The Woes of Writing Markdown (And the wishes of SquiggleMark) is an essay about some of the technical and artistic challenges inherent to writing ergodic text using markup language. I posted her story Weave Me Another Cocoon last year[0], and it's a fantastic example of how art can push the limits of a medium.
> But the real superpower of pandoc is that, much in the way switching to neocities escapes the prison-roads of locked down platforms, switching to pandoc escapes at once the restrictions of both rich text and standard markdown.
> If you aren’t familiar with my work, then when I said I loved the details disclosure element, or that I’m experimental writer doing creative things, you could have brushed it off as a cute yet idle exclamation or an otherwise meaningless remark. If you aren’t familiar, then gaze upon Weave Me Another Cocoon and let its depths ensnare you.
> And that, finally, is what this year started me down the road to writing my own markdown parser.
It can be done, and on the Unix end as long as it's hooked up as a tty you can just dump text into it, but you won't find any simple off-the-shelf modern hardware to do this.
This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
Airplane! also features tons of other TV and movie references doesn’t it? Basically what would have happened in these well known shows and movies when you add absurd scenarios while still playing it straight (the joke is never acknowledged of course!).
Not just jokes and scenarios - it's full of many actors that for years (and decades) played very serious "leading man" type roles. Seeing all these all-american heroes just being utter idiots helped make it so impactful.
For season 1 it very much satirises the early morning open university tv educational media format from the 70s through the early 2000s [1]. I'm not sure it'd land quite the same way for other countries or even for gen-z onwards.
I personally never liked it. All the characters were deeply unlikable and a lot of the jokes are just disgusting shock humour. When I used to live in a shared house, I always skipped it if it was on the television.
Well depending on your taste of TV shows and the general culture.
When I moved to the UK early 2000s I could understand but can't appreciate that type of humour. I think its rooted in culture. Luckily that was the golden era of British comedies and there were great diversities so you can pick and choose what flavour you like.
TBH there is a few standout really good British shows and the rest is forgotten about. A lot of humour in some of shows was really tied to the time of making and a lot of audiences won't get the joke.
If you watch Today Today or Brass Eye, unless you grew up at the time, it isn't funny. Most people under 30 won't know who any of celebrities are in the show.
Yes it's only relevant if you know the reference at that time. The day today and the other satire shows aimed to follow certain general formula though so even if it's not funny for some its archetypical characters still fit in that genre of comedies in my opinion.
I actually didn't see that era as a Golden era and actually much prefer the sketch shows in the 80s and 90s such has the Fast Show.
I don't like any Mitchell and Webb stuff and don't particularly find either of them very funny.
David Mitchell's (at least on panel shows) brand of comedy is just doing a stupid face and making sardonic/cynical remark which is often some thinly veiled political jab, that the target audience often already agrees with. That isn't comedy. It is activism. Once you can see it, you can't un-see it and I find nauseating.
In the 12th century a Welsh writer named Walter Map wrote the line "no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded". Not quite English but maybe he was already expressing the whimsy of the English kingdom.
A lot of people cite Hot Fuzz as one of the best examples in filmmaking. Almost everything is a setup for a joke or scene that resolves later on in the film.
I saw Baby Driver, which I really liked but I haven't seen any of the three movies since that.
The Cornetto trilogy are excellent. I'm a big fan of Three Colours (my favourite is White) and I think that actually in the same way that Kieślowski clearly doesn't care about the supposed theme, he just wants money to make movies, we can say the same for the Cornetto movies. We're bringing the commonalities to it in our interpretation, Wright didn't pour great effort into ensuring that these movies "work" as a trilogy, but they do if you squint, in the same way that Kieślowski didn't put great effort into relating his three films to the French flag but if you squint you can make it work fine.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business unfortunately and his last two films did poorly
Last Night In Soho was a absolute cinematic treat but had mixed reviews. I was fortunate to see it a week before release in 35mm in NYC and it was truly a special moment. But lets be real, even with films being graded on a curve due to the pandemic, the movie still did poorly.
Ok fresh start a few years later with The Running Man. This time he got big money, three time more than Baby Driver. (34mil vs 110mil) and the result? Baby Driver brought in ~227 mil and Running Man? Just ~69 mil.
Maybe he is better off producing smaller budget films and while I want nothing but success for him since he's my all time favorite director: Hollywood is a business. They will not look kindly on someone that keeps losing money.
To be fair to Wright, there were a bunch of big budget movies in 2025 that flopped: Thunderbolts, Tron Ares, Snow White, etc. There’s definitely a wider phenomenon at work of cinema struggling in general. But I agree, Wright’s big-budget career is likely over.
I like to think that if he managed to produce another smash hit maybe studios will take another chance. Studios know he is respected by the fans. Hes just got to show that he can bring in the dough and that Baby Driver wasn't just a fluke. Running Man seemed very sloppy and not what we have come to expect from him and I heard on the grapevine that the studio pushed down a lot of executive decisions. If true, that could explain some things but still surprising given his past history with Ant-Man.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.
I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.
I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
It's been some years since I watched the show so I've probably forgotten a fair amount, but I remember it differently. I recall Tennant arguing at various points that it's probably the more obvious suspect/explanation. It's the whole you're probably hearing horses not zebras thing. Which in reality is the more competent approach. Crimes usually are committed by the most obvious suspect and pursuing more obscure theories is a worse approach.
But of course in a TV universe that's completely flipped on its head, nobody makes shows about normal straightforward cases.
This same conflict bugged me about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The main analyst is 1000% sure that her hunch is correct and is constantly aggressively adamant about it, despite a lack of hard evidence. The others analysts are shown being much more rational, giving probabilities to their assessments and grounding conclusions in evidence. But since it's a movie of course you know the heroine is going to be correct and all of the other people seems like indecisive fools. But in reality someone who acted like her would be an absolute train wreck and the sober rational ones would be getting things done consistently with far fewer screw ups.
> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent.
Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent.
"Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!"
"What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons."
"Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..."
Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy Peep Show.
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.
(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*
*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
If you'd like some comedy in your police procedural, watch A Touch of Cloth
It's a parody of all British police procedurals simultaneously. It's the Airplane! of police shows... I won't say it's the Police Squad! of police shows, because that was spoofing US tropes, this spoofs UK tropes, but yes it's full of very serious actors saying very unserious things.
And yes, it has a gruff Scottish man (John Hannah) as lead D.I. Jack Cloth
Thirty years ago there was The Thin Blue Line, a sitcom set in a police station in the UK, starring Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean, Blackadder) and written by Ben Elton (writer on Mr Bean and Blackadder). I suspect it wouldn’t stand up to much rewatching today, but it was a thing.
This is also the core conceit of Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman AppleTV show. An office filled with MI5 officers who screwed up and so can’t be trusted with anything important.
I haven’t seen Broadchurch, but I have seen Slow Horses and it doesn’t seem like the description applies. Sure, they are “exiled” MI5 officers, but they also save the day every season, and not through luck. They’re not completely incompetent. Take River: he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made. Ho was sent there due to character flaws, despite being the most skilled at his job.
> he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made.
No, he was sent to Slough house over his reaction to that mistake. He disobeyed orders, caused panic at an airport, and assaulted a civilian. Now, that would have been fine if he was trying to save lives, but the whole thing was just a training exercise! He deliberately put people in danger just to massage his own ego; he absolutely deserved to be "exiled".
Except in Slow Horses, most of them are exceptional at least in some way. Many of them are too difficult to work with, yes, but they do excel at _something_. That is very different from being _all around mediocre_.
Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective!
When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch.
I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
I like to think of Lamb as an inverse Columbo - he's rude and horrible to people rather than Columbo's charm. They share the grubby look and intelligence.
Nooo, the character is such a wretched human that you can't help but root for him.
He's being an ass in order to push people to do better, and at the end of the day (over and over again) he cares about Justice or at least the National Interest, but he cares about the Slow Horses more (in his way).
The flatulanece (et al) works as a filter: can you see past the boorishness?
I'd argue that Coe is more than competent, just, you know, detached most of the time. Lamb always knows what needs be done, just never shares, and often lets things happen until what needs be done happens on its own or is inevitable.
Coe has extraordinarily high SA and makes decisions immediately. They might seem impulsive, but when he acts, it is always with forethought.
Coe is insightful and good at violence, but also (!spoiler for latest season) responsible for the most hilariously unfortunate cock-up of the show so far…
Lamb is more like a teacher, he'll let you make your own mistakes until the situation is about to go FUBAR, then he'll step in and save it and show you where you went wrong.
As you described, because he keeps to himself, he comes off as a loose cannon, which feels to me like something you wouldn't want on a coherent spy team, but nonetheless is so fun to watch, which is the point, really.
I would argue Taverner is meant to be very competent, although she of course has her own flaws, and his hardly a character for one whom is meant to feel sorry
For me the books have depth that the TV series doesn't – and can't – have: some of the plots are dumbed down a bit to give more visual impact, and of course you don't get the same depth of characterisation, or the insights into Lamb's and the others' pasts because much of it comes out in interior monologue, and it's much harder for the shows to, erm, show.
And you miss one of the glories of Herron's writing: as a stylist is on a par with Terry Prachett for cramming wisdom into short witty phrases. He is very good at memorable phrases skewering contemporary life, and particularly politicians. The shows bring some of this out, but there's only so much that you can do in dialogue.
Take this passage from the first book:
> Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.
Herron, Mick. Slow Horses: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 1) (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition.
That is a brilliant piece of characterisation, and if you know anything about British politics, you know exactly who he's describing, and how accurate a character assassination this is. The TV show's Peter Judd goes out of its way to make the character a lot more generic – their Judd is merely 'typical cynical nasty venal politician' and it loses a bit of force accordingly.
Or take the set piece descriptions which start every book: they recreate the seedy world of Slough House in a way that the shows can only hint at.
Not to say the shows aren't very good – they are one of the best things on TV – but the books are even better.
Yeah, I mean he has a lot of really strong flaws that almost seem purposefully to put one off (which could be his whole angle, who knows), but between his drinking, terrible health, horrid treatment of his team (who, yes I know, he actually does care for), you're often not on his side, but more eager to see how what he's put in place will unfold.
Slough House denizens screw up in blatant, over the top ways. While the Park screw up in ways that leave geopolitical consequences festering for years or decades while being good at covering their own asses.
The plot is generally some evil, corrupt actions the Park took in the past are coming home to roost and only the bumbling losers in Slough House can fix it (kind of, eventually, in a "at least London wasn't blown off the face of the earth" kind of way).
…sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence.
Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
My recollection is that the main guy is a highly competent at problem solving, but limited by an inability to work with others.
In some ways similar to Lamb in Slow Horses, though I think Lamb is a very good manipulator of people (he gets others to do what he wants without telling them directly), whereas the Dep. Q guy doesn't engage at all.
> Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype.
> If it was an attack on the hash algorithm, then two different files should share the same hash. If two files have different hash and both have a legitimate signature, it's simply because they have both been signed.There is absolutely no indication of a compromise of Microsoft code signing keys based on any information presented here. It also not the only conclusion left - it is just you jumping to the least probable explanation without any evidence.
The 'both were just signed' argument fails to address the structural anomalies. If Microsoft signed both, why does the malware use RSA-2048 while the official binary uses RSA-4096?. Furthermore, the malware carries a compilation timestamp from the year 2097, an APT technique to evade security filters.
We aren't just seeing 'two signed files'; we are seeing a malicious binary (verified with sandbox escape and session theft) that shouldn't exist in Microsoft's signing pipeline, yet it carries a valid signature and was delivered via a zero-click attack from an official CDN. This points directly to a compromise of the trust infrastructure (Key compromise, CA breach, or verification bypass), not a routine signing event
The President's statements, and even unspoken thoughts, have the full force of law. This President, anyway-- I think the Supreme Court has a special criterion they use to determine whether Unitary Executive Theory should apply to a particular administration.
Based on several analyses I've conducted—specifically on tria.ge, where it scored an 8/10 threat level for malware behavior—the most disturbing part is that the Microsoft digital signature remains valid. We are looking at a full cryptographic bypass.
> But the real superpower of pandoc is that, much in the way switching to neocities escapes the prison-roads of locked down platforms, switching to pandoc escapes at once the restrictions of both rich text and standard markdown.
> If you aren’t familiar with my work, then when I said I loved the details disclosure element, or that I’m experimental writer doing creative things, you could have brushed it off as a cute yet idle exclamation or an otherwise meaningless remark. If you aren’t familiar, then gaze upon Weave Me Another Cocoon and let its depths ensnare you.
> And that, finally, is what this year started me down the road to writing my own markdown parser.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143596
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