My media diet for the autumn of 2024

Ordered from most to least serious, which naturally places most non-fiction at the front and fiction at the back.

Great Formal Machinery Works

I was reading this non-fiction book as my bed-time book for a little while. It is a sort of intellectual history of how, out of the late 1800s maths crisis, arose the current paradigm. While I don’t get all the references, and some of the language eluded me at first (I think I’m starting to get a grasp of what intuitionist mathematics means), this book was highly fascinating to read, especially as I’m trying to get a better grasp of the foundations of mathematics. Now, I say that, but this book was also bed-time reading, and part of why reading it has been so slow, is that it is so dull and boring that I fall asleep after 15 minutes, tops, of opening it. This has meant that progress is slow. But the book held (for a little while) that magical spot of just so interesting that I wanted to keep reading it, yet just so dull, slow, and intricate, that I would fall asleep (for me) incredibly fast. Absolutely amazing.

Incomplete Nature

While I had hoped to completely finish this book in time for this post, alas it was not to be. I’m maybe 60% of the way through, and here too starting to lose interest. Maybe this post shall mark the DNF line, or I will pick it up again soon.

Regardless, this book describes the author’s theory of, most of all, emergence, and how it can lead to mental phenomena (mind, intention, consciousness). I’m not entirely convinced of the arguments so far, but the subject matter is also sufficiently complex - it is after all, a theory of the consequences of moving, complex, interactions - that I also do not get the full grasp of what the author intends.

The first chapter of the book was phenomenal, then the author took a while to build a case against current theories of mental phenomena, before slowly introducing his own. I am expecting the final couple of chapters to pick up again in excitement. But such are the words of sunk cost.

Gowers’ Math Blogs

For a couple of days, I had a lot of fun reading Gowers’ Why isn’t the fundamental theorem of arithmetic obvious and Proving the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. I’ve really enjoyed becoming (at least a bit) more mathematically savvy in the last couple of months, and don’t think I would have enjoyed this so much in spring.

Nora Amman’s Value Change Problem

I haven’t really been reading that much alignment content recently, but read this. It was a decent expose of something cool and interesting, and I’m glad that someone seems to be thinking about things like exactly this.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

This brick of a fantasy book, written by Susanna Clarke, took me a good couple of weeks to work through. It details the “rebirth” of “Good, English magic”, in a fantastical Victorian-Edwardian era British/European setting, and much follows the tone of other “period pieces”, with its own magical flair.

For much of the book, I had the feeling that there was no plot. However, throughout it all, there was character development, even when though that too was slow at times. This is a book I’m not sure I can recommend to others, and not sure it was actually worth my time finishing. It might be suitable for someone who usually reads slower books, but I have been fed on more modern pacing, and this wasn’t really it for me.

1000xResist

This video game by Sunset studios (“a group of majority Asian-Canadian diaspora creators”) caught me like a storm in the first days of November. 1000xResist is probably the most novel-like game I have ever played. There is very little game-play in this game, but what there is, blends seamlessly into the narrative, and it all culminates in a brilliant experience.

I’m not sure where to start with this game. On the one hand, I want any of you reading this to experience it with as few preconceptions as possible, to go into it with your minds open and unburdened by previous expectations. On the other, I probably have to drop some hints or details about what the game is about to entice you enough to actually play it. So I will do that. But first, I implore you to go play the game. I’ll still be here after you’re done. The game is currently €20 on Steam and about a ~10 hour playthrough. I’ll see you in the next paragrph.

If you’re just returning, welcome back. If you need a bit more enticing before pulling this particular trigger, I’m glad to have you along. 1000xResist pulls together a wonderful blend of themes, genres, and characters to create a story that pulls on the player both on the personal level, and the cultural or societal. In the game, you play as Watcher; a clone of the ALLMOTHER; the only person immune to a disease brought on by the visitation of an alien species to Earth. Coming out the other side of this apocalypse, the ALLMOTHER - or, Iris, which you eventually find is her name - is trying to re-create a society populated only with those still unaffected by the disease - identical, biological clones of herself. In this society, everyone has a purpose and a function.

You are Watcher - your job is to observe, record, and preserve the history of the ALLMOTHER and the society. To aid you in this task, you have a little AI companion - called Secretary - that helps you “commune” with others. In a communion, you experience some of Iris’ memories of before the apocalypse, which is supposed to help you gain perspective, and to relate that perspective to the other clones. And some of the revelations in these communions are shocking. One, which comes early on, is that Iris was a bad person. She was angry at the world, cruel to her friends, dismissive of her parents, and overall someone you would not like hanging out with. And yet, as Watcher, we are shown this, in its fullness, through the communions. On the one hand, the ALLMOTHER’s society is definitely a cult. On the other, if you wanted to maintain a cult, why portray its founder - yourself - in this way? Why create meaningful doubt about your capabilities as a leader? This is but one of the mysteries the game proposes for the player.

This is but one aspect of the intricate plot 1000xResist weaves. The narrative combines this with Iris’ parents participation in the Hong Kong 2019-2020 independence protests, the nature of the aliens and the disease, memory, identity, personhood, cloning, retribution, forgiveness, and, most of all, revolution & violent change.

But you might still be interested in the gameplay of 1000xResist. You control Watcher as you walk around in the facility housing the ALLMOTHER’s society. The major thing you do in the game is to talk to other characters. Occasionally, you go into a communion, where you will walk around and talk more with characters. Inside the communion you can also jump forward and back in “time” within the memory, which you will use to get around obstacles obstructing you from talking to yet more characters.

Like I said, this game is mostly a novel, with some stunning visuals, embodiment of the player in the Watcher character, and minor gameplay elements. If you usually read novels, and are a casual gamer, I can not recommend this enough.

And, for a delicious post-game treat, I recommend Jacob Geller’s excellent video Nothing Ever Stops Existing, parts of which cover parts of 1000xResist’s themes.

Claw

Claw is Wildbow’s shorter “break” serial in-between Pale and his next work, Seek. It is a crime novel, focused on the character Mia, a fixer hacker who helps people who want to “disappear” do so. Think of it like witness protection but for criminals.

I found this mostly enjoyable, in classic Wildbow fashion. If you enjoy Wildbow, or gruesome crime, or psychological thrillers, you might too. I can’t really speak too much to the pacing, as I mostly read this one arc at a time, but it seemed decent to me.

No One Belongs Here More Than You

I picked up this collection of short stories based on its absolutely phenomenal title. No One Belongs Here More Than You. An affirmation. Unconditional love, romantic or platonic. No One Belongs Here More Than You. Support and trust. It sang to me. Unfortunately the content did not do the same.

I feel I have now gained a view into “normie” literature I had hitherto missed. The collection is full of stories of hectic romance, cheating, affairs, and more, but the underlying tone and theme is women pining over men, and things going wrong. While some of the stories (like “Ten True Things” and the capstone story “How to Tell Stories to Children”) captured me, most of the stories felt banal and inconsequential. And I can handle banal and inconsequential if the prose is outstanding or vivid enough on its own. It was not.

No One Belongs Here More Than You was worth reading (it only took me a couple of hours total to get through the whole collection), and I enjoyed my time with it, but if someone told me this was their favourite book, or that one of these stories had seriously changed their life - I would look at them weird. I just couldn’t find something like that in here. Maybe that’s not the point of these stories. Maybe the point of such stories is simply to open up your view of others’ experience and to live through someone else’s eyes for a little while. The lives I stepped into in this book were surely quite different from mine. But I don’t think I needed a book to tell me to have compassion or understanding for others with a different outlook on life (different passions, different temperament, different plans) than me.

Competitive Pokemon (Wolfe Glick)

This season I also got more interested in modern competitive Pokemon play, mostly through the YouTube videos of previous Pokemon World Champion Wolfe Glick. Pokemon seems to be one of the more complex turn-based games that exist (though not, as far as I know, Turing-complete the way MtG is). Like other modern video games, a lot of the complexity involves choosing which pieces you bring with you to a match. To make an analogy to chess, imagine that, instead of the 6 types of chess pieces, you could pick and choose 6 from out of ~600 to bring with you, which is approximately $6.3 \times 10^{13}$. And this is but one source of variation. Every Pokemon has 6 characteristics, which can be individually tuned within a certain meaningful range. Additionally, each Pokemon chooses a combination of 4 moves out of a pool of ~150 (which is individual for each Pokemon). You can see how this becomes complicated. But, even once these parameters are set, inside a match itself, the game still holds large amount of meaningful choice and skill. Of the 6 you bring to a series, a player chooses four for any individual battle. You send out two Pokemon at a time, and choose an action for that Pokemon every turn; make one of four moves, or change that Pokemon out for another; forfeiting your turn but sending out another Pokemon which has an advantage over your opponent’s current pokemon.

Above all, watching the game is fun. Commentators add valuable understanding to each battle, but the important moments - one Pokemon gets knocked out, someone makes a wrong mistake at a critical point - are all easily understandable without deep knowledge of the game. This really tickled my strategy game sense for a while, before I got more seriously into FF14 Savage raiding.