Future Real
Happy May. This is the twenty-ninth issue of Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit — it’s just like all those other email newsletters, except what is an email newsletter really when you think about it?
According to ChatGPT, Iron Maiden has recorded over 150 original songs. I haven’t ranked them all, but I’d venture to guess that the track “Future Real” would rate among the bottom fifty, as it was created during the band’s late–90’s nadir. Anyway, this is the long way around to say you’re getting another half-assed newsletter.
Blargh
He looks like I feel.
The last month has been “All work and no play makes me a cranky boy”. But there have been a few breaks in the 12-hour work days.
Syd Mead predicts the future
On one of the first nice days of the spring, I made the trek west to Chelsea to see a small exhibit called “Syd Mead: Future Pastime”.
This was following a rewatch of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on the Lower East Side, part of a Metrograph retrospective called “Syd Mead: Illustrating the Future”.
From Star Trek to Star Wars to Blade Runner to Alien to Tron and Akira, Syd Mead’s imagination has occupied a big portion of my own.
But as I stared at one of his wonderful and ridiculously fantastical paintings — created in 1983 — it occurred to me that maybe these imaginative futurists not only predicted our dystopian present, but also inspired it.
1983!
We imagined sophisticated handheld communicators and intelligent-but-psychotic-computers that we could talk to and chat with — and so then we built them. Whoops! (Giant robot racing dogs next, tho.)
Fenway franks
I hopped on the train to Boston midweek to catch the Red Sox series against the Seattle Mariners. The Sox lost the series — and I worked every minute I wasn’t at the ballpark, including on the train, on my phone, and in the hotel room — but it was still worth it. The days were warm and I could smell the infield grass.
Other rabbit holes
The Enterprise. In space, everyone can hear your show’s theme music.
Do the next right thing. Heather Cox Richardson celebrates Patriots’ Day in the age of Trump: “What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing.”
Keeping humans in the loop. Paul Ford on when “God Gets Involved” with opining on AI: “The tech industry is extremely focused on getting humans out of the loop, because automating everything is how you make lots of money. The Catholic Church makes the opposite case: Humans need to stay in the loop, because that’s how souls get saved.”
And that’s it for this month’s edition. Have a good one.
jf