Crux Capacitor

It’s commonly said of New York City that “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” I don’t think this is broadly true, actually.

There exist three types of cities in the US:

1. Regional hubs
2. Industry-specific national hubs
3. NYC

The first category is made up of cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, etc etc, and smaller cities. You move there if you’re from the surrounding area and you want a Big City Experience™. Generally, you reach the age of 30, move to the suburbs, have kids, and repeat. There isn’t much more to be said about such cities.

The second category is composed of cities where the best people in a particular industry from around the country/world tend to congregate there. Examples include San Francisco (tech industry), LA (film industry), Washington DC (political industry), and maybe Miami (stripping and dealing coke.) These cities tend to have weird properties where people move there to strike it rich/famous and then move away later, whether because they got what they wanted or they couldn’t hack it. Those who stay tend to be the successful ones, creating a weird status bifurcation in the city.

NYC is…sort of both? In a sense, it’s the regional hub for the US/world and a kind of a pan-industry semi-magnet insofar as you can find reasonably sophisticated people in any industry there (despite the industry’s primary power brokers being located elsewhere.) The exception to this is the finance industry, of course, which is very much anchored in NYC and sort of sets the tone for everyone who lives there.

If you’re in a field other than finance, though, chances are NYC isn’t the place where people who are really serious about your field go. If you’re really serious about acting, you go to LA. If you’re really serious about tech, you go to SF. And if you’re really serious about politics, you go to DC.

You’ll be able to meet serious players from any field in NYC, but you’ll probably miss out on much of the industry-wide emergent properties that arise chiefly (exclusively?) in its primary national hub. In tech, at least, this leads to these weird dynamics where you can “make it” within the NYC bubble of people who LARP as SF tech people but be completely unknown in the arenas where it really matters. My guess is there are analogous phenomena in the fields of film, politics, and science, but I don’t know for sure.

NYC also sends you messages that are counterproductive to your success in any field other than finance. As Paul Graham has noted, NYC strongly tells you every day that you need to have money and you need to have and spend it now. The industry national hub cities, on the other hand, are perfectly fine with you having potential and/or connections, because both of those are easily convertible into money in the future (which you can spend in NYC if you so choose.)

As a result, it’s probably only useful to live in NYC in your 20s if you’re a peon at Goldman Sachs who aspires to be a not-a-peon at Goldman Sachs. Otherwise, you’ll probably build your career on a firmer foundation if you live elsewhere.

Recently, I saw this tweet¹

maybe the reason i dont enjoy prestige tv is i am basically happy and well-adjusted and dont identify with any of the fucked up broken husks of people that populate those shows, and its unpleasant to try so i just dont

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) January 22, 2024

and it got me thinking about the qualities that I do and don’t find interesting in TV, and art more generally.

For reference, “prestige TV” is a term that seems to refer to 1999-present neo-Noir TV shows. Think Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Succession, The Wire, etc. Basically, most of the stuff that HBO is known for releasing over the past 25 years. Among the commonalities between these shows is: I’ve not been able to get into them at all, with the partial exception of Breaking Bad (I watched the first two seasons in college fairly enthusiastically, then got bored during the third season and never finished it.)

Personally, I’ve never been able to like or identify with many/any of the characters on these types of shows, which I’m aware is sort of the point. You’re supposed to watch them make ethically questionable decisions that lead them down an ever-deeper rabbit hole of problems until the showrunners kill them off or the show ends. In some cases, maybe they find redemption at the end — noted film critic GPT-4 claims Walter White’s admission to Skylar that he did what he did for selfish reasons at the end of Breaking Bad is a form of redemption — but personally I find myself having limited interest in a show with a runtime 99% composed of characters making unwise, ethically dubious decisions and even 1% composed of those characters having redemption arcs.

Far be it from me to disparage shows for the inherent darkness of their subject matter. I realize that what I’m saying could be uncharitably construed as the grumblings of someone who just doesn’t like dark shows.

You’re just going to have to take my word for it that I do like some dark-ish shows. That being said, most of them tend to have either an absurdist and/or sci-fi bent to them.

Frankly, my main problem with prestige TV may be that it’s boring. The information density of a Star Trek episode dramatically exceeds that of an episode of any of the shows I mentioned above, as measured by them metric of “interesting things happening per minute of runtime”, let alone an episode of South Park or almost any movie. Make a neo-noir show if you like, but please try and keep the story serialization on the order of individual episodes, not entire seasons, let alone the entire show. If the Wachowskis could condense The Matrix — somewhat unambiguously the most pervasive, enduringly influential movie of the past 25 years — into a bit over 2 hours of runtime, you can condense your show about entitled rich people squabbling over their parent’s company or whatever to the point where each episode is individually meaningful as a standalone work of art. Life is too short to keep getting cucked by HBO’s storyrunners making you watch just one more episode for something interesting to happen.

As much as anything, though, the prestige TV style just feels really affected to me, sort of like overly-ornamented music or sports cars designed to draw attention to how cool they look. A piece of art that feels really cool and zeitgeisty today feels laughable tomorrow — I remember when big room house was all the rage in both EDM and pop music circles. It’s easy for a work of art that effectively says very little to be cool and zeitgeisty, because its authors aren’t going out on a stylistic limb in order to say something. Does Breaking Bad fail to really say something? Probably not, but there are probably shows that imitate it that do.

How is the prestige TV style an affected one? To me, it comes back to the way that the characters behave. In my experience, real-life people generally try and make the wisest decision for themselves and for others under the circumstances they’re in. This is generally not reflected in noir/prestige shows, in which the action is often moved forward by the calculating decisions of others for their own zero-sum gain. Is that an interesting enough premise to make a show or two about? Very probably. An entire genre? Probably not.

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1 – a somewhat rare good take from eigenrobot

There have obviously been a ton of gut-wrenching photos and videos that have come out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past few days, but one I keep finding myself coming back to is the one that has become known in English as “russian warship, go fuck yourself”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a snippet of radio communications between 13 Ukrainian border guards on a small, inconsequential island and a Russian warship that has come to lay claim to the island. The Russian ship broadcasts a fairly boilerplate exhortation to surrender or be fired upon, which is met with brief deliberation on the part of the Ukrainians, followed by simply a radio communication that essentially translates to “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” (Here’s a link to the video version.)

I think this has stuck with me as the Ukrainians’ behavior is borderline incomprehensible to me and likely many Westerners. As far as I know, they have no reason to believe they’re not being offered their lives in return for the surrender of a totally inconsequential island about the size of the park by my house. They’d realistically be causing their country no practical harm whatsoever by surrendering the island — it’s not like it has any strategic importance. They must be acting purely out of pride in their country and spite for those invading it without cause.

Now, I’d consider myself no less patriotic than the average American — I’m proud to be a citizen of the first modern liberal democracy and the primary acceptor of immigrants and refugees for hundreds of years — but if I’m being honest, there’s very little chance I’m sacrificing my life simply so I can say I didn’t surrender a tiny American island to a foreign aggressor. I would prefer to live, and I really don’t think anyone would fault me — it’s not like the US military has any kind of Stalin-esque “never surrender” policy.

These Ukrainians, however, do not hesitate to actively invite certain death when pressed to surrender a small parcel of their country’s territory. I really can’t get over it. On paper, it’s profoundly irrational behavior, especially if you don’t believe in anything resembling an afterlife. You’d be relinquishing your existence — ultimately the only thing ever guaranteed to you — for no personal gain whatsoever. It seems to me that you’d absolutely have to believe in an afterlife in order for the behavior of the border guards to be rational, right? Otherwise, their behavior is truly incomprehensible to me. Certainly, if there is an afterlife and if the term “hero” has any meaning there, these border guards are being treated as such right now.

Anyway, there are certain photos that have become emblematic of most historical moments — wars included — since cameras have been a thing. The photo of the Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima has become emblematic of the Second World War; the photo of the girl with green eyes has become emblematic of the war(s) in Afghanistan; the photo of the student blocking the advance of a tank column became emblematic of the Tiаnаnmen Squarе mаssacrе. I think this is an early candidate for the equivalent piece of media from this war. I certainly doubt I’ll be moved to an equivalent extent by any other photo or video yet to come.

I’m a huge fan of Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the books straight through maybe 5 times, seen the movies about as many times, and even read The Silmarillion, which functions as a sort of tedious, wonderful Old Testament to the more readable LotR and Hobbit books. Tolkien’s writing is by no means without grounding in the realities of war, since he fought in the First World War and based his writing on Old English and Germanic texts, many of which are martial in nature. The behavior of these 13 Ukrainian border guards therefore feels at once familiar and foreign to me. Their absurd bravery reminds me of Tolkien-esque fights to the last against a hopelessly superior foe; but their nonchalance and simple vulgarity is like nothing from fiction. They behave like you might if someone cut you off in traffic — “go fuck yourself” — but the consequences for them are not getting home from work 10 seconds later but their lives. I of course have very limited real-world experience with bravery in the face of real consequences, but I wonder if this doesn’t illustrate a difference between bravery in fiction and bravery in reality. In fiction, bravery is attacking your foes to reclaim your land after a rousing speech by a charismatic leader. In reality, bravery may be standing your ground for no rational reason in the face of certain death while telling someone with missiles aimed at you to go fuck themselves. I’m truly glad that we Westerners don’t come face to face with such questions very often these days because while I think I could do the former, I’m not sure I could do the latter. 🇺🇦

I may be five years late to the party here, but I just watched La La Land for the first time. It’s a remarkable film in many ways, as I’m sure you may know, but to me it’s most remarkable in that it’s devastatingly close to a gesamtkunstwerk-ian triumph of the arts, but ultimately falls regrettably short. On the pros list, it incorporates aesthetics like no director not named Christopher Nolan, and has enough depth/quality of filmmaking to be an enduring classic. On the cons list, its marriage with music is half-baked at best and the characters at times seem to make decisions based on what would be maximally convenient for the storyline. It won me over initially with its deep symbolic interest and aesthetic richness, then proceeded to lose me with its implausible writing and giga-cringe-inducing music. On the whole, a good film that is tantalizingly close to being a great one.

Cue the opening song and dance. We never hear the motifs from this song and dance again in the film, I believe. Strike one, musically speaking, especially considering how many goddamn times the “City of Stars” motif gets re-used. The filmmakers proceed to redeem themselves with this:

Fucking gorgeous. I’m a mega-simp for Art Deco (I’m not alone in this, apparently) so the font on this title instantly guarantees my interest for another ten minutes at least. Plus the company copyright thing with the Roman numerals. Inject it into my veins.

One begins to pick up on the whole color-significance thing pretty quickly. You could just show me this screen capture from the movie:

…and I’d instantly tell you I’d want to watch it. I’m of course not the first to point this out, but the TLDR of the color-significance in this movie is that blue signifies creativity/control/a good relationship, red signifies reality/making ends meet, and yellow signifies change. Obviously purple/pink signifies some kind of conflict between red and blue. It’s quite odd that this work of art set in LA has the same sort of color significance scheme as another somewhat more popular work of art set in LA.

Anyway, for a movie as well-made as this one, one thing that bothered me was the film’s dogged reliance on the ages-old romcom “oh hey funny seeing you here” trope in order to get the characters together. This is basically the romcom equivalent of “help me step bro I’m stuck” and should probably be banned by the romcom writers’ union. Apparently running into someone randomly over and over is more likely to mean that they’re your soul mate than that they’re a stalker.

We also need to get out of the way that whoever did the music for this movie sucks horribly and that if you want to enjoy the movie, you’ll probably need to think of it as just a regular movie with the occasional bit of bad music than as a bona fide musical a la Hamilton. Adding the occasional 7^th chord and a mega-cheesy jazzy glissando thing every 5 minutes does not mean you’re writing in the jazz style, dumbass – you probably should have listened to something other than contemporary top-40 radio to prepare for writing a musical movie about a jazz pianist. Even top-40 radio songwriters can write a melody, which the composer for this movie apparently can’t. D- grade. Moving on.

hey! I didn’t know you could go inside this building in GTA!

if they were trying to make a movie by hiring the male lead with the narrowest possible set eyes and the female lead with the widest possible set eyes, they succeeded

While the aesthetics of this movie are great, its single most meaningful aspect is the fact that it’s a rom-com firmly rooted in modernity. What do I mean by that? I mean the scene where we’re about to get a kiss and the music swells and then is interrupted by an iPhone ringtone. Gosling walks Stone to her Prius. All culturally relevant romantic narratives in recent memory (by culturally relevant I mean successful and societally pervasive to at least the extent that this movie was/is) have been rooted in the past, or at least in a fantasy world – think Downton Abbey, Twilight, etc. etc. There seems to be an implicit consensus that the real, contemporary world is not capable of producing fairytale-esque narratives. Where is the rom-com where the couple meets on Tinder? the tragedy of the text message that went slightly too far? For the most part, such stories simply do not exist. This may be one reason why La La Land was as successful as it was – if you’re looking for a realistic romantic narrative set in the present day, this movie plus Aziz Ansari’s Master of None are about the extent of your options, at least as far as reasonably popular works go. I’m not quite sure why this is the case, but I think it has something to do with a collective denial about the ways in which we digitally organize our social life. Nobody wants to watch a movie about the Tinder match that turned into a spouse because that’s not how we’d like our version of the story to play out. A break-up over text message makes for less dramatic shots than the IRL variety. Drama ensuing from a late-night Instagram DM is less sexy than drama ensuing from a drunken make-out. La La Land is really only partially rooted in contemporary reality (see also: chance encounters) but I think it deviates from the expected narrative enough to not be white noise.

Then again, the film can only partly be said to be modern because of its partial juxtaposition of modernity with a 1920s Art Deco aesthetic:

I’m not sure if this motif is leaned into enough to draw conclusions about its implications, but it’s certainly present enough to add some great aesthetics from time to time in the movie. It helps the movie stand out from the endless sea of generic movies currently being made, but like the music, it feels only partially integrated into the movie, and it kind of fades away as the movie goes on. So another missed opportunity to make something truly compelling out of what is otherwise just a strong point aesthetically. They could have switched to a 1930s aesthetic halfway through the movie or something! Instead, all we get is one shot of the Ingrid Bergman poster on the floor halfway through the movie.

Interesting, but it’s hard to say that there’s a cohesive theme going on here since this is all we get.

Ultimately, the movie ends with Emma Stone’s choice to keep her perfectly decent, un-romantic life (for which the color would be red) or cling to the creative, romantic, unknown life (for which the color would be blue.) You can already see where this is going:

Surprise surprise, she sticks with reality after exchanging a glance with Mr. Gosling. Compelling, I suppose, if perhaps predictable. The filmmakers do throw one last bone to us Art Deco simps:

In all, a movie that tantalizes us with the promise of basically being a Christopher Nolan romcom – it really would have been this if they’d taken the 1920s aesthetic to its logical ends, written the characters better, and given the film a more consistent voice – but ultimately disappoints, leaving us with essentially Hamilton, minus the decent music, incredible lyricism, and historical interest, plus a bit of aesthetic value. Worth watching, but only once.

On an unrelated note, I am basically the same in real life as Ryan Gosling’s character in this movie (we share very similar face shapes), plus the ability to play actually compelling music on the piano, minus the Thelonious Monk obsession, plus somewhat less narrowly-set eyes, minus a bit of dickishness, plus the ability to actually make real fucking money, minus the stubble-beard. Plus the ability to write sick-ass blog posts. So if you found yourself attracted to Ryan Gosling in this movie (which I don’t really know why you would, he’s really not the greatest male romcom lead) feel free to slide into the DMs of yours truly. Preferably if you bear some resemblance to Emma Stone.

With my inbox officially RIP’ed, until next time.

“…and they all lived happily ever after.” THE END.

What’s in a cliché?

There’s an exact point at which every love story stops. In The Princess Bride, for instance, it stops immediately after Wesley and Buttercup are reunited and ride off into the sunset (literally, I think?) True love was found, true love was lost, and true love was regained – THE END. In fact, they could not have possibly made a sequel to The Princess Bride, because the sequels would have gone like this:

1. The Princess Bride
2. The Princess Bride 2: Wesley and Buttercup Lose Some of Their Spark, But Decide to Stay Together Because Doing So Is Preferable to Breaking Up At This Point
3. The Princess Bride 3: Wesley and Buttercup Have Kids, and Spend the Next 20 Years Raising Them
4. The Princess Bride 4: Wesley and Buttercup are Now Retired, and Spend the Rest of their Lives Bumming Around in Florida

Understandably, none of these sequels were made (it would have been inconceivable!) Please try to come with a counterexample to my assertion that every love story stops where The Princess Bride does. “Hey,” you might say. “The Office doesn’t end when Jim and Pam get married. Jim and Pam don’t even ride off into the sunset. In fact, The Office goes up until midway through stage 3 of the sequels you mention above.” This is perfectly true, but A. one doesn’t watch The Office seasons 6-9 for flirty Jim and Pam moments, and B. The Office does in fact end at exactly the point that The Princess Bride does, but with Dwangela, not Jim and Pam.

This is also why soap operas and telenovelas (cough cough Friends cough cough) are notorious for not allowing their characters’ romantic lives to progress in any meaningful way. If you’re trying to milk the show/characters for swoony moments because that’s basically all your show consists of, you cannot under any circumstances allow your characters to get married.

More importantly, none of the above Princess Bride sequels could conceivably end with the cliché “and they all lived happily ever after”, even if Wesley and Buttercup did in fact live happily for the rest of their lives following the end of the sequel. There’s a deliberate ambiguity in that clichéd phrase which allows the reader/watcher to freeze time for the characters at the exact moment the story ends, and not consider what in real life would be the continuation of those characters’ story. Which, again in real life, would ultimately be either depressing (in the case of The Princess Bride 2) or remind the viewer of the characters’ mortality (in the cases of The Princess Bride 3-4.)

Hence, the Prime Directive of romantic fiction:

“Your characters are IMMORTAL. The viewer must not at any point be reminded that the characters WILL DIE.”

by Jasper Gilley

EDM isn’t actually dance music. It’s a tradition/style of meta-commentary on other music. Dance music, in contrast, is the original music that’s designed primarily for its club value/rhythmic ingenuity and secondarily for its ability to convey emotion. 10 years ago, when EDM was synonymous with house music or variants thereof, EDM might indeed have aptly been dubbed a kind of dance music, since there was essentially only one beat (four on the floor) and producers were evaluated on their ability to make a track sound good within the constraints of that beat. In contrast, today’s EDM often blatantly steals beats from hip hop, late rock (e.g., metal) and elsewhere, in addition to continuing the legacy of disco-derived four on the floor. Because the beats are interchangeable/expendable, producers must distinguish themselves with meta-attributes (melody, harmony, songwriting, sound, etc.) For this reason, EDM isn’t actually a genre in the same way that rock or hip hop are genres: the latter two have characteristic beats that are essentially synonymous with the genre itself, while EDM doesn’t (you’d be much better off comparing rock or hip hop to house or dubstep.)

This is actually directly analogous to every instance of great music that Western society has ever produced. Jazz isn’t a genre either, for instance: swing, Afro-Cuban, and funk are (since each have characteristic “beats” that every jazz musician will know.) Indeed, the closest jazz comes to a sonically/rhythmically cohesive genre is in its meta-commentary on the standards, which are old (early jazz) songs that jazz musicians have artistically dialogued with since the 1950s or 1960s. Importantly, the standards were, when written, of musical value not vastly greater than the popular songs of today – they only became great music in the hands of meta-commentators, beginning in the post-war bebop era.

It’s harder to draw analogies between EDM and historical Western meta-genres that weren’t directly derived from dance music (i.e., the various national styles of European classical music), but one can still observe the common theme of meta-commentary. In addition to the less directly observable meta-commentary of artistic dialogue between composers, classical music also produced direct dialogue from time to time (consider Dvorak’s New World Symphony or Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan, for instance.)

Because EDM has proven itself to be a meta-genre like jazz, don’t be too surprised if it develops a catalog of standards in a similar way. I think it’s not too unlikely, for instance, that producers will still be remixing Avicii and Seven Lions in 10-20 years (in addition to Mr. Brightside, of course.)

Darwinian Harmonic Complexity

Additionally, if EDM continues on its current trajectory, it may be only a matter of time before producers begin to commonly incorporate more advanced harmonic material out of a necessity to sound unique. What might the ceiling on EDM’s incorporation of advanced harmonic material be? Consider the context in which advanced harmony developed in classical music and jazz: one goes to a classical or jazz concert with a desire for the music to make them feel emotion. This is a very loose requirement that allows for harmonic innovation as quickly as listeners will learn to enjoy it. In EDM (especially that of the melodic/progressive variety), the context is this: EDM must make its listeners feel euphoric through the use of large-scale dynamic contrast, and secondarily must make its listeners feel emotion. This doesn’t immediately allow for harmonic complexity as easily as the context of classical/jazz does (for instance, if the harmonic complexity distracts listeners from the dynamics of the track, it starts to no longer be an EDM track), but it doesn’t prohibit harmonic complexity, and as soon as a more complex harmonic motif is common enough that it won’t distract listeners from the track’s dynamics, you have a green light to get as complex as you want.

Contrast this with popular music since the dawn of mass media in the mid-20^th century (rapped, sung, or otherwise), where the goal of the music is at some level or another, with few exceptions, purely to function as a vector for transmission/promotion of the singer’s Darwinian fitness. Shoutout to Britney Spears and Lil Pump for kindly providing such excellent demonstrations of this:

Obviously, my point goes beyond the music videos: Britney Spears sings about her Darwinian fitness in the form of promiscuity and sexual availability, while Lil Pump raps about his Darwinian fitness in the form of monetary security and ability to choose from between multiple partners. And of course, 90% of female pop stars project some version of Britney Spears’ message, while 90% of rappers project some version of Lil Pump’s message. Even before the era in which explicit promiscuity was allowed in mass media, this was still the case: the Beatles were clearly popular (at least in their early days) for their (slightly dog-whistled) sex appeal, and secondarily for their music (it just so happened that 1.5 of 4 Beatles were good musicians, which is why their later music was often good. But clearly Beatlemania wasn’t about their music, which was arguably bad at the time anyway.)

This is a very long-winded way of pointing out that neither Britney Spears nor Lil Pump nor really any popular musician since the era of mass media has any incentive to do anything musically interesting, since doing so would just detract from their advertisement of Darwinian fitness. (An important sidenote concerns why Darwinian dog-whistle content proliferates in a mass media environment: it’s a simple optimization of viewership in such a context, since people are different in their refined interests but alike in their basal ones. If you do the math, you realize you’ll reliably generate the most viewership/money appealing to basal interests, hence the incentive for Darwinian content to proliferate.)

The key difference between Lil Pump and Avicii as musicians is what medium their music is designed for. Lil Pump makes music videos primarily, and performs live secondarily (and poorly at that, from what I’ve heard.) Avicii performed live primarily and made music videos secondarily. (Importantly, Avicii was also designing his music to stand out on crowded music streaming platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud.) The difference in incentives leads naturally to the end result. Lil Pump performs generic-sounding rap but has a wacky, unique persona, while Avicii made unique-sounding EDM (a country-EDM mashup?!) but had almost no public persona whatsoever.

In short, it may now be becoming possible to create compelling music on a large scale for the first time in a hundred years or so. Importantly, it may only be becoming possible in what appears to outsiders to be a subgenre within the larger musical landscape.

(If you’d like a possibly slightly better laid-out version of my thesis about music in the age of mass media, please check out a tweetstorm of mine on the same subject.)

I’ve written about The Office several times already on this blog. For me, this is the most meaningful quote of the show:

The problem with the Good Old Days is that their day-to-day reality may have actually been shitty, for some non-negligible portion of the time. Empirically, I’ve found this to be the case. The defining attribute of the Good Old Days, nonetheless, is that you remember them as wholly not shitty.

Can you really say that the Good Old Days were shitty, then? I think it’s all but a truism that the actual content of an event is really nothing other than your perception of it at a particular (later) point in time (see also transcendental idealism.) If you had a bad life experience that, retrospectively, seems entirely like a good one, it was really only a bad life experience insofar as you abstractly remember that it was. (It’s not like you’re going to experience that portion of time again, after all.)

Also, the abstract memory of how shitty these experiences were is something that decays significantly with time. For instance, I’ve caught myself starting to reminisce fondly about my days working on a golf course prior to starting college, days that I found excessively shitty at the time. I’m beginning to wonder if that which we desire from memories and/or experiences isn’t an accurate rendering of their quality, but rather a narrative into which we can splice them. Judged by this metric, the golf course days get two thumbs up, because I started college immediately after and proceeded to have experiences that were decisively less shitty.

For those of us stuck in (potentially shitty) life experiences that will almost certainly be eventually remembered as the Good Old Days — and more of us are in some form of the Good Old Days than I think we would think — this should be a vastly encouraging thought: that it’s empirically true that there’s nothing more ephemeral than the highly mutable actual content of the potentially shitty experiences one is having.

Unfortunately, this insight isn’t very helpful at changing one’s perception of the experiences’ actual content as experienced in that moment. So really the only thing preventing the emotional syllogism of shitty experiences → despair is some abstract faith that, when viewed from ten thousand feet in 25 years, the experiences you found shitty at the time will fit squarely in that period of time known as the Good Old Days. It’s hard to know you’re in them before you’ve actually left them, true – but perhaps there’s some immediate value to be had from trusting that you are indeed in them. Perhaps this blind assumption will even make the likelihood that you’re actually in them one notch higher.

by Jasper Gilley

Sports are a thing that a lot of people spend a lot of time and mental energy caring about. Generally, I think I care about them about as much as the average person – there are some sports/teams that I follow somewhat seriously, and I’ll watch the finals of maybe 1 or 2 sports each year, but I am (with some exceptions) a fair weather fan otherwise. Because sports tend to occupy a place in many humans’ psyche comparable to what I’d imagine religion did back in the day, I’ve decided it would be a good idea to directly compare said quasi-religions. I’m not going to compare sports in a fun Wikipedia-approved way that’s designed to respect everyone’s feelings, either. I’m going to make a pronouncement about which sports are objectively better than others. What could possibly go wrong?

First, some boundaries on the scope of this discussion. I’ll only compare the world’s major team sports, since those are the ones about which people care the most, and I’m aiming to make the highest possible number of people very indignant. Specifically, I’ll consider:

• (American) Football
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Hockey
• Soccer (known to non-Americans and a few very pretentious Americans as ‘football’)

If you’re feeling indignant already because your sport was left out, this wasn’t just an arbitrary collection of sports I felt like considering – this is the list of the five most popular team sports in the world by revenue.

I’ll rank these sports by the following metrics, in order of importance:

1. Physical interesting-ness
2. Elegance
3. Monotony, or lack thereof
4. Other factors that make the sport more interesting

Without further ado, the definitive ranking of the world’s five most popular team sports. Please don’t mail me any bombs out of vitriolic anger that I’ve deemed your favorite sport bad. I’ll proceed with my discussion first on the basis of the aforementioned criteria, then give quantitative rankings.

Physical Interesting-ness

In most situations in most walks of life, you do not regularly witness 300-pound men knocking each other over, nor projectiles being thrown unaided at 105 mph, nor people running around extremely quickly. Ideally, sports provide you with an opportunity to witness such phenomena. American Football (henceforth referred to mononymously as ‘football’) baseball, and hockey dominate this metric. Baseball offers interesting projectile-related physical phenomena in abundance: in addition to 105-mph pitches, it offers 450-foot home runs, plus decent amounts of unusually fast running. Football also offers many interesting physical phenomena, as does hockey (slap shots can travel about as fast as MLB pitches, apparently.) Soccer, however, is much more physically mundane: the most exciting thing that can happen is a ball being kicked a few dozen meters into a goal, and its players cannot run around as fast as those of football (because of endurance/longevity considerations.) Basketball is abysmally bad by the metric of physical interesting-ness. Its most exciting event, a slam dunk, involves nothing more than a tall guy jumping a bit and flamboyantly placing a ball in a hole. If I was 6’6”, I could surely duplicate these results with maybe half an hour of practicing.

Elegance

What makes a sport elegant? I don’t mean aesthetic elegance; this is a fairly subjective matter (as opposed to the bastion of objectivity that is the rest of this post.) Rather, I think that any elegant sport generally lacks contrived/arbitrary rules and has minimal need for subjective officiation. Perhaps coextensively, an elegant sport should flow naturally out of its defining characteristics. For example, soccer has one major rule: don’t touch the ball with your hands. Beyond this, there aren’t a lot of exception clauses or additional rules, as far as I know (besides “don’t tackle other players too violently.”) Baseball, being the only sport on this list played on a non-rectangular field, can also be considered elegant: while it’s not as simple a sport as soccer, all of its components fit together very nicely, and the sample size is large enough that few called strikes or balls decided the outcome of the game, minimizing the effect that officiation has on the outcomes of games. I don’t know a lot about the intricacies of hockey, but it seems close to as elegant as soccer since I don’t think there are a whole lot of stipulations about what you can’t do. Football, however, is not a terribly elegant sport. There are many rules about who can tackle whom in what sort of a manner and about who can throw the ball to whom and from where. It’s also not a terribly uncommon occurrence to see a football game decided by the whims of the referees. Basketball once again seems to bring up the rear in this category, though. In one year of sporadically watching March Madness, for example, I saw the outcome of at least two games decided by referee whims, and because there aren’t any natural stopping points (as there are in football and baseball), video replays don’t play a factor in correcting for bad calls. It also doesn’t help that because basketball is inherently offense-biased (as compared to football, soccer, or hockey), one team has to be vastly better than the other to produce a point differential great enough to not be jeopardized by some bad calls.

Monotony

While watching 300-pound men knock each other over is physically interesting, if a football game consisted entirely of offensive and defensive linemen pushing each other, it would quickly become boring. Likewise, if baseball consisted of nothing other than batters trying to hit home runs (i.e., a home run derby), it would also be boring (there’s a reason that there are ≈1500 baseball games each season but only one home run derby.) Thus, we need to account for the variance in the physical interesting-ness of a sport as well as the physical interesting-ness itself. Football wins out in this category. There are just too many things that it’s interesting to watch: the multiple methods of scoring (touchdowns, field goals, safeties, two-point conversions), good offensive play (throws, catches, runs), and good defensive play (interceptions, sacks, tackles.) Importantly, these are all physically varied: a sack is about as interesting as a good catch to watch, but they involve completely separate mechanics. Baseball is also physically varied, having multiple elements of physical interest (home runs, curveballs, fastballs, good catches.) While some people (usually non-sports fans) complain that baseball is boring to watch, I’d argue that they say this because baseball can move slowly, which is distinct from its being monotonous. All of hockey, soccer, and basketball have similar levels of monotony: in each, the scoring mechanics are reasonably interesting, but all other interest comes from the positioning of the players, which most people who haven’t played the sport at a high-ish level won’t be able to pick up on. I therefore rank them below football and baseball in monotonousness.

Other factors that make the sport more interesting

Pro sports are only so interesting: they require some degree of being a ‘sports person’, and some regional identity from which to subsequently take on a team identity. If one doesn’t already identify as a sports person, it can be difficult to see the rationale in rooting for your local pro sports team. Some sports, however, have sizable contingents of teams that aren’t technically pro sports teams but still play the game at a high level and are easy to root for. In many cases, this alternate identity makes it easier for non-sports people to root for the team and gives sports fans another reason to root for said team. The football version of this is college football: instead of (or in addition to) rooting for the local NFL team, one can root for the team of one’s college, with which it’s easy to identify. (This is actually how I got into football in the first place.) Even those who didn’t attend college (e.g., 90% of the population of Alabama) can still root for their state’s flagship university’s football team (e.g., the Alabama Crimson Tide.) After all, their taxes are funding said football team (sort of.) This ease of identity association for college football teams makes football at least 40% better as a sport, IMO.

College basketball has a similar aura, except that people only care about college basketball if their school has a bad football team (e.g., Duke, Purdue, Indiana, Gonzaga, UNC, Michigan State, Michigan, etc.) For this reason, basketball does not warrant as high of a ranking as football in the ‘other factors’ category. Michigan’s football team is of course actually quite good at the moment but they’re still bad relative to the smack that Michigan fans talk (e.g., “revenge tour”.) Additionally, Michigan always somehow manages to lose to Ohio State in football, and as long as Michigan-OSU isn’t competitive, Michigan is still effectively a basketball school. Basketball is thus a secondary sport to football when it comes to identity factors.

Finally, soccer has the benefit of being the world’s only real international sport, which enables people to strongly identify with their nation’s national soccer team when the World Cup comes around. Additionally, soccer is essentially the only sport discussed here in which the women’s teams can be at least as big of a deal as the men’s teams (in the case of the US Women’s National Team, much more of a big deal), which also warrants strong ‘other factors’ consideration. I therefore give soccer the strongest consideration of any of these five sports on this metric.

The Rankings 

	Weight	Physics		Elegance		Monotony		Other	TOTAL
Football	8	9	6	3	4	7	2	8	134
Baseball	8	8	6	8	4	5	2	0	132
Basketball	8	3	6	3	4	4	2	7	72
Hockey	8	7	6	6	4	4	2	0	108
Soccer	8	4	6	9	4	4	2	9	120

As you can see, I’ve weighted each factor by how important I think it is in a sport. My choice of weightings is one of the aspects of this post that is probably up for debate. So, if you’d like, you can click here to view/edit a Google Sheet containing a copy of these rankings and change the weightings to your taste.

Our final ranking of the five major team sports is therefore:

1. Football
2. Baseball
3. Soccer
4. Hockey
5. Basketball

Honorable Mention: Ultimate Frisbee

Shameless promotion for ultimate frisbee here: having played it in college, I’ve found it to be superior to at least basketball, hockey, and soccer in how fun it is to play, superior to all of these sports in its gentle learning curve, and superior to most in elegance. No, it doesn’t have very interesting physical phenomena, and it’s somewhat physically monotonous, but as someone who is 5’11” and generally despises exercising outside of the context of actually playing sports, I find it to be a great way to able to apply some sports strategy and get some exercise without sacrificing my life (and/or brain) at the altar of athletic competition. Also, this is the only context in which I can make one-handed touchdown catches, so that’s something as well.

Honorable Mention 2: Rocket League

I generally get bored of video games pretty quickly, but one game that has managed to sustain my interest for much longer than most is Rocket League. Like soccer, it has a counterintuitive but compelling invariant (“don’t touch the ball with your hands” → “touch the ball with a fairly hard-to-drive car”), a corresponding strong degree of elegance, and even some ‘physical’ interest (you don’t get to control a flying car with rockets on it every day.) Also interestingly, it seems to be comparable to football in the degree to which scheme acts as a multiplier on the raw skill of players (it’s not an uncommon occurrence for two technically less-skilled players to beat two players of greater skill because of their superior schematic chemistry.) I would once again recommend Rocket League to those such as myself with neither the genetic predisposition nor the continued motivation to play ‘real’ sports competitively.

And there you have it: a definitive ranking of the five major team sports. Please direct hate mail to cruxcapacitorcontact[at]gmail dotcom, or impose your vitriol upon the world in the comments section below.

by Jasper Gilley

I think there are currently a large cluster of suboptimalities and misconceptions surrounding food, at least in the first world and probably also in the third too (in the second world, there wasn’t much food to be misconceptioned.) I’ll focus here on my experiences of food in the first world, because for better or worse, everyone is shifting towards this paradigm. In quasi-listicle format, I present my problems with food.

Problem 1: Food is Expensive/Labor-intensive

Food delivered by vector of restaurant is both dumbly expensive and inhumanly labor-intensive, which, of course, are two sides of the same coin. Beginning with the latter, which is really the original causal factor, it’s ludicrous that, in an era of electric cars, iPhones, and Grand Theft Auto, 12 million humans would still be employed in the food services industry. When you think about it, preparing food for others (and getting paid very little to do it) is a fundamentally dehumanizing occupation, akin to working in a textile factory or something. I think it’s pretty unambiguously the worst job that a large number of people in the developed world still have. I’m not sure, but I might rather be homeless than work in the food services industry.

Food delivered by vector of grocery store is still pretty expensive and still labor-intensive, just this time, it’s you doing the laboring. Which also doesn’t make sense, because, if you’re reading this post, the value of your time is probably higher than $10/hr. When you factor in opportunity cost, grocery store food is actually probably more expensive than restaurant food for most people. Which is also silly.

I’m by no means a workers’ rights crusader, but this is something that probably needs to get fixed ASAP as possible.

Problem 1.5: The Bundled Nature of Dopamine and Nutrition

Part of the problem here is the way that food is programmed into humans’ minds. Food is fundamentally something that humans just need to survive, but it’s also something that humans get dopamine out of. This also helps drive up the price of food, since nobody wants just the nutrition part. Why do something you need to do without getting dopamine in the process when you can get dopamine in the process of doing it?

This isn’t to mention, of course, the incredible extent to which bundling dopamine and nutrition is a terrible evolutionary adaptation at this point in time. Gorging on sugary foods (probably fruit) made a lot of sense for hunter-gatherers, for whom the abundance of such foods was a rarity. Gorging on Oreos makes no sense, except that you get a lot of dopamine from it.

This bundling also selects for foods that humans get dopamine from, one of which is meat. This creates a lot of further problems. See below.

Problem 2: Food is Absurdly Unethical

If you want to look for the most morally despicable things that humans currently do, it’s pretty obvious that these things are done to animals in the name of getting cheap dopamine to everyone. However, 99% of people – as in, literally 99% of people – don’t want to look for the most morally despicable things that humans currently do. In fact, as long as they get their dopamine, they’re happy to actively turn a blind eye to absurdly unethical shit. Which is fine, except that in 100 or 200 years everyone is going to look at this point in history as a time of Great Moral Depravity.

If you do any research at all into factory farming, it becomes quickly obvious that, even by today’s standards (e.g., “animal rights”), we shouldn’t be proud of the actions that we’re incentivizing factory farmers to take by demanding great quantities of meat on the cheap. By tomorrow’s standards (when terms like “animal rights” are going to sound hopelessly trivial/weak/anachronistic), it’s conceivable that factory farming could be viewed as the single biggest moral atrocity ever committed by the human race.

How could one assign such moral significance to the shitty things done to animals? one might ask. Isn’t doing shitty things to humans inherently something like 100x worse than doing equivalent shitty things to animals? This is certainly the viewpoint held by most humans right now, and the viewpoint that has been dominant among humans for most of human history. However, it’s based upon our only having theory of mind for humans, not animals (which is understandable, since at the moment we can’t communicate with animals.) We have no reason to believe, though, that animals (at least those with reasonably large brains) don’t possess something very much akin to what we’d term sentience in humans, and this hypothesis is likely to be verified as soon as brain-computer interfaces allow rigorous evaluation of brains, human or otherwise.

Solving Food

What does solving food mean? Well, here are some things that it doesn’t mean:

• Eliminating GMO foods
• Eating organic
• Patronizing “small batch” bougie food brands that are almost always more expensive and objectively less tasty than the alternatives

I’m not saying that these things are inherently problematic in and of themselves. Actually, with two of these, I am. Organic foods are in some ways better and in some ways worse than non-organic alternatives (better on most metrics of healthiness, worse on metrics of resource intensity and price.) All other things equal, however, GMO foods are quantifiably better than non-GMO foods, and only somebody who’s trying to sell you something will tell you otherwise. On a related note, there are not many things in the world that irritate me more than the aforementioned bougie food brands. (If you’re wondering what I’m referring to, these brands are what Whole Foods largely consists of.) They’re essentially a byproduct of the rule that, if you slap an Instagrammable label on a jar and use meaningless buzzwords like “made with all-natural ingredients”, you can get people to pay 5x what they otherwise would pay for food of equivalent quality.

Case in point:

(Fig. 1 – bougie useless food. Retails for $7.50/bottle)

Harmless Harvest Coconut Water™ is great except for:

1. Nobody fucking likes coconut water
2. Only people who hate themselves will pay $7.50 for a bottle of something that tastes bad and gives you zero nutrition
3. If you’re going to buy this, you may as well just spend your money on donating a building at your local Ivy League university because there’s about a 100% demographic overlap between people who do these two things
4. Why would you pay extra for a product that’s ostentatiously Fair Trade™ and split the proceeds 70-30 between a for-profit corporation and some farmers when you could make a donation to an actual charitable cause of actual significance
5. Also, nobody actually likes coconut water

Basically, patrons of Harmless Harvest Coconut Water™ and similar brands are following the Michael Scott model of philanthropy:

“…it’s for charity. And I consider myself a great philanderer. It’s just…It’s nice to know at the end of the day, I can look in the mirror and say, ‘Michael, because of you, some little kid in the Congo has a belly full of rice this evening.’ Makes you feel good.” – Michael Scott

Anyway, rant over, I think that solving food means – very generally – making food more industrial-capitalist. I use the term capitalist with tongue in cheek because it will irritate people who think parochially about economic systems. Here’s what capitalism is: the substitution of capital (i.e., investment) and technology for manual labor. What this means in the context of food production/preparation is automating the entire supply chain of food. Right now, food cultivation is wonderfully automated. According to one of my professors (read: I won’t bother fact-checking or citing), about 2-3% of the population of the world’s foremost agricultural superpower (the US) is employed in farming. However, by the BLS statistics cited previously, more people than that are employed in food preparation/serving (this also doesn’t factor in individuals not employed in food preparation who nonetheless prepare food for themselves, which really should be factored in if you want to get a complete picture of the market inefficiencies.) The extreme labor-intensiveness of food preparation/presentation is un-industrial-capitalist (or at least early-stage-capitalist) insofar as it necessitates large quantities of poorly-paid laborers. (A reminder: the early stage of capitalism, in which large numbers of people are paid in low-wage jobs, is also the one in which Marx argues that communist revolution is inevitable.)

Consider for analogy how humans heated their homes before and after the Industrial Revolution. For most people during most of the time prior to the Industrial Revolution, heating your home meant going out and chopping down trees and lighting them on fire in your house, or paying someone else to do it for you. Clearly, if you lived in northerly climes, it would be suboptimal to spend significant amounts of time or money on something so basic. Now, however, heating your home means paying a few bucks a month to the gas company, and tweaking your thermostat. Food right now is somewhat similar to pre-Industrial home heating: it necessitates a fairly sizable expenditure of either time or money to procure even kind of shitty food. What would be great is if one could do the equivalent of paying a few bucks a month to the gas company, but for food.

Of course, food isn’t a commodity – differentiation between products is very much a thing. But it seems like there should be a commodity version of food: something that tastes OK, provides you with at least some meaningful portion of your nutrition, and is super cheap. This only sort of exists right now. The closest thing I can think of is Soylent (or similar products), which ticks the first two boxes but not really the third. One shouldn’t expect a new product like Soylent to be commodity-cheap, but it’d be wonderful if it headed in that direction over the next few years.

And naturally, you should still be able to pay more money for novelty food, just like you can pay more money to get logs to put on your campfire when you go camping. But having to buy logs from a gas station every time you want to heat your house would seriously suck, and I think that’s the kind of situation food is in right now.

by Jasper Gilley

Much of the world is checking what is as of this writing the number one trending hashtag on Twitter, #Venezuela, with hope that it will bring news of steps towards the downfall of one of the world’s most odious regimes.

Some, however, are checking it with vitriolic ideological anger. These people seem not to be those you might think (Russian and Chinese oligarchs with a vested financial interest in the perpetuation of the Maduro regime, for instance.) Their ranks include Jill Stein, former US Green Party candidate for president:

As well as various others of lesser public weight:

Meanwhile, (ostensibly American) left-wing protestors have gathered at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC to protest what they see as a logical continuation of the US’ history of meddling in smaller countries’ affairs:

This is even the case when bona fide Venezuelans arrive to stage a counter-protest:

It’s remarkable that some subsection of the inhabitants of liberal, first-world nations will take time out of their day to publicly support a regime about as morally depraved as any that currently exist. Implicitly or explicitly, those protesting against the US government’s support for Venezuela’s democratic movement are helping to prop up a regime that has taken a country that should be as wealthy as any OPEC petrostate into a situation where:

• More than half of families cannot meet basic food needs
• Newborns have poorer chances of survival than those in Syria
• Three-quarters of the population has lost 19 pounds
• The education system has completely collapsed

In short, supporters of the Maduro regime, whether Twitter-based or otherwise, are in effect earnestly advocating for the proliferation of others’ misery. How is it possible that inhabitants of liberal democracies – who have reaped the fruits of liberal democracy their entire lives – come to vehemently oppose the spread of that same ideology to new nations? It is possible that such protestors oppose liberal democracy precisely because of their lifelong enjoyment of its fruits. The United States, as well as many other liberal democracies, was founded with remarkable cognizance of the full extent of human tyranny and cruelty. Indeed, many of the core ideas of modern liberal democracy – checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and popular voting, for example – were instituted with the explicit purpose of nothing other than preventing the atrocities that, as any student of history will know, seem to come very naturally to humans. It is perhaps for this reason that Winston Churchill said,

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

When democracy is separated from its very motivation – the existence of atrocities – by its sheer success and proliferation, as is arguably the case in much of the contemporary world, it may become the case that those who have benefitted from it the most lose sight of exactly why it’s necessary. Indeed, with no easily experienceable reference points regarding outcomes of other systems of government, one might formulate a complete political ideology based on the experienced shortcomings of whatever liberal democracy one lives in. In the case of Venezuela, Jill Stein may be generalizing an ideology from the arguably negative collective experiences of interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, or from the perceived excesses of the American capitalist class.

It’s worth noting that her suppositions are utterly absurd, as well. Ten years ago, US foreign policy might have supported Juan Guaidó for the purpose of gaining easier access to Venezuela’s oil. In the meantime, however, America has quietly become an energy superpower largely due to the rise of fracking, to the extent that it is now the world’s largest producer of crude oil. This is what made America’s strong sanctions on Venezuelan oil possible in the first place. Ironically, if there were no sanctions, Venezuela’s economy would likely have fared better over the past few years, so that the Maduro regime might not even be in crisis at the moment.

That democracy is motivated and empowered by the existence of tyranny and atrocity does, however, suggest a way of keeping the ideology of liberal democracy powerful and urgent. We must let those who have suffered from democracy’s absence most vividly be the champions of its refinement where it already exists. In the case of Venezuela, this means listening to the Venezuelan refugees currently in the United States (even, or especially, if it means the cessation of a protest against them.) Generally, this means continuing America’s proud legacy of being the world’s foremost haven for immigrants. We must do this – if we are to avoid becoming an absurdist farce of a crumbled democracy with an election-rigging former bus driver beholden to illiberal regimes across the world as President.