how badly she wants her music to connect her to her ancestors, Aloy finds the one and only recording of "The Last Two Girls On Earth" and does not go back and play the song for Laulai.

Laulai discovered what Shelly had discovered, that the pipes in the overflow basin were an amazing percussion instrument in their own right. Aloy has a recording of Shelly using those pipes in the coherent, rhythmic, Western way a punk band would use them. Aloy knows that Laulai is desperate for connection with anyone else who treated these pipes that way, and she knows that Shelly was desperate for some kind of closure, some sense that someone, anyone, other than she and Laura had ever heard or appreciated Concrete Beach Party.

And yet the writing in the story neglects all of that. It drops it as irrelevant, an uninteresting component of the game avatar's accrual of experience points. It never gives anyone in this sequence the closure they deserve.

One of the things that I treasure most in playing a video game is having someone interesting to hang out with. Give me a reason to like them, let them "save the cat" to use a Hollywood expression. Elizabeth from Bioshock is pretty canon, but so are a lot of characters. Bloodrayne, at least in the original series, with her mixture of murderous sexiness and ingenue bewilderment, was fun to hang out with. Aloy is... usually... worth hanging out with, but this sequence filled me with a great sense of disappointment. The writers missed a major aspect of her character with this broken opportunity, and it's a shame it can't be fixed.

Despite everything, the first morning “at sea” (we weren’t really, we were still getting out of the long chain of islands around the south-eastern tip of South America) I awoke early the way I do at home, and I finally got a good look at the Pursuit.

It was not what I expected at all.


There’s an auditorium right at the heart of the ship on Deck 4, but it’s small, with long couches arranged around the stage and room for less than 300 people. Behind that is the “Expedition Room,” which has a cocktail and coffee bar along one wall, and the ship’s tiny “boutique” along the other. Behind that is the atrium stairwell that goes from Deck 2 to Deck 9, and finally, taking up the rear of the deck, is the ship’s restaurant.


Deck five is mostly cabins (including mine and Omaha’s), at the rear of which is the “Colonnade”, where the smorgasboard is hosted, and finally an open deck with two hot tubs and a small “swimming pool” no more than three meters on a side and less than two meters deep. The deck is as broad as the ship with small serving area that has alcohol and cold drinks.

Deck six has the cafe at the rear, and another open-air rear deck area where people can sit on lounge chairs under radiant electrical heaters. The cafe was full-service and included an oven where the pastries were baked right before your eyes if you got there early enough. Outdoors, the temperature hovered just three degrees above freezing, but under the heaters, especially with hot coffee, it was a lovely place to wake up, read, and watch the world recede into the distance. Most of decks six, seven, and eight are cabins, but Six Forward has the Observation Lounge, which was less a “lounge” than a nice place to sit, with a ’fridge for soda pops, hot and cold water taps, and a collection of teas, but it also has repeaters for many of the instruments on the bridge. We could see many of the ship’s inner workings: navigation, autopilot, engineering, radars, and weather monitoring. It was interesting to note that the Captain was listed as the “backup navigator;” on this ship, the computer was in control.

Deck seven had a fitness center, yoga floor, massage tables and “wellness center” at the back.

Deck eight was cabins only, including the even-more-insane penthouse cabins, each of which has its own hot hub. I can’t imagine what it costs to book one of those.

Deck nine had the forward lounge, which had the biggest bar of all, as well as a sushi chef preparing dinners for anyone who didn’t want to go into the restaurant and smorgasboard. The rear lounge was smaller and more intimate, with live music every night along with the occasional trivia night. The forward lounge was quieter, and in the daytime the science staff seemed to congregate there since it had little to offer before the bar opened at seven. In between the two was an open deck where the Zodiacs are stowed and the cranes for lifting them installed.


We cleared the islands and headed out into Drake’s Passage. Described in Wikipedia as “one of the most treacherous bodies of water in the world,” the weather was perfect, the seas calm with full sun and wind barely 6km out of the northeast. “Drake’s Lake,” is what one of the crew called it. Omaha and I had a lovely day of exploring the ship and enjoying the sunlight.

And despite the apparent calm of the seas, Omaha became violently seasick that night, so much so that I ultimately made sure we got her down to sickbay, where they gave her IV fluids and a dose of the dymenhydrinate (generic Dramamine). They were worried because dymenhydrinate is not a friendly drug for epileptics and can inhibit the effectiveness of older antiseziure medications. She was in sickbay for about four hours before they wheeled her back to our cabin around 1am, stable and doing better. She was too shaky to manage her CPAP and didn’t sleep well that night. The nurse said they’d tested her for norovirus and that had been negative, so they were chalking it up to seasickness.

I don’t tend to get seasick. I spent a significant chunk of my adolescence in the Florida Keys and had my own boat (if you can call a few scraps of heavy plywood, six 55-gallon drums, two dangerously fiberglass “noses” to reduce drag, and a really cranky Evinrude outboard clamped to the plywood a “boat”), and sleep perfectly well at sea in everything from calm to hurricane weather.

And I have comfortable, reusable earplugs made of surgical silicone that block snoring perfectly. They’re “expensive” in the Vimes Theory of Boots way: buying two pair will set you back $150, but if you don’t have $150 in your pocket you’ll buy a month’s worth of foam plugs for about $13… and spend $160/year. So Omaha’s snoring didn’t bother me at all.

I was finally settling back to something resembling “normal.” I hoped Omaha would as well.

Between winning a trip to Antarctica and actually being in Antarctica is the grueling story of flying to Ushuaia, Argentina, where the Pursuit was currently making port. Ushuaia, “the city at the bottom of the world, is 12,427 kilometers from my home city of Seattle. London is only 7,700 kilometers away. Tokyo is 7,600 kilometers away. Equivalent flights would be to places like Melbourne, Australia, or Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s literally on the other side of the planet.

Our flight began early Saturday morning boarding a plane to Mexico City. I was genuinely surprised at how lax customs has become. Oh, the TSA is still a pain in the arse with your belt buckle but overall the amount of security theater was much less than I’d experienced before COVID. The flight itself on an Aeromexico 787 was a little short of five hours, wasn’t too traumatic, and the food was tasty and hot in a way US flights almost never have anymore. I masked until plane was in the air, at which point it exceeds the 5CH changeover for fresh air and risks are considered minimal, especially since I had gotten my COVID booster just a month earlier.

The “Your flight safety presentation today was brought to you by Volvo” notice was a bit disconcerting.

My travel laptop is a Surface Pro 6. I had cleaned it out before leaving and hadn’t put any movies onto it, so I was down to a very short list of films that didn’t really interest me. I spent most of the trip reading, as I had my e-reader with me and about 400 books on it are still listed as “unread.” I made quite a dent in my tsundoku list.


From the air, Mexico City looks like any city embedded in an agricultural region: core, sprawl, and then lots of parceled and enclosed farmland spreading out for kilometers in every direction.

It’s been a long time since I had last flown international. Long enough that Mastercard now takes care of the exchange rate automatically and traveller’s checks are something only people my age remember. The exotic cuisine of Mexico on display at the airport consisted of a Carl’s Junior, a Krispy Kreme, a Starbucks and a 7-11. I mentioned this to someone who was also traveling on the flight and he said, “Yeah, it wasn’t like this before NAFTA. NAFTA really gave the ‘international franchises’” – his voice heavy with sarcasm – “free rein, and this is the result.”

I wouldn’t have thought it was NAFTA.

Our flight from Mexico City to Buenos Aires was much longer, almost ten hours, but it was overnight and we’d sprung for the seats that reclined fully into beds, so we slept most of that. Omaha’s CPAP worked even with the plane’s power outlets, which helped her sleep as well as one can under those circumstances. The food was, for flight food, spectacular, especially the morning omelet. Only the coffee was boring.

In Buenos Aires, the Seabourn people more or less took over our lives. It turned out that the contributor of the prize package had been the president of Seabourn itself and that he had made it very clear that Omaha and I were very VIP. While there was a knot of five Seabourn people there to take in all the arrivals, there were four specific names on a separate list that received special handling, and we were one of those names. “You’re special,” we were told. “The director said something about a charity.”

Which was good to know, because that’s when disaster struck. AeroMexico had lost Omaha’s luggage.

She had a single change of clothes in her carry-on, a few toiletries, and not enough medication to make it through the whole trip. The Seabourn people assured us that they would do everything they can to find that bag, and in the meantime they would also help us find alternatives.

I don’t do well under these circumstances. Things are out of my control and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, and that’s when I start to break down. I went with Omaha to the hotel Seabourn had booked for us, the Alvear Palace. There were a lot of other people going on the cruise, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to talk to them and, under the circumstances, didn’t really want to.


The Alvear Palace hotel is a stunning place of marble, sandstone, oak, and brass. The Seabourn people whisked Omaha away to discuss the luggage and medication issue, and afterward we were free to wander the city. We found a local pizza place named El Continental, walked around the Recoleta Cemetery where Eve Peron (among many others) is buried, and visited a pop-up artisan market in Carcono Park. Artisan markets are the exactly the same the world over, with tsotchkes and such for sale that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Pike Place Market or the Seattle University District Street Fair.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I’m not even sure I slept at all. Fitbit says I got maybe seven hours of sleep, I was so anxious about the luggage and the medication. Omaha took charge and, frankly, I felt a little bullied about being hauled along by her whirlwind as she demanded I get onto the bus to the airport and the plane down to Ushuaia.

The ride to the airport included a bit of travelogue about Buenos Aries, including a massive, beautiful but broken mobile of a robotic flower, and a statue of Christopher Columbus gazing eastward while his victims slump and writhe at the base of his plinth. I like to think he’s gazing eastward toward the source of his power and approval, the kings of Spain.


I was miserable on the flight, even if the airplane did have a cute fox on the tail. I almost didn’t get onto the plane, instead thinking hard that I could just head over to the International section and book a flight home. But I just couldn’t do that, and so I ended up in Ushuaia. It’s a nice, fairly large town that does exactly two things: be the hub for the Antarctic tourist business, and support the Argentine Navy’s southernmost base of operations.

The Seabourn people let us onto the Pursuit, and told us three things: they hadn’t found the bag, they were trying to find a supply of Omaha’s medication, there was a seamstress on board who could provide her with some clothes, and when this happens the ship provides overnight laundry service.

With barely an hour until the gangplank was pulled and we would have to abandon the trip entirely, someone found us and said, “We found your medication.” A pharmacy at the north end of city had it, and it would be on board before we pulled out.

I was still wrung out. I’d gotten less than nine hours of sleep in the past 60. I don’t remember what I had for dinner, or what else happened that day. I went to bed and passed out.

I’ve encountered two perfect examples of enshittification in the past 24 hours, both related to Google. And let’s just start off with this: Google has a monopoly on search. Sure, there are others, like Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo, but for all intents and purposes Google is everywhere: email, maps, search, translate, the list of features Google provides to you, and from which Google extracts information to sell to advertisers, creating for Google a loop so “virtuous” (in Capitalist-speak) that Google can now do whatever the hell it wants with search and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Professionally useless

I was writing documentation at work, and our current product is a browser-based single-page application. This means that when you navigate around the system, instead of going from page to page, just parts of the page change; it’s a subtle difference that means a lot to web developers and probably not much to everyone else. At my last job, we called the main part, the thing you care about, the “page” and the whole thing the “frame,” but that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to know what terms designers used for those things.

I asked Google, and I asked Bing. “Glossary of Single Page Application terms,” “Term for the main part of a single page application,” “Glossary of web design terms.” I was getting desperate, because every single one of those queries gave me the exact same useless answers.

Google’s AI gave me the definition of a single page application.

The replies were equally worthless:

• (Wikipedia) Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Anatomy of Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Pros and Cons of a Single Page Application?


• Single Page Applications: What They Are And Why You Use Them

All of this beginner level dreck that’s only tangentially related to the question I asked, and despite that “anatomy” response, none of these actually answered any of my questions. And the Google page was so damned cluttered it bewildered the hell out of me.

Finally, after about half an hour of this, in desperation I went went to ChatGPT.

Me: In web design, a page contains a single, semantic unit of information. When someone clicks a link, that link takes them to a new page with a different semantic unit. In a Single Page Application, the “page” doesn’t change, only the important part, that semantic unit. Is there a common industry term for that semantic unit?

ChatGPT: Yes, in the context of Single Page Applications, the part of the web page that changes dynamically without requiring a full page reload is often referred to as the “view” or “viewport.”

Armed with this information, I was able to find not just other pages confirming this, but including whole glossaries of industry-standard terminology.

I shouldn’t have had to ask ChatGPT. Google says it knows enough about me to advertise to me effectively; if that’s so, it should also know that I’m not a friggin’ beginner when it comes to web development, or even SPA’s. So why hand me all the dreck?

Worse yet, that answer came from somewhere. Someone else wrote it, ChatGPT just barfed it up. I would like to know who they are, and what else they know, and give them the kudos they deserve. I’m not interested in reading ChatGPT and don’t want to read something no one bothered to write. By erasing the credit for creating this answer, ChatGPT decentivizes people from creating their own answers.

Personally useless

We just got back from a two-week vacation and there’s not a lot of food in the house, so this morning I decided I wanted Cream of Wheat. That’s an actual brand name; in fact, in the US it’s pretty much the only brand name known for the breakfast cereal known as [farina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farina_(food). It’s a staple, and it’s estimated that as many as 1 million Americans eat it for breakfast at least once a week or so. There’s also a standard base recipe for the three main ingredients: milk, farina, and salt.

I couldn’t remember the amounts of each. So I searched: “Cream of Wheat Recipe.”

I got back a page full of recipies for “Things you can make with cream of wheat.” Pies. Cakes. Complex desserts using fruits and whipped cream. I tried “Cream of Wheat Base Recipe.” The brand page didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but it didn’t matter: Their recipe page doesn’t have the base recipe either!

Finally, I hit on the right term: “Cream of Wheat ratios.” That got me what I wanted, but then it lacked the recipe cook times! At least with a couple of those terms I was able to find that next.

Good Grief. I’m trying to imagine my mother, who’s in her mid-80s now, trying to navigate such a terrible, terrible experience just to make something really basic. Unlike the above problem, where I had an advanced question and Google gave me really basic answers, this was where I had a really basic problem and Google gave me advanced answers. Imagine anyone who’s not completely web-savvy trying to navigate this, and you’ll start to imagine the scale of the problem.

Professionally dispiriting

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Google is planning for “the post-search world.” Pichai believes that most search will be replaced by “summarization machines,” these AIs that suck in all the knowledge we’ve been putting on the Internet and summarize it into some kind of coherent explanation.

This makes me furious. Everything I’ve done over the past 30 years isn’t just free material from which Google can make a profit and leave me with nothing. A world like that gives me no reason to write anymore, if Google can take my reputation along with my knowledge.

“Pretend that I’m nine years old. In Ru Paul’s voice, explain to me how derivatives of regular expressions can be made to work in a language without a garbage collector.” Like, NO, Fuck You Google, that is my work and my discovery and you may not just steal it from me and treat it like it’s universal knowledge. Point people at me, let them learn from me, but don’t fucking pretend the discoverer doesn’t deserve to be recognized alongside the discovery.

Closing off the future

Cory Doctorow points out that platforms “enshittify” by going through three stages: First, they provide services to their users, connecting them to resources. Then, they slowly evolve systems to get more out of the users, making their lives worse as they deliver more and more to the resources, because it’s the resources that pay the bills. And finally, once they’ve sewn up enough users that the cost of switching to a different platform would be unimaginably painful, they start to abuse the resources.

Google’s vision is the final step: kill everything. Nobody will want to produce new intellectual content and put it on-line, because Google will just suck it up and make everything awkward, endearing, vituperative, argumentative, or entertaining about it just disappear. It’ll just be the facts. No new jokes, no new music, no new and interesting stories. Just machine-generate summaries of them, the humanity completely polished off, leaving a glittering machine world we don’t belong in.

Fanfic, even authorized fanfic, can be a risky venture. I've often made that point myself as a writer of fanfic, and as a reader. Making a fanfic video game out of a beloved work from a deeply respected genre master is especially treacherous. And yet, The Invincible somehow manages to both be completely faithful to Stanislaw Lem's original novel, The Invincible, yet extend it brilliantly.

I played the video game first, so let's start with this: I knew nothing about this particular book when I played the game. Like most SF readers, my encounter with Lem consisted of being forced to read Solaris in high school, which I found terribly dreary and uninformative. Lem's writing style is very much an older, more telling style, a narrative mostly of descriptions of people doing things; dialogue is reserved for brief color and long expositions. Not a style conducive to video gaming.

The Invincible: the video game

The game focuses on the character of Yasna, a member of a small exploratory vessel from "The Commonwealth," as she wakes up in the desert of Regis III, an unknown world of very dry atmosphere and a weak, cool sun. Her last memory is of her agreeing to stay on the ship with the ship's navigator (and its commander) while the other five people on the crew go down for a look, but she finds her backpack and her notes sticking out of a dune nearby. In her notes she finds that she had been walking for several hours and has a map back to the team's campsite.

She gets in touch with the navigator, finds two of her crew in a state of catatonia, and from there has to find her way back to the ship's one working lander.

The plot and story of this game are what make it worthwhile. There are very few places where you have to decide more than "go left or right," and like most such games the outcome of any such decision is foregone. This is mostly a tale being told in a slow, engaging way by a first-person game engine. The order in which you explore a new place, and whether or not to check out some side-stories, are pretty much the only fundamental decisions you'll make.

That said, it is an engaging bit of work. Yasna comes into conflict with a team from "The Alliance," who came in a starship named Condor. The game doesn't say so in so many words, but you get the sense that the Alliance is "western" in some sense, whereas the Commonwealth is more "soviet." Eventually, the real crisis of Regis III comes to a head and Yasna and members of the Alliance must work together to survive.

The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is excellent, and Yasna is good company with which to hang out.

The Invincible: the book

The 1964 novel has no "Alliance" or "Commonwealth." We're told only that The Invincible has been dispatched by "the authorities back home" to Regis III to find out why Condor, which had been scheduled to explore Regis III eight months earlier, had not returned.

The book focuses on the character of Rohan, the ship's senior exec and second in command, and the experiences he has on the surface of Regis III. The story follows Rohan around as various expeditionary teams are sent out to try to find Condor to discover what could possibly have happened to the ship and its crew. It's dry in that way that 1960s science fiction could be dry, especially when joined with Polish sensibilities of that time and the translator's efforts.

For all that, it's a brilliant book. It was written 22 years before Drexler's Engines of Creation and yet every great idea in that book exists in The Invincible. How the dangers of Regis III emerged from naturalistic processes is so well-described it makes James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker read like fanfic. Lem single-handledly envisioned nanotechnology, and how nanotechnology, automation, and the feedback mechanisms of natural selection could interact decades before those very terms came into existence.

Faith and Deviation

The game is astonishingly faithful to the book. Recall that I read the book after playing the game. In the game, the Alliance has caterpillar construction equipment digging massive boreholes, balloon-wheeled all-terrain jeeps, ground-effect transporters, ducted-turbine "flying saucers," multi-legged crawlers and a few force-field floating war machines. The mix of vehicles felt completely nonsensical... and every one of those is in the book. The "atompunk" feel of the equipment in the game is accurate to the book in every detail. So are the limitations of the space suits, the communications equipment, the surface-to-orbit landers, the sensory gear, and even Yasna's compass is a pretty good representation of the same one Rohan used (although Rohan could wear his on his wrist, and Yasna has to keep taking hers out of her pocket).

The game starts on Regis III three days before The Invincible is scheduled to arrive, which creates tension in that the Commonwealth people, who are just a little exploratory team of eight, know they need to do a quick survey and get the hell out of there before The Invincible arrives.

There are a few deviations from the book. In the book, the crew of The Invincible find Condor and it's dead crew... and one guy who might still be alive in one of Condor's cryochambers. (It's not a spoiler to say he's not alive and can't be recovered; it's just a moment Lem added for pathos.) For game reasons, those cryochambers are empty and still working when Yasna finds the Condor. The book says that Condor and The Invincible are the same class of ship and of the same size. The game says that the Invincible is "the biggest ship in the Alliance, and twice as large as anything else they have." Condor's team didn't have time to set up more than one drilling operation to explore the strange metallic ruins under the sand, but the game, to stretch out Act II a bit, has three different drilling sites for you to visit.

And ... and that's about it. That last one could even be just that the crew of The Invincible, wrapped up in its own concerns, didn't find all the explorations the crew of Condor conducted. Otherwise, the game is a wholly faithful and reasonable extrapolation of what happened in the book, and the cold war conflict of the Commonwealth and the Alliance are deftly added, sensitive to the conditions of the cold war as it was playing out in 1964, and believable. It's a visual novel, an entirely new story, the best kind of fanfiction, told in an interactive way that gives well-thought and well-designed visuals to one of Stanislaw Lem's great works.

Technology And Its Disconnect

You get less of a sense of it in the game because the first-person visual narrative forces you to be "in the moment" with Yasna, but both the book and the game really hammer home the weirdness of atompunk sensibility (and the game somehow manages to do this without being "ironic" about it!). Lem's future is "like five years from 1964, only with bigger engines." Lem didn't expect information processing to get much better; he has robots and, like lots of SF writers, over-estimated how easy speech recognition would be and under-estimated speech production.

In the book, The Invincible has both orbital and atmospheric drones, but their lifespans are short and their cameras are both analog and terrible. On two occasions in the game, Yasna gets to operate a "camera balloon" drone (something not in the book, but completely believable given the tech) and the cameras have the classic snow and terrible bandwidth of analog. The teams use Morse code when voice radio becomes unintelligible. Their orbit-to-surface telescopes have a resolution of "miles", whereas the Mars Orbital Surveyor has a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, and unlike the MOS, The Invincible has to de-orbit the satellite so its payload parachutes within about 40 miles of their landing site so someone can retrieve the film!

This is science fiction from the 1960s in all its glory: manly men doing manly things, with bigger engines and more powerful laser guns, but no one and nothing is going to challenge man's position as the most intelligent being. Need to map a planet? You'll need 200 men and four months to go through all the photographs.

Now that I think about it, the introduction of Yasna, a woman crewmember, into the game is actually one of the biggest anachronisms; there are zero women in Lem's book, the only mention of women at all is Rohan's observation that Captain Horpach never married. Or it could be completely in keeping with the games "cold war" sensibilities to introduce a woman on the Soviet Commonwealth's side, since one of Lenin's positions was that, unlike the West, the Soviet union didn't discard the intellectual firepower women could bring to scientific endeavors like space exploration.

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Fun is where you find it. The book isn't fun, and neither, really is the game. What they are is intriguing and, ultimately, satisfying. The game succeeds wildly in what it sets out to do: retell the story of what happened to the starship Condor on Regis III from a unique (for the book) and different point of view, provide a visual vocabulary for all the wonders Lem described, and make the point of the book and its conclusion just as hard. You learn something from the book and the game, and you learn different things. The book is short, less than 200 pages, and can be read in about four hours. The game is about twice that long.

Technical details

The Invincible ran "okay" on my computer. I run Ubuntu Linux and have a GeForce 2060 with 6GB of RAM, and the framerate was sometimes not all that fantastic (I discovered that disabling the "special effects" on the operating system's window manager made it run much better!), but it runs well on modern hardware and it's gorgeous all the same. Given the nature of the game, I didn't need perfect aim. Running it on Linux and Wine (Proton) was otherwise flawless.

How are queer theory and the green energy discourse similar?

One of the books I’m happy to own is the somewhat infamous Fear of a Queer Planet, published in 1991, right in the center of the AIDS crisis. FoaQP was a distilliation of decades of queer theory, about how being queer was always an inherently political act, a challenge to a status quo. It didn’t incorporate everything: the influence of Roughgarden, Jane Ward, and Denny Lowell aren’t here, nor are the critical insights Pat Califia brought through the 80s and 90s, but overall it’s a good intro.

One thing queer theory does is explode the myth of “men are reliable and stable, women are fickle and unpredictable.” Gay men’s relationships are infamously less stable than heterosexual couples, and the ancient joke about what a lesbian brings on her second date still has a ring of truth to it. (Answer: A U-Haul.) The last 30 years since the publication of FoaQP has shown both significant progress in addressing this duplicity between the myths straight men tell about themselves and the reality straight women face in dating men, and often violent pushback from straight men that such truths should not be spoken.

I bring this up because we’re seeing it play out again in very strange ways when it comes to “green energy.” I’ve now encountered several conversations where the accusation is that green energy is “feminine,” that is, unreliable, fickle, and likely to fail when critically needed. “The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” goes the refrain from these manly men, “which is why the market is stupid to embrace these technologies.” (Nevermind that “those technologies” produce electricity at the lowest cost and highest environmental respect.) Both fossil-fuel boys and nuclear boys are enamored of their own tech: it works, they say, and it’s reliable. You can turn it on and off with a switch, unlike the sun or the wind, and that’s why they like it, and that’s why we should embrace it. And they’re independent: you don’t need a whole network to just drive your gasoline-powered car.

Except they’re not really reliable. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved that about nuclear energy, and fossil fuels have contaminated enough of our planet it’ll be centuries before the taint of their passing is removed from our air, water, and soil.

Commodity streams of oil and nuclear fuel depend upon “a whole network” to deliver commodity fuels to gas stations and nuclear power plants. The transport of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are both security and health nightmares for the people tasked with moving them, as well as the communities through which they might move.

Pro-nuclear-power and pro-fossil-fuel people lie about green energy the way men lie about women: because they like what they have, they like the feeling of power it gives them, they like the howling explosions– inside a V8’s cylinders and within the atoms at the core of any reactor– and they like the idea that it takes a lot of high-performance engineering to keep either from blowing apart the engines they power. Solar is disappointing: it just sits there. The worst thing a wind turbine does is catch fire and fall over, and that’s no fun. The opportunities to be manly, to engage in rescue, are few and far between.

The pushback against green energy resembles the pushback against queer theory: it’s an upset of the status quo, and it takes pieces of the carefully crafted “masculine” identity and says, clearly: you men are either lying or being lied to, and the lies are in service to a destructive (and self-destructive) lifestyle.

For the past three months or so, I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion on and off, experimenting with different settings and generally entertaining myself with silly things. At one point I tweeted out something about having a bad day and ending with, “Fuck it. Stable Diffusion, give me 100 images of Disney princesses masturbating by a beautiful summer lake.” And the thing is, Stable Diffusion can do that.

(No, I’m not going to share anything I generate; I know it’s crap, and I know the databases are probably stolen as much as everything on Tumblr not posted by the original artists was stolen, and people mourn the death of Tumblr much more than they will the unlikely end of Stable Diffusion.)

One of the things I’ve found, though, is that “real person” Stable Diffusion is really unsatisfying. Even when there’s a very good plug-in model of that person, using AI illustration to make more of what that person did doesn’t really have much of an impact.

I was in my 30s and 40s through the era when names like Chloe Vevrier, Renata Daninsky, Aria Giovanni, Erica Campbell, Veronika Zemanova were all over the adult corners of the internet, and there have since then been plenty of quite good plug-ins that will do a decent job of rendering these women in whatever phase of their careers that you like.

Even so, I discovered that while I’m still highly entertained with the idea of “render Rapunzel as an Aztec warrior,” I quickly lost interest in renderings of real people, even real porn stars, in the same way.

I think the reason is simply that we develop a parasocial understanding of real people, being really photographed, in a way that doesn’t carry over. For all that it’s fantasty, Zemanova really did hold a shotgut and really did fire it and really was filmed by a high-speed camera that captured every delightful movement of her prodigious bosom. Monroe Rhys and Katya Clover really did masturbate (or at least seem to) for the camera while wearing Apple watches that depicted the rise and fall of their heartbeats.

But no matter how “realistic” Stable Diffusion can make an image, those images it produces did not happen. We couldn’t have been there, we could never have actually seen those events happen in real time and in real life. I could wish that Monroe Rhys made more than three films, and I could wish Aria Giovanni and London Andrews never got any older, but they’re human beings and they get tired of the job or they just get older and more tired in general and… that’s what being human is about.

Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFF) is a sub-category on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own. RPFF puts words into the mouths of real people, often silly or horny or just revealing of what the writer wishes or believes the person being depicted should or would say. The writer is putting a lot of mental energy into maintaining and depicting the parasocial relationship they and their readers have with that person, and the strength of any given story comes from the resonance that writer can elicit from it.

Real Person Stable Diffusion, at least in the still image category, doesn’t have the same energy. Stable Diffusion is rummaging through a bag of eight billion tiny image shards and word relationships with those shards and assembling a collection of kaliedescopic images that, through the magic of alegebra and pareidolia, we hope looks like the prompt thet user typed in. It lacks even the illusion of verisimilitude: it doesn’t pretend to be true or possible or evidentiary or interesting. It’s just… pretty.

Pretty can sustain interest for awhile, but it’s not the basis for any kind of long-term relationship. Even animated films have the attention and interest of the artists behind them. CGI-heavy Marvel films work when we care about the characters, not the roller coaster ride of visual CGI. We want a story written by people, about people, for people. Real Person Stable Diffusion, no matter how “realistic” it can approach as a photographic simulation, sits deep in the uncanny valley where we know we are being fooled by a photograph of something that never happened.