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The Defenders

  • Why are they fighting in a sewer with glowing blue walls?
  • Fight choreography brought to you by people not even in the same shot.
  • Oh good we're starting with racist rich white trash cultural appropriator Danny Rand, this can only go up, right?
  • "New York City"? Who says that, unless it's followed by "Git a rope."?
  • Alias is still a mopey drunk, so characterization is established.
  • Cage is boring, so there's nothing new there.
  • Murdock takes all the best cases of chemicals (they're in everything!) either crippling or superpowering people, gets $11 million in settlement = $1.1M + court costs for him, but he still wants to go beat up bad guys instead of blowing coke off a stripper's ass.
  • Sigourney Weaver! In a terribly staged scene with awkward dialogue. I wish this shitshow would kill me, but sooner than weeks or months.
  • Long dramatic scenes going nowhere. I need to drink more than Alias to blackout thru this.
  • Cage: "Hero's your word, not mine." No, in the comics he & the less shitty Danny Rand ran a biz called "Heroes For Hire".
  • Oh no it's a natural(?) disaster which occurs about once a month in some places, so New Yorkers panic and light up Murdock's windows with gel lights, not that he can see.

Well, that was Ep 1. I can't even rate this, it's just random scenes leading to nothing. Maybe I'll watch E2 and see if it coalesces. Maybe I'll just self-flagellate some other way.

Thursday Music Thinks It's the Future

Perl 6

This is kind of fascinating in the train-wreck sense, but even aside from weirder-than-Perl5 syntax, taking a speed penalty like that in modern times is not acceptable; computers are fast enough to solve all problems in a few seconds, but the slower your program is, the more power it consumes, and that costs you real money in a data center.

I don't see any support in Perl6 for a web server, GUI, low-level graphics, sound, or even low-level UNIX libraries, you have to use NativeCall with a lot of wrapper code for every struct. Perl5 made Gtk pretty easy to use, hideous as it may be, and mod_perl made it a powerful choice on Apache servers.

What we expect from a systems programming language has changed since the '70s-'90s when Perl and its immediate ancestors were invented, and even the most rough, low-level programmers don't want to reinvent everything from assembly up anymore.

Python has multiple ways now to get faster, I'm currently trying out Cython and getting faster, compiled Python binaries, which can directly call C code (because by that point it is C code). Python's standard Tkinter GUI is primitive, but SDL works well if you can distribute it. Python's system libraries and web frameworks are top-notch.

JavaScript isn't fast, but modern runtimes are surprisingly good; I'd have to write some tests to see how Node or Electron compares to Perl 6, but I'd bet on the massive VM investments in JS. JS does everything now, it's certainly the most familiar user interface these days.

If you just want a multi-paradigm language for hacking, Scheme and Racket are ideal, supported by tons of papers and books like SICP, and they compile to fast native code.

And then there's the real outliers, like Lazarus, which is a Delphi-like Pascal IDE, or the usual "I want a hobby language" choices of Haskell, OCaml, Clojure, etc.

Even if Perl6 had come out in the first decade of its development, it would've been a little backwards, but compared to modern choices it's archaic.

I’ve avoided the Whatever Star because, in addition to making Perl 6 look like a lineal descendant of brainfuck, it is governed by rules that are too subtle for my understanding.
—Evan Miller

What I'm Reading: Dichronauts, by Greg Egan

Dichronauts is another of Greg Egan's "what if {MATH}" stories, like Schild's Ladder, Incandescance, and the Orthogonal trilogy. Often I describe him as the only Hard SF writer.

The world posited by having 2 space dimensions and 2 time-like leads to casual relativistic effects when you turn in a time-like direction, so it's sort of like Edwin Abbott's Flatland or AK Dewdney's Planiverse, in this case beings waddling on a mostly-east/west line, up/down being the other usable space direction, with symbiotes who can "see" sideways into the lightless cone north/south with sonar. So, uh, read Egan's paper explaining this and play with the simulation first.

While buildings are mentioned and the moving of one shown, I think not enough pages are given to the presumably vertical, thin architecture or how engineering or life would work.

Seth (Walker, wannabe hero) & Theo (his much smarter Sider symbiote) and others go off on a survey mission which finds some difficult terrain, a terrible cult-like town, and then a strange part of geography that could doom everyone.

The first two adventures are quite comprehensible (if you read the paper), and the physics don't interfere much with the story. Then the third goes into a different space/time region. And here he mostly loses me. The geography of the new region is hard to understand, and Theo doesn't spend the necessary "As you would know if you had paid attention, Seth" time to make it clear to me; I get the math on a flat plane but how it works in this region could use a diagram or two.

The drama in the first two parts of the survey would have made a better complete novella, I was engaged with the characters and cult plot. The last part winnows down the cast to one/two somewhat sad companions, and a communications barrier, which makes it even harder to care. The ending is abrupt and inconclusive. For a sequel, or just "done with this exercise, hit publish"?

"Do you really expect my counterfactual longings to be consistent with my merely hypothetical speculations?" —Theo

★★★☆☆