Links

• Scott Alexander’s post on parenting toddlers being “The Permanent Emergency” made me laugh.

• The Lost Patients podcast is an interesting look at how America in general and Seattle/Washington in particular deal with people who are severely mentally ill. (Not well, as anyone who has walked around downtown Seattle can attest.) It raises the question of whether we need a more efficient/effective process for involuntary commitment, and gives some history around deinstitutionalization. One frustrating fact they mention is that the shutdown of psychiatric hospitals in Washington happened simultaneously with a decline in single-room occupancy hotels in Seattle.

• Musa al-Gharbi’s recent blog post “On Crime and Punishment” linked me to Prison Policy Initiative’s annual pie chart showing what Americans are in prison for.

• An episode of Minds Almost Meeting contemplates how students interested in philosophy can engage with the subject after college. Arnold Brooks suggests:

  …they should … come up with a coherent set of ideas about how to live and… how the world works and… what their place in it is. And… they should probably write those ideas down… and then they should try to live out those ideas in such a way that if… somebody read their… biography in a hundred years, and no mention was made of these ideas, they’d be able to sort of roughly… predict them.

  I agree with Hanson that this is a bad response to the students’ request, but I do think it’s a fascinating exercise in its own right.

• Check out my friend’s new substack: “Where Are All the Animal Activists?”

How to achieve world peace, a step-by-step guide

1. Kill all the bad people.
2. Kill all the people who cried when any of the bad people died, since they’re clearly bad too.
3. Kill all the people who cried when any of those people died.
4. Repeat step 3 until the crying has stopped.

This will leave you with a society composed mostly of psychopaths who feel no genuine attachments to anyone. They’ll die out quickly since they won’t be able to trust each other enough to cooperate. And then, with humanity gone, the world will finally be at peace.

Review: Season: A Letter to the Future

This game starts on its weakest footing: a conversation-focused scene in an interior space. The character models are delightful, but they have limited animation, so interactions with NPCs sometimes feel a bit lifeless. (This contributes to a general sense of very uneven production values.)

But the charm starts to kick in as soon as you get outdoors. You walk and bike amid quaint buildings, scenic vistas, contemplative ruins, enchanting woods… you photograph graffiti and landmarks and curious artifacts… you keep an ear out for sounds worth recording… when you capture key things with your camera or microphone you’re rewarded with commentary or backstory. I think this gameplay mechanic is a really cool idea. I’m not sure the game explored it to its full potential; the audio recording aspect mostly only seemed useful at points where the game was heavily telegraphing that you should use it, e.g. by attention-grabbing colors and blur effects when you’re near memory flowers—but maybe I just wasn’t very attentive.

I expected the vibe to be basically: person goes on melancholy journey and reflects on finding beauty and meaning in a transient world. I expected this to be enjoyable but not to resonate with me too deeply. My predictions were somewhat accurate, but there were ambiguous undertones that helped the story hold my interest more: the village you start in has cult-like elements, and it’s not totally clear how much the memory-related magic is meant to be an allegory for real-world experiences or a strange (even sinister?) feature of this fantasy world. I also didn’t really expect the extent to which it would imply that an ability to forget—even at a societal level—might be desirable. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Review: Nine Sols

This is going on my list of favorite metroidvanias. It is very unforgiving; beating the bosses requires precisely parrying their attacks without making many mistakes. The first few encounters with any given boss—or even ordinary enemy—can feel like running straight into a wall; they put you down brutally while hardly taking a scratch themselves. To win you have to reverse this dynamic; you have to learn their patterns and train yourself to block and attack at just the right moments. So when you do win there’s a satisfying sense of mastery.

I have to say, though, that at a couple points the difficulty is just infuriating. I think I spent more than two weeks just on the final boss. I did not appreciate having to do the first two phases of the fight over and over and over just to reach the third phase and die within seconds.

Review: The Little Liar

It was a time in human history where the world was cleaved in two, those doing nothing about the horror and those trying to stop it. (p. 104)

If you stand for something during a war, you are going to pay a price. (p. 154)

…evil travels like dandelion seeds, blowing over borders and taking root in angry minds. (p. 258)

By the time you share what a loved one longs to hear, they often no longer need it. (p. 142)

A sad novel with a touching, albeit wildly improbable, ending. Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in public while I finished reading it; I had to fight back tears.

Before this book I was totally unaware of the history of Thessaloniki, Greece:

• “From the 16th to the 20th century it was the only Jewish-majority city in Europe.” (Wikipedia, “Thessaloniki”)
• “The majority of the 72,000 in the community were murdered in the camps. … Only 1,200 Jews live in the city today.” (Wikipedia, “History of the Jews in Thessaloniki”)

I also hadn’t heard of Katalin Karády, a Hungarian movie star who was tortured by Nazis, used her wealth to save Jews’ lives during the war, and went on to… run a hat shop in New York City. Wikipedia includes this little tidbit which cements her as an absolute legend in my mind: “Receiving a governmental invitation at her 70th birthday to return to Hungary, she only sent a hat, baffling officials.”

Review: There Is No Antimimetics Division

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

I love this concept and I was hoping the novel would explore it in a ‘hard sci-fi’ style, i.e., by trying to sketch out such an idea and its implications in a way that can at least briefly pass for plausible. Instead, it takes a more lovecraftian-horror approach, and the parts that relied on inspiring cosmic dread sometimes fell flat for me. But it was still a really fun ride.

Review: Heart the Lover

I really disliked this (audio)book and I kept having to replay parts because my attention kept wandering away from the story and toward mentally ranting about how much I disliked what I was listening to. It starts with the protagonist dating a pretentious jerk named Sam who has no obvious positive qualities; their drama is annoying because there’s never a particularly good reason for them to be in a relationship in the first place. Eventually she switches to dating Sam’s college bro Yash, and the apparently very deep and meaningful nature of Sam and Yash’s friendship creates tension, which is annoying because no foundation has been established to explain the loyalty they feel to each other (and because Sam continues to just be an unlikable jerk).

Anyway, once it’s established that Yash and the protagonist are super in love and perfect for each other, Yash abruptly destroys their relationship in a pointlessly cruel way. It’s difficult for me to feel very invested in how this self-inflicted wound affects him, but that’s sort of what the rest of the book is about.

While I didn’t enjoy reading it I can appreciate it as a cautionary tale: on my interpretation, Yash’s fear of wasting his life leads him to ruin his life by failing to commit to a relationship.

Review: Where the Axe is Buried

…there were millions of people like Palmer. He was the mode in the West—the most common value. A bit dissatisfied with his lot, certain there ought to be more to it all, constrained by the limits of his salary to . . .

To a circle, beyond which he could not pass. Pacing the edges of that circle, but in a better enclosure, with better food, nicer trees. Maybe so nice, and capacious, that on most days he barely felt enclosed at all. But he paced the edges of it anyway, instinctively. Wanted out of it, instinctively. (p. 185)

AI governments run Western Europe and a reincarnating dictator runs Eastern Europe. Corporate surveillance in the West can identify you anywhere by the “choiceprint” your subtlest behaviors reveal; state surveillance in the East monitors your speech and facial expressions and biomarkers at all times for any hint of deviant thought. Interesting premise, good writing.

Philosophically the book seems to sympathize with a let’s-just-burn-it-all-down approach to civilization’s shortcomings. That’s understandable in the extreme 1984-esque Federation, but in the other countries—which seem so similar to today’s Western democracies—I’m skeptical that it leads to anything but tragedy. What’s more likely to emerge from the pandemonium of a fallen society: a better and kinder system, or a more brutal and repressive regime? My admittedly-limited knowledge of history gives me the impression the latter is the more common outcome. We shouldn’t undervalue the incremental improvements our societies have made—and could continue to make—over time, nor underestimate the risk of reverting to a much worse state of affairs after a revolution.

One of the protagonists is the author of a fictional book called The Forever Argument. I like the perspective that we should not be seeking to settle on a perfect, permanent way of running society; that, rather, continuous argument is unavoidable and essential:

Review: Dark

I temporarily restarted my Netflix subscription to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters (I’ll spare you my review, but I’m a huge fan of Derpy and Sussie), and then to get my money’s worth I needed to find some use for that subscription for the rest of the month. I picked Dark, and once I started I could hardly tear myself away from it; I watched all three seasons in a week.

Now, there are things about this time-travel family drama that you could criticize. There is a lot of screen time devoted to characters just sort of staring at each other with Very Meaningful Expressions plastered on their faces. And characters frequently say cryptic things to each other before wandering off without anyone bothering to seek clarification. And the ending is kind of a let-down if you take it at face value.

Don’t worry about any of that. Dark is fantastic. Top-notch science fiction. I love the large cast, the intricate interconnections, the commitment to consistent time-travel mechanics (at least for the first two seasons?), the brilliant idea to complicate the closed time-loop via the interaction of two parallel worlds, and all those moody forest shots. And there’s no need to take the ending at face value when you could instead buy into one of the dubious convoluted fan theories that the show provides so much fertile material for.

Review: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

I loved this movie. It’s weird and funny and morbid; it’s absurd but serious enough to leave you thinking about how to interpret it after it’s over.

In an AMA the screenwriter talks about how some of the subject matter made studios reluctant to produce it. I’m glad he didn’t compromise on this because it’s one of the most memorable aspects of the movie.

Review: Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

Was not the tranquil rest of death preferable to the crushing chore of life?

There’s good artwork here, and the story is entertaining. I’m not that into the setting or characters. Supergirl has the classic Superperson problem of being too powerful for dramatic tension, and the story’s attempts to introduce real danger end up highlighting how ad-hoc and arbitrary the rules of this universe are (at least that’s how it feels to me as someone who doesn’t read many superhero comics). The mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero stuff also makes the comic’s gritty tone difficult to take fully seriously.

The ending is noteworthy: after centuries of imprisonment, the villain Krem—murderer of Ruthye’s father—begs forgiveness for his crimes. Ruthye promptly kills him. On the one hand, this is a fantastic ending, because it’s both clearly foreshadowed (Ruthye had fantasized about doing exactly this early on) and surprising when it happens (to me at least). On the other hand, it’s gross. My complaint isn’t that death is necessarily an inappropriate punishment for what Krem has done, or that Ruthye is wrong to administer it; it’s about what the appeal of such stories says about humanity. Krem is an over-the-top, evil-for-evil’s sake monster whose main motivation seems to be just that he likes hurting people. I don’t think this is representative of the form evil usually takes in our world, and I’m not sure Ruthye’s journey has much relevance to the battles most people face in our real lives. So I worry that what really lies behind this kind of extreme revenge tale is not a fantasy about justice but rather a fantasy about violence, where the villain’s whole purpose is to give us a target for our worst impulses who we don’t have to feel bad about exercising those impulses on.

Review: Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

The artwork is super cute (except when characters are being dismembered). Just look at this pig-person wearing a “THINK PIG!” t-shirt—so cute! The story is relentlessly nihilistic, which tends to bother me a bit even in works that are intended to be absurd, but it’s certainly entertaining.