in the process of reclaiming my life

movies right now are absolutely terrified of silence. every spare second is crammed with motion and noise and information. there’s always something new to look at, something new to process. look here. now here. don’t blink. don’t breathe. it’s constant stimulation. there’s no room left for a moment to land before the next one is already gone.

there’s good sci fi horror out there that do silence and restraint well. i can immediately think of under the skin, annihilation, and ex machina. sometimes the silence is the point. personally i think iron lung works in that lineage.

this isn’t a movie that will let you sit there and passively consume. this is a movie full of visual and audial clues waiting for you to unravel them. this is a movie that wants you to notice your breathing. to feel the silence press in until it’s oppressive.

isolation is the movie. it’s you alone with your thoughts, with time stretching and warping, with nothing to distract you from the constant dread creeping in. it’s not the monsters out there that you’re afraid of. not the constant drip, drip, drip of impending doom. but you, alone, in an endless sea of red.

can you count your breaths in the silence? can you hear your heart beating in your ears? can you live with yourself?

Anyway! Just saw it the other day, loved it, may buy it so I can watch again. Was frankly baffled afterwards by seeing posts complaining about the pacing--I thought it was just right. I was on the edge of my seat the whole 2 hrs, holding my breath during the lulls waiting for the next shit to come barreling out of the dark. It's called building suspense, & this poster explains better than I could...

Even a platonic version would be a hoot because you KNOW Tony would appreciate anybody with the absolute grapefruits to write that paper and cuss out some academic high muckymuck in public at a conference. That's his kind of dude.

superheroes knitting …

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

And then Ryland disappears for a couple days, before touching base to let him know he's safe, his clearance just got upgraded, and he's apparently going to be living in a base for the foreseeable future.

And then Grace learns about the coma resistance gene, and maybe that he has it. Confidentiality's a bit lower, because they're recruiting, casting a wide net trying to find qualified volunteers with this gene.

He doesn't know they're only planning enough astrophage for a one-way trip, so he calls up Colt like "hey, if you still have dreams of becoming an astronaut and going to space, now might be your chance — because having this gene can put you ahead of already-trained astronauts."

And so yeah, he jumps at the chance. Stratt knows it's one-way, and doesn't want to separate them. But because Grace was the first to be tested, his identical twin is one of the first viable volunteers: relevant skills so he'll pick it up quickly, an attitude toward danger that's willing, but takes safety precautions seriously.

So she invites him to start training, and when they get enough astronauts with the gene for a crew and backup crew, she's relieved (I actually doubt the crews were all astronauts prior to this; there aren't many people in good health who've been to space for how rare the gene is). She can keep him as a third choice for a third choice — so if (and she really hopes it doesn't come to that) Ryland has to go, they can go together.

When Colt gets the call that Jody's directing a movie, and wants him as her stuntman, well, he's been more or less bumped off Project Hail Mary (Stratt still lets him stick around for availability, he already knows what's up, he might as well keep Grace company), so he heads to Australia.

Then Dubois and Shapiro get blown up, and she tells Grace to look at their other options, but she already knows who it'll be, and she's trying to call Colt back in, but he's not picking up.

And then they get the news — Colt blew himself up, after murdering another stuntman.

That's it — together or not, she needs Grace on that ship, and at least she won't be separating them. He'll wake up long enough to solve the Astrophage problem, and then he can join his brother — he won't have to live a life without his twin.

Grace, of course, objects. Stratt puts him in a coma early.

And then she gets a call on Grace's phone.

"Hey, so I don't know if you've seen the news — but I'm not dead, not a murderer. I kind of need somewhere to lay low until Jody finishes her movie, and then I'll get it all cleared up."

"Mr. Seavers..."

"...Stratt?"

"How would you like to take a trip far away, right about now?"

"...That's a little more permanent than I was thinking."

"We lost Dubois and Shapiro."

"What?! I can't- I'm not a scientist, I can't replace them."

"I don't need you to — Dr. Grace will be the scientist."

"...He agreed to that?"

"He understood we didn't have better options on short notice — and thought you were dead."

"... Stratt. Why do you have his phone?"

"You know how he is about elevators, and the stress of everyone-... well... It was better for his heart to be induced in the coma now."

"You can't wake him up? Tell him I'm alive?!"

"It would be hard on his health to go in and out so much in a short period. This doesn't change the fact he's the only one that can do this — but I'm sure he'll be very relieved to wake up with you by his side."

"..."

"I'll send someone to pick you up."

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

Me: Stan Lee created Spider-Man at age 40. George R. R. Martin wrote A Game of Thrones at age 48.

Frank Herbert wrote Dune at 45.

Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant co-wrote the first Animorphs book at 40 and 42, respectively.

R. L. Stine wrote the first Goosebumps book at 49.

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created The Flintstones at 50 and 49, respectively.

Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at 58.

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula at 50.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.