Category: Uncategorized

I don’t control the dice, but I do control how many times I roll.

For I had been reading politcs.
The King in Yellow, page 71.

You don’t always win an argument if you keep calm, but you rarely win if you don’t.

The face I make when someone tells me to stop texting them because they’re busy, but they texted me first!

So another weird little thing about grammar is dualities. I’ll limit this to English and Latin, but they’re everywhere.

In English/Latin, the genitive case represents both connection and possession. So if you’re talking about a thing you own, you use the genitive. This is my toaster. But you do the same thing addressing a noun that exists in relation to something else, such as a parent.

This is my parent.

Likewise, nouns that can exist in relation to another word have that relation disclosed by the genitive.

This is my child. This is my boss. This is my employee.

But these constructions cannot take both meanings, as even if you could own an employee, you could not then own your boss. Ownership goes one way, so it can’t be both. But the grammar is the same, because genitive does both ownership and relationship.

Now the conjunction of ownership and relationship is an interesting one and worth thinking about, but the practical concern that there’s only one case for both purposes is somewhat simpler.

Likewise, apologizing has two purposes. One is to take responsibility for the suffering of others, acknowledge it, and affirm you’re not going to cause it again, and another is merely acknowledgement. The latter does have a little bit of ‘I support your suffering,’ but it’s mostly acknowledgement.

I was walking along and saw a bit of a gathering on the street, so walked over to see what was going on. A guy said his brother-in-law had just died, and they were having a gathering in his honor. It was outdoors because of Covid. I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

Obviously I didn’t kill his brother-in-law, but apologizing has that clumsy duality.

What makes that one work is that the guy was in that headspace, so he got it immediately. He understood. Me, not being in the headspace, felt the alienation of suddenly being immersed in it. So I felt like an outsider, but he felt like some polite stranger was trying to be respectful.

A few takeaway points of that:
1) People generally think better of you than you might expect. If you’re polite and there’s an obvious polite meaning, people will often default to that one.
2) Some senses of alienation don’t really exist. You may feel alienated from people, but often that’s alienation to a strange setting.
Both 1 and 2 tend to imply things aren’t as bad as they feel.

And to tie that back to dualities in grammar, those confusions are inescapable in human interactions.

I won a fight with my computer. I typed >format c:\ until it shut up, so that had all the subtlety of a brick, but it worked.

It’s extremely weird the way the ether idea comes back.

Michelson-Morley pretty definitively sank the idea, but the notion itself floats around. As a ‘cool-looking rock’ aficionado, I often talk to hippies who explain wave-functions mean they need to get high. I smile and nod. But they do mention that wavefunctions are everywhere and in all places. Um, yeah but no. The idea, that there is a substrata everywhere, permeating everything, has endured beyond Michelson-Morley.

Even religions often mention this idea with God being omnipresent. If you’re a scientist, you want a scientific thing everywhere. And you want to test it. If you’re a popular science enthusiast, you want popsci everywhere, and you want it to mean you should smoke a bowl. If you’re a religious figure, you want God everywhere, and you want to believe it. People tend to find what they’re looking for.

Right now, there’s an odd little idea floating around that Electric Fields exhibit some fluid properties. That doesn’t mean EF are physical fluids, but they do exhibit some odd behaviors. You can’t scoop them up or anything. But mathematically, if you do CFM on EF, the numbers you get are weird. What’s more, some forms of EF are seemingly everywhere. The best example is the cosmic background radiation, which is observable pretty much everywhere.

I’m being a little loose here with electric fields vs magnetic fields. Thinking on paper, as it were. But the idea that something ineffable and omnipresent exists is oddly ineffable and omnipresent itself.

On the east side of the Ritchie Engineering building is York Street, a one-way street going north. As I walked past York, an orange Jeep Compass approached on Iliff going west to east, so moving toward me. It did not have its turn signal on. When it came to York, the driver turned suddenly and went south, the wrong way, and nearly ran me over. The driver yelled ‘Watch where you’re going, dumb—!” and drove off.

That’s my day. How are you?

A lot of mobile games are grindfests. The player does the same level over and over again to acquire items, currency, or whatever. It ceases to be fun.

As such, many grindy games institute automatic play, where the player can have their phone play without them, or skipping play. The player uses a button or in-game item and effectively plays the level multiple times in an instant.

That’s a weird little balance. When the grinds got too bad, the game makers made the grinds easier. They didn’t reduce the grinding; they just made grinding easier. And people play these games.

I do to, some I’m not on my high-horse. But it’s weird. Why do I play these things if the biggest improvement in them is not playing? I don’t do that in card games or multiplayer games.

I think the difference is mobile grinding games make the grinding good, while card games, board games, etc. with a grind mechanic tend to have not playing as a punishment. The player is inflicted with a skip or missed turn, while the mobile grindfest rewards the player with a skipped or missed turn.

It’s still weird.

Looks like I dodged a bullet.