Category: Blog
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Flesh as Surface
“And I must go with stone feet / Down the staircase of flesh”—Ern Malley In the visual arts the past few years there’s been a slough of works that foreground the flesh, shoot meat in macro, and appropriate skin as texture.(Corpus as corpus.) We have Seth Price’s Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad, which showed…
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Ripple
It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are brokenPerhaps they’re better left unsung Grateful Dead, “Ripple” 1. Matching games We went into the pound blind. My aunt works in shelters, and I should have—but didn’t—reach out to gather intel: what are the signs, how do you know, how can you tell? The honest answers to such questions…
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Strategic Conceptualization
When consequences are the result of categorization, people will perform categories to attain their desired consequences. Categories carry with them a mix of connotations (social reputations) and decision rules (conventions for associated practice). Decision rules, that is, are domain-specific actions conditionally undertaken on the basis of whether a object or event under consideration is ruled…
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Précis for an action-oriented theory of language
What is a word, or message, or utterance? It is a move by an agent (~superorganism) undertaken in order to transform the environmental state, in a desired direction, by means of altering another agent’s information state. This transformation may occur directly, if the targeted slice of environment happens to be that agent whose informational state…
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Planète sauvage
I took 3-MeO-PCP for the first time in a long time, standing in the baby-blue kitchen of L & N’s Ridgewood apartment. I dissolved into litboard threads feat. The Brothers K, then schlepped across town to the Rubin c. 7:00 & smoked a spliff by the entrance & went inside the glass doors & went…
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Girls S2: Lip Service
This is the ninth installment in a ten-part series. “How can I be manipulating you if I don’t even know I’m being manipulative?” This, out of Hannah Horvath’s mouth after asking her father for a loan. This is the question of the Girls S2 finale. What does interpersonal manipulation really look like? Can we manipulate…
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Short-term, long-term in selection games
Natural Hazard prompts in the Pfeilstorch server: “The biggest problem with misrepresenting who you are in dating is that you might succeed.” Generalized: “The biggest reason to not strategically misrepresent yourself in a selection game is that you might succeed.” What properties of a selection game determine if or when this is good advice? Selection…
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Adaptation ripples in the NBA
Last time: Bateson was very interested in nontransitive comparisons, possibly because they subvert the commonsense transitivity of hierarchy and dominance which in many cases we read into the data because of our expectations. We rank sports teams for a winner at the end of the season, yet this final ranking aggregates a lot of non-transitivity…
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All Is Well E28: Functional Railroading
This is the seventh installment in a ten-part series. Timestamped link to clip under discussion, beginning 5:30 in. Shi Tiandong, love interest of protagonist Su Mingyu, is sitting in the restaurant he owns across from Su Daqiang, her father. Daqiang has been living, after the death of his wife, with his second son Su Mingcheng.…
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Value Clarity 2.0
C. Thi Nguyen’s “value clarity” concept (advanced in 2020’s Games: Agency as Art) is a useful one, whose basic idea goes like this: Nguyen believes games “work” (compel us) largely by providing value clarity for their players—that is, game worlds are characterized by artificially narrow and unambiguous set of priorities and purposes over which the…
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Baselines for the would-be strategist
There’s a set of strategy maxims that get passed around Pentagon powerpoints, Greek history textbooks, and business school seminars which can be considered platitudes of the field. I think they probably boil down to about a dozen guidelines—I’ve gotten them down to fifteen here, but think good synthetic work could manage single digits. Don’t tilt…
Suspended Reason 