Reader

I love the return to form that is happening with café patrons reading more and sharing their reviews 🥰 Inspired by the reading roundups of Elisa & Eddie, I thought I'd share my reviews of what I’ve been reading thus far in 2024 (but in my own style).

I will preface this with the fact that I don't like to know too much about a book going in. I think going in mostly blind to most media is something I'm starting to really appreciate. It is for that reason that I won't say too much about the contents of the books in my reviews. I also will not ascribe a rating to each as 1) I don't care enough to keep track as I finish reads 2) you may feel differently and 3) most books land fairly neutral anyways.

So with that out of the way, let's get into my reading roundup for the first quarter of 2024…

Stats breakdown from Jan – Mar 2024

• Total books read: ~7
• Reading mediums: 1 physical book, 5 audiobooks, 1 e-book
• Time spent reading: 34 hours

Books Read + Reviews

Heartstopper Volume 5 by Alice Oseman Medium: e-book copy of graphic novel

This was newly released in December 2023 and I was fortunate that I got to read this in the first week of January through the library. The Heartstopper graphic novels are such a comfort read, and this was no exception. This latest installment further explores Nick & Charlie's relationship, especially with Nick being in his senior year. Unlike most of the other volumes I read last year, the content of this one has not been captured in the show yet so it was especially endearing to get a glimpse of what's next for all the characters in this universe.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport Medium: Audiobook

I read Newport’s Deep Work back in 2021 and I have had this one on my list since then. For anyone unfamiliar, Digital Minimalism is about being intentional with your technology use and curating how you want to interact with it so it only enriches your life. However, I think if I had read this back in 2021, some of the messages, insights, and action items would have been lost on me. Visiting this now that I am already somewhat in a state of digital minimalism allowed me to have new considerations for what this meant for me in my life, and how I might implement the takeaways. I will probably share more about this in another upcoming Printhouse article, but I do think it's a worthy read if the concept piques your interest.

Everyone in this Room will Someday be Dead by Emily Austin Medium: Audiobook

This was an… interesting one. I added this to my TBR based on a video from one of my favourite creators where she shared a minimal synopsis and did a live reading of an excerpt. The gist of this one is that it's about a young woman who struggles with social interactions and cues. The main character gets herself into some predicaments as a result, such as accidentally accepting a job where the previous employee died and getting in a relationship with someone she had no interest in dating in the first place. I think this tidbit about the previous employee dying lead me to expect something that leaned more thriller, but this was not the case. While I could appreciate some of the thought patterns and observations the main character makes, the whole thing is very stream of consciousness inner dialogue. That said, I think one of the beautiful things about reading is that it can expose us to different perspectives. So while I could not relate to a lot of what the protagonist experiences and normally would not have chosen this read for myself, I was able to expand my horizons. Additionally, I thought this book was set in New York or something so the narrator dropping Toronto-relevant names (and mispronouncing Elgin) was a jumpscare.

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come – One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes by Jessica Pan Medium: Audiobook

I think the title of this book downplays and does a disservice to what it actually has to offer. The book is part self-help and part memoir. It follows Jessica Pan, self-proclaimed Shintrovert (Shy Introvert), and her adventures over the course of a year to become more outgoing and confident. While this is what she identifies as her goal at the beginning of the process, and it does provide somewhat of a through line for her experiences, Pan touches on so many other themes and experiences. What stood out to me: her pursuit to make friends and the effort it entailed as an adult (especially as an expat); her candid reflections on loneliness; the perceptions by others of what she was doing; the lessons she picked up from her various mentors; her journey towards feeling more confident performing on stage; and above all, how to host a great dinner party. Although the beginning felt a bit preachy and pick me girl, Pan eventually finds her footing and transitions her storytelling into something vulnerable and endearing. Since I listened to this via audiobook, by the end I felt like I had been on a long wholesome phone call with an old friend. I think you'll appreciate this read if you want to break out of your shell more, make more meaningful connections with both new and old people in your life, and/or improve your social life.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang Medium: Audiobook

Wow. I think this is my favourite read of 2024 so far. This was another one of those books that came highly recommended by the BookTok community but where the synopsis was kept minimal. June Hayward is friends with Athena Liu, an Asian American author who is a successful starlet of the publishing industry. June witnesses the tragic death of Athena, takes the manuscript for Athena’s upcoming novel, and goes on to rework it and pass it off as her own. The only hiccup? The novel is about the history of Chinese labourers in WWI. And you guessed it… June is white. The book follows June’s actions and how she continues to double down on her lies. It's incredible how Kuang is able to oscillate June's racist delulus with brief moments of guilt and clarity. This has me even more interested to read Babel by this author now that I've been exposed to her writing style.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger Games Prequel) by Suzanne Collins Medium: Physical

As far as a spin-off prequel about President Snow goes, this was quite good. I also found the world-building intriguing with how Panem, The Hunger Games, and other aspects we first visited in Katniss’ timeline came to be. Readers of The Hunger Games trilogy are treated to a number of moments of realization on the origins. Most of all, I didn't expect to be reading about Coriolanus Snow being horrendously down bad but there you go.

If I could sum this book up in one line it would be: boy gets his heart broken once and decides to make it everyone else's problem for the rest of his life.

Re: the film – I watched it the day after finishing the book and it felt very Shein quality to me. Looked good visually but upon closer inspection it's shabby and a rushed job. Naturally, the books will usually be better than the adaptation and have more details. I also get that film adaptations are a different medium so stories have to be told differently. But the movie really spoon-fed the audience in a way that downplayed their intelligence and cut out any payoff they might have experienced from piecing things together. There was also no chemistry between the main characters and it just felt like they were tolerating each other?? I think it would have fared better as a mini series.

Dune by Frank Herbert (Book 1 – Dune) Medium: Audiobook

I am pleasantly surprised to say I have really been enjoying reading Dune. Many thanks to Liam for putting us on to this and Noah for proposing the book club! Dune club has definitely made this large read more digestible and I've enjoyed discussing what we read week over week. That said, I'm constantly in awe of how intelligent the writing is and how deep we get to explore the thoughts and motivations of each character. Particularly how they must weigh their words so meticulously (an art I've always admired). The perspective switching is also done very seamlessly and heightens the immersive experience. I unfortunately think that the movie(s) will pale in comparison to me after reading the book but looking forward to it anyways. Lady Jessica is also such a girl boss and the concept of the Bene Gesserit is so cool.

Review of Book 2 & 3 to be covered in the next reading roundup.

Thanks for reading if you got this far!

Once again falling short in the playoff push last season against a pretty good team idk, the Blue Jays need a definitive step forward this season. Departures of Matt Chapman, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Jordan Hicks, Whit Merrifield, and Brandon Belt, although not major, are a lot of holes to fill for the Jays, and after failing to get Ohtani, they settled for a bunch of smaller role players to fill those spots. They signed pitcher Yariel Rodriguez to a five year deal, hoping he can show the same level of skill he showed in the World Baseball Classic for Cuba and in the Japanese Leagues. The Jays also ended up reacquiring Kiermaier on another one year deal, signed utility player Isiah Kiner-Falefa to a two year deal, and veteran third baseman Justin Turner to a one year deal. They also signed DH Daniel Vogelbach and veteran first baseman Joey Votto to minor league deals, which means if they perform well they can get a spot on the roster, and if not the team can release them. Santiago Espinal was also traded, opening up more second base opportunities for rookie David Schneider and Cavan Biggio.

The Blue Jays center core of George Springer, Bo Bichette, Vlad Jr, and the catching tandem of Danny Jansen (as I write this I found out he starts the season injured) and Alejandro Kirk all need to stay healthy, as well as perform to their ability. Vlad Jr has all the makings to become the A+ player his dad was, but needs to take a step forward this season. He currently holds the second highest arbitration salary at over 20 million, and has not performed to that price tag. With his free agency in a few years, the price tag will only go up, and if he does not perform to the Blue Jays standards, could get moved in the coming seasons. Alek Manoah is also returning to the big league roster after he fell apart last season for seemingly no reason. A player who skipped most of the minor leagues, and did not play in the 2020 season, Manoah missing a year of development in addition to fast tracking to the main roster could be a reason for his shakiness, and a fresh season with a full offseason of work could be the remedy for him.

With the Baltimore Orioles, New York Yankees, and Tampa Bay Rays all contenders for the AL East, its important that the Blue Jays stay as consistent as possible, something that has been trouble for them in the past. An excellent defensive team, the offense is the biggest question for them this year.

As of right now, the Blue Jays 2024 roster looks like this:

STARTING ROTATION – Jose Berrios, Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, Yusei Kikuchi, Yariel Rodriguez/Alek Manoah/Mitch White

BULLPEN – Jordan Romano, Erik Swanson, Trevor Richards, Zach Pop, Nate Pearson, Tim Mayza, Chad Green, Genesis Cabrera, Yimi Garcia

CATCHERS – Danny Jansen, Alejandro Kirk, Brian Serven

INFIELDERS – Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, Ernie Clement, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Spencer Horwitz, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Davis Schneider, Justin Turner

OUTFIELDERS – Kevin Kiermaier, George Springer, Daulton Varsho, Cavan Biggio

DH – Justin Turner

Bitcoin. NFTs. Artificial Intelligence. It feels like every couple of years, a newfangled technology leaps to prominence following the sudden enrichment of a few lucky people. Unfortunately, those lucky people tend to be unlikeable libertarians. This leads to a tendency among people who enjoy arguing with unlikeable libertarians to dismiss the technology outright. Admittedly, I am guilty of this. There may be or there may not be useful applications of the blockchain that aren't pyramid schemes built around collecting pixel art of chimpanzees, but the objectionable aesthetic of the people advancing the technology makes me biased against the core technology itself.

AI is different. The utility of AI technologies is obvious to anyone who isn't sticking their fingers in their ears or burying their head in the sand out of fear. AI tools like ChatGPT are being used and abused by millions of people. Image generation technology is producing images of increasingly astounding clarity. Every few months, a new tool exponentially more capable than what was being used even a year before is announced. Unlike NFTs – which have died, and Bitcoin – which lives in an endless yoyo of collapse and recovery, AI has already begun to be integrated into the social fabric in a way that makes it obvious that it is not going anywhere. Yet despite this widespread adoption, AI seems to fill many people with a not totally unreasonable dread. Digital artists in particular seem to be the most vocal critics of this technology. Their reactions to it vacillate between desperate fear of replacement and smug disdain towards its supposed incapability. In this article I'm going to address and respond to the response to AI from professional artists and their friends and allies: what they are right about and what they get wrong.

Are AI images art?

The most common criticism levied by artists is that AI is incapable of producing art. I suppose this opinion is subjective, as art is difficult to define, but I would strongly agree. AI is not an “artist” or a producer of art in itself, but a tool of production.

One of my favourite art commentators, Brad Troemel, points out that art fundamentally is an expression of subjective experience. In Troemel's opinion, art flows from the artist's relationship with and perception of the world around them. Each artist's style is unique and usually distinguishable, even if only subtly. I think this is a fairly intuitive statement. It's why diversity is valued so highly in art in a way that it isn't in warehouse work or manufacturing line supervision. The art world generally wants there to be a large range of subjective experiences among artists as it leads correspondingly to a wide range of artistic expression. The fact that AI “art” generators tend to produce images, poems, and stories that mimic human art implies that the AI is not engaging in art as an artist. While it is technically possible that the subjective experience of a diffusion model or a large language model is similar to a human's, I seriously doubt it. If AI were engaging in art as a producer rather than as a tool of production, we should expect it to produce something different from human art, possibly something incomprehensible or more akin to the average output of Deep Dream than Stable Diffusion. As it exists now, generative AI merely mimics what a probability model expects a human to produce. If a human is not involved in the design process of a piece, an AI art piece is merely a simulacrum of human expression.

To be art, a piece must be made with AI instead of by it. The qualitative distinction here is frustratingly unobjective. If I were to draw a stick figure scene and feed it into an image-to-image model, would the product be made by or with AI? If I draw 99% of a complete landscape and then use AI to generate a tree in the background of the image, is the final piece made by or with AI? In the latter case, how is the use of AI fundamentally different than the use of another assistive tool like a ruler or a compass? YOU may have hard answers to all of these questions, but that doesn't actually matter. The distinction between “too much” and the “right amount” of AI assistance in the artistic process will vary between different producers and consumers of art.

Are artists replaceable?

Artists aren't wrong to make the point that pure AI images are not art and I support that position, it's just irrelevant to the debate around generative AI. This point exists as a mask over the true dispute between digital artists and AI, which is that AI is a nearly apocalyptic threat to artists as a social class. In accusing images made with or by AI of being “fake” art, they are not motivated by some instinct to snobbishly gate-keep but by a material need to convince consumers of art that what they produce can not be replaced.

As a commodity, art has 2 broad use values. The first is art for its own sake. There is an “art world” of artists, galleries, and collectors that produce and consume art as a commodity due to the perception of art production as a noble pursuit. To the people in this world, the idea that AI could replace artists is farcical. Art exists to expose observers to a unique subjectivity. Fundamentally, the logic of the art world is an unusual condition of production. Artists in this sphere are monopoly producers, the value of their art determined largely by the perception of them as a brand. A piece by Banksy is more valuable than your average street artist not because of the socially necessary labour time of Banksy's work but because art by Banksy is a class of commodity in and of itself.

The art world only makes up a tiny fraction of art consumption. Most consumption of art falls under art's other use value: representation of a concept in the world at large. Images drawn by humans exist as book covers, advertisements, warning signs, representations of fictional characters, and even, unfortunately, pornography. The consumer of this class of art commodity is everyone. It is impossible to live in the 21st century and not consume some subset of this second class of art as a commodity. The vast majority of expenditure on this specific class of commodity art is done not for the love of art in and of itself but because the art serves some sort of social purpose.

It is true that AI can never replace artists whose art lies largely within the first category, but most working artists fall into the second category. They live on commissions or contracts or as designers within a corporate structure. It is this second category of artists whose position is threatened by AI image generation. Because their art is only art incidentally and is instead consumed for a purpose outside pure appreciation, their work could conceivably be replaced with an image that is not art, as long as it is a close enough approximation to still sufficiently fulfill the social purpose a human artist would've been hired to meet. It is certainly true that there are people who appreciate the artistry of book covers, print advertisements, and even road signs, but this appreciation is not why those forms of visual art are manufactured.

Of course, this is only a threat if AI is capable of fulfilling the social need common art fulfills. Digital artists' second refrain after “AI art is not art” is usually “Even if AI art is art, it isn't good art.” This isn't unfounded. There still exists a gap between human artists and AI art, but complaints made today are often “this high-quality image of a man has an extra finger” and not the complaint that “this image is not recognizable as a man” that people were making only a year or two ago. The progress of AI image generation has been extremely rapid and there isn't a good reason to believe we've reached a plateau in capability. Take for example the popular generator MidJourney. These are pairs of images generated from the same prompts one year apart:

“A superhero like Batman with a dark red futuristic cardinal themed costume. He has a mask with a beak. In comic book style.”

“A female teenage superhero. She has red hair. Her costume is Italy-themed. She has an Italian flag for a cape. In comic book style.”

AI image generation has progressed so incredibly fast that as early as 2022 it was found that image generators could literally be trained to use human brainwaves as a prompt to reconstruct an imagined image. (Takagi, Yu and Nishimoto, Shinji, 2022)

Image generation threatens the livelihood of the common artist and threatens to destroy them as a social class. This is the real source of animosity between artists and AI. The existence of AI image generation lowers the labour value of art as a commodity for its use value as a representation of a concept to well below the cost of hiring an artist to perform the same social function. The answer to “are artists replaceable” is in many cases, yes.

The future of artists

If you asked the average person whether or not they would rather buy a book that has a cover drawn by a human or an AI, they would probably say a human. But what about when it becomes impossible to tell the difference? What about if a book with an AI-drawn cover is a dollar cheaper? If you asked the average person if they would rather buy food grown by a local farmer or a farmer on the other side of the planet, they will probably SAY local but buy cheaper foreign produce anyway. When actually confronted with the consumer decision the cheaper option is chosen more often as long as it meets the same need.

To an outsider, the fight between artists and AI seems less like an ideological dispute between “pro” and “anti” AI and more like the impotent riots of the Luddites in Britain between 1811 and 1817. Just as the Luddites were unable to stop capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth, proletarianize, and increase productivity so too will artists be unable to roll the world back to how it was before the AI explosion. As @h has said about this very topic, “the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.”

Even though artists are staring down an AI-generated image of a barrel of a gun, art will continue to be made. Artistic expression is a part of the human condition. Art will still be produced as a hobby and there will still be (a much smaller group of) artists able to survive by selling their art to common people, just as there are still people who sell artisanal candles and knit hats even though 99% of candles and hats are now mass produced.

There will also continue to be Banksys and Gerhard Richters. Artists whose art is a luxury product consumed within the community of the “art world.” These people will probably come to embrace AI as a useful tool like their predecessors did with the once unprestigious acrylic paint and plastic paint brushes. However, with the prospect of a professional career in art becoming even bleaker in a post-AI world, more of these people will be sons and daughters of the wealthy and connected within that already insular community of fine artists.

Capital concentration is inevitable and immiseration comes for us all. Artists are no exception.

Coming soon

It's been a long time since I published something on the printhouse. That's because I've fallen into a bad habit of starting research on an article, planning the article, and then coming up with an idea for a different article and starting all over again. As a result, I have an ever-clogging pipeline of articles in production. Look for the following coming in the indeterminate future: – Range Feudalism 2: If they are victims of this tendency, why do farmers tend to support this? – Software Exchange Value redux: my original article contains a fundamental error so I unpublished it. I'm reworking it and when it is released again, it's going to be very different from how it was before. – Automation: a follow-up to this article about the (im)possibility of AI technology totally replacing the proletariat. – Culture War: what is it and where does it come from? Is there any escape? – Deep learning From First Principles: an explanation of how exactly AI works assuming nothing but high school math knowledge.

I think in a previous article I promised to write Rage for the Machine, a history of the CIA's infiltration of anti-establishment/counter culture, but I've scrapped this article because a lot of the evidence is simply too schizophrenic or dubious.

Brief summary if you're interested in reading:

Apollo Kagwa is just beginning to settle into his new life as a committed and involved father, unlike his own father who abandoned him, when his wife Emma begins acting strange. Disconnected and uninterested in their new baby boy, Emma at first seems to be exhibiting signs of post-partum depression, but it becomes clear that her troubles go beyond that. Before Apollo can do anything to help, Emma commits a horrific act—beyond any parent's comprehension—and vanishes, seemingly into thin air. Thus begins Apollo's journey through an enchanted world to find his wife.

Score: ⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪

Not what I expected but interesting enough (barely) to read through just out of curiosity for what happens next.

Summary if you're not interested in reading below:

I love thrillers and fantasy. But I did not sign up for 448 pages of parenting horror. I went through the entire book wondering when the fairies showed up AND THERE WERE NO FAIRIES.

Themes:

The theme was don't share your child's pictures on the internet or child predators (fantasy edition) will get them. This isn’t a joke. The bad guy starts kidnapping children so he can livestream them interacting and then getting eaten by a troll (there’s a line about SUBSCRIBER TIERS in the book).

The actual themes are that parenthood is difficult but a gift, love for your family conquers all, and generational trauma can be broken. And don’t share your child's pictures on the internet or child predators will get them. But the ending technology stuff is incredibly overwhelming compared to the emotional resolution for both Emma and Apollo.

A lot of technology shows up throughout the book halfway through – Patrice being a tech guru, William being a programmer, BOTH OF THEM WRITING SHITTY APPS?? Patrice wrote Daylight, an app that DRAINS IPAD BATTERY IN 4 MINUTES because SCREEN BRIGHTNESS. The other guy wrote an app that’s ‘airbnb for boats’ (how it’s actually described by him in the book). There’s a paragraph about Patrice’s big powerful machine with an Intel i7 blah blah blah- and there’s a ‘tell it to me in English’ scene too. I hate it here. The abrupt switch from ‘living normal life’ to ‘TECHNOLOGY IS HERE NOW’ wasn’t eased by any mention of tech advancements to clue the reader in.

Another issue I had was all the women either live off the grid or aren’t involved at all with technology. Why wasn’t Emma concerned at all with Apollo posting every detail of their son on Facebook? Why wasn’t there also at least an argument between the two about blaming him for posting so much when those stalking photos showed up? Pacing:

The first third of the book is about the life of Apollo, his grandfather’s and grandmother’s life, then his and his wife’s. It was kind of dull because it really, really wants to drill into you Apollo's daddy issues and his father's issues. The next 2 thirds meander through the big issue of Apollo struggling being a new parent and dealing with his wife's postpartum depression, except this time she's right to kill the child. There's a lot of ‘this was established, but that was wrong actually’ to switch up the story, but it's all people telling Apollo rather than him figuring out anything on his own. The same is true for the plot itself, with people sending him messages to tell him where to go.

And there's barely any magic. On the magic island he gets beat up with clubs.

In the last fourth of the book we really get into confrontation. The villain's father gives a monologue on why they do evil things in a noble attempt to give his son time to escape, and his son ignores his father's dead body to go back to the computer and spy on people through their laptops. He also calls the father of the family he's spying on a ‘beta cuck’.

Writing Style:

The descriptions and overall writing style is fine.

It’s annoying how the book keeps pulling out of the action of the scenes by referring to ‘us’. ‘Our solar system’, ‘your imagination’, small things like that peppered throughout the book that feel incredibly out of place while we’re still in the mind of the characters. It really does feel like the author is ‘telling’ you a story, in the way that a grandfather might tell a story to his fidgety young grandson by referring to him directly so he’d be more invested.

It happened again. I'm going to lose it. (Author’s note: I got used to this later, but it doesn't change my opinion that it sucks as a part of the writing ‘style’.)

The repetition of the main character’s reassurance to himself: “I am the god Apollo” is a really nice touch. It's repeated throughout the story at crucial moments, and anchors the character. This also has the very funny payoff (other than making you pay attention to his name) where you can clap at the end when you realise he kills the troll with sunlight. (Author’s note: Apollo is god of the sun)

Final Thoughts:

It's a solid book but not the book for me. I'm not a parent and I think technology is good actually and I already know that posting your child on the internet is stupid. I wish the characters were written better so more of them could feel alive rather than simple fixtures of Apollo's life. The brief moments with Cal from the magic island are so fun because she's allowed to be a person, not just a character in his orbit. Even though we read about Apollo's mom's life, we never see who she is afterwards outside of her being a hardworking immigrant mother to him. Emma's friends are completely written out of Apollo's life once Emma exits from his. Patrice suddenly becomes a tech guru halfway through the book because the story needs one to fight the super tech savvy guy (they reveal the bad guy as an internet troll too and it turns out the thing the children are being fed to is A MYTHICAL TROLL. WOW! Revolutionary for young boomers/old millenials who embody ‘old man yells at cloud’).

Really interesting themes of generational trauma and parenthood that get absolutely overwhelmed by ‘don’t spam post your child on the internet or the predators will kidnap them’ conclusion.

(This is an article that's been sitting in my notes bin for over half a year. I think I imagined I might add more to it, but I guess not. I wrote it, I haven't posted anything on here in a while, so what the hell..)

he surface of the planet is sleek, white ice without terrain as far as the eye can see, but for the snow dunes which rise and fall, moving over time as waves with the wind. Even in the insulated safety of your cockpit and hard-suit, you can feel the cold taunting your extremities- like an icy god playing with you on the tip of his knife. The only thing that lives here is the brutal and vast howling wind.

As your Mech carries you on the trek across this ghost-world, your mind wanders to the ice. You wonder how deep it goes, and remember that your briefing had no mention of that.

Suddenly the white-blue canvas of nothingness is pierced by a small black beetle crawling over the horizon- or it reminds you of one as it approaches from a great distance. But as it approaches, it is clear that these are no beetles. Hulking, almost waddling metal beings, holding close to the chest giant assault rifles and glaring back at you with a piercing red, glowing eye.

Nonno and Nonna's house was truly a portal to another place in time- homemade lasagna, a smell I had yet to learn was homemade wine, and so on. One thing was for certain though, Nonna would sit us down at the television and put on the channel that only plays 80's cartoons. It would become fairly obvious that she just wanted an excuse to watch Looney Tunes- but there was always one sound in particular that I was waiting for. Ever since then, myself and countless other idiot kids have been hooked on giant robots ever since.

There's a lot of reasons that the impossible mecha fantasy is attractive- It is something that is made by humans but is not human. The mecha robot is transcendent, an idealized form that we can assume. The mecha symbolizes more than any vehicle or weapon can on it's own; it is a projection of identity and a visual of raw titanic power. The psychology of mecha is a blogpost for another time, but the important thing is that it is a visceral genre that plays with expressions of self, power fantasies, and fascinations with machines- just all the stuff we're addicted to.

At some other indeterminate point in time, brother Noah sent me in the direction of LANCER, a tabletop game not unlike, and yet very unlike some dungeons and dragons you may be familiar with. Of course, I was enchanted by the artwork at first, which is brilliant. By Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan, (aka, Abbadon,) Lancer is a game where your players will be taking on the role of elite mechanized cavalry pilots, rivalled in skill by few, and taking on a galaxy of deadly machinery. In this post I'll mostly rave about the game, and share some snippets from our recently wrapped campaign, which spanned about a total 18 sessions, (or, by my crude estimation somewhere around 70 hours, give or take).

It started as a one-shot, just a short little adventure to try out the system and see if it would stick. I wrote up an intro mission called “OLD_DOG”, but there was a problem- we were going to need a team. A group of specially assembled psychos who were up to the challenge of the most nerdy shit known to all mankind...

You are aboard the Starship UNS Marigold, a small sized freighter ship that runs the edge of Union space, the outskirts of governed territory. When you had boarded the Marigold, you noted the bizarre asymmetry of the geometric craft- it seemed a miracle that this frankensteins starship could lift off the ground at all, though for that it gives no small thanks to an army of retractable stabilizing fins and growling blue thrusters. The only hint of elegance on this monstrous ship are the bright yellow and orange flowers painted along sections of the hull, seemingly having grown over the ship's previous markings.

Three realtime days have passed since takeoff. You knew that you had not been put aboard the most luxurious type of craft (in fact, this is probably as cheap as it gets,) but this had been torture- with no windows on the entire ship, and only a tiny crewman's quarter to call your own, what had only a few days earlier seemed a dauntingly large vessel quickly shrank into a cramped, claustrophobic box in the middle of outer space, with no exits. More than that, if you have never experienced zero-G environments before, you're probably only now getting used to your own weightlessness.

The setting of Lancer is one of the most unique pre-written settings I've seen for a game. Set in the impossibly distant future of 5016u, humanity has spread across the stars and become a vast, scattered and diasporan race. The only real galactic government is an organization called Union; a collection of worlds dedicated to equity and human rights. Recently reformed and re-consolidating its power, Union looks to turn a new leaf for the galaxy, and from its own checkered past.

Union and much of the galaxy at large exist in a state of post-capitalist, post-scarcity; thanks to the invention of 'printers', and an endless supply of resources thanks to space-travel, there is no need for such primitive class struggles. The revolution has happened, and it happened a millennium ago. For many, the barbarism of capitalist society is not even a memory. But not all the galaxy is so enlightened, or free. This is the Union's great project, and where our heroes come in.

The dystopian science fiction has become deeply engrained in the greater genre, and is not entirely without it's merits. A dystopian fiction has much to say about real life issues, reflecting on a dark future that when done well, is the consequence of the poor choices humanity makes today. Indeed there is much value in the cautionary tale- but we also need fictions to aspire to, fictions that give us hope for a brighter day. While Lancer's galaxy is far from perfect, it is a fiction built around a hopeful future.

A 'lancer' is essentially a term for an ace pilot, a mecha pilot whose skills are a cut above the rest by virtue of raw talent or special training. Imagine a galaxy populated with human life- how many more geniuses, incredible talents and wunderkinds would be produced. Some of these wunderkinds become Lancers.

First in no particular order, was Sebastian Silverago, a farmboy from the deep-union world Karthas who likes to set things on fire. In his pee-paw's old mech, he signed up with Union to improve his skills in the mech-tourneys. Then there was Cordelia Darlington, a pale-haired princess and a deadly markswoman from the serene world of Vernado, accompanied by her retinue of protective royal mechanics. In order to earn her birthright, she took to the battlefield. Finally, Mercury Callaghan: The man from the edge of the galaxy. An experienced killer and an ex-pirate looking to make good with the law, you can always count on Callaghan to do something unconventional, or potentially insane.

The game system itself though, could fit right into whatever type of world you can think to make it work in, with minimal tweaking.

 
THE GALAXY OF "LANCER, The 1984 Original Series"
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1. Cradle     4. Vernado
2. Karrakis   5. Nebula Terminal
3. Karthas    6. Ichor

Building Lancer characters is based more around the horizontal progression than slowly powering up over time. Each frame (essentially your robot's class,) has three levels you can put into it. Mixing and matching parts from different machine archetypes to create something nasty and effective is the fun of Lancer characters, taking all the options in the book and making a sheet that feels truly unique to your character.

Like a shower-curtain, the goliath pushes aside brick, splintering wood and shattering glass. The goliath's red eye scans the battlefield, assessing. Even now, you know that the UNS Marigold has begun its descent from above the clouds. The clock is ticking now.

The Goliath points this giant's shotgun, bearing a giant shield mounted on the upper arm which is inscribed with the names of the dead of the city guard. A resounding BROOOOOMP! erupts from the black barrel of this sonic weapon.

Let's face it, when it comes to D&D combat mechanics, it is what it is. There are some times that rolls simply need to be fudged on the other side of that screen, and that's just a necessity for extracting narrative tension from those mechanics. After your turn is over, you begin a new quest to find the bottom of the pretzel bowl, because you will be doing nothing at all for the next 20 minutes. In Lancer, it never felt necessary to do any of that, and while I don't have an exact answer why, I have to imagine it's because the combat feels so interactive as it is.

I would joke that I had successfully tricked everyone into just playing a wargame with me, but it is true in a lot of ways. In Lancer, you're going to be thinking about things like line of sight, range, cover, terrain, and team tactics. More-so, as the GM, setting traps for players has never felt so devious and evil.

The most interesting, and interactive part of the whole game is the way Lancer handles initiative. You wont be rolling or adding any agility bonuses. Instead, each team decides their own turn order as the round progresses. This leads to some seriously interesting strategic decisions. Should Callaghan go first, trying and take down the big opponent with his melee attacks, or allow Cordelia to try her smartgun on the invisible assassins, but meanwhile risking a big attack on himself from the enemy demolisher? There were plenty of moments where the difference in the decision of which party member would go first was palpably the difference between life and death- and watching the party seriously discuss the merits of their options is one of the true joys of GMing.

Likewise, as a GM you will begin to think tactically as well. Player characters in Lancer are powerful from the start, and this really enables a DM to stop pulling punches- making things deadly in this game rewards the experience greatly. Of course, you don't do this by padding npc stats (usually,) but by fielding considered teams of NPCs that have their own strategies and can compensate for each other's weaknesses. Want to add some snipers to the next fight to really force the players to use cover?– better add some defenders to protect against a straight charge, or a controller to provide an additional distraction. As aforementioned, Lancer is kind of a game for when the GM wants to play killteam, but the players want a roleplaying game, and in my opinion, it fuses the best of both worlds.

Lancer is clearly though not explicitly inspired by battletech, but takes advantage of the recent and gushing influx of D&D roleplayers by taking that tactical, interactive combat and making it player-sided and diverse enough to work with the 'new crowd'.

Let me put it this way, it's like battletech, except not for old geezers. This is the young folks' battletech, a battletech for blue-haired baristas, for graphic-tee loving anarcho-communists, and for tumblr girlies- which is deeply to its credit. (battletech also rules btw)

Towering mechs bearing waving banners have turned the sky into a patchwork quilt of many colours. Knights, Union Soldiers, and freelancers have formed the united army that now marches on enemy ground. Above your own heads a black banner flies, on which a coiling red dragon holds an orange flower between its fangs.

Your band marches past smoking craters, destroyed homes, and a large but deliberately placed metal slate, painted with obscenities and most prolifically; “UNION DOGS, FUCK OFF AND GO HOME!” The heavy rain has made alliance with the blistering winds which bombard your company.

Your skin yet stings from the kiss of the tattoo artist's laser brush, but by now you are built of tougher stuff and it is barely a fleeting nuisance to your senses. You are running on little sleep, but you've gone with less. Ahead may be your greatest battle yet- a siege that may end the war on the planet called Ichor.

If you can get an enthusiastic group together to play Lancer, I highly recommend. We probably got lucky, because any rpg group is a unique and singular dynamic, and everybody just really understood the vibe of the game. Sometimes the rules can get a little crunchy and you might have to crack open and check the rules on something now and again, but it's not overbearing on the overall experience.

LANCER, The 1984 Original Series (a story only four people will ever know): PART ONE 1. Pilot(s) 2. Trial By Fire 3. Beer Pong 4. Goodbye, Centurion 5. Dragonslayers 6. Left Behind 7. Rescue Part I 8. Rescue Part II 9. The LANCER Halloween Special PART TWO 1. Time-Bomb 2. The LANCER Holiday Special 3. Red Wire 4. Glass Throne 5. The Phantom Centurion 6. One Last Night on Ichor 7. Tombworld 8. He said, “I guess I'm just homesick.”

further reading: – massif press – transformers, the movie – Neon Genesis Evangelion – zeroranger

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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 an 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