#its also interesting how names can be deterministic

[omniphilic]

hiya soileil!!!! i wanted to ask if you have personal hcs (headcanons) for mark and how you generally like to imagine him when you write him!

thanks for the ask! 🙏🏾 next time if you're not sure how to spell my name, copy and paste it from my intro post or let autocorrect do its thang (fun fact: my name is sun in french :3), but to answer your question because i think about this A LOT.

I like to combine Comic Mark and Show Mark personality wise. Not to say the show version of him is the greatest person alive, but I choose to keep of his poorer traits or qualities from the comics rendition of him to give him more dimension. Overall, I follow the order of events as they occur in the show.

In my opinion, Mark is extremely Golden Retriever. I think he’s very personable, gentle and affectionate with those he loves, but I also see him as someone who can be stubborn, reluctant to change, impulsive, and self-centered. He isn't met with a lot pushback ever. In the comics this is more prevalent, as the only characters to openly disagree with Mark are portrayed as villains or become evil (Cecil, Robot) over the course of the run.

In the show, Debbie has the balls or the sense to actually nip Mark's nonsense in the bud. When Mark tells her to "Make me" after she tells him to come inside and stop flying. When she says "Is this what you need?" she's forcing him to confront that sense of self-righteousness. Amber is another character that does this, when she gets mad at him for 'ditching them' and leaving them to fight the Re-Animen.

I think Amber was justified in her irritation because he is essentially playing in her face, choosing to maintain the lie of him just disappearing instead of coming clean then and there or at any other point before. He lies to her throughout the majority of the relationship when the rest of his close companions already (William and Eve), choosing to leave Amber in the dark. As she goes on to reveal she knew his secret, I can understand her frustration. How are they supposed to be going steady when he's withholding a quite vital part of himself for.... literally no reason. She would've been safer had she have known, she would have never been mad at him if she had known. There were more benefits to telling her than not telling her.

Eve pushes back the hardest before they get together, like right before Omni-man fucks Mark's shit up and she tells him to stop moping about quitting hero work. He's presumptuous about her life, assuming he knows why she quit as opposed to asking directly, looking to follow in her footsteps because he's overwhelmed by a situation he himself created.

Overall, I don't think Mark is a very nice person. Going back to his conversation with Debbie on the back porch, I find it utterly insane he doesn't apologize to Debbie for essentially threatening her, and there are other instances of him not having others best interests at heart so he can maintain a sense of security—a big one being when he ditches Earth to go coddle her over a broken leg while the whole Invincible War is going on the background.

I think his self-centeredness doesn't allow him to deeply engage with the feelings of others, but his persistent, almost pervasive sense of conscientiousness is what keeps him on the straight and narrow for a large part of his time as Invincible. I feel like his sense of obligation is derived from guilt as opposed to love for humanity.

When Mark is around people he loves, or connects with emotionally, he is more comfortable divulging his true feelings. I find him to be both self-deterministic and rejection sensitive, averse to truly absorbing the opinions of others unless he feels that way himself, as well as being afraid of being told he's doing something wrong.

All of that to say... I don't think he's consciously being a bad person, he's just limited by those he's surrounded by, they don't tell him about himself regularly enough to get him used to that kind of push back.

For the most part I think he's on the level, tries his best to be a good person where he can. He has some capacity for pettiness, but it isn't often his first resort. Some of his biggest moments of growth occur when he's learning of the realities of the world, like during the first Flaxan invasion, where he realizes how brutal the life of a superhero can be, but he rarely ever has moments of self-discovery, understanding and reconciliation. TLDR; this boy needs a therapist.

He has nobody to relate to because nobody is exactly on his level, and the people who should be concerned with his emotional wellbeing (Eve or Debbie) and they don't encourage him to open up.

Often what happens to him in sensitive moments, when he does genuinely try to open up (to Eve, when he is trying to communicate what happened with future Eve) he is very strongly shut down, which would further reinforce his insistence on not communicating his true feelings.

This happens a lot. I think the reason is because of bad writing, honestly— Some people (primarily female characters, like Eve and Amber) act as is needed to move along the plot, I believe, but despite this shortcoming in the narrative I chose to just... bake it into his character.

Mark's upbringing (as a white dude who is written by a white dude) means he not only navigates the world differently but is socialized differently than most likely me or you, so he has a different sense of entitlement, a different understanding of right and wrong, and a lack of curiosity.

i think he would be more knowledgeable in his like. mid-later twenties (wait until I make that Dilf! piece with @wingfleur) but he's bumbling for a fair bit of his late teens early twenties.

He's just a loser trying his best!!! anyway this turned into a ramble imma dip out—

[raps-hellion]

i love it when demigods' names/surnames somewhat reflect their godly parentage.

aphrodite - silena beauregard (beauregard: "beautiful gaze")

apollo - lee fletcher (fletcher: "maker of arrows"), michael yew (yew: an evergreen tree with red berries, once used to make archery bows), will solace (solace: "comfort", sol: "sun")

ares/mars - frank zhang (zhang: "archer/drawing a bow"), sherman yang (sherman: after general william sherman [son of ares], or the m4 sherman tank)

demeter - katie gardner (gardner: "keeper of the garden"), miranda gardiner (gardiner: "garden/gardener")

hades - nico di angelo (di angelo: "angel/of the angels")

hephaestus - jake mason (mason: "one who works with stone")

nike - holly & laurel victor (victor: "conqueror/winner")

[the-necromancer-wife]

"I could explain more about the Laplace Demon concept if you, dear readers, are interested but that would be for another occasion. Another essay hehe."

Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease 🛐

Explaining Laplace's Demon tehory in the context of 14dwy.

Thank you so much for giving me an excuse to talk about this dear anon!

In this post i'll elaborate further about something i said in the end of this super long post. As always TW for 14dwy spoilers!

(Joke's on you, sir, i DID come here for the tales of old)

And this tale in specific is really old. Around two hundred years old to be specific. In 1814 a man known by the name Pierre-Simon de Laplace wrote an essay about a deterministic concept known later as the "Laplace's demon" (although he already seemed to be exploring this concept since 1773)

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.

(Pierre Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.)

But what does this all mean? Well basically this man spoke about a hypothetical "intelligence" (he didn't precisely used the word "demon") that, knowing the precise location of every particle in the universe and where they were headed, they would be able to guess the past and future values for any given time. In other words, we would be referring to an almighty hypothetical "thing" able to see the past and future of every single thing in the universe.

Of course this is all a model, a theory, an exploration on what would happen if something like this existed in the first place. After all, it was all a philosophical essay in the first place, wasn't it?

"Une intelligence ... Rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l'avenir, comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux."

Of course, Mr. Laplace wasn't the only one to explore the idea of an almighty intelligence since other philosophers like Condorcet, Holbach and Diderot also wrote about it.

Now there are several theories (some more modern than others) to explain why an intelligence of this nature will never be possible to exist but there is one that might ring a bell for some people "The Chaos Theory"

Or as some might know it: The butterfly effect.

This theory basically poses that minor variations between the starting conditions of two systems can result in major differences. That's why you say that "A butterfly flying in certain direction today can lead to huge catastrophes tomorrow" it's not something (so) literal but it is useful to illustrate how small can be the variation and how huge can be the result. Of course the change doesn't have to be huge. It can be a minor change, but a change nonetheless.

Btw chaos theory is applicable when knowledge of the system is imperfect, whereas Laplace's demon assumes perfect knowledge of the system, therefore the variability leading to chaos in chaos theory and non-variability in the knowledge of the world Laplace's demon holds are noncomparable.

But, What does this all has to do with 14dwy?

Glad you ask. Actually a lot.

Starting off with the idea of how perfect is this game integrating even its genre (Visual Novel) to the theory. I believe there is no bigger example of the butterfly efect than a Visual Novel, where choosing (or not) certain options can lead to certain results (big or small). Very much like the butterfly effect. And funnily enough, it's us, the player, the embodiment of this umpredictability, since we are the ones that make the choices in the game. We are the antagonists of a hypothetical Laplace's Demon. We are it's antonym. We are an angel. The idea of a change that the system cannot predict. Of course this is questionable. Because as much as we have certain "freedom" we still need to abide by the choices that the very game gives to us.

This takes us back to the question of who is the entity that speaks to us in this cryptic messages on day four? Who is this (allegedly) Laplace's Demon? and what are my personal arguments on why i don't think it's [REDACTED].

Let's start by breaking down the messages. I have them all decoded in my previous post along with a really easy (i hope so) explanation on how the cipher works.

"...ATTEMPTING TO REWRITE WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN ORDAINED SINCE THE BEGINNING"

Here, the entity mentions the certainty of the past, but not the certainty of the future.

"...ATTEMPTING TO DIG UP THE ROOTS OF FATE AS THOUGH IT WERE A WEED AND PLANTING YOUR OWN CORRUPT SEEDLING IN ITS PLACE"

Here, the entity presumably refers to the idea of our (very limited) free will and how we're pushing the limits of the system (in this case by attempting to keep advancing on a route that supposedly leads nowhere else). To make this more clear, this entity speaks to us when we load the save file multiple times trying to keep advancing down that path when the course of action contemplated is that we should just stop and load another save file. We're persistent creatures, after all.

"PERHAPS WE ARE THE SAME, THEN"

Of course fucking ✨not✨

"I TOO FIND ENJOYMENT IN DISRUPTING THE VINES OF KISMET AND WATCHING HIM STRUGGLE"

Now i swear i never heard the word "kismet" before this day. But it seems to be some sort of archaic synonim of the word "fate". Although according to Cambridge Dictionary it is actually "A force that (some people) think controls what happens in the future, and is outside human control"

Also, this entity seems to be having its fun with Ren/REDACTED's struggles. It doesn't really see our unpredictability (yet) as a threat.

"TWAS I WHO GAVE HIM HIS GIFT, AS I DID WITH OTHERS..."

AND THIS

This right here boy oh boy.

I gave him his gift: A rant about human deities through the holy act of programming.

(As pretentious as this title is, please hear me out)

There's a really interesting article named Embracing Λόγος: Programming as Imitation of the Divine that basically says:

The programmer must begin by defining things – material or conceptual. “We are unable to reason or communicate effectively if we do not first make the effort to know what each thing is.” (Rayside, Campbell) By considering the ontological questions of the things in our world, in order to represent them accurately (and therefore ethically) in our programs, the programmer enters into the philosophical praxis. Next, the programmer adds layers of identity and logic on top of their ontological discovery, continuing in the praxis.

But the programmer takes it a step further – the outcome of their investigation is not only their immaterial thought but, in executing the program, the manifestation of their philosophical endeavor into material reality. The program choreographs trillions of elementary charges through a crystalline maze, harnessing the virtually infinite charge of the Earth, incinerating the remains of starlight-fueled ancient beings in order to realize the reasoning of its programmer. Here the affair enters into the realm of Ethics.

“The programmer is attempting to solve a practical problem by instructing a computer to act in a particular fashion. This requires moving from the indicative to the imperative: from can or may to should. For a philosopher in the tradition, this move from the indicative to the imperative is the domain of moral science.” (Rayside, Campbell) Any actions taken by the program are the direct ethical responsibility of the programmer.

Furthermore, the programmer, as the source of reason and will driving a program, manifesting it into existence, becomes in that instant the λόγος σπερματικός (“logos spermatikos”) incarnate. The programmer’s reason, tapped into the divine Reason (λόγος), is generated into existence in the Universe and commands reasonable actions of inanimate matter.

Basically the programmer goes through each and every stage a deity would go through when creating the universe.

AND GUESS WHO IS A PROGRAMMER IN 14DWY???

(Ren/REDACTED in case you don't know hehe)

When the entity says "I gave him his gift" i believe this is exactly what he is referring to. While a Laplace's Demon knows every particle in the physical systems (and assumes it's knowledge of said system is perfect), a programmer works with Operative Systems (Windows, Linux, Ubuntu).

As for us, the angel, the antagonist of the demon of Laplace, we are the chaos theory, the one that conceives the knowledge of the system as imperfect.

Btw the person manipulating some choices in certain moments? Totally Ren/REDACTED. As they have the power of messing with the game and are totally self-aware of this being a visual novel.

But who gave Ren/REDACTED this power? Was Ren/REDACTED so skillful that they were able to defy the laws of worldbuilding? Picture this: the equivalent would be a programmer in the real world so skillful that they become able to defy the reality itself.

I believe the responsible is this "all knowing entity" since it just said it itself "It was I who gave him his gift". After all he is, and i quote, "THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, COMBINED INTO ONE" really ominous shit.

There are obvious gaps in this theory but it's the best i can do with the limited knowledge i have. I am not a physicist so i can't really dwell in formulas and numbers as much as i would. Maybe i'll interview a professor in college in the future but for now i hope this is enough.

[transdimensional-void]

Interesting parallels between Dany, Jon and Paul. I have seen some posts about how Paul and Dany being the 'white saviours' in their arc. What do you think?

glad you found my answer to this question interesting!

i actually highly recommend this princess weekes youtube video titled "Why Sci-fi & Fantasy Can't Fix Its White Savior Problem." she delves into the entire topic of white saviors in speculative fiction while discussing how paul and dany both fit into the trope.

as she discusses in the video (and clarifies further in a comment below it), paul atreides was always meant to be a deconstruction of the archetypical hero. (if you want to delve even more deeply into paul as "hero" i suggest this video by Jess of the Shire). in fact, it's quite clearly stated within the text of dune itself that paul being a "hero" is a bad thing for the fremen. as he lies dying, the planetary ecologist liet-kynes, who has dedicated his life to helping the fremen terraform their planet, hallucinates a conversation with his father in which his father warns him:

"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero," his father said. Reading my mind! Kynes thought. Well...let him.

and over the course of the series, this warning is borne out. in the wake of paul's ascension to the throne, the fremen way of life utterly disappears. their planet, now the capital of the empire, no longer belongs to them. the sandworms—their gods—disappear. fremen culture is eventually reduced to museum performances for tourists.

paul is even explicitly shown to be a false messiah. the prophecy that tells the fremen of their coming savior was planted by a branch of the bene gesserit called the missionaria protectiva. jessica, a bene gesserit, recognizes the signs of this when she first arrives on arrakis and later takes advantage of the groundwork her sisterhood laid to ensure that she and paul will be accepted among the fremen.

but what makes paul a tragic figure is that the moment he becomes aware of the path he is being lead down—to become this figure of prophecy, a hero, a messiah—he tries to resist it. yet he is trapped, by the deterministic prison of his own prophetic visions, by the millennia of planning and manipulations carried out by the bene gesserit which led to his birth, and by his own thirst for vengeance. also, he's only fifteen when he is asked to take on this mantle of hero-messiah-prophesied savior.

paul's failure to avert the devastating genocide that is carried out in his name is tragic...yet it doesn't make him any less responsible for his own decisions. he could have given up on vengeance, settled down among the fremen, and lived the rest of his life in obscurity—but he chose not to.

i think grrm has set dany on a similarly tragic path. she's so young, has experienced such massive loss, is the result of generations of intentional inbreeding to maintain her family's connection to magic, and when we first meet her, all she wants is a home, love, and security—things she has never had. despite all of these factors that make her a sympathetic character, though, dany is no less responsible for her own decisions than paul is for his.

her actions lead to ever increasing amounts of death and destruction. first, the lhazarene, then the people of slaver's bay, and probably, eventually, king's landing and other areas of westeros. she positions herself as a savior who is ending slavery and establishing a better, more benevolent form of government in astapor, yunkai, and meereen. yet, astapor is left in a state of utter ruin and devastation after dany's sacking of it. no one there is better off as a result of her actions. yunkai goes straight back to its slaving once she leaves, and she herself reimplements slavery in meereen as its queen. by the end of adwd, she's decided to abandon meereen like she did astapor and yunkai, so we can assume it will suffer a similar fate.

dany, like paul, is clearly meant to be a deconstruction of the white savior trope. in her own mind, she is a savior of the foreign cultures she invades and conquers (also note how similar her title "mhysa" is to "messiah"). yet the reality is that she has brought little to the people of slaver's bay other than death and destruction. and once she gets to westeros, who, exactly, will she be saving? westeros has no slavery. marching her armies and dragons in to claim the iron throne will be hard to spin as an act of benevolence rather than of conquest.

that being said...

as princess weekes points out in the video above, while the authors intended these two characters to be deconstructions of the white savior trope, the execution leaves something to be desired...because in both the case of paul and dany, there are large numbers of readers who take their claims of heroism at surface value, see them as straightforward heroes, and applaud their actions. they miss the context of them each being outsiders highjacking a foreign culture for their own ends. in some cases, the very types of people these depictions are most meant to criticize, are the exact same people who hold up these characters as their ideal...

so, are paul and dany "white saviors"? well...a lot of readers genuinely read them that way, even if that's not what the authors intended.

thanks for your question! i really enjoyed being able to discuss this topic.

[velvetvexations]

My controversial opinion about gendered socialization is that it IS real, with two caveats:

1) it is inherently trauma. Whether you are cis or trans, gender socialization is about conforming to binary gender standards, and that requires the repression of the self for any ' inappropriate ' traits

2) it is not universally experienced across culture or individual. I see gender socialization as, for example, when schools divide teams into boys versus girls and when children are discouraged from engaging with other children of the 'other gender' and when children are punished for their interests- it's something done to us by systems of power tied to White Binary Genders. Not something inherent to us, or monolithic. I *would* say we're better about this now but I think we're just different about it.

I do see myself as "socialized female" under the White American Gender Binary - I was the only child in my family who was taught how to tend a home and was told over and over (as a literal child) that the reason I had to tend the home was because I was a girl; I was pressured from pre-school age to marry and reproduce because Girl, my interests and skills were clipped and oppressed if they didn't tie in to stereotypical feminity because No One Will Marry You If You're Like That. And I saw it happen in its own way with my little brother, and how to make him conform to masculinity they socialized him in ways that weren't natural to him and denied him his interests and belittled his emotions (as a literal! Child!); and while I can only speak for myself, I think refusing to teach your son how to clean a house because you can just make your daughter do it since you've been making her do it for so long she's the only one in the house who can, is socializing both of them into tradcon gender roles. And I also don't think I had it that bad compared to other people I've known in regards to the trauma of binary socialization, because my parents were actually TRYING to be progressive and "let" me be a tomboy.

The fact that gendered socialization always comes back to claiming women are victimized empaths and men are emotionless sex pests is infuriating, when I want to have a conversation about systems of gender conformity and how that's weaponized against children everywhere from the home to their educational buildings. IMO as a non binary person, gender socialization is an element of how the binary sustains itself and we NEED to find a way to talk about it without falling into radfem nonsense.

I think that's somewhat different, at least enough that I wouldn't refer to it by the sane name.

When TERFs talk about gendered socialization, it's in the context of how an AMAB person will have been raised to have specific beliefs and patterns of behavior that makes them a risk. The idea is that every AMAB person runs a very high risk of having fully internalized, for instance, the idea that they should just get a woman to do all their cleaning for them. Basically, the idea of socialization is, imo, more centered around the end result of what you're describing, and mostly serves as a deterministic model of male behavior rooted in radical feminist separatism. Instead of doing anything about how children are "socialized", they just take for granted that AMAB people are programmed one (violent, selfish) way and AFAB people another (safe, innocent) way.

I don't think much if any radfem ideology actually has any interest in engaging with how children are raised - like that one post I love so much says, they can't imagine a world where feminism is actually successful and society is deprogramed of harmful memes, so they don't even try and are focused simply on separating "men" and "women". So like, everything you said is definitely correct, but it's my view that it should be kept conceptually distinct from the other thing.

[fretzine]

Cracking Wordle (kinda) with Monte Carlo Simulations: A Statistical Approach to Predicting the Best Guesses

Wordle, the viral word puzzle game, has captivated millions worldwide with its simple yet challenging gameplay. The thrill of uncovering the five-letter mystery word within six attempts has led to a surge in interest in word strategies and algorithms. In this blog post, we delve into the application of the Monte Carlo method—a powerful statistical technique—to predict the most likely words in Wordle. We will explore what the Monte Carlo method entails, its real-world applications, and a step-by-step explanation of a Python script that harnesses this method to identify the best guesses using a comprehensive list of acceptable Wordle words from GitHub.

Understanding the Monte Carlo Method

What is the Monte Carlo Method?

The Monte Carlo method is a statistical technique that employs random sampling and statistical modeling to solve complex problems and make predictions. Named after the famous Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco, this method relies on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results, often used when deterministic solutions are difficult or impossible to calculate.

How Does It Work?

At its core, the Monte Carlo method involves running simulations with random variables to approximate the probability of various outcomes. The process typically involves:

Defining a Model: Establishing the mathematical or logical framework of the problem.

Generating Random Inputs: Using random sampling to create multiple scenarios.

Running Simulations: Executing the model with the random inputs to observe outcomes.

Analyzing Results: Aggregating and analyzing the simulation outcomes to draw conclusions or make predictions.

Real-World Applications

The Monte Carlo method is widely used in various fields, including:

Finance: To evaluate risk and uncertainty in stock prices, investment portfolios, and financial derivatives.

Engineering: For reliability analysis, quality control, and optimization of complex systems.

Physics: In particle simulations, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics.

Medicine: For modeling the spread of diseases, treatment outcomes, and medical decision-making.

Climate Science: To predict weather patterns, climate change impacts, and environmental risks.

Applying Monte Carlo to Wordle

Objective

In the context of Wordle, our objective is to use the Monte Carlo method to predict the most likely five-letter words that can be the solution to the puzzle. We will simulate multiple guessing scenarios and evaluate the success rates of different words.

Python Code Explanation

Let's walk through the Python script that accomplishes this task.

1. Loading the Word List

First, we need a comprehensive list of acceptable five-letter words used in Wordle. We can obtain the list of all 2315 words that will become the official wordle at some point. The script reads the words from a line-delimited text file and filters them to ensure they are valid.

2. Generating Feedback

To simulate Wordle guesses, we need a function to generate feedback based on the game's rules. This function compares the guessed word to the answer and provides feedback on the correctness of each letter.

3. Simulating Wordle Games

The simulate_wordle function performs the Monte Carlo simulations. For each word in the list, it simulates multiple guessing rounds, keeping track of successful guesses within six attempts.

4. Aggregating Results

The monte_carlo_wordle function aggregates the results from all simulations to determine the most likely words. It also includes progress updates to monitor the percentage of words completed.

5. Running the Simulation

Finally, we load the word list from the text file and run the Monte Carlo simulations. The script prints the top 10 most likely words based on the simulation results.

The Top 50 Words (Based on this approach)

For this article I amended the code so that each simulation runs 1000 times instead of 100 to increase accuracy. I have also amended the script to return the top 50 words. Without further ado, here is the list of words most likely to succeed based on this Monte Carlo method:

trope: 10 successes

dopey: 9 successes

azure: 9 successes

theme: 9 successes

beast: 8 successes

prism: 8 successes

quest: 8 successes

brook: 8 successes

chick: 8 successes

batch: 7 successes

twist: 7 successes

twang: 7 successes

tweet: 7 successes

cover: 7 successes

decry: 7 successes

tatty: 7 successes

glass: 7 successes

gamer: 7 successes

rouge: 7 successes

jumpy: 7 successes

moldy: 7 successes

novel: 7 successes

debar: 7 successes

stave: 7 successes

annex: 7 successes

unify: 7 successes

email: 7 successes

kiosk: 7 successes

tense: 7 successes

trend: 7 successes

stein: 6 successes

islet: 6 successes

queen: 6 successes

fjord: 6 successes

sloth: 6 successes

ripen: 6 successes

hutch: 6 successes

waver: 6 successes

geese: 6 successes

crept: 6 successes

bring: 6 successes

ascot: 6 successes

lumpy: 6 successes

amply: 6 successes

eerie: 6 successes

young: 6 successes

glyph: 6 successes

curio: 6 successes

merry: 6 successes

atone: 6 successes

Edit: I ran the same code again, this time running each simulation 10,000 times for each word. You can find the results below:

bluer: 44 successes

grown: 41 successes

motel: 41 successes

stole: 41 successes

abbot: 40 successes

lager: 40 successes

scout: 40 successes

smear: 40 successes

cobra: 40 successes

realm: 40 successes

queer: 39 successes

plaza: 39 successes

naval: 39 successes

tulle: 39 successes

stiff: 39 successes

hussy: 39 successes

ghoul: 39 successes

lumen: 38 successes

inter: 38 successes

party: 38 successes

purer: 38 successes

ethos: 38 successes

abort: 38 successes

drone: 38 successes

eject: 38 successes

wrath: 38 successes

chaos: 38 successes

posse: 38 successes

pudgy: 38 successes

widow: 38 successes

email: 38 successes

dimly: 38 successes

rebel: 37 successes

melee: 37 successes

pizza: 37 successes

heist: 37 successes

avail: 37 successes

nomad: 37 successes

sperm: 37 successes

raise: 37 successes

cruel: 37 successes

prude: 37 successes

latch: 37 successes

ninja: 37 successes

truth: 37 successes

pithy: 37 successes

spiky: 37 successes

tarot: 36 successes

ashen: 36 successes

trail: 36 successes

Conclusion

The Monte Carlo method provides a powerful and flexible approach to solving complex problems, making it an ideal tool for predicting the best Wordle guesses. By simulating multiple guessing scenarios and analyzing the outcomes, we can identify the words with the highest likelihood of being the solution. The Python script presented here leverages the comprehensive list of acceptable Wordle words from GitHub, demonstrating how statistical techniques can enhance our strategies in the game.

Of course, by looking at the list itself it very rarely would allow a player to input the top 6 words in this list and get it right. It's probalistic nature means that although it is more probable that these words are correct, it is not learning as it goes along and therefore would be considered "dumb".

Benefits of the Monte Carlo Approach

Data-Driven Predictions: The Monte Carlo method leverages extensive data to make informed predictions. By simulating numerous scenarios, it identifies patterns and trends that may not be apparent through simple observation or random guessing.

Handling Uncertainty: Wordle involves a significant degree of uncertainty, as the correct word is unknown and guesses are constrained by limited attempts. The Monte Carlo approach effectively manages this uncertainty by exploring a wide range of possibilities.

Scalability: The method can handle large datasets, such as the full list of acceptable Wordle words from GitHub. This scalability ensures that the predictions are based on a comprehensive dataset, enhancing their accuracy.

Optimization: By identifying the top 50 words with the highest success rates, the Monte Carlo method provides a focused list of guesses, optimizing the strategy for solving Wordle puzzles.

Practical Implications

The application of the Monte Carlo approach to Wordle demonstrates its practical value in real-world scenarios. The method can be implemented using Python, with scripts that read word lists, simulate guessing scenarios, and aggregate results. This practical implementation highlights several key aspects:

Efficiency: The Monte Carlo method streamlines the guessing process by focusing on the most promising words, reducing the number of attempts needed to solve the puzzle.

User-Friendly: The approach can be easily adapted to provide real-time feedback and progress updates, making it accessible and user-friendly for Wordle enthusiasts.

Versatility: While this essay focuses on Wordle, the Monte Carlo method’s principles can be applied to other word games and puzzles, showcasing its versatility.

Specific Weaknesses in the Context of Wordle

Non-Deterministic Nature: The Monte Carlo method provides probabilistic predictions rather than deterministic solutions. This means that it cannot guarantee the correct Wordle word but rather offers statistically informed guesses. There is always an element of uncertainty.

2. Dependence on Word List Quality: The accuracy of predictions depends on the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the word list used. If the word list is incomplete or contains errors, the predictions will be less reliable.

3. Time Consumption: Running simulations for a large word list (e.g., thousands of words) can be time-consuming, especially on average computing hardware. This can limit its practicality for users who need quick results.

4. Simplified Feedback Model: The method uses a simplified model to simulate Wordle feedback, which may not capture all nuances of human guessing strategies or advanced linguistic patterns. This can affect the accuracy of the predictions.

The House always wins with Monte Carlo! Is there a better way?

There are several alternative approaches and techniques to improve the Wordle guessing strategy beyond the Monte Carlo method. Each has its own strengths and can be tailored to provide effective results. Here are a few that might offer better or complementary strategies:

1. Machine Learning Models

Using machine learning models can provide a sophisticated approach to predicting Wordle answers:

Neural Networks: Train a neural network on past Wordle answers and feedback. This approach can learn complex patterns and relationships in the data, potentially providing highly accurate predictions.

Support Vector Machines (SVMs): Use SVMs for classification tasks based on features extracted from previous answers. This method can effectively distinguish between likely and unlikely words.

2. Heuristic Algorithms

Heuristic approaches can provide quick and effective solutions:

Greedy Algorithm: This method chooses the best option at each step based on a heuristic, such as maximizing the number of correct letters or minimizing uncertainty. It's simple and fast but may not always find the optimal solution.

Simulated Annealing: This probabilistic technique searches for a global optimum by exploring different solutions and occasionally accepting worse solutions to escape local optima. It can be more effective than a greedy algorithm in finding better solutions.

3. Bayesian Inference

Bayesian inference provides a probabilistic approach to updating beliefs based on new information:

Bayesian Models: Use Bayes’ theorem to update the probability of each word being correct based on feedback from previous guesses. This approach combines prior knowledge with new evidence to make informed guesses.

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs): HMMs can model sequences and dependencies in data, useful for predicting the next word based on previous feedback.

4. Rule-Based Systems

Using a set of predefined rules and constraints can systematically narrow down the list of possible words:

Constraint Satisfaction: This approach systematically applies rules based on Wordle feedback (correct letter and position, correct letter but wrong position, incorrect letter) to filter out unlikely words.

Decision Trees: Construct a decision tree based on the feedback received to explore different guessing strategies. Each node represents a guess, and branches represent the feedback received.

5. Information Theory

Using concepts from information theory can help to reduce uncertainty and optimize guesses:

Entropy-Based Methods: Measure the uncertainty of a system using information entropy and make guesses that maximize the information gained. By choosing words that provide the most informative feedback, these methods can quickly narrow down the possibilities.

Whether you're a Wordle enthusiast or a data science aficionado, the Monte Carlo method offers a fascinating glimpse into the intersection of statistics and gaming. Happy Wordle solving!

[rishabhagrover11]

How Accurate Are Numerology Readings in Predicting Future Events?

Numerology, an ancient practice that interprets the significance of numbers and their influence on human life, has long been used to provide insights into personality traits, life decisions, and even future outcomes. While many people turn to numerology for guidance and predictions, the accuracy of these readings, especially regarding predicting future events, is a topic of considerable interest and debate. Here’s an exploration of the effectiveness of numerology reading and what one might realistically expect from them.

Understanding Numerology Readings

The Basis of Numerology

Numerology works on the principle that numbers have a mystical correlation with events and personality traits. By calculating various numbers based on dates of birth, names, and other significant life details, numerologists like Rishabh A Grover develop a numerological chart that maps out potential influences and paths.

How Numerology Predicts Events

Predictions in numerology are not about foreseeing the future in a deterministic way but rather about outlining potential trends and turning points in one’s life. These predictions involve interpreting various numerological constants like Life Path numbers, Destiny numbers, and Personal Year numbers, each offering insights into different aspects of an individual’s life journey.

Accuracy of Numerology Predictions

Scope of Predictions

Numerology provides a broad framework of what might happen, based on the vibrational properties of numbers at certain times. For instance, a Personal Year number can indicate whether the upcoming year is favorable for financial investments or if it’s a time for introspection and personal growth.

Success in Predictions

While numerology can give a sense of the themes and challenges one may face, its accuracy in predicting specific future events is inherently limited. Like any other predictive science, numerology works with probabilities rather than certainties. However, many users have found that numerology reading have accurately reflected their life events and helped them make informed decisions.

Factors Influencing Accuracy

Skill of the Numerologist

The accuracy of a numerology reading largely depends on the expertise of the numerologist. Skilled practitioners like Rishabh A Grover, who have years of experience and a deep understanding of numerological principles, are more likely to provide readings that resonate closely with the individual’s life and potential future.

Individual Interpretation

The personal interpretation of a reading also plays a crucial role. Numerology reading are often metaphorical and symbolic. The way an individual interprets and acts upon these readings can significantly affect their relevance and accuracy in real-life scenarios.

Practical Applications of Numerology

Guidance and Personal Insight

Rather than focusing solely on future predictions, the real value of numerology often lies in its ability to offer insights into personal traits and life cycles. It can help individuals understand their strengths, weaknesses, and emotional reactions, potentially guiding them to make more informed decisions.

Preparation for Potential Outcomes

Numerology can be particularly helpful in preparing for potential outcomes by highlighting periods of opportunity or challenge. Knowing these phases can help individuals plan their actions better, be it in career, relationships, or personal growth.

Conclusion

While numerology readings may not predict future events with pinpoint accuracy, they offer valuable insights that can help individuals understand themselves better and navigate their life paths more effectively. The accuracy of these predictions depends on the skill of the numerologist and the interpretation of the person receiving the reading. For those seeking guidance, numerology can be a useful tool in planning and decision-making, provided it is used with an understanding of its symbolic and probabilistic nature.

[bestworstcase]

it’s a trivial thing in the grand scheme but i do think my favorite of the many, many mirror-image reversals this volume has to offer is ‘curiosity made the cat immortal.’ that’s so funny and it’s also a really clever bit of sleight of hand, because as soon as you put a cat named curious into the story everyone is going to look in exactly the wrong direction.

the cat’s immortality is like salem’s—a curse that can only be broken with knowledge—but also, in one critical sense, unlike hers; nobody cursed the cat.

the point of salem’s immortality is to teach her a punitive lesson about the importance of the natural order (dictated by the god of light, only notionally in tandem with his brother) and light’s authority over the dead; it fails to do so because salem understands the the importance of the divine order perfectly well, but rejects the legitimacy of divine rule in its entirety. the true fulcrum of her enmity with the god of light is ideological and the unfathomable cruelty of his pedagogy, such as it is, proves her right. the brothers are, in fact, monsters.

in contrast, the cat is cursed because they have chosen to be so. their maker has left them and they want to know why. i don’t buy the reading that the cat’s obsession is truly compulsory—the notion that the ever after is a deterministic world whose denizens do not have true agency and can only do what they were ‘programmed’ to do is flatly absurd and has been repeatedly textually refuted—i think they could ascend, if they wanted a reprieve more than they wanted to remember.

salem’s curse is eternal because no amount of knowledge could ever change her ideological hatred of her creators. the cat’s curse is eternal because they love their maker too much to ever forget. that’s a really, really interesting contrast and it’s what makes me doubtful that the solution will be as straightforward as convincing the cat to ascend, whether by providing the answer or persuading them to make peace with not knowing. as i’ve said before, if the cat were meant to accept an unsatisfying answer or no answer at all, they’d be foiling yang, not ruby.

curiosity killed the cat -> satisfaction brought it back. satisfying the cat’s curiosity incites a reversal of their state of being (dead -> alive). if curiosity cursed this cat with immortality, then it follows satisfaction should break the curse. eternal existence is symbolically a form of death (permanent, static—think vampires) and its reverse, accordingly, is not death but restoration of natural mortal life.

that’s probably how salem’s curse is going to be resolved too; not with death, but with the chance to really live.

[penguinhug]

i’ve been wanting to write something on babel and um. utopia and totalitarianism (i swear it makes sense) for a long time and i finally did! so, yeah. please accept my humble offering

okay first of all im sorry for bringing up notes from the underground again lol but it was my starting point so bear with me please

i already mentioned in another post that vanitas reminds me a lot of the underground man in his philosophy and his relationship to free will. im not sure if this is a direct influence or a coincidence, but it’s probably not a reach considering dostoevsky is very popular in japan. im only mentioning this because one of the reasons for his popularity is that his works deal with the problems of the rapid process of modernization that both russia and japan went through in the 19th century

vnc is also set in this time period & it's not something incidental: it's an important aspect of the worldbuilding. the steam punk aesthetic, the references to real historic events and the astermite research all reinforce this

the underground man's attitude towards free will in notes is also historically grounded. it's a response to the utopianism of the era, especially the "rational egoists" who believed that, following science and reason, all people have to do is to act according to their best interests to be happy and abolish suffering. for the underground man this is a form of determinism, and would mean that people are mere "piano keys" being played by the laws of nature. but because people are not "piano keys" they will instead sabotage themselves and others just to prove that they are free. for him, rational egoists are wrong because people are not rational and because, ultimately, they value freedom more than happiness

so i wondered if there was an equivalent utopia in vnc that vanitas might be reacting to when he gives his free will speeches (of course, it comes from his trauma too, but i won't be focusing on that here). and well, yeah, babel and paracelsus' ideas are similarly utopic and deterministic

and we also know vanitas isn't a fan of babel

i imagine his disdain doesn't have to do with the creation of vampires, since he claims to hate everyone equally, but about what babel stands for as an idea

from Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Aferlife

i found this quote interesting because it's basically the opposite of vanitas? his entire character revolves around the notion of mortality: his name, the hourglass earring, the fact that we know from the beginning he is doomed to die...

anyway, back to paracelsus

paracelsianism proposed that nature was "raw and unfinished" and that man's mission was to "evolve things to a higher level" which in vnc translates to the formula rewriting that humans and coal went through during babel resulting in the creation of vampires and astermite

but while the creation of astermite is painted as a positive thing, since it allows technological advancement without hurting the environment, the manga always criticizes those who attempt to rewrite people. moreau, who views vampires as superior to humans, for example. but also chloé's family and their insistence in turning her back into a human. their cases are actually a great example of how evolutionism turns into eugenics once it's applied to people and society

vnc also always makes a point of putting humans and vampires on an even ground as much as it can. vampires are stronger, but they are also the ones vulnerable to the curse. and beyond that, there aren't any differences between them. vampires share with humans everything that makes them "human"

speaking of eugenics tho, there's a famous nazi film on paracelsus’ life... dostoevsky is also credited with "predicting" the totalitarian states from the 20th century in his work, especially in notes from the underground...

anyway, the babel from myth is also a utopic dream, so it makes sense that the incident that sets everything in motion is called like that. in the myth, humans united to build a tower so high it would reach the heavens and, in turn, god punished them for their arrogance

that's the most common reading of the myth, at least. but in jewish tradition, babel isn't about an insecure god teaching humanity its place, but about restoring diversity in face of uniformity. the problem with babel is that everyone speaks the same language and words, and so thinks the same thoughts; that the construction of the tower implies the sort of society where the product is more important than the individuals. so basically: that babel was the first authoritarian state to this, god answers by forcing diversity and pluralism on them by confusing their tongues so that they can no longer understand each other. and yeah, that brings the conflict back into the world but also interrupts the potential for imperialism and puts everyone on equal ground. so, from this point on, our relations to each other are always mediated by the limits of translation, which is "impossible, but necessary,” because we are unique and irreducible, but also in dialogue with others

isn’t that the beauty of it, tho?

the point of this criticism of utopianism isn’t to say that we should give up any attempt at change, but that we can’t forget our (and others’) “humanity” in the process. i think this is were the parallel between noé and ruthven will become relevant

they both start their stories as idealists, liking both “humans and vampires” equally, but when ruthven plan fails, he turns against his former ideas and next thing we know he’s trying to use chloé, his friend, to his own benefit

meanwhile, when noé fails to understand something, he tries harder. and it’s not like he hasn’t taken hits too, but he still chooses to keep trying and reach out to others. noé never "takes for granted” that he understands, and so he always tries to see people as they are. he is is open, and curious and he cares. a lot. and that care is grounded: is not only for humanity as a whole but for real people. because (let me reference dostoevsky one last time) “abstract love of humanity is nearly always love of self”

[incurablehumanist]

Humanism and SPN: a match made...on Earth?

so i think it’s time i explained this blog’s whole idk theme. it’s raison d’etre, if you wanna get fancy abt it. like, it’s prolly pretty obvious (it’s literally in the name) but i still wanna break it down and make sure people really get where i’m coming from. this is also something i wanna talk abt a lot during my Great Rewatch so i think it would help to have something to refer back to when this topic inevitably comes up in future. let’s dive in, shall we?

despite Supernatural being a show about, obviously, the supernatural, I wholly believe that it is, at it’s core, a story about Humanism (the philosophy). or it’s a show based on the same foundations as Humanism (the philosophy). or it’s just very, very, Humanism (the philosophy) friendly. either way, as a humanist it gives me ALL the feels and I really, desperately want to talk about it, so that’s what i’m gonna do!

to get specific, I’m talking about modern Humanist philosophy, frequently referred to as “secular humanism”. you can find a good overview of what that means on the American Humanist Association’s website, especially their 3 Humanist Manifestos (available to read here, here, and here. the last of those is the current manifesto as accepted by the AHA, but all of them provide good context of what Humanism means as a whole). this is as opposed to Renaissance or Religious Humanism, which have notable differences, though tbh a case could be made for religious humanism bc of the whole “god is canonically real in SPN” thing. When I talk about Humanism though I’m almost always gonna be talking abt modern “secular” Humanism. also i can literally never decide whether humanism should be capitalized or not so expect lots of waffling on that. now tbh I'm not super educated on Humanism as a philosophy beyond the manifestos and what can be found with a cursory google search, so I'm gonna be learning more abt it as I go, but i understand it enough (and have considered myself a secular humanist for long enough) to have Opinions. I’m hoping that as I examine the show through this lens i’ll both gain a better understanding of Humanism as a philosophy as well as how supernatural relates to it. no promises that anything good or coherent will come of it but I'm excited to see where it leads me! also if you too have Opinions on this topic I would absolutely looooooooove to hear them. seriously. hit me up. finally, for context, i’m gonna include some quotes about Humanism which I think best exemplify its ideology and will hopefully give people unfamiliar with it an idea of where I'm coming from/why I think SPN is such a perfect representation of it. I also highly recommend reading the manifestos on AHA's website, since they’re basically the horse’s mouth when it comes to the modern (Western) Humanism movement. beyond it’s relevance to SPN as a narrative, it’s also just a beautiful perspective on life, and it always makes me happy to read about it. like you’re about to do right now! here we go: "While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." – Humanist Manifesto II (1973) "Humanism is the light of my life and the fire in my soul. It is the deep felt conviction, in every fiber of my being that human love is a power far transcending the relentless, onward rush of our largely deterministic cosmos. All human life must seek a reason for existence within the bounds of an uncaring physical world, and it is love coupled with empathy, democracy, and a commitment to selfless service which undergirds the faith of a humanist." – Bette Chambers, former president of the AHA "Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a Humanist is that we believe this life is all there is - so what we do and the choices we make really count." – Stephen Fry "Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests." – Isaac Asimov "Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?" – Richard Dawkins "There is nothing new about humanism. It is the yielding to Satan's first temptation of Adam and Eve: "Ye shall be as gods." (Gen. 3:5)" – Billy Graham, Christian evangelist (lol)

[vvanite]

you know, I’m putting a bit too much faith in the chaos theory (the actual scientific theory) into my own theory/analysis when Travis might not even have considered this theory but this fits in well.

Okay, so I went full blown with these paragraphs; this is all a work in progress as a theory/analysis of Chaos! Also I am not a physicist/mathematician nor do I have a interest for these topics in a deeper level so I’m speaking with entry level knowledge.

**In summary, my main analysis is that to understand Chaos and their whole deal, we should consider the Chaos Theory. It states that chaos is determined with deterministic laws that are sensitive to preexisting conditions set. Patterns in Chaos. Irregularity in Order. When taking account to Fitzroy as in individual, Chaos fails to see Fitzroy as a human being capable of taking differing actions. They don’t realize people are more nuanced than that.

(For the sake of this theory, I do believe that Order and Chaos are the same person with 2 names because when they first meet Order, Order states that it is their first time meeting the group, but consider this, in the physical realm. They only met the boys through dreams. Later on, I want to explain why this is such a big deal.)

The Chaos theory states that chaotic behavior exists in natural systems (magic, nature, weather) and in artificial systems like its hero/villains system or H.O.G. Even with these systems in place and the sense of Order is established, Chaotic behavior can still occur! It makes sense that Nua has changed and developed its artificial systems so much that it’s becoming more complex and unpredictable for Chaos/Order to handle. From the wiki page of chaos theory, “ In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos “ That’s why Chaos hasn’t appeared on Nua for centuries (from Festo’s discussion) because during the past, life in Nua was more simpler and easy to predict chaotic behaviors for the deity to not have to interrupt. But now, Nua has more bureaucratic systems in place and strict rules. This also plays in how complex our world is and how the systems we hold today doesn’t fit well for the people, how ineffective it is. I think Chaos as a deity is breaking. Not just as a entity, but as its own theory, what they are meant for. 

Enter in Laplace’s Demon. The first published phase for scientific determinism.  “According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.“ Chaos is Laplace’s Demon. They have shown the thundermen their possible futures if the patterns shown in Chaos fall into place, aka the deterministic nature. One thing I want to address is how this theory isn’t so stable. There has been multiple arguments against Laplace’s demon as time progresses and new discoveries have been made. Same thing happening here. As Nua grows with new discoveries and complex rules, Chaos/Order as a Deity is being threatened for what they are.

Now, you may be wondering, How can Chaos/Order want Fitzroy to do chaotic things to set off drastic futures that contradicts Chaos’s determinism? Well, Both can exist. From the wiki page of Laplace’s demon, “ Chaos theory is applicable when knowledge of the system is imperfect whereas Laplace's demon assumes perfect knowledge of the system, therefore chaos theory and Laplace's demon are actually compatible with each other.” Therefore, With this knowledge at hand, Chaos know about these imperfections and variations to them are non-existent. That is why they encourage Fitzroy to rage and ensue Chaos. When really, they knew this was meant to happen. However, this would mostly apply when Fitzroy makes big decisions to a bigger group, a bigger variable. For example, the Calhain hand scene+apple scene and the dodge-ball thunderwave scene involve him making drastic decisions in public. It’s easier to predict a behavior of a system, rather than an individual. That is why Chaos is against Fitzroy assassinating Grey in private because the variables set in place aren’t wide enough to form into a collection of systems. It’s a dead end. Once grey is dead, the ball would stop rolling. No war, no action, not enough of the chaotic behavior Chaos craves.

Butterfly Theory aka Sensitivity to initial conditions. [new topic]

I’m sure you’re familiar with the butterfly effect but let me tell you it’s actual definition which means that with initial conditions set in place in a chaotic system, the points are more sensitive that if it is changed just a bit, then it would end up with big different outcomes. 

The Lorenz attractor,  is a good example of how a behavior of a system can be observed and provides us information. This is the cycle Chaos sees and wants to maintain.

from: episode 19 Creative Writing

To Chaos, Fitzroy is a point in that attractor that is more sensitive to changes from his initial condition. If we were to compare Fitzroy to an equation, it would make sense of why Chaos seems to insistent to Fitzroy that they know what he wants. To them, Fitzroy has a set of initial behaviors that Chaos knows. They don’t see him having human behavior. But that’s where they fail in their logic. They’re not taking account that people are not equations and they are more complex. Good people can make bad actions. Actions don’t equate to the person’s initial condition or even current. It’s more nuanced than that. So, when Fitzroy makes that change, not to the outside world, but to his character, Chaos is stunned. They can predict behavior of groups, not with an individual. They don’t know what outcome will happen if Fitzroy makes this small change to kill grey in silence.

[therealsaintscully]

[TJLC] Distracted by AGRA (or the many hints about personification of death in The Six Thatchers)

PLEASE CONSIDER THIS A WORK IN PROGRESS. IT’S NOT PERFECT BUT  I HAVE SOME GOOD IDEAS HERE, I THINK, SO KEEPING IT FOR NOW.

A FEW DISCLAIMERS: - I’m not a native English speaker and this wasn’t betad, so excuse the less-than-perfect English (although you’re about to find out what native language actually is). - I’m very new in the fandom and in reading/writing meta, this would be my second meta post tbh, so excuse the amateurism. - Everything I’m about to write here is based on very quick and easy Google searches. I’m BY NO MEANS AN ACADEMIC! I’m not well versed enough in any form of literary analysis to claim more than that, but perhaps this post will be a breeding ground for new ideas. If you are an academic and you find these interesting - please go ahead and expand on them. - Lastly, this may have been picked up before by other meta writers and if so - I’m not aware of it, as I’m quite new to this fandom.

tl;dr: The Six Thatchers seems to be full of hints about the personification of death and cultural/religious representations of it, in a way that may even hint that that Mary = death, and/or that Moftiss were very preoccupied with the idea while writing it. It should be noted that I find these tidbits interesting in the context of well-established TJLC theories I’ve been reading up on a lot lately, namely EMP and M-Theory. I found these details interesting in the context of reading TST as something that’s happening in Sherlock’s MP as he’s dying and suspecting that Mary is dangerous and perhaps even linked to Moriarty.

AGRA > Samarra > The Four Angels of Death

As these things always go, I’ve been re-watching episodes while researching my WIP fic ‘Turned’. I have this new habit these days of only listening, instead of actually watching the episode in search of a fresh perspective. This time I was blown away, once again, by Sherlock and Mycroft’s conversation about AGRA. It’s a VERY odd conversation considering the topic, and what caught my ear this time was Mycroft mechanically reciting facts about the city of Agra. Why Agra, I asked? What’s so important about it? Nothing, the way I see it. One search led to another and I looked up Samarra, thinking perhaps I’ll find some connection between the two cities, but couldn’t.

The search for Samarra and the parable about it led me to the Appointment in Samarra wiki page, which mentions that the title of the book comes from a retelling of an ancient Mesopotamian tale by W. Somerset Maugham (the source of the next quote is here):

"The Appointment in Samarra" (as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])

The speaker is Death

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

There is also a very interesting study guide link from this website, which asks some very interesting questions about tale, such as Maugham’s decision to make Death a non-omniscient narrator of this tale, as well as a woman. I’ll return to Death being referred to as a woman later. However, since I have no expertise in literary readings, I’ll leave it to others who might be to add some more here.

More below the cut:

The version of the story in TST is a bit different; the servant is absent from the tale; it is instead the merchant who has the nighttime appointment with Death in Samarra after being startled to see Death that morning in the Baghdad market. (This note was taking from a wikipedia entry about another - apparently-  very deterministic play by Maugham, Shepey.)

Anyway, the Appointment in Samarra wikipedia mentions that Maugham’s story comes from a much older version recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 53a.

The Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. I’m a Hebrew speaking Jew, though an atheist one who isn’t well-read in religious texts at all, but I was intrigued enough to look up the Hebrew Talmud version of the text (in fact it’s originall in Aramaic, but wikipedia offers a Hebrew tranlsation). A quick Google search led me to the wikipedia page about the personification of death, and that’s when things got interesting.

Under the section about the grim reaper in Judaism, a story from the Talmud is mentioned, which seems to be another version of the Appointment in Samarra story. Here’s the story, translated by Google Translate, because I couldn’t find an English version:

The Babylonian Talmud tells of a sage, Rabbi Bibi, the son of Abiy, whose angel of death was often in his company. Rabbi Bibi heard the angel of death ask his emissary to name a woman named Miriam (Mary) who was a hair dresser (the future mother of Jesus). The messenger of death accidentally killed another woman named Miriam (Mary) who was a teacher. The angel of death said to his messenger: "I asked you to kill Miriam the barber and not Miriam the teacher." The messenger of death replied: Then I will bring Miriam the teacher back to life and bring before you Miriam the barber. The angel of death said to him: If you have already brought Miriam the teacher, leave her with me along with the rest of the dead. The angel of death asked his messenger: How did you manage to kill the teacher Miriam even though it was not her time to die? The messenger of death replied: She was killed before an opportunity to kill her - she was fiddling with the stove with ember in her hand to clean the stove. Inadvertently she caused a burn in her leg - and when a person was harmed and his determination of his time to die was undermined - so I had a chance to kill prematurely. The sage, Rabbi Bibi, asked the angel of death: Do you have permission to kill people before their pre-determined time has come? The angel of death answered, "Yes, for it is written, 'There is no one who has perished without judgment.' 

(According to wikipedia, this story is taken from תלמוד בבלי, מסכת חגיגה, דף ד, עמוד ב – דף ה, עמוד א).

AGR(A?M?)

Alright, I said, two Marys, escaping death but then meeting it eventually. It happens.

But as I read on… that Hebrew wikipedia page mentions another personification of death, the angel of death Azarel. Azarel has three ‘colleagues’ (e.g archangel) in Islam (and in some variations, they also exist in Judaism and Christianity): Jibrail (Gabriel), Israfil, commonly thought of as the counterpart of the Judeo-Christian archangel Raphael, and Mīkhā'īl (Michael).

So wait, that’s -- that’s Azarel, Gabriel, Raphael... as in AGR(A)?  Whoa.  That fourth angel mentioned in Islam is Michael - which doesn’t hold up with AGRA - but could that be a coincidence? We’re told two things about BBCSh’s AGRA, but we can’t really know they’re actually true. The first one is that Mary claims it’s her initials, which we later learn is possibly not true - John gets mad realizing it’s another lie. The other thing is that Mary claims to be ‘R’, for Rosamund, but we can’t be sure about that either. However, another cool detail: in Christianity, Raphael is generally associated with an unnamed angel mentioned in the Gospel of John, who stirs the water at the healing pool of Bethesda. Yes - I know, the M really doesn’t fit there, but M really is a character that stands out in the BBCSH universe, doesn’t it?

Moving on to more cultural references of the personification of death the Hebrew wikipedia page offers, note that I haven’t read the first and it’s been years since I watched the second:

Death with Interruptions

In Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, they mention, death is a woman, and she falls in love with one of her future victims. She decides to spare his life: Every time death sends him his letter [notifying him of his imminent death], it gets returned. Death discovers that, without reason, this man has mistakenly not been killed. Although originally intending merely to analyse this man and discover why he is unique, death eventually becomes infatuated with him, so much so that she takes on human form to meet him. Upon visiting the cellist, she plans to personally give him the letter; instead, she falls in love with him, and, by doing so, she becomes even more human-like.

Chess and The Seventh Seal

Another reference is the film The Seventh Seal, about a knight returning from a crusade, and discovers his land his ravaged by plague. The knight encounters Death, whom he challenges to a chess match, believing he can survive as long as the game continues. Does that remind you of any particular promo pics?

What I find interesting in all these references, is that they all seem to deal with questions regarding ‘dealing with death’ that, in the context of EMP for example, can be seen as Sherlock ‘running simulations’ (or asking philosophical questions) on how to deal with his current situations:

- ‘Do you have permission to kill people before their pre-determined time has come’? (Can people time die before their pre-determined time? Can people escape pre-determined death?)

- Can you interrupt death with love? Was Mary supposed to kill John, fell in love with him and thus his death was postponed? Is John still in danger?

- What can one do to postpone death - perhaps challenging it to a game, hoping for survival as you distract it?

Tagging other meta readers/writers who I think might enjoy this ; let me know if you don’t - I won’t tag you again): @sarahthecoat​​, @devoursjohnlock​​ @inevitably-johnlocked​​ @possiblyimbiassed​​ @waitedforgarridebs​​ @tjlcisthenewsexy​​  @loudest-subtext-in-tv​​ @therealsaintscully​ 

[qrovidcore]

hey what’s up tumblr i’ve now seen hbo’s watchmen all the way through Three Fucking Times and i very well may go for a fourth if given an excuse whoops and apparently i can’t stop thinking about Laurie’s joke in She Was Killed By Space Junk, no i’m not the first person to analyze this and i’m sure i won’t be the last but i sure do have some Thoughts^TM,  so here’s some meta let’s go.

major spoilers ahead for the entire series:

Hey, it’s me again. I’ve got a joke. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. There’s this guy, he’s a bricklayer. He’s really good at it. He’s a real master of his craft. Because he’s precise. Every brick has its place. Anyway this guy has a daughter and he’s gonna teach her to be a bricklayer because after all, all a man has is his legacy. So dad decides to build a barbecue in the backyard. He does the math. He figures out exactly what he needs and he shows the daughter how to do everything. Step by step. And when he finishes, it’s a beauty. It’s a perfect barbecue. Just the way he drew it in blueprints. Only one problem. There’s a brick left over. One single brick. The guy freaks out. He must have done something wrong. He’s gonna have to start all over again. So he picks up his sledgehammer to knock the thing to pieces and his daughter suddenly says ‘daddy wait! I have an idea.’ She picks up the orphan brick and throws it up into the air as high as she can. And then…shit. Messed it up.

Okay forget that joke. Can I tell you another one?

As I said, I’m not the first to break down that Laurie is referring to specific people who have an influence on the story, there’s plenty of meta posts online that’ll say the same thing. I just think this is a Really Clever way to introduce us to her, to the major players in this story, and to the events from the comic that are going to end up being referenced. Anyhow, the bricklayer here is The Comedian. Laurie’s father. I’ll get back to this and how it connects later, but given that one of Watchmen’s major themes is the concept of legacy - who carries it and how, and what happens when that legacy is painful - this is a neat little hook into that idea. Laurie’s dad’s legacy. What she’s done with it, what she’s going to do with it, how she feels about it. Again, coming back to that.

Okay. Forget the brick. New joke. Three heroes die and they all show up at the pearly gates. God’s there and he’s going to decide what their eternal fate shall be: heaven or hell. Our first hero is dressed up like a big owl. God says to him “I gifted you the ability to make fantastic inventions. What did you do with this amazing talent?” Owl guy says “I made this really awesome flying ship and lots of cool outfits and weapons so I could bring peace to the city.” God asks, “So how many people did you kill?” Owl guy seems offended. He says “Zero. I didn’t take a single life.” God frowns. “Sorry owl guy, your heart’s in the right place but you’re just too soft.” God snaps his fingers and the hero goes to hell.

I'm not super into the comic so it took me a while to get that she's referencing Nite Owl. I think this is strange since he doesn't appear in the show himself, whereas everyone else she talks about does, but I suppose it gives a more rounded-out view of the different approaches to heroism, and what exactly constitutes it, and also ties in another one of the original Minutemen. They did cut this over her arrest of Mr. Shadow in the bank, which makes me wonder about his role and why he appeared, and I still find it strange that this part of the joke wasn't about someone who had more of a presence in the show. (Though that being said, DC making fun of Batman, their own big-ticket character? 10/10 thank you for this).

Where was I? The pearly gates await our next hero in line for Almighty judgment. Our hero number two is confident he can game this out because that’s his God-given talent: smarts. Some might even say he’s the smartest man in the world. “So what did you do with that big brain I gave you?” asks God. “As a matter of fact, I saved humanity, ”says Smarty Pants. “Well how’d you do that,” asks God.” “Well I dropped a giant alien squid on New York and everybody was so afraid of it they stopped being afraid of each other.” “OK,” says God. “How many people did you kill?” Smarty Pants smiles. “Three million, give or take. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs. “Christ,” God says. “You’re a fucking monster.”  “Am not,” says Smarty Pants. God snaps his fingers and our hero goes to hell.

GOD YES PLEASE DRAG OZYMANDIAS. GET THIS FUCKER’S ASS. Though the line that’s sticking out to me here is “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs.” Watchmen’s got an egg motif - and that’s an entire post on its own - and wow this is a place to drop it. I find it interesting that it’s given to Adrien here. Especially since it comes back later, when Will tells Angela that that’s what Jon said in justification of giving his life to stop the 7th K/Cyclops and Trieu. Eggs are used for a lot of things, but this line ties the motif solidly to a value of life here - how Adrien is the way he is because he refuses to value other peoples’, and maybe how Jon is the way he is because, when you can see the future laid out before you and live knowing how you’re going to die, how do you learn to value your own?

Okay. We’re down to the nitty gritty now. One hero left. God cracks his knuckles ready to administer the final reckoning. Now Hero Number 3 is pretty much a god himself. So for the sake of telling them apart, he’s blue and he likes to stroll around with his dick hanging out. He can teleport, he can see into the future, he blows shit up. He’s got actual superpowers. Regular God asks Blue God what have you done with these gifts?” Blue God says “I fell in love with a woman, I walked across the sun, and then I fell in love with another woman. I won the Vietnam War. But mostly I just stopped giving a shit about humanity.” God sighs. “Do I even need to ask how many people you’ve killed?” Blue guy shrugs. “A live body and a dead body have the same number of particles so it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter how I answer your question because I know you’re sending me to hell.” “How do you know that?” asks God. Blue God sounds very sad when he softly says “Because I’m already there.” And so, a mere piston in the inevitable of time and space God does what he did and will do. He snaps his fingers and the hero goes to hell.

And now, we’ve got Jon. Dr. Manhattan. It's a neat moment of insight into his actions, motives, and how those are perceived by others (namely Laurie), and it's a nice thread of introduction to his previous actions to drop for audiences who haven't read the comics (actually, I can make this point about Adrien’s part of the joke too). Especially because most of what we get of Jon in-show is his relationship with Angela, his entire character arc really revolves around her and we don't see him portrayed as the contentious, unfeeling figure the world sees him as. So this sort of contrast between him as a figure and him as a person is very telling, doubly so coming from someone who it's clear knew him. And I really appreciate that there’s just as much stiffness as there is warmth to the Jon we the audience see - he’s kind, he’s loving, but he’s also very matter-of-fact and deterministic, and that bit of characterization really spans the gap between these two versions of him.

And so it’s been a long day at the pearly gates. All the heroes have gone to hell. His work done, God’s packing up to go home and then he notices someone waiting. But it’s not a hero, it’s just a woman. “Where did you come from?” asks God. “Oh I was just standing behind those other guys the whole time, you just didn’t see me.” “Did I give you a talent,” God asks. “No, none to speak of,” says the woman.  God gives her a good long look. “I’m so sorry. I’m embarrassed. Seriously, this almost never happens but I don’t know who you are.” And the woman looks at God and she quietly says “I’m the little girl who threw the brick in the air.” And a sound from above, something falling: the brick. God looks up but it’s too late. He never saw it coming. It hits him so hard, his brains shoot out his nose. Game over. He’s dead. And where does God go when he dies? He goes to hell. 

Into some Thoughts^TM that I haven’t seen anyone theorize yet(?): I think God is meant to be Lady Trieu, and even if Laurie wouldn’t know this yet that’s some brilliant fucking foreshadowing. It's not as exact, but enough parallels are there that I think they're purposeful. It makes Trieu out as the ultimate judge of everyone - and in a way, she is. She sees herself as the most deserving of power of everyone, and it's her who kills Dr. Manhattan - sends him to hell, you could say, and he knows she's going to do it. It also hints at how she's going to die too, crushed by her machine falling from the sky like the brick, because she didn't expect anyone would be capable of stopping her. And where does God go when he dies? He goes to hell. Trieu isn't ultimately above the others, and she's subject to their justice as they are to hers. 

Fitting too that Laurie is involved with the plan to stop Trieu, since, as I said I’d come back to, the girl who threw the brick is Laurie herself. Her depiction of herself in this way is representative, perhaps, of Laure's own feelings on vigilantism and what justice is, and that she's the force that's going to bring down these overblown personalities and their many incorrect uses of their abilities. Given this, it's interesting to think how the "failed" joke at the beginning connects, given that Laurie's dad is the bricklayer, and he's definitely... not a good person, or at least not in this continuity. But I wonder if it's indicative of what Laurie mentions about her parents training her up to do vigilante stuff (especially since she’s based in part(?) on a member of the Minutemen from the comic), and how she feels about her father and his work. If the brick is symbolic of his work as a vigilante, is Laurie throwing the brick in the air, and ultimately taking down the threat at the top, meant to indicate how she sees herself using what she learned from him, or - maybe and - a disrespect for his work based on her justified hatred of him?

Roll on snare drum. Curtains. Good joke. 

[logladyfanclub]

metaphysics

Beyond the material world, beyond the common rules, limitations, and assumptions we take upon ourselves, resides a greater spiritual reality operating under a set of higher principles that can help us transcend foolishness, strife, and drudgery. Knowledge limited to the physical world and bounded by the shortcomings of our five senses is not enough to attain freedom. Metaphysics is the study of higher knowledge, the deeper truths of life. We only have to recognize these higher truths and live by them to rise beyond old behavioral patterns and access a new vista of inconceivably wonderful possibilities.

All is Mind:

Everything is consciousness, and all consciousness shares a common source. It is the ultimate center, the initiator of all causes, the core perceiver, the chooser.

Consciousness is the dreamer (Creator), the dreamed (individualized consciousness), and the dreamscape (matter, space, energy, and time). There is no difference between reality and dreams except that reality involves mass consciousness holding the rules of reality rigid, whereas in dreams usually only the personal subconscious does so. Just as thought underlies objects in dreams, so does thought form the basis of matter in waking reality.

Creation is infinite, composed of a unified infinite being (the Creator) and its expression as an infinite variety of finite beings. Stated another way, the Creator is an infinite being exploring its infinite potential through an infinite number of finite avenues. While individual evolutionary paths begin and end – beginning as the first stirring of awareness among primal matter and ending in unified congruency with the Creator – the grand experiment itself is without beginning or end because there are an infinite number of these paths.

Because all life shares a common source, all life is interrelated and of equal worth. Only the expression of the underlying source differs from one lifeform to another. To differing degrees, each lifeform is endowed with freewill, the potential ability to choose independently of another being’s choice. Freewill adds a wildcard factor that makes the grand experiment interesting instead of boringly deterministic.

Existence is both holographic and fractal in nature. It is holographic in the sense that all possibilities exist simultaneously and timelessly, while our individual consciousness interfering with this static pattern is what generates the illusion of dynamic experience. In other words, it is we who move through the static pattern, the dreamscape projected by the Creator. Existence is fractal in the sense that freewill requires discontinuities and inconceivable complexities in this static web of possibilities. A fractal exists as a static pattern created from a deterministic equation, but due to the infinite complexity of a fractal, its exploration by a conscious perceiver becomes an nondeterministic affair. And thus the game of life can be characterized by freewill even though the gameboard itself is static and deterministic.

Progress arises when freewill moderates the interaction between two opposite forces. This forms a trinity generically composed of an active force, passive force, and neutralizing or balancing force. This trinity can be found everywhere that progress is to be found. For example, the tension of a string comprises the active force, inertia of the string creates the passive force, and the musician is the balancing force. From this is born music. Within individuals, the lower impulses form the passive force, higher spiritual callings of the heart form the active force, and you – the incarnated consciousness – form the balancing force by choosing between these two opposite polarities. From this is born the progress of your personal evolution. Even the fractal boundary of the Mandelbrot set acquires its infinite complexity by being the balancing point beyond two opposing mathematical values, the finite and the infinite – which ties back into reality being a fractal hologram.

Good and Evil:

Choice allows one to serve the Creator within oneself by exploiting others or by serving the Creator within others. The first path is identifed as evil/darkness/negativity while the second path one associates with good/light/positivity. This sets up two branches of evolution – one that works against the laws of Creation and one that works with and for it. Both ultimately serve the Creator’s exploration of self, but only the positive path does so in a balanced manner. The tension between these two evolutionary paths enriches the grand experiment and provides the impetus for evolution by both sides.

As Goethe wrote, the dark force “wills forever evil yet does forever good.” The self-serving path, despite giving the individual personal power, also puts him in unwitting subservience to higher powers. The highest power of all is the Creator, which those of the dark hierarchy unwittingly serve by providing the grand experiment with the passive force necessary for evolution. They provide the darkness against which the light stands out. Lucifer is referred to as the “lightbringer” because through self-serving actions, manipulation, and infliction of pain, self-serving individuals unwittingly give others the opportunity to see the light.

Cosmology:

Finite consciousness can be classified into an octave scale of conscious development. This octave arises naturally because consciousness is vibration, and vibration strung between a beginning point (as matter) and ending point (as unity with the Creator) sets up a scale. This scale consists of eight notes: do re mi fa so la si do. The first note signifies sleeping consciousness and the last note represents active consciousness – and notice that these notes have the same name, illustrating how sleeping and active consciousness are just two expressions of the same infinite consciousness. The space between two notes on this evolutionary scale is called a “density” and there are seven total densities, each encompassing a particular class of conscious development. The higher densities have higher vibrations of consciousness and are more evolved.

Whereas densities categorize different evolutionary levels of the dreamed, the terms “spacetime” and “timespace” classify different aspects of the dreamscape. Spacetime is the arena of causal interaction better known as physicality, where two or more beings interact while bound by a common set of physical laws. Spacetime is where experiences occur and lessons are learned – the ground, the battlefield, the classroom. By contrast, timespace is the sky, the command center, the teacher’s office. It is where individual beings have a bird’s eye view of what occurs in spacetime, providing a still point of contemplation, reflection, and planning of further spacetime experiences. This is the state one enters in between physical incarnations. The lower densities exist primarily in spacetime while the higher densities choose to exist almost exclusively in timespace.

Personal Spiritual Evolution:

Upon incarnating into a physical body, we experience an occultation of awareness and forget who we are. Then social conditioning and biological impulses graft a false identity upon us that is in total discord with our true spiritual nature. Most people wear this false identity for life and fail to recognize and fulfill their true reasons for incarnating. But for others, intuition and experiences help them realize that there is more to life than the material world (matrix) admits. Throughout life these individuals experience higher impulses guiding them toward becoming lucid in this dream, while simultaneously lower impulses beckon them toward sleep. For those who consistently listen to their higher impulses, inner and outer life transforms and begins to operate under divine instead of material laws, removing limitations of the latter and opening up new possibilities. This is the process of transcending the matrix, using higher laws to override lower ones by developing and purifying one’s internal nature to resonate with higher realms of existence. This is a prerequisite for fulfilling one’s potential.

from montalk.net

[thegeneralsnotebook]

February Feature: Ten Things Every Metagame Needs

I’m going to start this month’s article by offering a little unorthodox advice. Unorthodox because, as someone writing a blog series about card games, who hopes that readers will take some precious time out of their day to peruse some of the words I’ve written, it might seem unwise for me to recommend other blogs about card games that you could spend your time reading. Especially when said blogs are written by actual professionals who no doubt have much more insight into matters of consequence than I.

For the last few weeks of February, I have been perusing and enjoying the collected works of one Mark Rosewater, a name likely familiar to many of you. For those who don’t know him, Mark Rosewater is the head designer for Magic: the Gathering, a position that he has held for more than 15 years. As someone who has shepherded dozens upon dozens of new sets through that game’s development process, it goes without saying the Rosewater clearly knows a thing or two about game design.

Of particular interest to me as an amateur game designer is his Making Magic series, covering design decisions and processes over a length of years and a variety of topics. But the one article that originally got me interested in his work, and the one that we’re going to be looking at today, is one of his most well-known: The Ten Things Every Game Needs. In this post, Rosewater covers ten bullet points that cover the very essence of game design, the absolute basics of things which no game can lack if it is to be properly designed. It’s a great read, but it got me thinking. About metagames.

In the context of a collectible card game, “the metagame” is generally defined as the swirl of trends and constraints that go into a player’s decision of what kind of deck to bring to tournaments. If you’re expecting a lot of Nightmare Moon at the next Harmony event, what will you do to take advantage of that? If most of the players in your group play aggro (or control, or combo or whatever) then how does that affect the kind of deck you should play in order to maximize your chances of winning? These are metagame decisions.

The word metagame literally means “a game about a game”. Yet, I thought, if a metagame is also a game, as that definition seems to imply, should it not also abide by Rosewater’s ten requirements? It turned out that the answer was a bit of yes and a bit of no, but there were still some useful thoughts that came out of the exercise.

1. A Goal

Before we even really get started, it’s going to be useful to clarify exactly what the metagame is. Because otherwise we’ll fall flat on our face with just this first question. What does it mean to “play” the metagame? And what is the objective of the players?

One interesting thing about the metagame for a CCG is that it’s largely removed from the act of playing the normal game. The metagame is played by building decks and taking them to tournaments. In that sense, if we’re looking for an analogue, a CCG metagame can be thought of along the lines of a simple bidding game. Given some info about what the other players are thinking (the trends), and an understanding of the resolution process (playing the actual game), each player secretly submits their own decks, and then things are resolved and a winner is decided. Then everyone heads home to craft their decks for the next round.

So given that, the goal of the metagame becomes straightforward: in playing the metagame one tries to build the best deck to maximize their chances of winning a tournament. Note of course that that goal is stated in terms of chances. The resolution of each tournament is non-deterministic, since we’re not all comparing decklists and grading them to see who wins the tournament. The games still have to be played, and upsets will happen. But over time, playing well in the metagame will translate to good performance and tournament wins.

2. Rules

One of the things that makes CCGs really interesting as games is that they fall under a category that we might call “living games”. Unlike other tabletop games that are published once and never change for the rest of time, CCGs change because the card pool gets updated. So it’s a shifting experience, and the same is true of the metagame.

Since the metagame is played by building decks rather than by playing the normal game, the rules of the metagame are contained within the OCR. These rules define which cards are allowed to be run at tournaments, and thus constrain the kind of decks that can be built. Of lesser importance of course are the game rules themselves, and the floor rules, as these place some additional constraints on what kind of decks are allowed to be played at tournaments. But the prime point here is the OCR.

What this means is that the rules of the metagame are constantly shifting, making it even more of a living game than the CCG itself. The metagame can be totally different from one set to the next, and indeed that is something a designer may like to shoot for.

3. Interaction

As we get into the middle of the list, we start to hit the really interesting ones. As I said at the start, there is something useful that comes out of this exercise, and one of the things we realize about metagames, and about living games in general, is that attention needs to be paid to them in order for them to be kept fun. A straightforward advantage of fixed games is that once they’re finished, they’re done. They will be fun forever. A living game though needs to be designed constantly, otherwise it can end up drifting away from what its developers originally intended.

One thing that’s cool about these Ten Things is that one can look at them not only as requirements for initial design, but in the case of a living game we can also treat them as metrics to measure our success going forward. If any of them are lacking, it’s a sign that things aren’t healthy in your metagame.

To that point, we come to Interaction: the principle that players should have to react to each other as they play the game in order to play optimally. On the one hand, this may seem to be an obvious strikeout for a CCG metagame, as it is played solo, on Ponyhead often late at night, and the other players are only seen when we come together to play the real game.

Yet even so, the metagame necessarily exists as a push-and-pull between different creators and different decks. What other people are bringing to the tournament is a key piece of info for playing the metagame, and that creates a game of hiding your intentions while attempting to divine everyone else’s. Anyone who has seen the pre-Continentals verbal jousting matches between Bugle and eminently_sensible on Discord can attest to that, I hope.

But to bring this section back to its point, Interaction is also one of the key gauges we can use to judge the health of the metagame. If there is an optimal strategy that means I don’t have to care about what other people are bringing, and I still have a good chance at winning, then that’s a bad sign.

4. A Catch-up Feature

This is another point where it may seem that if we’re thinking about metagames we’re out of luck. A Catch-up Feature is defined as a way for players who are behind to get back themselves back into the game. What does it even mean to be behind in a metagame?

Well, we know what it means to be ahead. The players in the lead are the ones playing the best decks at the moment, so the players behind would be the ones who aren’t doing that. The catch-up comes from two places. First, the players behind can simply build a better deck than the players in front, or at least one as good. Then, suddenly, you’re in the mix, just like that.

Alternatively, and this is again the somewhat more useful point to note, the players behind can look for the counter and build for it. In well-established CCG metagames, there are often broad trends that run across sets and release years. Style A rises to prominence, and the players naturally turn to Style B to counter it. Note that I didn’t say Deck A and Deck B. The decks change, but often the overall winds of style and strategy stay the same. When these counters exist, they naturally serve as the metagame’s Catch-up feature. So thus it’s a benefit to the metagame for those counters to exist.

5. Inertia

Inertia is the tendency of a game to end itself. Systems of inertia are systems that naturally raise the probability of a game ending as it progresses onward. And this is therefore the first of the Ten Things that CCG metagames can’t satisfy. After all, metagames don’t end. There’s always another tournament coming up, or another set that will shake things up. When a metagame ends, it dies, because that means it’s “solved” and there is no longer any question on what decks to bring to the next tournament.

Now, if one was looking for an excuse here, we could decide to break apart the metagame, and say that rather than one continuous metagame, we instead have many smaller ones, consisting of the constraints and trends that exist for specific tournaments. So once a tournament happens, its metagame ends and the next metagame (for the next tournament) starts right away. If this is our interpretation, then the game’s Inertia is simply the passage of time, as tournament dates are fixed and necessarily come along.

6. Surprise

For metagames, surprise is actually a pretty easy one, again covered by the same idea that gave us Interaction up above. A large part of the metagame is trying to guess what other players are going to be bringing, and while sometimes these guesses can be pretty easy, they’re still fundamentally guesses, and that naturally creates the possibility that they can be wrong.

In Rosewater’s article, he makes mention of a concept called Depth of Play, which is simply to say that game states should be complex enough that it’s difficult to know exactly what to do at any given point. The metagame has that solved easily, as there are countless possible decks out there. While it’s true that many of them can be discounted as unworkable, there’s always the chance that at the next tournament someone will show up with something completely out of left field, simply because they thought to try it while you didn’t.

7. Strategy

Counterbalancing Surprise is Strategy. While Surprise dictates that it should never be possible to know exactly what the right move is in most circumstances, there should at least be principles and heuristics that we can use to get an idea of the sorts of moves that might be better than others.

Here again, we can see that the metagame covers this category nicely. Some of the principles of playing the game well are easy: many of us learn the simple dicta of deck construction very early on in our forays into the game. But naturally there’s an advanced layer underneath, where one can learn to think critically about other decks’ styles of play and how to counter them, or which play strategies should be countered and which should be ignored in pursuit of increasing the strength of our own. Since the metagame is a living game, these strategies necessarily will evolve as the rules do. There can never be static analysis as complete as there is for a game like Chess, but that keeps the metagame interesting, as there’s always something to learn.

8. Fun

Don’t worry folks, the end is in sight. Especially as with these last three there isn’t a whole lot to talk about. As Rosewater freely admits in his article, while Fun is bar-none the most important of the ten requirements, it’s also the one that can’t really be talked about in prescriptive terms.

What some find fun others will not, and there isn’t really a way to find out if a game is fun except by letting people play it and finding out. Now, after all of this, I think I can reasonably say that a CCG metagame can be expressed largely as an exercise in problem-solving, with the added spice of a healthy sprinkle of incomplete information. I’m pretty sure that some people find that fun, so it seems we’re probably in the clear on this one.

9. Flavour

Now, here’s a funny thing. CCGs in general are usually dripping with flavour, and our humble MLP CCG is no exception. Yet CCG metagames, almost by definition, have none whatsoever. Because metagames are abstractions, existing purely in terms of optimizing decks. Decks, tournaments, strategies, these things are all abstract concepts defined according to the game rules, and thus can’t really have emotional connections attached to them. We do at least have human narratives that play out over the course of a season; rivalries between players and decks that become famed in their own rights. But I would argue that none of that constitutes flavour.

10. A Hook

And finally, the list ends with quite the whimper, as A Hook is something that Rosewater notes is for people that want to sell their games. For CCGs themselves the Hook is absolutely essential, as it is for all tabletop games. Yet, as it was with Inertia and Flavour, metagames by their definition are not sold on their own merits, and thus don’t need Hooks. One cannot buy the MLP CCG metagame, at least not without buying the CCG that underlies it, and similarly one cannot play the former without first playing the latter.

***

So, at the conclusion of all that, where do we stand? As I said starting out, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. If we take Rosewater’s Ten Things as the fundamental requirements without which a thing cannot be a game, then the metagame necessarily falls short, as it’s missing Inertia, Flavour, and A Hook. Yet that seems like a fairly meaningless analysis, as by their nature metagames don’t need any of those things, and wouldn’t benefit from having them.

I think there is value in looking at and understanding the other seven, though, as they all should be present in a healthy metagame, and a healthy metagame is something that requires work. Some of these properties are fixed: the Goal, the Rules, the Surprise, the Strategy and the Fun will always be present regardless of the design decisions that are made going forward. Note of course that many of these properties will still change as the metagame changes. But their presence is something that the living nature of the metagame has no real bearing on.

Finally, the remaining two properties: Interaction and Catch-up. These are the properties that the living nature of the metagame has the most bearing on, as a poorly maintained metagame can lose these two properties, and their absence is a sure sign that things are not going well. If the metagame has turned into one which lacks Interaction, where there is no need to think about the other decks people might bring to the tournament, then that’s a problem. If there’s no way to assail the top-tier decks aside from copying them, then that may also be a problem.

There’s often a fair amount of talk within the community as to when intervention is required to fix an ailing metagame. Well, these two properties can hopefully serve as nicely understandable metrics to let us know how healthy the metagame is from a more objective standpoint, and thus guide our discussion in more constructive directions.

As a final note, I feel I should perhaps apologize to people who may have been expecting a History of White this month. While I do intend to eventually cover all of the colours in that series, I also expect to interrupt it whenever something more inspiring comes up, as happened this month. We’ll have to see if White can get its due in March, or if sudden inspiration will strike again. Until then, thank you and good day.

[program-800]

Exploring D:BH Fics (Part 6)

I continue investigating the text of DBH fics. Here, I talk a bit more about the word2vec model mentioned here.

Recap: Data was scraped from AO3 in mid-October. I removed any fics that were non-English, were crossovers and had less than 10 words. A small number of fics were missed out during the scrape - overall 13933 D:BH fics remain for analysis.

Part 1: Publishing frequency for D:BH with ratings breakdown Part 2: Building a network visualisation of D:BH ships Part 3: Topic modeling D:BH fics (retrieving common themes) Part 4: Average hits/kudos/comment counts/bookmarks received (split by publication month & rating) One-shots only. Part 5: Differences in word use between D:BH fics of different ratings Part 6: Word2Vec on D:BH fics (finding similar words based on word usage patterns) Part 7: Differences in topic usage between D:BH fics of different ratings Part 8: Understanding fanon representations of characters from story tags Part 9: D:BH character prominence in the actual game vs AO3 fics

Preface Before I start, do note that word2vec models (and the dimension reduction techniques in the visualisation, save for PCA) are still relatively unfamiliar to me versus the other stuff I’ve done. I’ll be writing what I understand so far, but I’m still doing readings and am far from an expert on any of this. Now that’s out of the way -

Relations between words come easy to us. We just kind of know that generally, words like ‘pain’ and ‘agony’ are more similar to each other than ‘pain’ and ‘apples’, for example. It’s not as easy for a computer though - text data has to be preprocessed into a numerical form to do any quantitative analysis; how would you tell a PC that ‘pain’ and ‘agony’ are closer to each other than ‘apples’?

Many applications still work off a bag-of-words model (i.e., some form of word count). It sounds crude but it really still provides a rather solid baseline! But for the purpose of this part (finding similar words), a bag-of-words won’t work at all. For example, the sentences: ‘There was blood, he was in pain and screaming’ and ‘There was blood, he was in agony and screaming’. ‘Pain’ and ‘agony’ would just be counted as different words (as with any usage of ‘apple’) - there’s no information encoded in the word count about their obvious similarity.

Word2vec models can help with this. By working with the assumption that words that share similar contexts (i.e., surrounding words) should have similar meanings, these models represent each word as a unique numerical vector (typically hundreds of dimensions), by either (1) learning to predict a word of interest based on its surrounding words, or (2) learning to predict surrounding words based on a word of interest. With these vectors (word embeddings), we can then perform calculations; for example, calculating cosine similarity to find the most similar words.

I’d like to highlight that an effect of this assumption is that we don’t necessarily get synonyms only in our eventual lists of similar words. The similarity derived from word2vec is far broader - antonyms would also be considered similar under this assumption.

Much code for this part taken from Gensim’s tutorial.

1. Preprocessing. Very simple preprocessing done here. Given that surrounding words are important to the training of the word2vec model, I did not remove names and stopwords. I just removed the chapter/work text and newline indicators.

Then, I tokenised (split) each fic down into its sentences. I then applied Gensim’s simple_preprocess function to each sentence to get word2vec-ready input. The function further tokenises each sentence into individual words, lowercasing them all and ignoring words that are too short/long (at least 2 characters, no more than 15).

There were 6,817,169 sentences for the word2vec model to learn from.

2. Training the word2vec model. I used Gensim for this. I did not set a maximum vocabulary size for the model to work on, but I did set a minimum count of 100 (i.e., the word has to appear in at least 100 sentences to be kept for training). This left me with 18,733 unique words from the original 133189 unique words.

I used the skip-gram model, which learns to predict surrounding words given a word of interest. The window size was set to 10; this affects the size of the ‘context’ that the model’s working with (i.e., look at the 10 words before and after each word of interest in a sentence). I set the vector size to 200 - each of the 18,733 words was thus represented as a 1x200 dimension vector at the end of training. The model was allowed to run for 20 iterations.

3. Visualisation. Since it’s impossible for most humans to visualise at a level of 200 dimensions (please contact me if you can), I used tensorflow’s projector to visualise the 18,733 embeddings in a 3D space.

There are three options for dimension reduction - PCA, tSNE, UMAP. This notebook from the authors of UMAP show how these algorithms differ in their final visualisation output.

PCA is linear and provides a lower-dimension representation that captures the most amount of variance possible from the original representation. It is deterministic and results don’t differ across runs.

tSNE and UMAP (from what I understand) are non-linear, will change across different runs, and are sensitive to hyperparameters. I’ve mostly seen tSNE used as a useful pre-work visualisation tool to check if there is actual separability in the data before going on with clustering, etc. tSNE is focused more on local structure and doesn’t preserve global distances (so you can’t say a further cluster is more dissimilar than a nearer one).

UMAP is a really new algorithm that seems to be a contending alternative to tSNE. I don’t know enough to comment - honestly I went with UMAP for this visualisation just because it ran faster. It does seem to generally put the words that have higher similarity (as defined by cosine similarity) in the same local space.

Feel free to try the tSNE setting on the projector, but do note it’ll take a while for the result to stabilise!

Final notes Regarding model training, I’m not too sure if 100 sentences was too liberally low a count and if a window of 10 was too large. I’d like to continue experimenting with this.

Also, while the model appears to find qualitatively intuitive ‘similar’ words, that’s far from the only way to evaluate it:

1) I read that one way to test the model’s quality is to look at semantic relations, e.g. ‘man’ is to ‘boy’ as ‘woman’ is to ‘girl’, ‘Moscow’ is to ‘Russia’ as ‘Washington’ is to ‘America’. I ran a few checks and they weren’t that great. I (currently) suspect two reasons. Firstly - more data and more hyperparameter tweaking needed. Secondly - fics may just have a rather different focus/relations from regular Wikipedia/news corpora, and it’s being reflected here.

2) Another way to evaluate the model is to see the performance of the learned embeddings on some downstream task like text classification. I haven’t thought of a follow-up task, but it would be interesting to pursue this.