Lost in Lualand

I think many Swarthmore students often try, immediately after graduating, to accomplish a critical task at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way. I am not referring to your next jobs. Many of you will be doing jobs next year that you will be underpaid in and overqualified for. Tough luck on that, but it’ll get better eventually.

What I am thinking of is that many of you will try to do good and change the world for the better. And I do not think that you should. I think that this is exactly the wrong time for you to try and you will try to do it in exactly the wrong way. In trying, you misunderstand what it is that you are best qualified to do in the coming years, and you misunderstand exactly how it is that you go about doing good in the world [. . .]

If you set out to change the world for the better a week, a month or a year from now, with will and determination, with a sense of commitment and dedication, you are like an agronomy student setting off to practice your best cow-milking technique on a jaguar. It is the wrong time, but more importantly, it is the wrong attitude. People whose only goal is a total, overall or general change to the world for the better are people who end up disillusioned at best, and at worst, become the tools of–or weapons of–more cynical and calculating people.

What you are qualified to do tomorrow, or the next week, or the next year–not just qualified, but superbly capable of doing–is bearing witness. You are qualified to see the world as it is, to observe it meticulously, without blinders or filters. You are qualified to tell the truth, with rigor and discipline. This may come as some news to you, given how conflicted and ambivalent academics have become about what constitutes truth, and for good reason. Truth is not simple. It is not black and white. It is never predictable. Two people can witness the world honestly and end up seeing something very different, and both visions can be equally true. Truth is often a matter of perspective, and is often found through insight, inspiration and creativity.

Truth is hard, not easy. You can see it, if you will only allow yourselves to. That’s what critical thought does for you. That’s what ethical intelligence really is.

Your job now is to open yourselves as fully as you can to the richness and mystery of the human condition, to its irresolvable contradictions, to the dangers of knowledge. Don’t look away because you’re not supposed to see something. Don’t let anyone bully you out of being curious, or having a passion for knowledge. Don’t ever convince yourself that you have an obligation to lie, or to conceal the truth, to simplify things for reasons of political expediency [. . .]

If you look at the people who really have changed the world for the better–because most injustice is systematic, and really does require systematic attention from organized groups of people fighting for what’s right–you’ll see that most of them didn’t set out in life with the activist’s version of a “will to power”, determined above all things to change the world for the better. Nelson Mandela just wanted to escape an arranged marriage and live his life the way he wanted to. Gandhi just wanted to be a lawyer. If you want to change the world, just wait. The opportunity will find you at the right time, and when it does, your commitment to change will be organic, a part of your life rather than something outside of it. It will arise from within the conditions of your journey through the world rather than from hubris or fierce neediness.

—from Timothy Burke's Last Collection Speech (2002), emphasis mine

loosely-relatedly: one of my biggest personal annoyances with certain strains of "on" "line" "discourse" is how seemingly ignorant so many people are of the complexities involved in operating any organization with more than 40 people, anything with a nontrivial operating budget, and so on. sometimes the people involved are teenagers, or severely depressed, or just so unjustly and frequently exposed to Just The Bootheel End Of Things that they kinda don't want to hear about "perspective" and ok sure i get it. and plenty of times "uhhhm actshully this is just The Way You Gotta Do Things In A Big Evil Company" is a cop-out so ok i get skepticism toward that too. but sometimes people who really ought to know better seem willfully ignorant of, idk, obvious business realities like "you gotta pay a market rate for people to work for you" and stuff like that, and i always wonder if they... failed to do this, basically? whatever corner of the world you're in, you can pay attention and notice how things work there! and that's important work that, crucially, can't be done by machines; human judgment comes from humans

FFXII isn’t the most fun game to play. It’s drawn out, labour-intensive and opaque. Whether deliberate or not, though, the results work. All these disparate elements converge on the idea that if you do ever have the opportunity to change the world, the choice will be unclear, and it will not give you everything you want. If nothing else, this deserves praise for being so profoundly at odds with the ideology running through so much of game design that the aim should be to reward or satisfy the player.

—from this old blog post, emphasis mine

Okay here’s another story: the current era of formal verification has been dominated by the cost of proof. Specification has taken second place—we can’t even verify systems with simple specs, so why worry about everything else? Now, thanks to advances in modern AI, we may soon live in a strange world where proofs are cheap and abundant. If that happens, I think we will quickly verify every compiler and microkernel, then find that we’re stuck. Even Claude can’t tell us what to want.

[. . .] It’s a formal verification cliché that writing the specification tends to uncover most of the bugs in a system. To me, this suggests an analogy between specification and programming—both are tools for expressing what we want. In one way, this is a pessimistic thought: no tool can remove the burden of clarifying our ideas. But also, it gives me some hope. Programming is very difficult, but through careful tool design, we’ve made it available to hundreds of millions of people. With luck and skill, perhaps we can do the same for specifications.

—Specifications Don't Exist from Mike Dodds at the Galois blog, emphasis mine

something something, "spec-writing as a form of bearing witness / using-human-judgment / changing the world." also: the map is never never never the territory! also re: tools: horse and rider as one

. . . even highly automated systems, such as electric power networks, need human beings for supervision, adjustment, maintenance, expansion and improvement. Therefore one can draw the paradoxical conclusion that automated systems still are man-machine systems, for which both technical and human factors are important.

—from Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge

one way i've been thinking about that paper upon most recent read: it is true in many many systems that there are bad things that are parasitic on good things. automation in a power grid is good (better reliability at cheaper cost) but it's bad if the skills to recover from failure are lost. as in every system one hopes one could come up with a strategy for mitigating the bad while benefitting from the good, but, y'know, real-world track records on this is pretty mixed!

i'm in the middle of Music's Modern Muse: A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac by Sylvia Kahan, which is fascinating so far. i'm really looking forward to doing a writeup on it once i'm done. tl;dr: it's a biography of this chick who was the Big Lesbian Money in the Parisian music scene during her lifetime; she personally commissioned a bunch of Composers You've Heard Of and had them debut at her salons and such.

and, yeah, as i said, a full writeup will come later, but rn i'm just noting something that struck me / gave me an unexpected Some Kinda Feeling, idk—

( this is probably all really banal to ppl who read more history and/or queer theory than me idk lol )

This was a really solid page-turner.  I think marketing did this book a little dirty—the cover art gave me romantasy vibes, and the marketing copy called it "dark epic fantasy," but I don't think it's quite either of those things?  It's a full-speed-ahead court intrigue throwdown that happens to be in a fantasy setting.  A very cool fantasy setting, to be clear, and I could imagine some fun building-out-of-the-world if there's ever any more books in this universe, but as-is, most of the action here is about secrets and close spaces rather than magic or battles or romance.

( Read more... )

I managed to miss the explosion of "romantasy" as a genre so entirely that, when I went to a writer's workshop a year and a half ago, and a fellow workshopper read one of my stories and was like "yo, you could totally make this into a romantasy and make bank," I was like "oh cool, thanks! what's romantasy, again?" And when another workshopper sidled up to me afterwards and said, hey, this is good but it is absolutely not romantasy, do NOT take that other person's advice," I was like "oh cool, thanks! uh, what's romantasy, exactly?"

I then proceeded to spend all my time post-workshop frittering around writing a bunch of Exactly What I Want To Write without bothering to learn a single damn thing about The State Of Modern Publishing or researching the market at all, so, y'know, thank you kindly fellow students & sorry that your thoughts were so wasted upon me...!

But even so, I managed to vaguely glean a couple factoids and takes about this whole "romantasy" thing. Y'know, the sorts of takes you see on Tumblrs and in Substacks and such—"let women enjoy things" vs "they're pornographic trash" or whatever. Which sure rhymed with some stuff I remember hearing when Twilight was a hit, so when I finally got around to reading Fourth Wing, I was expecting... something like Twilight, right? Something not-really-to-my-tastes but nonetheless satisfying and pulpy? Like, I read the whole series back then, and while I didn't love them and wouldn't have read them if they weren't a popular phenomenon, like... they were in fact a pretty good time! I remember the third book in particular having a very satisfying progression and a cool final battle! I liked the weird Americana backstory stuff with that Jasper guy! The vampire baseball shit was legitimately charming! It was very easy for me to read those books, even as a judgy know-it-all teenager, and see what the appeal was.

I say this to establish some non-snob credentials because I worry I come off like a dragon here sometimes. "I can enjoy fun and normal and kinda trashy things," I say, persuasively and convincingly.

But like... Fourth Wing... really...?

Even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium, I found myself cringing at so much of the language—every instance of "for the win" was like nails on the chalkboard of my soul; so much of the language was just stupid or self-contradictory on a line-by-line level. And by God it repeats itself, often, as though it's worried you're... only barely skimming the text? only half-paying attention? so you need basic stuff repeated to you over and over? but it managed to do this so much it annoyed me even in the depths of my virus-induced delirium! Ahhh!!! (I commented on Tumblr that part of this might just be a "house style" thing? I guess?? if so I hate it???)

And there's so many logical/plausibility inconsistencies—each minor in their own right, each which might be easy to overlook on their own—but they pile up so much I was just left wondering what the stakes were or what basic facts were or who or what I was supposed to care about, so often, that I was just confused and annoyed most of the time.

Like:

( This section is literally me just scrolling through my Kindle notes and rambling on everything I marked with a "???". It gets so long oh my God. )

( the rest of my thoughts )

...in conclusion I do not think I am the right person to aim to try and write anything in the category of "romantasy" anytime soon.

time for the annual tradition~

Total number of completed stories: Six! They are:

Four Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn fics:
* Man of Letters (Pelleas & Naesala, Pelleas/Micaiah/Sothe)
* a way in the wilderness (Naesala/Leanne)
* Solstice (Reyson & Lillia)
* snake & sweet flower (Sothe/Tibarn/Reyson)

A Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fic:
* thrash the lake white (Verso &/ Sciel)

And my Yuletide fic, which was written for the James Tiptree Jr. story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever":
* That Which Crieth Unto Me From the Ground (...er, weird sentient birdlike things...?)

( rest of the meme under the cut )