I
Sometimes you see somebody bashing his head against a wall. It looks like it hurts a bit, so you walk on over and ask ‘hey, buddy, what’s all this about? doesn’t that hurt?’
The interruption does stop his skull, momentarily, from slamming against concrete, but there’s some blood visible as he turns to you and contemplates the answer. You give him some time to come up with one. Anyone would be dazed after so many repeated blows, and besides, anything to keep somebody from ramming his brain-can into the side of a building for another few seconds.
‘gee, I don’t know,’ he says eventually. ‘I’ve made a little progress, though.’
‘shouldn’t you stop?’ you say. ‘it doesn’t seem like that’s a good use of either your time or your gray matter.’
‘why would I stop?’ he says. ‘I’m getting really good at it!’
Now you’re the one who’s dumbstruck, and before you can say anything else, thud.
Such a person, clearly, is a rat-fighter, but not particularly skilled at picking his battles, and consequently not someone on whom I’d bet to win very many wars if left in command.
II
A ‘deckbuilder’ is a type of card game in which you construct a deck during the game, as a main part of the gameplay. Dominion is the first and most famous of these.
A ‘trading card game’ (TCG) resembles a deckbuilder, but (among other distinctions) separates deck construction and gameplay into two separate challenges. Each player must choose cards from a given pool, each with different effects, and assemble those into a deck; it’s those decks that are then pitted against each other during the actual game.
The first and most famous trading card game is Magic: the Gathering. In it, there’s a singular, most important dictum when it comes to building a deck: ‘play your best cards.’
Every card that it’s possible to put into a deck is either better or worse than any other card which could take its place.
Some cards are clear stand-outs, either because they’re very hard for an opponent to deal with or because their effect is far greater than the cost. They should be included, and the rest of the deck should be built around them.
Others are role-players, there to fill out the numbers, and their ‘wins above replacement’ (WAR) are low, sometimes even negative. Still, each is either right for the part or it isn’t. The best filler cards either patch up weaknesses or add synergy with other cards, justifying themselves with either ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ contribution.
III
Note the difference between force concentration and cathexis.
IV
When the blogs started to die out, they weren’t replaced by the news— at least, they weren’t replaced by reportage. They were replaced by the flip side of the logs themselves, and the ‘web’ became the comments sections writ large.
Sure, there’s still fighting going on in, say, the New York Times’ comments section (on the rare occasion that they muster up the courage to have a comments section.) What happens more often, though, is that a would-be commenter throws a link up on ‘social’ media and everyone discusses it there.
The center of gravity has moved from hosted pages on whose individual terms everything takes place to <10 aggregators on whose impossibly broad, supposedly unbiased terms everything takes place.
When e.g. Twitter or YouTube is the best place to get your idea viewed, understood, replied-to, the siloed post lists towards obsolescence. When there’s a freely accessible surplus of high-quality material available on the aggregators, the siloed sites lose relevance.
It’s a state of affairs amplified by the decline of at least Google’s search. When any publisher won’t rank highly unless deliberately, painstakingly optimizing for it, and when it’s necessary to rank highly to pull traffic, ‘social’ media becomes the easiest, most meritorious source for clicks.
Often, the comments section practically obviates the need to read the post or article in question at all. It can be obvious even from the tone of the first few responses and counter-criticisms that the original argument has been selected and described to incite such backlash, critique, or even praise. In this way, the headline written to convince you to read the piece extends down into the most visible ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t.’
These replies are like a police-chalk, human-shaped outline drawn around something since removed. If there’s fighting about politics along particular axes, the article can be ignored, no matter how notably equanimous the headline. If, instead, there’s a disagreement with specific facts and figures, or with a logical inference upon which a given conclusion rests, I’m willing to ignore a deliberately provocative title.
V
Even professional athletes sometimes hew to priorities other than scoring the most possible points. Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal famously refused to even try a new technique for shooting free throws (underhand) despite his poor performance with the standard form.
Even entire sports leagues sometimes contain inefficiencies. In the past twenty years, mid-range shooting has disappeared from the toolbox NBA teams employ. In their place, exclusively, remain shots from two locations. 1. just outside the three-point line, 2. right in front of the basket.
VI
Many people read advertisements to feel validated in their existing purchase.
A great deal of the value in the purchase of any professional service is reassurance that it’s not your fault.
Any person with the capacity to follow a simple list of instructions can, with a surprising paucity of equipment and a willingness to look up those instructions, perform any of these tasks to at minimum a first approximation:
cut hair into standard barbershop arrangements
produce restaurant-quality meals
work through a reading list with class-level rigor
construct and commit to a plan of exercise
And each of these types of task can be extrapolated into categories: that which is thought to require ‘gated’ knowledge, some special dexterity, an excess of practice, specialized instruction itself on the part of the practitioner.
For some, a payment for a helping hand is a bargain; trainers, chefs, instructors, and haircutters aren’t kept in business exclusively by idiots. They provide value. Savings in time and effort, the mental clarity afforded by a shorter to-do list, supposedly superior results, a personal connection, etc— the standard marketing spiel.
For all, unacknowledged, you get someone to blame when you don’t like the end result, no matter the mitigating circumstances.
VII
The following paragraph is lifted from The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, a book of instructions written from one demon to another:
“Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
The following video, by Richard Swarbrick, is an animation of the key moments from a 2010 clash between the two most dominant teams in Spanish soccer:
VIII
Compare these two sitcom scenes, each set in a dump:
1. (The Office, S6E20)
2. (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, S3E1)
Compare these two brief speeches, the surrounding text and description removed, from two children’s books.
1. (The Giver, by Lois Lowry)
"This is the time when we acknowledge differences. You Elevens have spent all your years till now learning to fit in, to standardize your behavior, to curb any impulse that might set you apart from the group. But today we honor your differences. They have determined your futures."
2. (The City of Ember, by Jeanne DuPrau)
“Young people of the Highest Class. Assignment Day now, isn’t it? Yes. First we get our education. Then we serve our city. What will that service be, eh? Perhaps you’re wondering. Something to remember, job you draw today is for three years. Then, Evaluation. Are you good at your job? Fine. You may keep it. Are you unsatisfactory? Is there a greater need elsewhere? You will be re-assigned. It is extremely important for all…work…of Ember…to be done. To be properly done.”
XI
If you are unfamiliar with the story of scurvy —the full story— it will surprise you that the events which I am about to summarize could happen as late as into the twentieth century. The nineteenth century, sure; it’s a hundred years of excellent beards, speed surgery, “railway madness”, and crackpot inventions. The twentieth? Why, we’re not too far removed from the twentieth century, aren’t we?
Such was my approximate reaction when I learned (again, link) that the British navy lost the cure for scurvy sometime in the late 1800s.
By 1800, the allowance of lemon juice for British sailors had been fixed and standardized, allowing ships in the Royal Navy to stay out at sea longer than those of, for example, the French. Keyword ‘longer,’ because scurvy takes months to set in if you’ve been eating right.
Steamships made journeys fast enough that no one noticed when lime juice replaced the far-more-effective lemon juice, and no one noticed when that lime juice wasn’t fresh, and no one noticed when it came into copper tubes.
Altogether, roughly no one noticed that the lime juice didn’t protect against scurvy (because it contained very little Vitamin C)— until polar expeditions took long enough to get scurvy while not eating any Vitamin-C-containing fresh meat.
The lime juice had stopped working, and the brand-new discovery of germs, instead, could explain from whence scurvy came. When none of the provisions spoiled, in Robert Falcon Scott’s 1903 expedition to Antarctica, and still the explorers began to contract scurvy, he resorted to fresh meat, bemused.
The misunderstanding over scurvy’s cause and cure persisted, muddled. In 1907, two scientists got lucky enough to test one of the few other scurvy-susceptible animals, guinea pigs, for another disease of deficiency. They found scurvy where they didn’t expect it, found that they could cure it with foods we understand to contain Vitamin C, and we were set back onto a largely scurvyless path.
Again, simplified.
And there are many other examples of knowledge we’ve lost, some of which we haven’t recovered, because it simply wasn’t preserved.
When was the last time you heard a Gettysburg Address?
X
In Rome there remain the remains of millions of amphorae, crushed and broken into shards enough to form a hill over a hundred feet high. For those few in non-imperially-enlightened countries who I am assured get these emails, that’s “over thirty meters high.” You’re welcome.
Here’s a picture:
This hill, Monte Testaccio, is over a kilometer, close to a mile in circumference. is about as large as one would naïvely expect such a hill to be. can see it on google maps maybe help drive scale home
Under that foliage is approximately nothing but smashed oil containers, discarded and shaped into a stable disposal site. It was one of the largest artificial dump hills (“spoil heaps”) in the ancient world, and demonstrates that 2nd-century Romans were about as fond of olive oil as 2000s-decade Americans were of crude oil. All these and more fun facts here on Wikipedia (and about its archeological importance here, to prove I don’t exclusively read Wikipedia.)
In the walls of many old homes, you can find more contaminated, used razor blades than any right-thinking person knows what to do with. Not only can you find one, you can find many; when the disposable blades came about, it was a common technique to slot them into the walls. More than enough room, and it solved the problem of sharp-edged trash for long enough to make it someone else’s problem of old, rusty sharp-edged trash.
We haven’t confirmed the presence of any aliens in outer space. It’s a fact for which there exist many varied explanatory theories.
What would we think of each other?
all the best
Orion
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(really, all the best)