Disharmonious (Chapter 5)

More birds, Selena thought, as the birds woke her up yet again.

And her mind obliged, supplying:  To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Selena snorted.  That was the kind of stupid joke that a mind came up with when it was woken up way too early.

She headed down to the kitchen and made herself some coffee.  She might have felt disheartened from not getting the song in yesterday, but somehow it was making her feel more motivated.  So far, she’d been prevented from doing it by things outside of her control and, well, her own procrastination, but not today.  Today, that wasn’t going to happen.  Today, she was going to get the song in even if it killed her.

So she ran some extension cords to other circuits to make sure things wouldn’t cut out again, set herself up comfortably, and began to sing.  She’d decided that she might as well go along with her mind and sing “Turn!  Turn!  Turn!”, something less depressing than what she was going to go with, but not happy and bouncy either.  She was set, she was ready, and to her complete surprise … she made it through the song.

And yet, despite being happy that she’d gotten through it, she was also disappointed.  It hadn’t felt right.  It had felt mechanical, like she was going through the motions.  Walking through the part.  She felt disconnected from it, like she was doing a technical runthrough instead of performing, or even singing for fun.  She’d hoped that she could recapture some of the magic she’d used to feel while singing, but it didn’t seem like that was the case.  At least not yet.

Still, just because she felt off didn’t mean she actually was off.  Her nerves and the issues she’d had so far could make her feel that way, overthinking her reactions and missing that she was actually doing things the way she’d always done them.  Maybe she was worrying for nothing … and maybe that worry was entirely responsible for, well, the feelings — or lack thereof — causing her to worry.

Well, only one way to find out.  She had to listen to the song itself.

But listening to the song only confirmed her worries.  It was technically sound, but it was flat, hollow, emotionless … just the way she’d felt when she was singing it.  Sure, she knew that lots of people would kill to be able to sing a song like that that well, but it was still devoid of any emotion, any heart, any brilliance or shine or, well, any of the things that she used to be able to bring to songs, that everyone had always commented on about her singing, and that she herself had loved to hear when she listened to her own music.

She sighed.  It had been a long time since she’d really tried singing, and she couldn’t expect to be back on form right out of the gate.  Maybe she could try some different songs, or …

Suddenly, her attention was drawn back to the song.  She’d been letting it run to the end while she mused about why it wasn’t working, and she could have sworn, at the end, she heard a voice say “Who are you?” right before everything cut out.

Quickly, she rewound the recording and played it again, but the voice was gone.  She tried listening to it a couple more times and even put the headphones on to listen to it without any distractions, but she didn’t hear anything from the song.  And a quick look outside showed that no one was around, and if someone had been in the house surely they would have said more than that.  But she searched the house anyway, and found no one.

Well, that’s not at all creepy, she thought to herself.

She must have been hearing things, she guessed.  She might have decided to take a crack at another song, but between setting everything up again, singing, reviewing the singing, and searching the house it was getting too late and she was feeling too tired, down and, yes, creeped out to bother.  She took a quick shower and set up for another evening of listening to music and praying that she could get her mojo back until she fell asleep.

Failure of Empathy

After writing about the recent issues in Warhammer, something struck me.  A lot of the people who would consider themselves to be on the “left” and would also be the ones who advocate for adding more diversity to various works also believe that they act out of empathy, and would often even argue that the reason that they advocate for diversity is because of empathy, and they would accuse their opponents of lacking empathy and being unable to see or understand any other perspective or viewpoint other than their own.  However, it seems to me like they can’t really understand the perspective of their opponents, which is what causes them to react as they do.  After all, if a company had decided to, say, claim that an all-female order was always co-ed, most of them would react far closer to how their opponents are reacting than to the way they are reacting to that change.  This is a point that I explicitly made in talking about “Ghostbusters (2016)” in response to an argument that even with the all-female team in that one things were still unbalanced because when including the previous two movies the ratio was still 2:1, which I replied to by pointing out that I thus could do the swap to “Sailor Moon” and achieve balance, but I didn’t think they’d appreciate my doing that or accept that argument.  Even in the Warhammer case, they seem unable to conceive that maybe the people who are so upset are less upset about women being marines — especially given that there were explicitly all-female orders already — but more than this was an awkward change to appeal to either an audience that wasn’t the core audience or else to an external cultural push … something that almost all fans of any media and especially a media that was considered niche and outside of the mainstream culture will be annoyed by.

But we can see this in politics as well.  The left will constantly argue that they act out of empathy and that’s why they believe what they believe, and accuse their opponents of lacking empathy.  And yet a lot of the time they will argue that they don’t need to have empathy for their opponent, or that they somehow really understand them despite the opponents explicitly denying that and there being other explanations for why they act the way they do.  So they argue that things should be done on the basis of empathy, and yet seem to have rather obvious failures of empathy in understanding their opponents by either misunderstanding their opponents’ position, deciding that they don’t care about their opponents’ position since it can’t be valid, or even completely reinterpreting their position to one that is incomprehensible to their opponents but makes sense to them based on their own position.

And the key, I think, is in being unable to properly map how they would feel or act in those situations to what their opponents are feeling and doing.  As I noted above, if they had merely thought about how they would feel if a company changed a long-standing fact about the universe to try to appeal to an audience that was not the one that had supported that universe for so long, they’d better understand the reaction, even if they didn’t agree with it or thought that it was a necessary move in this case.  Looking at the above examples, in both cases they are puzzled by why people might have voted for Trump over Clinton despite the fact that Clinton explicitly dismissed their economic concerns while Trump at least paid lip service to them.  In the abortion debate, we can see this in how one of the arguments they use is “If you don’t like abortion, you don’t have to have one” missing completely how this maps to “If you don’t like murder, just don’t commit one” and so is a terrible argument.  In the trans debate, they accuse their opponents of lacking empathy for trans people while completely missing that if those trans people haven’t transitioned at all it can feel, at least, like men attempting to move into what were traditionally female spaces, especially if they win awards and scholarships and the like that would have gone to someone of the female sex otherwise, or if they act based on what seems to be a male perspective while claiming to speak from the perspective of women.  You don’t have to agree with their assessment to understand where they’re coming from.

For me, it seems like this is the result of how people do empathy.  In the debate between whether we do mindreading by simulation or by theory, it seems to me that for most people simulation wins.  Even if it’s unconscious, most of the time we try to figure out what other people are thinking by placing ourselves in their situation and running things forward to see how we would react in those cases, instead of working it out with reasoning.  I have argued that I think that people who are autistic or people who are exceptionally good at reasoning might do otherwise, but it does seem like most people use the simulation method.  One of the benefits of using simulation is that if it’s done properly you would actually feel the emotions that they are feeling as well, and so would get empathy along with it.  One of the reasons I posit that those who are autistic use a more theoretical approach is because they have noted problems with that sort of affective empathy, even as their ability to determine what people are feeling scales with their IQ, suggesting that their reasoning ability determines how good they are at figuring this out, which is not true for people who are not autistic.  So people use simulation, get the emotions along with that, and use that as the basis of their empathy.

But the issue with this is that it relies on putting yourself in their position and running it forward, but other people are, well, not you and you are not in that position.  So it relies on a mapping between the situation you are in to the situation they are in, which requires imagination.  Again, one of the reasons I think that those who are autistic don’t use it is because they also have noted deficiencies in pretend play, which would be required here.  The issue is that if you don’t understand the other person very well, doing that mapping is difficult, and because it’s automatic you can come up with an answer that seems right and run with it even if it doesn’t entirely make sense.  In the above links, that’s what Miri seems to have done:  determined that the only reason they could have had for doing that is because they are completely racist people despite many of them possibly even having voted for and supported a black president before this.  That’s the only thing her underlying processes can come up with for why she’d do something like that, even though they may have other reasons.

In thinking about it, though, I think there might be another reason.  Remember, the important thing that we get from simulation is that affective or emotional response, which is why we get affective empathy for free with every simulation we do.  And if we were dispassionately considering the question, that might work.  But what happens if we have a strong emotional reaction to the question itself?  If someone feels really strongly that abortion must be legal, or feels really strongly that trans women just are women, then when this simulation kicks off that strong emotional reaction could overwhelm the emotional reaction that the simulation would give us.  If you feel that it is just totally wrong and terrible to oppose abortion rights, or that trans people are oppressed and should be free, when you run it forward you will still feel that opposing abortion rights or denying that trans women are women are terrible things, and then conclude that they must be terrible people, and that’s entirely why they do that.  If you feel that diversity is important and that opposing diversity is just trying to remove those groups from the culture, you will feel that the only thing they could be feeling is that desire or emotion, and so define their position — and them — accordingly.  And since we can see from Stoic arguments that emotional responses are self-justifying, we can see that these assessments would then become the basis of their entire position on the matter, and be almost impossible to shake no matter how much contradictory evidence — in this case, from the words of their opponents — is mustered against it.

When I look back at the sorts of things I have been saying about these issues over the years, this idea fits in with all of them.  When these people who claim to base everything on empathy really, really care about something and start from a position that the position of their opponents is a terrible and horrible one, they tend to start from there and interpret the position of their opponents in that light, concluding that their opponents must just want to oppose and oppress women or trans people because that’s the only thing that makes sense, and following the typical path of strong emotion by interpreting them more and more radically as they go along, until they arrive at the point where their opponents are just evil people with completely horrific ideas.  This is how they can take a horrific attack by Hamas combined with a potentially excessive response and conclude, in line with their feelings about Gaza, that this response is an attempt by Israel at genocide despite the reasonable argument that if it really was such an attempt they seem to be doing it incredibly inefficiently, and then moving on to call anyone who doesn’t agree with them simply someone who supports genocide and so is a terrible person, even if all they are doing is opposing illegal protests that are causing more hardship to people who are not involved in these things than the people who are.  Their existing strong emotions are overwhelming their simulation resulting in them interpreting their opponents as totally evil and making it so that they are unable to see what their opponents’ position really is.

I have long claimed that at least affective empathy is a bad way to do these things because of its link to emotion, which is an unreliable method for this sort of thing.  It seems to me that how things work in the world today is just more evidence that my assessment is correct.

Thoughts on “Beyond the Door III”

I think a natural question that would come up from just reading the title of this post is “Wait.  You watched the first movie in this series, and found that it was both boring as heck and not in a genre you care for.  Why in the world would you watch the third one, other than the fact that it was next in line alphabetically?”.  Well, the main reason was curiosity.  The description actually sounded somewhat interesting and somewhat different from the first movie, and I wanted to see if they had changed any of the things that I didn’t like about the first movie or if they had doubled down and gone full in on that sort of story, on the presumption that, I guess, some people liked the movie enough for it to get a couple of sequels.

And I have to say that I’m glad that I did decide to give this movie a chance.

The premise is that a young, somewhat outcast girl is in some kind of class studying Serbia/Yugoslavia, and the class gets a chance to go to Serbia itself to observe some kind of ritual.  As was common in American schools in those days (the 80s) they are sent off on their own without any kind of teacher or parental chaperone to meet with a strange professor who will be their guide.  Anyway, he takes a liking to the young girl and attempts to draw her in and befriend her in a way that’s not at all creepy, especially since he really starts to make his move when he finds out that she’s a virgin.  They end up in the village and are separated, and while everything is creepy up to that point they really begin to suspect that something’s wrong when the villagers nail their doors shut and use some kind of magic to light their cabins on fire, while the young girl is given soup that knocks her out, is checked for being a virgin by a creepy old woman, and wakes up in a strange bed with the door locked.  Almost all of them escape the fire, and they run to get help, finally getting to a train to be taken to the next stop — which is hours away — but they start getting killed one-by-one and the train itself meanders all over the countryside trying to return to the village while killing lots of other people along the way.  By the time it does that, the young girl seems to be invested in performing the ritual and becoming the bride of the professor’s master, but it turns out to be a trick as there was a strange, mute young man on the train playing a flute who has had sex with her at the end — they show us the two of them naked and looking like that’s what they were going to do, so we pretty much suspect that would happen — and so she isn’t a virgin anymore, which upsets the ritual, seemingly destroys the evil being, and allows her to go back home, with the implication that the young man was the ghost of a monk condemned as a demon worshiper but who really was someone who opposed them.

This movie is a lot less boring than the first movie, as it has lots of actual kills to go along with its creepy scenes which means that stuff is always happening.  The kills are often somewhat creative, and even though some of them can seem like, ahem, overkill, again at least that happening and happening in gruesome ways gives it a stronger horror cache than the first movie had.  The characters are all likeable enough that we don’t want to see them die off and the professor is interestingly urbane for a devil worshiper, seeming charming while still seeming creepy and evil, and the movie goes all in on the villagers being creepy, so much so that I think the country of Serbia could have sued the movie for defamation given how most of them up until we get to the train controllers watching two trains head on a collision course seem creepy, incompetent, or both.  This does, however, give it a creepy atmosphere that it really leans into.  Yeah, this movie can easily give the impression of being a cheesy 80s horror flick, but it also seems quite comfortable in that role and would probably proudly accept that designation.

What this movie lacks which would prevent it from being a classic is a set, standard, and clear arc or narrative.  The movie starts with them going to this village to view a ritual, but then the movie tries to kill them quite early — except for the young girl — and then they escape.  Then they get on the train, and the train meanders around trying to kill them and other people along the way to return them there.  Then the young girl is returned and the ritual becomes prominent again.  Then she turns the tables on them and manages to return home, although her mother was killed in one of the first kills.  The professor appears at the beginning, disappears in the middle, and reappears at the end, in line with where the focus is at the moment.

What this means is that we have two different narratives:  the train ride from Hell and the ritual from Hell.  If the movie had focused on them traveling across the country with strange things happening to prepare the way for the ritual at the end, that would have provided a narrative for the audience to hang on to, or if they had dropped the train angle and focused on the villagers preparing for the ritual and killing off the kids as they did so, then there would have been a consistent narrative that we could have followed through the movie.  Instead, we get this sharp shift between two completely different narratives that both set up for some horror hijinks in different ways.  We get kills and creepiness, but a sense of disconnect, like these are things that are just happening for no particular reason.  We might be able to follow the character development of the girl herself, but even though she starts as shy and withdrawn and has clear links to the area and possibly to the ritual itself, the movie also doesn’t really develop her.  She’s not an Alice from “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, and her connection to the ritual and even why she was chosen other than being a virgin despite there being hints that she had a deeper connection are not explored.  So we don’t even get to watch her character development to provide a focus for the events that we can hang on to.

Now, you might ask “If a horror movie provides a creepy atmosphere and a lot of gory kills, what does it need a narrative or character development for?  It’s not like the other movies you’ve talked about like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” had deep character arcs or plots!”.  And that’s a point, but I’m not asking for a deep or involved plot or character arc, just that there be something and that it be a consistent part of the movie.  For “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, the base narrative was some kind of brutal killer killing people for a more or less consistent reason.  Given that, we knew what the killer was doing which let us follow along with the killer and so in some way predict when we were going to be scared because the killer was going to attack.  It also let us in on how the killer would have to be defeated at the end, and think about it along with the potential victims as they tried to figure that out.  If they gave us a character arc with their Final Girl, that was only better, as it made us like her more and want to see her win through, and be happier at the end when she finally did.

The big thing in all of these, though, is that crucially they connect the events.  We see how all of the events join into a more or less coherent whole, either by following the killer’s plan or by moving the main character’s arc along.  The issue with this movie — and a bunch of other, more recent horror movies that I’ve complained about — is that the events all seem disconnected.  There’s no central theme and so it’s basically “Runaway train killing people until we get back to the ritual!”.  The interesting points of both the train and the ritual are swept away by the time spent on the other, and the main character’s arc also suffers from being in these two very different narratives.  A disconnected horror movie can still provide creepiness, gore, and even scares, but it will feel like a bunch of terrible things happening and not like some sort of evil, consistent threat that we should all be deathly frightened of.

Because of that disconnect, I don’t particularly want to watch this movie again.  But it does return the Shudder movies to the level of movies that were good but were lacking in something to make me want to watch the movie again.  I am glad to have watched this and it finally answers the question of “Can we not just get even a decent movie here?”, but the lacking and inconsistent narrative and character arcs mean that it’s not as good as it could have been.

Everybody has a Backlog: Eliminating the Backlog

So following on from my last post, the commentator in the video moves on after defining a backlog to talk about ways to free oneself from it, because so many people who have them seem to get so obsessed with trying to finish them that it can look like they are playing games merely in service of finishing the list and not to have fun anymore.

So their first suggestion is … just stop maintaining a backlog entirely.  Go back to playing games just to play games and not to finish off or make progress on their sometimes intensely detailed backlog list of games.  Play the games you feel like playing and not the one that bubbles up to the top of this backlog list through some esoteric prioritization list that seems to consider “the one I most want to play or think I will have the most fun playing” to be a less important consideration than other considerations aimed at finishing off the list.

Now, my objection to that is:  I’ve actually tried it.  I used to have my list of games to finish, that I started in 2011 and retired in 2020.  Given that it was a list of game that I was definitely trying to finish, it was definitely a backlog, but I retired it because a lot of the games on it were games that I wasn’t going to finish or no longer had the ability to finish, and I decided that prioritizing finishing games wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore.  Now, I always played games that were not on the list and so it wasn’t that obsessive a backlog, but it was one, and I set myself free of it after keeping it active for 9 years.

And then , in 2023, I built a new list, the list of video games to consider.  And the reason I did that was … I needed it.  There were still lots of games that I wanted to play and I still didn’t have time to play them all.  After reading “The CRPG Addict”‘s explorations, I also kept getting reminded of the games that I definitely wanted to play.  I didn’t like keeping them in my head, and didn’t like having to sit down and go through every game I had to decide what game I wanted to play next.  Yes, I do that a lot.  But having a list preconfigured and only having to decide which of those games I should pick up helped save me some time and mental energy, especially when redoing my schedule on New Year’s Day.  So I had a list, retired it, and then decided that I still needed a list.

This sort of thing carries over to their next suggestion, which is that instead of creating and maintaining a backlog and then writing about your progress completing that backlog, what someone could do instead is simply keep a journal about whatever games they are playing.  This, then, would allow them to keep the social aspects of their gaming intact without having all the pressure of finishing off games,

Now, the issue with this is that this is, for the most part, what “The CRPG Addict” does, and he has one of the most detailed backlogs I’ve ever seen, with strict rules about how he chooses what to play next and when he can move on to something else or reject a game and drop it from the list.  Now, he is indeed doing this primarily to work his way through every RPG ever made, but his entire blog is simply a journal of his journey through the games, and while he does make reference to finishing games and progressing through the years, everyone is aware that he will never actually finish that list and so for the most part it’s just a way for him to organize his own personal obsession with RPGs and RPG history … and he still needs a detailed backlog to do it.

The main issue, though, is that the people who made the video seem to think that the primary reason to keep these backlogs and to post about them is for some kind of social status or to link oneself up to the current culture by playing games that are culturally relevant so that they can say that they’ve finished it and can participate in such discussions.  “The CRPG Addict” is close to doing something like that, but he’s tracing RPG history instead of trying to hook up to the current culture.  But the reason I said in the last post that everyone has a backlog is that everyone has a list of games that they want to play for some reason but don’t have the time to play.  Thus, even if the backlog only exists in our own heads the backlog exists.

So the reason we would write it down — and the reason why my backlog list was resurrected — is primarily for organization.  We don’t want to have to try to remember all the games that we really want to play when it comes time to pick a game to play.  Some of the games that we might want to play are games that we don’t actually own, and so if we decide we want to play it we’d have to buy it, or at a minimum download it from GOG or Steam.  The broader our interests and the more games that are on the list, the more we need some kind of organized list to keep it straight and to avoid starting to play a game only to remember that there was a game that we wanted to play more that we can’t play now that we’ve started playing the other game.  Backlog lists, especially detailed ones, almost always start as an attempt to organize that list of games that we want to play in our heads, which is why simply getting rid of it won’t help.  If we get rid of it, we’ll still have to generate that list in our heads every time we sit down to decide what game to play next, or else choose a game at random and be disappointed in it when we see the games that we could have played instead.

The same issue applies to the public postings about the backlog.  Unless someone is just recounting what they are playing using that list as a way to organize that — like my own posts on video games and “The CRPG Addict”‘s posts outlining his personal quest — the main reason to post about their attempts to complete or reduce their backlog is not for social or cultural recognition, but is instead to allow for social pressure.  If you publish your backlog publicly and talk about what games you are playing, you will get people commenting on it, encouraging you and giving advice on how to do that.  This then commits you to the attempt to get through the backlog and play that game, and if you fail it would embarrass you publicly, to those very people.  Since they don’t that to happen, it gives them extra motivation to make progress on their list and prioritize doing that over some other things that no one else will notice that they haven’t finished or done.  I know that for myself if I know that someone is looking forward to my finishing or commenting on something I feel a little more pressure to do that instead of doing other things.  For me, though, it’s only one factor in a long list of them, and I am perfectly willing to face embarrassment or disappoint people if that determination works about against the thing they are looking forward to, even as I feel kinda bad about it.

So the main issue with the video is that they don’t really understand what backlogs and publicly posting one’s backlog is supposed to achieve, and so their suggestions for eliminating them do not provide the things that the backlogs were created to achieve in the first place, and so don’t work as replacements for them.  Yes, as noted in the last post oftentimes people become obsessed with the backlog itself and forget what it was supposed to help accomplish in the first place, to the point where it isn’t achieving what it was intended to achieve in the first place.  Humans are unfortunately very prone to doing that.  But that doesn’t change what backlogs were invented to achieve in the first place, and doesn’t change the fact that pretty much all gamers worthy of the name will have a backlog, even if it’s just one in their own heads:  because they all will have more games that they want to play than they have time to play games, and so will always have games sitting there waiting for their chance to be played.

My last post on this will return to Siggy’s original post and comment on why he doesn’t think he has a backlog and why he thinks that he can escape it through negativity.

So I Did It

So in December last year I wrote about my writing process, and noted that I hadn’t actually re-read most of my own stuff.  I had re-read some of the Victorious scenes, and some of the standalone stories, but hadn’t re-read “Inheritance of the Old Republic” or “I in the Sky” or “Jaded”, and obviously I hadn’t re-read any of the new shows.  But I had been re-reading some of my old posts while things had been compiling or I was waiting for installations and the like, and so decided to just push through with that to read until I caught up to the current day … which meant reading all the story posts as well.  So what did I think of them?

As I have noted before, I actually enjoy reading my own stuff.  I was worried about re-reading the stories because I figured that this time they might disappoint me, even though most of the time while I might find that they could be improved on and some awkward parts, in general they do what I intended them to do, and in general the stuff I really liked about doing them still generally work.  What I found was that, yeah, that held for here as well.  The jokes that I wanted to do in the “Victorious” scenes were still funny, and the events in “Inheritance of the Old Republic” still pretty much worked, as did the links to the games.  I did find that “Jaded” was a bit brief and am not entirely sure that the emotions of the last scene really worked that well, but it was more than serviceable and worked for the most part.  I also think that “Shadow of Death” overall worked, although it could have been a bit deeper.  As for “I in the Sky”, I was pleasantly surprised by it.  While some of the earlier scenes didn’t tie much into the ending — and since I was writing them because I thought they were cool, they didn’t tie much into each other either — but the move to where I resolve it was pretty much seamless, in my opinion.  So I rather enjoyed it, actually.

So, ultimately, yeah, I still liked my own stuff.  There’s room for improvement in all of them — although as fanfiction “Inheritance of the Old Republic” is probably about as good as anyone could expect, which can also be said for the “Victorious” scenes — but they do what I wanted them to do and I like what I did with them.  Whether anyone else would agree with that is another matter, but again right now I’m practicing, experimenting and playing, and it’s working out at least as well as I hoped it would.

So I’m going to keep doing this for a while … especially since I read the new ones as well and they seem to be working out, and arguably working out better than the earlier ones.  So I’ll see how they work out when I finish them off over the next year.

Ruby Jades Diary: The End

Did you know that if you attach a message to a journal with a certain tag, it locks that entry to the journal and you can’t delete it without deleting the entire journal?  Well, I didn’t.  I’m sure you can figure out why I’m mentioning that.

Anyway, I couldn’t put it off any longer.  I had to go and face the Council and find out what they wanted from me now.  I was guessing that they probably had some other annoying task for me to do, but I had to admit that they’d finally paid attention to what I’d been doing this past while and were going to reprimand me for not actually acting like a Jedi should.

Instead, they wanted me to take Master’s Syo spot on the Jedi Council.

My first reaction was that I didn’t want to get stuck in boring meetings in a boring planet like Tython.  Okay, that’s not true.  My first reaction was “Have you been playing attention?!?  I’m not a nice person!“.  But the reaction that I actually said out loud was the first one I mentioned.  Which really should have given them my first reaction.  But then they’d said that I’d shown admirable Jedi qualities, including diplomacy and patience.  Yeah, they don’t know me too well, do they?

But they said that things had changed and so Jedi Council members wouldn’t be forced to sit around on Tython debating all of the little annoying things that made up the issues that they normally had to deal with.  So let me get this straight:  I’ll get all the prestige of being a Jedi Council member, I’ll get the authority of being a Jedi Council member, but I can take off whenever I want and dodge all the annoying obligations of it, and in fact I don’t even have to be on Tython at all?  I’m dreaming, right?  This had to be a dream.

Anyway, it wasn’t a dream and I grudgingly accepted their terms that give me everything I could have possibly wanted when I joined the Jedi Order.

There’s one last thing to resolve.  See, “Uncle Koerran” was interested in me because he had a vision that I would be doing things that would bring me into contact with the Children of the Emperor, and he had an … interest in them.  Yeah, that implication is what you think it is.  The Jedi that he’s “mentoring” is also one that he’s, well, doing some rather private meditations with and she happened to be one.  She managed to shake it off, but she wanted to track down and convert some of the others back to the Light side.  Which almost makes me feel bad that I killed so many of them.  Including Master Syo.  But he said that what I did should make the Children easier to find and easier to convert, and that he didn’t think that I killed any of her personal friends, so she probably wasn’t going to be too offended.  If we ever met, though, he said that I probably shouldn’t bring it up.

Which was fine with me.  I don’t like to brag about my kills anyway.  Well, at least not too much.

And you know, I guess that’s why I’m pretty content being a Jedi instead of a Sith.  Yeah, as a Sith you get to work off a lot of your anger issues and use that to feed your power, but it seems like you also have to be an arrogant, overconfident ass, and while I resemble that remark it all comes down to this:  I’m not a nice person, but I’m not a complete jerk.  As a Jedi, I get to fight and even get to kill people, but I get to feel good about it after, pretty much no matter how I do it.  Evil and shady people almost line up to attack me, and I get to kill them in what pretty much always is self-defense.  That’s a much better life than I thought I’d have here.

But no, I haven’t forgiven her.  Wanna make something of it?

Broken Pieces Shine (Chapter 4)

So during the “commercial break”, the guys were hustled over to the comfy red sofa off to the side, their baggage was rearranged so that only the medium-sized bags were there, everyone’s makeup was touched up, and the audience waited more or less patiently for things to start up again.  Finally, everything was ready, the lights went back on, and Amanda stood over where she had stood before while Erica went over to the bags.

“Hello, and welcome back to ‘Baggage’!” she said cheerily.  “This is our Dealbreaker round, because at the end of this round one of the guys will be going home.  For that, we have their mixed bags here on stage.  They contain one thing about them that’s pretty good and one thing about them that’s … well, not so good.  The bags have been placed randomly so Amanda won’t know which bag belongs to which guy.  After seeing their good and bad baggage, Amanda will decide which bag she can’t live with and whichever guy claims that bag will be going home.  So let’s start the Dealbreaker round!”

The lights dimmed, dramatic music played, and then everything settled down again and focused on Erica again as she stood by the bag furthest to the right from Amanda’s perspective.  “Bag … number 1, ” Erica said, moving to reveal the good point from that bag.

“I have taken three startups to successful IPOs, ” Erica said.

Then she went to reveal the bad point from the bag.  “But … ” she said, “I’ve never had a relationship last longer than three months.”

Amanda winced a bit, but then found that she wasn’t all that surprised.  Heck, given that pretty much all of the guys that had dated her for longer than were just using her, that made him better than most of the guys she’d dated before.

Erica moved to the second bag, and to reveal the good point.  “I have university degrees in three unrelated fields, ” Erica said.

Then she moved to reveal the bad point.  “But … ” she said, “I am a confirmed and extreme introvert.”

After the audience had settled, Erica quipped, “Must be online degrees”.

The audience laughed at that, and Erica moved to the last bag, and to reveal the good point.  “I have copies of everything you’ve ever done, ” she said.

“But … ” she continued, “My mother must approve of all my relationships.”

After all of that was done, Erica walked over to Amanda.  “So, what are you thinking?  Let’s start with the first one, ” she said.

“Are you sure that you don’t have the good and bad points mixed up?” Amanda blurted out.

The audience laughed.  Amanda continued, “I mean, it’s nice that he’s attached to his mother, although he might be a bit too much of a Mama’s boy for me.”

“And what about the second one?” Erica asked.

“Well, that he has that many degrees certainly means he’s smart, ” Amanda said.  “But my career is all about socializing, and a guy that won’t socialize might be an issue.  Although I guess that he’d be able to help me escape from the heavy socializing when it got too much, which might be nice!”

“And the last one?” Erica asked.

“To build those companies shows that he’s ambitious, which I like, ” Amanda replied.  “But he sounds kinda like a ‘pump ‘n dump’ kinda guy, and I’m not interested in that.”

“Okay, now that you’ve said that, it’s time for you to choose.  Which of these bags is your dealbreaker, and remember that the guy who claims it will be going home, ” Erica said.

Amanda thought for a bit.  None of the bad baggage was all that bad, especially since she didn’t really want more than one date with any of them.  But the problem was with the good baggage.  Whomever it was who had everything she ever owned sounded like someone with a massive crush, and massive crushes led to disappointment, stalking and all sorts of other bad things.  Better to get rid of him before she had to spend an entire date with him fawning over her.

“My dealbreaker is … the guy who has everything I’ve ever done and has his mother approve his relationships, ” she said.

“All right, gentlemen, claim your bags!” Erica said.

The men got up and walked to the bags.  At first, they arranged themselves like they had originally:  Steve to the left, Alex in the middle, and Tony on the right.  Then, at a signal from the director, they shuffled around so that Alex was to the left, Tony was in the middle and Steve was on the right.  Which meant that Alex was the one who would be going home.

“So, Alex, anything you want to say?” Erica said.

“Well, my mother can read people really well, and if she doesn’t like someone then they aren’t a good person, ” Alex said.  “But I’m sure she would have loved you.”

Amanda didn’t say anything.  It was probably best that he didn’t realize that it wasn’t the bad baggage that she was rejecting.

“So I’m sorry Alex but it’s time for you to pack up and go, ” Erica said.

Alex closed the lid on the case.  He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice when he said “Good luck with these two.  You’re going to need it.”  And then he walked off the stage.

“Anyway, so we have Tony left who is an extreme and committed introvert, and Steve who has never had a relationship last more than three months.  We’re going to give Amanda a chance to get to know the two of you better, so come and join us on the Hotseat!” Erica said.

Hermeneutic Labour

So I recently came across this article coining a new term called “Hermaneutic Labour” and arguing that women are burdened more by it than men are.  This is a term akin to “emotional labour”, which the article loosely defines thusly:

Anderson’s theory ties in nicely to a more well-known concept: emotional labor, the idea that the effort of managing nearly everything at home ― especially the seemingly invisible jobs no one in your family acknowledges (making dentist appointments, managing temper tantrums) ― often falls on women’s shoulders. As outlined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, emotional labor also involves having to suppress any negative emotions you might have around such thankless work.

“Emotional labor is the nurse suppressing her frustration toward a difficult patient and presenting a warm attitude of care,” Anderson said. “Hermeneutic labor is this same nurse considering, on her drive home, whether or not that way of interacting with the patient was the right one.”

On the one hand, that women might do more managing of the emotions of people around them is not unreasonable, especially since for women they were the ones who were encouraged to be in touch with emotions while men were the ones who were expected to teach people how to suppress their emotions and to not let them get in the way.  And yet a nagging doubt raises its ugly head here, because while women complain about having to manage the emotions of people around them, men have always been encouraged to suppress and hide their emotions to avoid worrying other people.  It’s long been a defining trait of men that when things are going poorly such as when they have or might lose their job that they are expected to hide their feelings of concern and maintain that everything is going to be fine … and to do whatever it takes to make that be the case.  So on the one hand, women might well need to do a lot of labour to bring those emotions out or manage them so that they don’t cause negative consequences, but only because men were encouraged to try to suppress them so that women didn’t have to care about them.  A lot of the theory of emotional labour can be seen as being from the perspective of women and ignoring what men themselves might be doing that’s similar.

I think the same thing might be happening here, only more so, because it looks to me like a lot of this hermeneutic labour are things that men have been dealing with for ages.  Her initial comment:

As Ellie Anderson approached 30, she started thinking about all the time she and her friends had wasted poring over conversations and texts they’d received from men they’d dated: Was that stray “K” over text cause for alarm? How long should you wait to say you had a great time on a date and want to do it again soon without coming on too strong?

“These conversations generally happened when one of us started dating a new guy. A lot of the time, we’d try to guess at what a guy wanted and how to avoid ‘freaking him out,’” said Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Of course, the early days of a relationship are often a period of uncertainty. Still, it seemed to Anderson that the uncertainty usually worked in men’s favor. Meanwhile, it forced women to spend a lot of time trying to guess at men’s feelings because the men themselves were unwilling or unable to fully express themselves.

See, when it comes to dating, for the longest time men were forced to deal with this sort of thing.  There was lots of advice being given to men to ensure that they didn’t respond too quickly and look too desperate for fear of scaring her off, but also not to wait too long because then she might feel disparaged and like she wasn’t important or interesting enough and so get angry at the man for waiting too long.  And of course there’s the common story of a woman who gets angry at her partner for some reason but when he asks what is bothering her simply replies with “Well, if you don’t know …”.  Men have been always had to guess at women’s feelings because women — either by social necessity or by nature — have not always been forthcoming with what they are feeling.  Men are expected to ask a woman out of they are interested, while women rely on flirting and get upset when the man they like doesn’t discern their feelings from the deliberately vague signals that they were dropping (to give them the social out of that ambiguity).  At the same time, men were encouraged to not be too direct in their interest, especially if it had a sexual aspect to it.  That dating could be described as a dating game was not because men wanted it that way.

Ellie Anderson also links it to women’s intuition in an odd way:

What we call “women’s intuition,” Anderson said, is actually a hard-won achievement that takes years to produce and sustain.

“It’s a euphemism for hermeneutic labor,” she said. “We tend to deny the substantial amounts of work that women do to maintain relationships, as well as the fact that a lot of this work is cognitive in character.”

Except, women’s intuition was called that because it was, well, intuitive.  Women themselves didn’t think that it was cognitive, and couldn’t point back to anything that they had done to learn it.  Now, Anderson may have a point here that they can pick up on some of that from learning to manage relationships, but on the other hand the reason they tend to manage relationships more often and better might be because they had an innate faculty for it.  But it was never cognitive in the sense of being reasoned out or built out of logical assessments.

At any rate, while on the one hand Anderson might be missing how men tended to do that more often and now she’s facing the same thing, on the other hand some of it might be more a reflection of the insecurities of women and their seeing ambiguity and a lack of communication where none exists.  As we saw in the above quote, Anderson is wondering what a stray “K” in a text might mean … when, in reality, it might well just mean “K”.  And this follows on in this quote:

Akua K. Boateng, a psychotherapist in private practice in south Philadelphia, sees hermeneutic labor as a rite of passage for young women, especially in the text-centric online dating era. Generally speaking, women often let men take the lead in such communication.

“If he is texting, she is texting ― even if she might desire to talk by phone ― while talking with her friends about what the frequency or tone of his texts might mean about his true intentions,” Boateng said.

First, women are letting men take the lead, which is putting the labour on them instead of taking it themselves.  But more relevantly here, he is texting and she and a bunch of her friends are dissecting them to try to figure out what he really means by them, never considering that maybe, just maybe, all he means by it is exactly what he said.  No language lacks ambiguity sufficiently to survive being dissected at that level, and the short form of texts certainly can’t survive that.  Thus, perhaps he’s expressing things directly and clearly and it’s only this sort of dissection that is causing the doubts to be raised.  To then turn around and blame the man for making her do work and not communicating properly only because she’s finding ambiguity where none exists is obviously not at all a fair assessment.

And ultimately, that is my — admittedly shallow — opinion of hermaneutic labour.  It’s not fair to say that this is something that women do more often than men because for the most part it’s women complaining about having to do things that men have always had to do, complaining that men aren’t being totally clear in their communications when historically they haven’t been all that clear, and calling men out for being ambiguous in their communication only because they dissect those communications so much that they cannot help but find ambiguities in it.  And all of this is ultimately in service of them feeling that they have it hard and that any issues that arise because of this are failings in the men, not in them.  Yes, some men can be bad at communicating … but then so can some women.  Yes, if people aren’t communicating well then something might have to be done about that, but communication is a two-way street and so the issue might be on the side of the receiver, not the sender … and sometimes these sorts of issues aren’t about someone doing it “wrong”, but instead that the two people don’t communicate in the same way and so it takes more effort for them to understand that.  Creating a philosophical category of “hermaneutic labour” and trying to massage it to cover the things Anderson doesn’t like is the wrong approach here.

Thoughts on “Beyond the Door”

I didn’t realize that this was an Italian movie until I started watching it.  If I had known that, I might have skipped it, because I haven’t had a lot of luck with Italian movies, with them in general being “Meh” at best.

The idea is an interesting one, but the plot is a bit botched.  It starts with some evil entity talking to the audience about how they are really responsible for the movie, and then moves on to someone who seems to be a servant of the first entity, who has mostly failed and is about to die for that failure by driving his car off a cliff, but he gets a couple of weeks to ensure that a woman has the evil entity’s child.  We then switch to her, discovering that she’s pregnant even though she was using birth control.  The pregnancy proceeds at an astonishing rate, and the woman starts to act more strange and evil as it progresses, and moves from wanting an abortion to insisting on keeping the child in the course of one conversation.  The man from the beginning shows up and convinces the husband to let him try to help her, but he clearly doesn’t.  She seems to give birth and it looks like the baby might have died, but at least later a child — maybe one of her children from early on — develops glowing eyes indicating that he’s demonic, and is carrying a car that he flips over the side of the boat … a car that is a model of the car the man crashed in, and that man was killed due to the evil entity being capricious.

Why I say this movie botched the plot is that there are two decent ideas here, and they start with one, switch to the other, and then mostly drop both.  The idea of the man having to manipulate her into keeping the baby is a good one, but while he’s prominent in the opening he disappears for most of the movie.  So the idea of something similar to “Rosemary’s Baby” with the woman struggling to deal with a strange demonic pregnancy, but her personality quickly changes to a demonic one which cuts that off.  They could have had the husband’s attempts to deal with that be the focus, but he’s out of focus for most of it and doesn’t really do much.  So despite there being some good ideas that could have been turned into a serviceable plot, none of them are actually developed and so the movie seems to meander around the various ideas instead of developing one solid interesting plot.

Which then causes the movie to be completely boring.  There’s no consistent and solid plot to focus on, and again the plot meanders around through a bunch of ideas.  So that can’t hold your interest.  And the inconsistency in the woman’s personality means that we lose the ability to be interested in how she’s reacting to this.  The movie gives the kids personalities but shuffles them out of the way before any of that can be interesting, and so we don’t get to see the kids reacting to things either.  The husband and her doctor and the other characters are all minor and not developed.  Even the man at the beginning gets nothing other than a short appearance to finish things off and to be betrayed by the evil entity.  And as the evil entity says at the beginning the evil entity doesn’t really get much focus and doesn’t really do or say much.  Bluntly, not much is happening and what minor scares it has — some of which are effective — can’t save the fact that most of the movie is as dull as it can be.

Since this movie is so boring, I have no interest in watching it again.  There are some decent ideas here, but none of them are developed and because of that there’s nothing to hold my interest.

Everybody has a Backlog: What is a backlog, anyway?

So, I was reading around my normal haunts and came across this post by Siggy which linked to this video.  The topic?  Backlogs and, specifically, backlogs of video games.  And both cast the idea of backlogs in a negative light, and both attempted to claim that they themselves don’t have backlogs and think that most people shouldn’t have them either.  Since I think most people would agree that I can be said to indeed adopt backlogs, I decided that I’d make some posts defending the basic idea that they reject:  Everybody has a backlog.

Since the video is, well, a video.  I won’t quoting much from it directly, and since it’s a long video I’m not going to be rewatching it to get specific comments either, instead relying on my own memory of it.  So I invite people to watch it and correct the things that I get completely wrong, should I do that.  I’m going to get a few posts out of this, starting with this one that focuses on what a backlog is and why everybody can be said to have one, before moving on to the video’s attempts to replace the backlog and finally to Siggy’s notion about how his list doesn’t count as a backlog.

So, from the video, the concern they have about backlogs is that it looks like backlogs can indeed be serious business.  They talk about people having detailed spreadsheets tracking all of this, using How Long to Beat to calculate times, referencing lots and lots of videos talking about ways to get through that backlog, and in general doing an awful lot of things that make having a backlog seem like a chore rather than something someone is supposed to be doing for fun.  But as part of that, they end up trying to get a basic definition of a backlog, which boils down to “a list of games to play”, which Siggy disagrees with.  But more on that later.

Because that’s more or less the definition of a backlog.  In its most basic form, a backlog is a bunch of games that someone knows that they want to play but due to either a lack of time or a lack of resources or some other reason they can’t play or finish right now.  As the video references stacks, this was how it all started in the old days (of the Centauri Republic?) when people had to actually buy physical games.  People would go on their occasional trips to buy physical games, but still didn’t have the time to play all of them.  But they had to store them somehow, so they ended up as stacks.  And as that stack grew people would get the first pangs knowing that the stacks were getting larger and larger and they thus weren’t making a dent in that stack of games that they had decided that they wanted to play — or else they wouldn’t have bought them — but for various reasons hadn’t been able to get around to playing yet.

Which led, then, to what is the defining trait of the modern backlog:  organization.  Just to avoid the stacks following over, they needed to be organized in some way.  And since people were indeed actually playing games from the stack, there would be a temptation to organize it to make finding the next game to play easier, from stacking them in alphabetical order to stacking them in a priority order where the games someone most wanted to play would be on top and the games someone least wanted to play — but still wanted to play — would be on the bottom.  And from this, we can note that having stacks lying around can be hazardous if they get too big, so that might involve sorting them into boxes and the like.  And then some enterprising gamers might decide that something like a spreadsheet would work out better, and use that.  But ultimately once these stacks or lists get too big there soon comes a desire to organize it in some way to make handling it easier.

Now that we can get more games digitally rather than as physical boxes, this only becomes more important because digital video games are notoriously hard to stack.  But then the nature of digital video games also does a lot of that work for us.  People who play on Steam have their Steam lists.  People on GOG can look at their collection and sort it in certain ways.  So we have some of that organization built in once we start to go digital.

Except … that’s not really sufficient.  First of all, it doesn’t encompass all of our games.  We are going to have a mix of physical and digital games, even as the former might start to diminish in number as we go along.  But even for digital games most people will have things on Steam and on GOG and on a host of other places.  The lists a particular service provides obviously doesn’t cover the games on the other services.  Moreover, it’s not all that easy to sort these lists by priority, meaning by the games that you would prefer to play.  You might be able to sneak in some things like time to play and the like that would let you figure that you, but that’s not the same thing as, say, having that new Mass Effect game on the top of the stack to grab and play when you’re ready.

And as noted above, knowing how long a game will take to play is an important factor as well.  After all, if the spouse and kids are going to be away for a weekend or even a week, you kinda need to know how long the game you’re going to pick up in the spare time you suddenly have so that you can feel confident that you’ll finish it in time.  Or, more relevantly for me, if you plan on playing a game in your vacation time you need to know how long it will take to finish that game so that you can plan your time blocks accordingly.

So the desire for organization is what pushes things towards the intensely detailed spreadsheets that are cropping up more and more often.  These things need to be organized, and some people need or want more organization or more information than others.  As you can see from my lists, I don’t need that much stuff formally attached to my lists because I tend to “go with my gut” and lean towards what I think I feel like playing and what might be cool and assembling any information I need to work that out later.  But ultimately the key driver here is a desire to organize these things into some way as to maximize your fun playing them.

But then, why do so many people seem to go overboard on the organizational aspects?  Why do so many people seem to find working through their backlogs as an obligation instead of something for fun, so much so that they have to reward themselves by playing another game once they finish one on the list?  Why do so many people seem to use these backlogs for social validation rather than as something that helps them just have fun playing games?

Well, we are all human beings, and human beings can sometimes turn the things they find fun into overly organized obligations.  We can lose sight of the forest for the trees, and forget that the reason these things started was because we found we had a lot of games that we wanted to play for fun and so let the obligation take over and make us not have fun anymore.  We can indeed find that we are playing games that we don’t enjoy just so that we can claim to have finished it instead of moving on to a game that we might have fun with.  We can get some social responses from our list and so feel some pressure to play something because we know other people want us to play it (I get that feeling from people who have commented in my playing things like Ultima or the Gold Box Games.  Fortunately, I know that trying to force myself to play something in those cases never works and so can resist that temptation).  So, yes, ultimately, we can corrupt our backlog so that it no longer serves the purpose that it originally had and serves another purpose that might not make us as happy as if we had kept it serving that original purpose.

But, ultimately, why I say that everyone has a backlog is that if you are any kind of gamer and have to do anything other than simply playing games all day and have all the money you need to get any game you want, you are going to end up with games that you want to play but haven’t played yet and might not play for a while.  How formal your backlog is would be up to you, but a backlog in its most basic form is that gap between what you want to play and what you have the resources to finish before coming across something else you want to play.  Unless you hop from game to game like I hop between Wizardry 8 parties, abandoning one when the next one catches your eye, you will have a backlog.  And that model of game-hopping doesn’t seem like it would be an improvement over the more formalized and organized backlogs that can end up being corrupted into the exact opposite of what they were supposed to be.

So, yeah, everyone has a backlog.  How organized it is and how bad you feel about not clearing it will vary from person to person, and those things will determine if it feels more like an obligation than a tool for having fun playing games.  But the negatives of the extreme end of the backlog model doesn’t mean that you don’t have a backlog if you don’t go that far.

But maybe there are alternatives.  I’ll look at the alternative in the video in the next post, although, spoiler alert, I don’t think it works as an alternative because it doesn’t fulfill the purpose of most backlogs.