What I've Been Reading; March 2022
Shipping (no, not that kind), more Stephenson, and LessWrong.
Nonfiction
This post on the EA forum about recent funding moves in EA, especially for its breakdown on current efforts in near- vs long- term projects.
An analysis of fandom shipping and why it often occurs between non-canon, male-on-male pairings. Essentially, the author makes the points that shipping occurs when fandom perceives emotional (and not specifically romantic) interactions and tension between characters, and that this tension often occurs between the two male leads of a work of fiction (because of the obvious reason that most of the authors/showrunners of these things are still male). However, it is of course not always so (and the author uses several hetero examples in their post). Specifically tension and interaction between characters happen when their individual character arcs, and not just the romantic subplot, intertwine, so that there is push and pull between the two characters. I would really go and read the post - it's about 9k words long and well worth reading most of it even if you have an initial aversion to shipping.
This quote makes the point in a different wording:
Shipping isn't an unpredictable beast that grows completely independently of its source material. The ways writers craft interactions between their characters–and the places where they invest the most and infuse the most life–are powerful tools that impact how fans view and come to love seeing characters both separately and in romantic relationships.
This analysis makes me also reflect on the shipping in The Practical Guide to Evil, because boy, was there plenty of shipping in there, between basically all the characters and our main character, many of which were later embedded in canon (because the main character is a horny, horny, girl). And all of those ships arose pretty much directly out of the care the author placed into each individual character, in conjunction with the setting - where most major characters had a guiding Ideal or Virtue that very easily came into tension with other characters' Ideal or Virtue, meaning that a lot of character interactions involved growth or development. If, say, a Hero who was given a set of magical armour from a spirit in a lake, whose armour grows in power every morning, meaning the Hero is basically unstoppable, and has therefore never really needed to face a consequence in their life as they wander from place to place fixing local disasters, if this person meets up with another Hero who has a more universal worldview of looking at disasters over more time/space, who carefully judges which situations to intervene in and how for the greatest gain of Good over Evil, then those two Heroes would clash, sometimes only ideologically, and the world view of one would at the end look just a bit more like the other's. Or if a Hero who basically swore off responsibility and gave angels final say in whether or not he should intervene in something (by literally flipping a divine coin, one side meaning yes, the other no) met up with a Villain who believed that you have responsibility for your actions, this Villain would start arguing that the Hero made the choice of whether or not to flip the coin in the first place and therefore had responsibility (and was agentic).
Whew, that was a bit more about shipping than I was prepared to write.
TL;DR, the protag (and audience) of PGTE is horny and the author is really good at setting characters' motivations in tension with each other.The LessWrong best of 2019 series; Engines of Cognition. This month I finished the second book, Modularity. I feel like a lot of this went above my head, but my favourite essays in it were; Kaj Sotala's Building Up to an Internal Family Systems model, Raymond Arnold's The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag", and Yudkowsky's Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities, though all of the essays in Modularity were very good.
Fiction
The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson: Another Neal Stephenson instant favourite. Like some of his other books, this one starts out a bit slow, and brings you on with the premise alone: as the story starts, nano-engineering - manipulating matter at the molecule/atom level - is already a well-established field, and society is in places organised in a strange mix of techno-libertarianism and old Victorian values. The alternative title of the book - The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - indicates the nature of our would-be protagonist but the story only starts focusing on her around the 100 page mark (very roughly). Nevertheless, the titular Primer is basically a pedagog's biggest dream and greatest nightmare. It's an interactive learning tool that "bonds" to the first girl it meets, giving her learning material appropriate for her age, in a format that interests her. For our main character this is lots of things, including but not limited to: martial arts, history, etiquette, and Turing machines, usually in the form of narrative stories where her book-self is the main character. For that last one, it actually relates to the reader several of the lessons it teaches the main character, but I'm not sure one would grasp a full understanding of Turing machines through it - I certainly didn't and this is my third introduction. Were I to describe everything else I felt needed to be described fear I would run over my precepts of both word count and spoilers. The only thing I felt lacking in the Primer was the ending - but it seems to have been purposefully left so, for the reader to finish.
This last month I also read A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, on the recommendation of...I'm not quite sure. The Internet, I guess. This one really disappointed. I had no idea what I was getting into, other than that it was supposed to be a comedy of sorts. Reading it was more like a farce, but, it had one thing going for it, which is that I actually finished it. There was some alluring quality to it that meant I didn't drop it. Maybe I should have - it would probably have filled my reading for this month with something better, but there was some promise in the book; that there would come some payoff to the setup provided. There were points in the book I looked forward to - one specific, highly foreshadowed event in particular - but the book didn't hook me completely. It might have to do with the main character. Though the author might have been doing revolutionary work in his time, it seems to me now that the archetype this character embodied - the ignoramus besserwisser, the morally grandstanding reprobate, someone who looks down on everyone else but is in fact the most faulty character in the novel - is now a mere reality that gets thrown around everywhere as a satire of the political climate. If you like "deplorable character gets into comedic situations" style comedy, I guess this one might do it for you, but it didn't for me.