#Excel conversion to PDF

[dataentryinc]

How to Ensure Data Accuracy When Converting PDF Files to Excel: Tips and Best Practices

Have you ever found yourself completely stuck and confused while looking at numbers and texts after converting PDF files to Excel? If yes, then no worries you are not alone. Because data conversion does feel like solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded. It’s completely frustrating and challenging.

But we are not here to cringe about it, we have a solution to make the file conversion process smooth and errorless.

Every business runs on data and accuracy is not a choice but the foundation of success. So let’s look at some amazing yet simple practices that can be followed to convert PDF Files to Excel while preventing errors.

1. Choose the Right Conversion Tool

Not all PDF conversion tools are meant for you. Think of it like choosing the right partner. Choosing the right tool can create a difference or it will just be a mess.

Compare different conversion software: Explore the tools available in the market. Look for tools like PDFelement, PDFzilla, Adobe Acrobat DC, and other PDF converters

Read User Reviews: Don’t just trust Google reviews; look for real scenarios and a detailed user experience.

Check File Size Limitations: This is a very important factor. Not all tools convert big-size PDF documents. Know your requirements and then select the tool accordingly.

Evaluate Security Features: Your business data is sensitive. You must ensure that the tool you use must comply with data protection regulations.

Look into Customer Support Options: In any case, if things go wrong you will need reliable support. Ensure that the tool has multiple support channels like call assistance, live chat and email support.

2. Master Your Tool's Settings

Settings are the secret weapons needed to fine-tune conversion settings to get the most accurate data possible.

Choose the Right Output Format: XLS is suitable for older Excel versions, CSV is suitable for normal data exchange, and XLSX is suitable for newer ones.

Configure Table Detection Settings: Table can be a little challenging. You need to experiment between automatic, manual and grid-based to find accurate methods for your document type.

Activate OCR for Scanned Documents: OCR (Optimal Character Recognition) is known for scanning image-based PDFs. It transforms images into editable texts.

Experiment with Different Data Extraction Modes: You can experiment withing extraction modes like text-based, hybrid extraction or layout-based to choose the most accurate mode for your document.

3. Data Validation is a Must

Data validation is not just about catching errors, it is about ensuring data is reliable and rock solid.

Use Data Validation Tools: You need to set up some rules in Excel right from the beginning to prevent mistakes.

Define Specific Data Types: The right format must be followed for numerical data and phone numbers so that they stay within logical ranges.

Double-Check Logical Consistency: For instance, ensure that end dates aren’t before start dates or percentages stay between the range of 0 to 100.

Highlight the Errors: Use colour-coding to highlight the errors so that they stand out visually.

Run Error Checks: Excel error-checking tools are available to catch any formula inconsistencies.

4. Organize and Format Like a Pro

To make sure that your spreadsheet is visually appealing and easy to understand follow the below points:

Sort Systematically: You can arrange it in alphabetical order or chronological order or by any order that you think can make it easy to flow.

Apply Filters: If you don’t want to dig the whole sheet every time, apply a filter to allow users to explore specific subsets.

Add Subtotals: It is necessary to provide instant insights.

Create Clean Formatting: Consistent font, colour and style just not only ensure that the sheet is visually appealing but also easy to understand.

Highlight Key Insights: Use colours and bold fonts to highlight the important details

5. Secure and Share Smartly

Your data is like treasure so you can’t afford to lose it to someone. Protect it and share it responsibly.

Export Thoughtfully: Use the export options of Excel to create files that are compatible with other platforms and software.

Add Password Protection: To keep unauthorised users away from your files, secure it with passwords.

Add Encryption: Sensitive data must be protected with encryption to add some extra security.

Apply Digital Signature: A digital signature can validate the authenticity of your document.

6. Keep Learning and Adapting

The data-driven world is evolving. Staying up to date with the regulations and tricks is necessary.

Explore New Techniques: You can attend webinars, and courses or check blogs to stay updated on latest methods.

Stay on Top of Trends: Follow tech updates and industry leaders to learn about the best conversion tools.

Experiment with New Tools: You never know what you are missing out. Explore new tools, it might make your process easier.

Let's be Honest

Data conversion never offers a smooth road to the destination. Sometimes it’s messy and challenging. What matters most is your patience and dedication. The strategies that we have discussed are practical tools that will help you with data management.

Though they don’t work like miracles.

You'll encounter obstacles:

Some PDFs will resist conversion

Formatting won't always align perfectly

Complex documents will test your patience

With the right approach, these problems can be overcome. The right tools and techniques can turn your messy documents into useful and valuable spreadsheets.

Time to unlock the full potential of your documents to transform your challenges into opportunities. Start your journey to hassle-free PDF conversion services today!

Source Link: https://latestbpoblog.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-to-ensure-data-accuracy-when-converting-pdf-files-to-excel.html

[sportworldtone]

STREAMLINING Sports Data with PDF Conversion Excellence

PDFs are great for sharing because a layperson can layout accidentally by sharing a lot of pages. In this way, PDFs can transfer information from one side to another in a secure manner. Convert PDFs to your multiple pages of files into compound objects in a sequence.

PDFs are smaller in size in this way it is easy to store, and download. From Field To File: STREAMLINING Sports Data with PDF Conversion Excellence #STREAMLININGSportsDatawithPDFConversion #STREAMLININGSportsDatawithPDFConversionexcellence

[uniquesdata]

Boost Probability by Outsourcing Image Conversion Services

Images are a way of communication in the digital world. It attracts and compels the audience to proceed further with your business. Not only eCommerce but other businesses also require image conversion services for various aspects including advertisements, brochures, social media, and much more.

Uniquesdata offers reliable image conversion services for a variety of businesses to make a powerful impact.

[freelancingfromhome]

Hi, I am here for helping you to collect leads and manually data entry work. Please fell free to contact.

[ceausescue]

if there's one thing ive learned from my math education it's the ability to judge a textbook by it's cover:

fancy cover with actual picture, fewer than 15 years old, $300: absolute dogshit. time wasting exercises, poor exposition, that weird gloss they put on the pages probably makes it too toxic to use as kindling

title is just name of subject, referred to by author, 50 years old with like 3 editions: excellent. compact proofs, exercises good enough people refer to them by number in conversation. available for free by foraging somewhere they grow naturally

title is some shit like paul's notes, "cover" is just default latex titlepage, distributed as pdf to grad classes or by advisor: best coverage of whatever (usually niche) topic it's about in the world. crystal clear exposition. solutions to exercises available by emailing grad students working under author

[eliasgkhighflyer]

[thanergetic-hyperlinks]

Tamsyn Muir's writing beyond The Locked Tomb

Y'all, turns out there's lots of imagery and themes in TLT that Muir was already playing with in her earlier fiction. A lot of it is easily available online, in which case I'll link to it. (The short stories that aren't can also be easily read if googled, to be quite honest—that's how I read The Deepwater Bride and Why the Mermaids Left Boralus). • The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time (2011)

5K. Short sort-of-cozy romance (?) with (you guessed it) a time travel loop. Explores a very queer potential relationship. CamPal enjoyers might find a similar sweetness.

• The Magician's Apprentice (2012, Lightspeed Magazine)

5K. This is the one that stopped me dead on my tracks. It features an older, male mentor figure called John (a “very ordinary man” with “dark eyes”) who introduces the young, female main character to magic that has a terrible cost—and to literature such as Lolita. This excellent post by @familyabolisher does an incredible job of analyzing the very deliberate intertextual links between TLT and Lolita.

• The Woman in the Hill (2015, Lightspeed Magazine, originally for Dreams From the Witch House anthology of Lovecraftian horror by women)

4K. Possibly my favorite! It's a straightforward Lovecraftian horror, centered on the image of the woman (is it human though?) trapped in an unnatural pool inside a cursed cave. Chain imagery too. It does something different from Alecto, mind, but you can see links, ways of playing with facets of a strong central image. It's fun to consider how reliable the two narrators are. Here's an analysis and afterthought from Reactor Mag.

• Chew (2013) 4K. Zombie abuse and cannibalistic revenge story ft. an uncanny woman revenant, told from the eyes of a traumatized German boy. I was strongly reminded of Harrow's conversations with the Body. Tamsyn gave an interview on the themes and her intentions. Interesting to read in light of Alecto, I think, although I don't think she's going the same route in TLT: “the idea of post-war rebuilding connecting to rebuilding the body of the zombie; a Frankenstein who once rebuilt doesn’t act as planned or desired. […] I love cannibalism […] it’s innately spiritual […] any afterlife she goes to, he’s going too.”

• Apothecia (2014, published on Tumblr and tapas.io)

Short webcomic where an alien monster tries to corrupt the ruthless human girl who holds it captive. Musings on responsibility and murder, mention of child abuse. The alien's speech patterns remind me of a Resurrection Beast. You get wonderful dialogue like “Murder is a profession. Job. Employment, you tiny leg dog. There you are, walking along. Walk walk walk. Now you are a walker. Good job. Special child. Murder is like this.” Art by Shelby Cragg.

• The Deepwater Bride (2015, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

The opening line is: “In the time of our crawling Night Lord's ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie's Dream Car.” Need I say more? Extremely fun. A novelette where a young queer girl from a clairvoyant family struggles with an apocalyptic event while being annoyed by another very plucky girl. Lots of descriptions with nerdy marine zoology terms. Close in tone to Gideon. In the background, someone dies EXACTLY like that one death at the end of Gideon, which makes me wonder what happened to make Tamsyn interested in this particular image. I also liked that Tamsyn is aware of Nightwish. No link, but you'll get a PDF immediately if you Google.

• Union (2015, Clarkesworld Magazine)

5.5K. Very weird, extremely Kiwi story about a town that gets sent lab-grown wives by the government, but they're not made the usual way so they're Weird and people have feelings about it. Fascinating and eerie description of non-human (in some people's eyes, sub-human) women (?) who cannot be observed to have recognizable feelings or thoughts, yet have some sort of inner life. Quite touching, very uncanny.

• Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020)

Short novel (~200 pages). Very funny. I was reminded of Coronabeth because the whole plot is “princess finds herself branching out into decidedly non-princess-like activities”, but other than that—this is a fairytale for adults about people who make eachother worse. No particular links to TLT but a very fun read with some gut punches. Extremely Tamsyn through and through, what with the dubious morality and all.

• Why the Mermaids Left Boralus (2021, in Folk & Fairy Tales of Azeroth by Blizzard Entertainment)

Set in the World of Warcraft universe. Haven't read this one yet, will report back lmao. As with The Deepwater Bride, no link but I easily found a PDF of the entire compilation. It's illustrated!

• Undercover (2022, from Into Shadow, Amazon Original Collection)

Haven't read it either. Will edit once I do.

[ms-demeanor]

I appreciate you starting a conversation about the harms of homeopathy, and I just want to mention that homeopathy/alternative medicine is also largely BS when it comes to treating our pets. A lot of essential oils and herbal remedies are toxic to cats and dogs even in small quantities, but people still try using them as flea and tick prevention because they don’t want to use “toxic” medicine that actually works. CBD isn’t FDA approved for dogs because it’s not been proven to be effective and safe, but a lot of folks have pushed me to try it for my dog because he’s on medication for extreme anxiety. Some folks will seek out animal chiropractors to “treat” their dog’s IVDD or hip dysplasia instead of pursuing pain management or surgical treatment. People think that vets look at their pets and see dollar signs instead of an animal needing treatment and turn to snake oil salesmen instead. It’s maddening.

Yeah that makes me fucking crazy.

@drferox and @why-animals-do-the-thing are great resources on tumblr who have spent a ton of time discussing animal woo in the past; both have slowed down on posting because life is hard and tumblr is tumblr, but both have done a lot of excellent writing about things like animal training, raw pet food, vaccination, and how to be a good human to your pets. If you've got questions about animals, search their archives and you're probably going to find a ton of useful information.

Folks, I swear veterinarians aren't coming for your wallets and they are generally criminally under-compensated for the work that they do. They're brilliant professionals who are driven by passion and fucked by the market.

Sorry i went to go find some studies on dogs and cbd and i ended up finding a reprint of a small study from the american holistic veterinary medical association and I found this on the pdf and i'm going to murder somebody

for those who are not aware young living is an essential oil mlm largely targeting mormon housewives that was started by a man whose child died being drowned at birth in an at-home-water-birthing incident and who himself likely died of cancer he tried to treat with essential oils.

This is one of those things that's like a big flashing neon sign that the study/journal you're looking at is a hot pile of bullshit.

Anyway. Yeah. Research supporting the safety and effectiveness of CBD on dogs is pretty thin on the ground. Your pets depend on you. The choices you make determine their health and wellbeing.

Listening to woo-peddlers who tell you not to vaccinate, or who hype up untested "healthy grain free diets," or who promote and sell cbd in absence of evidence of its effectiveness is putting your pets hands in the health of someone who doesn't care about your pet, they just care about profit.

Also, while I'm here: don't feed your dog grain free foods unless they have a diagnosed allergy, grain free foods can lead to liver and kidney problems, dogs are more omnivorous, not obligate carnivores like cats and grain is not bad for their diet nor unnatural for them to eat, and there are very few brands that have done decades of feeding tests on dogs (Royal Canin, Hills Science Diet, Pedigree, Eukanuba, and Iams) and none of them are Blue Buffalo.

Appeals to nature are extremely common in online woo discussions of pet food and vet care. Your dog is not a wolf and does not need to eat like a wolf. Your cat is not a lion and does not need to claim territory like a lion.

Vaccinate your pets, don't let them wander, feed them tested diets, and listen to your vet's advice on their care.

[j-richmond]

Context: My brother and I make an indie TTRPG called The Magical Land of Yeld. Okay, so a few months ago my friend and constant ally and booster Emma Void (who is one of the two producers of our excellent YeldPlay actual play podcast) put me in touch with the people from Tiny Table, who do their own excellent actual play podcast. In the kind of magical way that these things sometimes happen, they were interested in playing and recording a Yeld game. Which I was very excited for! They asked me to write up a basic adventure for them to use, which I did (and which we'll publish later), and then they disappeared for a few months to do their own thing. A few weeks ago we got together again for an interview. The Tiny Table people are very nice and very funny, and had lot of smart questions and insights about our game. Which is rare, you know? If you play TTRPGs, you know that taking on and learning a new game can be a challenge, and it takes awhile to get up to speed. But it was clear that not only did they have a handle on the rules, but also really understood the themes Yeld gets into. We had a great conversation (which they recorded, so you'll be able to hear it soon), but they were quiet about the actual game they had recorded. Nick and I would have to wait to listen to it to find out what they got up to.

And I'm SO excited to find out! I just listened to their first Yeld episode, which is an incredibly concise rules overview by Julian. In less than 20 minutes they explain everything you need to know about Yeld, and I 100% couldn't have said it better myself. Something I noticed in both our interview and our brief conversations is that the entire Tiny Table group is very well put together and has a fantastic audio presence. You can hear this in Julian's rules overview, and it makes me even more excited to hear the first episode of their adventure (which I believe is coming next week)! I'm so excited to listen to them discover Yeld! Listen to Tiny Table here, and make sure to support their Patreon here! You can get the hardcover Yeld rule book and PDF from the Yeld site, IPR or Tabletop Bookshelf. The PDF is also available from DrivethruRPG and Itch.

[talenlee]

Dev Pile 2025-06 — Starter Kit

Making dev piles is a new experience for the blog in that they are explicitly deliberately timely. Where most of the work on this blog is thrown weeks, sometimes months in advance if it doesn’t fit neatly in a single spot, I am trying to make sure I write any given Dev Pile article covering the ‘week before’ the article goes up. This is a new kind of work for me, and it’s necessitated working ahead.

The week this article is being ‘written in’ is the week after Cancon. I had a plan for this week: I was going to spend the week writing an article developing the game dev I did, at cancon, in the dull periods at the table between the sales. Thing is, this year, that did not happen – Cancon was pretty much completely constant, so much so that the first day I didn’t even notice I never pulled out my notebook and what notes did get taken during the whole event were surface, or sketching out some minor ideas.

Therefore instead of a single intense focus here, this is going to be something of a hello and hey, here’s how to get started article about game making, tools, and prototyping.

Who Can Make Games?

You can make games. I can make games. Anyone who wants to can make games. The access you have to industrial scale production equipment to make the game you’re designing into something that looks like conventional product is a little more attainable than you may think, thanks to modern tools.

The core of you making games is this: Can you explain a set of rules to another player that let them understand how to play the game?

Great, then you’ve made a game. The next step is working out how to make that game the kind of game you want it to be. And to paraphrase what Adam Savage once said, the difference between doing game development and screwing around is just writing things down.

Tools

First things first, if you have a tool you like for any of the stated purposes, then you should use the tool you like. The tools I describe here should all be free, but that can make them less convenient in ways you may not like.

To write rulebooks, I use LibreOffice. This is a text editor in the same vein as Pages and Word, and much like Google Docs. We’ve pretty much solved ‘writing in a document for a computer user to read’ as a format, and that format has been kinda the same for thirty years. Notably, a formal editor like this lets you do tables and give texts formatting entries like heading styles, which means you don’t have to work to translate that stuff to a website like a wordpress content management system. Under the hood, these two things know how to talk to one another.

Notepad is a valuable tool as well for when you need ‘scrap’ text – no formatting, just some numbers or the like, but literally anything will do here.

Almost inevitably any given game design I have will need a spreadsheet. Sometimes a spreadsheet lets me present a skeleton of a game, with say, a sheet of 52 entries that just indicate the information on a card’s face. That means I use LibreCalc, but I only started using that seven months ago, when I learned about the IFS function. The version of Excel I was using from 2007 didn’t have this ‘new’ functionality, and I found that very useful. You may ask: How often do you need ‘IFS’ in game development and the answer is never. There are definitely thihngs I can use spreadsheets for, but these functions are not super necessary.

To do visual editing I use GIMP, pronounced ‘noo-imp,’ because gimp is a silly word to use in everyday conversation and it has worn its welcome out in my tongue. GIMP is a program that takes some getting used to, but the heart of what it is is a powerful photoshop-level program that puts almost everything it has directly under your control, including warp tools, healing tools, stamp tools and other simple filters. I will usually use GIMP to generate a template file or example for how a card should look, and then, when I want to put those cards into a file to make a pdf for printing, I turn to…

Scribus! Scribus is my layout and DTP program that I avoid using in every situation I can. I dislike Scribus interface a lot, and as a result, I route around it – I try to make sure that if I’m doing something in a design that Scribus ‘could’ do, I will ensure that Scribus is the only thing that can do it, and if something else can do it, I’ll do it that way. This is a combination of familiarity and convenience: Scribus is by no means a bad program, I’m sure, but I don’t like using it and it feels very easy to break things, which means when I do use it, I’m probably using it ‘wrong,’ and a Scribus expert would want to correct my technique.

For making simple slideshow videos, where I just show a thing, talk about it, and move on, I use the program OBS, which you can use for rules tutorials or explainers. OBS has its own ability to do slides – which you can make in a slideshow program like Google Slides or powerpoint or Prezi if you like – and then you talk over it, advancing the slides in OBS. It’s a very powerful, very flexible tool, but I can understand if it’s a bit overwhelming to start with.

If you want to record audio for your game, which is a cool thing to do, I use Audacity. It’s a simple audio program if you’re just using it for its basic functions, but it can be great if (for example) you want to record audio diaries of your creation process.

Also, mixed in with this is, cardboard, paper, scissors and glue. Playing cards need a standardised form so you can make a ‘blank’ deck of cards by taking an ordinary deck of cards and putting large, white, laundry stickers on each face, ‘wiping’ it so you can write what you want on the face.

Art Though?

I use free art where I can. There’s a lot of art assets, paid and free over on itch.io, which you can definitely use to make your game work look more interesting than base. And of course…

Bandaid tearing off time,

There are free image generators that you can use if you are comfortable with that. My advice is that you should only ever use generators for ‘zero value’ forms of media; that is, nothing you intend to sell and nothing you intend to use as identifying for yourself; don’t use a generator for a logo for your identity or brand, for example, because that’s uncopyrightable and then someone can just copy it. Even if they don’t, the fact they can undermines the copyright value of designing your own logo and title.

But yeah, image generators are available online. When I need an image for an example, the one I recommend using is dezgo, because it doesn’t require a login, doesn’t require you to pay money, and all it asks of you is time to let it finish working. You’re not going to get timely bulk media out of it, but that means, in my mind, that any artwork it generates is going to be worth scrutinising and editing to make it more appropriate to your needs. This is part of a greater conversation, but for now, the important thing is that if you’re going to use generative tools you need to make sure you recognise what they’re bad at and what they’re bad for.

Getting Started?

Alright, you have some tools to make what you have in mind more possible. What I recommend you do, and I will delve more into this later in the week, is make a prototype, and then, once you have the prototype, look at it seriously.

You’re going to have to get your head around the question what do I like without asking the followup question why at first. What is it about your prototype that satisfies you? What would you change if you could? Why isn’t it satisfying to you, what about it makes you concerned. Are there things you haven’t thought about because of biases you have? Is it a game you can’t play with one hand?

The point is the prototype marks the point you start finding out. You don’t need a perfect game to prototype – indeed, I have a lot of very ugly games as prototypes and I think those ugly prototypes work really well as a place to start working out what to do next.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[stolenglow]

a little leisure reading of judith herman's trauma and recovery (pdf available here for now). some notes from chapter 4 (captivity):

control and domination

Captivity, which brings the victim into prolonged contact with the perpetrator, creates a special type of relationship, one of coercive control. […] In situations of captivity, the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator. Little is known about the mind of the perpetrator. Since he is contemptuous of those who seek to understand him, he does not volunteer to be studied. Since he does not perceive that anything is wrong with him, he does not seek help [...] Authoritarian, secretive, sometimes grandiose, and even paranoid, the perpetrator is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive to the realities of power and to social norms. Only rarely does he get into difficulties with the law; rather, he seeks out situations where his tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired. His demeanor provides an excellent camouflage, for few people believe that extraordinary crimes can be committed by men of such conventional appearance The perpetrator’s first goal appears to be the enslavement of his victim, and he accomplishes this goal by exercising despotic control over every aspect of the victim’s life. But simple compliance rarely satisfies him; he appears to have a psychological need to justify his crimes, and for this he needs the victim’s affirmation. Thus he relentlessly demands from his victim professions of respect, gratitude, or even love. His ultimate goal appears to be the creation of a willing victim. Hostages, political prisoners, battered women, and slaves have all remarked upon the captor’s curious psychological dependence upon his victim. The desire for total control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny. Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims. Slaveholders demand gratitude of their slaves. […] Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission.

methods

The methods that enable one human being to enslave another are remarkably consistent. […] Amnesty International in 1973 published a “chart of coercion,” describing these methods in detail. […] Even in domestic situations, where the batterer is not part of any larger organization and has had no formal instruction in these techniques, he seems time and again to reinvent them. […] The methods of establishing control over another person are based upon the systematic, repetitive infliction of psychological trauma. They are the organized techniques of disempowerment and disconnection. Methods of psychological control are designed to instill terror and helplessness and to destroy the victim’s sense of self in relation to others. Fear is also increased by inconsistent and unpredictable outbursts of violence and by capricious enforcement of petty rules. The ultimate effect of these techniques is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance. The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live. Survivors of domestic or political captivity often describe occasions in which they were convinced that they would be killed, only to be spared at the last moment. After several cycles of reprieve from certain death, the victim may come to view the perpetrator, paradoxically, as her savior. In addition to inducing fear, the perpetrator seeks to destroy the victim’s sense of autonomy. This is achieved by scrutiny and control of the victim’s body and bodily functions. The perpetrator supervises what the victim eats, when she sleeps, when she goes to the toilet, what she wears […] even when the victim’s basic physical needs are adequately met, this assault on bodily autonomy shames and demoralizes her. […] All those norms of human behavior which are inculcated in one from the cradle are subjected to deliberate and systematic destruction […] Once the perpetrator has succeeded in establishing day-to-day bodily control of the victim, he becomes a source not only of fear and humiliation but also of solace. The hope of a meal, a bath, a kind word, or some other ordinary creature comfort can become compelling to a person long enough deprived. The perpetrator may further debilitate the victim by offering addictive drugs or alcohol. The capricious granting of small indulgences undermines the psychological resistance of the victim far more effectively than unremitting deprivation and fear.

resistance and 'breaking'

[…] under extreme duress anyone can be “broken.” They generally distinguish two stages in this process. The first is reached when the victim relinquishes her inner autonomy, world view, moral principles, or connection with others for the sake of survival. There is a shutting down of feelings, thoughts, initiative, and judgment. […] The second, irreversible stage in the breaking of a person is reached when the victim loses the will to live. This is not the same thing as becoming suicidal: people in captivity live constantly with the fantasy of suicide, and occasional suicide attempts are not inconsistent with a general determination to survive. […] The stance of suicide is active; it preserves an inner sense of control. As in the case of the hunger strike, the captive asserts his defiance by his willingness to end his life. Losing the will to live, by contrast, represents the final stage of the process that Timerman describes as adopting an “attitude of absolute passivity.” […] Prisoners who had reached this point of degradation no longer attempted to find food or to warm themselves, and they made no effort to avoid being beaten. They were regarded as the living dead.”

things post-trauma

Chronically traumatized people are continually hypervigilant, anxious, and agitated. […] But the features of post-traumatic stress disorder that become most exaggerated in chronically traumatized people are avoidance or constriction. When the victim has been reduced to a goal of simple survival, psychological constriction becomes an essential form of adaptation. This narrowing applies to every aspect of life—to relationships, activities, thoughts, memories, emotions, and even sensations. And while this constriction is adaptive in captivity, it also leads to a kind of atrophy in the psychological capacities that have been suppressed and to the overdevelopment of a solitary inner life. [...] prisoners develop the capacity voluntarily to restrict and suppress their thoughts. This practice applies especially to any thoughts of the future. Thinking of the future stirs up such intense yearning and hope that prisoners find it unbearable; they quickly learn that these emotions make them vulnerable to disappointment and that disappointment will make them desperate. They therefore consciously narrow their attention, focusing on extremely limited goals. The future is reduced to a matter of hours or days. Along with the alteration in time sense comes a constriction in initiative and planning […] the field of initiative is increasingly narrowed within confines dictated by the perpetrator. The prisoner no longer thinks of how to escape, but rather of how to stay alive, or how to make captivity more bearable. […] This narrowing in the range of initiative becomes habitual with prolonged captivity, and it must be unlearned after the prisoner is liberated.

[the victim] has learned that every action will be watched, that most actions will be thwarted, and that she will pay dearly for failure. To the extent that the perpetrator has succeeded in enforcing his demand for total submission, she will perceive any exercise of her own initiative as insubordination. Before undertaking any action, she will scan the environment, expecting retaliation. […] Prolonged captivity undermines or destroys the ordinary sense of a relatively safe sphere of initiative, in which there is some tolerance for trial and error. To the chronically traumatized person, any action has potentially dire consequences. The sense that the perpetrator is still present, even after liberation, signifies a major alteration in the victim’s relational world. The enforced relationship during captivity, which of necessity monopolizes the victim’s attention, becomes part of the victim’s inner life and continues to engross her attention after release. […] In sexual, domestic, and religious cult prisoners, this continued relationship may take a more ambivalent form: the victim may continue to fear her former captor and to expect that he will eventually hunt her down, but she may also feel empty, confused, and worthless without him. In isolated prisoners, [where] there is no opportunity to bond with peers, pair bonding may occur between victim and perpetrator, and this relationship may come to feel like the “basic unit of survival.” This is the “traumatic bonding” that occurs in hostages, who come to view their captors as their saviors and to fear and hate their rescuers. […] The repeated experience of terror and reprieve, especially within the isolated context of a love relationship, may result in a feeling of intense, almost worshipful dependence upon an all-powerful, godlike authority. The victim may live in terror of his wrath, but she may also view him as the source of strength, guidance, and life itself. The relationship may take on an extraordinary quality of specialness. Even after the victim has escaped, it is not possible simply to reconstitute relationships of the sort that existed prior to captivity. For all relationships are now viewed through the lens of extremity. Just as there is no range of moderate engagement or risk for initiative, there is no range of moderate engagement or risk for relationship. No ordinary relationship offers the same degree of intensity as the pathological bond with the abuser. In every encounter, basic trust is in question. To the released prisoner, there is only one story: the story of atrocity. And there are only a limited number of roles: one can be a perpetrator, a passive witness, an ally, or a rescuer. Every new or old relationship is approached with the implicit question: Which side are you on?

[mariacallous]

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

In the age of AI, however, there’s a new motto: There’s no need to turn pages at all! Not even the transcripts of your interviews. Oh, and you don’t have to pay attention at meetings, or even attend them. Nor do you need to read your mail or your colleagues’ memos. Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness.

LLMs love to summarize, or at least that’s what their creators set them about doing. Google now “auto-summarizes” your documents so you can “quickly parse the information that matters and prioritize where to focus.” AI will even summarize unread conversations in Google Chat! With Microsoft Copilot, if you so much as hover your cursor over an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get it boiled down. That’s right—even the condensed bullet points of a slide deck can be cut down to the … more essential stuff? Meta also now summarizes the comments on popular posts. Zoom summarizes meetings and churns out a cheat sheet in real time. Transcription services like Otter now put summaries front and center, and the transcription itself in another tab.

Why the orgy of summarizing? At a time when we’re only beginning to figure out how to get value from LLMs, summaries are one of the most straightforward and immediately useful features available. Of course, they can contain errors or miss important points. Noted. The more serious risk is that relying too much on summaries will make us dumber.

Summaries, after all, are sketchy maps and not the territory itself. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen joke where he zipped through War and Peace in 20 minutes and concluded, “It’s about Russia.” I’m not saying that AI summaries are that vague. In fact, the reason they’re dangerous is that they’re good enough. They allow you to fake it, to proceed with some understanding of the subject. Just not a deep one.

As an example, let’s take AI-generated summaries of voice recordings, like what Otter does. As a journalist, I know that you lose something when you don’t do your own transcriptions. It’s incredibly time-consuming. But in the process you really know what your subject is saying, and not saying. You almost always find something you missed. A very close reading of a transcript might allow you to recover some of that. Having everything summarized, though, tempts you to look at only the passages of immediate interest—at the expense of unearthing treasures buried in the text.

Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!

To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.

Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.

As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.

[aaiieell]

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[decepti-thots]

I'm really interested in your commentary on video game text. Do you have any favorite texts or other sources on the subject? Games as text is a super interesting conversation but I don't know where to start looking for more critical or academic analysis of it

I think A Play of Bodies is a great place to start, and it has the advantage of being a book the author has said people should pirate if they can't afford priced-for-academic-libraries-only prices, so I feel fine linking you to my .pdf.

Rather than a specific book, journal or piece in addition to that one, I think there are two really good places to start looking for info on writing about games that you can use as a jumping off point to find stuff you're interested in:

Game Study Study Buddies is a podcast by two excellent critics which has the specific intention of being a 'book club' where they read an academic text related to games studies, and explicitly set out to break it down for a lay-audience. I love this podcast. It is wonderful as an introductory resource, and a lot of my to-read list re: games and criticism is me cribbing from them. Some specific episodes I can recommend are Hamlet on the Holodeck (a really oldschool foundational text that tried to analyse and predict how computers might change narrative), Game Design as Narrative Architecture (actually about a well known essay which explicitly looked at people arguing about 'narrative' vs 'ludology' as how to analyse games; this was a thing for a few years lmao), but they have episodes examining books on everything from games and imperialism to the connections between theatre and gaming. Cannot recommend enough.

Critical Distance is a site that is dedicated to curating, promoting, and archiving good games writing, from the amateur blogger to the academic publication and everything in between. They post weekly roundups, monthly round ups, podcast series, compilations looking at writing about specific games... I have been a patron of theirs for many years now basically just because they were so helpful to me when I started getting interested in this stuff, lmao. The only permanent patreon sub I have. If you want to start reading games writing, they have stuff at every level to look for. Their search is a great way to find stuff on specific games, and you can just look through their roundups for interesting things. It's been going long enough that you won't run out any time soon.

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