pktechgirl

In first edition Mage (the world of darkness RPG), the opposition group was called The Technocracy. As described to me by my best friend in my freshman year of college, their goal was to wipe out belief in magic, originally for benevolent reasons like "penicillin works better with fewer chances of turning you into a chicken" but eventually because they just hated magic. Unknown to them, succeeding would cause an end to all scientific progress as well, because they would have killed humanity's ability to imagine and accept something better than what already existed.

Reading God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, I feel like a mage reading a book by a Technocracy operative. He points to all the terrible things people have done in the name of religion, and sees a reason to banish belief in deities. But that doesn't gel for me: there's no reason holding different stories about why the sun rises in the east should cause people to kill one another. Hitchens would argue that it's because the stories come with instructions to do so, but he also spends a lot of time proving that those stories are human creations*. It seems to me like religion is simply the name we give to the category of things that make people that stupid.** Or, I suspect, to one of the effects of a deeper Thing, the destruction of which would have larger consequences than Hitchens imagines or has even bothered to look for.

It seems like Hitchens believes that if he could just prove to people that their origin stories (and by extension their deities) were obvious falsehoods, they would stop killing their neighbors in the name Huitzilopochtli and everything would be fine. My belief is that, as long as there are resources to compete over, people will form in groups and out groups to help marshall those resources for themselves. Put another way: Christianity was used by priests in medieval Europe to move resources from non-priests to priests. But belief in God and Heaven and Hell, was the tool, not the reason, for that theft. You might as well ban electricity because it was used to execute people.

*I'm a bit annoyed at how long he's spent proving that the Talmud, New Testament, and Koran were assembled by human beings from a tangle of conflicting accounts, decades or centuries after the events in question, and in many cases can be definitively disproven with historical data. I would have spotted him this without argument, both because it's obviously true and because the point isn't interesting to me. It's possible I'm simply annoyed at him for not writing on the topic I wanted to read, but it's also possible I recognize a grad student padding out the strongest section of his thesis to disguise the fact that the rest of it is so thin.

**I'm using stupid in a less pejorative than usual sense. Being too stupid to know something can't be done is how we do new things.

When I was condo hunting, I explicitly did not want a 2-bathroom unit. I was the only one living there, why would I waste precious space on a second bathroom? Well, the unit I ended up with has two bathrooms, and I am just giddy over the prospect of peeing in a room no one else pees in. I'm not even giving the cats a litter box in there.

When I played D&D, the players were never less than 30% female, and often 50%. Nonetheless, 100% of the GMs were male. Bias can be subtle, but I know the people well enough to assert that the explanation was not simple sexism. But if you asked each player when they started, women never said earlier than college, and men never said later than middle school. The men had 10 additional years of learning to GM before the women even knew something was there. DMing is a skill gained in part through practice, and while a woman could choose to put that time in, she'd have to spend a lot of time doing it, and convince friends to spend a long time playing a boring, frustrating game before she got good. As a person who has tried to do this, I can tell you that you give up pretty quickly.

There's also a pretty clear pattern among my social groups, in which women have close friends of both genders, and men have close female friends. My hypothesis is at the time girls were learning whateverthefuck skill it is that lets you deepen a friendship's emotional level, boys were being discouraged from doing so, due to homophobia and gender policing. We mock the emotional viciousness of tween girls, but the fact is that a lot of that stems from their social-emotional reach exceeding their grasp, and mistakes hurt.*

So by the time you get to college, or even high school, girls have more emotional-social skills than boys. Even a boy who has conquered all homophobic culture and gender policing, and wants deepen his friendship with another boy who's done the same, has to overcome both his own ineptitude and that of his partner. Whereas the girls are just sitting there, with their improved articulation and listening skills. ** Worse, it's is self-reinforcing, as close friendships with girls relieve the pressure that might drive them to take some risks with boys, and friendships with boys give girls the skills to work with someone at a lower skill level than them.

This isn't a total explanation of course, and there are female DMs who started playing at 8 and straight men who have deep emotional friendships with men and only men. But don't underestimate small, cumulative pressures.

*They are also experiencing adults making their lives horrible. My tiny ninjas dodge most of that crap because the school has set up the system properly.

**I feel like a concrete example would be helpful here. Emotionally close friendships are based in part of a delicate dance of reciprocal self-disclosure. There's some skill involved in that: estimating the importance of what your friend disclosed, determining an appropriate disclosure about yourself, disclosing it, recognizing if you're being sharked or this simply isn't a person you want to be close to, appropriate follow up...

Crysis 2: It briefly won me over to shooters. Then I got bored. Also, the vehicle sections are worse than you could possibly imagine
Cry Engine: I will give a million dollars to whoever uses this to remake Endless Ocean.

Something that has been bopping around my head: you will always be the oldest you have ever been. If you don't grow a new source of happiness at least as fast as your "youth" (for whatever value of youth is meaningful to you) is shrinking, you will be less happy every year. And since human happiness is based more on the delta of your circumstances and hope for the future than the actual circumstances, you will get to miserable even faster than simple math would suggest.

My nominee for thing to grow is emotional maturity. Sometimes I see middle aged people lamenting that they're kept out of certain clubs due to age limits, and whine that they get along so much better with 25 year olds than people their own age. I don't know whether to cry or punch them, because to me that sounds like failing as a human being. I'm going to give a little wiggle room for the possibility that many middle aged people have failed to grow, and what these people want is to be back with people who still feel they have unlimited possibilities. But then I'm going to take that wiggle room back, because while college students have way more possibilities than I do, and there are individual college students I might like quite a lot, you couldn't pay me to put up with that crap again.* You could also build social capital, or get the hell out of bad situations.

But those are difficult, and hard to do on a schedule. What if you want an easier way, ideally something that can be proven with math? Economics has already done a lot of this for me, in the form of the Permanent Income Hypothesis. In a nutshell, this is the idea that people have something of a sense of their lifetime earnings, and will smooth out consumption with credit or excess savings, and only alter consumption after an enduring shock to their income. E.g. you don't (shouldn't) cut down much after losing your job if your field is doing well, but you (should) cut down on spending if your field is going south, even if you are currently employed. This theory has occasionally been misapplied by students getting degrees they believe will assure them high earnings to argue that they should finance a lot of luxuries on credit cards because they'll be earning so much later.

You can kind of see the argument for this at the edges- why save money now, when it will hurt less to save later? But this is failing to account of the intangible benefits of youth. If you could translate the intangible benefits of youth into monetary terms, that would shift the equation to saving more, however much money it ended up being worth. Bonus: by giving yourself a lower baseline, you make it easier to experience increases in utility, which will also make you happier.



*Exaggeration. For sufficient amounts of money and short periods of time, I would totally tolerate the prolonged who-IMed-who-first game again.

The problem with Game of Thrones (the TV show) isn't the gratuitous tits- gratutious tits are what made True Blood great. The problem is that Game of Thrones is trying to fit so much plot in so little time that every scene is an info dump, that characters feel like deliverers of information rather than people... except for nice leisurely breaks for tits and vadge. I'm fine with them being there, but I want them to either be important to the plot or stick to the background. They lost another couple of points in the moment when full frontal female nudity was not only appropriate, but called for, and the actress very awkwardly kept an object in front of her vulva. It was a major character and I'm assuming they couldn't find an appropriate actress who would do full frontal, but it was jarring.

In general: The acting is great (possibly minus Danny, who may be a bit of a Betty Draper), the costumes and set design is beautiful, but ultimately add little value to the books. The one place it really could have shown was in fight and battle scenes, because that's TV's comparative advantage, but they clearly didn't have the money for it. The fight choreography is awful,* and they won't even show the battles.

I've been trying to figure out why Song of Ice and Fire (the books) didn't click for me in a way they did for so many, including basically every heavy-reader friend I have. I want to say the problem is that I don't like or care about any of the characters, but that wasn't a problem for me in Wind Up Girl. I think the difference is that with Wind Up Girl I felt like I had a handle on the world, and I in SoIaF I don't. I constantly feel like new, game changing, things are being introduced at random, and the fact that this could happen at every times prevents me from attaching to the world as I currently know it. Part of this is my fault, because one thing the TV show demonstrated was how much I missed in the books. But I do think it's keeping me from getting more involved.

*Note: Since starting martial arts, I've become a fight choreography snob.

Men I've heard complain about trouble finding clothes that fit: 1. He was an extremely muscular man with a neck bigger than my waist.
Women I've heard complain about trouble finding clothes that fit: every one I've ever talked to.
Companies mass producing custom men's dress clothes in This Lifehacker article: 4
Companies mass producing custom women's clothes in same article: 1.
Companies mass producing custom women's dress clothes in same article: 0.

Friend: I like your shirt.
Me: I think you've seen this shirt before.
Friend: I know, I liked it then too. It's not facebook, you can like something more than once.

I thought this acoustic cover of Tik-Tok might be the definitive piece of evidence proving my Unified Field Theory of Ke$ha. Unfortunately, I've listened to that song too long to separate: especially with the over-enunciation, it just felt like an ironic cover to me. So I took the question the most virgin ears I know: my dad. I asked a very general "what are your impressions" type question, and he said:

"Caught what I took to be a reference to killing herself that day, which as a parent creeped me out"

Ladies and Gentlemen, I rest my case.

Me: I have to go back to my slum now.
Friend: Be fair; your neighborhood is very nice. It's just your building that sucks.