Author: Andrew West

I really enjoyed this. It’s the story of a woman trying to convince her husband and friends that her house is haunted, and her baby in danger. One’s a know-it-all skeptic (comparisons were made), one’s a believer, and all have a past. Debates happen. Things evolve. The set starts to feel like home. I thought it was good.

It’s not a full-on scarefest, but has its moments and is unnerving enough that your adrenalin levels are just that little bit elevated from beginning to end. And the audience reactions are entertaining in themselves.

Also it has Rosa from Brooklyn Nine-Nine in it, which is awesome because Rosa. She is not particularly Rosa in this play, and even though I do understand how acting works this was still surprisingly surprising*. I found her and the others entirely compelling.

I am not normally very good at plays, so any play I enjoy is usually at least different. Thank you very much to Hiba for the suggestion and the tickets!

*also see: Encanto

Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson

It’s politically toxic to suggest that climate change could be addressed by geoengineering – deliberate and large-scale intervention in the climate system – because the effects would be hard to predict. But maybe we should do it anyway.

It’s the end of the 21st century and climate change is impacting most of the planet, sometimes catastrophically. Unilateral geoengineering becomes an option. Cue a giant technothriller that’s as much about teaching you about how levees work as following the trials of a ex-ranger hell-bent on revenge against a particular feral pig (there are a lot of feral pigs), or the combatants in a YouTube-led martial-arts-based ‘performative war’ at an ever-shifting India-China border in the Himalayas (it’s hard to explain), or the piloting skills of the Queen of the Netherlands (what it sounds like). And then there are the global political ramifications.

Spectacular first 50 pages. And, following the initial craziness, some plausible and often-brilliant insight into how the future could look. But it’s mostly a paean to human ingenuity, and how we interpret politics as damage and route around it.

As ever with Neal Stephenson he tries to shift the overton window of competence. Everyone is very good at their jobs. Everyone is curious, and eager to learn. And most of them can and do kick ass when needed, whether physically or verbally. This is all just normal.

Every Neal Stephenson book goes off the rails at some point – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes…less so. To read him is to be waiting for this to happen. I’m pleased to report that Termination Shock does so only at whatever point you realise it’s actually a long letter to Elon Musk.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

The sun is fading. Not a lot, but enough to induce permawinter and kill us all off. Why is the sun fading? Dunno, but lots of nearby stars have the same problem. Except one. So let’s send a team to it in the desperate hope they can figure out what the difference is.

Bit of geoengineering in this one too, except this time to deliberately keep the planet warmer while they wait.

It’s from the guy who wrote The Martian, and the style is the same: great ideas, interesting and coherent science, and pulp-fiction dialogue where everyone precisely expresses their exact thoughts and feelings.

Go in blind to this one. Stuff happens.

The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef

This book could not be more relevant to my interests. It’s also highly recommended by Dominic Cummings. I don’t know what to do about that.

It’s about how to think clearly. This usually means: ‘here are a list of common mistakes we all make, so don’t make those!’. But Julia Galef goes beyond this, giving practical advice on how to avoid such cognitive biases.

She emphasises that it’s often very difficult. It’s all very well being told that our rational mind often acts as press secretary for our emotions, justifying what we want rather than thinking things through from the ground up. But recognising this in day-to-day practice is tough.

Cue the advice, drawn from years of research: she started a foundation dedicated to actually investigating such things.

Her main approach is a series of questions you can ask yourself, like ‘would you support the findings of this study if it supported the other side?’, or ‘if this idea were not the status quo, would I support changing the status quo to it?’. Get into the habit of asking these, she says, and you stand a better chance. It’s some work to do this – you basically need to write a list and check it. I haven’t done this yet. But it all seems sensible, and I fully intend to do so!

If this piques your interest, this is a better review: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-scout-mindset

The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle

What makes for good culture in any group of people? You may not be able to define ‘good culture’, but we know it when we see it. And we certainly recognise the opposite.

The author argues that this isn’t as mysterious as we think: it is caused by particular approaches (not people), which can be laid out.

These approaches are:

• First, you build psychological safety. This makes people feel like a team.
• Then you turn this into actual trusted cooperation by encouraging the sharing of vulnerability. This sounds like Goopy wellness stuff but is just being open about weaknesses and difficulties.
• Finally, you establish purpose by clearly showing what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to do it.
  • This is more than just having a clear purpose. It’s about knowing how you will achieve your purpose, then communicating it loudly and clearly and continually.
• And you achieve all of these via small, everyday behaviours – or ‘signals’. These signals must be everywhere, all the time.

I found this very useful at work. It’s changed how I induct new staff, as well as how I write documentation and introduce new concepts. Worth a look if this is your bag.

The Harry Bosch novels, by Michael Connelly

I caught up on the Harry Bosch novels this year. They’re classic hard-boiled police procedurals, based in Los Angeles, and solid as hell.

I like them because everything follows from the detective work. There are no magical gut feelings, or unlikely coincidences. You can run a string from the crime to its conclusion and know it all makes sense. It’s super relaxing to have that certitude.

And Harry is a long term friend and role model. He acknowledges the complexities of criminal behaviour in a vastly unequal society, but isn’t afraid to judge. He has a diamond moral code that drives everything he does, often to his detriment. You may not always agree with his actions, but they’re coherent.

By all accounts it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the LA police force, too. It’s all real acronyms, processes, frustrations, and corruptions. Also the *city* is real: Michael Connelly famously only uses real locations, and you’ll never see someone cheatily beat the traffic at rush hour.

Harry’s getting a bit old now (worrying), and has a younger partner who isn’t just him in a different body. She’s good too. Lives in a tent. Has a dog. I like her.

You might have seen the Amazon TV show, which ended this year. I thought it started off a bit weak, but it hit its stride in series 4 and was great after that. It accords to the same principles as the books, but also plays with the form. You see a lot of unnecessary action: people walking to cars, getting coffee, standing in lifts. As a result you never know when something is going to happen. They leave open doors in the background of shots for the same reason. Plus the lead actor is a perfect fit. The Harry in my head is now 50% the guy I’ve known for 20 years, and 50% Titus Welliver.

If you need a fast, satisfying read, I highly recommend these books. There are loads of them. The first is The Black Echo. Here’s a timeline.

Little life victory today.

When I was 10 I took grade 3 piano, failed it, and gave up soon after. This annoyed me for 26 years. So at the start of lockdown I signed up for remote lessons.

18 months later and today I passed grade 4. Most pleased.

I got points deducted for playing a baroque piece too romantically. That’s as good an epitaph as any.

Huge thanks to Kensington Piano Lessons for the teaching and encouragement, and for always checking whether it was me or Skype that dropped a note (it was me).

Today I went to the theatre for the first time in forever, for the Frozen musical. I am pleased to report it is exactly what it should be.

You secretly want it to feel like Disney did when you were a child, when stories and reality still overlapped, and all was wonder and wide-eyed excitement. This is obviously a tall order. Nostalgia can get you partway there, and that’s usually dandy. But a bit of you still yearns for a touch of that breathlessness.

Frozen gives this a pretty good shot. It is not an easy cash-in. It has put the effort in, and it pays off.

It does this by being a real spectacle. It is proper dazzling. It fuses beautiful set design with pixel-perfect digital projection mapping, but the two are blended so smoothly that it never feels like a special effect. It’s just Elsa getting emotional and remodeling the entire set in seconds. Wood cracks, snow falls, the temperature seems to drop 10 degrees. Ice radiates perfectly from her hands in choreography that must have taken intricate practice, creating a palace that is honestly visually better than the one in the film. Northern lights shimmer, objects gracefully fly to the wings, and all the time snow swirls in the background. It might have been actual particles of something, it might have been digital: I honestly couldn’t tell. I am a sucker for this kind of ambient magic.

Olaf is particularly clever. He really shouldn’t work on a stage. He’s a three foot walking talking snowman with a very specific non-human bearing. How do you do that and not have him look like someone in a suit? I will not reveal this secret, but they pull off quite the trick here. I am amazed it worked, but after 10mins I was cheerily watching and believing the walking, talking, non-CGI snowman.

The above is very much my kind of thing. I very much enjoy appreciating visual skill and hard work. But I also wanted them to play it straight. Plenty of stage shows go meta for an easy laugh or to paper over a difficult segue. That’s even easier to do in shows nominally for children. But Frozen doesn’t. It tells the story, with minimal adaptations for the stage. It retcons it a little in light of the sequel, and adds a fair few new songs as the second half is a bit sparse otherwise (fans will note the odd inspiration from the unused Anderson-Lopez demos on the Frozen Deluxe album). But it’s the right story, well-told, and they don’t shy away from the tougher parts. They don’t attempt the snow giant, but everything else is intact.

Also: there is a dress. I have been to enough ballroom dances to know a sparkly dress from a holy-wow sparkly dress, and this was a cut above. It was the talk of the interval.

I haven’t mentioned the music, singing, and dancing because they’re what you expect and enjoy in a west-end production. Impressive bordering on ridiculous. Elsa is played by Samantha Barks (Éponine from Les Mis), who seems to be enjoying herself immensely.

It’s bright, it’s clever, it’s a bit like being a kid again. And when they play the first two bars of Let It Go there’s a quiet happy sigh from every child in the room. And not a few of their parents.

Thank you very much to the friend from work who donated the tickets – it was very much appreciated!

This pulled me into another world for a couple of hours. Just lovely.

Imagine staring into a fresh coffee on the first proper day of spring, and in the swirls it’s all sun and youth and dreams and salsa and at the bottom, just for a moment amongst the foam, a little hope for the world. That, plus some thoughtful storytelling, a real sense of place, and enormous musical numbers that fill the neighbourhood – but not so much they don’t fit.

Also: Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans get some extreme cognitive dissonance. You’ll know it when you see it.

Here are the first 8 minutes:

(Very minor spoilers for the first 10mins)

Have you seen the meme about Cruella? The one that says ‘Turns out dalmatians killed Cruella’s parents, how are they so obvious, why am I not a scriptwriter lol’? Let me be 100% clear: none of these people have watched Cruella. Block them on sight.

These people have gone for a cheap gag, for the retweets. Never mind that Cruella itself never sinks to their level. Never mind that it’s a delightful reworlding, full of wit and craft. Never mind the hard work that bursts from its every frame. Never mind that it’s barely about bloody dalmatians. No, these people are connoisseurs of the arts, don’t you know. They’ve memorised tvtropes.org. They don’t have to spend two hours actually engaging with something to know it’s beneath them. I’m glad they’ve been able to signal their superiority and establish standing in their apparently-terrible social circles. They’ve got what they wanted. Now let’s ignore them and speak of things that actually make the world better.

You might indeed wonder how or why you would make a prequel about one of the most properly-evil villains in Disney history. I mean, she tries to kill 101 dogs. Dogs. She wants to kill dogs. This is a thought crime in all civilised countries. She doesn’t even come good at the end. We can all agree there is no redemption here, so are they really going to try and make her a sympathetic character? This is surely unconscionable.

I won’t spoil the plot. I will just say this: they have thought of that.

Cruella knows the story it wants to tell, and goes about it with professional care. There is *work* here. It feels rich. Almost every moment has an insight, or a progression, or a nod, or a spark of the unexpected. Every shot is frameable, every twist a jigsaw piece, every set months in the building, many lines wittier than they could have got away with. And its world is a swirl of impossible one-shot-steadicam dances.

Indeed, its visual style reaches out of the screen and insists on your attention. It successfully builds a large world with a coherent feel – something that’s especially tricky as it needs to make internal sense even when it shouldn’t. The cars are from the ’50s and the security cameras are very not. Does this matter? I didn’t mind, and still wanted to live there.

I liked that the characters weren’t stupid. The bumbling comedy sidekicks do not, in fact, bumble. The fashion people are not weighed down by luvvie. The dogs are clever, but not magic. The security guards are competent, and have to be defeated by cunning rather than slapstick. And the set pieces are spectacular, extravagant, and occasionally mad…but not silly. They tread the fine line between fun and ridiculous with a delicate style.

And the much-maligned plot didn’t go where I expected. It knew what it was doing. Every time I thought it was about to be a little too convenient, there was a reason. My prevailing reaction was ‘huh, clever’.

I enjoy anything full of inbetween moments, too. Half-second visual gags. Neat turns of phrase. Wit from unexpected quarters. Emma Thompson being Emma Thompson. There was no plot reason to go to the effort of Emma Stone stealing a postal bike rather than a regular bike, but it meant she got to ride over a stormy London bridge with envelopes flying in her wake. Just for a couple of seconds. They put in *so much effort*. Like I said, craft.

I suspect you can appreciate it from a fashion perspective too, although this is rather outside my area. But also if you finished The Devil Wears Prada feeling that these awful people did not get sufficient comeuppance, there is comeuppance to be found here.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. You could pick things out, if you wanted to. But there’s so much that’s done so very well that I feel it’s well worth your time. It is put together by competent people, who worked hard. It is never cheap. It is never easy. It is too classy to be meta, and too thoughtful to be dull. Worth a go, if this has piqued your interest. And you’ll see what’s actually going on with the dalmatians.