I’m away with family this week so here are some more scraps from my notes (previously).

Disney is considering a reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. Goodness knows how many Jurassic Park movies there are.

We need to create new IP.

Culture creates new ideas downstream. Without new IP, it’s like trying to feed yourself by eating your own arm.

So: moratorium on re-using IP in movies. The UK makes heavy use of movie subsidies. We should use this to disincentivise anything sits inside an existing franchise. If a movie’s success is likely more to do with existing mindshare than its content, don’t support it.

Radically reduce copyright down to 10 years or something. More than that: invent a new super-anti-copyright which actively imposes costs on any content which is too close to any existing content in an AI-calculated vibes database or something.

i.e. tax unoriginality.

The past is a foreign country that we should impose tariffs on.

There’s a kind of face that we don’t get anymore.

Neil Armstrong, Christopher Reeve as Superman, Keir Dullea as Dave Bowman in 2001.

I don’t know how to characterise it: open, emotionally imperturbable. happy. Where did it go?

I’m at the cricket today and England are losing. It’s an interesting feeling to be with, losing, especially while 90,000 people in the stadium (plus some visiting fans) are yelling for the winners – Australia, at this point.

I have zero memory for where cutlery goes in the cutlery drawer. I don’t consciously look when I take things out but if everything was moved around, it wouldn’t make any difference. On the occasions that all the knives, forks and spoons have been used and I’m unloading the dishwasher (which I do daily), I cannot for the life of me remember which sections they go in, so I return them in any old order. Raw extended mind.

A few weeks ago I was on a zoom call where someone had a standing mirror in their room in the background. I’ve never seen that before. It kept me weirdly on edge throughout like it violated some previously unstated video call feng shui or something.

(I had another call in which the person’s screen was reflected in a shiny window behind them and so I could see my own face over their shoulder. But that seemed fine. This was not the same.)

My disquiet came because the mirror was angled such that it showed an off-screen part of the room. I could see beyond the bounds; it broke the container.