THE BLAST THAT TEARS THE SKIES [501]

Before today, I have only seen Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2004 anime “Steamboy” once, just after its English dub had been released. I remember it wasn’t in ideal circumstances: it is one of only two films I have seen while on a plane, the other being “The Matrix”, but while I had seen that film many times - I hoped the gun fire would keep me awake during the long-haul flight - I was also able to fill in the detail lost by the reduced resolution of the smaller screen and the drone of the jet engines. Therefore, while I have watched “Steamboy”, I have only seen as much of it as watching it on your phone would allow today.

This would not do considering the level of detail in Otomo’s production, rivalled in animation perhaps only by his own masterpiece, “Akira” (1988), effectively the cyberpunk counterpart to “Steamboy’s” steampunk portrayal of industrial Manchester and London. I can now properly see the application of computer-generated imagery in whirling cogs and machinery, and into the moving of our view within spaces, or around objects. Over four hundred shots in “Steamboy” use CGI, and these can only be noticed closely through how these elements move ever so slightly differently from hand-drawn elements, none of which you can see on a smaller screen.

The science fiction author K.W. Jeter coined the term “steampunk” in 1987 to group together “gonzo-historical” works by the likes of himself, Michael Moorcock and Faren Miller, while a tradition of Japanese fascination with Victorian industrial Europe was evident in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky”, released in 1986.

What I remembered of “Steamboy” was its having been set in the UK, and an “Akira”-like build-up and explosion. Watching it for the second time confirmed Manchester as the base where which the Industrial Revolution continuously pushed steam power as far as it could go - the Steam family is at the centre of these developments, in rivalry with Robert Stephenson, the real-life son of George Stephenson, around which a web of military and corporate espionage rages. The MacGuffin of the story is the “steam ball”, a pressurised power source with near-unlimited energy that defies explanation, Working much like a battery, three “steam balls” power a “Steam Castle”, built as a private pavilion at Great Exhibition taking place in London, which sheds its conventional armour to become a fortress that flies uncontrollably into the centre of London, destroying buildings as it goes.

I loved the film, with its sense of family humanising the machinery. I watched the full-length English dub of the film, with Sir Patrick Stewart as grandfather Lloyd Steam, Alfred Molina as father Edward Steam, and Anna Paquin as James Ray Steam, all highly inventive and intuitive about steam power to make science seem like magic, the metaphor of man becoming machine rendered literally in Edward to his detriment. The emotional pressure to succeed in their ambitions and to save the day helps to explain and mask the literal pressure of the machinery, which I only understood as far as the story needed me to understand it. However, having the corporate element of the military industrial complex being represented by a conglomerate head’s daughter, an analogue and namesake of Scarlett O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind” was a strange choice, but with there being no other female character for much of the film, you let that flourish slide.

The voices of Stewart and Molina, using their own accents, was perfect casting, but the Victorian industrial and imperial British setting was a lot to take in. I am very aware of my country’s history, but I know not to choke on the nostalgia of it: I visited post-industrial Manchester in 2019, stayed in a hotel that formerly housed a bonded warehouse and a hat factory; saw a still-working loom in the Museum of Science of Industry, with George Stephenson’s Rocket in the foyer; followed the disused train tracks alongside the new tram lines; and saw the rejuvenated media centre of Salford Quays, alongside the gallery of works by L.S. Lowry. Meanwhile, the might of the Royal Navy pored over in the London scenes highlighted both how much of its income the UK spent on defence at the time, and how many wars it expected to fight simultaneously at the drop of a hat.

I will be watching “Steamboy” again, but not until I see “Akira” once more. Ultimately, I spent much of my time watching the film thinking there will come a time when someone discovers electricity, and everything I have seen so lovingly depicted here will be wiped away, but I am more cyberpunk-minded than steampunk. Watch “Steamboy” for the family, but not for the nostalgia.

I’M BACK IN THE VILLAGE AGAIN [500]

Cover to The Ron Grainer Orchestra's soundtrack album

Surrounded by films, TV series and albums that I “will get to eventually”, my next experience must call out to me.

I do not understand how it took until two weeks ago before seeing, for the first time, “The Prisoner”, the postmodern and psychological science fiction spy drama that was first broadcast by ITV in 1967, but it arrived at the perfect moment.

I was in the right mood for a story about an individual shorn of their identity, dumped in a place where they must conform, their name and clothes assigned to them, kept constantly under surveillance, and forced to undergo psychological mind games to reveal information about the decisions they made.

Of course, for an allegorical story where all the characters are numbered, its setting and plots are surreal, individuality pitted against collective community, and need driving motive – for freedom, for information – its audience sees what it wants to see, and I am glad the premise wasn’t made more specific for that reason. I realised my above description of “The Prisoner” could also fit “The Matrix”, Neo being forced to exist as “Thomas Anderson” until they escaped the reality created for them.

I am fortunate that I watched “The Prisoner” by myself, forming my own view of it without knowledge of the extensive industry of merchandise, including clothing, further novels and comic books, and many books analysing the series – I will get to them all eventually.

What started this journey was ITV’s placing of the first episode, “Arrival”, on their YouTube channel “ITV Retro”, alongside episodes of “Thunderbirds”, “Stingray” and “Sapphire & Steel”. Not having uploaded subsequent episodes fast enough, I moved to ITVX, their own streaming service, where they saw fit to add four breaks for advertisements in each 48–50-minute episode – my solution was to watch at 10pm, when there was less inclination to sell to me.

I liked that I didn’t initially think Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six – we never learn his real name – was a spy. Someone living in a London townhouse and driving a Lotus Seven he built himself doesn’t automatically make Number Six a continuation of McGoohan’s John Drake from “Danger Man”, a show I’ve never seen. He could have been a civil engineer, or the inventor of a bottomless bag of peanuts – recalling the only time McGoohan reprised the role, on “The Simpsons” in 2000 – also with sensitive information wanted by the organisation behind The Village, represented by the constantly changing Number Two.

The opening titles justify their three minutes of total length, portraying McGoohan as a forcefully determined individual – indeed, he is the only person to appear in every episode – driving his Lotus into Westminster, walking down a long corridor to resign his unnamed position, thunderclaps accompanying Ron Grainer’s theme tune. Gassed at home while packing for a holiday, notably by a man in black driving a hearse – the fade to black after McGoohan passes out invites guesses on the reality of everything that follows – and waking up to find both himself and his room transplanted to The Village, we get the barest of explanatory dialogue, indicating where they have ended up, what they are being called, who is talking to them, what they want, and what they won’t say – who is “Number One”.

McGoohan is perfect as Number Six – headstrong, resourceful and confident, with a sense of self that does not rely on anyone else. He knows exactly who he is – not having to explain what that is to anyone should be taken as a given, not as a challenge. I would hope that, if I found myself in a similar situation, I would know when to fight, but I know the situation portrayed in “The Prisoner” is an allegory taking things to extremes, but you should always be on guard for when things take a turn.

In making The Village a pleasant, controlled community that Number Six ideally will never leave, what stops me from wanting to go there for a week was being unable to identify inmates from their guards, everyone a possible informant. With the Edwardian clothing and festive air abounding, does The Village evoke nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler, and everyone knew their place? Whether or not, the look of it did make me search for room rates at the Hotel Portmeirion during while watching the first episode.

My favourite episodes were early in the series’ run, balancing contemporary psychedelia and Cold War paranoia with themes of dream manipulation (“A. B. and C.”), doppelgangers and identity theft (“The Schizoid Man”), indoctrination (“The General”) and conformity (“A Change of Mind”) – being labelled in the latter episode as “unmutual” is as good as “cancelled” today, including the psychological torture, but without the simulated lobotomy. 

However, constant surveillance in “The Prisoner” means that any story could be subjected to “deus ex machina”: any character sympathetic to Number Six could really be working for Number Two, or think that Number Six is there to test their loyalty, while any location to which Number Six escapes could be part of The Village. Any scene could cut to Number Two watching the same view on a screen, camera seemingly available at all known points, commenting on the action, and revealing that all we have seen was under their control the whole time, because that is the community that The Village creates.

I don’t know if invention or necessity led to later episodes becoming more outlandish in their approach to storylines: transplanting Number Six’s mind another man’s body, McGoohan filming elsewhere at the time; beginning one episode as a Western, titled “Living in Harmony”, with Number Six as a sheriff who resigns for his own reasons, then imprisoned for his own safety, finally revealed as a roleplay using hallucinogenic drugs; and “The Girl Who Was Death”, featuring Number Six undercover as an English colonel, and later in a Sherlock Holmes costume, was really Number Six telling a story to children in a nursery, Number Two’s hope being that he would drop his guard enough among them to reveal more about himself.

I have since read that McGoohan wanted “The Prisoner” to be a seven-episode mini-series, but production company ITC, run by Lew Grade, who also owned ITV franchise ATV, wanted a twenty-six-episode series he could sell to American networks – what was hoped to be two thirteen-part series became one of seventeen, that took over a year to shoot. “The Prisoner” ultimately aired on CBS on Saturday nights during the summer of 1968, in place of “The Jackie Gleason Show”, directly opposite NBC’s broadcasts of Roger Moore in “The Saint”, another of Grade’s series. 

Most fortunately for watching “The Prisoner” today is its having been filmed in colour, again required to sell the show abroad, meaning I can enjoy a high-definition transfer of the original 35mm elements today, light years from the murky 405-line black and white TV standard in the UK of 1967. An odd outcome of this situation is revealing the artifice that would have been covered on first broadcast – back projection, photographed and painted backdrops, studio sets replicating outside scenes – that I chose to interpret as further evidence of the covert operations by Number Two and The Village, a further layer that no-one ever intended. However, iconic as it is, the “Rover” weather balloon monster, looks silly no matter how you look at it.

As famous as McGoohan’s cry from the end of the opening titles, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” is a line from the opening episode: “I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.” To get by in the real world, where the footprint of your identity is on record to make your day run, I realise that I must agree to all the above, but I want them to be correct – if we are all to be “prisoners”, as the show insinuates, then allow me some agency. I can admire Number Six, but I don’t want to be in his tennis shoes.

I’M WORKIN’ ON MY REWRITE [499]

In “The Further Adventures of an Artificial Intelligence Refusenik”, I have realised that, if I ever need to prove that I am indeed the author of anything to which I have placed my name, I may need to go back to writing out that work longhand or, at the very least, plan them out using pen and paper.

This may sound like the latest stop on a road to paranoia, but for as much flak as people gave Ed Sheeran for revealing how he employs a videographer to record his songwriting process, to avoid further lawsuits over perceived breaches in copyright, his need for incontrovertible proof of his own creative ability speaks of how much the assertion of authorship has, well, been taken as written up to now.

I have found it hard to write much in a creative capacity recently because the presence of A.I. makes the act of writing mechanical in a way that threatens my dream of making it a livelihood, a threat I could not have envisaged when I started writing articles in 2016. The continued use of A.I. may require people to prove they did not use it to write anything, from a letter to a news article, from a short story to a complete novel. Rather than just needing to have something in my writing to help make me stand out, or to protect my ability to write, what we all need is something that proves that consideration was made into what words were used.

What highlighted this issue to me the most — although, to be honest, sniping about A.I. reliably rouses me anyway — was the use of em-dashes. The apparent story regarding these is that, because the ChatGPT program uses em-dashes as its default dash, not distinguishing its use with that of an en-dash or a hyphen, marks it as a red flag. An em-dash is used when you want to make a separate point within a sentence, like I did two sentences ago, but I know I am guilty of not selecting the correct dash while typing, which ironically could save me here.

It makes me wonder if this is acting as a kind of A.I. “watermark”, like imperceptible watermarks that can be added to A.I.-generated images, an irony when A.I. is often used to remove more visible ones. If A.I. doesn’t know when to use the right dash, but consistently uses the same wrong one, is this evidence of a wrong-footed style that acts as a deterrent for people to choose their own words instead? 

Not really, as while Google has created an open-source “SynthID” that records the weighting given to the choice of words by its text-generating programs, something similar is required for every other program that does the same. Until then, self-declaration is the name of the game, suggesting its own questions of motive depending on the answer.

People shouldn’t be left with the words they need to get by, or to have them mean enough for what they need. Playfulness needs to replace the paranoia. All we have our words, which I will need to write in ink.

YOU CAN’T START A FIRE WITHOUT A SPARK [498]

Procrastination is the defining style of my writing, a last-minute culmination of what I have sent too long thinking about. That it does not read this way is more a testament to the craft of writing, the “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration” of committing yourself to completing a cogent work hundreds of times.

Despite this, I would rather my writing not become a race. For example, I was recently asked to write a witness statement for someone completing an apprenticeship course. Once I knew the date for when it was needed, that immediately allowed myself into thinking I need not write anything at all until nearer the time, but I had the time to think of what I needed to include. Meanwhile, I started to worry too much about the small things: how precise in detail did I need to be, and how long did the statement need to be – things that were not specified, but might make a difference to who needed the finished piece.

In the end, the completed statement, delivered on the day before it was needed, was exactly what that person required, and I need not have worried, despite having manoeuvred myself into a position where I did. What was worse, it took only minutes to write, but I gave myself a week of thinking time.

Therefore, I have sought to address this problem, making my writing process more productive. Ironically, I had wanted to conduct this earlier, but the copy I ordered of Robert Boice’s book “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” was lost in the post, requiring me to order it again. While geared towards academic writing, the book’s direct approach was recommended to me as an aid to self-discipline – it is not just a matter of turning up earlier, it was what happens once there.

The major draw for me was a “Blocking Questionnaire” devised and standardised by Boice in tests on hundreds of people, its categories used across the book to help you locate the advice you then need. Broken into three sections, you are asked to assess a series of reactions to facing a tough writing assignment, the emotions that creates in yourself, and how you would approach completing it. With procrastination only one possible bock, I was interested if it was my only block, or a symptom of something larger.

Sixty-nine considerations later, the most memorable being “I’ll feel like writing if I do something else first”, and “If I were working efficiently, writing would come more easily, in more finished form”, my “Overall Blocking Mean Score” came to 5.13, just tipping from an indicator of inefficient writing into there being more serious problems, with recurring disruptive blocks. However, the maximum possible score was 10, so I was assured that any identifiable problems would be easier to address.

Categorising my scores revealed a more interesting issue: with little between them, procrastination was ranked joint third with apprehension about the work at hand, with “perfectionism” being a larger factor, and “rules” being largest of all.

What should I take from these results, apart from reading the rest of “Professors as Writers” to address them? I have more insight into what is either causing procrastination, or what it is covering. Based on the answers I gave, the blocks appear to be more emotionally and socially led. I have no problem with writing itself, but how writing makes me feel, and thoughts of how others will react, matter more – then again, they always do.

“Rules” was not an answer I expected, but the rules I put around completing the witness statement shows they do have an effect. I have been setting myself the target of completing a weekly article on various subjects, at five hundred-plus words in length, but that is more a deadline, or obligation, set outside of the act of actually completing it – at least, that is how I think of it, but is the act of setting myself a task triggering the construction of barriers, when all I have to answer to is myself? Time to read the rest of the book...

CAN’T YOU FEEL THE TOWN EXPLODING? [497]

I decided to use the famous shot of Buser Keaton being framed by the window in a falling wall, from his 1928 film “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, to illustrate exactly how I have felt since the UK Supreme Court decided that, for the purposes of the 2010 Equality Act, that transgender women did not count as women – I would have been flattened by the wall, had I not known where my marker was, which in Keaton’s case was a nail.

The monolithic stature and sheer audacity of the stunt means its context is rarely considered. After an hour of a comedy plot involving a rivalry between paddle boat owners, into which an effectual son of one captain arrives, along with his girl friend from college, a cyclone comes in to destroy the harbour town, at which point it becomes a disaster film – Keaton, in hospital, looks up as the building is torn away. His bed is blown through a street and a stable, avoiding falling masonry, until it stops outside a house – its occupant, seeing a crack opening the side of the house, jumps out of the top floor window and onto the bed, saving his life. Keaton, looking obliviously into the street, does not see the façade as it then falls, effectively re-entering the window the man had just leapt from. 

From there, every possible physical gag about walking into the wind, and last-second avoiding crumbling buildings, leads to a final escape on the steamboat. It is an extremely well-handled sequence, coming from someone either supremely confident in their ability to conceive and execute these stunts so effectively, or so lax in their judgement to have endangered themselves so recklessly in the name of entertainment, financial problems and alcohol abuse have contributed to the latter narrative. 

“Steamboat Bill, Jr” was also the last of Keaton’s films to be made independently, before a move to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that saw his creative control gradually eliminated. His previous distributor, United Artists, had already began to insist on the monitoring of expenses after Keaton deployed the most expensive shot in silent film history, the destruction of a steam engine and a railway bridge in “The General” (1926), while the cyclone sequence in “Steamboat Bill, Jr”, one seventh of the film’s running time but one third of the budget, replaced a planned flood sequence, although a real-life river flood also forced this change. In short, as Keaton reached his creative peak, he was becoming less trusted.

As I said, I knew where my marker was. I have held a Gender Recognition Certificate since 2017, having done everything required of me to prove my status as a transgender woman was stable and permanent. My gender was changed in law for all purposes, as the Gender Recognition Act 2004 stated. At no point was anyone telling me that I didn’t know myself, or that I am instead autistic or have borderline personality disorder because it fit the limits of their understanding. I am perfectly fine, and the matter was settled.

Since the Supreme Court decision on Wednesday 16^th April to define “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 to mean “biological” sex, because we all speak of ourselves in terms of washing powder now, it has felt like open season on trans people, despite gender reassignment being protected under the same act. I have been most perturbed by the tendency for the Supreme Court decision to have settled the matter morally, that trans people were never what they said they were, but I think the people saying that now only do so because they feel emboldened. So what – the terms “gender ideology” and “gender critical” appeared years after my formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and the phrase “live and let live” pre-dates all of them.

In May 2025, there are too many reasons to be apprehensive. Interim guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission appears to ban trans people both from the bathroom of their appropriate gender, and from their biological sex in certain situations, presumably if they “pass” in their gender too much, but I can’t be allowed to have nowhere to go. I can also still play a sport, so long as the association providing it is comprised of no more than twenty-five people. This is ahead of full guidance expected in the coming months. Meanwhile, I wrote to my MP asking for confirmation that my legal paperwork is still valid – I await their answer.

But I have not been made an outlaw. I have not been deemed an undesirable presence in society. Enough people treat trans people with dignity and respect to balance out those who say they should be, then do nothing more. 

Unlike Buster Keaton, I don’t feel that people have less trust in me because of my situation, but other people could not trust themselves with the subject and concept of gender, so it has been decided for them absolutely. Policing of gender will now be unavoidable – can you prove yours?

I’ll be fine, somehow – I think the law may still be on my side. In the meantime, hoping and coping produced the following playlist, unexpectedly all from the 1970s:

The Real Thing - Can You Feel The Force

Jackson Browne - Doctor My Eyes

Fleetwood Mac - Don’t Stop

Wings - With a Little Luck

David Bowie - Starman

Elton John - Crazy Water

Slade – How Does It Feel

AM I LIVING IN A BOX? [496]

For as much as the film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920) is celebrated for bringing German Expressionism to cinema, while providing the foundations on which the horror film genre were built, the first thing it brings to my mind was its having been filmed entirely inside a studio whose floor measured only six by six metres, or about twenty feet each way – I don’t know if it was a cube.

Finding the space to make a film is never a concern for anyone watching the finished work, but it may dictate if that film can be made at all, whether by availability, permission or cost. However, knowing it is perfectly possible to produce a multi-layered work of art, encompassing many locations and actors, within the dimensions of a large living room, means that nothing is impossible, so long as you can scale your production to that space.

To that end, the theatrical painted backdrops of “Caligari” work to provide setting, mood, light and depth, although not necessarily depth of field – if it were not for actors appearing in front of them, the backdrop props and floor could have appeared to be one painting. They are surreal, almost medieval, and designed to unsettle, appearing like stark, monochromatic prints from woodcuts.

There is conjecture about how “Caligari” came to be portrayed in a German Expressionist style, as it was not stipulated in a surviving script, just as there is conjecture over whether its framing story, planting the tale of a doctor using a somnambulist to murder people into the mind of an asylum patient, was mandated to make the story easier for audiences to handle. To me, it doesn’t matter: the film’s imagery is burned into my retinas, just as the eyes of the somnambulist Cesare look through you.

Few other films look like “Caligari”, but its constricted studio size and low budget adds to a notion that the film’s bold artistic choices were made due to the practical concerns of when it was in production from 1919-20. Lighting effects were also much harder to achieve in the silent film era, making the painting of contrasting blacks and whites onto the backdrops – and, through make-up, onto the actors – an easier path to achieving contrast. 

The small Lixie-Film studio, located in the Weissensee area of Berlin, was originally built in 1914, at a time when many film studios were still essentially greenhouses, trying to catch as much natural light as possible, in any way possible – attempts in chiaroscuro in early silent films would have been made with natural light. Carbon arc lights were only introduced in 1912, entering theatres before being adapted for filmmaking, and with film stock at the time being insensitive to red light rendered tungsten-based incandescent lighting as useless. The manufacture of film stock sensitive to the whole colour spectrum would begin in 1927, just as adding sound to motion pictures became a further headache for studios to overcome.

The expressionistic effect of “Caligari” has taken on a different meaning for me on more recent viewings. I initially saw it in rather poor public domain prints, the outlines of what the art direction intended reducing details down to shades and impressions of light and darkness. Subsequent restorations of the film, and Blu-ray and 4K home editions, means that individual brushstrokes can be properly admired, painting light as much as painting with light.

I SEE THE PEOPLE WORKING, AND SEE IT WORKING FOR THEM [495]

It may be strange that I even have notes to share on using a laptop computer, as more people than not will have a computer in this form. However, I have only started using one in the last month, which was not by choice, and my experience has reinforced why I would not do so willingly.

The computer I use at work was initially a desktop computer, a “tower PC” housing a large motherboard and spinning hard drive. This was later replaced by a “thin client” desktop PC that used a smaller solid state drive, used less power, and more similar to the specifications you can find in a laptop computer – as battery capacity has improved, and as processors’ power consumption has been reduced, any remaining gaps caused by compromising for a more mobile form factor have been reduced or eliminated.

The local final step has been reached, and I have now been given a laptop computer to use. I have never been given a laptop to use before, and I have never considered buying one myself, and I remembered looking at this thing like I was a caveman discovering fire. My immediate thoughts were that I hated the tiny keyboard and trackpad – I really can only use a full keyboard and mouse, having the space on a desk to do that – and the screen was too small, despite being of average laptop size.

This laptop was not for me to work from home, as I don’t do that, but it does keep me at work marginally longer by physically taking it out of a locked drawer every day, then packing it away at the end. The secure internet connection that was required was easier to implement through software, but it means more manually logging into programs and remembering login details to work.

Instead of having two screens on my desk, I have now also been introduced to the idea of the monitor-based docking station, the keyboard and mouse from my old computer now plugging into the one monitor left on my desk, to which the laptop connects through a USB-C cable and becomes the secondary screen, half the size of the one it replaced. It looks odd, and it makes me want to get an eye test despite being due one anyway.

On top of this, I am afraid of breaking the thing. It has a plastic case, and I have already once dropped it into its locked drawer harder than I expected, so I am dreading when I will fracture a corner, or break a hinge, or open and close the laptop enough times to over-flex the ribbon connector between the screen and the rest of the unit. The act of locking, in an eclosed space, an electrical device still warm from over eight hours of use, still gives me reason for concern – the desktop unit stayed in the open.

Of course, this is all nitpicking. Advances in computing, components and miniaturisation mean that the components of the average consumer computer will be similar regardless of whether you have a desktop or laptop model, and previous compromises that had to be made for a more mobile form factor no longer apply, battery capacity on laptops now allowing for all-day use on one charge – the difference between desktop and laptop is now down to personal preference, unless you require a gaming PC with enough fans to keep the processors cool.

But when you are given a situation where wireless internet connections drop out because you need to log back into a program to re-establish it, or when you realise the USB-C connection wasn’t charging the laptop at the same time, or the mouse suddenly stops working for some reason, you realise that solutions for many still involve compromises for some. For me, thankfully having the space at home for a desktop setup, desktop computers are the simpler choice because they cause less anxiety - mostly because I only have to use them, not handle them.