Why We Like Pirates: On the Depth and Breadth of Boat Stories
Also: Ahsoka and Putting TV in Cinemas, The Aesthetics of Impermanence, and Mr. Beast Closes His Mouth
The past two weeks, I got a copy again of Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb, and I watched the live action adaptation of One Piece on Netflix. To say the least, feeling quite piratey. The latter made me finally decide to dip my toes into reading the manga. Hoist the sails and let’s go!
I think there’s a reason we enjoy pirate stories and it’s because it usually contains the best of all worlds: it’s a boat story that has depth and breadth. Let me explain!
The Carrier Bag story as Venkatesh puts it:
… emphasizes contexts over events, evolving relationships over evolving individuals, continuous evolution over disruptive creative destruction, a communal point of view over an individual point of view.
In Ursula Le Guin’s own words, the carrier bag story is a life story, the opposite of the killer story.
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
It comes from Le Guin’s belief that the likely first cultural object was the bag, something to hold our things together, not the weapon: the cudgel or the stick.
The Hero’s Journey is the more familiar story, the one of conflict, drama, and adventure. It’s the hero venturing into the unknown wrestling both inner and outer demons.
In a different tone:
Carrier Bag stories are stories of socialization, gossip, ritual, and songs.
Hero’s Journey stories are “something like the campfire bro-brag solemnly mythologized into the paleolithic hunting tale with its cave paintings” (via Venkatesh). It’s the campfire orator regaling stories of adventure.
The combination of these are what Venkatesh calls a boat story (highlighting is my own):
Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere between gathering and hunting ways of feeding; somewhere between female and male ways of being. It at once stands for the secure attachment to home and a venturesome disposition towards the unknown. It incorporates the conscientiousness and stewardship of settled life, and the openness to experience of nomadic life. A boat is a home, but a home away from home. A boat story is a journey, but one on which you bring home, and perhaps even Mom, along with you. But it isn’t an insular home, even though it has a boundary. It is a territory but it is not territorial. It is socially open enough to accommodate encounters with strangers, and is in fact eager to accommodate them.
It’s no wonder why this genre is so popular. It’s both cozy and adventurous. It’s literal in many stories (sci-fi has a lot of this):
It’s the Rocinante in the Expanse.
The Rebels and the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. Found family is a huge trope in Star Wars.
The Going Merry with Luffy and the Straw-Hat Pirates in One Piece.
It’s the crew of the Wayfarer in Long Way Home To a Small Angry Planet.
It’s the Enterprise in Star Trek.
In the game, Spiritfarer, you build your boat (like a city planner) while out adventuring through the islands. One of my favourite games, ever.
While I find the contrast of Le Guin vs Campbell a great way to view boat stories, I think there’s perhaps simpler metaphors to use: stories of Depth vs Breadth.
Breadth vs Depth
Stories of depth are stories of staying and going deeper. It’s the carrier bag fiction stories. It’s about relationships and the dynamics of them. It’s the stories of tending, maintenance, and care. It’s growing roots. Cozy-core. It’s stories about home and games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. It’s seeing the same thing change over time.
Stories of breadth is about throwing the net wide, to explore, to learn, to fail, to adventure, to chase your dreams. It’s the Hero’s Journey. It’s to come back, having conquered and changed. It’s risk, reward, and success. It’s seeing many snapshots of life.
I think, ultimately, it’s what we want in life. We’re all somewhere on this spectrum, some preferring more than the other, but ultimately: a life of depth, means a life of connection. It’s growing older with people you love, saying hi to your local barista; asking for the regular, and recognising the names of the dogs in your local park. A life of breadth means play, discovery, and indulgence. It’s meeting new people, trying new food, seeing more of the world, and dancing.
A boat story is both.
PS. My cousin was Chu in the Live Action of One Piece! How cool? 😱
More Links!
Ahsoka Theatrical Release and TV in Cinemas
I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I’m enjoying Ahsoka. Next week, they are doing a mid-season fan event, where fans can go watch episode 5 of Ahsoka in the cinema (for free).
One reason I believe we’re seeing this, is that yes, amid the strikes, studios (and theaters) are trying to fill seats in cinemas. We’ve seen impending re-releases, so in part, it’s likely this mid-season episode being in a cinema is in part due to the strikes.
But… It also feels like an experiment. I *definitely* believe that cinemas should experiment with more regularly hosting weekly viewings of TV. For example, cinemas should allow fans to buy a “season pass” to watch the show each week with fellow fans. During popular TV, like the Game of Thrones era, going to watch it with others in a local bar, for example, was a thing.
I don’t understand why we aren’t seeing this more? Put more TV in cinemas.
Tenochtitlan and Mexico City Comparisons
When I was in Mexico City last week, one thing I craved, was being able to see how Tenochtitlan interfaced with the current city and also, how it changed. Luckily, the algorithm this week coincidentally dropped some amazing comparisons and changes during the history of Lake Texcoco.
This project imagines how it looked alongside side-by-side comparisons to modern day Mexico City. It’s amazing!
And then, a guesstimate at how it was slowly but surely infilled over the years.
Amazing history.
Blockchain Art & The Aesthetics of Impermanence
I enjoyed this perspective and take on blockchain artworks that use time as a medium from James Bloom. Wholeheartedly agree on these takes.
Art that acts through time has been around since at least 1919 when Naum Gabo created the kinetic piece ‘Standing Wave’. It is a realist sculpture, using an electrical motor to transform a straight rod of metal into a wave-form through the medium of time. You might say that the optical effect is an illusion, but there is no sleight of hand here. What you see is what you get: the action of energy on matter over time produces a vivid experience in the present.
Artworks like Terraforms by Mathcastles or Chaos Roads by Chainleft connect back through time to Standing Wave. Both blockchain art series have change and entropy built-in – it’s part of their software. We experience these artworks in a state of impermanence, moving slowly forwards in time. Their current state is just one modality, one momentary possibility in a much longer process, an access point to consider that greater span.
Some other example not mentioned that I enjoy, include:
Exodus II by Folia & David Rudnick. Poems are hardcoded to be made available for sale, decades into the future.
0xDeafBeef’s new HASHMARKS, where the artwork needs to be updated by its owner for 10 years in order for it to retain its shine.
My own This Artwork Is Always On Sale, which as it states, will be for sale, forever.
Time + provenance is still an underrated component of blockchain art as a medium and I hope to see more awareness and projects building with this as a part of its experience.
Steam Banning AI + Copyright Case Denied
I continue to be interested where exactly society draws the line in AI generated works. What *is* AI and what’s sufficient to be accepted or denied?
The case of the guy that won an art fair received another rejection from the US Copyright Office this week, citing that it was done so because the artist wanted to include the entire image for copyright protection. The Copyright Office was willing to copyright the human parts (eg, the edits he did on top of the MidJourney image), but not the entire drawing.
The Office explained that “the image generated by Midjourney that formed the initial basis for th[e] Work is not an original work of authorship protected by copyright.” Id. at 6. The Office accepted Mr. Allen’s claim that humanauthored “visual edits” made with Adobe Photoshop contained a sufficient amount of original authorship to be registered. Id. at 8. However, the Office explained that the features generated by Midjourney and Gigapixel AI must be excluded as non-human authorship. Id. at 6–7, 9. Because Mr. Allen sought to register the entire work and refused to disclaim the portions attributable to AI, the Office could not register the claim. Id. at 9.
It’s interesting because it seems at odds for example how the WGA wants to classify AI assisted scripts for the sake of credit and remuneration. Any AI in the script is not up for any credit or remuneration, which would mean that if a studio gave an AI script to a writer to touch up, the writer would receive full credit as if they wrote it (I stand corrected).
I don’t know if it makes sense to draw the line at purely denying copyright to a creative process that is predominantly machine/AI assisted. Rather, the totality of a work is what makes more sense to me. The act of having to define the process of each work and then having it be judged to be insufficiently AI or not seems like a way bigger burden than just saying: was their sufficient originality and creativity involved even IF the foundation was an AI image. For example, generally, you can get copyright for a photograph that looks the same (same angle and day, subjects, etc) if the creative intent wasn’t to copy. If the AI image background had sufficient creative input (eg, cycling through many prompts), then in its totality alongside its post-snapshot modification seems sufficient for protection if it’s intent isn’t infringement/copying.
In another case, Valve bans AI in games, while Epic Games is more amenable. Tim Sweeney’s approach is more on the outcome, which I agree with.
My view is that, while one could abuse generative AI as a copying mechanism by overtraining or conditioning it to intentionally reproduce something substantially similar to a particular work (just as a human artist can), that’s not usually the case.
There’s inspiration and then there’s copying that can result in harm. If you use the tool to copy, that’s closer to infringement. Of course, the discussion is much broader, because you still have consider the inputs into an AI system.
Steam doesn’t want to put generative AI in their games until there’s a definite court case. But, who knows when that actually happens. I don’t think it’s going to be as clear cut as they want it to be.
It might also just be the case that arguing marginally about these cases doesn’t make sense when in reality it could be seen to be an order of magnitude change. That in itself asks a new question: when do we define something to be so impactful and disruptive that we need to redefine our laws?
It’s still just really interesting how this is unfolding. My opinions will definitely change over time.
Mr Beast Closes His Mouth
It’s kinda wild what access to data Mr. Beast has when you have billions of views. He determined that closing his mouth on thumbnails increases watch time.
I must admit, the YouTuber face always annoyed me, but I guess we’re hardwired for faces. Now, perhaps, it means that it’s just a bit less obnoxious? 😅
BUSTED X HANSON - MMMBOP 2.0
Unashamedly been playing this pop banger from Busted and Hanson. A great remake of a pop hit. Charlie Simpson has such a smooth voice. Really fun.
That’s all for this week, friends! Enjoy a sunset (from your boat over the ocean)!
See you next week!
A lot of fun stuff in here. Enjoyed it!
Campers are such a desirable thing.. Another form of ships... the home away from home. I know people who pay money to park their campers in storage when their HOA disallows it in their driveways.