my journey to one million dollars pt. 3

cha ching baby

progress

Progress on millionaire status has plateaued since my most recent resolution. I hold strong. The lives and well-being of do-nothing flâneurs everywhere depend on this project’s success.

I have created a totem to guide me in my journey to a million:

today in history

Today (10.2, when I wrote this section) was the day Thurgood Marshall was nominated to the supreme court. Brings to mind two things: one, how completely insane our system of governance is, and two, how completely naive the narrative surrounding the Supreme Court is.

First, it’s pretty nuts how a president gets to appoint members to this goddamned thing, basically guaranteeing that it becomes a partisan appointment, and then, on top of this, it’s a LIFETIME appointment. How many regimes in need of a “regime change” have been demonized for their appointment of lifetime dictators, yet here, in ‘murica, we’re totally A-OK with a bunch of geriatric dunderheads getting to decide life or death for 333 million people. NUTS I SAY

Thurgood Marshall, at least, had a good record on civil rights and was crucial to desegregation and had the good grace to resign before he died to ensure a reasonable passage of power. I’m sure he was a cool guy or whatever. I have absolutely zero interest in the lionization of public servants. Like good ol’ spidermans, great power entails great responsibility, and don’t expect me to shine your shoes just because you have power over elevating and/or destroying my life. You’re responsible for me, not the other way around.

This is something that has always seemed totally bogus to me — propaganda and feverish, breathless adoration of politicians. Kamala is “auntie,” RBG is the “notorious RBG,” in spite of not protecting her “legacy” and failing to discharge her “responsibility” to women by not resigning when she got cancer the first dozen times in 2009, when she could have been replaced by the Obungler.

For some reason, in the hell with a side of tapeworms that is America during election season, we are treated to patronizing and sympathetic depictions of literal ghouls who will knowingly give us nothing that we want, let alone anything that we need.

It’s enough to make you insane, and it’s definitely made me insane. We live in a country that somehow finds unlimited money to finance genocides but simply cannot handle responses to ever-present, never-ending climate catastrophes.

Fuck these people.

depression corner: television edition

I’ve been on a nostalgic TV bender, been watching lots of Doctor House, MD, probably because Instagram clips reminded me that I liked it when I was 16. I still like it. Hugh Laurie chewing scenery and doing an American accent is always enjoyable, and I just can’t get enough of a good procedural. The show has an interesting ontological problem as well, as thematically, it’s set up around the idea of people never changing, addicts being addicts, needing to find meaning in a meaningless universe and so on and so on, but this is at odds with what good storytelling tries to do. We like to see characters change, end up in different places than where they began, become more interesting, or at least, different versions of themselves.

House as a character and House as a show undercuts itself a little, partially due to the fact that even in later seasons where the good doctor ends up in jail or whatever, the structure and routine of the show does not change.

We have the Columbo open, where some character actor gets a disease that causes their butt to explode or for them to forget who they are, and then we’re treated to differential diagnosis after differential diagnosis in different sets, peppered with cute asides with the doctor people we like. Finally, the patient gets sicker and sicker, and then House has a revelation after having an irreverent conversation with another character. Sometimes there’s a deviation from this formula, usually in a dramatic season finale, but mostly, things stay safe.

Reminds me of the family sitcom, where the most important thing is that the family remains intact and nothing changes. The structured comfort of the procedural is reinforcement that we’re all just doing our best, and it’s the same thing over and over again.

doctor board games, md

I got to spend a weekend in a rented house with some friends this past weekend, and it was a delight — I got to play a bunch of games that would otherwise be difficult to play normally, and several experiences got me thinking about the relationship between playing games and having fun.

Games are not always fun or pleasurable, and I’m not totally convinced they have to be. Not every encounter with art must be a dance in the garden of earthly delights.

However, I think board games in particular have reached a point of rupture. The art form has seen dramatic expansion in the short time I’ve been deeply involved with it, and one of the first artistic sacrifices that has been made is competition, and I view this as a potentially fruitful and exciting development.

While not necessarily the majority opinion, the most compelling expectation among connoisseurs of gaming is that the point of games is to determine a winner. The quality of the game is determined by how open the field is for determining the winner. Games where you can lose because you didn’t make the correct book opening are often frowned upon unless there are enough book openings to make creativity possible. Cleverness and creativity are prized, while rote memorization is less so.

The problem with this thesis, which I think is a pretty solid one, is that you run into problems of agreement with the participants, which is essential for a game to function. Many people, for instance, think that playing for second place if first is denied to you is a viable approach. I tend to disagree with this account, mainly because in multiplayer games, we are not participating in creating a social hierarchy where our relationship to first place is relevant. Either you triumphed over a bunch of players trying to get first, or you didn’t. In many sports, placing has a function because it can track competitors over time, and many sports, like running, are tests of individual achievement where you are not allowed to interfere with the achievements of others. You can get into the weeds with this, but in a multiplayer game, where we are interacting, interactions between players are such where it is difficult to say if you took a secondary position because of poor play or because another player failed to balance the scales between player positions correctly.

Maybe you can see where I’m going here, but the interesting thing about recent developments in board gaming as an art form is that the nature and form of competition is being fucked with.

Gaming has entered a sort of reverse-brechtian phase — Brecht was obsessed with turning the emotionally manipulative theater into an intellectual exercise designed to get people to think rather than feel; modern board games, conversely, seem to be trying to get people to feel rather than think. Or, to be more precise, many board games are now trying to get people to understand that feelings are rational, which is a very challenging proposition for people who are obsessed with intellectualization.

Archipelago is an interesting example of this. It’s a colonialism simulator, where you are evil Europeans colonizing in the pacific or the Caribbean. While some of its depictions of the denizens of the area being colonized are a bit goofy, the game pulls no punches. At the beginning of the game, everyone is assigned a card which tells them a condition that can end the game as well as a point scoring category which will be made available to every player. This information is secret. From there, the game takes place in three main dimensions. There is a map, where you will develop and exploit resources, a market where you will sell those resources, and a tableau of cards featuring personalities and events that you will use your money to buy. These cards are inherently destabilizing and can often be used by other players against you, so players are very cautious about what they purchase.

Additionally, as you develop and exploit to your heart’s content, the indigenous population grows angrier and angrier, especially if you do not involve them in your evil project. On top of this, players collectively face resource shortages and crises each round that each player decides if they want to contribute to fixing or not. If enough crises go unmanaged, the game ends with a group loss, unless one player is the revolutionary, a secret role which is sometimes in the game, sometimes not. They win if the island collapses.

Right out of the gate, Archipelago obfuscates two important concepts in games: we don’t know what we’re competing over, and we don’t know what’s going to end the game. The game blurs the lines between performance and competition. Is that other player over there building churches because they need them to end the game, or are they worth points? What if they just like churches?

The process of playing the game endlessly generates ambiguity and moral discomfort. A lot of people dislike it for this reason. People prefer their colonialist fantasies free of questions about the subaltern and the colonized. When you’re forced to act like a patrician, it pushes the limits of what can be comfortably categorized as play. Sure, you might win, but did winning feel like winning?

Maybe this has nothing to do with anything, but something about this feels very comparable to the American experience.

K THX BYE