j. b. crawford

People, especially enthusiasts of classical music, sometimes criticize John Williams for being a bit repetitive and over-bombastic. But, well, he’s first and foremost a film compose, and that’s sort of the nature of the genre. People tend to select film composers because they liked their previous work and want something very similar, so they tend to have a pretty consistent style. You see the same with other prominent film composers like Hans Zimmer. I guess what’s notable about John Williams is that he was such a prolific and popular film composer for such a long period that his style was the style of film scores for a generation. It’s hard to imagine an era of film, hits like Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, without his bombast. His tendency to “go big” is part of what defined these epics.

All that said, my favorite John Williams composition strays a little bit from film. It’s “The Mission,” better known as the theme for the NBC nightly news. The short theme is instantly recognizable to probably most Americans, but not so many have heard the full composition. NBC used to play it over credits at the end of the last news segment but I don’t think they do any more. Fortunately there’s a (potato quality) YouTube video of John Williams himself directing a Sony studio orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7kIgcYgIQk

Increasingly I find it depending mostly on what the game was built for… I was raised, if you will, on PC point and shoots, and so my preference is for mouse and keyboard. But even a lot of AAA games these days that are console ports have noticeable pointer lag and aggressive reticule gravity or other aids. I find these really frustrating since they interfere with the 1:1 sense you get with motion on a mouse, so I’ll switch to a controller instead.

Hogwarts Legacy is an example of a recent AAA release that has such heavy reticule gravity that sometimes the best strategy is to just hold an analog stick forward and not move it (e.g. in the broom races)… I hate this kind of thing but I feel like it’s something you put up with as a PC gamer due to the popularity edge the consoles have. At least it tends to be games where fast aiming isn’t a huge factor.

An interesting article. I have some experience with colonias as there’s one near me and I have been through and near others. What’s a bit confusing to me is that this doesn’t sound like a colonia at all (although it is referred to as “formerly” a colonia, perhaps confusing me further). Colonias are typically areas with no incorporated entity at all and often on land not platted for residential development. This leads to a near complete lack of infrastructure. Without water, sewer, paved roads, or even street addressing, colonias tend to have significant safety and health problems just due to the realities of exurban population concentration without the infrastructure to support it.

That’s not the case here, though—the area is apparently a planned residential development with an active developer and property owner’s association. To the extent there are infrastructure issues it’s probably a result of underregulation of residential development, a widespread problem in Texas that the article nods to. But that’s a whole issue aside from the “haven for illegality” accusation which feels like far more of a scare story than a reality. Still, crime in areas like this can become a significant problem… impoverished people in marginal living situations (e.g. RVs parked on rural lots) tend to be very attractive targets for theft, and that starts a feedback loop of escalating violence and worsening conditions as residents feel forced to defend their livelihood and shelter—and therefore get trigger happy with firearms and aren’t able to hold down jobs due to the time they’d be away. This has visibly played out in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, for example.

The situation here seems fairly optimistic, though, doesn’t it? The school district seems responsive, the POA is funding law enforcement. It looks like a community that’s maybe on the edge of this downwards trend starting, but that’s taking active measures to stop it. What they need from the state legislature is probably more funding and perhaps authority to incorporate, I’m not sure how that works in Texas. But that doesn’t look like what they’re going to get, because the legislature’s dominant party has decided to make it an illegal immigration story.

The detail that this is playing out in “Liberty County” is, of course, a wonderful one. It invites a comparison to libertarian/anarchist development efforts that have often failed in interesting ways, but then this doesn’t seem to be one. The leg seems invested in it not coming off that way, either.

It’s sort of hard to know what happened in more detail without really good-quality reporting from in the courtroom, that might inform as to why the jury found the way they did. We know that the judge issued a majority instruction, a not very uncommon process where, if the jury deliberates for too long, the judge tells them that a ruling can now be accepted with one or two dissenters. I don’t think the jury says what the vote was, just that it was enough, so it could have been unanimous, we don’t know. In the US journalists often try to track down jury members and interview them to get those kinds of details but jurors don’t always want the media circus around them and I don’t know if that’s common practice in the UK.

The dropped charges were apparently alternative counts covering the same crime as the other charges and were probably dropped for that reason, although it’s interesting that no reporters seem to have really given a reason why. I don’t know enough about the UK legal opinion to give much of a guess as to why except that I see the crown prosecution manual does discourage using alternative counts (of a lower crime) in rape cases. Some context in, of all things, Yahoo News, suggests the judge may have been concerned that the alternative counts were making things more complicated for the jury. In the US, some states prohibit charging the same crime as multiple alternative counts for this reason, or have a special procedure for the jury to make it easier, it’s sort of a known issue that it’s hard for a jury to come to a verdict when they’re having to choose guilty/innocent for multiple counts of different exact allegations over one event.

The outcome is dissatisfying, but it’s sort of the outcome the criminal justice system is designed to produce. All the jury found is that there was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Spacey was guilty. There could still be evidence making it most likely that Spacey was guilty, but criminal prosecutions require the higher standard because of the severe impacts of criminal charges. The crown prosecution service put out a statement that they accept the ruling and were just doing their job, which in the US would look more like a prosecutor trying to save face over pursuing what wasn’t the strongest case, but I have no idea about the UK, it might be totally routine to make a statement like that.

The Spacey thing is interesting if you like to follow the legal details. The US cases against him (criminal and civil) were both dropped after the accuser stopped cooperating with the prosecution, at one point pleading the fifth when testifying. That tends to be taken as a sign that the accuser was lying about at least something substantial, thus the prosecutor dropping the charges, but that wasn’t determined by the court or anything. It’s possible, although maybe not so likely, that the accuser was acting in good faith and lost interest in pursuing the case for some other reason. That’s probably more likely when a celebrity is involved, these celebrity prosecutions are all the more complex when it comes to people’s motivations.

The whole culture around sexual harassment/assault allegations has changed a lot over recent years (since “MeToo” if you will), for the better in many ways, but I think there’s still a lot of unsettled issues. It seems like in celebrity cases it’s a lot more likely that “hangers on” will show up with claims that are maybe not untrue but at least stretch the truth. At the same time we obviously have to take accusers very seriously or we risk ignoring criminality because the accused is a popular celebrity. The justice system produces a lot of these unclear outcomes where maybe there were multiple accusers and things look really sketchy for the accused, but it’s not clear enough for a prosecution. That situation has always ended up going to the court of public opinion for a final verdict, but in the case of a big celebrity like Spacey that’s sort of a huge deal. Will studios keep working with Spacey? I suspect the answer is yes, because he’s a huge celebrity, not because of anything about the merits of the case against him. In corporate environments the company will sometimes hire a private investigator to make a decision about the accusation and fire based on that (this is in the US where there are no employment protections), which kind of has its own sketchiness, but the media industry isn’t known for caring that much.

There’s an interesting aspect of this issue that I think the post summary really dismisses. Photos coming from phones these days sort of are AI, and in an annoyingly pervasive way.

I’ve actually gone back from using my phone to using a proper camera again over the last year or so because I’m getting so irritated by the amount of ML-based post-processing my phone does. It results in a lot of photos looking bad, and there’s no easy way to bypass it besides setting the phone to save raw which sort of defeats the point of using the phone in a lot of ways (ability to go from taking the photo to posting on the device). A really common situation for me is when I take a photo with my phone that is blurry because of bad focus/shake/low light/some combination. The phone does really aggressive ML “sharpening” of the image that makes it look extremely artificial and, frankly, a lot worse than if the postprocessing had been omitted. I’ve had sets of photos I took totally ruined by this kind of “helpfulness.”

It’s a tricky issue, there absolutely are benefits to cameras using the best technology available to create the best photograph available. I’m not meaning to appeal to some sense of artistic integrity or “real photography” here. I just hate the lack of control over the product. I used to be really into photography as a hobby and had a lot of opinions about lenses and mostly set up exposures manually. Nowadays I use my Sony Alpha with the kit lens and rarely take it off of its “smart” auto mode, which does have some ML-driven features like subject detection. But it feels like I have so much more control over the output than I do with my phone, because the Sony doesn’t run the image through ten layers of AI processing that’s not a whole lot better than the state of the art in Instagram filters before saving it. If I don’t hold the camera steady it’ll just come out motion blurred, not like someone new to photoshop has just discovered the posterize button.

As I understand Apple is better than most of the Android vendors about this kind of thing and the iPhone processing probably produces better output - but it’s still frustrating to me feeling like photos are changing from “capturing the scene” to “recreating the scene.” I did graduate work on forensics of digital images, learned a lot of theory and methods for analyzing and reversing in-camera processing. I did some research on the “auto HDR” feature that was starting to appear in Android devices at the time and whether or not it defeated some known forensic methods for device fingerprinting (mostly, not totally). But that was the tip of the iceberg… it used to be that cameras only did a bit of processing, debayering for example, the kind of things that really need to be done to turn sensor data into a useful image because of the properties of the sensor and readout pipeline. But phones, the dominant photographic tool today, are taking it to this whole new level where they do what would have been very complex postprocessing on every image, as it’s taken.

As with so many things, I guess it’s good when it works, but endlessly frustrating when it doesn’t. At least it feels like the phone vendors are doing their part to preserve “traditional” photographic technology, if that’s what you’d call a Sony mirrorless, by really nerfing phones as tools for people who want much control over the result. I do understand there are third-party apps for iPhone that expose a lot more user control but it seems like they also have some limitations with how much of the camera stack they can control/bypass.