Not a joke, I think. Thespians are a superstitious bunch and the Scottish play at this point is virtually a self-fulfilling prophecy of disastrous productions.
As someone with the last name "McBeth," I very quickly got any interest in theater verbally beaten out of me by this particular religion. There's always that one person in the production who takes it way too seriously, legitimately thinks it's real, and will make sure you know how terrible of a person you are for even showing up with such a name.
It's also a very physical play with a large number of onstage fights. Fight choreography is some of the most dangerous stuff to do onstage: a single mistake and someone can easily be hit by a sword that was supposed to just barely miss them. And although stage-fighting weapons are naturally blunted, they're still big heavy metal rods that can bruise or break bones if you get hit by them. (See my P.S. for a funny story about that, BTW — nobody was injured in that one, but it came close a couple times).
There are some scenes in Macbeth that can be turned into offstage fighting if the director wants to minimize risk to the actors; for example, the battle with Macdonwald (not a typo) in Act 1 Scene 2 is reported to King Duncan, but not seen onstage in most productions. (Though an ambitious director might choose to have a mass battle depicted during the transition from Scene 1 to Scene 2, then have the combatants leave when Duncan walks onstage to hear the report). But there are three scenes that explicitly call for an onstage fight:
Act 3, Scene 3: three hired killers attack Banquo and his son; Banquo is killed but the son manages to escape. This all happens onstage.
Act 5, Scene 7: Macbeth fights young Siward, and kills him.
Act 5, Scene 8: Macbeth fights Macduff, and it's a long fight. They fight once, pause to exchange some words while both are gasping for breath, then they fight again. The stage directions call for them to exit the stage still fighting, then come back onstage still fighting, just in time for the audience to see Macduff kill Macbeth.
With three swordfights that must happen onstage, the potential for accidents is a lot higher than for most of Shakespeare's plays.
On the other hand, Romeo and Juliet has a similar number of fights, as does Hamlet — yet neither of them has acquired the same reputation. So it's also possible that there's an element of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here: actors who are worried about getting hurt might not have their full attention on the fight choreography, making them more prone to make mistakes that do actually result in injury.
P.S. Now for the funny story I mentioned. If you haven't seen The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye as the protagonist and Basil Rathbone as the villain, go watch it; it's hilarious, and it deserves to be more widely-known than it is. In the final swordfight between Kaye's character and Rathbone's, the fight ranges all over the castle, and for plot reasons, Kaye's character is alternating between fighting expertly, and making wild, amateurish swings with no skill at all. Thing is, Rathbone was an expert fencer, and helped teach Kaye (who had no fencing experience) how to fight. Now, usually in a swordfight scene, they would substitute a stuntman to double for the actor when the actor's face isn't visible. But in the scenes where Kaye's face is visible and Rathbone's isn't, it's still Basil Rathbone doing the fighting — because Kaye was so inexperienced that he was likely to make mistakes, and Rathbone didn't want anyone less experienced than himself facing an inexperienced actor in a dangerous fight scene. (In fact, if you have a lot of experience with fight choreography, you can probably spot the times when Kaye came very close to actually hitting Rathbone for real, and if Rathbone had been less experienced he might very well have been injured).
P.S. Another reason why Macbeth might have more injuries than either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet is the setting. In both Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet they're fencing with rapiers, appropriately to the setting. But in Macbeth they're in the Scottish highlands, and a rapier just wouldn't look right. I don't believe Shakespeare ever explicitly specified what kinds of swords the characters in Macbeth are fighting with, but traditionally they've used either longswords (two-handed) or arming swords (one-handed swords, which are what you might think "longsword" means if you came to your knowledge of weaponry through D&D or other RPGs). Both of which are heavier (especially the longswords) than a rapier, and easier to accidentally injure your opponent with (broken bones, concussions, etc) than a blunted stage rapier.
So that fact alone might help explain why injuries tend to be higher in stage productions of Macbeth. It's just inherently more dangerous to perform than the rest of Shakespeare's plays.
This is something I've felt very deeply intuitively. (It's also something that it feels like my life actively optimizes against to prevent me being able to do it.)
An automated service station could be quite compact; it wouldn't need plumbing, lighting, human-comfortable climate control. Parts can be modular, and when a station gets low on spare parts, a self-driving truck could come by to pick up damaged parts and drop off replacements.
We're not there yet, but I think we're a lot closer than most people realize.
Kind of stupid, but I decided to make one final search through my huge bookmark list after posting and just came across the story. The bookmark was to a list, not the story itself, and I missed it in the first couple passes.
- it's less convenient. If the cost difference is small because trucking is cheap people will pay more for convenience.
- the cost difference is smaller than it should be. Trucking is highly subsidized, since diesel taxes don't come anywhere close to paying for the roads. OTOH railroads have to maintain their own infrastructure.
They were gifted the land when the land was close to worthless because the transport costs for western products were higher than their value. The train is what made western land valuable. That land had value before the train came through was almost pure speculation -- people bought and settled land assuming that it would have value once a train arrived.
It was a real subsidy, but it was small and it was > 100 years ago.
OTOH, the land the freeways and roads were built on already had significant value before it was expropriated for road construction and wasn't paid for with diesel tax revenue, so it's yet another subsidy for truck traffic.
- My trucks require roads and do more damage to roads than trains do to rail tracks? No problem, roads are paid for by the taxpayer, while the rail companies have to pay to build and maintain their tracks.
- My trucks produce harmful emissions and particulates that trains don't? No problem, I don't pay for any of that.
- My trucks kill people in accidents? Again, no problem, not paying for any of that.
Yay, we've successfully optimized out any inefficiencies of trucks by externalizing literally all that's possible to externalize. Isn't the free market great?
I feel like I've been in a recession economy since the day I entered the workforce 14 years ago. The movement of the stock market has had no effect on my reality. It's like two different universes inhabited by two different sets of people.
IMO, all the narratives we were exposed to around privilege before and after COVID were a cover up of this fact that we have a two-class system which is explicitly creating this condition. The issue is at the system design level and goes far beyond "technology putting people out of a job". The privilege narrative was classic communist-style "accuse your enemy of what you're doing yourself." It was literally the privileged few preemptively accusing the unprivileged masses of being unfairly privileged in order to take control that narrative before it was used on them.
Use the /btw feature. If you talk while it's thinking, it takes what your say as steering, not as the next rung in the conversation. You can also hit escape to make it stop and acknowledge you.
yeah I know the BTW but often times the things I want it to do ARE, in fact, steering-related things. And yeah, I do interrupt it sometimes to force it to hear me out. Some of the questions I ask it are often also related to the work they are busy with at that moment and my questions are load-bearing.
It just frustrates me so much that it doesn't do a simple "ACK". I with they were more open to pair-programming than INSISTING to do everything completely autonomously or agentic. The models continue to hallucinate and I often feel the need to steer them, but the more powerful the models get, the less interested it seem to get in my opinions/requests...
Anyways... just my observation/frustration with Fable. Thanks for the reply.
Oh another issue with BTW is that is read-only - it can't influence or actually do ANYTHING other than respond in a readonly way. Sometimes thats not what I really want.
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