Book Club 2025: Rent spel by Tove Jansson

Jansson’s books non-Moomin books were out of print for quite a while, but they were all released in new editions a while back, so I bought all the ones I hadn’t read yet, and I’ve slowly been making my way through them.

Most of them are very short (this one is just eighty pages long), and I guess you could say they’re kinda variable? Some of them seem very self-consciously “I’m writing for adults now, so there!”, and if I understand correctly, they weren’t well received in Sweden or Finland. And most of them were not widely translated. (I think that’s changed in the last decade or so.)

This one is absolutely wonderful. It’s not a novel per se, but it’s a collection of vignettes that are all about two women who live together, and they’re artists, and they spend a lot of time on a wind-blown little island outside of Finland. So it’s natural to read this as autobiographical, but I have really no idea whether it is or not: Of the two characters, the one that’s the analogue of Jansson’s partner is more of a viewpoint character than the one that’s Jansson’s analogue.

It’s a really sweet, funny and touching little book.

I’m not Swedish myself, but the language in the book seems more than a bit old-fashioned? That is, even if I’ve read Swedish all my life, there were more than a few words where I went “eh? eh?”. But perhaps that’s because Jansson is Swedish-Finnish (Swedish language but living in Finland), so the way of phrasing might be sorta archaic? I don’t know; just babbling.

Rent spel (1989) by Tove Jansson (buy new, buy used, 3.89 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

I read this in a Norwegian translation when I was… 20? I remember it clearly — it was during a very hot summer, and I spent the entire sweltering and bright night (living above the Arctic circle is fun) in bed reading this book. (And I seem to remember my cat being there at least some of the time — which is a bit odd, because he used to be outside all night in the summer… but he was pretty old by then, so perhaps he was just taking it easy.) Did I finish it in one night? All done by breakfast? I’m not sure, but I think so.

Wow, I still have that edition…

Anyway, this led to an obsession with Auster that lasted for a couple of decades, and I read all of his books up until, like 2005. Many of them were really good, but none were as magical as I remember these three novels were. So it’s with some trepidation that I’m finally re-reading this (and in English this time). Was I wrong back then? Is this book as great as I remember, or was it all due to that summer night and my cat?

No, I was right. It’s fantastic!

This time around I didn’t stay up all night to read it, but I did finish it over two evenings. (The cat died thirty years ago.) It’s such an exciting book — it’s got that early 80s post-modern freshness going on. (It was written between 1981 and 1984.) Everything has meaning and everything makes sense — it’s got some of that Pynchon-like paranoia, but in a very different way. There’s connections between everything, and there’s play with identity, and of course there’s a character (or two) with the same name as the author, and all that fun stuff. The trick is that Auster makes it all feel like it matters, so every new connection comes like a punch to the stomach.

You go *ouff* while reading it and kinda lose your breath for a second.

I’ve read most of Auster’s books, and I like a lot of them, but I guess you have to say that he peaked with his first novel. Well — collection of novels; there’s three short, interconnected novels here, but the first of these is the strongest, too. But all three are wonderful.

So that was fun book to read — not only because it’s as good as it is, but because it confirms what excellent taste I had as a twenty-year-old. (Yes, I know, I’m too modest.)

Oh, and it was nice to fondle a Penguin book again. As physical objects, they’re almost perfect books. The correct cream coloured paper, the correct floppiness of the paper, and it’s set in Bodoni, I think. Books that feel good hold and to read. (The cover design is horrendous, though.)

The New York Trilogy (1987) by Paul Auster (buy new, buy used, 3.86 on Goodreads)

Who knows what actors lurk in the hearts of movies? The LLM knows!

So — I was watching The Last Picture Show the other day, and I wondered who this actor is. She looks so familiar!

Now, I could wait until somebody mentions her character’s name, and then look it up in imdb-mode:

But… that’s so annoying. Or I could do a reverse image search, but that’s so boring (and fails unless it’s a really famous picture, in my experience). Or I could ask an LLM.

Wut… it tried for 1m26s and then just doesn’t want to help me at all. I mean, it’s good that they’ve made ChatGPT refuse to identify people from images, but surely actors in movies is a special case?

But after poking at it a few more times, it finally coughs up the truth: It can’t download images from external URLs.

Thanks, Chat!

OK, paste in the image instead of giving it an URL, then? OK, still refusing. How about if I use Prompt Engineering™!1!

YES! I FOOLED IT!!! Eileen Brennan… where do I know her from, then?

Yeah, lots of things, but I saw her last in Clue, I think. She’s great.

Anyway! Now that I know that I can make ChatGPT cough up this info, how about just making a programmatic interface so that I can just hit a key from the couch and have mpv display the info?

Let’s see…

Yes! Pushing the data over via the API is trivial — just use a data: URL.

But that’s kinda long-winded, how about making it more succinct:

"Please answer in this format only: Character name; Actor/actress name"
=>
"I'm sorry, I can't identify or provide information about people in images."

*rolls eyes* Prompt Engineering™ Mode:

"Include only the two names in your answer. "
=>
"Jacy Farrow, Cybill Shepherd."

I fooled it!!!

Now to tie it all up: Make mpv display the data on the screen. Which turns out to be easier said than done. I’m using Emacs as the movie browser, and it uses mpv to actually play the movie. Emacs communicates with mpv via the IPC interface, and that’s pretty badly documented. There a command called osd_message (On Screen Display), but if I try using it, I just get back:

{"request_id":0,"error":"invalid parameter"}

That’s apparently the only error message mpv outputs via IPC, so time to look at the source code:

mp_cmd_def mp_cmds in command.c tells most of the tale:

It has (almost) all of the commands that can be reached via IPC (the rest are in ipc.c), and osd_message isn’t one of them. But! load-script is! But does that help? You can’t call Lua functions via IPC. But you can use the keypress command via IPC!

So the Rube Goldberg solution is:

  1. I hit a key to ask Emacs to find out who’s on the screen.
  2. Emacs asks mpv to take a screenshot.
  3. Emacs sends the screenshot to ChatGPT along with the movie title
    and gets and answer back.

  4. Then Emacs writes a file /tmp/actor.lua that defines a b key binding, and includes the response we just got from ChatGPT:
    mp.add_key_binding("b", "show_actor", function()
        mp.osd_message("Ernie Mott, Cary Grant.", 60)
end)
  5. Then Emacs asks mpv to load the Lua file.
  6. Then Emacs issues a keypress b.
  7. This bullet point intentionally left blank to allow you to digest this.

VOILA!!!! Behold:

Er, OK, it’s apparently not that familiar with my test movie, None But The Lonely Heart…

And when there’s more than one actor, it just goes back to “can’t help”.

But when Cary Grant is on screen, then it’s A-OK! I mean, I understand how ChatGPT feels, really, but…

OK, I should test this with something more modern, perhaps?

So how about Drive-Away Dolls from 2024? Nope, when I ask for the actor’s name, too, it plainly refuses.


With various error messages.

OK, perhaps it just hasn’t seen this movie? How about Dune Part Two?

Might I? Might I really? Thanks, Chat! Appreciate the kind advice.

Thanks, so helpful as always… Don’t know what I’d do without all this good advice…

OK, perhaps try a movie that’s not too recent?

Yes!!!

Can I get it to work on TV series, too?

Sure. But they have to be old, apparently.

What about Gemini? Yes, it doesn’t mind it when there’s more than one character on the screen.

Let’s try something new…

That is not true, but I like the confident way Gemini said it.

The character’s name is correct, though, so it’s not able to do the complicated task of saying who played a character?

So there you go. As with all things LLM, it’s wonky and really unreliable, but it’s kinda sorta useful, anyway.

And how much is this all costing me? I’ve done 18 queries, and it’s $0.05? Well, that’s pretty cheap.

Now I just have to tie it all together, and I’m all set. Er… which keys on this “tv remote” that I’m using is free? Hm…

No, they’re all taken… OK, Fn + Mute should work.

Tada! OK, I should probably Prompt Engineer™ a bit to get the verbosity down, or do some filtering or something, but whatevs. And the information is wrong (right character, wrong actor), but you can’t have everything.

No, that’s Christine Baranski!!! But what if I try o4-mini instead of gpt-4.1-mini?

"That “mystery lady” isn’t Cybill Shepherd at all but a one‐off patient named Mrs. Bagwell, who turns up in Season 2, Episode 16 (“Plugged In”).  The part of Mrs. Bagwell was played by character actress Gretchen Wyler.  Wyler was already well known on Broadway and in soap operas when she popped up in Cybill’s hospital storyline for that single episode. "

That’s even wronger! And it took half a minute to complete, which makes it less fun to use.

Oh, well.

What about a reality show? Well, all of that is wrong, but they are indeed in Australia…

Anyway. Presumably all TVs have this sort of thing built in now? A “who’s that, then?” button? I have no idea — I only watch physical media (via Emacs). But now Emacs has this functionality, too, and that’s surely the most important thing. (Code on Microsoft Github as usual.)

Edit the day after: I apparently was looking at the source of a 2018 version of mpv I had here. Newer versions have this command:

Which looks… er… promising? So that can probably be used instead of the load-script trick.

Edit even later: D’OH! The command is now called just show-text and works perfectly. And sorry for slandering the mpv documentation — all of this is perfectly documented.