Wish (2023): A Disney Love Letter

The movie Wish (2023) stars the voice actors Ariana DeBose (the protagonist, Asha), Chris Pine (King Magnifico) and Angelique Cabral (the wife of Magnifico, Queen Amaya). One interpretation of the film is that it is a love letter from Disney creators to the “Spirit of Disney.” This message starts with the normal Disney Castle opening animation that reports that the film is part of the celebration of the Disney 100th anniversary. It is daunting to hide a subnarrative about the entire Disney project hidden in what the studio hopes will be an appealing story.

Wish is a fairy tale that was thrown together haphazardly. Eventually it becomes a stock story of good vs. evil. However, it starts sunny with a song introducing the island where the story takes place. From Asha’s song “Welcome to Rosas,” Rosas is described as a very happy, successful and safe kingdom. This song seems an uncanny clone of the introductory song “The Family Madrigal” from Encanto (2021). Further aspects of a Disney fairy tale that are obligatory are added as the story progresses: talking animals, a wizard, a hidden secret, and a supernatural force that shakes things up.

The movie opens its centenary theme with the 100th birthday of Asha’s grandfather. As the film progresses, one might notice details that resemble types from classic Disney films. Seven characters reprising the personalities of Snow White’s dwarves, dancing animals, a seemingly perfect society, a chase through the forest, and a powerful wizard. The tension between providing homage to the old cliches vs. having an original story was too much. I started to waste more effort noticing what a scene alludes to rather than appreciating the story for itself. That tension made the film appear derivative rather than creative.

In Disney films, there isn’t much doubt that a wizard is not going to be commendable for long. Here, instead, his wife is ambiguous. What is her culpability in Magnifico’s activities? Is she redeemed in the end? Does she even need to be redeemed? Her character is one of the more difficult to suss out. For much of the story, she is a passive side character until she is needed for more forceful action. She doesn’t really fit in a morality play about good and evil. Ambiguous characters in Disney films don’t need as much thought. However, I might just be infected by Star Wars’ proposition: the dichotomy between the dark side and light side is sufficient to analyze a character. Magnifico’s character certainly fits the light side/dark side character arc. It’s even made explicit in one scene. But if I’m trapped in that Lucas Simplification, a morally complex character like Queen Amaya just does not compute.

The credits of the movie are clever. Through them, you’re invited to play a game of identifying other Disney animated films. Twinkling starts form constellations in margin of credits roll. (One would wish on them?) Each constellation resolves into characters from other Disney animated movies. The audience could compete to recognize the characters and their film. This playfulness in the credits expands on the joy of 100 years of Disney. The very, very end of the credits is meaningful both as the love letter’s completion and the consummation of one final character’s wish.

What will come next

from the red book…

Wondering what will come next, I fell into a somber mood. The sky was ready for spring. I saw the buds on the trees start to green. It was wonderful to anticipate the returning flocks. I am always amazed when they finally arrive.

Some farmers burn their fence rows in the spring. Normally there is enough moisture that the fires don’t spread. I never liked the harsh smoke that the fires made and have never set those fires.

It has been a hard winter. The ice was everywhere. I keep my house clean so that guests will feel welcome. Some days I try too hard, and I can’t stop moving.

It was windy today. I wanted to go for a walk. I have plenty of people to visit. I think they will be surprised to hear my bold knock at their door. I like it when people came to visit. Usually, it is strangers with something to sell or a message to share.

Soon I will be able to travel. I don’t go out much, but I would like to walk on a wilderness trail. I don’t want to get lost, so I stay away from the wild areas with paths that are hard to follow.

I was reading today. The words were from people who can share their stories in an inviting way. I look forward as they offer lessons that open my eyes to a new reality.

I was sorrowful when I learned how so many people are waiting for a chance to escape. While I feel safe in my home, I know that not everyone has the same attitude. What I welcome, some find as oppressive and harsh. I wish I knew what could offer a different way.

The earth is always turning and each day the sun rises from a different point on the horizon. I see the changes from season to season, but the world is more intricate than that. The planets move through the sky following their own missions. The wild animals don’t notice the changing heavens as they search for food and hope for a chance to live another day. The seasons begin when they are ready, and I wait for them to come around.

I see the world change from day to day. While I don’t always have the words to describe each change, I am glad that the changes never stop.

Independence Day Stories

To help staff celebrate Independence Day this week, the New Yorker is publishing a double issue, the July 8 & 15 2024 issue. I discovered this while I was updating my New Yorker fiction page. The page here is a growing index of the New Yorker short stories published each week. I try to extend the table one week forward and one week back every week. Right now, it goes from 2019-2024.

When I saw that it was a double issue, I was elated briefly, expecting that it would make it an easy two weeks to read all of the stories. Then I looked at the issue’s landing page and found that there are four stories for the issue–the first quadruple story issue in my index.

One of the stories is an unpublished story by E. L. Doctorow. His biographer said that the story “The Drummer Boy on Independence Day” was written in the 1950s but never published. The other three stories are “Kaho” written by Haruki Murakami, “Opening Theory” by Sally Rooney and “The Hadal Zone” by Annie Proulx.

The Hadal Zone is introduced with the blurb “Arwen’s last thought before sleep is that he is in a twisting cyclonic fall down through the ocean trench to become a compressed speck of matter. It feels good.” That’s a curious topic because, coincidentally, Randall Munroe published a video this month “What if you drained the oceans?” answering the question of what would happen if you would put a drain at the bottom of Challenger Deep. Munroe is known for the nerdy xkcd.com and has published several books including a series themed “What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” that was the inspiration for the video)

My “What if” question today is what if I would get a trap and capture the rabbit terrorizing my garden. I’ve got several tomato cages surrounded by fencing devoted to protecting the pepper plants. I planted some zinnia flowers and the rabbit really likes those too. I put a fence around some of them in the hope that a few will recover enough to produce flowers.

It is a pretty bold rabbit. Yesterday I was weeding in the evening, and it came out and watched me. …presumably waiting to find something to eat. I’m more vulnerable to him this year because I have more plants that are rabbit friendly. Peppers are definitely rabbit food. I knew that from last year but was wishful that they would be spared this year. Zinnias are rabbit food and last year’s sunflowers were gone before they got started. I’m glad tomatoes, zucchini and other squash vines are all crossed off in the rabbit diet guide.

I’m glad that I don’t have groundhogs. A cousin who lives in Pennsylvania has a group of groundhogs that have decimated her garden. They have a broader palate than a rabbit. My sister’s garden nemesis is crows which like to play and pull out all of the seedlings. Not to eat them, just to be irritating.

a pepper plant protected by a wire fence

This is one of the plants from a couple weeks ago. I haven’t had any rabbit damage to the peppers now that they’ve got the fence around them. I was concerned that the rabbit might try to dig under the screen, but it’s not that motivated. There are a couple of plants that the rabbit didn’t see because they were hidden in the weeds. Now that they’re more visible, they’re more vulnerable to attack.

The New Yorker is a really solid magazine. I enjoy it every week. One of my projects last year was to make a book containing the comics organized by the artist’s name. It was fun making that. It could be a companion to the book the “New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons”

Some artists are prolific contributors to the New Yorker, adding a comic every two or three issues. There are other artists who only publish one or two comics. It’s been a fun project to learn how to recognize the artists without needing to see the signature. Edward Koren, Roz Chast, William Haefeli, Sarah Akinterinwa, Liana Finck, P.C. Vey, Frank Cotham and Lars Kenseth all have unique styles. There are many other artists with their own characteristic styles that I haven’t listed.

I would like to be skilled enough as an artist to make a mashup of a couple of these artists’ styles (without the cheat of using an A.I. engine to help.)

Walking down the street

Sometimes I walk down toward Cedar Creek. It’s a small river that goes through the middle of town. It’s nice to watch from the bridge and see the water stream by beneath the trees along its banks. As I walk down the street, often there are people sitting on their porches.

I often wave at them or greet them as I pass. There are other houses that look well maintained but no signs of the residents. I wonder what their lives are like. I don’t expect that I’ll ever know. It wouldn’t be polite to go up to their door and ask, “what are you doing tonight?” I guess that lack of knowledge that is a natural state of affairs that hasn’t changed for a longtime.

When I speculate on their lives, I can come up with all sorts of stories. Listening to the comments of family and reading blogs, it seems that the idea of a charitable appraisal isn’t very popular… that the people that disagree with me are deluded or somehow dangerous.

That’s not the attitude that I learned growing up. People can disagree and I don’t need to speculate as to their motives.

It’s easier to feel comfortable with people you see in town. They might be at the store or church. Perhaps I’ll run into them at a sports arena or concert. That familiarity isn’t offered to people further away from the next state or nation. While, in theory, I might believe that we’re all created the same, it’s too easy to speculate, if not here in my neighborhood, across the country something is amiss.

Fair use and ChatGPT

A quick note about the copyright lawsuit centered on fair use and ChatGPT’s use of copyrighted texts. I think the lawsuits are looking at the wrong moment in time to demolish fair use arguments.

My understanding is that there are 4 factors for determining fair use. The Stanford libraries explain them as:

The goals that the material is being used for
The copyrighted item’s properties as a work
How much of it was copied and how substantial that part was
How will the use affect the value of the original source.

Unfortunately, these criteria are fuzzy and need a legal proceeding to come to a definite conclusion.

Most discussions of fair use in the OpenAI copyright lawsuits focus on the final product: the large language model developed from the documents OpenAI accessed. Looking at the ChatGPT product is the wrong moment in the process to identify infringement.

Before the large language model had been created, the text was downloaded to OpenAI’s servers. At this moment, the claim of fair use is most tenuous. The information has been copied in full and potentially can destroy the market for the copied text. It is a situation to deny fair use claims and to apply conventional copyright protection statues.

At this moment of text ingestion, the purpose of the use is to transform the information into an unpredictable level of fidelity. The work is textual, and its value is the information in contains. The majority, if not all, of the information has been taken and it could harm the potential market by making the information available without accessing the original service.

To make an argument for fair use more convincing, fair use evaluation should be made before the information has been taken. One can always say, after the fact, “this is fair use,” but unless the analysis has been made up front, OpenAI can throw out all the ideas they can think of and see if any stand up in court. It is similar to the situation where the police find a criminal using techniques they can’t bring up in court, for example by using a Stingray. The police can backtrack and wash the information they already know, hiding the improper methods from the defendant. OpenAI can backtrack and find any idea they can think of no matter how disingenuous.

Another issue of fair use is that the user of the information should be able to make a listing of the materials that have been accessed. If I’m going to take a painting and claim my use is fair use, I need to be able to present where the work came from. If OpenAI can’t identify what they have taken, they can deny a practice of violating copyrights by hiding the “low hanging fruit” of implausible fair use claims.

If they could show these secondary properties of a fair use access, it would bolster OpenAI’s claim of fair use. Did they make their analysis before accessing the data? Can they completely identify what information they used for fair use. Did they consider the different fair use situations for the different kinds of sources?

They took the text verbatim when they acquired the text. They intended to use it in a way that they can’t argue convincingly that it would not harm the existing market for the text. Those are strong violations of the fair use definitions, it’s just a different point of time when the problematic behavior happened.

News organizations such as the New York Times can argue that the infringement happened when the text was acquired. Whether or not the original text can be retrieved from the created system is irrelevant. The infringement happened long before the OpenAI was brought to defend itself.

Angels in the Snow

When you’re pulled away from connection, the emptiness cannot be filled with distractions that try to protect the best memories. Remembering is a burden that freezes life. The time spent in the evening alone can be an opportunity for sadness and a time for melancholy reflection. The song Alienation by Morning Parade comforts the listener with an appealing image of childhood, making angels in the snow, which contrasts with powerful memories of regret.

The music of Alienation has an insistent beat that matches the chorus’s encouragement to “love a little more” and “live without regrets.” The lyrics insist that it is possible to distract oneself from the anguish of being alone in a world that doesn’t need you. While waiting for change, the song offers hope that one’s life is not set in stone: you’re not doomed to repeat the suffering that came unbidden.

Alienation is a song about distance and separation. It suggests one can escape the schizoid attitude that one doesn’t need anyone else. Rather than knowing that they have nothing to offer, the musicians explain that they might be a source of renewal. The song says that isolation is not an inescapable fate. One can save a few happy memories like playing in the snow as you search for a new way to relate to the world.

This song is the second track from the Morning Parade album “Pure Adulterated Joy” which was released in 2014.

The lyrics describe the tension between one’s world being destroyed and finding a new way to live. Loving more is a way out of despair over one’s past. Even though you are alienated from your past life, you’re in a galaxy full of possibilities. Once you can’t reach out to home anymore and you’re on your own, you can live without regret as you remember simple pleasures and construct a life worth living.

Can’t add account in iPhone Hangouts

I was trying to open Google Hangouts on my iPhone to verify my Google Voice number. The app on my iPhone asked me to log in and then once I gave my password, I got an error message to the effect that it was unable to add the account. The app seemed stuck in a loop so I searched for “Hangouts iphone can’t add account”

This question has a simple answer: Google Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat and Google Meet. See, for example, “The latest on Google Hangouts and the upgrade to Google Chat” at blog.google and “Google puts an end to Google Hangouts once and for all” from Techcrunch.com.

However, when I searched for information with search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, they have at the top of their results a post on the Apple “Ask Different” Stack Exchange (apple.stackexchange.com StackExchange is a collection of topical question and answer sites that allow members to vote on answers. The name is a play on Stock Exchange and the name of one if its first sites, stackoverflow.com that is targeted for programmers.)

What is surprising and frustrating about this is that the preview text of some of the search engines comes from a downvoted answer from 2014. Answers with a negative rating should generally be ignored because they’re considered wrong or unreliable but that is what the search engines present as the answer. None of the answers are current to the January 2023 Hangouts end date. I learned that the transition was announced years ago but the information is drowned in the search results by a lot of obsolete information.

This is a stark example of a weakness of search engines: Once a piece of information is resolved as the highest ranked answer, it is very difficult for it to be replaced, even if it’s wrong. Search engine autocomplete indices are difficult to update and in this case, the auto-completes for a Hangouts search has been captured by ancient history. Typing “google hangouts” in the search box gives autocompletes that appear to indicate that Hangouts is still available.

Fortunately, in this case, the problem could be resolved with an edit to the Apple Stack Exchange question to include a currently valid answer. (I don’t have the reputation points to edit the question nor Apple expertise to get them.)

Closed captioning in an election year

In November I was exercising at the gym. At the front of the room, they’ve got four different networks on the TVs. When I’m on the bike machine, it’s hard to not watch the video. Being November, it was time for the renewal of Medicare insurance policies.

It was hard to not want to mock the Advantage plan advertisers which didn’t include captioning. The vendors are trying to reach an audience that has a higher likelihood of having hearing loss, yet their ads are inaccessible to that group of people.

Election year is another time for lots of targeted advertising. Again, the gym is a good opportunity to see how much different candidates or political parties value the community. If they omit preparing captions, they appear not to care about a wide swath of their hoped-for constituents.

Hearing loss isn’t the only situation where captioning is valuable. Just as I can benefit from the captioning at the gym, live captioning of sports events enhances the experience of the game at a bar or restaurant. At family gatherings such as Thanksgiving, the ones who want to watch a game can turn on the captions and mute the sound to allow the rest of us to visit.

Although my hearing is normal, it is nice to have the captions on while watching a movie. It helps when background sounds in the film muffle the speech. My mom has good hearing but prefers to have the captions on as well. Sometimes people talk too quickly. It helps us enjoy the latest Marvel series more.

YouTube and Nebula also have captioning in the videos. In addition, to the presence of captions, the videos, the urgency for captions on new material can come at the prices of accuracy. It’s not easy to create good quality captions. Captions can degrade when the transcriber or voice recognition system isn’t primed with the vocabulary of a technical video. The technology can continue to improve. Some shows acknowledge the service and who paid for the transcription as the first of the captions.

In the teaser trailer for the Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, I learned from the captions that the laughter at the very end is the Emperor. That was an interesting clue that felt like insider knowledge when I first saw the trailer.

I don’t really like to vote for a candidate whose ads don’t include captions. It shows a lack of care and consideration for who they are asking to vote for them. Do they really care about disabled or older voters, or do they just want to win the election as cheaply as possible?

Image “Closed captions” by Oregon State University [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Everything, Everywhere at Eckhart

A few years ago, my community’s library was attacked by an arsonist that destroyed most of their collection as well as caused severe damage to the main library building. It was really heartbreaking.

While the building was being renovated, the library set up a branch location in a local strip mall. It had a big banner above it “Eckhart Public Library.” Now that the library building is alive again, they have been building their collection for quite a while. I go to borrow videos. I also borrow books and videos from the inter library loan service available through their participation in the statewide Evergreen consortium.

Libraries aren’t just for books. The nearby Allen County Public Library has a makerspace. One time I used their tools to transfer a video I had made onto a DVD. They had a 3-d printer. Locally in Auburn, our library offers many digital services. One that I used last night was Kanopy.

Kanopy is a video streaming service that is optimized as a service for libraries. The library provides access to the service and the patron can stream the videos offered by the service. Months ago, I had watched “Parasite” there. Last night, I saw “Everything, Everywhere All at Once.” It was fun to see it again after seeing it in the theater when it was new. The next video that I hope to watch is Beau is Afraid with Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Ari Aster. I saw news about the Aster film when it was in the theater but never went when I had a chance.

The library is welcoming and a nice space to visit. Having an online presence makes it even more useful. They offer Wi-Fi hotspots for people to borrow. The fire happened in the middle of the summer reading program so there were more books checked out than normal so they that they could rebuild a small offering right away as they were returned.

I was concerned when they closed the temporary branch location before the new library was fully ready. However, it was providential that they did because shortly after that, the pandemic hit. The amount of money saved on not renting a facility no one could use could be folded into their renewed presence.

It breaks my heart for librarians who only want to provide the best service to their patrons are forced to spend time dealing with attacks on their professionalism and the people they serve. Even more so that a small number of people are filing complaints to harass communities that they don’t reside in. It’s shameful that people are losing out in valuable services because of a few troublemakers. According to the Washington Post’s research “The majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.”

Libraries are more than just books and offer lots of services. Our library here has a teen library with youth-oriented activities and resources. I’m glad that the community rallied around our library after the fire. It was definitely something that people who threaten librarians and libraries must never think of as a possibility–that libraries are an asset to a community and not a threat that needs bow to such a limited view of a library’s mission.

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