Dayten Rose - Personal Website & Portfolio

0, 1, or 2

January 23, 2023 February 12, 2023 / supernormal

Doctor Strange holds up a finger in Avengers: Endgame. — Okay I promise I won’t talk about Endgame anymore after this one I’m sorry

This post continues my exploration of spoilers and story arcs.

I saw Avengers: Endgame (which, I’m sorry whatever spirit I angered, please don’t make me mention Marvel properties here again) before every one of my friends back home. It released later for them, somehow, than it did for me in rural northeast Missouri. When I saw it, my group chat allowed me to send one text, one byte, to indicate the number of post-credits scenes: 0, 1, or 2. No “dude guess what happened,” no “I can’t say any more but,” not even “I liked it” or “I didn’t.”

My friends and I pathologize spoilers. Why? Endgame isn’t art. It’s not confronting. Its creators would never suffer a twist ending. What did we all seek from unblemished viewing?

Well, I’ve been thinking about catharsis theory, or any of the explanations for why we like sad and scary movies. No one claims to have cracked this thing wide open, but plenty of reasonable explanations pry the question ajar. All have to do with stimulation.

When we are exposed to the supernormal (gah, I love that), we’re switching on lights in potentially disused parts of our brains. You don’t usually get to enjoy it when a masked figure hurtles at you with a kitchen knife. In the safety of a story, you can. It’s rehearsal.

We experience sadness more commonly, so sad movies are less kicking the wheels and more about taking our emotions out for a spin. Empathy rules, and getting to feel empathy where no one you love is actually being hurt rules more. This feels like it’s on the right track.

Sadness, fear — but also joy and righteous anger. Surprise, the startle response, is another foundational emotion. Surprise is ephemeral by definition. Tragedy and true terror linger on for a long time, so it’s easier to noodle on the depth of experience afforded by those emotions. Why don’t we give surprise a fair shake?

Art is about novelty, among other things. Surprise is the emotional response to novelty. Don’t these two naturally pair?

In D&D, we huck dice all the time. Running that game would be so much easier if I could just describe what I want to happen. But that murders the magic of the game. Dice reflect uncertainty. They are ersatz novelty — something for us non-Lynchian laymen, still chipping through our nonfiction books but watching three Bond movies in a month, who have moments rather than tortured days to consider how the Character’s decision will unfold in the direction of their Motivation, towards Tragedy and Bliss.

If you could tell me how every die roll would turn out, the game would be ruined. If you could spoil it, in other words, the game would lack surprise.

Stories conjure sadness, fear, happiness, anger, and surprise. Some arcana could probably thieve the joy from a happy movie — just try watching a feel-good flick starring a hard cancelled actor. But in a world where it’s easy to steal joy or fear or rage we would need some word for it. We don’t. We only have spoilers, because surprise is easy to spoil.

Surprise doesn’t star in superhero movies. At best it’s on the fourth or fifth screen of the credits. “Robert Downey Jr., with surprise and Buncha Crunch.” The event of Endgame, though, had drama all its own. There were stakes. 0, 1, or 2? We didn’t know what was next. We all wanted to walk away with our own experience, our own opinions, ones that were ours. Spoilers, maybe the thrill of spoiling, is that you can make someone else’s experience your own.

And people love power. No surprise there.

What I played/watched/heard this week

January 22, 2023 February 12, 2023 / list

Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Sam, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings standing and looking out of frame. — Us, one hour into thirteen.

Winding down from a longish week and a busy weekend. Here’s what I made time for this week:

The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. Some friends and I got together to watch them the whole way through, which I’ve done once before. That time was basically delirious, and so this viewing with plenty of refreshments and pacing around fared much better. I ended up focusing a lot more on Frodo’s characterization this time around, which could be the subject of a future post if I keep thinking about it.
If Books Could Kill, a podcast about “airport bestsellers.” I’ve talked a little about my thoughts on criticism before, but I do think there’s an asterisk, which is that you can criticize an idea you hate for the love of ideas in general. I read and enjoy Malcolm Gladwell, but their episode on Outliers made me really think about his style of writing in a way I hadn’t before. Thinking about more things more ways is always goood. This podcast is really good.
Skyfall. It didn’t touch Casino Royale for me personally, except maybe the action scenes kicked more ass. (Except the introductory chase scene in Casino Royale, which kicks the most ass.) Loved Javier Bardem, obviously. As a “Daniel Craig is James Bond” movie rather than a “Daniel Craig becoming James Bond” movie, Skyfall really accentuated the character.
Marvel Legendary. I did also mention it in my golden age of fun post but which I also played a lot more of. Yay games that reward investment with mastery.
Fire Emblem Engage. Great tactics games are hard to come by, and while I haven’t gotten to really dig into this one, I don’t imagine it’ll stray too far from Three Houses, which I loved.
SOUVENIR by BUMP OF CHICKEN. Haven’t figured out while that band is called that thing, but this song will loop until I recover from finishing season one of Spy x Family (season two supposedly to come in 2023!).
Avengers: Endgame. Since I’ve had so much Marvel intake lately, I thought it could be fun to rewatch that movie for the first time since theaters. It was… fine! I’d compare Endgame to a good concert rather than a good movie, in that it bounced energy off of an audience better than it sounds at home.

Without language

January 21, 2023 February 12, 2023 / collection

From linguist John E. Joseph:

“Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion. These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence.”

Multi-hyphenator

January 20, 2023 February 12, 2023 / creativity

Pen drawing of an astronaut with a screen on his chest, displaying a heart. He carries a flag with his own picture on it, with text reading "OK."

Creative people typically do several creative things. I don’t know why. Different creative pursuits utilize many different skills, and writing poetry shouldn’t have anything to do with embroidery or interpretive dancing.

Unless creativity is its own skill, which gives some center to an artist’s web of interests.

I’m not musically inclined, and although I find doodling really relaxing I’m not particularly good at visual arts. I’m terrible with crafts. D&D requires lots of writing, but also a lot of acting, and sharp mathematical intuition. Milo Beckman’s Math Without Number has come up here before, but another point he makes in that book is that mathematicians really don’t concern themselves with the utility of theorems. Proofs have beauty all their own. Pure math is, in my opinion, a creative exercise.

But I don’t really have any math to share, so here’s a doodle instead.

Lost on Usenet

January 19, 2023 February 12, 2023 / internet, supernormal

An old Usenet window reading "Agent - [alt.usenet.offline-reader]." A text box at the bottom reads, "Re: Have you tried Agent yet? Has anyone out there tried Agent yet? A friend of mine said it was really cool." — Photo via web.cortland.edu

I’m pulling archived Usenet pages for a story I’m working on. This is unmistakeably the Internet, but in the uncanny valley of a totally bygone culture.

Whether the old internet is inherently eerie by modern standards — it’s decluttered, styleless, emotionless — or whether it’s only cast that way by horror fiction that uses the old internet (like Welcome to the Game) is, I guess, a philosophical problem. Chicken, egg.

Which, by the way, is there a name for that genre? In fiction it would be called “epistolary.”

Anyway, it has me thinking about discoverability again, the refusal of the internet to show us something unless we know to ask for it. Usenet was an insular community of insular communities. Discord, if you want to compare the two, feels like a vast community full of vast communities. I’ve tried my best to get involved with Discord servers. You can’t get a word in edgewise. The early adopters, the people who were “there,” acquire the clout to moderate a conversation. As a newbie, things become much harder. You can scroll through thousands of users and struggle to find your own name.

“Community” is a bigger word than it’s ever been before. It unshutters a far more grim angle of discoverability. Namely, who will discover you?

Conversely, maybe what fuels internet-interface horror is the idea that you will certainly be seen?

Yeesh. You don’t want to see someone in an empty hall, and you don’t want to cram in a crushed hall. It’s almost like the march of technology asks difficult questions that force us to adapt to new realities. Someone should write several centuries of genre fiction about this stuff.

Dayten’s action-packed guide to Aktionsarten

January 17, 2023 February 12, 2023 / misc

A cartoon of Isaac Newton watching an apple fall from a tree. — Newton ponders after noticing an apple falling from a tree before it bounces on the ground.

I tried writing this once and it got wiped — which is an interesting writing exercise: Write something once, then write it again but frustrated. The result will condense. Purple prose fades to a kind of beige.

Lexical aspect is the boring word for Aktionsart, which describes verbs with respect to time. There are four or five classes, which you can fill out in sort of a truth table. It goes like this.

Achievements are those people you hate. They do everything they say they’ll do, right when they say they’re going to do it. They answer emails first thing in the morning. They drink matcha while they do it. Release, remember, notice, arrive: achievements are instantaneous, and as soon as they start, they finish.
Accomplishments do what they say they will, but you have to trust them. It might take a few business days, and their work might be patient and invisible. Whether out of respect for modern ideas about self-care and work-life balance, or due to the lack of ambition that plagues young people these days, accomplishments take time. Cook, drown, say, fold: accomplishments fulfill some end goal over time.
Semelfactives just sort of badger you. They blink in and out instantly (incessantly), but don’t do anything. Knock, click, sneeze: one giveaway for semelfactives is that you can repeat them over and over. (Note that we’re talking about deep brain cognitive abracadabra here, so even if a sneeze isn’t technically instantaneous, we still talk about it like it is. You wouldn’t ever say, “Oh, what were you doing while you were sneezing?”)
Activities mosey on, hands deep in their pockets, woolgathering over shapes in the clouds or plucking blades of grass to roll between their slow fingers. They’re going nowhere, and they aren’t getting there any time soon. Walk, read, sleep, talk: activities could go on forever and ever.
States are the “sometimes Y” of Aktionsarten. They don’t describe a goal or a lack of goal. They just are, and they stay are. Know, be, love, prefer: states reflect the unmoving world.

Do some of these seem to overlap? Can you think of verbs that fit in multiple categories? That would track. Linguists trade in permeable barriers, not rigid taxonomies. Evidenced, maybe, by the use of “achievement,” “accomplishment,” and “activity” as distinct terms of art.

My takeaway — if, indeed, there is any practical application of Aktionsarten: Try to be kind when it comes to achievements. Forgive people for what they don’t “notice”; judge them by what they don’t “look for.” Forgive people for what they don’t “remember”; judge them by what they don’t “consider.”

4 years of art school

January 16, 2023 February 12, 2023 / creativity

Writer and game designer Matt Colville tells a story about a friend of his, an illustrator, inking a pencil drawing. Of the probability cloud of lines he’d sketched, that illustrator followed the best one with ink, and a professional drawing emerged. Matt Colville asked how he knew which line to follow. His friend replied, “Four years of art school.”

He said:

I generally think that, if you are someone who has it in you to lead a creative life […] I think the path you choose tends to be which, of all the different ways you can be an artist, did you first realize there was a person on the other side of.

Creativity is an impulse — some take it, some leave it — but it’s something that can be practiced. Maybe the path to a creative life starts by realizing that other people like you have gone before. The obsession with artists who change everything, go tortured into the bleak crags of unknown, goes down with the same flavor as the obsession with serial killers. Weird, dangerous, sort of sad. Idolize artists whose life you actually want to imitate.

Then, make like an illustrator, sketch thousands of lines of lead, and practice seeing the picture that already exists.

Smooth jazz scheduling

January 15, 2023 February 12, 2023 / blogging

A late night, smooth jazz post for your Sunday. No commentary on whatever, just one or two clerical notes now that I’ve been doing this for a while. If you’re more interested in the blog rather than the writing of the blog, I’m proud of some of the ideas from yesterday. Although they betray a pretty general lack of understanding about professional poker.

The smooth jazz in question.

Having a space to explore new ideas, start a post before knowing exactly where it’s going to go, has been very productive. Feeling obligated to make that every post has not been so productive. I tend to wax long-winded.

Feeling totally free from the pressure of ever making longer posts sort of defeats the purpose. Daily posting is just numerically more taxing than weekly posting, but it’s a burden I took on because I thought it would help my writing. And it has!

From now on, I want to start identifying between “idea posts” and “collection posts.” Exhibit A, Exhibit B. The first lets me explore an idea, the second lets me share my collection — and in doing so, encourages me to collect more in my day-to-day.

I won’t be going on any strict posting schedule, but I would expect two idea posts Friday to Sunday, and one Monday to Thursday.

Then, of course, there’s planning posts like this one. Hopefully these are disappearingly rare. Next time I go for it, though, will be when I talk Substack and ideas worth sharing.

Kaiju poker

January 14, 2023 February 12, 2023 / review, supernormal

Daniel Craig as James Bond and Mads Mikkelson as Le Chiffre play poker in Casino Royale.

I’ve been wanting to write about poker for a while. I played it for the first time in a long time while snowed out in Buffalo. Someone told me that beating young men at poker is easy: you just don’t be a dumbass. Gambling hijacks a part of the male brain. Thoughts like “How many Queens are left in the deck?” and “What hands are better than my hand?” turn into “All in? All in? Should I go all in? I should go all in. All in. I’m all in.”

Hope Poker is of the same genre as Hope Chess, in which you try and outwit your opponent rather than just playing the game that’s in front of you. That’s literally a line in Casino Royale. Bond says to Vesper,

“Then you’ll know that in poker you never play your hand…you play the man across from you.”

Which, that’s just silly. The only person you play in poker is the one sitting in your seat. Good poker players beat bad poker players because they actually know if their hand wins in most cases, and because they see far enough in the future to bail before making a stupid bet.

I’m not a great poker player. I’m not even a good one. But I did watch Casino Royale recently, and I just started reading Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle. One is a poker movie, the other is a poker memoir.

Actually, that’s not even true. Casino Royale is a spy movie with poker themes. (And I guess, The Noble Hustle is a memoir with poker themes.)

The differences between the poker scenes in these two works are actually really instructive, particularly because one is fiction and the other is nonfiction.

Take hand probabilities. In Noble Hustle poker, we’re stuck with Wikipedia probabilities. 2.6% for a full house, 4.83% for trips, 0.0032% for a royal flush. So take a full house. In a five-player hand (and I’m taxing my memory of probability math here), the chances you don’t see a full house are 88%. Ish. In ten hands, odds are you’ll see one full house.

In the final hand of Casino Royale, something like three of the players at the table all show increasingly high full houses. Probability-wise, it’s more of kaiju movie than a poker movie.

Oh no, spy movies aren’t realistic. One detail, which I sort of love the filmmakers for including, is how each player’s stacks change dramatically between shots, implying that we’re cutting a lot of hands. Presumably the high card hands (17.4%) and the one pair hands (43.8%) just aren’t worth our time. Which, you know, it’s also not worth our time to watch James Bond get a good night’s rest, put on his deodorant, price shop for fresh produce.

Half of the difference between James Bond and Colson Whitehead is odds. The other half is that Colson, like the rest of us, has to live moment-to-moment, while Bond only has to live jump cut-to-jump cut.

Remember that next time you find yourself dazzled by a friend’s Snapchat story.

One other parting thought: On the morning I played poker in Buffalo, we also watched Moneyball. A friend of mine, a marrow-of-his-bones football guy, told me that the conflict of that movie — “sports are a number game” versus “sports have an ineffable, artistic quality” — is still very much at large. You figure poker players must feel this, too, behind their dark sunglasses. On the other hand, I think all chess is Billy Beane chess.

The difference is that a football or a baseball game could be decided by a rainstorm, by cheers, by elevation. Bluffs are always on the table in poker. Chess is surgically methodicalized. It’s a game of perfect information, and minimal chaos.

What does it tell us that chess is robotic, while poker and football are “intuitive” or “art forms?” It tells us that most people like to believe they can ride chaos upward.