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On the vibe shift, pt 1: Worldbuilding
See Part 2: Nameless, Faceless. Chatting with a friend last week, I mentioned I was writing a party report on the Lisbon ETH conferences for Spike. She said she was surprised. That there was a narcissism to the genre she’d expect to turn me off. A reasonable criticism—the format’s short history is ≈ synonymous with […]
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Zoom Call #1
And I said, I said, ‘a simple point that people forget to explain to outsiders about the consumption of random/plain/goofy/noisy artifacts is that it’s not the random/plain/goofy/noisy artifact that is doing the work but the 3000 years long acummulation of techniques for attentively scrutizing objects (which developed as a corollary of 3000 years of creating […]
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All Is Well E17: Acculturation as Brainwashing
It’s great how Mingyu (or the CC translator) chose “brainwashed” here, because that’s what piety is, a cultural expectation that gets drilled into you while your brain is in a formative state, that’s enforced through social pressure and shame. “Brainwashing” as we think of it is just rapid re-acculturation—to a new hierarchy, a new set […]
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210931
I wonder if anyone’s done a good treatment of “space” or “breathing room” as high-level, abstract patterns or metaphors—in the sense of lacking density/airiness, freedom of movement, reconfigurability. Perhaps starting from the level of physics—gas vs. liquid vs. solid—then moving up to organisms, psychology, sociology. Open spaces and evpsych. Claustrophobia. Start-ups vs. ossified bureaucracy, toeing […]
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Barry Lyndon, pt 2: The Duel
Last time: It is selection games and debt, all the way down. Nora has been “flinging” herself as an option to “every man” in the area, but none have selected her. Barry owes his uncle a great deal, and his uncle owes the bank a great deal in turn, which puts both into obligation. This […]
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Games of Strategy are Games of Reading and Writing
1. Schelling defines games of strategy as any situation in which each player’s best choice of action depends on the actions (he expects) the other player will take (and vice-versa, reflexively). This is in contrast to games of skill and games of chance. “Strategy,” then, is the study of conflicting parties’ behaviors as they are premised on […]
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Aesthetics vs. Microsociology
The problems of perception, assessment, category, association, prestige… What we are coming to call generalized reading.
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Notes on the Inexact Sciences
“Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.”
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Transfer Phenomena & Two-Person Languages
“Spotted: a dirty brown bag crushed under a tennis shoe. Looks like someone won’t be eating dinner tonight. XOXO… Gossip Girl.” The thing about voices is they are contagious. I can’t do accents, but spend a week watching TV re-runs and I can GPT-3 an essay in the narrator’s delivery.
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Oh Barry
And I said, PDL’s protagonist is basically a Barry Lyndon who always stayed a mama’s child, who never volunteered for military service which is to say never ran into highway robbers. It’s resemblance down to the disrupted dinner parties and shattered glass, disappointed relatives in varying states of shock, their shared naivete with women. You really expect me to believe it’s accidental, his name, Barry Egan? Egan’s an Irish name too, with the fiery connotations of its pagan namesake Aodha.
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Barry Lyndon, Man of Games pt. 1
Our lives, being a kind of game—an attempt at optimization, within constraints and laws—are subject to four interwoven influences which determine the game’s outcome. Who we are, the choices we make, the abilities we carry, and the luck which accompanies them. In other words, our status, our selections, our skills, and our stars.
A D Jameson all communication is manipulation Alva Nöe ambiguity chords compression Erving Goffman fashion fitness games generalized reading hermeneutic circle institutional theory Interpretation Jürgen Schmidhuber Karl Friston language games linguistics literary theory literature Maggie Nelson meaning music music criticism New Sincerity nostalgia opticratics Peli Grietzer Pierre Bourdieu pop music poptimism predictive coding predictive hermeneutics predictive model predictive processing Sarah Perry selection games signaling signaling theory strategic interaction surrogation the inexact sciences Thomas Schelling vibe theory visual art
Suspended Reason 