Lost in Lualand

Deer Among Cattle (new fic) + notes

queenlua — Wed, 06 May 2020 12:33:34 GMT

Judith is suspicious of the new Riegan heir.

~9.5k words.

Here at AO3.

spoiler-filled notes!

* "it would be very fun to write Claude being a scheme-y bastard to win the trust of noble peeps in Leicester," i said, when planning this fic. then i stared at an empty doc for like three nights in a row before i realized, oh shit, this means i have to write politics, how do those even work, i don't read enough political fiction ahhh????

someone suggested i just go rewatch some House of Cards. so i did. and i gotta say, as much as i'm "meh" on most of that show, it really is a solid example of how, mechanically, to make paperclip-trading work in a narrative context. note: i rewatched half a season of a fucking show before i even started writing words for this nonsense. fanfic takes so long sob why is writing so time-consuming

* leaning into the Ordelia plotline was a revelation. i knew needed something for Claude to fix, a problem that mattered on both a human-emotions level and Claude-could-leverage-it-into-an-advantage level, but i really didn't want to make one up out of whole cloth because god that sounds like work (and also just less resonant in general when you're fanfic-ing), and when i finally realized wait Ordelia has very good cause to be suspicious of outsiders it was a blessing from heaven. thank you Three Houses for giving me just barely enough worldbuilding to work with

* initially this was going to be, theme-wise, the "Claude gets disillusioned with Fódlan, starts thinking about demanding a refund" fic, but uh, then i realized that doesn't marry well with the actual mechanics of the plot i wanted to write, so i wound up changing all the emotional/thematic beats to something else entirely. sorry Claude! you'll have to get disillusioned next time i lose my mind and spend another couple weeks agonizing over you!

* i was sort of annoyed when i realized that the story needed to be mostly told from Judith's point of view but i think it worked out for the best in the end

* i feel i got very lucky with this fic's predecessor, "The Signet of His Lords," in that i had a very strong rhythm in mind for the story i wanted to tell, and while obviously i had to work a little, everything came pretty easily because i had such a strong returning rhythm/beat in mind. i was a little annoyed that i didn't have that for most of the process of writing this fic! but i'm actually mostly okay with how a lot of the rhythms wound up lying on the page in the end; revision worked some wonders (AND ALSO ADDED 2k WORDS, HEY EXCUSE ME WHAT THE FUCK CAN I JUST WRITE A SHORT FIC FOR A CHANGE). poke me if you want a whole "lua's rambly thoughts on rhythm as it applies to prose-writing" thoughtdump; tldr i think i'm finally starting to vibe with that annoying fucking Virigina Woolf quote

* ...speaking of which, this isn't even the first fic i wanted to write after finishing "The Signet of His Lords." this is the fic i had to write in order to get access to the fic i actually wanted to write after finishg "The Signet of His Lords." yes! i am going to write yet another fic in this series! this is what quarantine does to me or whatever i guess!

* oh, i also totally stole the bit about casting out the nines from this EXCELLENT blog post, which was so damn fun i wound up purchasing a copy of the Treviso Arithmetic myself. i... actually started writing out some proofs for some other fun tricks in the book, but then i was like CHRIST LUA THIS WILL NEVER MAKE IT INTO THE FIC UNLESS YOU ARE JUST COMMITTING PACING CRIMES, so i dropped it, but uh. math is fun!

and yeah them's the notes

summer is miles and miles away (new fic) + notes

queenlua — Sat, 02 May 2020 09:02:33 GMT

Modern AU. Half a year after graduating from Harvard, Lorenz returns to campus for a bit of a reunion—and runs into the last classmate he’d expect.

aka, Lorenz and Claude get third & fourth wheeled together & it’s all very awkward

~8k words.

Here at AO3.

is there a way to write a college AU without being absurdly self-indulgent?

this was self-indulgent on a lot of levels. the biggest struggle was perspective, actually—since the plot’s essentially a pastiche of stories i’ve experienced directly, or heard from friends, i noticed that it was harder-than-usual to stick to a consistent narrative voice. when i wrote the first draft, it was sorta omniscient-third-person-narrator-like, and it just didn’t quite feel like a story. once i figured out how to ground it mostly in Lorenz’s head, it came out better, i hope. (i have known so many people like Lorenz, like Claude, like Ferdinand—i hope it came through how much i love these humans, in all their frustrating complexity.)

i’d like to say that Hong Kong Restaurant is one of my favorite places on the planet, and it’s so beloved by the university that there is a goddamn plaque on campus to honor the restaurant’s founder.

stuff i thought about vaguely while writing:

* “elegy for an enemy” by stephen vincent benet. i think about this poem in a lot of contexts, tbh, because it absolutely slaps—but god TELL ME if this stanza isn’t a whole fuckin’ #claurenz mood:

Rest you, my enemy,
Slain without fault,
Life smacks but tastelessly
Lacking your salt!
Stuck in a bog whence naught
May catapult me,
Come from the grave, long-sought,
Come and insult me!

* "fukai mori" by do as infinity. ironically, i fell in love with this song before i knew it was an inuyasha thing—i looked up a translation on the internet, in my youth, and the haunting implications of that chorus line always struck me:

Go on with our lives and lose those things behind.
Wrapped around in lies, we stand there voiceless.
We want to leave our lives, until we find a way.
Searching for the light for eternity.

voiceless. in every dystopia i’ve ever written, there’s someone who’s mute. if only lorenz could find the words, etc etc

* "don’t trust anyone but us" by ellegarden. probably not for any thematic reason, the lyrics don’t fit, but i was already on the Japanese rock train and damn is it catchy

* this actually extremely excellent turkish bakery in watertown which actually exists

some books i read lately (april edition, fiction)

queenlua — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 20:52:32 GMT

splitting this into fiction vs nonfiction this month, since uh, historically my nonfiction reviews tend to run long. expect the nonfiction books sometime this weekend.

Crazy Weather by Charles L. McNichols

Why have I never heard of this book before?! THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING.

I picked it up on a recommendation from Ursula K. Le Guin—she wrote the foreward for this edition, for an imprint of books which tries to highlight rare, out-of-print-and lost books. (The idea that Crazy Weather was ever out-of-print stuns me.) And her foreward is a better pitch than I can give, but I’ll try to go for a tl;dr version anyway.

* Apparently one of the original inspirations for the book was the author meeting some white lad on a ranch in the southwestern US who spoke Spanish and Mojave better than he spoke English. Hence our protagonist, South Boy, a teenage kid between cultures. On the one hand, he’s white, with a very Proper Christian Mother and a hard-working rancher father. On the other hand, he’s raised deep in Mojave country. He speaks the language, he’s friends with the people, and when he’s off running around outside (which is most all of the time), he’s running around with the Mojave.

So the story starts when he runs off on an adventure, but this isn’t some ~spirit journey~ woo nonsense—he runs off because his good Mojave friend Havek invites him; he runs off because this particular kind of journey is a Thing You Do in Mojave culture, just like, I dunno, going to prom was a thing in the culture I grew up in. As Le Guin puts it, the author “is never disrespectful of Mojave ways, yet is as unsentimental as a coyote”—it helps a lot that our protagonist is young, and thus ignorant of some of the larger prejudices in the world; he’s able to hold Mojave creation myths and Christian teaching in his head simultaneously, with no apparent contradiction or impulse toward thinking of one as “better” than the other. And thus we get a wonderful window into those two worlds.

* But beyond the (very cool!) historical and cultural portrait, this book is just a rollicking good fun adventure. You know the structure of like, I dunno, Watership Down, where every chapter involves some fun new encounter, some new character or obstacle, and there’s some super-thrilling interaction with the thing, and the chapter ends not with a cliffhanger but with a feeling of triumph, of having just tangled with something really cool? It is such a good structure, and it’s the backbone of this tale. Like, yes, I love my gritty psychological realism and my political intrigue and people quietly pining over the course of many chapters or whatever. But I also fucking love starting a new chapter and we run into some dude called the Mormonhater who’s hurt and sick and South Boy has to scramble to save him, and we start another new chapter and now we’re hearing some kickass old war stories from Yellow Road, and so on and so forth...

* Here’s a thought I had while reading: very rarely are teens ashamed in modern YA, are they? They can be angry, they can be rebellious, they can be embarrassed—but I feel like I rarely see a teen do some minor selfish act, and feel actively ashamed, like they’re not being the sort of person they respect, like they’re not being the sort of person other adults would respect. South Boy, though, feels this in spades—not in a tedious Puritan-guilt way, but in a dang-I’m-trying-really-hard-to-be-a-person-worthy-of-respect-and-there-I-went-grandstanding, gotta-try-and-cut-that-out-next-time way. We take South Boy’s growing-up seriously because South Boy himself is taking it so seriously—it reminds me a lot of Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl, which I loved so very much. More of this please.

* I ask “why have I never heard of this book before” because, well, honestly it seems really well-suited for classroom teaching. It’s fun, it’s not too long, and while the tale itself is straightforward, it’s laden with all sorts of ironies and hints of deeper tragedy. It’s set in a dying world, after all—when South Boy asks the Mormonhater if he can apprentice under him, the answer he gets is a resounding no: “I’m the last of my kind . . . These is the times of steam trains and irrigating ditches. You go find somebody to teach you about steam trains and irrigating ditches. You got no business in a mud boat with me.”

This comes after we’re over halfway through the book, after we’ve fallen so deeply in love with these Mojave and these ranchers and these Mexicans and these odd vagabonds in-between, this little early-1900s portrait of the world, and it aches because, well, from our vantage point here in the year 2020, we all know the Mormonhater is right.

What a book.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

So somehow I got this far in life without reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My knowledge of Vonnegut was pretty limited—on the one hand, I knew he’d written some truly beautiful letters. On the other hand, "Harrison Bergeron" sure is pretty cringe to a modern reader.

Well, I’m pleased to say Slaughterhouse-Five holds up quite well—though it’s definitely more of an experience than a story.

It is almost prose-poem-y, in how it’s constructed—he uses a very thin sci-fi-y/magical-realism-y device to allow us to leap wildly between different parts of Billy Pilgrim’s life, back and forth in the timeline, such that the narrative gathers force not from the story’s progression but instead from how laden with meaning and feeling all those disparate repeating scenes, rhythms, and phrases become. (I think I will shiver when i see “so it goes” or “poo-tee-weet?” for the rest of my life.)

It’s often cited as an anti-war novel. Well, sort of. I think it’s obvious that Vonnegut hates war, that he thinks it’s brutal and awful and only chosen by trumped-up, self-important, narrow-minded men in power (like the horrible, horrible Harvard professor near the novel’s end). But there’s also a strange resignedness here—very early on, he mentions some jackass at a dinner party who derided the book’s premise, said that anti-war people may as well be anti-glacier, and the whole Tralfamadore thing only serves to reinforce this feeling of stoic inevitability.

So if the book’s anti-war, I think it’s only so because it’s a meditation and a mourning, and it’s very evocative and good at that.

Duplicity by N. K. Traver

Quick YA thriller-ish book; picked it up because of a (very vague and distant and one-sided) connection to the author. The problem with being a Full-Time Professional Hacker is that you’re, uh, very picky when it comes to fictional depictions of hacking (even if said depiction is obviously meant to be a little supernatural), and I will tactfully hold further comments :P

West by Carys Davies

Honestly, the NYT review summarizes my feelings better than I could, so just take a gander at that.

I’ll only add:

* I picked it up because when I read the back cover and saw “dude goes on journey out west because of ancient monster bones discovered in Kentucky,” I was like oh HELL yeah let’s see some magical-realist and/or supernatural Kentucky shit, let’s have mammoths wandering the old American west, etc... this book is not that :P It’s entirely within the realist world, which is not bad! Just not what I expected.

* The prose really is lovely; there were whole passages I copied into my commonplace book.

* While I wouldn’t necessarily read another novel by this author, I’d be very curious to read her short fiction—I think that lovely prose and loose plotting would work much better in a more compressed space.

The Signet of His Lords (new fic) + notes

queenlua — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:10:24 GMT

There are a hundred lessons the queen wants to teach her son before he leaves her.

Pre-game, Almyra. ~3k words.

(aka I wrote some self-indulgent pregame fic with Claude and his mom, come join the ride)

Here at AO3.

* i know a guy who accidentally smuggled a bunch of precious gems to the US in the 70s. he was ten; his mom put him on a plane and said "it will be VERY COLD in the US so you must be VERY SURE not to take off that jacket." he lands in the US, his aunt picks him up, and the first thing she does is cut open the jacket and pull all the gems out of the lining.

this guy is a very straight-laced gentleman who would never have knowingly smuggled gems and he's very salty if you ever bring this story up

anyway that's where i got the idea for that bit of the story :P

* title came from Daniel 6:17, because apparently i'll never be able to unmemorize all this fuckin Bible shit i learned in my misspent Baptist youth

preparing for the last war

queenlua — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 12:28:20 GMT

did you know that, in Switzerland, there's a legal requirement that all housing includes a large enough bomb shelter for everybody?!

it's one of those Cold War relics that is, for whatever reason, still on the books, and apparently still followed.

(no idea whether the fallout shelters are... actually that robust... against nuclear fallout... but yeah)

this amusing fact came up while i was talkin' w/ some peeps about how a lot of Hong Kong's coronavirus response has been driven by "SARS was extremely terrifying for us specifically, so fuck that noise, next time some mystery respiratory bullshit happens we will be prepared," which sure is panning out better investment-wise so far than these lil' nuclear bomb shelters, as charming as they are

writing about writing blah blah

queenlua — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 23:28:06 GMT

lately, i've been trying to be a little more systematic with how i approach my writing.

not in terms of writing schedule, or wordcount goals (though there is a bit of that), more like—i'm keeping a little log of the problems/decisions/tradeoffs i encounter while i'm writing any particular piece, and i'm trying to figure out how i make those decisions, if i can make those decisions faster, etc.

because—look, i'm a slow writer in general, but if i'm in a groove, 1k/day isn't too hard to hit. if i could hit that groove consistently i'd be golden. the problem i often run into, though, is that i'll have a piece mostly done, but then i'll spend like, damn near a week rewriting the same transition over and over because nothing's quite working, and i'll try fiddling with every damn lever available to me (do i need to switch PoV here? does this one scene need to be three scenes instead, and if so, how does that change the overall flow of my narrative? can i word this in a way with the desired conciseness that's still clear? etc), and so on. and i usually find a solution eventually (or, give up, throw hands, and push out something suboptimal), but then two months later i've forgotten all the shit i tried to make that work, and how i decided on the thing i did, because my brain's a damn sieve. and i'm hoping if i record that process, i'll be able to internalize it better, and converge on a solution faster, when i run into similar problems in the future?

in a way this feels not-unlike when i was learning mathematical theory—i was playing catch-up in college on that front, trying to figure out how proofs even worked, and of course the kids who'd been doing this stuff for years couldn't really explain their process. "idk, i looked at it and it felt like an inductive approach would work, so i just did that" i managed to catch up to them only when i started thinking of math in terms of tools—you've got a bunch of math widgets and theorems and axioms lying around, can you use any of them in some fun way for this problem?—and i'd just grind through trying shit out until something stuck. and that works! eventually you internalize some things!

so, hopefully being explicit about my thought process will help me figure out why sometimes the words come fast and why sometimes it's a slog. we'll see!

* * *
at some point i got annoyed at Writing Advice Books, because so many of them focus on more basic elements of craft, or writing prompts for "inspiration", or religious adherence to some Fixed Way Stories Much Work—but maybe there's some book that addresses this sort of thing? stuff like "if you're having an issue introducing a character [x] given [y] complicated situation, here's some stuff to try that you may not have thought about?"

maybe what would be helpful is something like that "writing as a craft q&a" that Ursula Le Guin ran online for a while. (maybe i should pick y'all's brains more...!*)

* i've also toyed with the idea of posting some of the stuff from my "writing decisions" log, but i somewhat suspect that'd only be of academic interest and/or only of interest to me, so

or maybe i'll discover something entirely new about "when the words come easily" vs "when words are horrible"; i'm reminded of this old bit from Virginia Woolf:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

anyway yeah that's what's up in writingtown lately, thoughts welcome

a lowkey recommendation

queenlua — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 22:50:22 GMT

if you've got anything ranging from a passing interesting in tech news, to, y'know, deep in the thick of it all day errday—you should probably be reading Normcore Tech.

it's a newsletter written by an east-coast data scientist, about "issues in tech that I’m not seeing covered in the media or blogs and want to read about." it turns out i also want to read about them!

for instance, here's a piece on the creator of Nginx getting arrested last month. while the mainstream news sites covering this story got the main points correct, what those stories lacked was the context/backstory that this author provides, which is just dang interesting in-and-of-itself (how Sysoev got his start is super-fun!), but also helped answer some of the questions i had: "woah wtf? is this just some Russian oligarch being comically evil again? did something happen? how is this related to the acquisition by an American company?" etc, etc.

(if you're a techie, the importance of Nginx is self-evident, and if not, that's chill; she explains that too.)

her bit on the deceptiveness of big tech companies' claims of AI prowess is another example of her solid writing approach. while companies misstating/exaggerating claims is hardly news or surprising, her doggedness in clearly "following the money" and explicating why this specific claim, and why now is quite useful.

that concludes my Official Recommendation TM

Where the River Meets the Sea (new fic) + notes

queenlua — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:22:26 GMT

Hilda meets Claude’s parents. They’re not who she suspects.

Postgame, Verdant Wind. ~12k words.

Here at AO3.

idk if people really do "making-of" or fun notes on fics anymore? but i'm doing it today, because, fuck it whatever, and i'm feeling self-indulgent

under the cut because spoilers

so one of my Nagamas prompts looked like this:

Claude/Hilda post VW route: Claude finally introduces Hilda to his family, and she realizes there's a lot about him she doesn't know - aka "let's confront Hilda's racism". No sad/bittersweet ending please. Preferably romantic Claude/Hilda, but friendship is ok too

...which sounds 110% like my jam, so, hell yeah, let's do

i started writing it in December, though i wrote it all backwards: i wrote almost the entirety of Chapter 3 that month, because i thought Chapter 3 was going to be the "frame" around the overall story, with Claude's little teatime getting interrupted with flashbacks to the whole meet-the-parents thing.

but then i got carried away, because Lorenz was so fun to write, and i realized i'd written like five thousand words but not a single one about Claude's parents yet, whups, and thus i confronted the horrible reality that this story might need to be in chronological order.

the story started cohering the day after Christmas, when i first wrote the line "Like water off a wyvern’s back—that was what people said about trying to get a rise out of Kamyar el-Samandi", though ironically the bits with his parents were still some of the last things i wrote. (worldbuilding is hard! i am a procrastinator! etc)

Chapter 2 was an absolute bitch to write and and there were a few scenes that i probably rewrote like eighteen times ugh. good thing there was a deadline or else i'd probably still be rewriting it...!

but honestly overall the whole thing was a blast to write & i'm very excited to be steppin' back into Fire Emblem fic writin' :)

energy channeled while writing this fic:

* that time my partner decided to introduce me to his parents with literally ten minutes of notice
* seriously, we were on our way to a cabin for the weekend
* because he was like "we can hang out! we'll have the place to ourselves! it'll be great!"
* we're ten minutes away and he's like "mom'll be cooking us dinner so that's cool"
* me: ...mom????
* him: oh yeah my parents are gonna be at the cabin this weekend too lol
* me: ??!?!?!?!?!?!
* cue me frantically trying to throw on makeup in a subaru goin 50mph while swearing and shouting a lot
* cue partner being all "idk why you're acting like this is a big deal, my parents are totally chill, blah blah"
* and to this day he swears he didn't intend to walk me into a trap, he's just a space cadet and forgot his parents were also going to be at the cabin until uh. ten minutes out
* and you know, it was fine, it was totally fine, his parents were in fact ridiculously chill, but oh boy do i remember my blood pressure spiking like 800%
* (for the reverse scenario: when i introduced my partner to my parents, i gave him a fuckin' checklist, i coached him on Proper Southern Manners, he was gonna be so damn impressive... he proceeded to do exactly nothing on the checklist, and y'know what, it worked out anyway, so, whatever, life is an adventure)

* that time my brother went to Paris
* (...that girlfriend is no longer dating him)

* raymond carver (thanks for the title bro)
* ...tite kubo
* those horseback riding lessons i took in middle school, somehow
* pretty much anytime i've ever made out with a dude because i was bored & he was hot

how Ken Liu rebooted his career

queenlua — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 09:22:02 GMT

from an old interview, emphasis mine:

Luc Reid: Back around 2002-2003, you won the Phobos contest (may it rest in peace) and were a published finalist in the venerable Writers of the Future contest. Then things were pretty quiet until 2011, at which point your fiction, in the words of Aliette de Bodard, "was basically everywhere." What happened in the years between, and what so powerfully motivated you to pour new effort into your writing career?

Ken Liu: Briefly: I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.

And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments (http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/). The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."

I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing—and amazingly, my stories began to sell.

(h/t sumana's blog. "There is no ur-editor. It's us.")

professionalization & celebrity: some links & thoughts

queenlua — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:45:21 GMT

professionalization

see this excerpt from Marie Hicks's Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (h/t Ted Lee's 2019 books retrospective):

‘The pay scale of the Senior machine Operator is increasingly causing us unease,’ wrote an executive officer at the government’s Central Computer Bureau in 1969. ‘Politically, we are sitting on a powder keg and something must be done as a matter of urgency,’ he continued. ‘It is out of proportion that these girls, academically unqualified with clerical staff, should so quickly be able to reach salary levels above those of Clerical Officers and even Executive Officers,’ he argued (154).

As this example shows, the rationale for changing the composition of the computer workforce had little to do with talent and everything to do with prestige. in the effort to make computer work comport with the importance now being accorded it, the talents and experience of many women computer operators were squandered. Their isolation in the machine grades meant that despite their greater technical skills they were seen as worse candidates, even for jobs they were already successfully performing. A key part of computer posts becoming professional and firmly white collar was their being elevated into the power structures of the state and of industry. Now that the jobs were more technocratic than technical, workers with actual computing experience lost out to ones who were seen as having management potential (159).

see also some tweets from Aurelia Augusta:

This is one of my biggest problems with the mainstream humanities/ethics in tech conversation - it washes out to 'let's send the tech nerds back to their place', on the assumption that traditional decision makers (lawyers, policy wonks, philosophers) would be better . . . the entire domain of tech policy has developed into an elite power squabble with little attention towards systematic solutions

i do not like what professionalization does to things, basically. there are elements i find frustrating but probably necessary or at least useful—i probably do want someone to verify that the folks building and designing bridges, sewage treatment planets, etc, are not incompetent, and i probably want some mechanism for holding them accountable.

but there are so many elements of "professionalization" that are stultifying, confusing, or just feel plain wrong. so much bullshit statistics, without particular care for what those stats actually mean or what we should infer from them. so much regulatory capture. so many people helicoptered in without any on-the-ground experience or actual domain knowledge, to "ideate" and "analyze solutions" or whatever—and nine-times-out-of-ten these helicoptered-in {managers, consultants, commissioned officers, etc} don't offer any particularly obvious skills besides "being from the managerial class," "talking like a manager," etc, which surely is just something you could teach one of the people you already have to do? (see: the death of promoting from within, etc)

and even if everyone agrees the value-add of a Professional MBA is limited, you still end up with some MBA-type folks at some type of helm, because all the other businesses only listen to those types, and it's hard to play ball unless you buy in too.

see also the weird history of MBA programs, see also the military whose two-tiered commissioned/enlisted hierarchy has confused me since approx forever, etc

(see also my incoherent grumblings on the topic of credentialism != intellectualism, and also my periodic grumbling that "ethics classes will not fix engineering's ethical issues" which i can't be bothered to dig up a link for)
* * *celebrity

see this Ursula K Le Guin interview (esp around 13:20 onward), one of the last before her death, where she discusses how much she dislikes celebrity as a *thing*. how often it's confused with achievement.

& see this tweet from a professional musician, which makes the interesting & depressing assertion that, with the rise of streaming/tiktok/etc, people increasingly want to follow artists based on who they are, rather than just the music—"rebirth of the author", so to speak.

& see also the weird feeling i get whenever i see a new venture or startup or whatever, from someone who's "twitter famous" or particularly well-known on the tech-talk circuit, because, well—

okay, maximum salt incoming.

there are a lot of trivial and boring and lame talks in the "tech talk circuit." most of these seem to be done as some sort of masturbatory thing? building clout, building a brand, screaming into the void "hi my name's robin and i do technology" with a slightly louder megaphone than a plain damn resume would do?

and mostly i hate it because it seems to produce this intense sense of anxiety in so many people. you'll see people who are like, 23, and freaking out because they must give four talks this year or no one will believe they're technical enough!!! and this will secure their career and also they must hang out with The Right People and yada yada...

...this despite the fact that a lot of the technologists i most admire, who i'd be desperate to hire, who have empirically done both the hardest work and the grungiest work there is... they don't give talks. or they give a talk, like, once every few years. the only talk when they've actually got something to say, and coming up with something to say can take time. if i want to learn how to set up Kubernetes, there's like, 800 tutorials online for that. if i want to hear how you tackled really knotty, horrible architectural issues in migrating some massive org from something else to Kubernetes... well, first you need to do two years' worth of work, don't you?

and the hard parts of technology are always always those really time-consuming knotty things.

but like, the tech-talk circuit is A Thing, and there are people who go to so many of them you sorta wonder if they find times to do their jobs (backchannel, you hear that some of them don't—and like, okay, more power to them, "drinking and hanging out with people at conferences" seems like a fine gig if you can con someone into backing it)—

—anyway, idk, i can never tell how much fire there is behind the smoke, but it seems like you can raise bajillions of dollars in venture capital with a lot of smoke regardless of the actual fire, so maybe i'm the rube here!

and, back to the "rebirth of the author" thing—see the Ye Olde terrycloth mother experiments & also recent studies on parasocial relationships more generally.

ocean of time

queenlua — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 22:07:21 GMT

a friend popped across my feed, a friend who i haven't thought about in—gosh, forever.

we were very fast friends when i lived in Boston, but for only about half a year, maybe longer. she wound up having to leave the city because The Rent Was Too Damn High, and she wound up in the Carolinas for a bit because that's where her parents lived, and the internet tells me that's where she's at now.

we shared dreams together, got drunk at the awesome taqueria near BU, cried over a breakup together, yada yada. and now i'm just... not even sure who she is, nowadays, how she's doing. i hope she's doing well but i don't know. we were only friends for a little while, in the grand scheme of things, little enough that i can't decide whether the "hey i was thinking of you" message would be worth it, or if it'd just be weird, with those five years of distance between us.

the thing that i always found most beautiful and moving and tragic about Final Fantasy 8's core story was this: using a Guardian Force erases people's memories over time. you can have power, you can have incredible power. but that power will consume you, until you won't remember how much you used to cherish and love the people around you, why you loved them and how. (think of Irvine! running into Squall and the rest of them, after such a long time apart, and then realizing none of them remember you, none of them remember each other—augh!)

but the hideous truth is: time will do that anyway. and it may not even give you power in the exchange.

no August book post

queenlua — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 19:49:29 GMT

since last time, i started but did not finish:

* The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedua. it wasn't a bad book, but it was a bit dull/slow in the hundred or so pages i read, and then the library started nagging me to return it and i decided i didn't care about it enough to deal with the overdue fines

* Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Geiman. the bits with the angel and the demon were great, and The Tumblr Dot Com would lead you to believe that's the entirety of the book. unfortunately they are a bunch of other bits and i found them interminably dull and overly cute / impressed-with-itself

all the rest of the time i would've spent reading instead went to playing Final Fantasy XII, Elsinore, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. (two of those are 60hr whoppers, you do the math)

oh also basically every weekend has been booked so

yeah!

expect more fun book posts soonish; my weekends are calming down soon & i'm in the middle of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferante, which is very good so far

some books i read lately (june edition)

queenlua — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 09:38:41 GMT

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

This book is a resounding counterexample to that old adage of "write what you know."

I loved Dazai's "Schoolgirl" even though the narrator was so unlike the author himself, and the author nailed the perspective perfectly: I felt very sharp memories of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old girl, reading it. By contrast, Dazai's protagonist here is almost autobiographical (bookish suicidally depressed rich kid from Hokkaido; am I describing Dazai or our protagonist?), and while some of Dazai’s razor-sharp insights are still there (I enjoyed his strangely-motivated childhood friendship with Takeichi, and wondered quite a lot about his good-for-nothing drinking buddy Horiki), it meanders into a rather unappealing of self-absorption and rumination. And the behavior of the cast of characters around the protagonist is a little bewildering—and, I mean, the protagonist himself is bewildered, so it makes sense. But I found myself wondering if I needed translator’s notes (was I missing something), or if this was just a symptom of the character’s all-too-evident myopia and depression, or just flat writing, and it just didn’t work for me.

It may simply be a matter of form. Schoolgirl kept such a tight, documentarian focus on the minute-to-minute thoughts of the protagonist that the structure flowed effortlessly from there: the structure of a single day: quick beginning, languorous middle, wistful ending. A book written in the form of a journal is a dangerous thing: it meanders, it mopes, it focuses on feeling and pain, and if you don’t connect with that feeling and pain right off, there’s not much else to grasp.

The forward was interesting, pointing out (back in 1958!) that Japanese folk are just as Westernized as many European countries, based on the literature & education of their effete members, and recounting how his literary friends in the country get annoyed at being classified as “Japanese” or “Asian” or “World” literature. (Those barriers have broken down a bit, in the half-century since that writing, though not enough.)

The claim on the back cover is that this is one of the “ten bestselling books in Japan”—I’m not sure what metric they used, but it seems poor Dazai has since been whalloped by, among other things, Harry Potter and Who Moved My Cheese? Comparing it to Kokoro, the other Super Famous Classic Modern Japanese Novel TM I know about, might make an interesting exercise—I haven’t read Kokoro since high school, and both novels do the weird frame-narrative thing, but I think Kokoro touched me more, ironically, by having more distance between you and the story. I’ll probably be musing on all the different ways distance works in fiction, I guess, for a while.

(Oh, also, a reference to Christianity as a weirdo death-obsessed religion came up, as it did in the last Japanese novel I read—might just be a common characterization there?)

On Writing by Stephen King

Plenty who do can’t teach.

I’ve generally avoided the “how to write” genre in recent years, mainly because I was pretty sure those books didn’t have anything to teach me that I couldn’t figure out by just writing. That’s still true, actually, but going to a few one-day writing workshops this past year convinced me that’s there’s still value in hearing a writer say “here’s what it’s like for me; does it work like that for you.” I came out of a Henry Lien workshop with all sorts of neat tricks for imbuing fresh life into limp stories (like, all his little parlor games and tricks were presented in the form of, “so here’s the thing I did that produced the idea for story such-and-such that got published a year later,” which sure felt practical and fun); I came out of a Steifvater workshop feeling quite vindicated in trying out some different ways of approaching very long works (tl;dr for a long time, she couldn’t figure out the difference between the novels she was able to finish and the ones she wasn’t able to finish—she claims that she actually has to brainstorm and think for a very long time, because she needs to know exactly what kind of novel she wants, in terms of mood/theme/etc, before ever putting a word to the page—only the desperate drive to make that extremely vivid vision real can push the novel through—which surely isn’t how it works for everyone, but resonated for me, and helped me understand how I can barf up 20 pages in a day for something I’ve ruminated over for ages, but taper out on things that seem like they “should” be better ideas).

Anyway. So those workshops were useful. All King really does here is bark Strunk and White at you for 200 pages, which, yawn.

I don’t mean that as a potshot at King; I picked the book up because I know the dude can write a book that sells, I’m not sitting over here being a literary snob. But it seems he’s better at doing than teaching, alas.

The first hundred pages, strangely but somewhat delightfully, are just a memoir of his life, and that bit was quite fun. That part may be worth reading if you’re a King fan; skip the rest.

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

I was delightfully surprised that lavendre read this right about the same time as me :) I’m not sure I have much to add to her review. These books were sold to me as “Game-of-Thrones-style plotting, but sans grimdark, and targeted at YA,” which doesn’t fully capture the spirit of the books (they have a delicious Mediterranean setting all their own, and it feels much more like an adventurous romp than GoT ever did, even when the politicking is thick), but it’s certainly a fair enough pitch that it compelled me to read, and I enjoyed the ride. The Queen of Attolia herself is a really fun character (her super keen awareness of her delicate circumstances, as a brutal ruler of a tiny kingdom, was so delicious), and I really hope we see more of her in the next book (which I have already checked out from the library!).

Words Are My Matter by Ursula Le Guin

As a 90's kid, I adored fantasy and science fiction with no inferiority complex about it whatsoever: the world was already shaping itself to meet my tastes. I saw Fellowship of the Ring in theaters with my dad, when I was eleven. By the time Return of the King came out just a few years later, all my teenybopper friends were standing in line with me. The closest thing to a literary snob in my life was, uh, Time magazine’s list of the “100 Best Novels of All Time,” which in hindsight was full of awful selections (The Fountainhead?!?! The fucking Fountainhead?!?!), but it was all I knew to judge The Best by at the time, and Lord of the Rings was on there, so of course I thought fantasy and science fiction were Real Literature, with Real Hollywood Budgets, who the hell thought otherwise?

I mention this because in Words Are My Matter, Le Guin has several essays where she still—still!—is beating the drum about how fantasy is Real Literature, and all these snobs don’t understand. I don’t deny that was very much the case when she was in her writing prime, but it’s amusing how often public intellectuals fail to notice when they’ve won, the world has shifted to their point of view, they can move on!

Amusing, but not awful or bad. Compare Le Guin’s quirky insistence against, say, Paul Graham, the venture capitalist who got high on his own supply and still insists that nerds are some embattled minority entitled to uproot everything they can sling Javascript at despite the fact that oh my God the year is 2019 and Google is worth a bajillionty dollars. Or compare against Jared Diamond, once-edgy pop-anthropology guy who’s just making up random theories for whatever now.

(An interesting corollary to this: it’s interesting how much of cultural change is governed not by active battle with the old vanguard, but mere boredom with it. “Oh, Paul Graham’s tweeting again, who cares, I stopped reading his shit years ago.” Stephanie Coontz mentioned this phenomenon in passing, in The Way We Never Were—she remembered how her Greatest Generation mother thought The Feminine Mystique was a revelation. Her mother nattered to her on the phone about all the ways The System held women down, and she—couldn’t be more bored. Blah blah, the system held women down, okay whatever, she was college and it was the 60s and she was busy getting dates and passing tests and joining clubs and making her own way in the system, which had, bit by bit, already begun to change.)

ANYWAY. So Le Guin beats a few old hobby horses here and there, but overall she’s still an engaging and delightful essayist, and this collection is great. A few standouts, to me, were “The Beast in the Book” (a reflection on the significance of animals and animal transformations in literature, particularly children’s literature, and with a particular focus on The Once and Future King), “Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf” (short, but moving), and “Living in a Work of Art” (a really lovely portrait of her childhood home). The book reviews, too, are all lovely, and damn near all of them convinced me to go buy or request the book from the library immediately, so I’ll report back on her taste in a few months, haha.

Oh, also her essay on abortion was stunning.

BONUS ROUND: COMICS

I impulse-read a bunch of random comics/manga of highly varying quality these past two months!

I Hear the Sunspot

Eh. Very light boy’s-love-ish romance story between a deaf dude and some other guy in college. It wasn’t offensively bad, but didn’t seem to ascend beyond the level of a Very Special Episode.

Halfway through I found myself thinking, "y'know, this really seems like a disability narrative played straight, rather than an actual boy's love thing or whatever." Then the author's notes at the end specifically mentioned that, apparently, she submitted the original version to her publisher, her publisher said “hey this is really good, but uh, this is a BL magazine, did you put any actual boy’s love in there?” and she was like OH SHIT and jammed in a final chapter with some actual romance. Called it.

Go With the Clouds: North by Northwest by Aki Irie (Volume One)

I already gushed about this one in a strange, sideways sort of way. For those who can’t be bothered to read my full-on incoherent rambling, the short version is probably something like: “This is a gorgeous manga with an intensely unique setting and I wanted to fall into every page. The conceit is clever and, modulo a few mildly-distasteful off-color jokes, I’m hooked by the setup. Will report back in August whether Volume Two lives up to what’s here.” Oh, and also, yes I bought it because of the birds on the cover, do you know who I am.

Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Hey, did you know Bryan Lee O’Malley wrote more comics after finishing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World? I sure didn’t!

Seconds is a standalone graphic novel, and both the art and humor styles are comfy and familiar if you’re a Scott Pilgrim fan. While it didn’t quite have the frenetic action and story highs that I remember from Scott Pilgrim (I adore the series, but it’s been years since I read it, so my memory’s fuzzy), it’s still perfectly fine.

Actually, I can put a finger on why it’s just fine, to me.

See, our main character, Katie, is introduced as a struggling, striving, stressed twentysomething. She’s a bang-up chef who singlehandedly transformed her first restaurant into the hottest place in town; now she’s trying to start a new restaurant, one that’ll be her own. Of course shit’s going down—the repairs on the venue for the new restaurant are taking too long and taking up too much money, her boyfriend broke up with her a while back, one of her best line chefs has a not-quite-appropriate crush on her, and so on.

So the story’s whole schtick, right, is that Katie finds some magic mushrooms, and she can eat one to get a “do-over” on something in her life. She starts out with just “don’t make the mistake I made this morning”; obviously she gets carried away and starts trying to fix stuff that goes way further back. In particular: she uses a re-do to avoid breaking up with her boyfriend.

So she wakes up in a new universe, where she didn’t break up with the boyfriend. But also, she doesn’t own her own restaurant anymore. He’s the “co-owner”, but really he’s calling all the shots, and they chose a design that’s not her own, and he’s doing a worse job dealing with the contractors and getting repairs done, and when she tries to talk to the contractors they get annoyed, because they talk to the boyfriend, not her.

I expected Katie to think: well, damn, turns out breaking up with him was a good idea. I expected her to try and revert the choice right away, because even in the struggling, striving, stressed universe, she was fulfilled. Maybe unhappy, maybe wigged out, but she was really alive.

Does this make me a cold bitch? I dunno. I expect a partner to be a multiplicative force, not a subtractive one. I think that just makes me idealistic, if anything.

But that’s the ending I wanted. The ending you get instead isn’t awful, but it’s just too have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too, and it just doesn’t cut to the core of anything I particularly think or feel or know to be true.

trusting fiction

queenlua — Wed, 08 May 2019 08:35:50 GMT

i tried to write about how i felt after finishing a really good manga tonight, and it was supposed to be like, half a paragraph (hence, typing it up on Tumblr)

...but then i apparently needed to get a bunch of Literary Musings down before i could just talk about my feelings like a normal person, so

here's that post—about the many ways that an author can earn a reader's trust, and how something almost-like-trust can be very very good too.

some books i read lately (april edition)

queenlua — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 22:16:44 GMT

didn't read as much as i wanted to these past two months. alas. here's what i did manage to read:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (part 1 of 4)

I found a book club that's planning to read War and Peace together this year, to keep each other motivated, and also to keep it manageable (reading War and Peace in four parts is easier than swallowing the whole book at once).

I hopped onboard, because I figured I would never read these damn epic Russian novels any other way. I am surprised & delighted to report, however, that so far it's really... fun? Light? Extremely accessible?

Listen, all I knew about War and Peace going in was that it was famous, and that it was enormous. That predisposes me to think it's going to be Great Literature, and it'll be full of Ponderous Discourse and all that shit. Like, I read The Glass Bead Game as a kid, right, I get that sort of thing even though I don't read it very often.

But! it turns out War and Peace was published in a serialized format during its day, and it turns out soap operas weren't a thing back then, so here it is. I am so delighted by this, y'all.

Like, I went downstairs for a snack while I was blazing through the first 200 or so pages, and a housemate asked me what was happening in the book, and I was delighted that I could report, "Well, Pierre just got totally smashed at a frat party where these dudes fuckin rode an actual live bear around because Fraternity Shenanigans, and Pierre's family found out via the subsequent arrest record and got so pissed they banished him to Moscow, which for our purposes sounds kinda like Tacoma, and I think Pierre's mom is about to pull some CRAZY AMAZING CONNIVING SHIT to cheat Pierre into getting a massive inheritance but he's too clueless to realize it's happening, and also there's bad shit coming for the Natasha/Boris ship, I can tell..."

Amazing. Amazing! I'm really liking it so far & will report back here as I get through the rest. (We read through after the Battle of Austerlitz, for our first meeting.)

Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne Valente

holy shit, i actually cried at section seven, way to creep my patron saint into your story you glorious bastard

anyway i really should've read this story before ever attempting to write a dream sequence, ever, because Ms. Valente just fucking nails it, over and over and over.

i've been reading a lot of Ms. Valente's stuff lately (more on that later, whenever i get around to writing some short story reviews), and i have some mixed feelings about her but mostly i really like her shit. my chief quibble would be, she leans too hard into the poet-side of her when writing prose, and she can end up with clusters of sentences that are dazzling but signify nothing, or just end up leaving you plain confused about what's going on in the story, because she's too busy showing off.

but. as a show-off at heart, as a bit of a poet, i like that sort of thing, a bit. you just have to know how to use it.

this story, i think, knows how to use it. this story is told in a mythlike manner because it is a creation myth; the story is inherently confusing because the mind of an AI is going to be fundamentally alien and thus you're less worried about the confusing bits; this story is able to luxuriate in its strange dreamworld because it nails the concrete real-world details so well.

also, the fact that a large part of the story takes place on a weird little house on the Shiretoko Peninsula plays into my biases hard, but also that mansion is still haunting my mind weeks after i read the story—i want to go there even though i know it doesn't (can't!) exist. wistful sigh.

(aside: this one's a novella, not a novel, and you can read the whole thing free here if you're curious about it)

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

You will enjoy this book exactly as much as you are excited by the following phrase: "Ocean's Eleven meets Final Fantasy."

And if you are a person of taste, you are very excited right now. This sucker knocks out so many of my favorite dumb heist and/or JRPG tropes. You've got the chicka who, at the wizened age of seventeen, is already a decorated and battle-hardened soldier. You've got the bad-boy protagonist and the sees-through-his-shit female lead, who are definitely actually into each other despite their denials of this fact. You have a fuckin' cool-as-heck campy intro scene for each member of the heist team where you get to see 'em doin' whatever tropey bullshit their Thing is. And there's magic! and stuff! and things!

It was glorious: a little dumb but also quite clever when it mattered. The writing's a little "YA-ish" in parts (and if I knew how to define that term, believe me, I would) but it was still a great romp. Goddamn I love the whole damn heist genre.

Selected Stories of Lu Hsun trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang

I read this for research, primarily, but the stories themselves were reasonably solid as literary works in-and-of-themselves. Lu Hsun was a leftist activist and writer in early 1900s China, and while his stories are not explicitly or obviously political, he saw writing itself as a political act. (Apparently he was inspired to become a writer while in medical school in Japan—he saw a photo where a Japanese soldier was about to behead a Chinese man, and a group of Chinese people had gathered around to watch, apathetic to the man's plight. Hsun then decided literature was the real cure China needed for their spiritual illness / apathy, not Western medicine.) Thus, Hsun's short stories are nearly all tragedies, and they focus on the plight of the poor and the underclass and so on. "A Madman's Diary" was probably my favorite, just for the creepy psychological horror aspects, but wow the stories with the theme of "Chinese 'traditional' medicine is a scam preying on the life savings of people who are already extremely poor" are all brutal. "Village Opera" was such a beautiful little portrait of town life and served as a nice contrast to his bleaker stories, and "The Misanthrope," I thought, was a really wonderfully delicate and nuanced portrait of what it's like to feel just outside of things, just on the edge of things.

I do wish it were more heavily footnoted; I think I missed a lot of cultural context on these stories. And perhaps the most fascinating bit of the whole book was the introduction—the translators wrote about Lu Hsun's life with, uh, suspiciously charged language (e.g. they attribute the strength of his later stories to his having "correct politics", e.g. becoming more lefty). This combined with other weirdly-propoganda-y phrases throughout the introduction prompted me to look up the date of the translation—1960—and the background of the translators (they seemed to chug along translating books for years and years without incident, then then the Cultural Revolution happened, and now apparently the couple's autobiography is banned in China, jeez), and uh, wow, that is a whole mess of worms there. And I've got a lot more research to do...

Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse

So let's be real: this tweet is what convinced me to go pick up this book posthaste: "I'm reading a Japanese SF novel from 1967. It spent 200pgs as a Bulgakov-by-way-of-Clarke meditation on religion, deep time, and death. Then Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama had a superpowered cyborg mecha battle in the ruins of 3909 Tokyo."

I mean. What a pitch.

So, obviously, I knew going in that this was going to be Extremely Anime, but I don't think I was prepared for how much it was going to remind me of JRPGs in general, and especially Chrono Cross*.

I mean. The book literally opens with a pages-long, vivid description of the primordial ocean, alluding to what the ocean represents for Life In General—that's very Chrono Cross-y already. It does a crazy amount of infodumping in the last act, while the characters are in the ruins of some once-very-technologically-advanced civilization—again, that's very Chrono Cross-y, and I got Dinopolis and Dead Sea vibes all over that. And the way so much of the book's dialogue steers towards the vaguely philosophical, in a way that feels stilted but is clearly an aesthetic choice because they do it everywhere—that's also very Chrono Cross. (I found it striking, when I started a replay of the game recently, how many of the random villagers you talk to SURE SEEM to have very existential feelings.)

So does this all work as a book? Eh, kind of? The plot is pretty hard to follow, which leads you to think the plot must be something of an afterthought, a framework for developing these meditations on The Heat Death Of The Universe. But those meditations themselves are both bleak and rather cyclical, which doesn't lend itself to super-engaging reading. (One starts to appreciate why Nietzsche relied so much on humor when presenting his own bleak, cyclical little philosophies.)

The chapter where Jesus is introduced is fascinatingly strange (Jesus is framed as a madman and as a prophet of death, in a way that feels viscerally strange if you were raised in Stereotypical American Sunday School or whatever), but overall I thought this book was more interesting than it was actually gripping or good. C'est la vie.

I would be curious for how influential / widely read this novel was within Japan itself—apparently the creator of Ghost in the Shell was a big fan (he wrote an afterword for the edition I read).

Strange Horizons did a little book club about it a while back, in which people far cleverer than I chat about the book, so go there for more thoughts if you're still curious.

No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy

Did not finish.

So we've all seen Business Books lying around, right? They usually feature dreadfully uninspiring cover art, have some sort of forced pithy saying for a title, and serve as a vehicle for bundling up dubious pop psychology and bogus MBA case studies.

I have read precisely one of these books before, ever, and that was under something like duress. See, at work, I once had to go to a seminar for Crucial Conversations, and we all got a free copy of the book, and listening to the seminar-person talking was worse than reading the damn thing, so I wound up just reading the book while the seminar-person yammered on.

And it wasn't an awful book, but I found myself vaguely bemused by it—it seemed like Basic Communication 101. Didn't everyone have an Aggressively Social mother growing up, to drill you hard on the fine art of How To State Your Opinion Without Sounding Like An Ass, and How To Come Up With A Good Compromise, and so on?

I mean, empirically the answer to this question is no, most people really suck at communication. Maybe these books actually help some people with that. If so, kudos, but as for me, I was just pissed off that the used bookstore wouldn't even take my copy of Crucial Conversations, because they already had too many. (Who is buying all these damn copies??)

Anyway.

This is all to say, I should've known I wouldn't like this book, because it's a damn Business Book, but now that I work for The Man, I tend to see Business Books come up with disturbing frequency, and sometimes people I really like recommend them, and in particular an engineer I really admire said this book was the bomb dot com and I was like, wow, they are so technically brilliant, I should read this book.

So once again, I am faced with a book that is not awful. But it's really just a bundle of pop psych tips and MBA studies that you've probably already skimmed in some form or another while interneting. The presentation is really cute, too. But around ninety pages in, I was so bored, and then I realized these books are never gonna work for me, and luckily I got this shit from the library so I can just return it instead of begging a used bookseller to take this thing away from me.

I am not very good at Business Books.

musings on Final Fantasy IX, and also things vaguely related to Final Fantasy IX

queenlua — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 07:45:01 GMT

did you know Final Fantasy IX is available on the Switch?

i found out last week and i've been fuckall productive since then. it turns out replaying beloved old RPGs is delightful when you can just hit the "win" button to blast through battles that you just don't wanna deal with. 10/10 nostalgia experience, would play again.

rather than properly reviewing this ~~ohmygodican'tbelieveit'ssooldi'mgettingold~~ 19-year-old game, i'm just dumping a bunch of random thoughts here, loosely arranged, for anyone who also enjoys rolling around in blather about 19-year-old games.

(1) home

the main theme song of FF9 is titled "the place i'll return to someday," and in hindsight, it's amazing how apt that title is. just about every major character gets a homecoming in this game. zidane's visit to terra, vivi's visits to the Black Mage Village, and Garnet's return to Madain Sari are the three big ones, but even Freya's return to Burmecia after so many years away counts, though her character moments are too-quickly swallowed by the larger crisis at hand.

interestingly, Garnet's homecoming is the only one that doesn't provoke some sense of existential crisis. quite the opposite, actually—the sisterly vibe between her and Eiko surfaces almost immediately, and when you're standing by the eidolon wall it feels so cozy, and of course, this is the location where that beautiful "Ipsen's Line" scene plays out—the kind of sweet, romantic little vignette that can only happen when you're having a moment of reprieve. in some ways Garnet's got the most stable sense of self of any of them.

FF9 doesn't give off the vibe of a game trying to be deeply thematically coherent/resonant, unlike, say, FF10. it's a bundle of high-spirited fantasy adventure, charmingly delivered, and it's got some things to say about friendship and finding a place for yourself in a big confusing world gone to shit, but it's delivered lightly and erratically.

still, though, gosh i really loved all those homecomings. the bleak stark warm cozy steppe of Madain Sari. the Black Mage Village, before and after, in heartbreaking contrast. and even Terra—yeah, the game was jumping the shark at that point, but it was still eerie to see Zidane look around and think of that blue light he remembered from his childhood, and to sense the raw environmental tension from just being there—the headache he's getting from the light, the way his usually-silver tongue falls flat just trying to talk to these folks. three very different visions of "home."

(2) coherence

the previous bit makes me wonder, actually—people like to drag FF13 and FF15 for having incoherent plots, and, while i see what they're saying, FF9 also suffers from this affliction, and yet people seem to remember it immensely fondly, and rarely accuse it of being, well, a little batty.

i think FF9 gets away with its incoherence more easily because (1) the dialogue is read, not spoken, which i think makes it easier to click quickly through things that might be considered plot holes, or just kinda shrug and say "i must've missed something" if something doesn't entirely make sense, and (2) FF9 mostly keeps in sight the core mood it's going for—this is a Fun Fantasy Romp with a Charming Prat as the leading dude, so we're gonna have warm colors and soft moments and good vibes.

i suspect you can get away with a lot if you really nail a specific vibe/theme.

but you can also see that there was a pull in the other direction, as well—homecoming as a repeated theme isn't an accident, and while the whole idea of "memory" seems to come out of left field (Memoria is a fucking bizarre final dungeon given the vibe of the entire rest of the game), it's clearly foreshadowed by the whole Freya plotline. you can feel the warm-homey-feelings grating against some sort of grand thematic meditation on memory. i found FFXV fascinating partially because i could see all these hastily-stitched-together seams; i could see how many directions in which the development team wanted to pull this whole great sundering mess. i think FFIX has some hints of that too, but they smooth it over so well that you don't notice it so much.

this is a long-winded way of saying, wow, i'd love to be a fly on the wall of the production team for a big ole epic adventure game like this sometime. making 40hrs of storytelling cohere into something consistent must be exhausting and impossible and it's amazing it ever happens at all.

(2.5) an extended rant about terra

the "You're Not Alone!" sequence has always driven me nuts because it's so close to perfect.

see, zidane never seems like the kind of dude who cares overmuch where he's from. we hear him tell a story about going off to find home as a kid, and then he decided it didn't matter—the end! and so seeing him backtread on that lesson he learned as a kid, seeing him misstep so many years later just because he's arrived at Terra.. i mean, it's not impossible, the whole place is a bit of a shock, but i needed to see more of why this shook Zidane so much, particularly after all the pep talks he's given Vivi!

he also never seems like the kind of dude who "does everything on his own." kind of the opposite, really. when he's moping over Garnet being made queen, he spends his time getting drunk and begging to get back into Tantalus and being a huge PITA to Marcus and Blank. whenever someone wants to come along on the adventure, he generally defers to their judgment—he never tells Eiko or Vivi it's too dangerous, and he's fine with Garnet joining on their Desert Palace trip even though she's clearly shook as all hell, and so on.

so seeing Zidane so distraught over this, and seeing his friends rail on him for being such a loner, doesn't make sense. it almost makes sense—or at least, it would only take a couple more paragraphs in the script to make it make sense. you could have Zidane introspect a bit more on his origins—show us that he was putting up a bit of a front for Garnet, when he was saying it didn't matter. show us that he's a bit of a hypocrite—not hugely so, don't render him unlikeable, just show he's willing to extend more charity to Vivi than he is to himself. and bring out a bit more a self-sacrificial streak; show that he goes just a little too far for other people sometimes.

that's it! two paragraphs, and you'd set yourself up to make this scene down the line perfect.

and yet. even as-is, the scene is beautifully staged, the music lends an incredible energy, it's legitimately relieving to have your companions show up mid-battle to save your butt so many times, and you viscerally feel how weak you are without them. (this is a trick FF15 played with, years later, and everyone hated it, but fuck everyone i thought it was great.)

and there's also a sort of strange satisfaction in seeing such an unflappable character turned snippy, turned nasty (it legitimately makes me flinch to hear him call Eiko and Vivi a bunch of "brats")—it gives him a bit of an undercurrent that's not ordinarily visible (and, ha, yes, that's a trope i'm a sucker for).

but, ya know, does it really matter in the end? because i've literally been humming that damn song all damn day so i think they won, right

(3) more game writing stuff

there's a lot of spots in FF9's dialog where someone explicitly says, "you've changed." Zidane says it to Freya when she's all Serious about protecting Cleyra. Zidane says it about Vivi when he gets furious about Kuja. Marcus says it to Garnet at some point. Freya says it to Zidane right before the very last scene.

it's interesting because i would balk at writing a line like that into a short story or novel or whatever—it's too on-the-nose, too explicit, and can't you tell the character's changed, just by context, by their actions? likewise you probably wouldn't see that line in a screenplay for the Latest Hot Netflix Show; you'd want to convey it via the actor's expressions, the way folks' postures have changed, and so on.

that was actually what i found maddening when i took a screenwriting class in college. even though dialogue is often the first thing that comes to me when writing a story, even though my earliest drafts are often just pages and pages of dialogue, it drives me nuts when you can only write the dialogue. for the most part, in screenplays, even giving actors directions on expression / tone / etc is considered too heavy-handed; all you get is dialogue, and whatever the actors bring to their characters, and i was too much of a control freak to really trust actors :P

and with game writing you get even less than that! you get dialogue and, uh, a handful of sprite animations to pick from? good luck conveying what you need with that—it seems like an interesting challenge, and also means that you probably end up just spelling out more for the player.

but i also found the repetition a little soothing/nice, in its own way—it's not just some narrator telling you Vivi has changed, it's Zidane-the-pseudo-adoptive-older-brother-of-Vivi noticing that Vivi's changed, or Marcus-the-random-soft-spoken-stranger noticing that the princess has changed—and to notice someone's changed, you have to know them really well to begin with—it's a beautiful way to show how the cast is slowly pulling closer and closer together.

(this is one of the big advantages JRPGs have always had as a medium, i feel—really pulling you into the journey, and allowing you to experience all these small moments of character growth and interaction in an organic way, in a fashion that would be unbearable if it were, say, a 40hr movie rendition of the same thing. ~~though i guess there are people out there watching Let's Plays and stuff so maybe i'm the weird one here...~~ i started reading War and Peace a few weeks ago and have been thinking a lot about how it accomplishes a lot of the things i love about epic-length RPGs; remind me to write that post sometime)

ANYWAY, as a final passing thought: the ATEs ("little cutscenes showing what other characters are doing while you wander around the city") called my attention to something i hadn't noticed before—the interesting / subtle / dynamic ways in which FF games mess with cast-based storytelling. FFIX does a surprising number of party splits and reunions, and you don't actually get a lot of control over who you have in the party until the very end. that, combined with lots of scenes in which the party members split up and have quiet moments with just 1-2 characters, adds a lot of texture to the game, and deepens your investment in all of them ~~(even though i kind of resent having to use Quina against that earth guardian qq)~~. it reminded me of what FF13 would do just a few games later, and also some stuff i vaguely recall FF6 doing, and it would make an amusing blog post to research & write sometime. (it also reminded me a bit of Tenra Bansho Zero, an interesting Japanese pen 'n' paper RPG that explicitly calls out "don't split the party" as a bad rule of thumb, and has mechanics to actively encourage you to break up your party into smaller groups frequently, to do more interesting / dynamic character development scenes. spiffy.)

(4) final passing thoughts on set pieces & space

it's interesting to me, years after playing these games, that what i remember most clearly are the set pieces. in FFIX, it's the opening theater performance and (of course!) the swordfight minigame, as well as the Festival of the Hunt. in FF8, i vividly remember protecting the Garden from invasion: i remember all the crazy logistics and the thrill of arranging everything just so and punching dudes while swinging from ropes, hell yeah.

and it makes me curious about what it would be like, to try and pack a game more densely with these set pieces, make it where it's all glorious thrilling memorable sequences like that. because, disappointingly, i think some of FFIX's late-game dungeon design is rather flat—Ipsen's Castle is a cool concept, but has a confusing and uninspiring interior, Mount Gulug's forgettable, and so on. i guess you need to space the exciting moments out a bit, pacing-wise, and minigame-centric set pieces are always going to be risky (not everyone wants to repeat the swordfight minigame fifty times to impress the Queen), but when i look back to times i've put a JRPG down, it was rarely when i had to level up, or when it was hard, or whatever—it's when the game was starting to feel stale.

i'd also like to do an extended bit, sometime, on how RPG level design is so much about mediating movement through space in an emotive way (as opposed to the core functionality that e.g. platformer level design entails). the way you can feel the "bigness" of Treno just by the way you're forced to move through it, how Daguerro's quirky little levers and water-systems and such highlight the quirkiness of the whole institution, are two examples that spring to mind; there's plenty of others.

finally, the way that the first minute of this song just plays on loop the whole time you're equipping your party for the final battle is freaky as fuck, that is some A+ underappreciated sound design i never noticed before, bless you Nobuo Uematsu.

and yeah, that's a wrap. FFIX was really fun and joyous and tween-aged me had solid taste. god bless modern ports

Party Coherence Factor

queenlua — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 22:17:51 GMT

i have seen this called the "D&D problem": when you have a large cast of disparate characters going adventuring together, how do you actually make it make sense for them to stick together?

the classic case is "why the fuck is the lawful good paladin traveling alongside this chaotic neutral rat bastard sorcerer"—and while you can come up with plausible near-term rationales for this ("the town you both were in was suddenly under attack, and thus you banded together to fight a common enemy"), it's reaaaally hard to stretch some plausible reason over the course of an entire adventure.

in D&D, folks tend to just kinda "go with it" because, on a meta level, we just wanna play a goddamn game with our friends.

in JRPGs, we are often also asked to kinda "go with it", but to varying degrees involving various slights-of-hand, and i find it super entertaining to squint at games and figure out, how much of a fast one is this game trying to pull?

my favorite case is Chrono Cross. there's a point, relatively early in the game, where you honestly don't have any incentive to go on. you got warped into a crazy alternate dimension, you figured out a way to warp back to your home dimension, and you saved the life of the random cute chick who helped you out while you were in alternate-dimension-land. you can just go home now!

but random-side-character Macha says, "hey, aren't you curious what that sketchy villain dude's deal is?" you can choose yes, and go track him down. or you can choose no, and... Macha proceeds to chide you for LACKING A SENSE OF ADVENTURE, and then you can choose yes or no again, until you finally just choose "yes" and go on an adventure.

and all your party members—all of them! just kinda go along? usually for "reasons" that are explained in literally one throwaway sentence. it's wild and silly and you're definitely not supposed to think about it too much, just go with it.

so yeah, Chrono Cross gets an F grade on Party Coherence Factor.

off the top of my head, here's grades for other random games:

FFXV: gets an A-, surprisingly. the plot's sort of a chaotic mess, but not in ways that drastically affect the believability of "these people would in fact join together to do these particular things"—it's a king and his royal-guard-slash-childhood-friends; of course they're sticking together. the ding is because it's never entirely explained why collecting all the astrals + royal arms is a higher priority than, y'know, anything else you could be doing to save your kingdom, but i think the assumption is that we're going by Anime Power Level Rules and everyone understands Noct needs over nine thousand to beat the big bad or whatever.

FFXIII: also gets an A-. as awkward as the whole l'Cie mechanic can be, it does present a very convenient forcing function wherein everyone involved is real damn motivated to stick together, because everyone else wants to murder them. i do vaguely remember finding it a bit surprising that everyone was so on-board with the mission to rescue Sazh and Vanille on the Palamecia, but everyone was kinda buddies by that point so good enough.

FFIX is like... a B? it's very coherent in the early part of the game: while not everyone has the same motivation (which is what FFXV and FFXIII had going for them), their motivations very neatly align—Steiner and Zidane are both determined to protect Garnet, Vivi wants to learn more about the other black mages and that seems to correlate really well with wherever the fuck the others are going, Freya's hometown gets obliterated fairly early on and her boyfriend has Tragic Anime Amnesia so it's not like she has much better to do...

but it gets a little tenuous later in the game. for instance: when it's demonstrated that Kuja is a real and potent threat, it sure seems like we should be sending a whole goddamn army to the Desert Palace rather than just Zidane and his ragtag buddies. also Garnet's insistence on not telling Cid that we're off to fight God is maddening, etc etc. basically, once the conflict goes global rather than strictly personal, it seems like it should have more of a global magnitude, but—hey, just go with it! it's fun fantasy adventure, making it global would be strictly less fun :P

anyway at this point i got bored of assigning ratings, but, feel free to share your own Party Coherence Factor scores in the comments or w/e

loosely-related literary ideas that have been bouncing around in my head lately

queenlua — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 10:14:52 GMT

1)

This past weekend I read James Joyce's "The Dead," allegedly one of the best short stories of all time. Spoilers: it isn't.

Oh, I see what it was trying to do. Like a good neurotic overachiever I've now read five essays on the damn story, to make sure I didn't miss anything.

But the great "twist" at the end, which the whole story hinges on (has to hinge on, due to how little motion there is elsewhere), just fell utterly flat.

Here's your situation.

Your wife, who you've been married to for years and years, who you have a child with, tells you that the last song she heard at the party tonight reminded her of a boy who died young. She tells you this in the darkness of your bedroom, close to tears. She says he was seventeen, and he sang love songs outside her window. What do you do?

You may be a little startled—this is something new, something you hadn't known before. But that's what I love about people; they never stop surprising me, no matter how grouchy and jaded I get. Maybe you're a little sad, wondering why your wife never shared this with you before. Maybe you ruminate a bit on life and death. Certainly I hope you hug her.

Joyce's protagonist, instead, feels a sharp flash of jealousy—I'm younger than the protagonist, and even I can't imagine feeling anything like jealousy over something that happened in my partner's life when they were seventeen; that's so damn long ago. And then the narrator ruminates wistfully that he's just never loved as passionately as a seventeen-year-old kid, and thinks about the way the memories of the dead haunt us living souls, and then the story... tapers out.

It's not awful, but I couldn't help wondering: does this husband talk to his wife? does he know anything about her? does he care? (Maybe that's Joyce's point; the protagonist is meant to be a bit of a loser. But the story gives him the last thought, gives him just a little too much weight, if it's meant to be a subversive thing.)

And now for the very personal jab—to some extent I think all criticism is about the very personal things, is about that finicky question of, does this story affirm the kind of world I believe in? And, no, it doesn't. Again, it's not awful—the final image of the story is very beautiful, and I think meditating on how much the dead live among us and influence our lives is quite wonderful. But the professor takes this revelation and responds with strange resignation. He thinks how he has never loved anyone as passionately as that seventeen-year-old kid—but neither does he see any virtue of his own quieter life, or any impetus to change, he just takes it as an excuse to... continue, as a passenger in his own life.

You can tell it's personal because I'm being unfair. Not everyone can be gung-ho and finnicky and relentless as you, Lua. But still, it doesn't work for me. O how I wish he'd hugged his wife at the end, and held her as she went to sleep. That would've felt like an affirmation of something. Instead we've just got the snow, general all over Ireland, and it's very pretty but that's all it is.

2)

I went to a writing seminar recently, led by a rather popular YA author. The seminar was about writing novels in general, but someone raised their hand and asked if there was any advice specific to writing YA novels.

The author's response was interesting—she asked what she meant by YA, exactly? Because nineteen-year-old protagonists don't count as YA just because they happen to be teenagers.

She said something strange has happened to YA lately: adults started reading it, because YA was offering a more positive and optimistic attitude toward(, paradoxically), adulthood and responsibility, and that was something people were craving, that adult fiction didn't have. YA was also more willing to blend genre and literary sensibilities, another thing people were craving. So "YA" as in, YA aimed at twentysomethings, has blown up hugely, but it's left a bit of a void for twelve-to-fourteen year olds, and the author concluded something's going to have to fill that vacuum, and we're going to end up talking about not a YA market but which YA market.

I wouldn't consider myself especially fixated with YA, but I do read it some, and that resonated with me—modern YA often leaves a good feeling because you're hype about the kind of adults the kids will become. Contrast this with, damn, is it too much of a potshot to say "any John Updike protagonist?"

Or contrast it with "The Dead." Not as mortal of an offender, but still—it couldn't even give us two people holding each other in the end. How's that story supposed to hold me, in either sense of the word?

3)

Science fiction's another interesting case. Despite occasional yeast infections like the Sad Puppies, I'd argue that scifi's general tendency is toward progressivism and optimism, due to the nature of the genre. Yes, there's plenty of dreary dystopias to be found, and yes, there's plenty of tiresome alpha males shooting lasers. But thinking seriously about the future, about story-experiments, requires thinking fully about the future, endeavoring to embrace every possible worldview, or at least understand it.

I've heard the argument that fantasy is inherently a bit conservative, for similar reasons. A great deal of its magic relies on harking back to long ago, traditions, remember-whens, and all that.

4)

An aside: I find Ender's Game interesting because so many people read it in middle school, at an age when one's tastes are both still-forming and undeniable. You'd swallow the whole book in one night without a single thought for whether it was cool, or classic, or proto-fascist or whatever; you just knew it was a hell of a banger.

Most people I know nowadays are a little embarrassed to have liked Ender's Game once upon a time; their tastes are more literary nowadays, and the page-turner revenge fantasy doesn't fit into that palate, let alone a page-turner revenge fantasy written by a homophobe. A few wonderful, insufferable hipsters will profess a love for Speaker of the Dead over Ender's Game. There's plenty of tech nerds who don't follow io9 and still think the nerd revenge fantasy is fucking kickass thank you very much.

As for me?

It was a banger. I don't think I thought about it overmuch, past the page-turner-y thrill, and I haven't read it since.

But the one scene that's stuck in my memory clearly all those years is when Ender's finally, finally reunited with his friends, leading with one of the few decent kids in the novel: "Salaam," said a whisper in his ears, and oh my god it's Alai! Alai, who was my favorite; Alai, who I suspected was the cutest. And all the rest, hand-in-hand, kiddos from all over joining forces to save earth.

Yeah. That shit appealed to my Girl-Scout-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbayah sensibilities.

5)

My parents saw Green Book and loved it.

I didn't have to get more than two sentences into the description before rolling my eyes. Some generic Oscarbait white savior film. I actually hate most movies so it takes hardly anything to make me not see one, but still.

I'm sure my parents thought it was very heartwarming, probably progressive, even. I'm sure the fancy movie executives, around their age, thought similarly when casting their votes.

Meanwhile my city, which is known for trending very young and very progressive, convinced the local cinema to pull their previously-planned "Oscar-winning-movie" showing for, uh, literally anything else, because I guess there's a bunch more people than me rolling their eyes here.

6)

Coupland: "Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called Breaking Bad. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is Breaking Bad."</a>

7)

We've strayed a bit.

I saw a thread on Twitter the other day, where someone was getting irked by "adults transparently writing YA fiction for other adults," saying it's creepy/weird/stunted.

I kind of get where she's coming from. I don't want saccharine bullshit in my fiction. Or, worse, recycled and tedious and shallow fiction.

But look at the recycled and tedious and shallow shit that gets churned out for adults all the time. Green Book. Urgh. Actually, let's take a potshot at one I've actually seen: Shawshank Redemption. Fuck that movie. And it's #1 on IMDB! (The #2 film is good, at least—The Godfather holds up well. But gosh, you can tell how much I don't like movies, can't you.)

8)

There's no summary here that wouldn't be trite, or overgeneralizing, so I'll leave with this: right after finishing "The Dead", I popped open a book of Lu Xun short stories, written right around the same time as Joyce, and damn are they charming the hell out of me. "A Madman's Diary" was creepy as hell to read before bed, and I ached for Kong Yiji.

Who knew, after reading a flurry of milquetoast-progressive short stories from Tor, and that disappointing story from Joyce, that I was going to find all my delightful short reads in a volume I was planning to just read for research purposes. Well, now it's for pleasure, too, and I can't wait to share what I find.

some books i read lately (february edition)

queenlua — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 11:28:37 GMT

this looks like i read a lot, but most of these are very short and also very low-effort, because i was kinda shit in january ngl

Top Elf by Caleb Zane Huett

After reading that big pile of nonfiction back in November/December, I wanted something light and bright and cutesy, a fictive palate-cleanser. And, hey, this one was Christmas-themed to boot!

tl;dr: It's a kid's book. It's a cute kid's book. If I had a kiddo in my life I would give this book to them. There are awful puns that I laughed a lot at, and there is lots of charming SCIENCE because one of the elves is a wonderful Christmas-science nerd, and there was even a potshot at Ayn Rand so good times all around.

I'll confess I bought this book almost entirely because I fucking adore the podcast that the author does with a friend, but hey, there are worse reasons to buy things, and I had a fun time :)

The Lies that Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Meh.

I feel a bit badly that I don't like Appiah's books more; he seems like a lovely dude. But, as with his other book Cosmopolitanism, my regret is that he doesn't push far enough. He tells us about how race is more complicated than we think. He tells us how gender is more complicated than we think. He tells us how class is more complicated than we think (and also, weirdly, he does his own take on the Veil of Ignorance argument). It's not an unpleasant read; it's full of interesting anecdotes illustrating all of these fuzzy distinctions (the aforelinked bit on Amo Afer was great, the story of Michael Young's life, beyond merely "the guy who invented the term meritocracy", was great, etc). But it didn't leave me with answers to questions like: how much should identities bind us? how do we determine when an identity is being useful or not? and so on, except near the end, where he adopts the notion of treating "identity" as a sort of additive, liberatory thing—i.e., one should not feel pressured to be a "southerner" vs a "west coaster", or "femme" vs "nonbinary", or "American" vs "immigrant" or whatever, but should instead celebrate a self-conception that mingles all these together in a proud, glorious mess. "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me." I'm intrigued but he didn't finish the job.

Props for his, uh, particularly spicy tackling of the whole cultural appropriation issue. "Accusing people of cultural appropriation means you're endorsing the TPP" is a take I did not expect in the middle of this otherwise mild book.

Art and Fear by Bayles & Orland

Ordinarily I'm not super into Books About Writing or Books About Artmaking, because they seem to focus on the most elementary or mundane things over and over. But this book came so strongly recommended I gave it a try.

I liked this book immensely, particularly its focus on habit and practicality—not just generic advice like "write every day," but musings on how to hit stuff like a daily mark more consistently, what communities and practices better foster artistic growth, and so on. And it's written in the kind of tone that I, as a fundamentally squishy and dreamy person, most appreciate—while never denying that artmaking is hard, that going at it without the support of a community and with all the built-in precarity and uncertainty that comes with it is hard, the book pushes you to find a way. There's urgency here but it's because your work is at stake and it's up to you to make it happen. (Contrast against the more yell-y "GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER" style of advice that tends to be in vogue these days. I'm concerned enough about artmaking for its own sake; all I need is someone to acknowledge how serious that is, without the extra yelling.)

I also liked their description of how you acquire style, generally. While I've never worried overmuch about finding my "style", this seems to be a preoccupation particularly among young visual artists, and they should probably just have this whole passage in boldface over their desk.

Everything past the first section repeats itself too much, but the first section is gold, and rather short, so give it a read if you've got a chance.

a giant pile of so-so AtlA slashfic

[when i am chronically sleep deprived] i tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

I commented a long time ago about the "50's style of scifi writing"—where there's an emphasis on so-called transparent prose, sparse but specific details, no flashy stylistic tricks, and so on.

The thing about these stories is that they often feel devoid feeling for me, in an important way. I totally get why some people care more about technobabble than squishy stream-of-consciousness nonsense, and why people were so into the arm's-length emotionality of, say, "The Cold Equations," but I just don't like it personally.

Chiang, in what I've read of him, seems a clear inheritor of this tradition. He's not out here doing bombast or crazy stylistic tricks, and his characters are often forgettable, because they're not the point. He takes an interesting thought-experiment, finds a narrative for it, and puts it to the page in as clear and clean a way as he knows how.

However, sometimes what Chiang's doing really works for me. For instance, "The Story of Your Life" absolutely slays me each time, and it's because he chose such a powerful framing narrator for the story. Of course the narrator's a little detached, of course the narrator's a little dry; she's an over-intellectual academic. But even so, her raw feeling for her daughter, her husband, for everyone can't help but emanate through even her very restrained, balanced prose. And so I can quote the opening paragraph of the story from memory, and quote it at random people all the time, because it's so powerful, and the power grows each time I reread the story:

Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s near midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomethings swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”

I hadn't read Chiang in a while, and was surprised to learn that he wrote a novella, so I picked The Lifecycle of Software Objects up.

And this novella almost works for me. The material is super-interesting (humans raising AIs, but instead of the AIs becoming superintelligent destructive monsters, the AIs are more like disabled kids, needing special attention but getting shafted by society), and Chiang brings in a bunch of interesting angles on the core conceit. The natural comparison to stuff like Second Life, which formed such devoted communities around such a surface-level-trivial thing, gives you all kinds of spooky-tingling feelings while reading.

And while you feel for the AIs, the story seems to be loosely built around the relationship between Ana and Derek, and that aspect just didn't do a ton for me. That, plus the fact that the ending seemed a little forced, means it fell just short of hitting the same mark that "The Story of Your Life" did for me.

Not a bad read by any means, though, if you're intrigued by whatever summary you read.

Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai

Picked this up on a rec by missxylia and boy I'm glad I did.

This whole book is a testament to the sheer beauty and vibrancy of a liberated mind. The protagonist is a schoolgirl, and thus powerless and restricted in the way all schoolchildren are—you have parents telling you to do shit, and you have a school you have to go to, and chores you have to do, and a place you have to live, no matter how you feel about it. But she is utterly free to think whatever she likes, and she thinks about everything. Big questions, which she wrestles with in a way that belongs to her and no one else. Small annoyances, which sting with just how rude and relatable they are (e.g. her true feelings on a school-friend, who she doesn't even like but humors anyway). And she changes her mind over and over—she is trying to be a "good girl"; she's really an awful girl; but she tries to be good sometimes; she doesn't want to be good; she can't decide (and really, how often do any of us ever finally decide anything?). Over the course of a single day (!!!), she thinks the most unpardonable and daring and petty and profound and mundane things, ponders duty and suicide and creepy old men and a blind cousin and what it must be like to be her mom and so much more; I can hardly believe the book's as thin as it is.

There's some similarity here to Virginia Woolf—both of these authors are interested in getting as close to the mind itself as possible. But whereas Woolf is trying to pull you in, trancelike, to some Glorious Artistic Whole, the point where a hundred different minds converge—well, Dazai just hones in on one mind, and he has a razor-keen insight into just how much stuff we think about on a daily basis, and from there he merely brings it all into the same sharp, equal focus. The resulting assemblage is both maddening and illuminating—but first-and-foremost it feels real in the same sharp way an Ansel Adams photo feels real. (The photographer comparison is really sticking to me, here.)

This book is watching the process of becoming. Not becoming anything in particular—I've no idea what the protagonist will be like when she grows up—just becoming. I mean, I think everyone is becoming all the time. But young girls are especially so, and it's an exhilarating thing to experience.

This slim little novella made me want to think more freely and powerfully myself, and that's as great a gift as anything a book could give.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

An odd-but-charming little book. The author uses the color blue as a jumping-off point for musing about a broad swath of topics: failed relationships, how the science of color works, anecdotes about the Sar-e-Sang mines (where lapis lazuli is found) and Newton's experiments with light, musings on loneliness, and so on. I have often wondered what a successful "prose-poem" would look like, and, well, here is one. It's slight enough to be read in a couple hours, so if the concept intrigues you, may as well pick it up at a library.

I found one review that compared it to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the sense that both are composed of little aphorisms and anecdotes, and I find this comparison delightful. How a mopey 1800s continentalist philosopher stands in dialogue with a hippie 2000s MFA prof is an exercise left to the reader.

Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

This is actually just three essays bound up into one book. There's decent tips for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself, but didn't find much here that was new to me. Possibly useful for beginning writers; turns out a lot of the advice for writing-people-who-are-unlike-yourself is identical to just plain good writing advice.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

WOAH I ALMOST FORGOT I READ THIS ONE.

This book seems to have been written somewhat as a reaction to the Bloomberg articles that hype up the notion of a "gig economy" and see the development of high-tech platforms as some radical reshaping of the economy. Srnicek argues that this new "platform capitalism" is not a new thing at all, but a predictable result of past trends.

Chapters 1 and 2 give a concise overview of the three major economic events of the past half-century: the 1970s economic downturn (which prompted corporations to bust unions and cut back like mad, to try and remain competitive), the 1990s tech boom (in which we laid down a fuckton of fiber and other internet infrastructure via a mixture of government policy and VC funding, which led to a short-term boom/bust but yielded further ground for long-term later developments), and the response to the 2008 financial crisis (in which we cut interest rates like mad, which seems mostly good, except it reduces incentives to invest, and since it's already so easy for tech companies to hoard money overseas relative to other industries, since they can just #yolo license their software wherever, they end up squatting on huge piles of cash).

Chapter 3 is where Srnicek describes two kinds of "platforms", what he describes as "lean platforms" and what I'll call "monoliths." Lean platforms are things like Uber and TaskRabbit—companies that operate by owning as little capital as possible and employing as few people as possible. The conditions that have allowed these companies to thrive, Srnicek argues, are somewhat anomalous (low interest rates, favorable environment for VC investment, etc), and seem likely to implode the second the winds of monetary policy shift—even though Uber doesn't employ the vast majority of their workers, they still can't manage to turn a profit. Thus (the argument goes), if Uber's gonna survive, it'll either turn into a luxury service (i.e. start charging what it'd actually take to earn a profit) or have to transform its business model (i.e. become a self-driving car company, and then it actually owns some capital, etc).

The platform monoliths, on the other hand, are any big players whose business is amplified by having access to big data. Google and ads is the obvious case, as is Amazon and retail. Big Agriculture and whatever the fuck Monsanto's doing is less-obvious but perfectly legit. These companies have to compete for data if they want to stay competitive in the marketplace—data, Srnicek asserts, is a bit like the crude oil of our time—a resource that companies can "refine" to extract value/profits. Consequence: this means companies are going to keep trampling all over "data privacy" notions as long as they can, because the capitalist imperative. Consequence: data uniquely benefits from network effects, e.g. I join Facebook because all my friends are already there, which means this data shit amplifies capitalism's already-strong tendency toward forming monopolies.

I... wow, summarizing nonfiction takes forever.

Anyway, this is a pretty slim volume, and I am not an economist so my knowledge of this shit is kinda sketchy, but it was a pleasant read. The discussion of how interest rates and various federal monetary policy things had such crazy ripple effects all throughout the economy in the 1970s downturn + 1990s bubble + 2008 crisis were super-interesting. Comparisons of Uber/Lyft drivers to the much older "farm laborer" type of work, where you show up at the farm one morning and hope they've got some work they want to pay you for that day, were interesting. (Also I think the term "hyper-exploitation" should become more common just so we can describe what we, as like, a world society, are doing to certain sectors of employment.) I'm actually somewhat unpersuaded that all the lean platforms must either Go Big, Go Lux, or Go Bust (I've heard arguments that e.g. Uber could be profitable tomorrow if it just stopped investing in growth, though I haven't looked at the term sheets—at the very least it seems like there should be a state where you are "lean enough" to be actually profitable), but the brief glimpse into how data is transforming not just my industry but every industry was... interesting.

anyway yeah that's my armchair economics of the day

Kitchen Table Tarot by Melissa Cynova

If I were learning tarot from scratch today I'd definitely pick this book. Heck, even though I'm well-acquainted with tarot, this book was a fun, quick read for reviewing the basics—the delightful, down-to-earth, slightly cheeky tone makes the same-old same-old feel new and fresh.

impostor syndrome: the hottest of takes

queenlua — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 22:03:10 GMT

The phrase "impostor syndrome" has made me bristle for a long time, and I think I'm finally able to articulate why:

Say a new hire says that they feel like they don't fit in, that their skills don't feel up to snuff, or that they can't possibly learn the all things they need to do their job.

By telling them "don't worry, it's just impostor syndrome," you are not really fixing those problems. You are telling them "just tough it out; it gets better."

There are times when this makes sense. There are gun-shy new grads who just need an extra nudge to get the courage to push out their first design document. There are people who get temporarily overwhelmed when they're staring down the barrel of a 900-page spec that's about as comprehensible as Egyptian hieroglyphs. So, sure, tell those people that they are qualified and they can do it; a little nudge is fine and reasonable.

But if you're sending this message all the time, if you're saying "oh it's just impostor syndrome" with any regularity, what you're telling the person is that there's only two possible reasons for their organizational discomfort:

1: they are, in fact, bad at their job

2: it's "all in their head" and they just need to be more confident

And both of these put the responsibility squarely on them.

Which means "impostor syndrome" can be used as a dumbass excuse for all kinds of things that are actually organizational problems.

If it takes a long-ass time for the average reasonably-sharp new hire to figure out what the fuck's even going on with your team's processes, maybe you need to fucking document that shit, or have less insane processes.

If someone says they're afraid they don't know anything about Fancy Technology X, maybe offer to just pay to send them to a training on Fancy Technology X, so they have a nice Official Base Set of Knowledge to work with, instead of just muddling along for a few months.

If someone constantly feels like they don't "belong", maybe your team culture is full of domineering asshats who are constantly jockeying to be the "smartest guy in the room," and you should get them to cut that shit out.

If you're a huge company, honestly, you can probably absorb a lot of the time wasted by such organizational problems. People can get used to anything, given enough time. But why would you want that? Wouldn't you rather strive for an organization where people feel empowered and capable, rather than just offering some feel-good messages and a bunch of confused, disoriented people "toughing it out"?

End rant.

moral musings

queenlua — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 06:20:28 GMT

a few threads of moral thought / themes but i've been thinking about lately, or else, seem to be coming up a lot in media i've consumed lately: 

(1) to what extent should we take responsibility for, or else be held responsible for, actions done under some kind of duress?

see: The Fifth Season, a novel which examines the injustice of trauma—people who are traumatized, are much more likely to enact that trauma on others, and are much more likely to be pressed into doing awful things—while the originator of the trauma (the oppressive society, the shitty dictator, whatever) never seems to be held accountable.  surely that's the thing we should be going after?

alternatively, see: this random Twitter thread, which argues for a radical ideal of responsibility: you should take absolute ownership of everything you do, even when it was for survival, even when you were hurting at the time, it's always a thing that you, personally, did.  one corollary of such an attitude: it renders you unimpeachable when holding others to account; not because you’ve never done anything wrong, but because you don’t deny it.  people can always say "but i had a bad childhood" or whatever; if you say "that's not an excuse" and mean it, always, that’s a power move.

my rough instinct, looking at these two views, is probably along the lines of my snarky maxim that you should be "a liberal with respect to others and a conservative with respect to yourself."  you should give other people a break because maybe it will help them.  but you will be a better person, and feel like a more whole person, if you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.  which can mean apologizing for shit even when you had no alternatives at the time.  which can be owning shit that wasn't even really your fault—i mean, what is Jesus praised for, right, if not that.

the point not being guilt, i imagine, but ownership—i know i did this thing, therefore i can choose to not do that in the future; i have power over me.  and so on. 
see also "Moral Luck", the famous and excellent Nagel essay, which opened up a lot of these issues in modern philosophy.  when i show this essay to other engineers, they always just bite the bullet immediately—"well of course justice doesn't mean anything, of course it's just a means of coercing people into what we doom socially-acceptable behavior, why does Nagel seem to think it's so important that justice actually be correlated with blame"—but, well, that doesn't feel quite right to me, though i've never been able to articulate why to my own satisfaction.  (i have partially-satisfactory answers, but eh.)

 (2) to what communities, distributed both temporally and physically, should we be held accountable?

 by this i mean: if someone got away with a bad thing a long time ago, and we just find out about the bad deed now (a year later, a decade later, many decades later; centuries later), do they get to get away with it forever?

see: the whole Kavanaugh thing, which to some extent was about whether it makes sense to punish someone for something that was "kinda" "sorta" socially acceptable three decades ago.  no one wants to be held responsible for shit they did three decades ago; that almost may as well be a different person.  but what if they couldn't have gotten where they were today, without "getting away with" something in the past?

that's in the case of an individual; it’s also worth pondering this with respect to families (am i responsible for my father’s sins? need i attempt to make amends for them? ancient societies often seem to answer “yes” to that, but we probably wouldn’t), and with respect to nations (America is quite literally built on the soil of injustice; what can be done about that?).

see: The Color of Law, a book which argues clearly and vigorously for some sort of reparations for black Americans, due to federal housing policy hindering their ability to accumulate wealth during the "boom" years before, during, and after World War II.  reading the book, you feel an urgency at its core: the author knows we must restore justice as fast as possible, or else it’s doomed to slip away forever (and in many cases it already has; for individual lifespans, often, justice delayed is justice denied.) another theme that i thought was important in the book: we—that is, all Americans—do not owe this only to Black Americans.  we owe this to all of us.  making America more just is a project we should all be committed to, and it will make all of us more whole in the end.

see: that one really sick AtlA episode, heh

i think the bit o’ media that brought this question to the forefront of my mind most clearly was a somewhat disturbing twitter thread.  someone was arguing that someone's apology cannot possibly be genuine unless they "turn themselves in" for punishment, clearly implying: to the U.S. justice system.  this person ran in the same kinds of crowds that talk freely about how deeply fucked up the US justice system—how disproportionate it is, how racist it is, how much it focuses on punishment versus rehabilitation, and so on.  you cannot have it both ways.  if the justice system is fucked, then you can't have it apply only when you think someone is particularly bad or unrepentant.  you have to think more specifically—in what way do you want the person to be held to account? specific.

(semi-related sidebar: i don’t think i appreciated, until relatively recently, how powerful the “trial by a jury of your peers” thing is. more specifically: trial by a local, specific-to-your-community jury of your peers. it’s not just about keeping “the people” as a stopgap against “the government”—it’s about keeping “your” people, for some relatively sensible value of “your”, in control of what happens to you. as fallible as juries are, there’s something powerful in the theory that, well, maybe my community judges me less harshly than some rando federal judge from the other side of the country, and that’s okay because my community understands the prevailing social norms and culture in our part of the country. it’s a remnant of federalism, a stopgap against applying the rules too evenly or strongly everywhere.)

to some extent, both of these questions are things we pondered in my college philosophy class—the topic of the class was free will, but naturally that topic brings up a lot of considerations of blame/responsibility/etc—but it’s been a long time since i took that class, and i don’t think i thought about things in quite the same light back then.

the spiral of death

queenlua — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 22:12:05 GMT

So I replayed a bit of Final Fantasy X over Christmas, and—man. While Auron’s “spiral of death” speech doesn’t hit particularly well out-of-context, I rightly remembered it as one of the most affecting moments of the whole game:

Auron: "[Yuna's] strong. She'll make it."

Tidus: "She'll make it? What, so she can die? Why is it...everything in Spira seems to revolve around people dying?"

Auron: "Ahh, the spiral of death."

Tidus: "Huh?"

Auron: "Summoners challenge the bringer of death, Sin, and die doing so. Guardians give their lives to protect their summoner. The fayth are the souls of the dead. Even the maesters of Yevon are unsent. Spira is full of death. Only Sin is reborn, and then only to bring more death. It is a cycle of death, spiraling endlessly."

When Auron says these lines, he is tired. He's seeing a kid finally "wake up" to the reality of the world that he's known and lived for a long time. And he's complicit in it just as much as the foul maesters are, to his own disgust.

It sounds a little hippie-dippy to say so, but, I've thought about this a bit on-and-off throughout my life, when regarding governments, social organizations, and so on—this system we're building, what's it spiraling around? Is that thing horrifying; has it become horrifying?

For instance. The classic case in Silicon Valley is "data." There are so many goddamn "data-driven" companies, which started out as a beautiful, liberatory thing (if you can prove with numbers that this is better then you can just go make it better!). But before long, data turns into a bizarre fetish in-and-of-itself—UX people have to contort qualitative user experiences into "data" to be taken seriously, people represent data dishonestly or end up pursuing certain metrics until they become useless or actively harmful, people who vainly say "I dunno everything just feels worse" are ignored because they can't express their concerns in a spreadsheet, until no one's even thinking about users anymore, they're so damn busy chasing those numbers.

I mean, that's one cynical take, in one domain. Pick your favorite domain, system, whatever—I'm sure you can find plenty of other spirals.

FFX's final act is arguably overly optimistic, arguably a power fantasy—not because they defeat the villain, but because there is a villain, a man with a name who we can slay to make this horrible cycle end.

Because in the real world, the first shock is realizing the spiral exists, and the second shock is realizing no one person can stop it. Even the people who, in theory, could make it stop, you discover cannot, or have bought so much into the spiral that they cannot believe they have the power to make it stop. (Like every other summoner who approached the heart of Zanarkand, and made the hard choice to bring the next Sin into the world, all for just a precious few years' reprieve from Sin's suffering.)

((Also, as an aside: FFX is quite literally a game about letting dead things go. It's interesting to replay it, with that in the forefront of your mind, since that theme is less obvious on a first playthrough.))

a tale of two widgets

queenlua — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 21:29:28 GMT

say i'm in a team of engineers, and everyone else is discussing how to use Widget A to solve a problem.

but i think we should be using Widget B. so i say, "why don't we try using Widget B? i think it's better than Widget A for this."

a Super Senior Engineer could respond with a massive screed, with multiple bullet points, tearing down every aspect of Widget B, implying that it is Total Garbage.

i could then respond in one of two ways:

(1), the most likely, i'll stare at Super Senior Engineer, and i'll stare at all the dudes on his side, and think: fuck it, this isn't worth arguing about, let's just go with Widget A.

i haven't been convinced, and no knowledge was gained, but Super Senior Engineer sure got to feel superior.

(2), i'll buckle down: come up with a point-by-point rebuttal of all of Super Senior Engineer's points, and then Super Senior Engineer will get frustrated that i'm not "listening to him," and no matter who wins (probably not me!) we're both going to leave the encounter feeling unheard and frustrated.

alternatively, Super Senior Engineer could respond with a simple question: "hey, i've worked with Widget B in the past and it had some issues with cache coherency, but what's your experience with it?"

then that opens the door for me to answer: "well, i thought Widget B worked great for [x], but you're right that we did have to deal with cache coherency," and then we'll have a bit of a discussion of how i dealt with that, and maybe we'll still end up deciding that Widget A is best, but i've been heard and maybe Super Senior Engineer even learned a thing about Widget B he didn't know before. or, hell, maybe that even lets me say, "actually, they fixed the cache coherency problems in 2.0," and now maybe we can all agree that Widget B is better!

say Super Senior Engineer does the "massive screed" approach, though. then a colleague comes to him later and says: hey, did you consider maybe not doing a massive screed.

if Super Senior Engineer is being defensive, he could say:

* but i was right, it shouldn't matter how i say it (sure, but we're all squishy humans here so actually it does matter)

* but i care so much about getting this right and i don't want to feel like i can't speak up about engineering problems that are important to me (sure! but don't you want to speak up in an effectual way?)

* but when i argue that way with So-And-So, they argue right back, and we actually do discuss things and change each other's minds (okay, but maybe you and So-And-So know each other better, maybe you and So-And-So generally have an equal number of engineers on each other's sides, and so on... by default you should probably assume someone suggesting an alternative is being brave, and is a little nervous, perhaps)

* but that other engineer didn't even consider my point of view, they didn't even consider that they could be wrong or really consider Widget A (well, you didn't really give them a chance, after that opening salvo, right?)

* look, i'm a Super Senior Engineer, i have to deal with people questioning my decisions all the time, i'm fucking exhausted, i just had a kid, i'm too fucking tired to word things nicely for some punkass junior engineer. (yep! being senior sucks!!! sorry but that's just life. you're allowed to delegate, or just bow out of discussions until you're less tired, you know. but seriously, it sucks, sorry, part of the job.)

okay, i disguised this all as an engineering metaphor. and i think it applies in engineering situations. but really i was thinking of the average level of discourse i see in Certain Parts Of The Internet. replacing the relevant variables is an exercise left to the reader.

Pokémon Card Game vs. Magic the Gathering: A Cursory Comparison

queenlua — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 21:26:30 GMT

so, i played a couple rounds of the Pokémon TCG with the boy a while back.

in particular, the 2018 World Championship decks were on sale right next to the cash register at Kinokuniya, and in general i'd rather dive straight into the deep end of "intense competitive play" rather than fuck around with "starter decks", so i bought a couple and we both plunged in without any previous knowledge of the game.

and from a game design point of view, the contrast with Magic the Gathering is fascinating.

(i'll attempt to write about this in a way that makes sense even if you're not familiar with Magic, but uh, no promises.)

so, if you're coming to the Pokémon TCG from Magic, you look at a card like Cynthia, which basically says “ditch your hand, draw a new hand,” and you automatically think, “that is the most broken shit ever.” see: Memory Jar, the only card to ever get an emergency banning in Magic history, which has essentially the same text. how the hell, we thought, could they have cards like this flying around without completely breaking the game?

there's two reasons Cynthia seems broken, coming from a Magic point of view:

(1) there’s a concept in Magic called “card advantage”—he who has more cards in hand, has more options available, and thus has the advantage in any encounter. in Magic, a card that lets you draw three cards for cheap is considered utterly broken. a card that lets you draw a new hand would just straight-up win you games.

(2) the combo potential for something like that is unbelievable. the reason Memory Jar got banned wasn’t just “drawing cards”—it was because you could combine that with Megrim to just kill your opponent via the act of discarding cards. in general, there's lots of disparate elements in Magic that can interact with each other—card draw can affect life totals, creatures dying can cause more creates to be created, spells can "buff" certain creatures, and so on.

after playing a game of Pokémon, however, i began to understand that, while Cynthia is very good, she’s not broken, for two reasons:

(1) everyone has access to trainer cards. there are no restrictions based on which Pokémon you’re using, what type of Pokémon you’re using, or even what turn it is—you can play as many trainer cards as you want during your turn, of any kind, and they all cost you nothing. compare to Magic: a complaint for years was that blue/black had all the good card draw and counter spells, and since you really needed those sorts of things to be competitive in tournaments, this meant everyone played blue/black. magic responded to these complaints by making the average blue/black card weaker over time, and other cards stronger, so that (hopefully!) any given color you play will be tournament-viable, even if you don’t have access to every good card.

pokémon responded by just saying: sure, whatever, everyone can play all the good cards. which is certainly a very tidy solution.

(2) the lack of instant-speed effects or alternate methods of dealing damage really dilutes the usefulness of card draw. even if you draw the perfect hand, you have to put a pokémon on the playing field, and that pokémon can only attack once per turn, and that is all the damage that will happen. they will (almost always) have to attack six times total to win the game. compare to Magic, where damage can come from creatures, but also from “burn” spells, discard effects, and so on…. the game can end on any turn, for the most part, limited only by the powerfulness of the cards available.

the implications of these design choices, gameplay wise, are fascinating:

(1) the competitive scene seems fixated around consistency—you can easily draw/filter through most of your deck in a game, so you're mostly using trainer cards to get your best Pokémon in hand, then using your best Pokémon in every encounter. Magic also focuses on consistency, but since there's less card draw / filtering, there's a certain amount of randomness that's unavoidable and must be accounted for.

(2) there aren't really combos in Pokémon. each "trainer" card is more-or-less a singleton action; you don't "chain" them together or do anything super-wacky with them. so really you're just putting together the most optimal hand and playing with it.

thus, in terms of gamefeel, Pokémon ends up being a really soothing game, in a certain sense. i'm the kind of person who likes shuffling cards just to relax, so, i like the amount of drawing/shuffling/filtering. it's also a little solitaire-esque, though, which can be good or bad—the ways your opponent can interact with your Pokémon, outside of attacks with their own Pokémon, are rather limited.

but i do miss the combos, the unexpected ways different cards could affect each other, and the overall feeling of interactivity. i understand why they don't have those things—the complexity of your game ramps up enormously as soon as you let people "respond" to things with instant-speed spells, or when things start interacting in surprising ways. it's what makes Magic so famously difficult for new players to learn (and, less famously, so difficult to write a computer program to play). but that dynamism is also what makes Magic so fun and memorable.

anyway, tl;dr "card advantage" is not a concept that applies equally to all trading card games! which is obvious in hindsight, but was really fun to experience in such a direct way.