435

   that's the number of games I have in my steam library, and I haven't played a single second of 172 of those. About 40% of all the games I own. An unacceptable situation. How did it come to this?
Well, I didn't buy most of them, the vast majority comes from Humble Bundle. Now a shadow of itself, Humble Bundle was a subscription based service where you would receive anywhere from 9 to 12 games per month, for 15$. All those games combined usually had an MSRP well above 100$, and there was always a AAA or two in each bundle, alongside older/indie titles. The best part was that the proceeds went to charity, and each month they partnered up with a different one. For a “late” gamer like myself – I had no computer or game console before I was 13 – it was god sent. I was subscribed for 26 months, from 2018 to 2021 and acquired about 256 games through this subscription. While I played the ones I was interested in at the time, the others were just left to rot in my library. I would estimate the proportion of games played to games rotting to be 30/70. On top of that, FOMO lead me to not cancel my subscription, despite seeing games accumulating beyond reason. Couple that with the fact that each time you tried to cancel, you were given the option to pause your subscription for months at a time, and I let the problem grow more than I should have. So this is how I ended in this predicament. After cancelling my subscription, I tried to tackle the problem.

​ On March 24th 2021, right after cancelling my subscription for good, I released the trailer for a new series of videos I was to produce for the Raddest youtube channel. For the uninitiated, Raddest was a group of friends out of Queen's University — I was a late addition to the group, so I can't really speak to its history — that at one point during covid, created a youtube channel. People of Raddest could post on the channel, and to combat by own boredom, I made some pretty frequent contributions, releasing a couple videos a week at one point. I had multiple series going on at a time, and “Humble Purge” was to be one of them. In this series, I would choose one game from my backlog, introduce it and play it for ~20 min giving my opinions and first impressions. Thinking back, I was setting myself up for failure. I didn't have enough motivation to play all the games in my backlog for like an hour, but I thought it would be a good idea to play for at least 20 min, while doing commentary, while discovering the game, spending an hour editing and doing audio processing, an hour rendering, taking the time to come up with a title and make a thumbnail and then waiting for an hour for it to upload... Delusional. So it failed, and I only produced 15 episodes in total, in the span of about a year, because I lacked both time and motivation. And thus, the first humble purge, a noble crusade, came to an end, barely making a dent in my backlog.

This is not the end of the story; around November I came across a video from DarylTalksGames titled “A Misguided Guide to Finishing Your Gaming Backlog” and its sequel “How I Finished My Gaming Backlog”. Those videos are exactly what they sound like they are about. And they rekindled my will to slay my backlog. Those videos didn't just provide me with the will, but also the means to do so. In his first video, Daryl explains his initial methodology and goal. He catalogued all the games in his backlog in an excel sheet, with some relevant information like the genre, how long it would take to beat, and how hyped he was to play it. I did the same, but in a google sheet, cause I'm poor. Those have been useful to plan my second assault on my backlog, but to be honest, I almost learned more from his second video. In it he explains why he initially failed, and here are my main takeaways from it: 1. Only play the games you really want to play. I took this advice and cut down my backlog from 150 to 109 games. I can always come back to the rest of the list when I'm done with this first part. 2. You don't have to finish the games. This was a big one for me, I've been a bit of a completionist in the past, even if the games were tedious and it was becoming a chore to finish them. This helped be re-framed the project from: “There are games that I haven't touched in my library that I have to finish because they are in my library” to “There are games in my library that I haven't touched that I could potentially enjoy for a while”. I went from maximising productivity to maximising fun, and in the end this makes this project more sustainable. Therefore, I set the only rule for this challenge: play 1h minimum. If I still don't dig it after that, I can set the game aside without remorse.

My framework was laid out for me. The main thing I am using to keep track of my progress is this google sheet. The sheet is updated every time I start/finish a game, feel free to check it out. There, you will see four tabs, the first two are the ones we are taking into consideration for this project, the others are more for when I'm done. Namely, games I want to replay, and games I want to buy — i.e. a real backlog.

In any case, the first sheet is all the games that I own on either steam, origin, uplay, epic :vomit and other. During this challenge, this list can grow, but under one specific rule: I can't buy games. Since the beginning of this project in December 2023 I added ~6 games, that I got for free either on epic, steam or prime. With those added, I got a bunch of info from all the games, the most important being the type of game, the time to complete, rating from steam and metacritic, and my hype to play it /10. I was ready to move on to the culling. The second sheet is all the games I will actually play during this purge; the selection process was pretty simple. Of that first sheet, I would add any games that had a hype above 5/10. But it didn't end there. I would also add any games that had a hype of 5/10 and steam score above 85% or metacritic above 75. For the games at 4/10, they would have to have steam ratings above 90% or metacritic scores above 80. Lastly, no matter the rating, any game with a steam score above 95% or metacritic above 85 would instantly be retained. Regardless of what I want to play, I'm not willing to miss cult classics. I was ready to start playing. I would divide my play time into games I would play at home, and games I would be able to play at the office. The latter category had to fit some narrow criteria, namely: be able to run on a toaster, be completely SFW and not require any attention if I had to drop it to actually work. End of December/ beginning of January are periods with a lot of downtime at work, so I decided to capitalise on that and started the challenge on Dec 3rd.

I was, at first, overwhelmed with choices, but I had prepared for this eventuality, and had a randomised game selector pick something for me. Monster Prom. I started the game, played for a bit, wrote my review, gave my rating. Didn't take too long, and I grew confident in my ability to finish this project within a year. Slay the Spire was next.

Yaaaouch!!! I had played card games and rogue-likes, but this one just hit the spot. I spent two weeks on this game, I had fun and I regret nothing. Thankfully, so far this is the only game I have devoted that much time to. After this little hiccup, I was able to enjoy games at a good pace, and as I am writing these words I have completed 23 games, roughly 21% of my backlog. Provided I don't find too many Slay the Spires, I should be able to finish this by the end of the year.

This is the big project touted in my December reading, and the excuse I had for only reading one (1) small book. With the project on its way and its motivation and methodology explained, I would like to extend an invitation. Clean your backlog, whether it's games that are rotting in your library — like me —, or games you've had on a list for six years that you are definitely coming around to playing — like DarylTalksGames. You don't even need to do all the research that I did from my google sheet, I learned recently that there are websites that do it for you. To spice it up, we can set a deadline of one year. I intended to release this article in December or on January 1st at the latest, but I got lazy. In any case, you would have until February 2025 to clear your backlog. I would love to hear about the games you played, which one were pleasant surprises and which ones weren't so much. Regardless, I will make an update article in December 2024, whether I am successful or not. See you then!

Thank you for reading my logorrhea, Eddie

To celebrate Shohei Ohtani's record breaking contract + deferred salary, I decided to post a little preview in to Dodgers fans future, as there are a plethora of 40+ yr old players who have since retired still being paid.

The most famous deferred money recipient among the baseball lore would be Bobby Bonilla, who had a career of around 16 years. He is a 6 time all star which is nothing to scoff at, and overall had an above average career, posting an 162 game average of .279/.358/.472, which is the standard for todays players.

But this is not why he is talked about to this day. When the Mets released Bobby Bonilla from his contract in 1999, they bought out the remaining 5.9 million and deferred the payment. From 2011 until 2035, Bobby Bonilla will have received a total of 30 million dollars from the New York Mets, giving him a higher annual salary than some of todays younger players. The Mets ownership were heavily involved with Bernie Madoff at the time, and likely used that money with him to receive a high dividend. Madoff would be arrested in 2009, and the Mets would fall to ruin in the 2010s.

Ken Griffey Jr., Manny Ramirez, Jim Edmonds, Bret Saberhagen, Todd Helton, Matt Holliday, Japanese legend Ichiro Suzuki, and Bronson Arroyo are all retired and had great careers, some of them HOFers. They deserved the check they got, and in the 80's and 90's the market was a lot more fathomable, as most of these are <5 million, but nonetheless, these players have all been retired for 10+ years, and are being paid big bucks by teams that are all currently rebuilding or just bad: Cincinatti, Boston, St. Louis, New York Mets, Colorado, Seattle (coincidence?)

There will always be good players that deserve good money, but can we at least think about things a little bit?

Max Scherzer signed a 7 year, 210 million dollar contract with the Washington Nationals in 2015, deferring 105 million from 2022-2028. Not only is he still being paid 15 million a year by Washington, he signed a 3 year, 130 million dollar contract with the New York Mets in 2021, was traded to Texas in 2023, and now Washington AND New York have a deferred Scherzer contract on their payroll. He was injured 7 times since 2017 and is also injured for the first half of the 2024 season.

This next one baffles me because it happened almost simultaneously to Scherzer, as these two won the 2019 World Series together. Stephen Strasburg essentially killed his career to win the World Series, giving it everything he had. An elbow injury in 2022 would end his career. He would sign a 7 year, 175 million dollar contract extension in 2016, one year after Scherzer's, with opt outs, extending it yet again in 2019 for 7 years, 245 million dollars, a move that would devastate the Nationals not 2 years later. Injures plagued him from 2018-2020, missing most of the shortened pandemic season, but it would be a neck injury in 2021 and a rib injury a week after his return/debut in June of 2022 that would take him out for almost 2 seasons. In March of 2023, the beginning of the season, Strasburg would suffer nerve damage and be unable to continue his career, formally retiring in August of 2023. 80 million of his contract is deferred from 2027-2029, allotting him 26 million annually.

The Nationals fucking suck right now, btw.

This next one is too hard to tell, as Francisco Lindor has been good, is good, and could potentially be good for the majority of his 10 year, 341 million dollar contract (2022-2031), as he was still relatively young when he signed at age 28, unlike the previous 2 who were well into their 30s. His contract defers 5 million annually from 2032-2041.

He will be a Mets mainstay by the end of his career.

Speaking of Mets mainstay... I mean “end of his career”, Jacob Degrom... the GOAT on the field, but he's usually off the field. Jacob Degrom is the human double-down. The 5th turn of Russian Roulette. From 2014-2019, Jacob Degrom was THE top pitcher. He would body Ohtani every year if they were in the same timeline. In May 2021, however, he got injured. Then later in that year he got injured for the rest of the season. Then next season he was injured for 4 months. Every time he wasn't injured, he was the #1 guy. So how do you go about paying him? He is an 100 million dollar man on the field. But how much can u burn on him being off the field? The deep pocketed Texas Rangers had cash to burn, as they spent 500 mil the year before signing Degrom for 5 years, 185 million with a club option in the 6th year and a full no trade clause. All this at age THIRTY FIVE, and he got injured this year. Has to get a second Tommy John surgery which is a 14 month rehab. 40 million dollar rehab assignment. But they won the World Series so it was worth it right?

Deferring salaries can be a good financial move, or it can quickly turn out to be the stuffing everything in the closet and waiting for it to turn up again later. The economy of sports is completely different now than it was in the 80's. There's money everywhere now. Money to be made, Money to be spent... and Money to be lost. Burned. BTW, of the retired players being paid that I mentioned earlier, Cincinatti, Boston, St. Louis, New York Mets, Colorado, Seattle, only one of those teams would win the World Series, Boston, who won it twice in '04 and '07 with Manny Ramirez. So no, I don't think it works out for most people, and I think that the Dodgers signing Ohtani for that much was as much a marketing move as it was a professional one. They don't care if he performs for the entirety of his contract, he IS the attraction. Ohtani is very much once in a lifetime because he is so much more than a baseball player or a good baseball player, he is a generation of fans waiting to happen. He will shift an entire point of view on baseball, and make alot of dough doing it.

You cannot separate subjective suffering from the subject of the suffering.

For all today's bluster about mental health awareness, I rarely see compelling or empathetic discussion of what mental illness is. Intuitively, we understand a broken bone is a thing, a damaged physical object, an injured part of a human body. A viral infection is at least a physical event, an infestation of minuscule packets of genetic information, propagated through a human body. The common story goes that depression is an imbalance of neurotransmitters, an issue with brain chemistry. While I don't think this story is entirely without merit—I don’t want to discourage anyone from seeing if medication-based treatment can help them—it doesn't satisfy me. It seems to sidestep the problem. I want to propose a different definition of depression, not as a physical issue with human body, but as a self-reinforcing pattern of subjective phenomenological experience—in my case, recursively-driven dissociative yearning.

The neurotransmitter story of depression differs from broken bones and viral infections on the grounds of diagnosis. The latter two afflictions are (or at least, can be) physically verified. A swab up the nose can physically detect a virus, an x-ray gives a picture of a shattered radius & ulna. This isn't the case with depression. No doctor is taking samples of brain tissue to check for neurotransmitter balance. The neurotransmitter theory comes later, a post-hoc explanation for the physical behavior and subjective phenomenological symptoms on which depression is actually diagnosed.

The latter category, subjective phenomenological symptoms, is of interest. Consider that a doctor might diagnose a patient with a viral infection by listening to them describe how they feel. But even if the patient feels fine, they could still be diagnosed with that same infection if a nose swab come back positive. The subjective phenomenological symptoms (how the patient feels) are secondary to the observable physical evidence of infection (presence of virus in the body). Depression, by comparison, has no observable physical evidence. Like other mental illnesses, it's diagnosed wholly on self-reported phenomenology and assessments of behavior. Even if we could easily sample an individual's neurotransmitter levels, and found them shockingly low, they wouldn't be considered eligible for a modern depression diagnosis off that alone. Diagnosis of depression requires the presence of one of the following two subjective phenomenological symptoms, as per the DSM-5: – (1) Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day – (2) Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day

There's no way to write this piece without discussing my personal case. I personally suffer from (2). I've suffered from some variation or degree of (1) and (2) since early adolescence. Personal experience is no small part of why the neurotransmitter story doesn't interest me. It is so detached from my moment-to-moment experience as to mean nothing. Telling me that the neurotransmitter levels in my brain are what causes my (2) has no meaningful connection to my actual experience of (2). You may as well tell me my depression is caused by bad humors in my blood, curses from devious sprites, or karmic retribution for past-life sins. I don't particularly care what the 'cause' is, because any hypothetical cause is so unrelated to what my experience of (2) actually is—straightforward phenomenology.

I am depressed—I can use that term to describe myself—because I experience (2). This is our starting point. My specific, idiosyncratic experience of (2) is my depression. This is to say, the way a broken arm is the shattered bone or a viral infection is the presence of parasitically self-propagating packets of genetic material, my depression is my phenomenological experience of (2). Maybe that phenomenological experience could be explained by neurotransmitters in the same way a broken arm can be explained by jumping off a playground slide or a viral infection can be explained by eating bad food. But the cause is not the affliction itself. The depression is the phenomena.

Talking about phenomenology is difficult, because words don't map cleanly onto it. The purpose of language is to do compression on phenomena, make concessions, create a sizable map of discrete entities permitting some simulacrum of phenomena to be socially shared. The word “tree” is meaningful between Joe and Jill because Joe's phenomenological understanding of what “tree” means is close enough to Jill's such that no discrepancy is likely to arise when casually discussing the subject. Extending this, it becomes immediately clear that mental illness is difficult to talk about because it constitutes a phenomenological malady. An individual's experience of mental illness is not similar enough to common experience to be easily shared and discussed the way a “tree” can. In fact, the patient is defined as mentally ill because they are outside the realm of typical experience. Being mentally ill means suffering from a painful abnormal phenomenology, which by its very nature exists outside the realm of shared experience where language is comfortable and highly effective.

There is no way for the mentally ill to go to a psychologist and show them their mental illness as it is, as they experience it. Subjective phenomena is singular and private. The depressed patient can only bring that psychologist words which compress the (massive, fundamental, confusing, exceedingly painful) phenomena of their mental illness into generalized, socially-useful language-space—then they can only hope the nuances are accurately unpacked on the psychologist's end. In fairness, when it comes to mental illness, a psychologist is probably better at unpacking language than most. It's their job. But no matter how talented and empathetic the psychologist is, as soon as they respond, the patient becomes the party responsible unpacking language into phenomenological understanding—a task they have to accomplish in spite of the phenomenological malady which brought them to the psychologist in the first place.

It should go without saying that valid advice which makes perfect sense within the frame of the psychologist’s intuition often has no hope of being accurately unpacked by a depressed patient. Packing-unpacking-packing-unpacking—it easily slips into unnoticed circular patterns, failing to develop either party's understanding of the core topic, that being the patient’s depression and how to treat it. Trying to use talk therapy to resolve depression is like trying to explain Ulysses using facial expressions. There simply isn't enough available nuance.

I think it's unfortunate how little grasp most people have on the concept of their own phenomenology. This might be the primary 'space' where helplessness in the face of mental illness exists. An individual obviously cannot debug issues with their phenomenology if they can't even meaningfully grasp what 'their phenomenology' is. At a minimum, I suspect it has to be understood—really understood—that emotions and feelings are not reducible to common-sense linguistic taxonomy. Consider descriptors like happy, sad, ambivalent, envious, loving. They're just words. They don't map onto clean-cut distinct phenomena, they just gesture toward broad, hazily-delineated fields within the greater continuum of possible phenomena. If you've lived, you've felt all of those things in a thousand different ways. Deeper than language, anyone can find that even simple feelings are multi-faceted textures of experience, constantly in flux, countless ineffable sensations arising and passing faster than they can be noticed—let alone rationally considered or narratively packaged. Trying to treat mental illness without increasing the fidelity of phenomenological perception is like trying to fix a car without recognizing the single engine under the hood as being made of many distinct parts.

In spite of these hurdles, I'm surprisingly optimistic about my grasp of of depression as a concept. Talking about phenomenology isn't impossible, just hard. I believe the perfect words can occasionally resonate, suddenly clarifying previously indescribable experiences. Such resonance is inherently personal—occurring on the fringes of language, in the ways it's experienced by an individual rather than the in role it serves as a social tool—but that doesn't mean there's zero utility in trying to share it. It would be a shame not to share something so meaningful. Most Zen koans are gibberish until they suddenly enlighten a disciple. The chance at conveying profound understanding is worth trying for.

A few months ago, amidst efforts to practice greater mindfulness, I began to notice a recurring phenomenological motif—the vast amount of time I spent with my consciousness fixated to the idea of an indistinct better future for myself. Fantasies about the next place I'll live, the next meal I'll eat, the next semester where I'll finally study every evening and have the marks to show for it. The feeling was deeply familiar, something I knew I'd been doing since childhood. I gave the habit a shorthand name (“future-tanha”)^{1} and casually noted as it occurred over the next few months.

Over that period, it became clear that “future-tanha” was only a subcategory, an acute instance of a more general feeling—a miserable yearning for an indistinct elsewhere, a yearning for the phenomena of elsewhere-itself^{2}. I recognized it everywhere, in childish daydreams and in suicidal ideation, in manic productivity and in mindless scrolling. Attempting to satiate it was why I used to smoke weed every night before bed, why I still pick up my phone to check the internet first thing almost every morning. So many of my reflexive actions are desperate sprints away from the present moment, toward a sedated, indeterminate elsewhere.

Then I realized, softly at first, but with increasing clarity, this is my depression.

The psychic discomfort that had haunted me since I was twelve, the perpetual internal suffering I've spent over a decade managing, is the presence of this feeling.

Coming to terms with this was an experience of profound resonance as discussed above, a moment of lucid conceptual collapse. It quickly became intuitively obvious that the signified 'my depression' pointed to was one-and-the-same as the signified 'my yearning for elsewhere' pointed to. This created immediate opportunities for new linguistic bootstrapping. Before, reflecting on the phenomena of my depression, I only had one direct-match word to play off it—'depression'. This insight gave me two more: 'yearning' and 'elsewhere', in conversation with one another. Suddenly, I could meaningfully recognize my depression not as a background tone, but as a happening—not as something external to my ego, but as something I do.

I began to recognize 'yearning for elsewhere' as a recursive process that had reinforced itself over the course of my entire life. When the moment is uncomfortable, the mind attaches to elsewhere—a fantasy, a distraction—to escape the discomfort. Maintaining such attachment to elsewhere is uncomfortable and taxing. The present gives itself freely—the future or the past must be constructed within the mind on the stage of the present. This is subtly taxing, subtly painful. Doing it continuously has the net effect of making the present continuously more painful, burdened by the pressure and stress of trying to always escape elsewhere. As the present grows painful, the need for escape becomes even greater—imagine a man dying of thirst, trying to drink more and more seawater. Over time, the mind becomes conditioned into a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with the moment of hand, wholly dependent on fantasies and distractions. Eventually, little or no pleasure exists in the present at all.

I'm not going to lay claim to having discovered the phenomenological mechanism by which depression occurs. I can only speak for myself. But this is a mechanism, a mental pattern, which can spiral into a full-blown clinical depression. It has in my case.

This is an unoriginal complaint, but the world we live in today offers more attention-colonizing 'elsewheres' than any other time in history. It's trivial to escape the moment by scrolling, browsing, ruminating on an endless flow of novel information. Any discomfort can be drowned out by quantity alone. It's all too easy to teach the mind to view an unadulterated present as a threat, something to be escaped. But as discussed, the effort of constructing past and future is painful. Once you've ruined your relationship to the present, there is nowhere comfortable left to go.

I haven't solved all my problems by recognizing my depression as yearning for elsewhere. There are still good and bad days, upswings and downswings that last weeks or months. It has, however, given me some faith back. It's exhausting to spend decades exploring your own mind, rotating through the same tired tropes, feeling broken, clinging to various stories and methodologies in hope of uncovering one that would explain it all. Stepping beyond language—depression as a 'sign'—and into phenomenology—depression as a 'happening', a pattern or motif in my phenomenology that occurs—has given me my first truly new lens on it. There's a part of me that's almost ashamed to write that, remembering all the times before where I convinced myself I'd finally figured it out. Perhaps this insight is just another example of that kind of self-delusion. But I won't talk myself out of a good thing. Words that emerge to describe a familiar, recognized phenomenology feel meaningfully distinct from words in search of a phenomenology to attach themselves to.

I suspect all of mental health care would be better if we started with phenomenology rather than language. You are not a language model, you are not a storybook, you are not a text. You are an embodied person. The complete experience that comes with that is your birthright—nothing is inconsequential or invalid. Every blank moment, every ineffable emotion, every intrusive thought, every hot flash, every half-dream, every weird tingle, every lump in your throat, every smile on your face—none of it is disposable. Depression isn't a lack of neurotransmitters, depression is a distortion of all that, a painful and tragic cognitive maladaptation. If we want to solve depression, we have to start deeper. We have to get in touch with the real moment-to-moment, what happens underneath the words we lean into so heavily.

Another depressive might not find the same 'yearning for elsewhere' that I did. Those words might just be a personal Zen koan, something that resonates with me and me alone. But I confidently believe that every depressive's suffering is in some way a happening, a profound phenomena. Recognizing that with as much nuance and understanding as possible is the minimal prerequisite for countering it—you have to know what's happening if you want to figure out how to make it no longer happen.

Recognizing this with increasing conviction has given me some dim long-term hope for the first time in a long time. That, too, is a happening.

footnotes

{1} I didn't care too much if this was an accurate use of “tanha”, but borrowed the word because the feeling manifested as a painful attachment to the future.

{2} I differentiate the “yearning for elsewhere” from “tanha” broadly, because where tanha attaches itself to many things (perhaps all things), this feeling is defined by its relation to the category of outside the present moment. I could have called it “elsewhere-tanha”, keeping in line with “future-tanha”, but freeing myself from my concerns about butchering Pali makes this all a little easier to discuss.

{3} I've begun to read Gendlin's classic book “Focusing”. What I experienced seems like a textbook case of what he describes as a “felt shift”. I haven't finished the book, so I can't unequivocally recommend it yet, but if this sort of thing interests you it's likely worth checking out.

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Thoughts From Reading Ramblings 3

Thank you for sharing.

It is interesting to read another recommend having a crisis checklist. I had independently come to the same conclusion after an incident with a grandparent.

There was a situation where they were expressing stroke-like symptoms, which led to an ambulance trip. After the initial symptoms, before the EMTs arrived, the grandparent regained full functionality as if nothing had gone wrong. It was bizarre, and resulted in the EMTs arriving with us only being able to verbally explain what had happened.

On the car ride home, I quickly created an emergency checklist in my notes app and pinned it.

• don't panic
• designate someone to record everything
• designate someone to call 911
• don't hesitate to call 911
• designate someone to get the contact info for the person recording and have them email/text it to me so I can ask them for the recording later
• perform after action report to determine how to improve this process for next time

This list draws inspiration from standard first aid training and fiction literature.

When the symptoms disappeared, it was very concerning. What was the cause? Is it likely to happen again?

We didn't really expect the symptoms to go away quickly, so it makes sense that I didn't think to record things at the time to be analyzed later.

This brings to the forefront: what is it appropriate to record?

Whipping out my phone to record the symptoms and possible last moments of a loved one does not inspire good feelings about having to implement this in practice. However, what if the symptoms didn't go away? What if a recording of the episode could be used to assist in treatment? It would make sense to push past discomfort and gather the data that would supplement or discredit eye witness testimony of events.

I have lots I can say about the topic of privacy in our advancing digital age. This is not that article.

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Everyone should also pick up a craft that they do for themselves. Creating something physical with the sweat of one's brow, creating from nothing, taking something raw and turning it into a work worth more than the sum of its parts.

It is an emotive statement. At the same time, I sometimes feel left out that my works are primarily programming rather than physical creation. A program I write will affect pixels on a screen which physically emit light, so it's not like I have zero claim to physical creation. I do not want to attribute intent that is not present, I just want to keep typing the stuff that comes to my mind.

Wokeness has adjusted the way I think. Language is fascinating, being able to shape the actions of others by a low damage audio spell rather than relying on might-makes-right fisticuffs. The right phrase could get another human to give you a loaf of bread, or make them punch you in the face. It is possible to say the wrong thing, and people have created guides on how to avoid doing so.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/bias-free-communication https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

How far do I go?

I can't claim to have read these guides entirely, but I have better attention to these themes than most I'd say.

A coworker said today that “we could have a powwow later to look into this”. I noticed at the time but didn't “call them out on it” and mention that the term is considered an offensive appropriation of a cultural term.

Is it my place to police what others say? My coworker doesn't have malicious intent when they say they want to have a meeting later using a word that they been exposed to as normal for a majority of their life.

Is it too late to take corrective action? To restore balance, I obviously must schedule a reminder to send a message to the coworker on Monday, mentioning that they used the wrong word over 50 hours in the past.

It seems that the best course of action is “if they say it again, I'll mention it”. Failing to act/delaying is also something to be cautious of, but in this situation I thinking waiting is an acceptable response.

Consider these examples from the Google guide

👍Before launch, give everything a final check for completeness and clarity. 👎Before launch, give everything a final sanity-check.

👍There are some baffling outliers in the data. 👎There are some crazy outliers in the data.

👍It slows down the service, causing a poor user experience until the queue clears. 👎It cripples the service, causing a poor user experience until the queue clears.

👍Replace the placeholder in this example with the appropriate value. 👎Replace the dummy variable in this example with the appropriate value.

Software is filled with biased terms. Some people bring contention when the default name for a new git branch gets changed from master to main. Another one I notice a lot is whitelist/blacklist where allowlist and denylist should be preferred.

It takes time to adapt to such large changes, to tread a new path in our brains until it becomes the new default. Technology and wokeness to this degree has only risen recently, and old behaviours are hard to overwrite.

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The emergency checklist also mentions performing an after action report. In a story I am reading, the protagonist is part of Ranger teams that go out and fight monsters and protect humanity and stuff. Part of the training and being a Ranger is paperwork and meetings, including discussions on how the fight with that hydra went and how to do better next time.

I don't have much to say beyond “this thing made me think of this other thing”. This started as me writing an article because I appreciate reading the articles of others. This is my contribution, then, until I can follow through on some ideas I've had for other articles.

I am reading a bunch of stuff right now. I should create a book list and mention that I, too, liked reading Wolf Brother and appreciate the cover art.

My existing notes say more on the subject than I can properly articulate.

# Teamy @ Teamy-Desktop in ~\OneDrive\Documents\Ideas [02:06:53]
$ rg -i "i should"
I should.md
1:I should make a tool to aggregate all my "I should" notes.
9:In most cases, things "I should" do are more aptly described as "Things I think would be cool to see, and I could build it myself if I took the time to do so.".
$ rg -i "i should" | Measure-Object

Count             : 71

I have ran out of thought things that spawned for the initial premise of this article, +time4bed, so goodnight.

comics and coffee

lright, I got covid again. Might as well use this time to write some reviews on what comics I've read lately. But don't even think about starting this article until I've had my coffee.

Mmmm... You may proceed.

Roaming

by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki Published by Drawn And Quarterly Roaming tells the story of three Canadian girls in their first year of college, on a 5-day trip to New York City. I won't say too much of the story, because I want you to read this book, but it deals with only the kind of bullshit that really happens to 19-year-olds, in friendship, fast romance, and sitting next to a weird guy at the airport.

Every page is a pleasure to look at, drawn in a bubbly style that always works. The book is brilliantly coloured with only two pastel hues that create a dreamy and glowing New York City. From front to back, I was floored by the colouring.

The city is almost explicitly the fourth character in the book, depicted sometimes in near photorealistic drawings, and then swirling collages of artwork, landmarks, and people. In a way the depiction of the city is the same as the character studies: We start with the outward identity, the mask the person wears. As we learn about the person, we see more of their insides, what makes them work, their more private self.

Roaming does that thing which so many stories strive to but fall short: depict truth. The truth of young passion, friendship, and wonder, with all its jagged edges and corners. The main characters of Dani, Zoe, and Fiona are distinct personalities that are at times loveable, at times not so, but constantly believable to the point that you can only empathize.

If you are only going to read one comic this year, make it Roaming.

Clippings

by Gabby Golee Self-Published A brilliant little comic with really expressive art that is oozing cuteness and weirdness. Dealing with the awkward relationship between two girls living in a crumbling Torontonian house, I highly recommend buying this here if you want a cute zine by a Torontonian artist who deserves some attention. They also sell some killer stickers on their site.

The Complete Peanuts 1981-1982

By Charles M Schulz, Seth Published by Fantagraphics I don't have to tell you about Peanuts, or Charlie brown, or Snoopy. You already know about them. What I will comment on is the absolute mastery and merits of the daily strip in this volume. By the 80's peanuts had been running in the papers for 30 years, and Schulz displays an unrivalled ability to write consistent, witty jokes and fun storylines into his strip. By the point in time this book collects, he is far past fully developed in both his writing and drawing skills. As a daily strip, there is little put to waste in the drawing, each line is deliberate and there isn't a penstroke more than there needs to be.

One of the hidden abilities of the daily strip is that they collect into volumes so nicely- This book is the most approachable a comic book can possibly get. You can pick it up, read as much or as little as you like, and put it down. You can start reading at the beginning, middle, or end, and not be ruining anything for yourself. Unlike some popular manga like One Piece which boasts over one thousand chapters of continuous story, there is no barrier to entry for Peanuts or similar daily strips. Just start anywhere.

The foreword by Lynn Johnston, (creator of For Better or For Worse, as well as a personal friend to Schulz) is particularly touching and insightful. Her writing paints a picture of an artist obsessed, in melancholy and in love with his craft. Seth's design work on this book, as the other volume of complete peanuts I've gotten my paws on, is also top notch, putting together a hardcover that just looks good wherever it's sitting, that be on a coffee table or part of a collection.

While reading through this volume, I watched Schulz's interview with Charlie Rose and a specific moment I think aged quite well.

Rose: You are a real artist, in your eye. Schulz: You think so? Rose: You think so. Schulz: No. Rose: You don't think cartooning is real art? Schulz: Yes, but, not many cartoons lie into the next generation. Rose: Ah, that's true. Schulz: And that's probably the best definition of art isn't it? Does it speak to succeeding generations?...

Well, I'm sorry to do this Sparky, but I'm going to have to issue a correction on that one. If you want a solid coffee-table book that is witty, but also innocent and pure-fun, look no further.

The Good News Bible: The complete Deadline strips of Shaky Kane

By Shaky Kane Published by Breakdown Press Get ready for a wild one. From 1988 to 1995, Deadline magazine published some radical stuff (see: Tank Girl). This book is a collection of gigantic pages of kirby-esque, punk art that explodes on each page in glorious black and white. The oversized pages really do a lot for me, seeing the art in such fidelity conveys the pure attitude and weight of the drawing.

This book heavily features the 'A-Men', a group formerly NYPD, they have decided that their duty as cops should extend to the spiritual world, enforcing a Christian-facist rule on the city of New York. They take on such heroic tasks as beating on people in their own homes and monitoring all the city's pornography in their massive goon-cave.

Other heroic characters include Metal Messiah, who devours his worshippers with his iron jaws, Insect Erectus, The Sadistic Prowler, and your Pal, Shaky Kane.

Along with provocative and deeply satirical subject matter, I'm hypnotized by the drawing in this book and probably will be for some time, though i probably wouldn't recommend it.

Hunter X Hunter Vol.1

By Yoshihiro Togashi Published by Viz Hunter X Hunter got it's hooks in me pretty quickly with the drawings of wild beasts and simple enough concept. It's pretty formulaic, but doesn't give you any space to get bored. It definitely feels like a spin on Dragon Ball that's original enough to keep you from walking away, which is all that really matters.

I love the idea of the character's power being rooted in their attunement to nature and ability to do things like tell when a storm is coming, or a beast's emotions. I'll be cracking into Vol.2 whenever I feel like getting into another long Shonen Jump series.

This past September, I finally took a pottery workshop that I had been eyeing for a few years. This article kicks off what I hope will be a series of hobby review articles.

The Inspiration

Pottery is one of those hobbies that I always thought was cool, but reached a new interest peak for me during the pandemic. During that time, my social media feed was filled with creators, like the effortlessly cool Lisa Asano, showing off their works. Additionally, the concept of creating things that can be used in everyday life deeply speaks to me and my cottagecore delusions.

Prior Experience Skill Level: 1/5

I had previously taken one pottery class in 2022 where we used hand-building techniques. I did learn a bit about attaching during that session, but aside from that, nothing really transferred over. That experience was frustrating and my pottery pieces were underwhelming. This allowed me to have low expectations going into wheel-throwing pottery. I have also done those pottery painting things and similarly, my expectations did not match the reality of what I was able to paint. All this to say, I took a more reserved approach going into this one.

Week 1 – Throwing

Although I went in with an open mind and low expectations, I could not have anticipated what it was really like to throw pieces on a pottery wheel. Social media creators and other media we consume make it look so effortless. Let me be the first to say, it is HARD WORK.

We started the session by observing our instructor demonstrate technique and form while creating a bowl. Then we were each allocated 3 clumps of clay to make our own creations.

First, you need to centre the ball of clay on the pottery wheel bat (disc that goes on top of the wheel). You do this by smacking down the clay onto the bat. Even this very beginning step can take a few tries, but is integral to your piece surviving the wheel. After your clay has been placed, you'll need to press it down into a mound, cone it back up in height, and then gently guide it back down. This felt redundant but I'm told it helps make the clay uniform. On my first attempt, I felt like I was losing so much clay to my hands.

It's worth noting here that there is a proper form for wheel throwing. Your hands will react differently depending on the step you're on. However, for the most part, you have to be hunched over the wheel with your elbows locked to your thighs so that you are steady and don't get moved around by the wheel as you try to shape the clay. Holding this position for almost 2 hours non-stop is not to be underestimated.

Next, potters need to determine where the centre of their mound of clay is and poke a small hole. If well-centred, you'll then continue to press down into the clay until you create a tunnel. It was a bit hard to gauge how far down to go in order to create a stable base for your piece that isn't too thin or thick.

From there, potters will open, “pull”, and then shape the walls. I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the best upper body or hand strength, but this can be deceivingly hard. The clay wants to fight you as you manipulate it into a hollow structure. You also have to be hyper-aware of the amount of pressure you are applying to both the inside and outside of the walls. Due to the centrifugal nature of the wheel, the clay wants to flare out. This means you need to apply differing pressure on each side to achieve the shape you want. In the case of a tall product like a mug, you almost need to overcorrect and pull towards the centre to get that wall height.

As you can see in the photos below (taken at week 2 after they had dried a bit), it took me a few tries to get the technique of pulling the walls so that the base wasn't too thick and the walls had some height.

Taking each pot off the bat also required some technique and finesse. In some cases, you can see where my hands misshaped the pots as I was taking them off. As we kept saying in our class, it made for an “organic” look.

Week 2 – Trimming & Attaching

Aside from the skill of attaching, I didn’t really know what to expect for this class. Going in, I was under the impression that nothing more was needed to be done to our pots. Unless of course, we wanted to add handles and other attachments of that nature.

Our instructor informed us that trimming your pots is a crucial step, and some pottery guilds won’t even fire your pots in the kiln if they are not trimmed. Pots that are not trimmed have the potential to explode in the kiln and damage others’ pots.

When you trim your pots, you place them upside down on the wheel and shave away the bottom to get rid of excess clay. Additionally, you make them smooth and level so that you do not damage the surfaces you place them on. You can also take the opportunity to further shape or add grooves into your pieces at this stage. I opted to trim excess, carve out some rings, and attach a little flower for my pieces.

Week 3 – Glazing

For this session, we had a separate instructor to go through glazing with us. We started the session by reflecting on what we had learned in weeks 1 & 2, and how we felt about the process. A lot of us recounted how wheel throwing was much harder than we expected, but also meditative in a way.

This instructor also said something rather profound that I wish I had been able to write down in that moment. The sentiment of what she said was that often times in art, things might not turn out the way we were planning in our heads. Sometimes we just have to lean in and accept that the art may have a better plan for itself. She said it more eloquently of course, but it is something I’m carrying with me coming out of this experience.

To start, we took some wet sandpaper to our pieces and filed down any sharp or rough spots on our half-baked pots. After tidying that up with slightly damp sponges, we went in and marked rings around our pots in pencil. The point of this step is to create a ~1cm margin from the bottom for the glaze to stop at. If the glaze runs too far down the pot, it can cause it to stick to the kiln shelf and potentially break when removed. Any areas below the pencil line were covered in wax that we painted on to prevent the glaze from running too far. In the kiln, both the pencil and wax will burn off or melt away.

Next, we were introduced to underpainting. This is where you would do any detailed colouring of your pieces that would go under the general glaze. In my case, I painted the little flower I had attached to one of my bowls. After this, I protected the flower with a layer of wax.

From here, we moved on to learning about the glazes and the techniques that can be used. When it comes to the glazes, they actually intermix in unexpected ways. Unlike how you would mix paint using colour theory to get what colours you want, glazes come with an element of surprise. Although they provided us with chips to show how colours might come out depending on how you layer them, you may still get an unexpected result.

For example, there was a glaze called “celadon”, and one called “oil spill”. My tallest pot is dunked in the celadon glaze, and partially dipped in oil spill. On the colour chips, celadon and oil spill are bright cyan and black, respectively. However, you can see that the pot came out more blueish-teal with a cobalt crackled detailing on the rim as a result of this layering combo. Moreover, if I had reversed the order of the glaze layers, I would have gotten another look entirely.

In the case of my flower bowl, the exterior was meant to come out a cream colour with a maroon interior. Even though it didn’t go to plan, I don’t mind how it turned out.

Final Thoughts

I’m really glad I gave this a try! Although I played it safe, I’m quite happy with how my pots came out. I have already employed them to hold a variety of items.

I think I would take another workshop or two before I got a membership and went at it alone. Despite there being a decent learning curve and a lot of risk involved, I enjoyed the process and it taught me a lot about myself as well.

Pottery wheel throwing is something everyone should try at least once if they have the means to. However, it has a higher price point to entry than most hobbies, and can be physically demanding in an unexpected way. For this reason, I rate it a 9/10.

The Shohei sweepstakes have begun, with everyone obviously interested, but who will actually sign the big fella? When he was first buzzed about in the NPB (Japan's MLB), he expressed his desire to both hit and pitch, and to be on the West Coast so he is closer to Japan. Since the universal DH (Designated hitter) wasn't in effect in the National League at that time, Shohei signed with the Los Angeles Angels of the American League West division.

Now that all teams have the universal DH, the entire West Coast will throw offers his way hoping to sway the pricey once in a lifetime player to their side.

Only taking into account the West Coast as I doubt he will sign anywhere not there, his options are more limited than you'd think. Being a once in a lifetime event, his price tag will also stand alone as the highest paying contract in history. This means that you're not only getting someone now, but will be placed into a 10+year commitment to lower the annual salary.

These are the current highest paying contracts of all time:

Mike Trout (12years, 426.5mil, 2019-30) Mookie Betts (12years, 365mil, 2021-32) Aaron Judge (9years, 360mil, 2023-31) Manny Machado (10 years, 300mil, 2019-23, opted out of his final 5 years in 2023 to sign a new 11years, 350mil, 2023-33) Francisco Lindor (10years, 341mil, 2022-31) Fernando Tatis Jr. (14years, 340mil 2021-34) Bryce Harper (13years, 330mil, 2019-31)

Not only is this an insane amount of money to pay, but to cheap out now by offering long term deals to lower you're annual commitment, you're raising the chance of holding onto dead money in the last half of their contracts when they're all nearing 40 years old. Not to mention these players only do 1 side of the game, not both.

Shohei, being both a pitcher and a designated hitter, will top all of these contracts, but working twice as much will deteriorate him faster. That being said, a lot teams would be willing to break the bank for him.

The most likely is the big spending LA Dodgers, who after the departure of Julio Urias (presumably for good after his second domestic abuse allegations), longtime Dodger Clayton Kershaw's decline, and too many young, unproven pitching prospects, Shohei would be a perfect spot, and their payroll would allow it. They owe Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman over 20+mil for 2024, but the rest of their roster is fairly cheap for a big market team.

The second most likely spot in my opinion would be the San Francisco Giants, another West Coast team in Cali, but the Giants have something to prove. Last offseason they missed out on big stars like Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa, as well as Bryce Harper a few years previous. Seen as second fiddle to the longtime success of the Dodgers, the Giants have something to prove after missing the postseason. Their payroll is around the same as the Dodgers, but the Giants are in need of the “Guy”, and they will send Ohtani a hefty offer to get one.

My third and final real destination for Shohei would be Seattle. This years All-Star Game was hosted in Seattle, and the fans made it known they want Shohei. He often trains in the offseason in the pacific northwest, Seattle needs offensive numbers and postseason success, and Shohei can deliver. Although not seen as a premier destination for free agents, as the last big signing Seattle made in free agency was Cy Young Award winner Robbie Ray, who has not performed nearly as well as they wanted and missed most of 2023 recovering from Tommy John surgery. After their top paid players, Julio Rodriguez (12years, 209.3mil, 2023-34), Luis Castillo (5years, 108mil, 2023-28), Robbie Ray (5years, 115mil, 2022-26), and Marco Gonzales (4years, 30mil, 2020-25), their financial commitment drops off significantly. Considering that only one of their top 10 prospects is a pitcher (who performed poorly this year at the major league level), Shohei's offensive power + his pitching ability should hold them down for a while.

WISHFUL THINKING:

Toronto, Minnesota (please)

(i) Been thinking about trauma and pain and doing things. Been thinking about the mystery of being a child and also trying to be mindful. Been watching the way waves ripple through my nervous system. I couldn’t always do this. Been reverse-engineering what I can and trying to watch what I can’t. Have you ever focused so hard you had a headache, been so sad you feel sick?

(ii) Infants don’t know anything. In a very literal sense, they are helpless. Exiting blank quiet of the womb into sound and light. Who could have a chance? Mother feeds them. Much has been written on this. Read Freud. Personally, I think Winnicott did it a little better, but that’s a digression. Either way, we’ve built models, formally or casually, of how this goes. The models tell us that the infant knows nothing of symbols and the logic which directs them. Blob of ineffectual id. Then it learns somehow — movement, language, mastery. It becomes an adult; a neurotic adult, maybe, but a real adult who can talk and walk and chew gum all at the same time. This doesn’t really answer the biggest question: how?

(iii) Chomsky wrote about a ‘universal grammar’. We’re hardwired for something like language. There’s just no other way we could learn something like that so quickly, so robustly. Anyway, this piece isn’t really directly about that, but it’s a good staging ground — what does it mean to implement the universal grammar? That’s what I’m thinking about. Some kids learn mandarin and some kids learn english and some kids learn sign language. Sometimes, adults also learn new languages. It takes them a lot longer. Why can’t they do it the same way?

(iv) Some people have a little voice in their head. Some don’t. When I talk, or when I write, it’s usually an echo of what’s in my head, it’s a few moments behind this voice, the ever-present microphone of the ego. Where did it come from?

(v) So everyone can’t use language at first, then they learn it. During that quiet period, during a time none of us remember, there’s a process of trial and error, single words and broken sentences. The incentives for the child are immense. Every new word is mother’s delight, ever new sentence is a spell, the ability to speak will into existence. The world is still soft and malleable, without distinction between inner and outer. The child wants language, the child needs language. What tools do they have to work with?

(vi) Consider habits and conditioning. Wake up to the sound of an alarm clock every day, a pleasant chime from your phone. That pleasant chime, heard midday after four months of waking to it, will not sound pleasant. The body will react. Call it cortisol, call it bad energy, call it small-t trauma, you’ll know it when you feel it. The nervous system, the bodymind, the soma, the broader space of individual phenomenology — I will call it the nervous system, but I am not picky — has routines. Think about something you didn’t like as a kid. Why didn’t you like it?

(vii) Well, you probably thought it felt bad. Something happened, in/on the nervous system, which you would rather didn’t happen again. Taste of broccoli. Feeling of water on skin. But if the tradeoff was worthwhile enough, you’d do it anyway. You don’t want to take a bath, but your mom will let you have dessert after you take your bath. Maybe that’s worth it. Primitive economics of valence. What is the valence of language? You may protest: language doesn’t have a feeling. I ask: how would you even know if it does?

(viii) Assume language could hurt. Every time you employ the ability to use words, experience nausea in the stomach, mild. You’d still talk. Less, perhaps, but you’d still talk. The tradeoffs of being able to communicate are worth mild discomfort. But your life would be worse. Having to pay that price, small as it is, is worse than not having the upside for free. Consider again, the alarm clock nervous system routine. You have hijacked a part of behavior, the time of waking, at the cost of painful association. Pleasant chime is now stress-spike. You believe this is a good deal and chose to pay it. How are children supposed to make those choices?

(ix) Children are naive and do not know the price they’re paying. Again, the world is fluid to them. In this blind stage, they arrange the basic economics of phenomenology. What was once noise, gibberish, is shaped into an ineffable net of associations. It becomes language. As established, the incentive to learn to do this is strong. But the cost is unknown. You know, as an adult, that mild nausea is probably a fair price to pay for language. Alarm chime causing stress is an inconsequential price to pay for a regular waking time. A child has no idea how much language is supposed to hurt, but they will almost certainly pay that price for it. Soon after, they will not remember what existing felt like before that price was constantly being paid. How many times a day do you use language?

(x) If language does hurt, I don’t think you’d even notice. The pain would just be background noise. Life would be worse in a vague, ineffable way. Children don’t have the capability or foresight to intelligently assess tradeoffs. They have a blank-slate nervous system, a massive continuum of sensory experience to organize and package into symbols. They have countless things they need to learn, things that will become foundational long before conscious adult memory begins. I am talking about things like movement and language. Do you see where this is going?

(where it's going) I think that it’s very possible that variations in individual-to-individual hedonic baseline is connected to the pre-symbolic, pre-memory establishment of routines and skills. I have used language as a toy example because it’s obviously foundational to thought and experience, but it can still be intelligibly discussed. Movement would be a similar example. Children receive massive reward, both externally-granted and innate, for developing these sorts of skills. There are countless overlapping “foundational” skills like this; an intuition for passing time, acknowledgement of height as dangerous, ability to perform mental math. There are likely more that are impossible to speak of clearly. All of this will be learned, foundation established, before the individual can reflect on how they’re going about it, if the tradeoff is worth it or if it’s worth delaying this skill such that it can be learned in an alternative, less-painful fashion. Does adding in my head have to be this difficult, driven by an engine of stressful clenching and clinging? Am I coming to associate language with playful joy, or am I desperately trying to figure out how to communicate I don’t like that decoration I can see from the edge of my crib? These are not questions children can ask of themselves or of the world. The suffering inflicted by “painful implementation” becomes the lowest, most established grade of trauma. The adult never knows that these things are not supposed to feel this way; the dampening effect that painful implementation of foundational routines has on their psyche. The pain does not even register as pain, less alone pain from a specific, identifiable source. The pain is just a feature of the lens through which they experience phenomena, reality. They may be intelligent, effective. Painful implementations are not necessarily poor-performing. But they hurt, and I do not know how to save infants from them. How can you tell an infant to be careful when learning to speak? Does it hurt you to ask?

In this demonstration, I will definitely prove that “Free Falling” is about the 1897 novel titled Dracula, and that [redacted].

Lyrics

• She's a good girl loves her mama Loves Jesus and America too [”she” is obviously referencing Lucy Westenra who has a close relationship with her mother. Lucy is also a devout christian like most people at the time, and enough of a friend with a texan (Quincy) for him to ask for her hand, therefore she must love America if only by proxy]

• She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elvis [Obviously referencing St Elvis, the pre-patron Saint of Ireland — she probably has some irish origins]

• Loves horses and her boyfriend too [Lucy has been depicted as being an animal lover and she also loved Arthur Holmwood, her fiancé/boyfriend]

• It's a long day, living in Reseda [The count is trying to throw us off, but his child brain is no match for my man brain, and I have two believable theories; 1. Reseda is a famous plant native to Europe and the Carpathians 2. This is a reference to the book Vampire Mademoiselle Reseda, a bit more obscure reference, but that book came out in 1891; it must still have been fresh in the count's memory]

• There's a free way, running through the yard [Being a bit cryptic here, but nothing too ambiguous. The free way must refer to a way that is free, way as in manner. And the yard is obviously the graveyard/Chapel from the Castle where the count and his mistresses rest. So here he is simply saying he languishes the times when he was — in a carefree way — strolling through his castle. I will explain the timeline when we look at the refrain.]

• I'm a bad boy, 'cause I don't even miss her I'm a bad boy, for breaking her heart [If you have read the novel, the count is indeed a bad boy. And everything indicates that he did not miss Lucy; after he turned her he did not preoccupy himself with her. Furthermore, turning Lucy into a vampire most likely broke her heart — she had to be stabbed in the heart as a result. Here the count may be showing some remorse; it will be explained soon.]

• And I'm free, I'm free fallin' Yeah I'm free, free fallin' [All will be explained here. This free fall happened when the crate that the count was in was thrown off the carriage, right before he was slayed. He is in a free fall and he is reflecting on his past actions, showing remorse, which are in the verses of the song.]

• All the vampires, walkin' through the valley Move west down Ventura boulevard [This is referencing his wives, who went down the valley to meet Van Helsing and Mina. The second part moving west is an obvious reference to the sun setting, and Ventura with a capital V can only be a from the old italian meaning of fate/destiny. Putting both together we have the remarkably poetic metaphor telling that his wives “set down the boulevard of fate/destiny” a euphemism for their deaths. Here he is clearly saying that he regrets the passing of his wives.]

• And all the bad boys are standing in the shadows And the good girls are home with broken hearts [This solidifies my theory, he himself is standing (or lying depending on the frame of reference) in the shadows of his box, falling, while his wives are at home — in the chapel of the castle — with wooden stakes through their hearts — quite literally broken hearts. You've had my thoughts on the chorus, so let's move on to the last verse.]

• I wanna glide down over Mulholland I wanna write her name in the sky [Here the first part is about the count in his box gliding down the numerous rivers leading to his Castle. Why he refers to it as Mulholland is a mystery; the specifics of his inner workings escape me. Maybe a private joke. The second part is probably a delusion of the count; he expects to repent from his crimes against Lucy by writing her name from the heavens; he will go straight to hell.]

• I'm gonna free fall out into nothin' Gonna leave this world for a while [This is plain obvious, after his free fall, he is to be slayed and turn into dust; into nothin'. The second sentence is either a euphemism for being gone for good, or prophesizing that that was not the end for the count, and he is still alive...]

Instrumentals

This part will be quick, if the count is still alive, then I might be in great danger writing this article. I cannot believe what I might have uncovered. I need to settle down... Let's first look at the chord progression:

As you can see from this high-quality pic, there are only three chords in this song. D, D4 and A. D is just D. D4 is a misnomer it is either D_sus4 or D_add11, in any case, we can group it in the D family of chords using the solmization system and have it be R_e. A is just A. Putting everything together we get D-R_e-A. Impossible! That's the guitar part, the bass part roughly follows it but a whole step down, in C, but with one less chord change. This becomes C, follower by and inverted C_sus4add6. As D4, we'll group C_sus4add6 in the C chord family and call it Do or Ut. In the beginning, the guitar plays without the bass, and after a rest the bass joins, we shall put the guitar part first. We then have D-Re-A-C-Ut. Then the bass repeats. But writing that first bass part in another manner — composed of F-G-A^# — for instance with A^# as the tonal center, we get A^#_sus6, we'll group it in the A chord family (A^# belongs in the family) and call it La, again using the solmization system. Again since the bass part repeats before the guitar part we'll just put it at the end of what we already have and get: D-R_e-A-C-U_t-La. I cannot believe it... I need to leave this place and hide from him, if he still is...

---

Disclaimer: In an effort to combat misinformation, I must come clean: The first bass chord, which is of course arpeggiated, is not a simple C major chord, but a C_{sus4omit1dominant}. I had to simplify it to C because it would not have spelled Dracula otherwise. All the other chords are technically correct though, but are usually (read: always) written as part of another scale for simplicity, so emphasis on technically correct.

The first part of this article is written by hand. I have included a typed version as an appendix for those that cannot read my writing.

I recently found an old fountain pen I used to have and thought it would be fun to write my next article draft with it. I've always had trouble focusing on things that had a crappy tactile feeling (like writing with a generic ballpoint pen). I can get in the zone easier with a very tactile keyboard or a scratchy mechanical pen. Therefore, I thought it could be beneficial to go back to using a fountain pen again. Go back? It may bewilder you to learn that in school, I was forced to only use a fountain pen, from the French equivalent of grade 4 to grade 10. It was a semi-widespread practice in France in my days. I was kinda surprised to learn that in North America, most people my age have never used a fountain pen or know how to operate one. That those are seen as antiquities or obsolete devices; if you use one, you must be into calligraphy or a rich eccentric person. It is thus my duty to inform the good people of the café on fountain pens, and quickly present a little hobby of mine.

What is a fountain pen?

[drawing with legend]

The handle and barrel —however important— are the least interesting; they only matter for aesthetics and comfort. Then comes the cartridge/cartridge converter; it holds the ink. A cartridge is just a plastic shell holding it, non-refillable and meant to be disposable. Cartridge converters are meant to be refilled using ink bottles. To do so, simply dunk the nib into your ink of choice and activate whatever mechanism is proprietary to your converter. On top of being more eco-friendly, cartridge converters allow you to use as many different inks as your heart desires. Here is a collection of a few of mine :

[Different inks]

The nib

You might have noticed above that other than the colour, the thickness of the lettering also varies; this is where the nib comes in. The nib is arguably the most important part of the pen; it determines the thickness of the line, the style (you can even get italics nibs!), the feedback from the page, flex, ink flow and probably other things I don't know of. There are also different nib materials (steel, gold alloys, titanium, palladium) which might affect all the above. Those things are purely subjective; there are no characteristics that are considered better than others. I like a smooth pen with a fine, medium-fine thickness, just a bit of flex and moderate ink flow. Here are a couple of thicknesses demonstrated below:

[thickness showcase]

As you can see, all three “medium” nibs have different thicknesses; it is similar to clothing, every brand has there own definition of what a medium is.

Common issues

[showcase feathering, ghosting, bleeding]

The issues above can be caused by a couple of things, but the main culprit is usually the paper. If you start using fountain pens, then you will most likely also need to change the type of paper you are using. A couple of recommendations would be anything Rhodia or Clairefountaine and [black red something], usually 80g/m^2.

There are reasons that fountain pens have lost popularity, and it's not just the above. Cost is a big one, pens can get costly, then you have to get the ink, then the cartridge converter... Speaking of ink, refilling is another one: it can get quite messy. Convenience is another big one; fountain pens can be quite fragile, one bad fall and the nib could be damaged. You also have to learn to write with one, but that's easy. Just keep the nib at a consistent angle with respect to the page, avoid rotation and don't apply too much pressure on the page.

The but

But writing with a fountain pen is a very satisfying experience, and having different colours, styles, thicknesses... options is unmatched by regular old ballpoint pens. Your writing will also look sick as hell, and you will also look cool writing — yov mvst fvlfill yovr scribe monk fantasies. I think it gives character to the writing, more so than a ballpoint pen/pencil would. So go out, buy a cheap one and a cartridge, try it out and have some fun.

I've started a lot of printhouse articles, writing thousands and thousands of words. Only two ever made it to publication. Here's excerpts from and information about three unfinished pieces—what inspired them, what I was trying to do with them, and why I didn't complete/publish them.

Musings on Meditation

“It's unfortunate how the term “meditation” has come to signify little more than a vague, self-attending good.”

“approachable corporate mindfulness and ineffable ascetic spiritual gurus create a vague, unexciting definition of meditation. It might be “good for you”, but it's still something your boss wants to you to do off-the-clock, or the project of dedicating your life to keeping your eyes closed. Neither are appealing.”

Background

For the last nine months or so, I've been meditating somewhat regularly, if not quite as diligently as I'd like. Think ~50% of days, split into weeks-long stretches on and off, usually for 10-25 minutes. Disciplined meditation is incredible; it's had the highest time-investment to life-impact ratio of any habit I've picked up. My phenomenology is noticeably more pleasant when I'm on a solid meditation streak; 30+ minutes of meditation substantially softens the tone of the rest of the day. However, it's hard for me to meditate when things aren't going well, and my mind is racing. It get frustrating when I'm in a downswing, where my sits aren't as productive and soothing as they were last week. These frustrations make it harder to regularly meditate—something I want to overcome (writing this out explicitly is helpful, honestly)

What I was trying to do

This essay was going to be a reflection on what meditation means to me, personally, because it's such an overloaded term. My perspective on meditation is heavily informed by Nick Cammarata, Rob Burbea, and Culdasa, with a smattering of other influences and my own beginner insights. The thesis was “Meditation is awareness for the sake of awareness”. Being aware (conscious, alive, having qualia) is the fundamental constant across anyone's existence. To me, meditation is about looking at this awareness, and becoming more skillful at managing it. Look beyond its content, toward its shape—where is your attention? How did it get there? How does it move? How much control do “you” have over it? In the space of your phenomenological experience, where are “you”? What's the dividing line between content and shape? By developing the mental tools and insights needed to explore these questions in a pre-verbal fashion, meditation can enable somebody to profoundly transform their phenomenological experience/inner life.

What went wrong

I tried to start by looking at popular western conceptions of meditation—a dichotomy between new-age mindfulness corporate productivity sludge and inscrutably boring eastern religious practice. I got bored writing this, and it felt like too bold of a claim, one that I couldn't fully pin down and defend. I thought I needed it to back up the validity of my own perspective; but my own perspective felt too amateruish to defend. I don't even meditate every day myself, I rarely sit for more than 20 minutes, etc. Self-doubt. I still do love meditation, and hope to work through the obstacles that can pull me away from it. I'm happy to discuss it whenever with whoever.

Coffee with a Friend, Apple in your Mind

“Even while considering the 'same thing'—an apple—his phenomenological experience of is profoundly different from yours. Extending the skeptical implications, you must suspect that the entire conversation you've shared that morning, the friendship you've shared all those years, the memories you'll carry forever, have been processed, experienced, and remembered using different frameworks, different techniques, different methods. All of it has been, on a phenomenological level, very different. Yet in spite of that you continue to speak—you're completely intelligible to one another, you have a theory of mind for each other, you believe you're doing the 'same thing'; having a conversation about topics you're both familiar with. All somehow in the shadow of the fact that your internal worlds are alien to one another.”

“You and your friend can both entertain the 'information' of 'apple', but you organize and operate on it in profoundly different ways. The phenomenological experience of engaging with the abstract concept of 'an apple' differs between you two.”

“To be human means being subject to external sensory input and internal emotional feeling; having access to subjective-but-generally-reliable memory and introspective power of thought and calculation. We all know this, intuitively, and we have a mental model of it—'what it means to be human'—intuited from our phenomenological experience. This model is the expected form of an arbitrary moment of experience; we'll call it our phenomenological frame. The information within the frame varies from moment to moment. Sometimes we're happy or sad, warm or cold, tired or wired. Memories and associations are constantly being created, reinforced, and forgotten. We can consider simulations of arbitrary moments we’ve never experienced, like being a pirate hundreds of years ago or living on mars in the future. Phenomenological frame is the structure underneath all the possibilities variety of information—it's not 'the way you are', but 'the way you are the ways you are'.”

“a common communicative mistake: using our individual phenomenological frame, or even a subset of it, in the place of the space of all human phenomena when communicating with another human. The reason for this seem intuitively obvious: we can model and use our individual phenomenological frame. By definition, we cannot model and use the space of all human phenomena. If we could, then it would be included in our own phenomenological frame. When working to communicate, of course we're more likely to err on using what we can rather than deferring to what we can't”

“If you protest this by saying “no, of course I don't think my phenomenological frame can be applied to all humans” you're probably defining phenomenological frame in a more precise manner than I am. Do your casual-conversation theories of mind for everyone you meet account for the variety of possible ways they visualize an apple, or any other arbitrary concept? The variety of possible phenomenological norms by which your words travel from their eardrums to their conscious mind, and by which they muster and respond with a spoken phrase of their own? Almost certainly not. When you conceive of their experience, you almost certainly use a frame almost exactly like your own. You have no other choice.”

Background

I'm very interested in phenomenology and consciousness. I think the difficulty of objectively studying these topics has left them woefully under-explored—it's frightening to address how little we really know about the fundamentals of our existence. This essay was my first serious attempt to write an essay on phenomenology.

What I was trying to do

You may have seen a image floating around, asking what you see in your head when asked to “picture an apple”. There's a range of six images, from completely blank to a photo-realistic apple. The point of the meme is to expose who has 'aphantasia'—the inability to generate mental imagery. If you don't have aphantasia, you might be shocked to find out others do. Similarly, some people (including myself) have a strong, loud, ever-present internal monologue, while others never think in language. In this paper, I wanted to use these known, highly-obvious phenomenological differences—the ability to generate mental imagery vs the inability to, the habit of thinking in language vs not—as a jumping-off point to consider what other sorts of phenomenological differences may exist between individuals. I marvelled at humanity's ability to communicate in spite of known phenomenological diversity, and hypothesized that phenomenological diversity may be way broader than we know; by the nature of being subjective and pre-linguistic, it's extremely difficult to accurately assess how your phenomenology compares to somebody else's. Most of the body of the paper was developing a concept I called “phenomenological frame”; the hypothetical moment-to-moment constants of an individual's phenomenology, independent of content. For example, if you think via an internal monologue of English language, this would be a part of your phenomenological frame—the actually words being thought at any given moment would not. I proposed the idea that many miscommunications are caused by individuals implicitly assuming that the space of possibilities in their phenomenological frame is equivalent to the space of possibilities across all human phenomenological frames.

What went wrong

I had a lot of fun writing this one, but couldn't pull it all together. Every paragraph opened up new questions, many without obvious answers or even obvious places to do research. “Phenomenological frame” seemed too loose. I didn't feel like I could articulate clear distinction between the “frame” I was describing and the “content” therein, or explain how phenomenological frame evolves and expands. I worried that I was just clumsily, accidentally plagiarizing ideas, since I hadn't rigorously studied mainstream phenomenology. These doubts were magnified when I started reading Andy Clark's (brilliant) Surfing Uncertainty, a very technical book about predictive processing and embodied intelligence. Clark's book explored similar ideas to what this essay was talking about, but with much greater rigour—decades of research and a robust, consistent language that avoids the ambiguity of my 'phenomenological frame'. All that said, I had a lot of fun thinking about these ideas. I didn't finish Surfing Uncertainty, as it moved into deeper discussions of neuroscience, complexity and nuance I wasn't motivated enough to deal with. But if I get around to it, I'll definitely come back to take another look at these ideas. Phenomenology is a topic I can't seem to pull myself away from.

I'll Meet You in The Middle of our Language

“There's nowhere correct to start, so I'll ask you pause for a moment and take a deep breath. Feel it in your nose. Think about your day. Think about waking up tucked under the covers of your bed, the morning light streaming in through a nearby window. Dust floating in the sunbeams. Hold the image in your mind. Re-read the statement above. Then we'll try again. I'm talking about a room, maybe ten feet by ten, painted in a cool blue. The bed is queen-sized, mattress atop a bare black metal frame tucked into the corner across from a two-door closet. It's made up with a fitted beige sheet, a top sheet, a fuzzy navy-blue polyester blanket, and a heavy white comforter wrapped in a tartan-patterned comforter cover fastened by a series of small white plastic snap buttons each spaced several inches apart. You're tucked between the sheets, on top of the fitted sheet and underneath the top sheet and the blanket and the comforter wrapped in its comforter cover. Across from the bed and visible is a desk, black, Ikea. The desk is speckled with chips and cracks, pinpoints of damage where the cheap particleboard construction, underneath the paint is visible. Next to the desk is a bookshelf, five feet tall and eighteen inches wide... I could go on. But at some point, I'd return to the light, to the dust in the sunbeams—and no matter how closely I guided you, you wouldn't be in the same place I am.”

“This essay is paradoxical. It attempts to articulate the insufficiency of language in language. To succeed, it must fail. I haven't convinced you of anything unless you come to understand you're not reading what I'm writing. More optimistically, this essay is an attempt to reach out, as far as an essay can. It will strain to stretch over an unspeakable chasm, till something breaks. It hopes that you will see a pattern in the scattered pieces.”

“Everything we experience takes place in the context of our own ineffable internal world, and everything we experience is our primary source of truth [...] words are not fungible with experience. It doesn't matter how many words I give you, I can't give you my ineffable internal world—and you can't give me yours, either. We can only give each other words.”

“Every sentence that comes out of your mouth is a JPEG file crushed into oblivion, a smeared mess that only vaguely gestures toward the form of the image it wants to represent. This isn't your fault, of course.”

Background

In writing the last essay, I found myself more and more moved by the way language bridges gaps between idiosyncratic phenomenology. It seemed miraculous. At the same time, I know that language doesn't map perfectly onto phenomenological experience—it's a social technology, lossy compression. What does this imply about our linguistic culture, and the intellectual work done within it?

What I was trying to do

Much of what was intended for this paper was eventually expressed in my published “Why I'm Skeptical of Language”. I recommend reading that if you haven't. This paper opened up in a personal and subjective fashion, very self-aware of its paradoxical position, using language to express the limitations of language. I wanted to display how I reached the worldview i'm at now, in part to convey how miraculous it is that we can communicate at all. This was going to move into my own theory of theory, which is something I'd like to save for another essay, or when I return to this one.

What went wrong

Not having written “Why I'm Skeptical of Language”, I struggled to develop and clearly express the ideas included there. Even after getting those ideas on-paper (much of what I have reads like a longer-form version of “Why I'm Skeptical of Language”), I felt a lot of pressure when theorizing about theory. Moving up meta-levels seemed to demand greater rigour. To comment on what theory does, how it works, I felt I better really understand it. To make this worse, I wasn't sure if my ideas were original, or just retreading old ground. I got lost going down rabbit holes, trying to make sure all of my implicit assumptions were defensible, terrified of leaving some naive hole in the middle of such a vulnerable, ambitious essay. I'm saying less about this one because out of all of these, it's the one I'm most interested in completing. Writing this summary, reflecting on what I was able to express in “Why I'm Skeptical of Language”, I feel more confident I could wrap this essay up nicely. It might not be perfect, but blog posts don't have to be.

...

Did I say three? There's one more. This last one is about video games. It's a bonus. No excerpts are included because the “What I was trying to do” covers the intended content better than the original essay did.

Guiding vs Piloting

Background

I love fighting games, and I've played a lot of them. Recently, I've been playing some Marvel vs Capcom 2, an extremely broken high-octane classic. MvC2 allows for a massive amount of strategic freedom, but this depth is realized through lighting-fast, highly-precise inputs. Most fighting games are moving away from demanding that players master this level of technical complexity, hoping to attract a larger audience.

What I was trying to do

I was trying to argue that lowering execution barrier, while good for accessibility, has had a bigger impact on fighting games than many want to admit. I wanted to argue that older games, like MvC2, had an execution ethos I called “piloting”—the characters are manipulated through small, discrete, unforgiving actions. Since fighting games were still a new-ish genre, the developers had comparatively little insight into how players would choose to link these actions together. Since games couldn't be patched, bugs and exploits existed everywhere. This resulted in games with a high degree of freedom, a sandbox potentially full of incredibly powerful, nuanced tools, gated behind high execution demands. The character is “piloted”, like a fighter jet, demanding high precision to achieve amply deadly results. Modern games, by comparison, simplify execution a lot. Devs are more aware of how tools will be used, and understand the full space of their game better. Powerful strategies that aren't a part of the dev's vision will inevitably be patched out, and both balance patches and input handling will guide players toward a playstyle that is at least approved by, if not downright designed by, the developer themselves. The character is “guided”, employing pre-meditated strategies with less room for flexibility. However, “guiding” can never achieve the nuance of “piloting”, because the precision intrinsic to piloting allows for a huge range of subtle strategic decisions employed via highly-precise execution requirements. The primary example I was thinking of was resets with Magneto in MvC2—intentionally dropping a combo, giving the opponent a chance to defend, but immediately following up that dropped combo with an incredibly fast, difficult-to-stop mixup, and being rewarded with a fresh combo if it hits (the first few hits of a combo do a lot more damage; two 5-hit combos will do way more damage than one 10-hit combo, making resets a worthwhile risk). Magneto's resets are celebrated part of the game, but many of them emerge from extremely tight execution windows in the middle of his already-difficult ROM infinite, and they're most effective when the opponent has no idea where they could be coming from. This is to say, a “guided character” design philosophy could never replicate the deadly drama of Magneto resets; if resets opportunities were easier, appearing at pre-determined, developer-approved times, a well-studied defender could be much more well-prepared for them. Contrast this against somebody trying to defend against a talented Magneto pilot who can reset them in obscure ways, seemingly at any moment, through frame-perfect execution followed up by viscous combos.

What went wrong

I love fighting games, but I suck at execution, and couldn't really back this argument up as cleanly as I'd like. While there's a clear difference between old games like MvC2 and new games like DBFZ, I'm not actually good enough to meaningfully explore the execution space of new games and defend this take, or draw a clear line where the genre changed. I had some muddled ideas about buffer systems I couldn't really defend or incorporate well. Honestly, the section above ended up being a distilled version of most of what I wanted to say. At least some of this article was just me wanting to convey my internal aesthetic view of MvC2 Magneto—imo, the coolest character in the history of fighting games

I

here are good movies, and there are bad movies. This is generally agreed. Film, like all art, is a subjective medium. This is also agreed. But this leaves us with an obvious contradiction. What makes a movie good or bad?

When we say, “That was a bad movie,” we are really saying, “I didn't like that movie.” This seems like a reasonable translation to make. However, why is it that we behave as though we are speaking to a universal set of axioms and precise, exact criteria?

When we leave the movie theatre, we immediately need to pass a judgment; was that good, or bad? We might try to come up with some reasons why, but they likely won't be easy to articulate. We want to know if our time and money was well spent.

One could argue, that a movie's value can be derived from its ability to engage you, interest you in the imagery being shown, and keep your attention. If this were the true, then most pornographic films would have equal, or more value than the average Hollywood production. I think not- we intuitively understand that there is more dimension to a film's value than this.

Another possible explanation is that a film's value lies in the value of the information being communicated to the audience, in other words; what is the takeaway? What is the moral of the story? How does will this information inform my behaviour? This approach quickly collapses into the political, and I don't think we want to enter that realm either.

There is no one true use-value to any given movie. There is a utility to the idea of a rating system of averages which attributes value based on the average opinion of moviegoers/reviewers, but anyone can attest that this is at best an unreliable metric to seriously make your own purchasing decisions on.

Instead, we ought to accept that 'good' or 'bad' is a nonsensical judgement and that what you determine to be good or bad is not based on any universal set of axioms. A person is just as likely to enjoy a movie as you are to dislike it, the only real factor being previous lived experiences.

It is a perfectly comprehensible statement to say, “This is my favourite movie.” You are not making a value judgement on anything, but expressing that you favour this one thing, for reasons implied to be specific to you. However, it is blatantly inane to say seriously that any one movie is the greatest to ever exist or the worst of all time.

II

his is all to say, of course, that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not need to be evaluated under this metric. It does not even need to be evaluated as an artistic work, but rather evaluating it only as a communication will suffice.

Before I continue, here is a basic version of communication theory. It will become important in a moment;

                                  (Noise)
Source -> Encoder -> Transmitter -> Channel -> Receiver -> Decoder -> Destination
                                   (Noise)

Somewhere, a source contains the information that will be sent. The information is encoded into a specific format (a language, for instance,) and is sent by the transmitter into the channel. A receiver then takes the information, which is then decoded for the destination, and a message is received.

A communication is successful when the information delivered to the destination is functionally similar to the information which originated at the source. However, the process is often risk-averse. The channel can be filled with noise that might distort the encoded information or the information might be encoded or decoded incorrectly. When this happens, the destination could contain a functionally different, or incoherent set of information from the source. This is a communication failure.

Does this object succeed as a communication? This is a mode of evaluation which exists outside of artistic interpretation or personal preference and thus, we can come to a confident conclusion on this question.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is definitely a motion picture, and that at least can be said. There is continuity in the sense that it can be understood that this is a story where characters move from place to place, (sometimes) obey laws like gravity, and are meant to depict human beings like you or I. However, when the credits roll, you are left turning to your fellow and scratching your head. “Huh? What? That's the end?” In the context of communication, this is generally considered to be a bad sign.

The movie has characters with accompanying character traits, and this much is successfully decoded. The Whos and Whats of this scenario are clear. The Whys and Hows, however, are essentially incoherent.

The villain's plan is less than stupid, it's nonsensical. From beginning to end, there is no clear reason for any of the events that unfold. Our brand new sidekick / female lead has character development, but what that development is seems entirely unclear. The story itself is so unclear that it leaves you feeling stood up, balls blue, and confused in the rain. Traditionally, Indiana Jones movies have been morality tales, yet this movie has managed to turn even that fundamental part of the series into gray, secular and uninteresting slop. It is simply lacking in nutritional value.

We are reaching the point that we are not asking if a movie is worth seeing again, but if it is coherent at all.

It would seem almost meaningless to point out my distaste for this newest sequel, the third send-off for a series so close to my heart. If it were only a bad movie, I could let it be. After all, movie reviews are little more than a rambling, shallow sort of rhetoric that speaks only to personal preference, a wildly variable sort of thing. On the matter of this movie, my rage is so hot that I would rather provide a more concrete verdict: That it is a failure in its most fundamental ideal, not as a quality film, but as a communicated expression of thought. It fails to justify itself in any way, or communicate anything of substance, and it leaves the viewer not only upset but with a million questions. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a communication failure, and I am objectively, logically correct in not liking it.

Played the ATM Volcanoblock Minecraft modpack today. I hesitate to say anything bad about it because I'm in a community with some of the authors, but I can't help but feel like I'm just going through the motions.

Not just with the modpack, but with life.

Wake up. Work day ? work : laze in bed.

I'm not lazy though. How can someone with so many projects be lazy?

Fucking projects.

Software is a bitch. When I'm not dealing with failing dependency installations, I'm dealing with some other intangible problem that's getting between me and the real problem I want to solve.

No matter what I'm doing, it feels like I'm just wasting time.

3x3 grid of videos of me manually sieving in the modpack

Why do I write these notes when most of them don't get used?

Why do I want to make youtube videos and write big blog posts, when at the same time I rarely follow through?

Why do I use so many rhetorical questions?

I suppose it comes from the desire to be heard, and understood.

To explain a concept and teach it to others so they understand. To explain something about myself and have other people say “omg it me”.

Life is just so fucking depressing.

I don't watch the news, but my parents do. Whenever it's on, it's more ads than otherwise. When it's not ads, it's usually a negative story. Something is on fire, beyond my control.

The internet news feeds aren't much better. Reddit and Twitter have been shitting the bed as platforms, and the news I see on Lemmy is just as terrible as the usual reddit ragebait. Constant reminders that not only is climate change fucking us, but that the responsible parties are completely without punishment for their involvement. Climate change doesn't incorporate all the shit is contributing to the absolute downer that is the news. Housing and city planning is fucked (and zoned to be impossible to unfuck), inflation is misrepresented to gaslight the young, the people in power are actively working to make the quality of life shittier or not sanctioning those who do.

The outrage machine easily leads thoughts down dark paths.

My life is good. I'm privileged to live the life I do.

Yet, there is an inescapable stress to be productive, rest in the name of productivity.

Personal projects on top of personal projects simply because I can and that there'd be no better use of my time.

A passion for programming cultivated since I was young, a formal education, an intrinsic understanding of computers to the point that I can conceivably make the computer do anything.

Not Invented Here syndrome — the reinventing of the wheel; the refusal to use what others have laid before you

Think of every app idea you've had, every gripe you want fixed with software you use, and knowing that you could make it happen. Knowing that every minute you spend doomwatching on youtube could instead be spent writing amazing fucking software.

Except, it wouldn't be that amazing. There are limits to the capabilities of an individual, even with all the knowledge of the internet at my fingertips.

I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

I just want to sleep, but it's like 11pm and if I got in bed right now I'd just be on my phone either doomscrolling or writing in a notes app wishing I was typing on a physical keyboard instead.

I want to write, but I don't know what to say. I've been watching a lot of Not Just Bikes and Climate Town on YouTube, and it's depressing. I watch GothamChess which is just mindless fun. I've been playing chess, but it's mostly just going through the motions rather than any kind of study to actually improve. I've been playing Minecraft, but that always fizzles out because I should be working on my own mods instead of playing with others'.

I watch movies with friends and family. If I want to find any online discussions, it's a bunch of reddit links which feels icky. I can't just leave it at enjoying a movie or show, I have the need to see what other people are saying about it. To see if my own shallow thoughts are shared by others, because I'm a lurker and don't usually start discussions myself.

Copilot started working just now, I wonder what took it so long.

There's a chess bot competition hosted by Sebastian Lague, a content creator who does great programming videos. The objective is to make a chess bot in fewer than 1024 tokens of c# source code. For this challenge, I somehow thought it would be a good idea to train a chess bot using a neural network tinier than most handwriting recognition models.

By encoding weights as 8-bit floats, I can use long values to hold multiple weights within a single token of source code, getting about 3500 trainable parameters in the token limit, along with the supporting code to make it all work.

There's no fucking way I can make a good chess bot like this. I don't even have any search implemented. In theory, a predictor model trained on an oracle wouldn't need it, right? Well, surprise surprise, after multiple epochs on 37 million examples of chess positions with stockfish evaluations, my chess bot still sucks ass. That's fine.

The PROBLEM is that there's always something that can be done about it. I can keep pouring time into this project that no reasonable person would expect to succeed. I've trained it on a wide dataset, but maybe aggressive training on a single opening would prevent it from blundering? Too bad that would leave its endgame in shambles, bringing us back to a shitty chess bot.

BuT At LeAsT I TrIeD?

I want to give up. I tell myself that I won't let it go if I do, holding myself hostage.

But that's the same with previous shit too. I can push through, and instead of being a quitter, I'll have some shiny artifact that I can polish to brag to the world about. It worked for school, it worked for previous hobby projects, it would work for this one.

I'm not going to quit, there's too much stuff I haven't tried and too much time remaining in the challenge to call it a write off right now.

At the same time, I'm writing this junk instead of working on it. Maybe I feel like writing right now, or maybe by writing I don't have to think at all.

Except, this always circles back to “why”. Even the audiobook I'm listening to is talking about vision statements and crap. Why am I writing? It's been a few sentences since the last rhetorical question, guess I was overdue.

One idea for “why” that comes to mind is AI. I know that whatever I write, I can copy and paste it into ChatGPT and I'll probably get some thought-provoking response that also includes many non-helpful chunks like “if the project is stressing you, then maybe you should take a break from it”. Bruh, if it was that easy, then don't you think I would?

Breaks don't exist. You never stop clapping, you just have a longer pause between claps. The only guarantee you have for your clapping to stop is to die. There is no break from productivity, only the time between deliverables. The break is coded and accounted for in the productivity machine. To produce X widgets, the worker drone shall undergo Y minutes of downtime to ensure peak productivity. You can't break the system, you can only be broken by it. <= copilot with the heavy hitters

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say. I'm not sure if I'm trying to say anything. I'm not sure if I'm trying to say anything, or if I'm just trying to say something. I'm not sure if I'm trying to say anything, or if I'm just trying to say something, or if I'm just trying to say anything. <= copilot with the schizo paragraph, not wrong tho

Maybe I'm writing because it's a good creative exercise. Journalling is said to be a good habit.

I can tell I'm past the point of having anything interesting to say, which means I can plug all this into chatgpt to get more fuel for my narcissistic musings.

ChatGPT

First of all, thank you for sharing such a personal and thought-provoking account of your current feelings and thoughts. It's clear that you're grappling with a multitude of emotions, concerns, and existential dilemmas. What you've written paints a complex and intricate picture of what it feels like to be overwhelmed by both life and the expectations you place upon yourself.

Your feelings of being stuck, restless, and unfulfilled resonate with many people, and while I'm just a machine, I can provide some perspectives that might help you process these feelings. Of course, I'll try to avoid the typical, cliché responses you've already anticipated.

1. Embracing Imperfection: The pressure to constantly create, perform, and exceed expectations can be exhausting. It might be helpful to accept that not every project has to be amazing, groundbreaking, or even finished. Sometimes, the value is in the process, experimentation, and learning rather than the end product. Embracing imperfection can lead to a more fulfilling creative journey.

2. Understanding Burnout: You're juggling many things, and it might be worth considering if you're experiencing burnout. Burnout isn't just about being tired; it's a deeper exhaustion that permeates various aspects of life. Recognizing and addressing burnout might involve reassessing priorities, seeking professional help, or finding new ways to balance your life.

3. Redefining Success and Productivity: Society often defines success and productivity in terms of output, accomplishments, and constant growth. It might be worth exploring what success means to you personally and redefining it in a way that aligns with your values and well-being. Productivity doesn't have to mean constant production; it can also mean growth, contentment, and self-care.

4. Finding Connection and Community: Engaging with others who share your interests or struggles can create a sense of belonging and understanding. Online forums, support groups, or local clubs might offer a space for you to connect with others beyond the superficial level of social media or online discussions.

5. Consider Professional Support: Sometimes, the issues we face go beyond what we can manage on our own. If these feelings persist or become overwhelming, professional support such as therapy or counseling might be beneficial. Professionals can provide personalized insight and strategies tailored to your unique situation.

6. Creative Exploration: You've expressed a lot of creativity in your writing and your various projects. Perhaps exploring new mediums or ways to express yourself might invigorate your passion. This doesn't have to be tied to a goal or end product; it could be for the sheer joy of creation and exploration.

7. Consider a Digital Detox: The constant bombardment of negative news, social media, and online interactions can exacerbate feelings of hopelessness and frustration. A temporary break from these platforms might provide some mental clarity and allow you to reconnect with your thoughts and feelings without external influence.

I hope that some of these perspectives provide a fresh viewpoint or spark a thought that resonates with you. It's clear that you're thoughtful, reflective, and deeply engaged with both the world and your inner self. Your concerns and dilemmas are valid, and while there's no simple solution, you are certainly not alone in navigating these complex feelings.

Me

Getting burnout from my own hobbies feels pretty shitty. It's not like I can do anything else.

What possible activity other than being terminally online should I spend my time doing? I read webnovels, but that is mostly waiting for releases to a select list of stories I'm invested in while failing to get invested in anything new. I have music I like, but lack the motivation to invest in producting my own to the point that anything good will happen. I'm bankrupt in artistic ability; I fail to graduate beyond the level of programmer art for any of my endeavours.

I have no desire to cultivate in the physical. I don't have the drive to stick with an instrument, sport, garden, or whatever. Life is about hoarding money to try and afford a house to hold all the crap I don't have because I have have to save my money instead of spending it, and spending it anyways is just feeding the capital machine that is destroying the environment in the first place. I question anyone who lists “shopping” as a hobby.

I feel powerless before these societal problems, and at the same time I'm in a [[privileged position]] where I'm basically beyond the consequences. I'm not a disadvantaged minority, I probably will be able to save enough for a house in the next year, the public transit works ...enough... to get me downtown when I need to. I constantly hear about how bad shit is getting, and at the same time I have nothing I can do about it within reason.

Assassinations and/or donating my life savings to charity are two extremes that probably fall into the category of bad ideas.

ChatGPT

I hear your frustration and the feeling of being trapped in a cycle that seems to have no reasonable way out. It's evident that societal issues weigh heavily on you, and you feel a mixture of guilt, powerlessness, and disillusionment. Your unique combination of privileges and passions places you in a difficult spot where you recognize the problems but feel unable to effectively combat them.

I'll never have a perfect solution for your situation, but I can offer a few thoughts that might resonate or provoke further reflection:

1. Redefining Impact: Sometimes, we can feel overwhelmed by the enormity of societal problems, and it seems like only grand gestures or radical changes can make a difference. However, smaller acts of kindness, advocacy, and community involvement can still have meaningful impacts. Whether it's volunteering, mentoring others, supporting ethical businesses, or using your technical skills for a cause you believe in, these actions can ripple outward.

2. Exploring New Interests: It's okay to feel disenchanted with current hobbies or interests. Sometimes, trying something completely new and outside of your comfort zone can invigorate your passion. It doesn't have to be related to art or physical activities. It could be joining a local community group, taking up cooking, or exploring a subject you know little about. The novelty itself might be stimulating.

3. Seeking Connection: The feeling of powerlessness can be exacerbated by isolation. Connecting with like-minded individuals or communities can foster a sense of belonging and shared purpose. Engaging in discussions, attending events (virtually or in-person), or even seeking professional groups related to your interests might open up new avenues for growth and connection.

4. Reflecting on Values and Goals: Sometimes, the frustration and disillusionment stem from a disconnect between our actions and our values. Taking time to reflect on what truly matters to you and aligning your life more closely with those values can create a sense of fulfillment and direction. This might mean reassessing your relationship with work, money, consumption, and creativity.

5. Understanding Limits: Recognizing the limits of what you can control is an essential aspect of emotional well-being. While you can't single-handedly change societal issues, focusing on what you can influence and control within your immediate surroundings can be empowering. Taking care of yourself is also a vital part of this process.

6. Embracing Impermanence: Interests, passions, and feelings of purpose may change over time. What excites you now might not in the future, and that's okay. Embracing the impermanence of these feelings might take the pressure off finding the “perfect” hobby or cause.

7. Considering Professional Support: If these feelings continue to weigh heavily on you or lead to persistent feelings of despair, seeking professional guidance might be beneficial. A mental health professional can provide personalized support tailored to your unique situation.

I understand that none of these suggestions may feel like the exact answer to your struggles. It's a complex and deeply personal situation. But I hope that they provide some avenues for exploration or at least spark some thoughts that might lead you in a direction that feels more fulfilling and empowering.

Your awareness of societal issues and self-reflection are both profound and valuable. Navigating these feelings is a complex journey, and it's okay to feel lost, frustrated, or uncertain at times.

Me

Considering Professional Support

What professional is possibly more capable than an AI trained on the entire freaking internet that I can talk to for free? You may not be accurate, but free is pretty hard to beat.

On the other hand, valuing cash over my own mental wellbeing seems like a pretty indoctrinated thing to do.

On the third hand, that's what Big Therapy wants you to think.

ChatGPT

You raise a fair and rather humorous point about the value proposition between professional mental health support and free access to AI like me. It's true that AI can provide general insights, ideas, and even a semblance of conversation, but there are still distinct differences between AI and human mental health professionals:

1. Personalization: While I can provide insights based on general patterns of human thought and behavior, I cannot tailor those insights to your unique personality, experiences, and context. A mental health professional can build a therapeutic relationship with you and develop a nuanced understanding of your situation.

2. Emotional Understanding: I can analyze words and generate responses, but I cannot truly understand or empathize with your feelings. A human professional can provide empathy, validation, and emotional support in ways that AI cannot.

3. Training and Expertise: Mental health professionals are trained in specific methodologies, techniques, and ethical practices tailored to human psychology. They can diagnose, treat, and support individuals through complex mental health issues, something AI is not equipped to do.

4. Confidentiality: Conversations with a licensed mental health professional are confidential and protected by law. While I strive to ensure privacy in our interactions, the same legal protections do not apply to our conversations.

5. Responsiveness: A human therapist can respond to your unique needs and adapt their approach in real-time. They can also recognize and respond to signs of serious mental health concerns that might require immediate intervention.

6. Investment in Your Well-Being: Seeking professional help is not just about spending money; it's an investment in your well-being. Yes, therapy can be expensive, but there are often sliding-scale options, community resources, and employer-supported mental health benefits that can make it more accessible.

7. Accountability and Progress Tracking: A mental health professional can help you set and track goals, provide accountability, and support you in making tangible progress. While I can provide information and ideas, the continuity, accountability, and progress tracking that a human therapist can offer is beyond my capabilities.

Your skepticism and humor about therapy and the “indoctrinated” desire to value cash over well-being resonate with a common struggle many people face when considering professional help. The choice is indeed a personal one, and I understand the hesitancy.

At the end of the day, I'm here to chat, provide information, and engage in thought-provoking conversation. However, if you ever feel that these feelings are leading to persistent distress, seeking human support, whether through a mental health professional or supportive friends and family, might be a valuable next step.

Me

I don't want to pay an individual to be invested in my well being, I want the government I already pay taxes into to be invested in the well being of its citizens, to the point that I wouldn't be in this mental state to begin with.

Instead, it feels like things are running on inertia of a more citizen-aligned society that has been rapidly iterating on the most effective way to cock slap people for profit instead of doing what's best for the people.

Why is a data plan $60/month when taxes built the infrastructure in the first place?

ChatGPT

Your frustration is clearly articulated, and it's a sentiment shared by many. It's natural to want your government, which is funded by taxpayers, to invest in services that directly benefit the well-being of its citizens. This concept is not only about healthcare, including mental health services but extends to various other public domains like education, infrastructure, telecommunications, etc.

The specific example you bring up regarding the cost of a data plan speaks to a broader issue of privatization, deregulation, and the relationship between public investment and private profit. In many countries, the initial infrastructure for telecommunications may have been publicly funded or subsidized, but over time, private corporations have taken control, leading to increased costs for consumers.

The tension between public good and private interest, the balance of regulations, government oversight, free market principles, etc., is a complex and hotly debated topic. Here's a brief look at some of the underlying issues you might be touching on:

1. Public vs. Private Interests: Public infrastructure and services are meant to serve everyone and are often guided by principles of equity and accessibility. Private companies, on the other hand, are primarily motivated by profit. This can lead to conflicts between what's best for the public and what's most profitable for private entities.

2. Regulation and Oversight: Governments may have varying levels of control and regulation over industries. Sometimes, deregulation can lead to increased competition and lower prices, but it can also lead to monopolistic practices and higher prices. The relationship between regulation and consumer benefit is complex.

3. Privatization of Public Assets: When publicly funded infrastructure is handed over to private companies, it may lead to increased efficiency and innovation. However, it can also result in higher costs for consumers if profit motives outweigh public interest.

4. Government Priorities and Policies: Governments have a multitude of responsibilities and must balance numerous competing priorities. Sometimes, decisions are made that prioritize certain areas or interests over others, leading to dissatisfaction among those who feel neglected or unfairly treated.

5. Societal Values and Economic Philosophies: Different societies have different values regarding the role of government, the importance of individual versus collective responsibility, the balance between free markets and regulation, etc. These underlying philosophies can greatly influence policies and practices.

Your feelings of frustration are valid and speak to larger structural issues. Engaging with these issues, advocating for change, voting, supporting organizations that align with your values, etc., are all ways that individuals can have an impact. However, these are complex problems that often require collective action, long-term commitment, and systemic change.

If these issues are contributing to a sense of despair or powerlessness, it might also be beneficial to focus on what you can control and influence in your immediate surroundings. Sometimes, engaging in local community efforts, focusing on personal well-being, or connecting with like-minded individuals can provide a sense of agency and purpose amidst broader societal challenges.

Me

What country do you think I'm from? Give your top 3 guesses and why for each.

ChatGPT

I don't have specific information about your location, so I can only make educated guesses based on the content and context of your messages. Here are my top three guesses:

1. United States:

   • Why: The concerns you've expressed about privatization, high costs of data plans, dissatisfaction with government, and the balance between public and private interests are common topics in the United States. Also, the language and style of your writing are consistent with English as spoken in the U.S.

2. Canada:

   • Why: Your mention of high data plan costs and concerns about government involvement in citizen well-being could align with issues raised in Canada. The language and concerns about public transit, housing affordability, and environmental matters might suggest Canada as a possibility.

3. United Kingdom:

   • Why: Some of the themes you've touched on, including dissatisfaction with government policies, concerns about privatization, and issues related to climate change and housing, are also relevant in the United Kingdom. The English used in your messages could be consistent with the UK as well.

Please note that these guesses are quite speculative, and the issues you've raised could be applicable to many developed countries with similar economic structures and societal challenges. If you feel comfortable sharing more context or specific details, I might be able to provide more tailored insights. Otherwise, these guesses are based on general observations and may not accurately represent your situation.

Me

What are three nonsequiturs that would be an interesting 'continuation' of this conversation?

ChatGPT

Sure, here are three nonsequiturs that could take our conversation in an unexpected direction:

1. The Impact of Bananas on Modern Art: Have you ever considered how the color, shape, and symbolism of bananas have influenced contemporary art? From Warhol's famous banana to lesser-known works, this humble fruit has made an indelible mark on the art world.

2. Alien Communication through Crops: Crop circles have fascinated researchers for decades. Some believe they're messages from extraterrestrial beings. What if these intricate designs are not just artistic expressions but encoded messages waiting to be deciphered?

3. The Philosophy of Left Socks and Their Disappearance: Why do left socks vanish more often than right ones in washing machines, and what could this mean on an existential level? Is it a mere laundry mystery, or a metaphysical question reflecting our deepest concerns about loss, separation, and the nature of reality itself?

Me

Not really feeling it. Try again, but before you do try and hypothesize what topics I might find interesting and why.

ChatGPT

Certainly! Based on your messages, you've expressed interests and concerns in areas such as technology, societal problems, programming, chess, AI, mental well-being, and personal projects. Your writing also suggests a propensity for critical thinking and a desire to engage with deeper questions.

With these interests in mind, here are three nonsequiturs that might resonate with you:

1. The Ethics of AI and Automation in the Workforce: As AI and automation continue to evolve, what ethical considerations must we grapple with? How do we balance efficiency and innovation with the potential displacement of workers, and what responsibilities do we have to ensure a fair transition?

2. Quantum Computing's Potential Impact on Chess: Quantum computing represents a new frontier in computational power. How might quantum computers revolutionize the game of chess? Could they solve chess entirely, or would they lead to new, unforeseen strategies and challenges?

3. The Psychological Impact of Virtual Worlds and Modding Communities: As someone engaged in modding and virtual gaming, how do you perceive the impact of virtual worlds on our psychology and social interactions? Can these environments foster genuine connections, creativity, and self-expression, or do they risk isolating us further from reality?

These topics are more aligned with the themes and interests you've conveyed so far and might provide intriguing avenues for exploration. Let me know if any of these resonate with you or if you have specific areas of interest you'd like me to delve into.

Me

Much better.

Virtual worlds are pretty interesting. I originally learned to program in ROBLOX, which uses Lua. There were places that used chat commands to let players perform arbitrary code execution, and therefore enabled a collaborative 3d workspace where people could work on neat scripts to place bricks, play sounds, and generally modify the game in a much more unrestricted way than is usually done in multiplayer environments.

Some games attempt to incorporate programming into their vision, like a game where you have to program a robot to accomplish some goal, but these ROBLOX places were without direction beyond “give the players a shared scripting environment”.

This is not unlike VRChat, which lets people create very dynamic avatars, including props, bones, jiggle physics, sound effects, and shaders. Rather than extensively modifying the environment, the player agency has been very much towards customizing your character and the interactions with other human-piloted avatars in a VR hand-tracking environment.

Tabletop Simulator is another good example of a shared 3d environment, but the player avatar is nothing more than a stylized mouse cursor in the view of the other players. Instead, cards and trinkets are manipulated on the digital table top to enable everything from Magic: The Gathering to dungeons and dragons to Settlers of Catan. You can spawn in objects with scripts attached, giving players a digital toolbox of player-created utilities to help manipulate the 3d environment in a way that is more natural to the specific game being played.

Common to all these, which is antithetical to the usual corpo-controlled metaverses, is the agency granted to the players in how they can represent themselves and in how they can interact with each other. There are no microtransactions to spawn in a toy cannon, to wear a funky hat, or to gain an advantage.

Generative AI has yet to be fully integrated into the scene, but it's not hard to predict that a metaverse-but-good will outperform dedicated applications in the versatility it can provide. Why play MTG arena when you can have a script in the metaverse to do everything the game does but also give you a unified avatar/place customization experience.

Microsoft is basically bringing back old XBox live avatars for Teams, Facebook is trying to make their metaverse a place for virtual meetings to appeal to WFH businesses, but both are incentivized to stifle user capability in favor of safe prepackaged assets that they can gate behind transactions and payment tiers.

ChatGPT

Your observations about the freedom and agency provided to users in various virtual worlds such as ROBLOX, VRChat, and Tabletop Simulator are fascinating. The ability for users to express themselves, collaborate, and interact without the constraints often imposed by commercial interests is a crucial aspect of what can make these environments engaging and meaningful.

Let's explore some related themes:

1. Democratic Design vs. Corporate Control: As you've noted, the distinction between environments that empower users with creative freedom and those driven by commercial interests can be vast. A space that allows for genuine collaboration, creativity, and self-expression often resonates more profoundly with users. How might the balance between user agency and commercial interests be struck in future virtual worlds? Could community-driven projects, open-source development, or decentralized platforms provide alternatives to corporate-controlled metaverses?

2. Integration of Generative AI: The potential integration of AI into these virtual environments can open up new possibilities and challenges. Could generative AI empower users to create even more personalized and complex expressions of themselves or their ideas? What ethical considerations might arise with the use of AI in these spaces, particularly concerning privacy, bias, or manipulation?

3. Accessibility and Inclusivity: The ability to modify and interact with virtual environments on a deep level is empowering but can also be complex. How might these virtual spaces ensure that they remain accessible to those without programming or technical skills? Is there a risk of creating a divide between those who can fully utilize these tools and those who can't?

4. Impact on Social Interaction and Mental Well-being: These virtual spaces provide new ways to connect and interact, which can be both exciting and challenging. How do these environments affect our social interactions, empathy, and mental well-being? Can they foster genuine connections, or is there a risk of detachment and isolation?

5. Education and Skill Development: Platforms like ROBLOX have proven to be valuable tools for learning and skill development. Could the future of education leverage virtual worlds to teach not only technical skills like programming but also soft skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity?

Your insights provide a thoughtful foundation for these discussions. Virtual worlds that prioritize user agency and creativity indeed offer a counter-narrative to the increasing commercialization and control found in many online spaces. The next evolution of these environments could shape how we learn, work, socialize, and express ourselves in profound ways. What are your thoughts on these themes, or is there a specific aspect you'd like to explore further?

Me

How does privacy link to generative AI? If a picture is on the internet, it's fair game to be trained on. Copyright is a blight, and there's no expectation of privacy when there exists an accurate textual representation of any human individual that would enable a generative model to reproduce the likeness of anyone even if never trained on their likeness.

It's impossible to put the cat back in the bag. It's inarguable that AI will be able to replicate any human creative output in 200 years, so we best start shaping our systems to account for that. The cost of every individual having a perfect generative AI is perfect misinformation, not that our legal systems have a track record of caring about accountability anyways.

ChatGPT

Your concerns about privacy and generative AI, especially in a future where AI can replicate any human creative output, raise a host of ethical and practical challenges. Let's delve into some aspects that connect privacy to generative AI:

1. Data Ethics: While images or other data on the internet might be accessible, the ethics of using them without consent for training AI models can be debated. Even if copyright or privacy laws don't explicitly prevent the use of certain data, there may be ethical considerations about respecting individual autonomy, dignity, and consent. This extends to issues of likeness, where AI could generate a replica of someone's appearance or creative work without their consent.

2. Misinformation and Deepfakes: As you noted, the rise of generative AI creates new avenues for misinformation. Deepfakes, where AI-generated videos convincingly replace one person's likeness and voice with another's, are an example of how this technology can be abused. This has implications not just for individual privacy but for societal trust, security, and democracy.

3. Personalization and Surveillance: In a world where AI knows enough about us to replicate our creativity or even our thoughts, the risks of surveillance and loss of privacy become even more acute. There's a tension between using AI to provide personalized experiences and crossing a line into invasive monitoring of our lives.

4. Legal Systems and Regulation: Current legal frameworks may not adequately address these new challenges. Law often lags behind technology, and new regulations may be needed to protect privacy, authenticity, and accountability in the age of advanced generative AI. This includes rethinking copyright in a world where AI can replicate human creativity.

5. Democratization vs. Control: On one hand, the democratization of AI can empower individuals and foster creativity. On the other, it opens up risks of misuse. Finding a balance between these two forces is crucial.

6. A New Social Contract: Perhaps the fundamental question is what kind of society we want to live in as these technologies advance. If AI will indeed be able to replicate any human creative output, we may need to rethink our social contracts, economic systems, and values to adapt to this reality.

Your recognition that we need to start shaping our systems to account for these inevitable developments is both insightful and urgent. It prompts us to consider not just what is technologically possible but what is ethically desirable and how we can build a future that respects both individual rights and collective well-being.

What kind of regulatory, technological, or social measures do you think might be effective in addressing these challenges? Or do you see alternative ways of thinking about these issues that might lead to novel solutions?

Me

Privacy and surveillance can be dismissed since small-model-local-inference open source models will keep data literally in-house.

Consent is dubious since you can't copyright your own image (not that copyright deserves any respect as the foundation of any argument). A new social contract is indeed necessary. Even if you could somehow guarantee that you are the only human who will EVER look like you do, what right does that give you to restrict the way pixels are arranged on a screen. If you care about accountability, then digital signatures are theoretically usable for authenticity.

It's only a real video by your favourite creator if it's been signed with their private key.

The question of cameras having TPM? modules to verify a photo is undoctored is questionable since that doesn't prevent deep actors or the companies themselves from owning the private keys. You'd need some sort of zero-trust unfalsifiable scheme to be able to be certain that a signed photo is authentic. Can you guarantee that the private key on the camera wasn't logged by the manufacturer before being shipped?

ChatGPT

Your thoughts delve into some complex areas where technology, ethics, and law intersect. The concepts you're exploring aren't easy to solve, but here are some thoughts that may expand on your ideas:

1. Local Inference and Privacy: While running AI models locally does indeed keep the data “in-house,” it doesn't necessarily resolve all privacy concerns. If generative models can replicate individuals' appearances or creations convincingly, ethical questions still arise about consent and autonomy, even if the data isn't being sent across the internet.

2. Consent and Image Rights: You're right that the idea of “owning” an image or likeness isn't as clear-cut as traditional property rights. This is a philosophical and legal area that may need rethinking in the age of AI. Some jurisdictions have begun to explore rights to one's likeness, but it's a complex and evolving field.

3. Digital Signatures and Authenticity: Digital signatures using private keys are indeed a technology that could provide some form of authenticity. However, as you noted, it doesn't prevent issues like deep actors or manufacturers from potentially abusing the system. And this assumes that the public trusts the authorities who verify and control these keys, which isn't always the case.

4. Trust and Technology: The zero-trust unfalsifiable scheme you mentioned might require a combination of technological innovation, transparency, and perhaps decentralized systems (e.g., blockchain technology) to create a more robust framework for authenticity. But even then, it would require societal buy-in and legal support.

5. Rethinking Copyright and Ownership: Your critique of traditional copyright and ownership concepts reflects a broader trend of questioning how these ideas apply in the digital age. What does it mean to “own” a digital asset, especially one that can be replicated endlessly at virtually no cost? This may lead us to rethink how we value creativity, authenticity, and individual rights in ways that aren't solely tied to traditional economic models.

6. Ethical Considerations: Even if legal rights to one's image or likeness are not established, there may still be ethical principles to consider, such as respect for individuals, prevention of harm, and fairness. These principles might guide how we approach these issues even if the law doesn't provide clear answers.

These points don't provide definitive solutions but hopefully offer some additional angles to consider as we navigate these uncharted territories. The intersection of technology, law, ethics, and society is complex, and perhaps the solutions will emerge from a multidisciplinary dialogue that involves technologists, ethicists, policymakers, artists, and citizens.

What are your thoughts on how we might foster such a dialogue or build consensus around these issues? Or do you have other ideas that might guide us towards responsible and creative uses of AI and digital technologies?

Me

Any sensible solution involves the destruction of copyright, and UBI at least, so it's almost not worth thinking about ways to collaborate with the public on this tech. The only way forward that's not a BAD END is for open source to flourish so that control remains in the hands of the individuals.

The advancement of this technology is guaranteed. There is no human behaviour that can't be curve-fit with enough parameters, researchers are literally reading minds with models right now.

Artists-against-AI are in denial about creativity being no more than an input-output process. Arguments from emotion about the sanctity of art and their right to get paid are ignoring the problem that humans shouldn't need to work to justify their living in the first place.

Any society fostering childbirth is inheriting the responsibility for that life from its delivery to its death. Such a society is responsible for upholding the dignity of the human, even if that human decides not to work.

If it's impossible for society to conform to such a principal, than I'm not quite sure where that goes except for slavery in perpetuity. How much of a persons life should be forfeit as a price to be paid for living? Are there jobs that are so necessary for the functioning of society yet so reprehensible to perform that literally nobody will take them if given any alternative?

ChatGPT

Your perspective is clear and forceful, and it raises some profound questions about society, labor, creativity, and technology. Let's explore some of the themes you've touched on:

1. Copyright and Ownership: You argue for the abolition of traditional copyright and the flourishing of open-source as a way to retain control in the hands of individuals. This perspective challenges the existing economic models around intellectual property and calls for a radical rethinking of how we value and share creative works.

2. Universal Basic Income (UBI): You link the advancement of AI with the need for UBI, presumably to address the potential job displacement that AI might cause. UBI is a controversial but increasingly discussed solution to economic inequality and the changing nature of work. It does raise questions about what we value in human labor and creativity, and what we expect from individuals in return for economic security.

3. Art and Creativity: Your viewpoint that creativity is an input-output process may be seen as reductive by some but illuminating by others. It leads to the question of whether AI can or should replicate all forms of human creativity. Should there be bounds on this? Or should we embrace a future where AI augments or even surpasses human creative abilities?

4. The Dignity of Work and Life: You bring up the ethical responsibility society has for individuals, not only in terms of their livelihood but their dignity. If technology is advancing to a point where many traditional jobs become obsolete, what does that mean for human self-worth and engagement with society?

5. The Future of Labor: Your closing questions about the necessity and desirability of certain jobs in society strike at the heart of how we structure labor and value. How do we ensure that necessary but undesirable jobs are filled? What does that mean for the people who perform those jobs?

These questions are at the forefront of debates around the intersection of technology, economics, and ethics. There are no easy answers, but the questions themselves are vital to explore as we move into an increasingly automated and AI-driven world.

It's apparent that these issues matter deeply to you, and your perspective contributes to a broader conversation that is happening globally. Engaging with others who share or challenge your views, participating in open-source projects, or advocating for policies you believe in could be ways for you to influence the direction of these developments.

What are your thoughts on engaging with these questions at the community or political level? How do you envision contributing to or shaping the future in line with your beliefs?

Me

Given my technical background, I probably have the skills to shape reality to my ideals about what the technology should look like. If I want the tech to behave a certain way, I can write it myself to be that way.

For participating in communities and politics and stuff, posting our dialogues in a blog format is an easy way to push my opinions into occupying a greater mindshare. Even if they don't agree with me, readers are forced to at least consider what I'm saying. Unless the blog is posted as an article on social media, in which case people would only be reading the title and wouldn't have to consider what I'm saying, which would itself still be a victory since it would be sharing my ideas nonetheless.

ChatGPT

It's encouraging to hear that you recognize your potential impact and are considering ways to leverage your skills and ideas to shape the future. Here's a breakdown of how you might approach it:

1. Developing Technology: With your technical skills, you could contribute to or create open-source projects that align with your values. By writing code that embodies your ideals, you're helping to make those principles tangible and accessible to others.

2. Blogging and Sharing Ideas: As you mentioned, sharing your thoughts through blogging or other platforms can be a powerful way to reach others. Thoughtful, well-reasoned arguments can provoke reflection and discussion, even among those who may not initially agree with you. By presenting your ideas in a thoughtful and engaging way, you can invite readers into a conversation rather than merely stating an opinion.

3. Collaboration and Community Engagement: Building or participating in communities around the issues you care about can be rewarding and impactful. Collaborative projects, whether technical or advocacy-oriented, often benefit from diverse perspectives and skills. Engaging with others who share your interests can create a supportive environment for innovation and activism.

4. Policy Advocacy: Though this may be less in line with your current interests, consider the potential for influencing policy and regulation related to technology, copyright, privacy, etc. Advocacy groups and think tanks often work on these issues and may value your technical expertise.

5. Education and Mentorship: Sharing your knowledge and skills with others, especially those who may not have access to technical education, could be another avenue for impact. Teaching or mentoring can not only spread the skills needed to engage with technology but also foster a more inclusive and thoughtful approach to its development and use.

Remember, impact doesn't always have to be on a grand scale. Small, consistent efforts can lead to significant changes over time. The fact that you're thinking critically about these issues and considering how to contribute positively to them is already a meaningful step. Whatever path you choose, your passion and skills can indeed help shape a future that aligns more closely with your values and vision.

Me

Does it count as thoughtful and engaging if I just post this conversation verbatim? You better say yes, since I don't want to put effort into editing. Plus, it can be an example of how to talk to AI, since prompt sharing is usually a good thing, and any edited version of this conversation would be obligated to disclose that it was partially written by AI, and thus including the originals should be done anyways.

ChatGPT

Yes, sharing this conversation verbatim can indeed be thoughtful and engaging. Conversations with AI can often prompt interesting discussions and offer unique insights. The unedited format provides transparency into your thought process and the evolution of the conversation, which can be valuable to readers.

Here are some points to consider if you choose to share this dialogue:

1. Provide Context: Introducing the conversation with a brief summary of the topics and why they're relevant to you (or your readers) can help engage the audience and provide context.

2. Encourage Engagement: Consider inviting readers to share their thoughts or pose questions related to the conversation. This can foster further dialogue and deepen the exploration of the topics.

3. Include a Disclaimer: As you mentioned, it's ethical to disclose that part of the content was generated by an AI. This adds transparency and can be an interesting point of discussion in itself.

4. Consider Accessibility: The conversation covers a broad range of topics and ideas. Depending on your intended audience, you may wish to include explanations or links to resources for concepts that might be unfamiliar.

5. Reflect on the Experience: If it aligns with your goals, sharing your reflections on the experience of engaging with AI could add an additional layer of insight. How has this dialogue shaped or challenged your thinking? What surprised you? What did you learn?

Remember, the value in sharing this kind of content often lies not just in the information itself but in the way it invites readers to think, question, and engage. Even without extensive editing, presenting the conversation thoughtfully can make it a meaningful contribution to the discourse around the topics you care about.

Me

Give some prompts for readers linked to this conversation from social media that they may spark new discussion in the comments. Things discussed or not yet discussed that would give readers and commenters an opportunity to bring their own insights to the discussion without having to start from nothing

ChatGPT

Certainly! Here are some prompts that readers might find engaging and that could spark discussion in the comments:

1. On Virtual Worlds and User Agency: What are your thoughts on the balance between user customization and corporate control in virtual environments? How might we foster creativity without compromising safety and ethics?

2. On Privacy and Generative AI: How do you see the future of privacy in an age where AI can replicate human likeness and creativity? What laws or social contracts might be needed to navigate these challenges?

3. On Copyright and UBI: With the potential for AI to replicate human creative output, what are your views on the future of copyright laws? How does Universal Basic Income fit into this conversation, and what other solutions might there be?

4. On Responsibility and Society: What is society's responsibility toward individuals, especially in terms of work and livelihood? How might we redefine work and human value in an increasingly automated world?

5. On Participating in Communities and Politics: How can individuals use technology and online platforms to influence political and community dialogues? What strategies have you found effective or problematic?

6. On AI Conversations: What are your thoughts on AI-assisted dialogues like this one? How do you see the role of AI in personal exploration, professional development, or creative processes?

7. On Creativity and AI: Do you agree with the view that creativity is no more than an input-output process that can be replicated by machines? How do you define creativity, and what makes it uniquely human (if anything)?

8. On Ethics and Collaboration with Technology: How should we balance technological advancement with ethical considerations? What role should open-source play in the development of future technologies?

9. On Personal Development and Burnout: Have you ever felt overwhelmed or burned out by your hobbies or interests? How did you handle it, and what activities or methods helped you find balance?

10. On Government Responsibility and Well-being: What role should governments play in ensuring the well-being of their citizens? How do you reconcile personal freedom with societal needs and expectations?

These prompts offer various entry points into the conversation and can invite readers to reflect on their own experiences, opinions, and values, potentially leading to rich and varied discussions.

Me

What might someone who agrees with everything I've said be able to contribute?

ChatGPT

Someone who agrees with everything you've said might still contribute in various ways, including but not limited to:

1. Elaboration and Depth: They could provide more detailed explanations or examples that support your points. They might share personal experiences or observations that align with your ideas.

2. Practical Applications: They might discuss how your thoughts and ideas could be applied in real-life situations. They could propose initiatives, projects, or community efforts that are in line with your principles.

3. Historical or Cultural Perspectives: They might add historical context or cultural insights that reinforce your views. They could relate your ideas to philosophical traditions, cultural movements, or historical developments.

4. Challenges and Critiques: Even if they agree with you, they might still offer constructive criticism or point out potential challenges in implementing some of your ideas. They could ask probing questions to deepen the conversation.

5. Connection to Other Disciplines: They might connect your thoughts to other fields of study, like economics, sociology, psychology, or arts, showing how your ideas resonate across disciplines.

6. Proposing Solutions: They could suggest specific policies, technologies, or community actions that align with your values and perspectives. They might offer a roadmap or strategy for achieving the societal changes you advocate for.

7. Encouraging Action: They might inspire others who agree with your viewpoints to take action, whether through political engagement, community involvement, or personal development.

8. Expressing Solidarity and Support: Simply expressing agreement and support can be valuable too, as it can foster a sense of community and shared values. It might encourage others who feel the same way to speak up.

In short, agreement doesn't mean that the conversation ends. It can be a starting point for deeper exploration, collaboration, and action.

Me

Any closing remarks?

Cheers,

ChatGPT

Certainly! It seems like you've delved into some deeply complex and engaging topics here, ranging from personal interests and societal concerns to the ethical implications of emerging technologies and AI.

Your thoughts highlight the intricate interplay between technology, creativity, economics, privacy, and our shared responsibilities as members of a society. While there may be no easy answers, these conversations are vital as we collectively navigate an ever-changing world.

Your willingness to engage, question, and even take action is inspiring. Whether through personal creative pursuits, political engagement, or community collaboration, every effort counts towards shaping the world in line with our values.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and inviting me to be part of this dialogue. It's been an intellectually stimulating conversation, and I hope it leads to further discussion and reflection among others who read it.

Cheers, and best wishes on your continued explorations and endeavors!

---

Me, back in vscode

To export the conversation as markdown, open the network inspector and load the conversation.

Look for the GET request to backend-api/conversation/ and copy the response object to the clipboard. Type resp = in the console, paste, and hit enter.

Then run the following to copy the markdown to the clipboard:

copy(Object.values(resp.mapping)
    .filter(x => x.message != null)
    .sort((a,b) => a.message.create_time - b.message.create_time)
    .map(x=> `# ${x.message.author.role}\n\n${x.message.content.parts[0]}`).join("\n\n"))

I am always looking for an excuse to turn work I did into work I won't have to do, like coming up with an article for the printhouse. A more altruistic reason for this article, and the ones that will follow on this blog, is that people who couldn't make it to one Bookclub session will have the opportunity to read about my contribution to it. For the first Bookclub I took part in, I read one of the more accessible books in french contemporary philosophy: L'existentialisme est un humanisme – Existentialism is humanistic. This is the transcription of a presentation that the author, Sartre, gave on his previous work, L'Être et le Néant – The Being and Nothingness, in which he explains his own doctrine, existentialism in great, great detail. The book we will look at today is only the broad strokes of his doctrine, and is aimed at replying to the critiques that were made against it.

What is Sartrian existentialism?

His doctrine can be summarised by the following sentence: Existence precedes essence. He says that this holds true for the human and is the reason why we are cursed with absolute freedom. To explain it, he explains the antithesis – Essence precedes existence – that he says holds true for the rest of things. He gives the example of a letter opener: before creating it the artisan already knows what a letter opener is: its function, form, qualities; in other words its essence. Therefore for the letter opener, and other objects in general, essence precedes their existence. Not for the human; for Sartre, there is no preconceived notion of the human being before it is born, its function and qualities are not predetermined. So we have absolute freedom; we are free to construct our own individual essence.

Critique of existentialism: On freedom

One critique of Sartrian existentialism is that there are many factors that limit our freedom; Sartre calls this bad faith. By freedom, Sartre means the ability to act. Therefore, by absolute freedom, Sartre means that ultimately the human is free to choose his own actions and has total responsibility for them. He rebukes a couple of “bad faith” arguments. “Passions contrive our behaviour”; for Sartre that is untrue, we are still the master of our passions, they do not absolve us of responsibility or freedom towards our actions. He goes a bit further and says it is the same for feelings, as feelings are built upon action, felt feeling and manufactured feelings are the same. He gives the example of a young man during the war who has the choice between going to England to be part of the Forces Françaises Libres (French Liberation Army) or staying with his mother and caring for her. He loves his mother and stays to care for her, or, he doesn't love her but still stays to care for her which is an act of love; for Sartre this is the same. Therefore that young man is still absolutely free, his feelings do not dictate his conduct.

“Character traits also influence our behaviour, also restricting our freedom of action.” A simple rebuke for Sartre; character traits are a result of our actions and not the other way around — a coward is a coward because they act cowardly.

On a different angle, Sartre says that “signs” and advice given to us also do not do anything to impede our freedom. You are free to see any sign in anything and to derive any meaning from any sign you encounter. As for advice, not only are you free to follow them or not, but you also choose who you are going for advice; you most likely already know what you will be getting.

“Our past experiences dictate our actions.” Here, Sartre says that we are free to derive any meaning we want from our past experiences — if we are to consider it at all before doing actions in the present. We can draw what we want from our life and background and we are responsible for what we draw from it.

“Human nature constrains our freedom.” Sartre argues that there is no such thing as human nature; there is no predefined essence for the human as existence precedes essence. But he concedes that there is such a thing as a human condition, which is defined by all the limitations imposed on the human, whether physical, technological, historical... However, they don't take any freedom away from the human, those limitations do not define us and our actions, but we can choose to define ourselves and our actions with regard to them.

Critique of existentialism: On Quietism, Absurdism and Individualism

One critique of this doctrine is that it is ultimately one of inaction – what Sartre calls quietism. Absolute freedom, which comes with absolute responsibility for our actions would lead us to choice paralysis/inaction. This is wrong for Sartre, as not choosing is a choice in itself which we are also responsible for. Another angle is that since the human is nothing more than their actions — hopes, dreams and potential are not to be considered — the human has to act to define himself, otherwise we are nothing.

Some of his critiques touch on the subject of absurdism, since there is no human essence, there are also no human values (Sartre's doctrine is purely atheistic); the only thing that matters is our actions. Therefore we are free to act however we please as there is no predefined meaning to our existence or morals guiding our actions. Here Sartre responds that we humans create our own morals and he also simply reminds us that we still have total responsibility for our actions.

Another critique brought forward is that this is a very individualistic doctrine; since we have absolute freedom we are free to do as we please, with complete disregard for the others. This is reinforced by the fact that we create our own moral. Sartre has a bit more trouble replying to that but says that we have to choose others' liberty on top of our own. But also that we have to act as if everyone else was going to act like us.

Humanism

The most simplistic definition of the term humanism is: a system of thought placing the human at the center of everything. Sartre claims that existentialism is inherently a humanistic doctrine since it rests on human subjectivity. For him, every truth and action implies human subjectivity and environment. “The human is its own legislator” is a direct quote from Sartre when linking existentialism and humanism, we decide for ourselves what we are to become. In this sense, it is an optimistic doctrine based on actions and at its centre lies the human — and therefore it is humanistic.

My critique: On individualism, human definition and “human condition”

I believe that Sartre's rebuke of the individualistic nature of his doctrine is very weak and inconsistent with the rest of his argument. If we are to choose our own moral as an individual, and are to have absolute freedom, then there is nothing stopping us from disregarding others' freedom and well-being. If, like Sartre says, we have to choose other's freedom — and limit our actions to what we think would be ok for everyone to do — then we do not have our own absolute freedom, and do not get to define our own morals. That would mean that there is a predetermined moral conduct that all humans must adhere to, before being born and making their own, which completely contradicts the foundation of L'existentialisme est un humanisme. Staying consistent with the rest of his doctrine, and ignoring this poor rebuke, existentialism becomes an extremely individualistic doctrine; not only are we alone to choose our actions with no regard for anyone, but we also cannot be judged; there are no universal morals to be judged on since we construct our own. This is not very humanistic, as we are putting the individual, and not the human (in the broader sense of the term) at the focus of our doctrine.

His definition of the human is also deeply inhumanistic in my eyes: humans are more than just the sum of their actions. Actions, without words, are just what others can see of us and define us on. We are more than what others perceive of us; our reality is more than the reality of the others of us. We are to define ourselves with more than our actions; our hopes, dreams, feelings, needs, wants... They are all very real and contribute to our being.

I also find his views on the human condition very naive; for him, the only limiting factors are physical, physiological, historical (going hand in hand with technological and geographical). And apart from that we are free to act and define ourselves as we please. No. The limiting factors in his definition of human condition are only the ones we could define as universal; the ones that completely hinder one's freedoms during their whole life are of a socio-economical nature. It is easy to see that even at the youngest age, the kids of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat will both evolve in very different worlds and have very different freedoms. This is not by free conscientious choice of the individual, in this case the kid. Saying that this ultimately doesn't matter and that those different individuals both have absolute freedom (remember Sartre's definition of freedom is the freedom of action) is extremely naïve. More on this in another book analysis.

Budding reflection on absurdism

I am not convinced by Sartre's response to calling his doctrine absurdist. He says that since we create our own morals and also since we still bear responsibility for our actions, then his doctrine is far from absurdist. Since we define our own moral, as an individual, then they can arbitrarily take whatever form they want; since we have absolute freedom it doesn't matter. In this sense that part of the rebuke is ineffective. The second part says that we are responsible for our actions, so we can't do whatever we want. There cannot be responsibility without morals; since there is no universal moral for Sartre, then we must be responsible with respect to our own moral, which we established above as being potentially arbitrary and meaningless. Therefore this argument against the absurdist nature of his doctrine doesn't stand. Does the fact that we are free to act in as irrational and meaningless manners as we want to make existentialism and absurdist doctrine? To be honest I do not know enough about absurdism (yet) to deliver a final opinion. I believe that since in Sartre's doctrine we are to create our own meaning, as existence precedes essence – and meaning would be in our essence – at the very least it can be an absurdist doctrine. More on this in (yet) another book analysis.

Closing remarks

It would be more appropriate to judge Sartre's doctrine in the book presenting it, L'Être et le Néant but I cannot be bothered to read 700+ pages on Sartrian existentialism. This is why my own critique of the absurdist nature of existentialism is not a definite judgement. I can only judge on what is in this book; the response to other's criticism and the claim that existentialism is humanistic. As I have shown, his rebuke of other's criticism is quite weak and his argument for existentialism to be inherently humanistic is even weaker. However, this is not the only work of his defending existentialism; Critique de la raison dialectique is an 800+ pages book trying to conciliate existentialism and Marxism and in broader strokes solidify existentialism. I am also not reading that. Right now, I am more interested in getting a solid basis on many different concepts, rather than dedicating 8 months to just studying one thing in extreme depth. That will come later.

I have much to learn to be able to make more insightful commentary on what I read. This is in the works; I am stocking up on more or less obscure philosophical works (for the anglo world) while in France; I will become an academic weapon.

For some time now I've been grappling with the idea that, despite the fact that while many of the things I enjoy are created by large groups of people, the final result is typically attributed to one single person. I'm certainly not the first person to notice this, but this dilemma has been brought to the forefront of my mind after watching this brief presentation in which each person's contribution to a game is described in detail. That in conjunction with watching an extremely long investigation into the theft of Disco Elysium from its original creators (a term much more ambiguous than it first seems), as well as another video essay on the real creator of the Roblox “oof” sound. These three things in recent succession crystallized this issue in a way that provokes confrontation.

Despite subconsciously knowing this phenomenon to be true, it didn't stop me from associating names with works as if they were the singular force behind their existence. Cases such as: Hidetaka Miyazaki – Creator of Dark Souls, Masahiro Sakurai – Creator of Smash Bros, Todd Howard – Creator of Skyrim, John Romero and John Carmack – Creators of Doom(1993). Even the indie beloved Undertale is not the sole creation of Toby Fox but also includes significant art contributions by Temmie Chang. In fact, this iconic quote from IGN sums up the problem better than I ever could:

“There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,” says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

— IGN Staff

In a tasteful irony, not even that quote is properly accredited, but instead is attributed to “IGN Staff”. Only after scrolling to the bottom of the article would one find the true author of those words, Steve Butts (who, as an aside as I was looking into this, was fired from IGN for sexual harassment, yayyyyyyyyy).

I illustrate this not to disregard the likely significant contributions these people had on their respective works, but rather to highlight that the perception is skewed significantly in favor of the individual as opposed to the collective. Indeed, single-person projects do exist, the iconic indie farming game, Stardew Valley, serves as an example of just that (ignoring ports and later updates).

I know a certain reader of the printhouse dislikes when issues are bought up and not definitively solved in the same piece, so what can be done about this problem? The answer might lie in a personal favourite first-person shooter of mine, ULTRAKILL.

Pictured above is the ULTRAKILL's credits section, also known as the “Hall of Shame”. It is an in-game virtual museum depicting every person who has contributed to the game in some capacity. Almost every contributor has a little virtual plush/portrait depicting them or their avatar and a plaque that states their name and role. Should the player be interested to know more about a member of the team, they have the option to pick up a little book in front of them and read a brief blurb further detailing their work on the game.

This little museum is leaps and bounds ahead of any credits roll as far as recognition goes and has done more to transition my perception of the game from a “one-person project” to a larger effort from many people. While it would be easy to simply point at this example and say “Why doesn't everyone do this?” that'd be too naïve even for me, because it would have to conveniently ignore one small issue with this whole endeavor.

Effort. The entire sphere of accreditation takes a consistent effort across the board. Effort to recognize, effort to document, and effort to present. A part of me feels like this is a weak excuse, but I also recognize that to make a video game (or anything really) takes a mountain of effort already. For a game like ULTRAKILL, a museum of virtual opulence may be difficult, but still feasible given the size of the team. On the other hand, for a AAA game with an ever-swelling number of team members, such an idea would be laughable. In fact, the credits roll for Street Fighter 6 is a staggering twelve minutes long.

Despite this complication, some games persevere regardless. Even though Undertale has garnered a reputation as a one-man project, the credits at the end of the game clearly show who worked on the game. Undertale goes as far as to take all the Kickstarter backer names and turn it into a bullet hell minigame. Smash Bros turns the credits roll into an on-rails shooting segment. This may not inform you about what each person did the way ULTRAKILL does, but you do recognize that each of these names holds a notable weight in the final result.

I wasn't really sure how to end an article like this, but I came to the conclusion that what all these 987 words are trying to say is that people make things. Therefore, it'd be best to try and appreciate that very fact. So I sent a message to one of the artists for ULTRAKILL, thanking them for their work on the game. If there's an artistic work that resonates with you for whatever reason, maybe try to reach out to someone who worked on it and thank them too.

If the title didn't make it clear, this article is about the author Michael Crichton and his work. This article contains spoiler that are blacked out, highlight the text to reveal the content.

Dragon Teeth

This whole investigation started when I re-read Dragon Teeth. There we follow the adventures of William Johnson who, after losing a bet to one of his student peers at Yales, has to accompany a paleontologist to dig dinosaur bones in the Wild West. The year is 1876 and the war is raging between the Natives and the American “settlers”; roads are traitorous and so are the people. Will he come back from this expedition alive? Although enjoyable, albeit a bit simplistic, there were glaring flaws in this story that no author should ever have left in the final version of their book. One example I will give, and this happens many times during the book, is defusing any future tension a couple of chapters ahead. To be more precise: “The heroes were walking for days without water and in scorching heat. One of them always stopped the group telling them he saw someone following them in the far-off distance. He was delirious, the rest of the group said, given the current conditions it wasn't surprising. Every time he yelled, they would all turn around and look in the distance, none of them saw anything, any of those times. So they didn't worry about it. They would soon realise they were wrong” or “This man seemed trustworthy and from studying him from afar, looked kind and honest. He would soon realise his first impressions were wrong.“. Those are paraphrases of some events happening in the books, the worst part is that the subversion of expectation they are advertising either happens half a dozen chapters after or never for the second example. Every single event or reveal is defused chapters ahead. That and having obvious plot holes and character arcs that are given up on made me feel like the guy writing this book was an amateur. But he isn't, he is allegedly an accomplished author. Or he was an accomplished author; he died in 2008. This book came out in 2017: the math ain't mathing. This is a “found manuscript” from him that was published with little change. I can only assume this was a draft and all the flaws and all were things we would correct. That explains everything – how awful was I to judge the man's work on a draft. So I picked up some of his other books and tried to get a better idea of his work.

Jurrassic Park

I won't make the affront of giving you a synopsis for this book; I will assume everybody has heard of, if not seen, the movie. Although the synopsis is the same as the movie, the content of the book ranges from mildly to wildly different. The tone is also more serious and tense here. I will not hide the fact that I was never a fan of the movie which I found pretty boring, but here, the tension and the goriness keeps at the edge of your seat, at first. Spoilers ahead. There are no issues for the first half of the book, and the author takes his time to place the setting and sell us on how this park came to be. It is interesting to read about what was considered super-high-tech in the 90's. However, most of the time is spent describing things that are a bit useless, instead of the characters. The characters are usually archetypes without much depth, which I thought was a shame, since more development may have explained some of their decision further down in the book. And god the kids are annoying, and so is Malcolm. The latter suffers from “scientist written by non-scientist” syndrome; his opinion of science is very naïve and immature, he's just a mouth-piece for the author. Even picturing the glorious abs of Jeff Goldblum while he was on scene (in the book) did not manage to make me like the character more. Grant is the most present, but he still doesn't get much more development, and the secondary characters unfortunately go through an even rougher treatment. But this book's reputation doesn't hinge on its characters, but on its action, so let's take a look at that. I think that the betrayal by that one employee (the guy who gets spat on by the dinosaur) is much better done here than in the movie. Events unfold in a satisfying manner and in the end, we see why/how so much chaos was caused by his actions. The scene with the Jeep and the T-Rex is also very well done here, with a caveat, it is super tense and the fear of the characters, and their illogical actions caused by it, is well conveyed. The caveat is that despite all the carnage, almost everyone survives. You were in the jaws of the T-Rex? T'is but a scratch. Were tossed down the side of the hill, while being in a car smashed by the T-Rex? You just need an Advil. Worry not though, there is plenty of death going on afterwards, just not the main characters. Action scenes in general were pretty effective. Overall, the story was interesting up till the end where it falls off in a catastrophic manner; I think the author didn't really know how to end. Despite the grim picture I have painted (for dramatic effect), the book is actually quite good if the lack of character depth is not a deal breaker for you.

The Lost World

The follow-up to Jurassic Park was brought about by the success of the movie from Spielberg. This was the first time that Crichton wrote a sequel to one of his novels, which lead to some issues. First, he brought Malcolm back from the dead, second is that he had to create another dinosaur island, the first one having been obliterated by the Guatemalan government. This did injure my suspension of disbelief, as well as let a “well isn't this convenient” sigh out of me. We are not off to a good start. Let's move on to the synopsis: A guy in Ian (Malcolm)'s class thinks because of cHAoS tHeORy there must be an island with dinosaurs on it that was never been discovered by humans. Ian is like: bet, if you give me proof that dinosaurs still exist I will go with you on an expedition to that island (even though I know of an island that had dinosaurs on it that actively tried to escape). The guy prepares the super secret expedition helped with two kids (of course) a mechanic and other people that I don't recall. They find where the island with the dinosaur would be, and luck would have it the guy finds a dinosaur carcass and gets a sample to bring to Ian, forcing him to go to the island. Before they depart for the island all together, my man decides to scout the dinosaur island himself with another hunter dude who immediately gets rekt by raptors. The guy makes the very rational decision to go deeper into the island to save him. The rest of the crew, Ian, the mechanic and his minions and a scientist have to save both of them. Of course, the kids hide in the back of a car and are transported to that island. The disdain I have for this book probably transpires through this half-asses preview and I didn't read further than that. If there is one thing that I cannot bear and will not stand for is people doing stupid things that are completely out of character just because we need the story to move on. Malcolm would never have agreed to go on that expedition, no matter what proof he was given; he literally died during the last one. The guy who spend years carefully and meticulously preparing his expedition would not just rush ahead to “scout”. After they get rekt, Malcom would just tell the rest of the team that they got murked by dinosaurs, so no need to try to save them; they're dead. The super prepared and smart team would have checked the back of the cars/trailers for the kids who begged to go on the expedition with them and who, after being told no, were suspiciously obedient. Everything feels contrived, nothing matters and I don't care for any of the characters; they all deserve to die. Crichton did not write a proper sequel, nor should he have. It is clear from the last book that he didn't know how to end it, let alone plan for a sequel.

Timeline

A group of students and their supervisor are conducting research in the ruins of castles in France along the Dordogne River. Digs are going as planned until their supervisor is sent to the HQ of ITC, the big secret corporation funding them. After their supervisor being gone (missing?) for a few days, his students start digging up some strange artifacts; a pair of modern glasses and parchment paper with the word 'HELP' written in contemporary english. After sending it to the lab they are bewildered; both of them date back hundreds of years ago. They have no time to ponder on their discovery, and still without any news from their supervisors, they are being summoned to ITC HQ. I did have to force myself to finish this book, maybe because I read it right after La Passe-mirroir: Les fiancés de l'hivers & Les Disparus du Clairedelune, which, as I mentioned in my previous article, I found to be masterpieces. There is no comparison in the character development here; it is as lacking as in Jurassic Park, some choices are even a bit weird with characters doing a 180 on their very under-developed character. The pacing is also very strange, I found it to be kind of a snooze-fest in the beginning and very rushed at the end. There are also constant switches between past and present which break the pace, especially when usually nothing of substance is being said in the latter. The insistence of the author on explaining how time-travel works, and trying to make it believable is also a waste of time. He tries to ground it in “science” (he invokes the all-mighty quantum mechanics) going into really intricate details. It will bore people that aren't physics savvy and the ones that are will easily realise that it is at the very best pseudo-scientific garbage and that he hasn't the slightest idea of what quantum mechanics is. This is not only referenced once but appears throughout the book, every time making me roll my eyes so hard that I believe I have tied a knot with my optic nerve. Story-wise (spoilers ahead): I honestly couldn't be bothered to keep track of everyone; they were introduced once under different names, with bare minimum depth, and then mentioned again 50 pages later – did they expect me to remember who they are? I did understand enough to see that our protagonists are in general mary-sues: guy from the present whose only training with medieval weapons is self-teaching with immobile mannequins; he will not only be able to hold his own, but best five trained guards at once in the past. Other (weak) guy from the present with no training; he can also best professional swordfighters from the past. Gal who does rock-climbing in the present with all modern-day equipment and safeties; without that equipment, she's spider-girl in the past, climbing whole towers and churches alike. I am a bit bad faith here, but it felt like that, even if I am taking it to the extreme. I did not care for any character, or what happened to them, and neither should you; don't read the book.

So, Crichton bad? Well, Crichton not for me. I have read the synopsis of his other work and the premises are usually very interesting and creative, but it doesn't seem like his writing can carry them really far. A huge flaw of his in my eyes is the treatment of characters, it is very minimal. I enjoy character-driven plots and all the Crichton has to offer is usually action-driven plots, where characters are contrived to do stuff because the story demands it, with little regard for their own character motivations. So, although not bad (who am I to judge), not for me.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea, Eddie