The Digital Antiquarian

On PC gaming history. Jimmy Maher has an excellent blog on working & playing his way through the early computing industry as it impinged on gaming, covering the wild ferment of the times, D&D, the European scenes, the economic backstabbing, game creators and studios’ swift rises & even swifter falls, and everything (often benefiting from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives).

There are many curious parts of gaming/computing history: for example, there is a striking prevalence of mtf (but not ftm) transsexuals; and exemplifying the chaos, it’s hard to identify any thing that people consistently got wrong—for every tactic that worked brilliantly one time & place, there appears to be an equal & opposite failure elsewhere. For one 1980s company, a foray into business software doomed it, while the same pivot works out brilliantly for another who is still around; one company dominates the market by leaping boldly onto a cutting-edge new system, while another bets the wrong way & dies or blows the revenue from its hit & is left scrambling; one company unwisely abandons the cash cow of older systems, while another reaps cash flow from obsolete microcomputers until it’s too late. The industry bet on computers rather than video game consoles looks like genius—right up until Nintendo invades. Many companies profit massively from selling hardware and commoditizing licensed OSes or software, unless they are IBM/Microsoft and it works out the other way etc. Given the sheer number of computer & video game platforms, people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs come off as having been both inevitable & far more lucky than good. (See also my review of Brand’s The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.)

Many posts are worth the read:

Amy

Amy (2015): Amy is a documentary/biopic on singer Amy Winehouse; while I was almost totally ignorant of Winehouse beside knowing she was some sort of singer who died of a drug overdose a few years ago, this was highly rated as a documentary, with the major attraction of Winehouse having been filmed in long home videos for years long before she ever became famous. Since for famous people, the most interesting part of their life is often their obscure beginnings, which for exactly that reason is also the most poorly documented part of their lives, this makes the documentary much more interesting than usual.

So, Winehouse. I assumed from the bizarre makeup and tattoos I’d seen in occasional photos that she was some sort of southern American redneck; turns out she was actually British and more or less a chav (despite being Jewish?), inheriting all the pathologies of the lower classes. A proper review of this could only be written by Theodore Dalrymple but the summary is short: fame often makes people more than themselves, and Winehouse was broken from early on & lived with broken people, from her dubiously supportive friends to her useless parasite boyfriends/husbands to her negligent, selfish, exploitative father to the record industry to the fans who bought her 2006 song “Rehab” & funded the paparazzi. Perhaps she might have grown out of it into a better self, but the accelerants of fame & money spread the fire too fast.

The documentary tries to suggest that Winehouse’s problems were all Freudian and based on her parent’s divorce around while she was starting puberty, but this is unlikely as it is a bit of a post hoc (impulsivity and behavioral problems would tend to surface around that time regardless), most people survive a divorce without becoming drug addicts, and problems of various sorts appear to run in the family (“everything is heritable”/“everything is correlated”). The genesis of “Rehab” really says it all—a quip boasting about not getting treatment for the poly drug abuse (including but not limited to tobacco, marijuana, heroin, & alcohol) which was quite visibly killing her—watching the videos progress over the film, she already looks half-dead by 2006 as she destroyed herself with drugs, tattoos, and ever more bizarre makeup—is greeted by her collaborator not as a crisis but a hook for a new song, and by the rest of the world as a revelation. (To quote Dante’s description of Wuthering Heights: “The action is laid in Hell,—only it seems places and people have English names there.” Presumably, the second/third circle, the realm of hungry ghosts.) The surprising thing is not that Winehouse died young but that she survived so long. So it is a horror movie. As far as that goes, it is quite good and greatly benefits from the home videos.

The major flaw of Amy is that it does a terrible job of showing why Winehouse & her music were so popular. The music is presented mostly as snippets, and I am left not understanding what was good about it. This leads to some eyebrow-raising scenes like early on where a music executive praises the young teen Winehouse as “a force of nature” in her first label audition as she plays on a guitar straining to sing some lyrics which sound like, well, a young teenage girl had written them in a diary decorated with drawings of little hearts. ‘One does not care to recollect the mistakes of youth’, but the director is hardly doing a good job of showing what musical talent she had to deserve such world fame and Grammies. I should not have to go outside the text to understand something as fundamental to a musician’s life as their music.

Overall, required viewing for any Winehouse fan and of general psychiatric interest; possibly too painful to watch for others.