Star Wars, Marvel, and Start-Ups
What am I having for dinner? Why do we watch TV shows we don't like?
Do you still watch the Star Wars TV shows? Or the Marvel TV shows? The spin-offs and the sequels and the prequels and the tiny bit-part characters given “their own adventure”.
For those who don’t watch them anymore, or maybe never did, the list is impenetrable gibberish. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law? Moon-Knight? Ms. Marvel? Ashoka? They’re not even words, just sounds. Are these titles even designed to encourage you to watch them? Yet still, I have watched them all. I know, I’m the hero Gotham deserves.
At this point, I don’t even know why I watch them. Do I enjoy them? I don’t think that question registers anymore. You might as well ask if the wind enjoys Saturdays. The concept doesn’t exist on the same spectrum as my viewing. Watching these shows is an aspect of life I accept in the same spirit as heartburn or wet socks.
The shows are beyond parody. Take She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, a show about the Hulk’s cousin who becomes a Hulk and is also a woman. And a lawyer. Honestly, the title tells you all you need to know. Based on a comic character from the 1970s, her awkward name causes the show some wrangling. In one fourth-wall-breaking moment, She-Hulk turns to the camera and asks “Is this working for you?” then, in a trompe l'oeil display, breaks through the screen and stumbles into the Disney+ episode select screen. For a moment, the overflowing screenful of spin-offs seems like parodies. But they are all real. Including I am Groot, a whole series in which Vin Diesel plays a tree who can only say the words I am Groot. “There’s a whole universe of stories to tell,” Brad Windernaum told Variety. This show includes episodes such as “Groot Takes a Bath”.
Incidentally, I made a mistake earlier. There isn’t a whole season of I Am Groot episodes. There are two whole seasons.
Even the supposed blockbuster films are impenetrable now. The one-line description of The Marvels at my local cinema reads: “Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence.” I don’t even understand the grammar. Is this the background you need going into the film or a summary of what you’re about to watch?
The TV shows have concepts that sound like trolling. There are three seasons (and a spin-off from this spin-off) of a Star Wars TV show, the premise of which, fundamentally, is: what if Boba Fett adopted Yoda as a child and they, like, went on road trips? This show has been nominated for forty-two Emmys.
I watch them all. Not out of any interest, but out of an ill-defined need to keep in touch with some nebulous, commercial zeitgeist. Perhaps this is the eventual endpoint of capitalism: buying things we don’t want or need out of a vestigial feeling we should.
A friend of mine said recently that he was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and not enjoying a second of it. In the latest Zelda game, players turned off auto-updates so they could exploit a glitch that let them duplicate items, rather than play the game properly. I have joked before that Fortnite, with its long to-do lists of pointless tasks, is Jira for children. Do we even enjoy our fun anymore?
I don’t know what to make of this joyless entertainment. This wading through media to keep on top of it. Is it a habit? A sort of media completionism? I feel a vague desire to keep engaged with culture, but The Marvels is hardly required viewing to take part in public discourse. I know barely anyone who has seen it (which makes sense for a film that lost half a billion dollars at the box office) and those who have say variants of “it isn’t as bad as all that,” with the tone of one describing invasive dental work.
But what’s that on the side of a bus when I step outside? Marvel Studios Echo is streaming, a mini-series based on the exploits of Maya Lopex, a side character from the TV series Hawkeye, a spin-off from the Avengers films. I guess I’ll get the popcorn in.
Elsewhere
An anonymous piece in Intelligencer, Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder:
Buried in my master plan was an assumption that I could stay above the emotional fray of building a company. In hindsight, this was dumb. Start-ups are like sharks: They need movement to survive. But movement implies change, change implies volatility, and volatility implies fluctuations between good and bad. To succeed, you need to average more good days than bad, but bad days are impossible to avoid. And more than any other trait, good founders are defined by an obsession with doing things right; it was inevitable that my self-worth would become entangled with the performance of the business.
It’s a shame that this piece is anonymous as I find the writing compelling. It’s the story of someone starting a business, ostensibly with the American dream of getting rich, cashing out, and doing nothing. But instead, he becomes trapped running a slightly profitable company. First-world problems, perhaps, but it’s beginning to feel that the whole industry is like this: everyone doing the minimum they can while they wait to cash out.
Paul Ford in Wired, Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability
I once enraged a client because I promised during a meeting to build them a “big, boring software platform.” They took me to a fancy bar to yell at me. “We didn't pay you for boring!” they said. “We paid you for exciting!” I had to explain how, in tech, “boring” can be an asset, a way to build for growth, how things that look exciting, like New York City, are built on boring things, like sewage, or investment banking. An endlessly churning consumer economy might be fun in the moment—but have you ever seen the floor of the movie theater when the lights come up? (Of course I paid for the client's drinks.)
Stability is a hard sell, I'll grant you; the payoff is far away. No hominid ever thought, “If I poke this stick into a termite mound, then 50,000 generations from now my progeny will pay for five streaming services, including Peacock.” They thought, “I am tired of chasing these termites all over the place when there's a veritable termite fountain over there.” And suddenly, right then, they were eating the world. Humans are here for a good time, not a long time.
Is there a backlash against constant change and “cool new libraries” spreading across the technology industry? I don’t know whether this is the voice of experience or whether the invisible hand of the generic internet algorithm has discovered I like this sort of thing and is pushing it to me, but I’m seeing more and more articles like this.
Perhaps it is simply that technology has reached a point where we notice how destructive it is to deprecate libraries and frameworks and trigger rewrites. I love boring reliable things. It’s terrifying how rarely you encounter them.
From GQ, by Gabriella Paiella: Spouse Out of Town? It’s Time For ‘Husband Meal’
“Eating an entire pizza and watching a weird movie when the partner is away is Dude Canon,” read one recent tweet. Back in 2018, another tweet precisely captured the feelings inherent to Husband Meal. “SPOUSE: I have to work late Thursday,” it read. “OUTER MONOLOGUE: I am going to miss you. INNER MONOLOGUE: I am going to eat something very stupid.”
In this article, I saw myself. And every male friend I have. A friend of a friend revealed that left to his own devices, he eats an entire can of peas for dinner. I know of several people who, like the anonymous man quoted in this article, might eat for dinner “a grocery store rotisserie chicken over the sink.” My own “husband meal” is a tin of beans and sausages. High protein, low effort. Also delicious. You won’t find it in any Delia Smith cookbooks.
That’s all for today,
Simon