This month, the ace journal club discussed a quoiromantic manifesto, translated from Japanese!  Probably not the easiest read if you don’t have prior familiarity, but we thought it was great stuff.

The World of Pride and Prejudice is Not the World of Purity Culture | Tell Me Why the World is Weird – Christian purity culture frames itself as a continuation of centuries-old practice, but if you look back at history there are many differences.  This is a pretty insightful look at the idiosyncrasies of purity culture, by way of comparison to Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel.

Exposing a $10,000,000,000 Debt Industry | Coffeezilla (video, 16 min) – Hey, I know a bit about the debt settlement industry.  When someone is having trouble with debt, a debt settlement company will offer to step in between the lender and debtor, and negotiate to pay only a fraction of the debt (maybe about half).  In return, the debt settlement company takes a cut.  It ruins your credit score, but could in theory reduce your debt.  But I wasn’t familiar with the abuses and scams in the industry.  That’s something that should be pursued by the consumer financial protection bureau (CFPB) as a violation of UDAAP oh wait

Against Immersion: The Holodeck Must Burn | Celia Wagar’s Critpoints – Celia discusses how people value “immersion” in video games, but what they mean by that is all over the place.  e.g. it’s common to argue that removal of UI is immersive, but some will also argue exactly the opposite.  Another concept of immersion is realistic interactability, such as modeling fragments of fruit when you shoot them.  This arguably doesn’t contribute to the game at all, and wastes developer time to implement.

The way I have decided to think about “immersion”, is that it’s basically the aesthetic of speculative fiction.  What would it be like if this set of events really happened, and can we create a fictional world that will explore the possibilities in a believable way?  But there are alternative aesthetics, such as the aesthetic of literary fiction: stories are arranged in a deliberate way to explore a theme.  For example, in the game Wanderstop, the protagonist meets a variety of characters, many of whom have stories that reflect aspects of her personal struggles.  I saw some players speculate that she’s actually in a magical realm that magically reflects her psychological struggles back at her.  But there doesn’t need to be a magical explanation, that’s just literary convention.  The story has something to say, so it will say it over and over again with every tool it has available, including through side characters who have no logical connection to the protagonist.

Everything was already AI | Unlearning economics (video, 1:41 hours) – I’ve heard people say, “the problem isn’t AI, it’s capitalism”, but this video offers a take that’s new to me: “capitalism already was AI”.  I find the social theory under discussion a bit too all-encompassing for my taste, but interesting.  I like that the ultimate conclusion seems to be that there needs to be some sort of intelligent regulation.  If only there was some sort of consumer financial protection bureau (CFPB) that was created in response to the 2008 financial crisis oh wait

The Venezuela Oil Grab – What it means for Oil Markets (and Canada) | The Plain Bagel (video, 17 min) – Just a factual discussion of the US invasion of Venezuela, focusing narrowly on how that impacts oil markets in the US and Canada.  The Trump administration isn’t even trying to hide their vile intentions of putting oil before people, so it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t even accomplish what they think it will.  Venezuelan oil requires high capital investment into infrastructure, and creating political instability makes it even less worthwhile.

The Hidden Order in Chaos | 4,000,000 Double Pendulums (video, 26 min) – Excellent visualizations of the chaotic motion of the double pendulum.  Although, I wish it would get more into the theory.  One of my courses in grad school discussed chaos theory but I didn’t really understand most of it.  Really, it’s too advanced to learn from a single youtube video.