serakit

WHAT THE HELL, SHOW, WHAT THE HELL!

( Finale Spoilers! )

Protip: advertising your subscribers-only writing group in your rejection letters is super sketch and makes you look like a vanity press.

Seriously, it's framed as joining their critique group will help you improve so that maybe next time you'll produce something good enough to get accepted. Which would be fine and even laudable if it didn't cost money to join their critique group. As it is it just looks like a scam. (Like, I am seriously wondering if they advertised a pro-rate-paying opportunity for months *just* to get a bunch of writers to advertise their critique groups to.)

Are these Google certifications worth anything? The advertising algorithms seem to think I would be interested in. There are circumstances under which I might be (good job, ad algorithms!) if they are worth anything. (We'll see how the python self-study shakes out first.)

I'm not sure if this is new or if I just didn't notice it last year, but the tax software now includes a question about whether I've traded cryptocurrency in the last year.

(I have not. But I have been somewhat worriedly staring at the news of Wall Street investment places getting into bitcoin; that is not going to help with the "this is a ridiculous speculative thing and the sooner the bubble bursts the better off we'll all be" aspect of it.)

And the INEVITABLE bad follow-up take from the Baen Books thing: "There oughta be a law!"

Specifically, that maybe it's time to reconsider Safe Harbor laws and make companies legally liable for speech on their platforms.

This is what the DMCA does. I know of NO ONE who thinks that has worked out well, and malicious DMCA takedown notices are quite common. Do you really want to expand that to the entire internet?

Like, yes, Baen is absolutely being bad here. I am in favor of them losing customers and reputation over this, and for anyone making actionable speech to get gone after, particularly the death threats crowd.

But no, Baen should not be liable for the speech; there are way too many knock-on effects from that which we don't want. Ye Gods, people, think about all the ways a law can be weaponized against the most powerless groups you like and how you will build in systemic blocks that are not "But it's not meant to be applied that way!" before you start agitating for it.

(There's also the usual ranting about how we should expand hate speech laws, but I've been over why that's a bad idea here before; I don't need to do it again.)

I'm reading Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, the book that first named complex PTSD and is still one of the seminal PTSD books. There are some interesting moments where, if you know what else was going in 1992, it becomes very obvious that she's trying to comment on both the satanic ritual abuse stuff and the memory wars without actually coming right out and commenting on either of them. She outright says at one point that therapists going "You have clearly suffered ritual abuse" based on a symptom list should not be doing that and implies that the "ritual abuse specialists" are practicing irresponsibly, but both of these are brief asides in a more detailed discussion about amnesia and recovered memory in PTSD. She also remonstrates the recovered-memory people a bit by pointing out that you really shouldn't need dramatics most of the time: talking about what the patient is currently feeling is usually enough to start memories surfacing on its own, and if after a lot of doing that there are still major memory gaps "judicious use of powerful techniques" may be warranted, and goes on to describe much calmer forms of hypnosis than the ones that got famous, with a heavy emphasis on leaving control in the hands of the patient. And I'm just looking at this like "Yeah, you were totally trying to be a voice of reason without actually saying that's what you were doing." (The book does show its age in this respect: while she's clear you shouldn't use anything on her last-resort list until the traditional approach has failed exhaustively, group therapy and hypnosis have fallen out of favor for that sort of thing these days and no one ethical is still using sodium amytal.)

This supports something else I read recently that was talking about memory gaps and the recovery thereof having been largely uncontroversial within war-based PTSD treatment and only got controversial when people started talking about child-abuse based trauma, which there was much less opportunity for external corroboration, since most of the war memories had a lot of other people present and military reports documenting them. Though I think it also has something to do with that being when the dramatic and unreliable methods of memory retrieval started getting popular. (As an aside, I don't remember which Elizabeth Loftus book I read, but I've read one of them-- one of the later ones, since she talked about experiences she'd had since getting famous. She didn't prove repressed memories don't exist; she proved false memories are possible. That gets lost a lot in discussing her work. As does her resigning from APA suspiciously close to an ethics complaint being brought, almost like someone tipped her off there was about to be an investigation.)

I like studying the history of psychology, and this is a neat example of putting pieces together through context clues in a book about something else: this is how the contemporary people talked about it.

WELL LOOK WHAT CAME BACK!( Cut for Spoilers )

Apparently what hanging out in Magic-related Discord servers gets you is "Hey, what if we had a podcast?" invitations. So, look, I'm in a podcast!

https://www.mtgnexus.com/articles/1084-wnxs-episode-1

Mostly I'm just beyond exhausted. Mystery Hunt is probably the most exhausting event I do every year even when we do it in person; I recall my first Mystery Hunt I was only physically there on Friday and afterwards I was more exhausted than after an entire Arisia. That's gotten a bit better with time and acclimation-- this was my third Mystery Hunt-- but Friday night still ended the same way it's ended the last two Mystery Hunts: Mathfriend gently suggesting that I'm not having fun anymore and would feel better after sleeping.

Mystery Hunt this year was really cool and had some incredibly high production values: they built us an entire MMO with a recreation of the MIT campus and had Hunt in that. According to wrap-up, they were planning that before the lockdowns started with the idea that they'd have a lot of "some team members need to be in the spot in the MMO and some need to be in the corresponding spot in physical reality," but once it became apparent that we couldn't have it in person, the virtual world took on more importance. They took the opportunity to do some neat things they'd never be able to do in physical reality, like designing a round around the Infinite Corridor being truly infinite and having some puzzle unlocks that were dependent on exploring the virtual world.

The story was also very cute and creative, centered on the experimental cosmology department at MIT opening a portal to a perpendicular universe and sending some stuff through, and then sending a professor through. Initially the problem is just "there are errors in the cross-universe communication device we need to fix," and then "we need to fix the portal so we can rescue Professor Yew," (with the MMO's conceit being that it's a projection device to let us safely project avatars of ourselves into the "Perpendicular Institute of the World") but eventually Professor Hemlock, one of the theoretical cosmologists from the other side, comes through into our universe to yell at everyone for scientific irresponsibility because if we don't get all matter back into its correct universe both universes will collapse; they're not meant to mix that way. And no one on our side even thought to ask whether dangerous side effects were possible.

(Professor Hemlock gets the best line in the whole thing: "I'm a theoretical cosmologist at the Perpendicular Institute of the World." "Oh! We're experimental cosmologists." "Yes, I noticed.")

Also cute: while the final runaround took place in game, there were also a couple of the organizers running masked around the deserted MIT campus streaming the equivalent runaround in the real world.

As usual my part in it was mostly the corraling of the non-puzzle puzzles-- there are always one or two that are like "Go make a thing." This year I baked sugar cookies in the shape of the team emoji and sent a picture in, and made sure the pictures of team members eating and drinking (as a subtle hint to not get so involved in puzzling you forget to eat) got sent in. Also one of the items on the obligatory scavenger hunt puzzle was "library stacks," which was right up my alley. (With a pun, not with going into a library.) But I also got to contribute somewhat to the *actual* puzzles this year. Not a huge amount, but I made real, measurable contributions to our progress. Which I think is a first. (I was also intensely delighted when the aftermath of baking the cookies was a Zoom call with HQ. I got my very own mini-interaction!)

We were able to order physical puzzles (as "conference swag", since we were all there for an experimental cosmology conference) ahead of time, although the one I ordered was sufficiently complex that we did not solve it and after solutions were posted I was staring at the solution and I *still* don't get it. I'm going to try again tomorrow with more brain. (I am getting the sense that my weekly call with Mathfriend is going to be *entirely* occupied by post-gaming Mystery Hunt this week.) I am regretful about not ordering the water bottle puzzle because then I would have a Mystery Hunt water bottle.

We were among only twelve teams to finish the entire hunt, but closer to the bottom than the top timewise-- which is *fine*, because the winner has to run next year's, and running Mystery Hunt is a huge undertaking. (As our team leader put it: "we finished comfortably out of contention.") Winner seems to move back and forth between the same few teams each year. We often finish, because we want to see the entire hunt. We are actually one of the larger teams-- certainly larger than some of the ones known for winning-- but we're very casual about it, and heavy attention to efficiency counts for a lot with winning.

(Dinner tonight was delivery food. I in no way have the spoons to think about cooking. Fortunately I was bright enough to take tomorrow off...)