Pathetic Fallacy

Although it’s been said many times, many ways, Feliz Navidad

Traveling with a large, active dog means forgoing air travel, and instead committing to road tripping, however long it might take. This year, as with the previous two Christmases, my wife, our dog, and I spent several days driving through the wilds of the Midwest to see family; this requires patience, fortitude, and a lot of music and podcasts. My wife does most (okay, all) of the driving, so her phone was linked into CarPlay, and she had selected several festive playlists for the trip.

Almost immediately upon hitting play, the music began skipping erratically. Songs cut out before their final, or even second, choruses. They faded into the next song but skipped its first minute or two. Some songs blipped in for a few bars and left. One of these was “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and I was mostly thankful for its truncation, but on the whole the situation was not conducive to singing along, and isn’t belting songs out-of-tune in the safety of one’s car the whole point?

I soon realized what had happened: AutoMix. Apple published the most recent release of iOS, 26, with this new feature in their Music app—and in fact, AutoMix is turned on upon upgrade without alerting the user. Apple touts the “enhancement” in a press release thusly:

Apple Music delivers an elevated listening experience with AutoMix, which mixes one song into the next, just like a DJ. Using AI to analyze audio features, it crafts unique transitions between songs with time stretching and beat matching to deliver continuous playback and an even more seamless listening experience.

What this means in the real world is that during play the application fades songs one into the other, attempting to sync up passages with similar tempos. This may require making the beat faster or slower and jumping over bits of the songs. Except it’s not bits, it’s often most of the track, and it’s not a “seamless listening experience,” it’s a freaking mess.

There’s a lot to hate about this feature. Apple wants users to think of it as having a virtual club DJ in one’s pocket, but it feels to me more like radio in the 60s and 70s, when announcers would cue one track into another and talk over the introductions and fadeouts in an effort to keep fickle listeners from turning the dial. Songs were treated like unvariegated slop instead of as discrete works with their own integrity. Producers during this time mixed tracks with an ear to radio play, and so almost every song ended in a tediously long fadeout; some even had fade-ins, or lengthy instrumental openings. Disk jockeys even had a term for talking over the entirety of a song’s opening, stopping just as the vocals began: “hitting the post.” Punk rock’s greatest gift to the world was to normalize songs that simply started and ended without any of that nonsense.

So there are aesthetic reasons to reject Apple’s feature. But even if you really, really want (for god knows what reason) your songs to fade in and out seamlessly, AutoMix ain’t it, kid. Its output is beyond broken: songs are truncated, lyrics are cut-off mid phrase. A feature this busted should never have been released, let alone be set as the default behavior. Somewhere along the line a coder, or a project leader, or QA tester, or even a clueless manager type should have listened to a tech demo and say, eww, no, what the hell is that, make it stop now.

But this is the problem with tech companies today: a fetish for novelty intersecting with the sunk cost fallacy. They spent x number of man-hours creating this electronic albatross and by god they’re going to ship it, even if (especially if) no one was asking for it in the first place. They have to be the first out of the gate, or someone else is going to corner the market in bad ideas. Apple’s press release brags that AutoMix uses AI in its analysis, and in many ways this feature is an encapsulation of the industry-wide fiasco that is Artificial Intelligence. AI is shoved on us whether we want it or not, whether it’s actually useful or appropriate. AI carries ethical and moral concerns. But most of all, it just doesn’t work.

Fortunately for my wife and dog and me, I was able to turn the feature off after a few minutes poking around the phone settings. Sweet relief! Then when we eventually arrived at my parents’ house, I got to experience the joy of turning off their TV’s motion smoothing. It was truly a magical Christmas. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us Every One!

Bonus post: More Eldritch AI Horrors

One of the stops on my round of Christmas Day socializing with family was to visit my older brother Rob and his extended family, and they are all perfectly wonderful people, but by that point my stupid autistic brain was pretty much shut down, so while everyone was playing party games the way normal people do, I was hyper-fixating on a YouTube video that was playing on the television, titled descriptively enough, “Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Gene Autry, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole🎄Golden Christmas.” I believe Rob was just looking for an easy playlist of seasonal crooner classics, and for the most part, the audio of this video fit the bill, providing familiar recordings that are probably not really public domain, but let’s not draw attention and pretend that they are.

But it wasn’t the songs that I was focused upon, it was the unearthly generative AI video that accompanies them. This consists of an eight and a half minute loop that depicts festive scenes of a holiday-decorated train traveling through impossibly white mountains covered in pine trees and snow. From time to time the train arrives in a Thomas Kinkade-esque village where happy people mill about shops that resemble dollhouses. Everything is rendered in the oversaturated glow of AI. And if one is prone to hyperfixation, strange things become apparent the more the loop repeats.

The number of cars in the train, for example, keeps changing. And the engine itself changes from a steam-powered to a cable car (although the cable car seems to have a vestigial smoke stack). The train’s riders stick their mittened hands out of the window and snow bursts off the knitwear in clouds, although the trees the passengers reach for are about 20 feet away. As the train streams through the town center, there are no platforms and the pedestrians wander by mere inches from their festive deaths.

Strangest of all is a happy couple consisting of a man in his 60s and a woman in her 20s (I guess AI is prone to midlife crises). The man carries a wrapped gift precariously pinched between the his right thumb and index finger. He stops and turns to his companion, smiling. As he lifts his left hand, a second gift magically appears, pulled whimsically from a parallel dimension.

Around the 1:23 mark, the real cosmic horror begins. At this point, the soundtrack also becomes generative AI, with a Dean Martinish voice singing unholy chimerical monstrosities that resemble actual songs, as one might remember them in a waking nightmare. I don’t know why the producer of this video decided that an hour and twenty three minutes was the limit for unauthorized song use, unless perhaps that producer were actually an AI as well. In any case, the soundtrack for the last forty minutes of the video is Christmas songs from the Upside-Down, as sung by a choir of Gremlins and Heat Misers. For me, the apex/nadir of the lyrics are:

so wave goodbye to Frosty,
as he melts away today

To which I say again, God Bless Us Every One!

Hang in there

Note: this is another companion essay to an episode of podcast, Sophomore Lit. Maybe listen to it before reading this?

Shortly after recording the most recent Sophomore Lit episode about Robert Westall’s young adult novel The Watch House (1977), guest host Ross Cleaver pointed me towards an online discussion about a magic lantern series called Our Life Boat Men. While most of the eight-slide series features scenes of rescues involving life boats, there is one slide that depicts a rescue using a rope line and pulley, the technique that Westall describes in his book.

“The Pulley.” Slide no. 7 from the series *Our Life-Boat Men*, W. Butcher & Sons, c. 1901.
Image from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

Magic lanterns were a form of image projector popular in the 19th and early 20th century. The ability of curved glass to bend light was known from antiquity, with the earliest written reference appearing in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Reading-stones (rounded glass magnifiers) and even spectacles were used in medieval times. But modern lenses as we know them started in the 17th and 18th century with the development of the telescope and the microscope. By the 19th century optics had become precise enough to sharply focus projected light. This development, along with increasingly bright light sources, such as gas and limelight, led to the commercial production and popularity of magic lanterns.

Butcher & Sons “Primus” magic lantern, c. 1890.

These projectors used glass slides that came in a variety of sizes upon which were the images to be projected. The first slides were hand-painted, but later, photographic techniques allowed for mass replication. At first, publishing companies mechanically transferred black line images to the slides, most commonly using decals; colors (if any) still had to be added by hand. But at the end of the 19th century chromolithography and semi-transparent inks made possible printing uniform editions of magic lantern slides, albeit with often imperfect registration of colors, as is evident from “The Pulley.”

The series Our Life-Boat Men was sold as a part of London-based W. Butcher & Son’s Junior Lecturer’s Series. While the slides themselves are undated, a 1901 advertisement lists Our Life-Boat Men as one of six “new” lithographic sets produced to be used with their Primus line of lanterns. Butcher & Sons aimed at a market of well-to-do home users, and their chromolithographic slides were relatively inexpensive when compared to ones designed for theatrical use—and yes, in the 19th century people did pay admission for the privilege of viewing still projections in darkened rooms.

Butcher and Sons — Advertisement for W. Butcher & Sons in *The Optical Magic Lantern Journal* and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901.

In Westall’s book, the book’s protagonist Anne is told of the techniques employed by the Victorian life-savers who used to work at the titular watch house. The port of the novel’s fictional town of Garmouth (based upon Westall’s hometown of Tynemouth) is bounded on its sides by shallows covered with mounds of rock, and in bad weather ships could beach themselves only a few hundred feet from shore. The watch house volunteers would shoot ropes to the ships using rockets and survivors could be drawn ashore using pulleys. As I mention on the podcast, when I read these passages—describing rescues carried out in the 1850’s—I was incredulous. It didn’t seem possible, especially with 19th-century rockets, to fire with such accuracy while dragging 20 pounds of rope (or more). But apparently this was a widely-used technique. The Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum of displays examples of the apparatuses that were employed.

RA Fig 2 — The Boxer rocket, developed in 1855, was a two-stage rescue rocket.
Image by Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the slide “The Pulley” the intrepid hero is riding in a lifebuoy that is hitched to a hoist trolley—if something goes wrong, at least he has a flotation device. In his arms he appears to be holding a child wrapped in a tattered red blanket. The rescuer is lightly dressed for such cold weather, although he wears a sou’wester oilskin hat, which is standard rough weather maritime gear. There are narrative details that make me wonder. Why is the man barefoot? Is that standard practice, or did he loose his boots in the operation? He appears to have a strand of kelp trailing from one foot. Does this mean he’s grazing the water? Is he in danger of submerging? Come to think of it, how can the rope be staying that taut? Wouldn’t it dip with the weight of the passengers?

But mostly: Why can’t I stop obsessing over random bits of forgotten culture?

Hoorah for the pumpkin pie

This post is a companion piece to this year’s Thanksgiving Special episode of Sophomore Lit. If you’re not a listener, why not give it a try? But if podcasts aren’t your thing, go read another post on this blog.

This Thanksgiving marks the 10th anniversary of drunken “special” episodes of my podcast, Sophomore Lit, featuring my brothers, Rob and Dan. Sophomore Lit is normally a podcast where a guest and I read a work of formational literature—often one that we were assigned to read in high school, or grade school, or college, but also simply works that young readers read. Then we discuss the work, but with the perspective of older readers. These special episodes with my brothers, however, are purposefully goofy, having as their subject pieces of culture that are obscure, marginal, and in most cases literature in only the loosest sense.

When I started Sophomore Lit, my concept was to humorously dissect the kind of book you only ever read in high school. I got the idea when one of my own kids had to read Lord of the Flies for their English class and I thought about all the books that are largely remembered today as assigned reading. Particularly A Separate Peace, which I think is a very weak novel, but which somehow won the lottery of staying perpetually in print because of high school lit classes. If you listen to the first dozen or so episodes of the podcast (I don’t recommend it), you can hear me trying to strike a comedic tone¹. But as the show matured, I realized that my listenership was sincerely interested in discussing these works and nostalgic for the kind of discussion that only happens in the classroom. I remember a comment from a gentleman thanking me because he had never gone to college, but hearing books discussed was a way for him to partake in literary discourse.

As the episodes piled up I became more and more interested in the whole idea of literary canons. I realized that the teachers who taught me had themselves been in high school in the 1960s and 1970s, and the works they chose for their classes reflected Boomer tastes towards counterculture, science fiction, and social change. They were also mostly written by a bunch of white guys. So I started to go out of my way to enlarge the works the podcast covered, to include more women, minorities, non-Americans, and works that were not a part of my canon but a part of Millennial canon, or British canon, or others. I found that I was teaching myself by doing this, and that my listeners were getting exposed to a greater variety of works, and I’m glad for the evolution of the podcast. But in the back of my mind, I still occasionally wanted to do something silly.

Near where I live in Boston there are two streets a block apart called John Alden Road and Myles Standish Road. There is, however, no Priscilla Mullins Road. This amused me for a long time because I wondered how many people who lived on these streets had ever read “The Courtship of Miles Standish.²” I have a soft spot in my heart (and my head)³ for ponderous 19th century poetry—I find it fascinating that writers like Longfellow, Tennyson, or Greenleaf Whittier were the rock stars of their age, and that whole generations of schoolchildren were forced to recite their work for declamation. My father used to quote “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” to me all the time. I thought that I should eventually do an episode on “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” because the idea amused me, and because the poem was a card in the Whitman card game Authors that my family had when I was a kid.

Authors card — Whitman *Authors* card for “Courtship of Miles Standish” c. 1967

Many years ago, in the early 2000’s, Dan had made fun of visiting me for Thanksgiving (or at least a fictionalized version of me) in an episode of his Channel 102 series 9 O’Clock Meeting. So when in 2016 he again came to Boston for the holiday, I decided it was fair game to put him on the spot.

Dan did this series with Matt Koff back in his pre-podcast days.

The characters in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” were all Pilgrims, which sort of made the poem appropriate for a holiday episode, and because we had eaten too much and were slightly drunk I was feeling festive. And to be honest, I try to have Dan on my podcast as much as he’ll put up with, because he’s the internet celebrity of the family and I always hope he’ll bring some of that sweet Flop House listenership along. (I don’t really know what my podcast stats are like, but I suspect they are perishingly small compared to his, which is probably why he’s never asked me to guest on the Flop House⁴.)

I can’t speak on Dan’s behalf, but I enjoyed recording the episode a lot, and so the next year I wanted to do another. That time my older brother Rob was also visiting, so I invited him to partake. Poor Rob, in spite of being a lawyer and therefore used to arguing in public, was a bit mic shy, but I got him drunk as well. That time we discussed Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is bona fide Literature, but also goofy as hell. And when I posted the episode, Jason Snell, the head honcho of the Incomparable Network (my podcast home), made a very nice tweet comparing the three of us to the McElroys, in the sense of being three brothers, not in the sense of being anywhere as funny. And so the Thanksgiving episodes became Sophomore Lit tradition. At least a tradition for me; I guess it became tradition for my brothers to dread my annual pitch for increasingly silly topics. Here’s a full list of all the previous specials:

2024 Comfort Reads
2023 Poor Richard’s Almanack
2022 The Wreck of the Hesperus
2021 Burma-Shave
2020 Trees
2019 Casey at the Bat
2018 Over the River and Through the Woods
2017 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
2016 The Courtship of Miles Standish

As for this year’s subject of protest songs: the idea came to me from a combination of my memories of Dad playing Alice’s Restaurant on the piano and of my irritation with the smug coyness of the fictional “Mountain People” in One Tin Soldier, who really must take some responsibility for their own demise. And then I threw in Where Have All the Flowers Gone? because of the rule of threes.

I should stress that I have genuine affection for all the songs we discussed. I’m sure that much of that comes from hearing these when I was very young, but a lot of it also comes from admiring their earnestness. By the 1980s a veneer of sarcasm and cynicism covered most of American pop culture, and this was the formative decade for Generation X, so it was sort of inevitable that we would be seen as ironic and nihilistic. But our childhoods were steeped in sincerity, however mawkish, and I like to think that that’s the gooey core hidden under our hard candy shells. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving.

You can also hear a lot of abrupt audio jumps from me fumbling about in Audacity, trying to correct all my verbal tics. ↩︎
Standish, Alden, and Mullins were all real people who arrived on the Mayflower, but only remembered through Longfellow’s fictional poem. ↩︎
This is not my original joke but I forget where I read it. ↩︎
Hint, hint. ↩︎